Slashdot Mirror
The Internet as the "Geekosystem"
Lev Grossman writes "Is the Internet alive? Of course not, silly. But as this article points out, in some ways it makes sense to study it as a living organism, or an ecosystem, in terms of its growth and structure. "
There is growth and reproduction and it reacts to outside stimuli. I think /. is a great example of the net reacting to outside stiumuli and I am pretty sure my unix boxes eat electricity.
So it's alive, reproduces, reacts to outside stimuli, and uses nutrients. I think the net meets the bilogical defenition of alive.
Vidi, vici, veni. (I saw, I conquered, I came)
Are we predators? Prey? At the bottom of the food chain or the top?
I don't wanna be a shark, but OTOH, I don't wanna be a protozoan either. Hmm... I am armored against flames, I move around a lot and I can be a bit crabby...
Jack
- -
Are you an SF Fan? Are you a Tru-Fan?
Not the kind of alive you meant though, right?
Most synthetic development can be profitably analysed from a point of view informed by biology. Technology always benefits from submitting itself to biological laws. Open source software, Z.B., has benefited immensely from its rigorous and challenging environment, the sheer number of people enabled to hack on it. Nietzsche's famous quote regarding adversity was clearly coined after an encounter with The Origin of Species.
illegitimii non ingravare
It seems to me that the "Darwinian Theory" that was presented at the conclusion of the article was a bit off... Way back when yahoo was a couple pages with lots of cool links, it was survival of the fittest. Now it's survival of the richest, or those that can spam the most, or target the best ads, or plant the most (irrelevant) keywords getting so much of the attention. Yahoo and friends are exceptions... Hold-overs from the Internet's more open past. Anything created today has a snowballs chance in hell unless they have the capital or engage in sketchy practices.
On the other hand, the idea of 4 clicks of separation is pretty neat, and true in most cases, too, I'd bet. The article's a bit fluffy, but after separating the wheat from the chaff there is some useful/interesting information in it.
I think the net becoming it's own ecosystem is a fascinating concept, and cant help but consider the building blocks of it. The net is built on the "cream" of the human ecosystems in a way. Anything we have deemed sincerely worthy of expressing, worthy of buying, worthy of ranting about, or worthy of laughing at, worthy of researching, has found itself posted on the net. It is a collection of it's members dreams, fascinations, and passions. Studying the e-cosystem will yield benefits on many levels, both as an ecosystem within itself, but as a collection of smaller ecosystems as well... it's recursive!
Or wasn't there a study that said any two random sites are 19 clicks apart? Now we're down to four? In a matter of two months since I saw the story? I don't buy it, yet. Maybe in another year, but we're still farther apart than four clicks. The study was probably skewed by taking a small sampling in a confined area, say the U.S. only. Then I could believe that we're only four clicks away from most material. But there just isn't any possibility that I'm four clicks from any old site I choose right now, even in such a confined spot. Nineteen clicks is more believable.
ALL HAIL BRAK!!!
I prefer keeping the objects of my affection in deep dark holes in my cellar. If you think that I am wierd, see the guy who keeps women trapped in pits on www.bobandtom.com for more details. The only troble is filtering out their screams with white noice, but I find Zamfir the pan flutist to be the best. It also is good for brain washing the victims,ahem... object of my affection. So you plan on suing the state who have laws against statuephiles. Does this mean that you are discriminating against states with statutes against statutory love? Boggles the mind somehow.
Romanes eunt domus? People called Romanes, they go the 'ouse? It says Romans go home. No it doesn't. What's Latin fo
Yeeesh... the internet, alive? Yeah.. I can just see it now - the next sci fi horror flick will be something like the lawnmower man - guy steps into closet with some patch cable, and a week later they find him walled up in there - suffocated to death because the network didn't like him plugging in a Ascend router instead of a Cisco. Network admins - request hazard pay now!
I suppose it all depends on how you define "living thing", because the a-life people will certainly want to discuss it. A flock of birds is not necessarily a living entity unto itself, but it moves in its own way, responds to stimuli, and so on. A "glider" in a game of Conway's Life is really just an optical illusion, it's really one 6 cells that are either on or off independently and just happen to look like a little angle bracket marching across the screen. And then there's a bag of independent molecules all doing their own little job in order to produce......well, us. At what point did we shift from just being the emergent behavior of a bunch of cells into being something that really is alive?
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
Ah! I finally found the man that poured hot grits down my pants in that slashdot thread last week. Oh boy... now it's MY turn!
Yeah, sure the web is a living thing, but we as humans are simply observing it swim around... We are not part of this 'web', nobody exists, simply machines... the tin cans and strings as referred to in the article.
Nobody has any control of this thing, and like a jellyfih it will reach out and sting us all, then mercilessly devour us....
Apathy -- The state of numbness of the mind. When you are apathic, you can think.
Personally, I buy into James Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis, which gives me one universal test (in theory), rather than having a seperate definition for each and every possibility (which, IMHO, is silly.)
Gaia can be summarised as the ability to move a system towards a preferred state, which may or may not be unstable.
If we use this definition, is the Internet alive?
IMHO, no. The transfer of data, whether automatic or through human intervention, has no preferred state. Nor is there any non-trivial negative feedback loop in the system.
This would appear to violate the two conditions required by the Gaia hypothesis, which would imply that the Internet is not alive in any meaningful sense.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Yes, but the best ones need a credit-card... (Or so I'm told...) Where does our contorsible companion (I think AMEX patented flexible friend..) fit into the E-Cology? Are they the equivalent to sexual attraction...?
Surfer: Oooh.. they take Mastercard...
Server: Oooh.. She's got a platinum card...
On a (slightly) more serious note, I really like IBM's Digital Immune System. I know in my heart that it will be an abysmal failure, just because, but I like the thought of human 'antibodies' protecting the net.
You'd probably get a cool T-shirt to wear, too.
-Feargal Reilly.
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
*sniff* *sniff* Do you smell something?
Yeah, I do. What do you think it is?
*peering around the corner* Just a bunch of dead links, keep moving.
Can't recall where I saw a quote like this:
"Sometimes I believe that the only thing that prevents all the interconnected machines of the Internet from achieving consciousness is that Bill Gates is responsible for the OS running on most of them."
Hmmmmm...
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
If this is a sign of the "evolution" of the web, then mommy I'm scared, take me back to my nice cozy porn sites and away from people like this.
:)
However, that was pretty funny.
Just remember folks, natural selection. The Shakers died, not because they were bad people, but because they didn't want to have sex. Ergo, no next generation of Shakers. The same would happen with this, guy if he's serious. But I hope he isn't, because I don't think I could handle that many anonymous cowards.
Natural selection on the web would mean, I suppose, getting your page viewed and keeping it online. The goal here would be to be popular, and there are many strategies for that, my favorite is making a *useful* page...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Okay, this girl/statue thing is getting out of hand. Aluminum beanies for EVERYONE...on ME!
Aha, and you measure not the text of the answer but the time between characters.
--
__
Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
How many many many times do I have to explain this??
Okay. I'll take this very, very slowly.
Everyone....... will....... be....... a....... statue......!!!
Simple enough?
That's how the human species will survive without sex in my ideal world. There'll be no need to reproduce. Everyone will live forever as a statue.
And yes, I am MOSTLY serious. I HAVE been a devoted statuephile all my life, and I have no real desire for "biological" sex, however as should have been obvious, I inflated a lot of my views on sexualists to insane troll-quality proportions. I don't really care one whit about "sexualists" or the other. I was just trying to take what I had, and make it into a decent troll. It worked pretty well.
I know that until Christ's return, people will STILL be having sex and doing all that nasty stuff, and there will NEVER be a world filled with cute teenage girls. However, for as long as I live, I can still spend my 2 hours a day (I exagerated again in my post) whacking off and thinking about the possibility.
Which reminds me..... gotta run! Bye!
to pour hot grits down your pants? Watch out for your genitals. Getting third degree burns on you penis can't be good for it.
I much prefer this analogy to all these fancy shmansy theories. :) Either that, or the old "How the Internet is Like a Penis"...
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
You know, this annoyes me to no end.
I know First hand, being zoophile, about the isolation and feeling that you have to let everyone online know about your sexual preference, due to the anonymoity of the internet, and the no-real-concequences attitude whith which this entails. But this, albiet creative, and at times funny, way to express that urge is quite immatture. if you really are wanting to "come out" to the rest of society, then this is an easy way of turning society completely against you. A somewhat Freaudian outlook on your posts suggests you are quite insecure with your own sexuality, or even possibally have just "discovered" it.
not only that, it is extremely annoying to have to scroll down 5 pages before getting to the first relavant comment to the article i am wanting to read. Please, i ask, grow up. ~~Anonymous for my Karmatic Protection.
Download a chunk of the Web, study it with a keen mathematical eye, and soon enough you'll be able to speculate about its future behavior. :) :)
Yeah, 'cos the net really needs more idle speculation published on it, hey?
The net is a synthetic organism - it exhibits organic properties. But it's evolution rarely comes in gradual stages like real organic matter - on the net you have an innovation which changes everything overnight (like Cisco's cool new networking stuff). I can't think of any organic life that has a large gap in it's evolutionary history except... Homo Sapiens!!! Maybe the Internet will help us find the Missing Link!!!
People are authoring from scratch.
Blimey, what a shattering statement!!! Next thing you know, these industry pundits will be telling us "computer data is made up of 0's and 1's"... Sheesh...
Strong data typing is for those with weak minds.
I don't know much about James Lovelock or his "Gaia Hypothesis" (and what I HAVE heard sounded like crap), so I'll just respond to your tests (which sound reasonable).
No preferred state of data transfer Sure there is: Efficiency. Efficient data transfer can mean two different things and I think both apply (on different levels).
1) Getting packets across the Net via a least path (time, cost, etc). Sounds like routing to me. And the Internet moves toward an ideal state on this.
2) Getting information into the hands of the people who want it. Again, this is getting better and better with things like Google (for searching) and Babelfish (for translating).
No non-trivial negative feedback loop I'm not sure what you mean here. What non-trivial negative feedback loops does a human have? The Net slows down when you try to send to much over it. That's low-level neg feedback. There's also reputation (company, individual, site) that provides negative feedback at an information level. For instance, I no longer read anything from The Register since I've found that all they publish is speculation that has no basis in reality.
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Linux MAPI Server!
http://www.openone.com/software/MailOne/
(Exchange Migration HOWTO coming soon)
I don't know why cmdrtaco claims, "Of course not, silly!" to the question of whether the internet is alive.
At any rate, the concept is old enough. John Varley wrote an excellent novella ("Press Enter_") on the idea in, I believe 1982. The debate has been going on for a while.
What I found interesting was the claim that the so called e-cosystem isn't damaged by bombs and so forth. The body squirms, the legs shrink momentarily -- and then grow back, stronger than before. That shouldn't be surprising--it's one of the characteristics of an ecosystem. If you could kick an ecosystem and then leave it alone, and it didn't repair itself in some way, then it wouldn't be a (stable) ecosystem at all, but more like a single organism.
Also, regarding the darwinian nature of the 'net, it should be remembered that while the "strong" survive (and grow, and prosper, and get all the hits) the "weak" don't die off--they can exist quite happily as weaklings. How many personal homepages have you seen with counters saying, "you're the 13th person to visit my website since 1996!" There's no _need_ for them to die off, because unlike in the wild, they don't consume significant resources. In fact, strong websites inherently consume more resources than weak ones, which suggests a levelling effect in the long run. On the other hand, the resources are manmade and growing rapidly, so who knows?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
mikre he sophia he tou Mikrosophou.
It doesn't surprise me that an information system the size of the Internet would have some unpredicted emergent properties. Stanislaw Lem, in his Summa Technologiae in 1962, predicted that biology would be the main source of engineering inspiration in the 21st century, and clearly this is coming true.
However, don't mistake a metaphor for a truth. They do not propose any kind of unified framework for analysing the 'Net, nor can they. They are simply looking to biology to inspire analytical methods.
Examining usage logs of 120,000 sites, Huberman and Adamic discovered that the distribution of visitors follows a universal power law -- better known as winner-takes-all. This is a world as viciously inequitable as the real one; the most popular 5% of websites get the lion's share -- 75% -- of all Internet traffic.
They missed an important implication of the power law. Increasingly, we should see metasearch systems parasitising the most commonly viewed sites - so long as IP law doesn't prevent it.
I'd like to see some useful predictions come out of there analysis, but I don't see any.
I'm not convinced that disk space restrictions are the major cause of the Darwinian distribution of file lifespans, as the article asserts in the second last paragraph.
Their discussion of an immune system for the web seems pretty speculative, and as they point out elsewhere in the article, monoculture systems are not sufficiently robust. A monoculture immune apparatus (as they propose) probably wouldn't be adequate either.
The point about monoculture is the best one they make. Melissa would have been impossible to propagate, or at least much less damaging, if Windows wasn't so widespread. You would think we had learned this lesson during the Internet Worm fiasco back in the late 80's.
Bail on the word "e-cology." Lem would probably call it "webological analysis", but I think something more greco-latin is in order. Gnostography maybe? Araneastics? Cognostofluxology?
If the internet was alive, I think It would almost be like my baby cousin.
My baby cousin can't walk so she crawls.
She tends to be irritable and tempermental so she crys and whines all the time.
She can get angry, and when she does watch out! Because you should hear some of the things that come out of her mouth.
She likes talking gibberish.
She can be fascinated by the stupidest things.
Of course she is not all that bad, there are some rare good qualities in her.
But boy-o you should see some of the shit that comes out of her!
Man
Well part of the theory of 'Pi' was that the stock market was like a living organism. In GitS they said the AI was just a merely self replicating program it replied 'I submit that your DNA is also merely a self replicating program'... Hmmm.. Of course the REAL fun comes in distributed Neural Nets. They might have some bizarre properties, as latency would occur between various sections of the whole. This however could be the key to making a real self-aware network. With the ammount of people in Seti@Home and Distributed.net... It would be able to have an immense number of neurodes.
and the matrix has you.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
E-COMMERCE, PORN, SPAM, its all roadkill, the ruins of a once proud, semiproductive Network of people, the goldrush has DESTROYED ANY hope we have of true mainstream, and if I do say so, maybe an Widesperead, non for profit, commercial free network should be created. I dislike banners, I dislike spam, but I dislike the way they tagged and bagged something once used for science. While I am on this rant, what IDIOT decided to allow javascript actions when leaving a site, Hello, popups(ANNOYING), just wait till they start adding sound to banners................. We need to do something, and it's not censorship, its a community cleanup effort. tired of E-BULLSHIT
Any site on the Internet is an average of 4 clicks a way, ok lets try this out will you .
Start page 1 http://www.slashdot.org in 4 single clicks from slashdot.org home page get to http://www.eurosluts.com.
Hrm, kinda hard, try getting to yahoo.com from excite.com in four clicks, nope!
Get to the page http://www.yellow.com/pokey from http://www.linux.com, kinda hard huh?
Try to get to http://www.internet.com from http://www.sendmail.net
these are not some small little web pages running off a 14.4 modem in middle of the jungle somewhere, this are main portal sites, and it is very hard to get from ne to the other in just 4 clicks, raise that to 9, I could see it.
Click Here for CIA homepage.
How many licks does it take to get to the center on a tootsie roll pop?
+&x
Google started farily recently, and is catching on. If you build it good, they will come. Capital or no.
I'm sure you all did. it basically said as "random" systems get more and more complicated, they start to resemble predictable organisms. the movie delt with chaos theory and the stock market and how it was a large enough chaotic system that it could be predicted with the right algorythm and a large enough number cruncher.
Anyplace where I can go to my family farm's home page and accidentally end up being asked for my credit card number for porn might be just chaotic enough to qualify. I don't think the internet will be large enough until it spans "heavenly bodies." When I can go to homer.crater.lun and end up sending packets to the sea of tranquility, THEN the internet will be alive.
"The Probability of Mischief varies inversly with respect to the proximity of an authority figure."
If jellyfish are alive then the Net must be, too. They both are colonial organisms made of of individual specialized creatures. The collective whole lives and breathes as one animal due to the autocoordination (like that word? I think I just made it up) of its members.
There are stinging cells, eating cells, communicating cells, motion cells,...
Sounds alive to me.
You never really know how close to the edge you can go until you fall off.
Are in no way related to how the Internet works.
/. is a black hole.
/. as black hole observation)
Think more along the line of Galaxies and Universes. The Internet is Flat, without definable boundaries, and our current assumption is it will expand forever. Links are wormholes, bandwidth is heat, and
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from the article
Modern man's patterns of what researchers call information foraging turn out to be just as habitual as his ancestors': he follows the sent, hunts in packs and returns to familiar ground as often as possible.
So is Google a shotgun or a spear? This metaphor is way too wide, it can apply to almost any human behaviour, including human behaviour as a whole.
Right now, the average user pulls up a mere three pages per website (and as most news sites will tell you, their stickiness is measured in seconds)
(see above
I don't think of the Internet itself as life, but as a place where other life exists, bots, daemons, streams, etc. This type of life (existing only as a electonic impulses (which could, I guess, be said of people too)) and don't operate under the same rules as the rest of us. I would love to see that movie of the Internet's growth, that would be cool.
+&x
There is seven or eight of them left. they live collectively in vermont or new hampshire, make furniture, own a lot of land and are filthy rich (considerring they are shakers). How do I know this? I heard it on NPR. that proves it it true
but, could we liken spam to fire ants swarming over the victim, filling it with painful stings that last (indefinitely, in the case of the net.. until you can clean them all out of your inbox)?
;-)
Perhaps we could do some biological engineering and make packets that produce tunes (like tobacco plants that glow under fluorescent light bulbs).
Or maybe I should just lay off the chocolate
Insert mind here.
I think you'll find that many of the laws "of biology" tend to really be much more general, and are instead general laws of diverse complicated systems. Biology happens to be an interesting and easy to study niche in this larger field.
Survival of the fittest?
You have a cardboard box with a bunch of things made out of legos in it. Shake the whole box a lot. The ones that doesn't break are what's left over. If that stuff can get reproduced somehow (by itself, or by anything else), "natural" selection happens.
This happens with wholes (organisms & web sites) as well as parts (genes & memes/paradigms) - if the part causes the whole to break, that part won't be very common. We don't see a lot of humans with the "dead" gene.
Nothing comes free, even existence. That's what makes this whole thing work. (in other words, your website is in a cardboard box getting banged against legos)
For internet entities, the cost of existence is bandwidth & server space. Human interest is what it costs to cover these needs. Whether people are interested enough to pay the internet bill because the entity is neat or useful or lucrative is irrelevant.
Existence for humans is normal activity, as well as healing wounds - general metabolism. This cost is paid by an influx of chemical energy (food).
Biological things expend energy getting food, Internet things expend energy getting people interested. If either one of those entities's costs of existance exceeds it's resources, the data pipe will be shut down, so to speak.
Reproduction?
Q: What's the best way to learn HTML?
A: View->Source
In biological systems the notion of parenthood is pretty clear-cut. In memetic systems, however, it can be very difficult to see where ideas come from. But don't tell me that everybody who's implemented a web-based shopping cart thought of the idea themselves.
There are differences, sure. Darwinian vs. Lemarkian evolution.. One or two parents vs dozens or hundreds of 'parents'.
But what's important is that the environment has only limited resources (food, eyeballs), there is some kind of non-exact reproduction (cells divide, ideas get solen), combined with a non-zero cost for existance. Given those constraints, you're pretty much guaranteed to get an ecosystem, or something similar to it.
Is it (the internet) life? I don't care. If it is, great. If it's not, make a new word that means the same thing as "life" without requiring the processes be biological in nature. Good luck getting people to use it.
Trees can't go dancing
So do them a big favor
Pretend dancing stinks!
Much more importantly than asking if the internet is in anyway alive, it would be sounder to ask if it could die.
/. would be nothing if no one posted messages so the internet will continue to 'live' for as long as people use it.
The only way in which you could apply any form of evolutionary theory to a man made construct such as the internet is if it exists within an environment of competitors. Almost all software is like this, *nix fights it out with win*, each occupying a niche within the user base and each able to move into the others territory if improved to a sufficient degree. Open sourced software is even more evolutionary in the way that many programmers will suggest improvements but only the best will end up surviving into the next release. Of course these parallels should not be taken too far, programmers do not suggest random changes to code (or at least avoid doing so) which might have good or bad results, which is how nature works.
There is only one internet though, and nothing for it to fight against (ie nothing to kill it). Whenever any new technology is introduced it is carefully merged into the existing fabric so that those who do not adopt the new 'improvements' can continue to use the system (in theory..). Also, the costs involved in creating a whole new internet-like system are phenomenal and will stand in the way of any potential successor.
Can the internet die any other way? Parts of the internet die off every day when someone pulls a page from a server, a startup business goes bust or a malevolent hacker gets into somewhere he shouldn't. Other parts of the internet are more permanent, the physical apparatus behind the internet, computers, cables and fibres, will last for as long as they are maintained correctly and can easily be changed or updated as capacity is required (the internet getting poorly). What really makes the internet though are the people who use it,
This is not near to biological life though. The internet does not make any decisions for itself, never has to hunt for its dinner and will not have to search for a mate, it is cared for 24/7 by dedicated teams of professionals and has nice (if misinformed) things said about all over the media. In fact, I think I might try to become an internet myself....
There is no conspiracy
Are cities the equivelant of coral? With quantum or biological processors and smarter routers will the internet wakeup? If a site gets alot of hits and they increase the bandwidth pipe to it can this be considered a strengthening of a neural pathway as occurs in the brain? Is the internet really alive or just the excess of humanity being pumped into a flower. Maybe all the aliens out there are just sitting by waiting for us to go 'matrix' before they knock on our door. Perhaps matrix-eske technology signals maturity of a civilization?
Click #1: "topics" on the left side of the page, http://slashdot.org/topics.shtml3 6&mode=nested
:-)
Clich #2: "News" option, http://slashdot.org/search.pl?topic=news
Click#3: "Australian Government Cracks Down on Net Users" from Nov. 26 (Currently #8 on the menu]), http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=99/11/26/10512
Click#4, Right-hand side of the page, "Related Links" box, you will find... CIA (http://www.cia.gov)
What do I win? I hope it's a bowl of grits.
TCP/IP is going to have difficulty communicating over huge-latency links, because its error-correcting model is based on ACKs and re-transmission requests. A better model is forward error-correction such as the digital TV satellites use. Here there is no possibility for a receiver to ask for a re-transmission of a particular chunk of data, so instead they build enough redundancy and error-correcting codes into the data stream that you only need to get some percent of it to get a perfect reconstruction of the data. This would also apply (and is probably already in use somewhere) to Internet multimedia transmissions like RealAudio streams or videoconferencing, so that a small number of lost UDP packets wouldn't cause a video/audio dropout.
The corporate organism has one instinctive drive, The Bottom Line, to which all else is subordinated. If any of the cells in its forebrain (senior officers) wander too far from this imperative, the hindbrain (shareholders) will overrule or replace them promptly.
"But wait, there's more!"
The corporarte organism lives in an ecosystem (the world economy) where it competes with other corporations in the same or similar niches. History shows that the coporate organism does much better in the wild (capitalism) than it does in captivity (socialism). As in nature, corporate organisms thrive on symbiosis, and close examination reveals powerful links between the most unlikely of corporate enteties
When they grow large enough, corporate organisms can not be controlled by anything but their own hard-wired Bottom Line seeking algorithms, and interactions with other corporate organisms that are themselves beyond the possibility of human control. How, after all, could one bring any desired controls to bear?
Charismatic CEOs? Nope, they get and keep their job by advancing the existing Bottom Line program, not by changing it. Government? Nope, without corporate sponsorship, nobody gets near an office with real regulatory clout. Popular uprisings (boycotts etc.)? Nope, these can't happen without corporate sponsorship via mass media propaganda. Pull the plug? Just try, and see how long the police (corporate immune system) let you keep trying. In short, we have already created machines that rule the world, we are almost completely dependent on them, and we have virtually no input to their command decision processes.
My point? Don't have one. Just wanted to throw out the model. Make of it what you will.
Google is a fantastic search engine. Yes.
...If the average person will get off their duffs and leave the mediocrity that altavista and lycos have embraced.
Google is a popular search engine. No.
Google will become a popular search engine: Maybe.
Google has a silly name. Most definitely. *grin*
I've read a lot of posts on /. that made me burst out laughing, but this is not one of them at all. I'm more embarassed at its corny-ness, even if it does come from the mega-posting Signal 11.
Any reason you're being such a jerk? There's not really much merit to what you say. But I'll address it anyway.
I guess a lot because people aren't buying into this. I guess it's in the same vein as "Gee well I guess because people are black/jewish/gay/straight/different in any way we will hurt them, torture them, and then cremate them in ovens it is just abhearent.
Is it "abhearent" to give someone an eternal, peaceful life if they choose to accept it? I'd never really turn a girl to stone long-term against her will. If I ever implied I would, it was just to upset the Politially Correct crowd out there. And it worked! Your analogy is very poor. First, generally when hurting someone, the activity is being performed AGAINST HIS/HER WILL! And even if the person were masochistic or something, you'd still be HURTING someone. You've got no way of establishing that being transformed into a statue could be considered "harm," especially if it were a willing transformation.
In a word no. Basically this is just an indication of a control oriented invididual who wishes to have unlimited sexual contact without any consequences. An ego taken into extreme preportions.
I simply want a world of statues. A world where there are ONLY females, and the females are statues, because males are bad and don't deserve to live, and it is wrong to force females to live in an animate, biological state and to grow old and die. Being a male, I have no place in this world. I will be dead. But I will be happy that I fulfilled my purchase in life. Can the dead be controlling and egotistical? If I were controlling and egotistical, why would I want the females to remain stone after I died? I wouldn't be getting anything out of it after my death. So why not set it up to restore them after my death?
BECAUSE I'M NOT MOTIVATED BY PERSONAL GAIN!! I only want what's best for the women and the world.
Including you? I doubt it from your views. Since cells will be replaced with crystaline formations (you said stone) that will be the basis for this new "life form". It get's a little fuzzy about exactly how the need to reproduce is eliminated. As a biological person I may elect not to reproduce or to sit in a bunker under ground for the rest of my life. See the need for sex has been eliminated.
The statues the girls will be transformed to will not be "alive" in the biological sense, but they WILL be CONSCIOUS, which to many people is perfectly good definition of "alive" even if the consciousness isn't inhabiting a body that is biologically alive. Don't you know anything about statues? When's the last time you saw a statue reproduce? The girls will not need to perform any biological functions, and will be incapable of moving or reproducing in any way. They will be STATUES. Say that out loud.
Statuephile? Sounds like a new doctorine. I have a hard time believing that this is something other than something quite recent. Have you ever had sex before with a real person? Other than your mother? Well people find it interesting because there is a massive endorphin release from doing said act. If you have a method of releasing endorphins directly into your pleasure center of your brain I would love to hear about it.
Those who live only for the lusts of the flesh (endorophins included) are doomed to die to the lusts of the flesh, after living lives of sin and decadence.
We've been around forever, but it's only within the past decade that, thanks to the Internet, we've begun to find each other, and organize. For most, there IS no doctrine, it's just a sexual interest, they don't believe in any particular philsophy as I pretend to do in these troll-posts. It's just what they like instead of, or in addition to, sex. Most enjoy sex as well. Some don't. To each his or her own.
Yes, I have had sex, with a woman, when I was 18. I didn't enjoy it, just as I knew I wouldn't. And I'm never going to do it again. Because I choose not to.
So you think that the christian second comming of christ will bring about an end to sexual reproduction? Ineresting unless he kills all of us there still has to be a method of reproduction that is simple and quick and sexual reproduction fits the bill.
There's simply NO excuse for this. You obviously haven't even read the Bible. If you did, you'd know that we'll ALL be transformed into our spiritual bodies at Christ's return. The Bible states over and over again that we have exactly TWO bodies, no more, no less. One is a physical, earthly, mortal body that is prone to sin and death. The other is our spiritual body, which is celestial, immortal, not subject to the desires of the flesh, and is incapable of feeling pain, being damaged, lusting, or reproducing. When a person dies, he instantly enters his/her spiritual body, the body in which he will eventually stand judgement. When Christ returns, all who remain alive will ALSO enter their spiritual bodies, and we will be the same as those who have died. We will not all perish, but we will ALL be changed into our spiritual bodies.
If you read the Bible, you'd know this stuff. There's NO excuse not to!!!
Don't trip over your shoes billy or maybe all the used porn magazines that you colored the skin grey on to make them look like statues. Your father and I have really had concerns about your welfare ever since you started handing out with those terrible slashdot kids. You have started to do strange things and quite frankly we are concerned. Now take your prozac and a glass of warm milk and get ready for military school in the morning ok?
That was just a mindless, insulting troll and doesn't deserve a response. So it won't get one.
"A piece of metal is made up of atoms, many of them
the same as those that make up the human body; what is the difference between the two?"
I've often wondered the same thing for instance what separates a virus *non-living* from a cell *living* (especially a bacteria cell). I've come to the oppinion that virus' are living, and that anything that has a necleic acid is living because life's 5 essential elements (proteins, lipids, etc) don't seem to cut it.
As for the internet you could make an argument that it is alive because of the conscience *sp* behind it. I think the internet is more of a means to connect life to life as if it was almost telekenisis or somthing of the sort. Another argument you could make would have to be argued after the creation of a true AI. Then you could say that we have created life, and The program code would bee the same as the DNA or the RNA that exists in the life we know.
cheers,
Mike
The Internet Mapping Project
Peacock Maps (buy one for xmas!)
-- jbum
You have a multitude of intelligent, insightful posts, but these recent stabs at humor just fall flat...Now, that's just IMHO, I know, but when you get those "embarrassed for the other person feelings" it's a pretty good indicator that it's not funny. But, it seems that a moderator or two thinks differently...go figure. Anyway, my advice: stick to what you are good at.
Then it'll take over some poor soul's ghost and... (Boy it's been a long day...)
--
Humans love machines in AD 2029.
Now if it was conscious, that would be another matter entirely. "Ego cogito, ergo sum", as Descartes put it. I don't of course think the 'Net is going to gain any "real" semblance of a consciousness anytime soon, but if it did, the ramifications would be enormous. The mind, as they say, boggles. But this is all hypothetical.
So the net exhibits signs of biological life. Big deal. Call me when it starts comprehending of itself in relation to others.
As I recall, Katz did an article on this a long time ago. At the time I thought it was an interesting concept, but now I just think that it is kind of like forcing a round peg in a square hole. The reason that I am saying that is that it just seems that we should study the internet or whatever else on its own terms, and not try to learn about something peering through the veil of poor analogies.
.{redmist}.
Sorry to be a party-pooper...just my 2 cents.
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I can't make an exact copy of myself (although my cells can make exact copies of themselves pretty much). A salt crystal in a supersaturated medium can can make copies of itself as well.
I think that life, like pornography and art is one of those things that is difficult to define objectively.
--
"L'IT c'est moi!"
I created my Digital Video pages in the last year or so, and they've certainly been successful and gained a quite loyal audience [ http://www.amazing.com/dv/dv-faq.html ]. My fruutydates dating service [ http://207.151.18.18 ] seems to have attracted a nice niche of cool people.
In the first case, I wrote about a technology when it was starting to become popular and there were few net resources around. In the latter case, I got most of my users by latching on to the traffic from a web site whose owners spent substantial money on promotion.
So I wouldn't give up - new resources have a good chance of surviving and even thriving, as long as you put some kind of unique spin on your subject. And if you can't, why are you bothering?
Remember, if you're an individual setting up a site on some hot topic, people will find you - and you don't need billions of viewers to produce a useful resource people will enjoy.
D
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