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We already know that a statement like the continuum hypothesis can be proved neither true nor false from ZFC. We don't need Godel's theorem to prove "incompleteness or inconsistency" when we have lots of practical examples of its incompleteness. So your claim of "don't know" is false.

Well said. As another example, the "C" of ZFC (axiom of choice) is independent of ZF.

First order logic is consistent and complete. In fact, Godel proved this.

No, he didn't. This is a common misconception because of the name of his "Completeness Theorem".

The "Completeness Theorem" simply states that whatever you can prove (syntactically) with first order logic within a system is exactly what you would accept (intuitively) as true. This is important because it guarantees that if you apply first order logic within a set of (true) axioms, you can only reach things you would normally accept as true; and conversely, if you reason using only the axioms, you can write down your reasoning using first order logic. So, it is only in this sense that first order logic is "complete".

The Wikipedia article on it (here) makes the distinction clearly, stating that the "completeness" of one theorem is of a different kind than the other, but I recommend this book (sorry, Amazon link), which explains it way better (and much more clearly).

Additionally, consider the set S of all possible propositions of set theory. Somewhere in the power set of S must lie the set of all true propositions. Just take these as your axioms. Voila, a formal system that is both complete and consistent. Your characterization of Godel's theorem is incorrect.

Well, sure, but it's kind of a cheat to have infinitely many axioms without a production rule... How exactly do you know what are the axioms (i.e., which element of the power set of S to take)? :-)

...or figuring out why there was a 75 cent billing discrepancy... http://www.amazon.com/Cuckoos-Egg-Tracking-Computer-Espionage/dp/1416507787

The "mark" facility is one of the most powerful things in Vim. The m[a-z] syntax drops a marker at the current position of the cursor. So you have the full alphabet at your disposal for markers, not just a & b.

The " ' " (the single quote char) with a mark letter is how you address a mark. This can be combined with many Vim commands. Example: drop a marker-h (mh) at the function you are working on, then no matter where you move to in the file, typing "'h" will take you to the "home" function you are working on.

To yank a series of lines, drop a marker-a (ma) at the beginning of the series of lines. Move down to the bottom of where you wish to yank. Hit "y'a" and you will yank all the lines from marker-a to your current position and can then "place" them (I call it drop them) with the p or P commands.

There are plenty of other marker capabilities and many other cool things in Vim. Steve Qualline's great book "VI iMproved", http://www.amazon.com/iMproved-VIM-Landmark-Steve-Oualline/dp/0735710015/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1226030977&sr=8-3, is a great read and well worth the money for it. For those that can not afford it, it is also available as an online PDF ftp://ftp.vim.org/pub/vim/doc/book/vimbook-OPL.pdf

There's lots of good stuff in here.

Granted CAT5 doesn't have have security to access (like wifi tkip/aes key), but it is physically secure, which is at the same level of security as the physical machines themselves.

I use WPA2 with an apple 802.11n router at home, and all my important traffic goes over SSL connections. I would say this combination is close enough to "secure" that it's extremely unlikely my data is at risk. It's more likely that someone will break into my house and steal my computer.

I find WIFI performance and coverage to be dodgy at best. It's an absolute pain to support.

You didn't mention in what context, nor with what equipment, but now that I switched to an apple airport extreme, I completely disagree.

At home, 1400 sq. ft. house built in 1963, I get extremely high speeds throughout my house with this router, and have not had any trouble with it. I can't say the same thing for my previous linksys routers, but then again, they were a fraction of the price.

Granted CAT5 doesn't have have security to access (like wifi tkip/aes key), but it is physically secure, which is at the same level of security as the physical machines themselves.

I use WPA2 with an apple 802.11n router at home, and all my important traffic goes over SSL connections. I would say this combination is close enough to "secure" that it's extremely unlikely my data is at risk. It's more likely that someone will break into my house and steal my computer.

I find WIFI performance and coverage to be dodgy at best. It's an absolute pain to support.

You didn't mention in what context, nor with what equipment, but now that I switched to an apple airport extreme, I completely disagree.

At home, 1400 sq. ft. house built in 1963, I get extremely high speeds throughout my house with this router, and have not had any trouble with it. I can't say the same thing for my previous linksys routers, but then again, they were a fraction of the price.

You would think that the popularity of Cryptonomicon among the public, nerds and not-so-nerdy people alike, would have translated into a bit more enthusiasm for preserving some of those old crypto legends. Did Stephenson himself ever issue a call for support?

This is a grown up version of risk. The game was given away to free to some people who liked Dreamcatchers's adventure games.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005YTYF/mimofficialbooks/

The best wireless router I had is from Buffalo. It is switched on 24/7 and I never had any problems. It is also damn easy to install tomato on it though for some models like WHR G125 you need to install a special version of tomato.

Or leave a comment about the router-spam where buyers can find out about avoiding this
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000LIFB7S

Sounds similar to the octospiders featured in the Rama sequels.

Oh god. I've been trying to forget those for over ten years now, and now you've brought all the horror back. In case anyone doesn't know, Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama is a science fiction classic that only gets better with age. The sequels made in collaboration with Gentry Lee, however, have no touch of Clarke's genius. It's suggested that Gentry Lee penned them all by himself, and his interests were peculiar indeed. The third volume of the series has some of the most ridiculous sex ever found in science fiction, a genre already infamous for bad erotic scenes. Then, in the fourth volume, Lee reveals that the mysterious aliens whose starship humans had boarded were, in fact, angels serving the Christian God. Though why an omnipotent deity works through robots and subjects races to agonizingly slow slower-than-light travel is never explained.

Quality code depends more on the dedication of the developers on the project than it does on programming IQ (again, whatever that means).

Programming IQ is defined quite clearly in _The Elements of Programming Style_, Kernighan and Plauger - http://www.amazon.com/Elements-Programming-Style-Brian-Kernighan/dp/0070342075

It's required reading and the advice is timeless.

In Sorcery and Cecelia (or maybe it started in the sequel), the heroines knit fashionable items for each other, and code the message in the pattern of knits and purls.

Nice. I have always wanted one of those, but it is slightly above my price range. :) Mine is a lot cheaper and still a lot of fun. And yes, I have actually used it to open packages!

If dealing with a Bussard ramscoop, of the type seen in e.g. Larry Niven's stories in Neutron Star , wouldn't this kind of protection from radiation also mean deflecting mass useful for propulsion?

I think that statement is very much open to debate after the last few months. A better statement would be people believe in regulated free markets. Completely free markets would just be handing all the worlds money to a bunch of wolves who are already using the global economy as a giant casino with all the tables rigged in their favor. The challenge is in figuring out the fine line between enough regulation, not enough and to much.

Do you realize the Fed was created in 1913, the big crash happened in the late 1920s. And now Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are government entities - that with various acts starting with the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 under Carter and getting amendments over time, encouraged lending to the risks a normal banker would see a mile away?

Please spout off on more regulation. Greenspan hasn't been for free markets since he headed the Fed, the exact opposite of a free market entity.

This financial downturn has been predicted by free marketeers since 2002 by the likes of Ron Paul and Peter Schiff:

http://www.lewrockwell.com/paul/paul128.html

http://www.amazon.com/Crash-Proof-Economic-Collapse-Sonberg/dp/0470043601

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/

Around the turn of the millennium steganography became a big topic, the idea being that using PGP would only draw attention from the authorities. In my Amazon review of Schneier's Applied Cryptography I even complained that Bruce didn't talk about how to hide even the use of crypto.

But now that SSL is everywhere and the use of encrypted VPNs is a typical part of telecommuting, I don't think cryptography suggests the same anti-authoritarian counter-culture rumblings it used to. Do we need to hide crypto anymore?

Well, and what else is it supposed to be?

Its supposed to be a complete communications framework for all kinds of IPC. I see from your post that you've only seen/used the webservice stuff, but there is more in the whole package. I think WCF is positioned as the main communications system for everything in .NET

All my info comes from Juval Lowy's book (though probably with more stuff picked up here and there)

I'm amused to note that the author list stretches over three pages, which I gather is common for this sort of paper.

This is a standard in academia, where the number of publications you co-author is critical in getting grants or achieving tenure. It is informally known as the "publication of the month club", and is a variant of the you-scratch-my-back strategy. One of the club members writes an article and adds all of the others as co-authors. In return, that person can expect to be listed as a co-author in the next article written by each of the others.

I learned this and many other useful things about academia from the book "Oral Sadism and the Vegetarian Personality" http://www.amazon.com/Oral-Sadism-Vegetarian-Personality-Polymorphous/dp/0345347005.

This is much less efficient, but lots more fun.

.

and this is a problem for Time-Warner, because?

The Dark Knight (+ Digital Copy and BD Live) [Blu-ray] (2008) $24

What kind of idiot buys a product specifically for opening plastic packaging? It's called scissors, and you probably already have a pair.

That thing on thinkgeek is a piece of crap. It's a flimsy knife with a weird handle. This is much more effective. And cheaper (since you get three). And you can cut metal with them. They're called tin snips. AKA, the manly alternative to the overpiced ones designed by and for women.

That thing on thinkgeek is a piece of crap. It's a flimsy knife with a weird handle. This is much more effective. And cheaper (since you get three). And you can cut metal with them. They're called tin snips. AKA, the manly alternative to the overpiced ones designed by and for women.

... and I am an Anarcocapitalist. I believe that there's no government you can design, that authoritarians of either the Communist-type or the Fascist-type won't eventually turn into their own tools of oppression (always, of course, "for everyone's benefit")

I know it sounds extreme, but if you're a fan of the work of Nobel-prize winning economist Milton Friedman, I suggest you have a look at the work of his son, David Friedman, which extended his father's work to its natural conclusion.

And in any case... whether you want a return to the limits of the Constitution, less government overall, or no government whatsoever, I suggest you check the link in my signature.

With all the weird things we find on Earth, I wonder what could be in that water?

One of the most poignant scenes in all of science fiction is the encounter between crashed astronauts and life on Europa in Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two . Even though Clarke's powers as a novelist were failing even then, he gave an impressive vision of a possible Europan lifeform, something very unlike anything in our experience, though we could use basic metaphors like "trees". I wish I could find more science fiction with such truly other alien species. I really read a Vernor Vinge novel that had two humans on a world with species little distinguishable from wolves and pigs.

Lincoln was not anti-slavery. The emancipation proclamation was a war tactic, not some courageous stand. Many northerners were disenfranchised by the emancipation proclamation.

Perhaps more appropriate for /.

Being for South != Being for Slavery

http://www.amazon.com/Real-Lincoln-Abraham-Agenda-Unnecessary/dp/0761526463/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225740557&sr=8-1

The APress offering in this category, Pro C# 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Platform, is almost certainly superior in both breadth of topics covered and details presented. I own the Apress book and have found it to be a useful reference on numerous occasions, but read the reviews and look at the scores before deciding what to buy. If you only have funds for one or the other then get the Apress book, you won't be disappointed.

While I agree with all the excuses cited for why people feel justified in acting like a D-Bag online, I have a different theory for the cause. If you've ever been fortunate enough to know a hard working person, and I mean a really hard working person, that isn't making a lot of money than you've often met a person that is strangely positive about life.

Paradoxically is seems to be the people living comfortable lives, that have time to sit around and post on websites or play lots of video games, that are the most angry. I don't believe it's the games or online anonymity that makes them angry as much as a sense of futility, or not having anything better to do with their time. People that work a lot or have productive hobbies seem a lot happier in general.

There's an interesting book, that I actually haven't read yet, called "The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse". The most interesting citation I've heard from this book is that according to studies quadriplegics have a more positive outlook on life than millionaires.

I've extrapolated this out figuring that those people that don't have time, or have better things to do, than sweat the small stuff are going to be a lot happier than those wasting their precious time on meaningless entertainment.

There was a recent Slashdot discussion on music from pulsars which didn't get quite the attention I wish it did. Along those lines, I'd again encourage all nerds here to check out Gerard Grisey's work Le Noire d'Etoile for six percussionists. This work is based in part on the periodicity of a certain pulsar, and at one moment the performers pause while the sound of another pulsar is acquired with a radio telescope and relayed over speakers in the hall. This would definitely appeal to the many nerds here with an astronomy bent, but it sadly remains little-known outside of IRCAM circles.

Unless the government pulls another "we aren't going to tell you anyways", like they did in US v. Reynolds, as depicted in the book Claim of Privilege. Even getting an in camera review is a gain, so don't overlook that.

Assuming an Obama win on Tuesday and a serious shift towards Democrats (what polls largely suggest), are we finally going to see some serious investigations and accountability for this current administration?

A Democratic administration doesn't necessarily mean a stance against wiretapping. Many of the "ECHELON" activities which came to the public's attention with the 2001 European Parliament report were instituted under President Clinton, who also was a fan of "leveling the playing" field between American and foreign businesses through eavesdropping. A good introduction to the troubling rise of violation of privacy in the 1990s, which coincided with a popular Democratic president, is James Bamford's Body of Secrets .

Interesting that you brought up this view. I was reading a book the other day called 'Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution' by Robert Sussmann and Donna Hart. They argue against the two reigning cultural and sociobiological views of man in primal states: (1) man as a predatory hunter and; (2) man as an egalitarian noble primitive.

They use a number of sources from primatology to paleontology that come to the conclusion that man was a scavenger in the day time and hunted as prey at night. I wonder if this game kicks this primal scavenging neural-wiring back in as you play it?

$18K.

18K in the 1970's? That's quite a bit, a bit over double what my family made. You're basically proving what I said, people who are well off don't want to admit it.

I'll admit that I didn't think much about time when I posted. After this retort, I recall that our family income (while I was still living in the home) peaked at that amount in 1985.

According to this chart we were in the "middle income" bracket - but JUST BARELY. Somehow I doubt that means we were "well off"

People can climb out of poverty. It frustrates me when people believe that they are permanently poor simply because they are poor today.

I believe that it was more possible in the past, but that there's less class mobility today.

I reject that thesis, and here's a link that addresses this with facts and analysis. I recognize you may reject the writing either because it is a few years old or because of the conservative source, but it rebuts your idea using data.
 
 

The answer to poverty is not throwing money at the poor. The answer lies in personal character and family structure. Money addresses neither.

Considering how little the government actually spends on non-elderly poor they haven't been exactly throwing money. Character doesn't buy food, character doesn't buy training or the ability to move to a new location.

Let me tell you a story. There once was a company called Motorola, they made televisions.....

Now what were those workers supposed to do, are you saying they didn't have character? Things happen to people that are beyond their control, market forces, economy have more effect on poverty than anything else.

Ever read Who Moved My Cheese?

Let me tell you a story: the coal industry tanked in my area due to a combination of automation and workers collective bargaining terms pricing themselves out of the global market. The chemical industry limited hiring white male workers because they had quotas to meet to escape litigation.

Each of these factors significantly limited work opportunities and I could have claimed that "the man" was keeping me down. Instead, I worked hard, lived frugally, and then moved to where the jobs are. I could have started a business there, but preferred to work as an employee to owning a company.

Opportunities abound, even in this economy. Make a product or service that people want or need, and you will make money.

People can do as I did and have their fortunes improve. There's no caste system here. People need to stop being victims. I am terribly frustrated by people looking for some lawsuit to provide them with a fortune, or claiming disability when they could work. Plenty of people have overcome obstacles. People need to take action. The world awaits! Go make your fortune!

Excuse what could possibly be a dumb question here but is it like if you install Azure on your hardware, then you have to keep up to date with their latest and greatest or is it more like if you run apps on their cloud, then you have to keep up with their latest and greatest?

If the former, then that will significantly raise your TCO for using Azure. It's very hard for little guys to keep up with Microsoft's technology churn. If the later, then that is a given with any cloud offering including Google's and Amazon's.

Here's another example.

$240 for a paperback book.

Actually, in that particular case there's probably enough market to justify another printing, and indeed Baen books has picked it up and will be releasing it in a few months. The real sad cases are those in which the potential market is too small to justify a printing run. This is particularly true for obscure reference books, which people tend to buy to keep, removing them from the market completely.

There's a lot of value in making these books available on-line. Oh, and if authors/publishers of a particular book don't WANT it to be available on-line because they're thinking about printing it, they can easily ask Google not to make it available.

But Liberal Fascists do really exist. Not that all Liberals are Liberal Fascists, some are Classic Liberals and not Neo-Liberals or Fake Liberals who are really Communists or Anarchists pretending to be real Liberals.

Here is proof of Liberal Fascism Fascism need not be right-wing it can be left-wing as Communism is the left-wing version of Fascism and Communism existed first as Left Wing Dictatorships and Benito Mussolini created Fascism as the Right-Wing version of Communism to combat it.

Adolph Hitler was a National Socialist and did a Beer Putch to win the votes of the Working Class by bribing their votes with beer, The Jewish People were the Right-Wing Rich Class that Hitler spoke out against and claimed he was for the working class to redistribute the wealth from the Rich Jewish People to the poor German Aryan people, that by definition is Ultra-Left Wing Socialism combined with Nationalism, and isn't that much different from EU Socialism and American Liberalism today.

Moveon.org is the head of the Ultra-Left-Wing Liberal movement in the USA and keeps saying hateful propaganda in blogs they hire shills to write and in Newspapers and TV shows as well.

Barrack Obama, good thing he is more towards the center, he is still a Liberal but a Classic Liberal and not an Ultra-Left-Wing Liberal. I like that Obama does not play dirty politics as Moveon.org, Liberal blogs, Liberal Newspapers, and Liberal TV and Cable News channels do.

I salute the Classic Liberals that are not at all like their Ultra-Left-Wing Liberal counterparts.

It cracks me up how all these fanatical Atheists on slashdot are making a big deal over the author of
"3:16"

I had long feared that the skilled cryptographer Bruce Schneier, author of Applied Cryptography , had been utterly replaced by Bruce Schneier the security consultant who peddles his wares in all of his recent lightweight publications. It's nice to see the cryptographer return.

The bold is a accident.

I needed darker and larger text for editing on this display.

The Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War is the most significant book about death and society to appear in years.

Americans in the 1860s were simply not used to experiencing death outside their church, their family.

You died at home. You were laid out in grandad's parlor. You were buried in a small plot on the farm where you were born.

When these most elemental of rituals and social traditions break down the consequences are never trivial.

The terrorist doesn't see a body count.

He sees a crack in the foundations.

Numbers do not tell the whole story. Numbers never tell the whole story. For that you need experience and empathy.

There is a running gag in Frank Miller's "Dark Knight" graphic novels: a succession of Left Coast geeks who can't see that anything that happens in Gotham or Metropolis really matters.

Shotguns aren't always effective against zombies. I suggest a box full of cleavers. [1]

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Zombie-Survival-Guide-Complete-Protection/dp/1400049628

One day we will have mathematical assurances that our votes are being counted properly by electronic voting machines. Cryptographers have been working on mathematically proven cryptographically safe voting schemes for years. (See also Bruce Schneier's Applied Cryptography.) Secure algorithms already exist, although they are not yet fully practical.

I repeat myself for emphasis: there are methods to produce a secret, secure, election that is verifiably correct to an arbitrary degree of certainty. If you don't understand how, do everyone a favor and follow the links and read the material.

We need to consider voting a cryptographic problem and a research area of critical interest. A CERN-like multi-national government funding agency should work to develop a practical, economical, open-source technological solution with mathematically proven security. Once it is developed we can distribute it globally for free.

Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.

MOD PARENT UP! It's infantile to believe that the U.S. government can spend money on people. The U.S. government HAS NO MONEY, it is DEEPLY in debt. The U.S. government has no money.

It amazes me how little most U.S. citizens know about their government, and how little they care. It appears to me that the U.S. government is corrupt in may ways, not just in starting a war to help make weapons and oil investors rich, and to act out anger. Read House of Bush, House of Saud. Bush and his friends and associates sell U.S. government power to those who pay the most. Saudis have paid them 1.4 Billion dollars, so the Saudis got EXACTLY what they wanted: Higher oil prices, the U.S. taxpayer paid for defending Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein, and a weaker United States.

Politics is certainly not a primary interest of mine, but I educate myself about what's happening. Here's just ONE area of corruption, the unprecedented, organized vote fraud:

Rolling Stone magazine has an article about vote stealing in 2008: Block the Vote: Will the GOP's campaign to deter new voters and discard Democratic ballots determine the next president? That article is also available as a PDF file.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law has another article: Voter Suppression Incidents 2008. A PDF is available.

Neither of those articles discuss how votes are stolen using computer fraud. Slashdot has run 17 stories in 2007 and 2008 about computer vote fraud and electronic voting, listed here in reverse order by date. Note that the evidence is that the last two presidential elections were stolen:

West Virginia Voters Say Machines Are Switching Votes.
Black Box Voting 2008 Election Protection Toolkit
How To Spot E-Vote Tampering?
Hard Evidence of Voting Machine Addition Errors
New Jersey E-Voting Problems Worse Than Originally Suspected
The Cost of Electronic Voting
Sequoia Vote Machine Can't Do Simple Arithmetic?
Ohio Investigating Possible Vote Machine Tampering Last Year
Diebold Voter Fraud Rumors in New Hampshire Primaries
Ohio's Alternative to Diebold Machines May Be Equally Bad
All Fifty States May Face Voting Machine Lawsuit
Judge Voids Un-Auditable California Election
Re-Vote Likely After E-Vote Data Mishandling
A Flawed US Election Reform Bill
House To Vote On Paper Trail and OSS Voting Bill
U.S. To Certify Labs

Here's a good book on Quantum computing (November 5, 2003)
All about what you can and can't do with quantum computing (and how to implement it)
If you don't want to wade through everything, skip to Chapter 11

One day we will have mathematical assurances that our votes are being counted properly by electronic voting machines. Cryptographers have been working on mathematically proven cryptographically safe voting schemes for years. (See also Bruce Schneir's Applied Cryptography.) Secure algorithms already exist, although they are not yet fully practical.

We need to consider voting a cryptographic problem and a research area of critical interest. A CERN-like multi-national government funding agency should work to develop a practical, economical, open-source technological solution with mathematically proven security. Once it is developed we can distribute it globally for free.

Electronic Voting can be much better than paper ballots. We just need to stop being stupid about it.

We can only speculate how much further along we would be scientifically now if we had not destroyed knowledge, or allowed it to be lost, so cavalierly in the past. We also need to get over ourselves. That you use iPods and "teh Internets" does not necessarily make you smarter than the inventor who came up with this.

A good, historical book (you know, all that old, "useless" knowledge from 100+ years ago) is Ancient Inventions by Peter James and Nick Thorpe. It's amazing how many "modern" inventions the ancients had already discovered, and used, only to have that knowledge lost to future generations, which then had to rediscover that knowledge all over again.

So yes, although you may not care, it *is* important to preserve knowledge for future generations so that they, hopefully, won't repeat our same mistakes.

I disagree with you that the "average CEO" makes 400x a worker's salary. Only in the largest companies do we see massive salaries. Most companies that provide the bulk of US jobs are the smaller ones. Their owner/operator CEO's are not making huge salaries, in fact they may be making less than their employees, but will be the ones affected by Obama's redistribute the wealth plan. These are the average men and women who either have or want to have their own business.

I've have friends that either have or had a small business. Most people don't want to just be the only person on the job and many can't do it all alone, depending on the type of business. (One friend owned a custom frame shop, the other owns a chain of restaurants.) They want to expand their business. And yes, they care about their employees and would like to give them competitive benefits. When you think of running a business AND trying to expand $250K is really a drop in the bucket. That 250K profit could go to getting a larger buidling, taking on a big job that needs capital, supplying workers with insurance, hiring more workers, etc.

This tax is going to kill a lot of dreams and a lot of businesses. Once the government steps in and says, "Hey you make too much, give it to us," they have just provided a disincentive for small business growth. And who benefits from that: the very large, mega-corporations that you just complained about. They're the ones who are getting bailed out or they've got enough cash or leverage to raise prices, move overseas or otherwise cover additional taxes.

What should be required reading in school is, "The Millionaire Next Door." It not only shares how they gained their wealth, but you'll be surprised about just who these wealthy people are and how anti-stereotypical.

I read his book. Recommended.

In 100 years, I won't care.

Well, with technology progressing the way it is, maybe there's some small hope that we will soon see the possibilities that Ray Kurzweil foretells in his works like The Singularity is Near . One would think that the chance that the younger generations will have indefinitely longer lifespans would encourage more people to think of long-term consequences.