But if the drive falls into the hands of a specialist with a scanning tunneling microscope, they can tell the difference between "this was a 0, overwritten by a 0" and "this was a 1, overwritten by a 0".
Not really true.
They can tell that there were various 1s and 0s - but telling what order they were in is impossible ("data written to the disk prior to the data whose recovery is sought will interfere with recovery just as must as data written after - the STM microscope can't tell the order in which which magnetic moments are create...
What John Maxwell said. I don't memorise the name of my Representatives because I don't need to memorise it. (I do, actually, give lots of thought to politics, but at the level of policy, rather than party or individual.)
If I care what he's done supposedly on my behalf, I can look it up (but since I'm very much a political minority, especially in my locality, I don't expect him to represent my opinions very well, and indeed would count doing so as a failure of his democratic duty, though perhaps not of his civic or constitutional one).
Likewise, if I wish t...
My problem with this is that Mr. Yudkoswky (of 2006)'s examples (at least Gandhi and Gandalf, the ones I'm familiar with) were not disinterested and impartisan.
(The problem of the disinterested "Wise Man" in general, apart from the inapplicability of these examples, I have no quarrel with, and the problem is interesting. Though I can't come up with any examples of such a man, offhand. Hasn't wisdom always gone hand-in-hand with knowing The Right, and thus not being impartial?
The Buddha was not impartial about attachment and nirvana, and he's as c... (read more)