Conscientious objection (CO) is the refusal to obey laws due to moral, religious or belief principles. The ideologies or religions underlying laws or constitutions have been seldom analyzed. Scientific Ethics finds that constitutions and laws have implicit or explicit ideological elements that are imposed on citizens, and denies or forbids others that lead citizens to CO. Ideological analysis i...

In his paper Computing machinery and intelligence, Turing introduces a rather trivial chess problem as a conversation piece in an example Turing test. The example is about much more than computers playing chess: it has a hidden message that is about resolving ambiguity and knowledge representation, probably inserted by Turing as an Easter egg for us to find.

This paper looks at Turing’s postulations about Artificial Intelligence in his paper ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’, published in 1950. It notes how accurate they were and how relevant they still are today. This paper notes the arguments and mechanisms that he suggested and tries to expand on them further. The paper however is mostly about describing the essential ingredients for buildi...

Perfect failure detectors can correctly decide whether a computer is crashed. However, it is impossible to implement a perfect failure detector in purely asynchronous systems. We show how to enforce perfect failure detection in timed asynchronous systems with hardware watchdogs. The two main system model assumptions are (1) each computer can measure time intervals with a known maximum error, an...