Well, such tech would probably require a way to "refresh" the brain as well, that and the central nervous system is probably the biggest hurdle.
But even without being able to "refresh" the brain to reduce the level of degradation technology that lets you fix the rest of the body could be very useful and convenient. Sort of like how even if you don't know anything about restoring car engines you can still take an antique car and fix the rest of it up and as long as the engine (brain) is in good condition to begin with you'll probably get a lot more out of the car than you would if you just left it running the way it was before restoring it.
Well, that would be the mountain top instead of the stars. If you can build someone an entirely new body that would obviously be a bigger achievement than "just" replacing specific organs, why bother replacing your lungs or your heart when you can just "reboot" yourself by getting a shiny new body while you're at it? I know that if the option existed I would gladly start my (still far off) retirement by changing back into a 18-20 year-old's body.
Of course, you'd probably not be able to stay retired indefinitely then, but working to 65, living a care-free life as a retired 20-something until you're around 30 and then going back to work would be pretty nice.
As much as your comment may have been intended as a joke it is interesting to imagine a future in which you basically load up a large machine with the necessary basic materials, input a scan of yourself with whatever changes you want made and let the machine rebuild your body. And why stop at changing genitalia? or even general enhancement of your existing body, imagine what such technology could do for transsexuals, step into the machine a man and come out a woman. Hell, maybe you want to be a horse with a human brain, maybe if technology progresses far enough this will one day be possible...
Yes, I'm speculating wildly but I'd rather aim for the stars and reach the top of a mountain than aim for making my way to the gas station two blocks away and ending up at my neighbor's house. <Insert rant about space exploration here>
Well, if the supermarket doesn't just buy up "a whole bunch of coffee" but is basically waiting at the pier when the ship loaded with coffee arrives and buys all of it although they only needed 0.1% of it for themselves then it is dishonest and they're clearly trying to exploit others.
Also, this is a classic case of where "voting with your money" just doesn't work because the profit margins and the demand are both so high that even if you could get say, 80% of the prospective customers to agree not to buy from scalpers you'd still be looking at them selling a boatload of tickets, and since they're pretty much the only game in town they can raise prices to compensate if the demand gets too low (thus creating an artificial supply shortage), if you want a ticket to Springsteen you're just gonna have to pay those $500 that the ticket just went up to, it's not like they're just gonna give the tickets back. The only times scalpers sell tickets at or close to the original price is in situations where the demand was very low (happens sometimes with open-air festivals because those often release tickets several times instead of all at once so people aren't as inclined to purchase them from scalpers) and even then they'll wait until the very last moment since they're probably already making a profit, they're just trying to maximize their profit.
Well, if you consider that a 1L bottle of denatured alcohol can be had for about the same price as two beers it's not really that hard to imagine someone who's low on money (and crazy enough) buying a bottle of denatured alcohol to stay drunk. An example of what I've seen punks (not the green day/blink 182-listening kind, the kind who lives in squats, dumpster dives for food and thinks superglue is a good alternative to going to the dentist) is T-Röd which is 95% ethanol and not really that dangerous (although it does contain irritants that cause stomach cramps and nausea).
What denatured alcohol would this be? Because not all denatured alcohol is the same and there is plenty of "denatured" alcohol out there that doesn't even contain methanol, just various stuff that's supposed to make it taste bad and make you feel sick.
Also, when it comes to denatured industrial alcohol it's not uncommon for it to be well over 95% ethanol, kind of hard to squeeze in 10% methanol then.
Yes, but most of the time the denaturing is done by adding something that will make you feel sick and make the liquid in question taste horrible, and this is clearly pointed out on the containers. In fact, I've seen people drink more than a liter of modern denatured alcohol with the only side effect that they felt a little sick (gotta love some of the characters that show up at music festivals).
Reverse engineering the protocol used shouldn't be too hard with the aid of proper tools like Wireshark. As for encryption, at some point the data has to be unencrypted in order for your system to be able to use it.
Now, it may not be as easy as putting "activationserver.developer.com 127.0.0.1" in/etc/hosts (or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) but I'm sure someone will create a "pirate" server that can be run locally along with any required patches for the game itself.
I believe you could call that "artificial scarcity" (or use some other similar term), despite the fact that a new copy of the comic book could be made that is of higher quality collectors would rather fight over an old copy.
Actually, it is possible to define the value of products and services in other ways than just "what people are willing to pay for them". An example of this would be a hypothetical economy where the value of products and services is determined by the resources (labor, energy and and raw materials) required for providing said products and services.
And this is why I, someone who loves Real-Time Strategy (large-scale battles that take hours of actual gameplay to finish) have so much trouble with most RTS games, they're almost always more about tactics than strategy. I'd love to have a game like Company of Heroes "scaled up" to the point where you have the ability to control individual squads but the overall gameplay is more about strategy and less about ordering a single rifleman to duck down into a ditch or cranking out tanks as fast as possible so that you can rush your opponent.
And yes, I've wasted way too much time on the various Civ games and Alpha Centauri (I spent the better part of my first semester in college playing AC, there were weeks when I would average 10+ hours per day). That said, the Civ games are empire-building/"God" games, not pure military strategy games (and they're turn-based which makes sense for an empire-building game).
The point is that greylisting is little more than an ugly hack that's only slightly less ugly than rejecting all incoming mail from servers where a reverse lookup doesn't match a forward lookup ("example.com resolves to 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.1 resolves to 328.cust.biz.isp.net, clearly this is an evil spammer!!1oneone")
Except there are plenty of people who don't go to bars precisely because it is too expensive, a lot of these people drink at private parties (where you bring your own beer or the host provides beverages), how many of these people do you honestly think would start spending $100 per night in bars if "home use" of alcoholic beverages was made illegal?
"K2 incense" sounds like some legal "smoke mix", I assumed you were talking about the cannabis strain "K2", apparently there are two things in the same "realm" both known as "K2". Oh well, that's what you get in an unregulated market.
I'm not sure about that. I've been around stoned people and I've been around really tired people.
Oh really? The rest of your post doesn't give that impression.
Really tired people don't seem to have the same mental differences from their normal state than stoned people.
I'd agree with you if you were using "It's 22:00 and I normally go to bed at exactly 21:30" as an example of "really tired". Now if we're talking about really tired people (like an ER surgeon who's been up for 36+ hours and working hard for most of that time) then we're looking at seriously bizarre behaviour, hallucinations and an inability to concentrate that would make my cats seem like geniuses in comparison.
The average marijuana user just tends to be a bit more relaxed, giggly and goofy and most likely lacking in concentration but at least aware of these shortcomings.
Stoned people seem to lose certain asepcts of their personality.
What parts of their personalities would this be? Because I can't say I've observed this outside of state-sponsored anti-drug propaganda.
IQ? Sure, maybe that doesn't go down. But IQ isn't all you want your doctor to be. You'd also like to have your doctor, say, empathetic to your pain, realize what time it is,...
Most people don't become emotionless zombies when they are under the influence of cannabis (unless we are talking about the aforementioned state-sponsored propaganda). If anything most people become more emotional after smoking marijuana (but will seem "emotionless" when asked to take out the trash or clean the dishes, sort of like how someone who is drunk will laugh similar things off while under the influence).
As for perception of time, cannabis does impair your ability to keep track of time but unless we're talking about a doctor who's so stoned he/she can't stand up then this really isn't that much of an issue. It's a much bigger issue when you have nothing important to do and you forget to go out and buy more soda before the grocery store closes because you're "busy" watching a movie.
etc. Really tired people don't seem to have quite the same brain "skew" that someone who is stoned does.
Obviously the effect isn't the same, but I'd rather be in the hands of a doctor who's had a few hits of a joint an hour ago than a doctor who's been up since yesterday morning.
And this is how I communicate (somewhat) anonymously.
Whole disk encryption on netbook.
Make sure to use noscript and disable all other browser addons.
Connect to website from public wireless access point.
Make sure to save website's SSL cert.
Create account.
Go home.
Connect to website using Tor.
Admittedly there are still possible security breaches but it's a lot more anonymous and safe than just adopting a defeatist attitude and rolling over, you still have to remember stuff like scrubbing EXIF data and messing the noise levels in images if you plan on uploading images.
Well, the average "soccer mom"/"joe sixpack" may not have heard of h.264 but there are definitely a lot more users out there who know that h.264 is a video codec than there are users who know that Ogg Theora is a video codec (admittedly those who know of h.264 through warez probably think it's called x264 but that's still a lot more knowledge of h.264 than knowledge about Ogg Theora).
Only because youve drunk so much of the koolaid and so used to be roughed up by corporations that you have no idea what its like to have a phone platform that does more
First off, I'll admit that I generally like Apple's products since they different parts are well-integrated (just to get that part out of the way, if that makes you think I'm a fanboy or that I've "drunk the kool-aid" then so be it).
Second, I've used and owned other smartphones that were much more capable than the iPhone on paper but which with real-world usage fell flat because of massive user interface issues, applications that leaked memory and general instability that made any perceived stability issues with the iPhone seem completely insignificant in comparison.
An example of this is the touchscreen on a friend's "high end" Nokia (I think) smartphone which together with the general UI lag makes using the phone painful, precision was so poor it was almost painful.
A second example would be my gf's phone (I can't remember the brand or model, the models are all 32789XS91080++ TouchTurboDeluxe gibberish to me), I experimented a bit with the UI and concluded that from the default "home" screen it took about half a dozen keypresses to get to the browser, once the browser was running I had to open a menu, scroll down to the "I want to visit a website" option and scroll down to the "I want to enter an URL manually" option before I could enter an URL. And that was the fastest path I could find. As a comparison, on an iPhone entering an URL involves tapping Safari, tapping the address bar and typing in the URL. It's hardly revolutionary but at least it's done right.
As for flash, the only times I miss that is when I stumble across some website designed by some incompetent hack who thinks the only way to do menu rollover effects is with flash...
Well, the way the swedish legal system works you aren't "really" guilty until the appeals process has been completed.
Besides, it's pretty much standard fare for decisions in tingsrätten to be overturned by hovrätten or högsta domstolen since in tingsrätten there is normally only one actual judge and four laymen (most often politicians), and interestingly enough these laymen have a tendency to occasionally focus more on their emotional assertion of a case, how much money someone slipped them under the table or just plain political ideology ("Drugs are bad because they're illegal and they're illegal because they're bad, also by law any use of illegal drugs is always abuse, here's a SEK 20,000 fine for abusing drugs (but oh, don't forget that drugs are only illegal so we can help abusers stop abusing)").
It seems that today we are exposed to a lot more sources of information and ideas and the amount of raw "data" per source is both smaller than it used to be (blogs, twitter, irc, podcasts, etc.) while at the same time larger ("Hey, this snippet of text from $AUTHOR was pretty good, I wonder what I can find about him on Google/Wikipedia...").
If you were writing a book back in say, 1950, you would have to base it a lot more on your own experiences in the "physical"/"real" world while today you would probably use the internet and other media sources to aid your creativity to a larger degree.
One issue I can see with your method is that an honest team that decided to copy your code and look at it to perhaps use it to figure out how to solve a problem with their own code might end up with their home directories wiped because they decided to do a test run to have reference output. After all, they probably weren't expecting you to deliberately create $HOME-wiping code and share it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, such tech would probably require a way to "refresh" the brain as well, that and the central nervous system is probably the biggest hurdle.
But even without being able to "refresh" the brain to reduce the level of degradation technology that lets you fix the rest of the body could be very useful and convenient. Sort of like how even if you don't know anything about restoring car engines you can still take an antique car and fix the rest of it up and as long as the engine (brain) is in good condition to begin with you'll probably get a lot more out of the car than you would if you just left it running the way it was before restoring it.
/Mikael
Well, that would be the mountain top instead of the stars. If you can build someone an entirely new body that would obviously be a bigger achievement than "just" replacing specific organs, why bother replacing your lungs or your heart when you can just "reboot" yourself by getting a shiny new body while you're at it? I know that if the option existed I would gladly start my (still far off) retirement by changing back into a 18-20 year-old's body.
Of course, you'd probably not be able to stay retired indefinitely then, but working to 65, living a care-free life as a retired 20-something until you're around 30 and then going back to work would be pretty nice.
/Mikael
As much as your comment may have been intended as a joke it is interesting to imagine a future in which you basically load up a large machine with the necessary basic materials, input a scan of yourself with whatever changes you want made and let the machine rebuild your body. And why stop at changing genitalia? or even general enhancement of your existing body, imagine what such technology could do for transsexuals, step into the machine a man and come out a woman. Hell, maybe you want to be a horse with a human brain, maybe if technology progresses far enough this will one day be possible...
Yes, I'm speculating wildly but I'd rather aim for the stars and reach the top of a mountain than aim for making my way to the gas station two blocks away and ending up at my neighbor's house. <Insert rant about space exploration here>
/Mikael
Well, if the supermarket doesn't just buy up "a whole bunch of coffee" but is basically waiting at the pier when the ship loaded with coffee arrives and buys all of it although they only needed 0.1% of it for themselves then it is dishonest and they're clearly trying to exploit others.
Also, this is a classic case of where "voting with your money" just doesn't work because the profit margins and the demand are both so high that even if you could get say, 80% of the prospective customers to agree not to buy from scalpers you'd still be looking at them selling a boatload of tickets, and since they're pretty much the only game in town they can raise prices to compensate if the demand gets too low (thus creating an artificial supply shortage), if you want a ticket to Springsteen you're just gonna have to pay those $500 that the ticket just went up to, it's not like they're just gonna give the tickets back. The only times scalpers sell tickets at or close to the original price is in situations where the demand was very low (happens sometimes with open-air festivals because those often release tickets several times instead of all at once so people aren't as inclined to purchase them from scalpers) and even then they'll wait until the very last moment since they're probably already making a profit, they're just trying to maximize their profit.
/Mikael
Well, if you consider that a 1L bottle of denatured alcohol can be had for about the same price as two beers it's not really that hard to imagine someone who's low on money (and crazy enough) buying a bottle of denatured alcohol to stay drunk. An example of what I've seen punks (not the green day/blink 182-listening kind, the kind who lives in squats, dumpster dives for food and thinks superglue is a good alternative to going to the dentist) is T-Röd which is 95% ethanol and not really that dangerous (although it does contain irritants that cause stomach cramps and nausea).
/Mikael
What denatured alcohol would this be? Because not all denatured alcohol is the same and there is plenty of "denatured" alcohol out there that doesn't even contain methanol, just various stuff that's supposed to make it taste bad and make you feel sick.
Also, when it comes to denatured industrial alcohol it's not uncommon for it to be well over 95% ethanol, kind of hard to squeeze in 10% methanol then.
/Mikael
Yes, but most of the time the denaturing is done by adding something that will make you feel sick and make the liquid in question taste horrible, and this is clearly pointed out on the containers. In fact, I've seen people drink more than a liter of modern denatured alcohol with the only side effect that they felt a little sick (gotta love some of the characters that show up at music festivals).
/Mikael
Reverse engineering the protocol used shouldn't be too hard with the aid of proper tools like Wireshark. As for encryption, at some point the data has to be unencrypted in order for your system to be able to use it.
Now, it may not be as easy as putting "activationserver.developer.com 127.0.0.1" in /etc/hosts (or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) but I'm sure someone will create a "pirate" server that can be run locally along with any required patches for the game itself.
/Mikael
I believe you could call that "artificial scarcity" (or use some other similar term), despite the fact that a new copy of the comic book could be made that is of higher quality collectors would rather fight over an old copy.
/Mikael
Actually, it is possible to define the value of products and services in other ways than just "what people are willing to pay for them". An example of this would be a hypothetical economy where the value of products and services is determined by the resources (labor, energy and and raw materials) required for providing said products and services.
/Mikael
...if I wanted tactics, I'd play an RTS.
And this is why I, someone who loves Real-Time Strategy (large-scale battles that take hours of actual gameplay to finish) have so much trouble with most RTS games, they're almost always more about tactics than strategy. I'd love to have a game like Company of Heroes "scaled up" to the point where you have the ability to control individual squads but the overall gameplay is more about strategy and less about ordering a single rifleman to duck down into a ditch or cranking out tanks as fast as possible so that you can rush your opponent.
And yes, I've wasted way too much time on the various Civ games and Alpha Centauri (I spent the better part of my first semester in college playing AC, there were weeks when I would average 10+ hours per day). That said, the Civ games are empire-building/"God" games, not pure military strategy games (and they're turn-based which makes sense for an empire-building game).
/Mikael
That's because your initial analogy was broken.
The point is that greylisting is little more than an ugly hack that's only slightly less ugly than rejecting all incoming mail from servers where a reverse lookup doesn't match a forward lookup ("example.com resolves to 10.0.0.1, 10.0.0.1 resolves to 328.cust.biz.isp.net, clearly this is an evil spammer!!1oneone")
/Mikael
Except there are plenty of people who don't go to bars precisely because it is too expensive, a lot of these people drink at private parties (where you bring your own beer or the host provides beverages), how many of these people do you honestly think would start spending $100 per night in bars if "home use" of alcoholic beverages was made illegal?
/Mikael
"K2 incense" sounds like some legal "smoke mix", I assumed you were talking about the cannabis strain "K2", apparently there are two things in the same "realm" both known as "K2". Oh well, that's what you get in an unregulated market.
/Mikael
"Trippy" would be more hallucinogenic, more "giggly", more energetic and a bit more unpredictable.
"Couch lock" is the effect of smoking high CBD cannabis (Indica), generally you're more likely to get sleepy, drowsy, tired and lazy.
The strain K2 is just another cannabis strain and just like other strains it will show up on drug tests.
/Mikael
High THC to CBD ratio means you get a very "trippy" high, a low THC to CBD ratio gives a "couch lock" high, this is pretty well known and basic stuff.
I've heard about K2 lately-- it sounds like it is more of a high THC high without the happy part.
Actually, from what I've gathered K2 is a 70/30 Indica/Sativa hybrid so it should have a fairly low THC to CBD ratio.
/Mikael
I'm not sure about that. I've been around stoned people and I've been around really tired people.
Oh really? The rest of your post doesn't give that impression.
Really tired people don't seem to have the same mental differences from their normal state than stoned people.
I'd agree with you if you were using "It's 22:00 and I normally go to bed at exactly 21:30" as an example of "really tired". Now if we're talking about really tired people (like an ER surgeon who's been up for 36+ hours and working hard for most of that time) then we're looking at seriously bizarre behaviour, hallucinations and an inability to concentrate that would make my cats seem like geniuses in comparison.
The average marijuana user just tends to be a bit more relaxed, giggly and goofy and most likely lacking in concentration but at least aware of these shortcomings.
Stoned people seem to lose certain asepcts of their personality.
What parts of their personalities would this be? Because I can't say I've observed this outside of state-sponsored anti-drug propaganda.
IQ? Sure, maybe that doesn't go down. But IQ isn't all you want your doctor to be. You'd also like to have your doctor, say, empathetic to your pain, realize what time it is,...
Most people don't become emotionless zombies when they are under the influence of cannabis (unless we are talking about the aforementioned state-sponsored propaganda). If anything most people become more emotional after smoking marijuana (but will seem "emotionless" when asked to take out the trash or clean the dishes, sort of like how someone who is drunk will laugh similar things off while under the influence).
As for perception of time, cannabis does impair your ability to keep track of time but unless we're talking about a doctor who's so stoned he/she can't stand up then this really isn't that much of an issue. It's a much bigger issue when you have nothing important to do and you forget to go out and buy more soda before the grocery store closes because you're "busy" watching a movie.
etc. Really tired people don't seem to have quite the same brain "skew" that someone who is stoned does.
Obviously the effect isn't the same, but I'd rather be in the hands of a doctor who's had a few hits of a joint an hour ago than a doctor who's been up since yesterday morning.
/Mikael
And this is how I communicate (somewhat) anonymously.
Admittedly there are still possible security breaches but it's a lot more anonymous and safe than just adopting a defeatist attitude and rolling over, you still have to remember stuff like scrubbing EXIF data and messing the noise levels in images if you plan on uploading images.
/Mikael
Well, the average "soccer mom"/"joe sixpack" may not have heard of h.264 but there are definitely a lot more users out there who know that h.264 is a video codec than there are users who know that Ogg Theora is a video codec (admittedly those who know of h.264 through warez probably think it's called x264 but that's still a lot more knowledge of h.264 than knowledge about Ogg Theora).
/Mikael
Only because youve drunk so much of the koolaid and so used to be roughed up by corporations that you have no idea what its like to have a phone platform that does more
First off, I'll admit that I generally like Apple's products since they different parts are well-integrated (just to get that part out of the way, if that makes you think I'm a fanboy or that I've "drunk the kool-aid" then so be it).
Second, I've used and owned other smartphones that were much more capable than the iPhone on paper but which with real-world usage fell flat because of massive user interface issues, applications that leaked memory and general instability that made any perceived stability issues with the iPhone seem completely insignificant in comparison.
An example of this is the touchscreen on a friend's "high end" Nokia (I think) smartphone which together with the general UI lag makes using the phone painful, precision was so poor it was almost painful.
A second example would be my gf's phone (I can't remember the brand or model, the models are all 32789XS91080++ TouchTurboDeluxe gibberish to me), I experimented a bit with the UI and concluded that from the default "home" screen it took about half a dozen keypresses to get to the browser, once the browser was running I had to open a menu, scroll down to the "I want to visit a website" option and scroll down to the "I want to enter an URL manually" option before I could enter an URL. And that was the fastest path I could find. As a comparison, on an iPhone entering an URL involves tapping Safari, tapping the address bar and typing in the URL. It's hardly revolutionary but at least it's done right.
As for flash, the only times I miss that is when I stumble across some website designed by some incompetent hack who thinks the only way to do menu rollover effects is with flash...
/Mikael
You should try using Quicktime on OS X instead of on Windows, just like iTunes and Safari it is a lot better on OS X than it is on Windows.
/Mikael
Well, the way the swedish legal system works you aren't "really" guilty until the appeals process has been completed.
Besides, it's pretty much standard fare for decisions in tingsrätten to be overturned by hovrätten or högsta domstolen since in tingsrätten there is normally only one actual judge and four laymen (most often politicians), and interestingly enough these laymen have a tendency to occasionally focus more on their emotional assertion of a case, how much money someone slipped them under the table or just plain political ideology ("Drugs are bad because they're illegal and they're illegal because they're bad, also by law any use of illegal drugs is always abuse, here's a SEK 20,000 fine for abusing drugs (but oh, don't forget that drugs are only illegal so we can help abusers stop abusing)").
/Mikael
It seems that today we are exposed to a lot more sources of information and ideas and the amount of raw "data" per source is both smaller than it used to be (blogs, twitter, irc, podcasts, etc.) while at the same time larger ("Hey, this snippet of text from $AUTHOR was pretty good, I wonder what I can find about him on Google/Wikipedia...").
If you were writing a book back in say, 1950, you would have to base it a lot more on your own experiences in the "physical"/"real" world while today you would probably use the internet and other media sources to aid your creativity to a larger degree.
/Mikael
One issue I can see with your method is that an honest team that decided to copy your code and look at it to perhaps use it to figure out how to solve a problem with their own code might end up with their home directories wiped because they decided to do a test run to have reference output. After all, they probably weren't expecting you to deliberately create $HOME-wiping code and share it.
/Mikael