First, you seem to assume that "more people" (ignoring the fact that birth rates are already decreasing) will mean "resources will be stripped that much faster", without creating new jobs or new tax revenue. You also seem to assume that people will reproduce more ("multiple families") as they live longer. That doesn't match what we see happening in the real world today.
Finally, if you "assume they will have solved" age-related diseases, why do you rely on those diseases as your main argument against longevity?
Imagine a whole population of polymaths as people learn at their own pace over 100s of years. 20 years as a bar tender. 20 years as a carpenter. 20 years as a fishermen. Life time on life time bleeding into each other.
Its a good thing.
No, no, no! The only way for a species to progress is for its individual members, with all their hard-won experience and wisdom, to each suffer and die after a fairly short lifespan. That's why rabbit culture is so far ahead of our own.
And if we stopped entropy, cell detioration would not occur. It's about as likely, I'm afraid. Telomeres are a molecular _answer_ to DNA deterioration, preenting the connection of one DNA molecule to another at the end points. And some types of system damage are cumulative, especially since scar tissue accumulates and regrowth of neural tissue has never been mastered.
"Has never been mastered"? What kind of argument is that?
Telomeres are one answer to DNA deterioration. It's folly to think that there are no others. Evolution is not a system for finding optimal solutions in bounded time. Or are you arguing that we're already optimally designed?
Overflow from the men's room flooding the server room, with lots of high-voltage cables lying around under the raised floor. Fastest system shutdown I've ever seen an admin execute; pulling the main breaker will do that.
I was set on a career in chemistry before I discovered computers in high school. I count it as one of the luckiest breaks in my life. See, I've always tended toward absent-mindedness and clumsiness. In Computer Science, you frequently have an Undo option, and failing that you can go to backups. In Chemistry, not so much. There's a good chance I never would've survived grad school.
True. If what you want to run on XP is an old stand-alone game, you should be in fine shape.
In my experience, though, the vast majority of even non-technical users "want it to do" things on "the Internet". Even my elderly parents don't pine for the Good Old Days before email and the Web; indeed, those are the things that finally drove them to get a PC (running XP).
You seem entirely unfamiliar with the concept of "security updates". Even if your computer "does what you want it to do and does it well", you may wake up one morning to find that it's doing what a stranger wants it to do.
Clarify, please, the difference between this and -- oh, I don't know -- someone hacking the electronic systems that already control your car's brakes, or throttle, or traction control?
Are you kidding? I'm having trouble thinking of an application that wouldn't benefit from this type of feedback. A few, off the top of my head:
Tactile feedback on a keyboard yields a huge improvement in speed and accuracy.
Tactile feedback on buttons helps confirm that you're hitting the right one, and successfully activating it.
Tactile feedback on scrolling can give you another channel for judging speed or position.
Lack of tactile feedback is one of the single biggest impediments to "virtual control" usability. I don't know if this approach is the magic bullet, but I welcome all research in this direction.
I'm pretty sure saying "there's a reason why species go extinct" is begging all sorts of teleological questions. Humans are a part of the natural (occurring in nature) evolutionary process, and so is this effort. Unless you want to argue that humans are somehow outside or beyond the natural universe...?
I can't see this working out well. Probably only a small number of individuals could be resurrected, simply because of lack of good DNA samples, and I bet a lot of errors would be introduced in de-extinction given current tech.
Genetic diversity, therefore, in the de-extinct species would be incredibly poor and any second generation would likely be rather sickly and not resistant to diseases. Either that or a continuous and very difficult (impossible?) genetic engineering effort would have to be involved in restoring genetic diversity to the species.
They address this briefly in the article. They intend to perturb the genome to introduce variability. I don't know whether they'd do this by introducing traits from the host species, or just more-efficiently permuting the variation from existing individual samples, or whether we've actually reached the point where we can synthesize variation based on our understanding of allele function in other species.
Some of the arguments against "de-extinction" (there's got to be a better term) puzzle me.
"Why go through all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?" First, perhaps we're now in a position to avoid the stupid actions that drove extinction the first time -- in the case of the passenger pigeon, and perhaps even the mammoth, over-hunting. Second, this argument would seem to apply equally to species that aren't extinct at all, but merely endangered. Whey go to any arbitrary amount of effort to protect a species, when it's likely to go extinct (eventually) no matter what we do?
"It's likely to become a new disease vector." This happens all the time anyhow. As the article points out, restoring a species that competes with current "pest" species (rodents and deer) may well reduce transmission of diseases like Lyme that are currently increasing.
I'd like to see some discussion that focuses on the differences between "de-extinction" and restoration of endangered-but-not-quite-extinct species. I'd also like to see some discussion about efforts like the American Chestnut Foundation, which is working to undo the profound damage from the early-20th-century arrival of chestnut blight in the US. Our forests have adapted to the loss of the chestnut, and its re-introduction would surely cause another ecological upheaval. Does anyone see this as a dangerous undertaking? If not, why not?
A picture is worth a thousand words, but most sets of 1000 words can't be succinctly described by a single picture.
Similarly, while I'm sure that you can write a few lines of Wolfram and do amazing things, I wonder how often you can set out to do an amazing thing and end up with a few lines of Wolfram. Maybe the answer is "pretty often", which would be wonderful. But I'm waiting to hear from some outside users.
This is a solution doesn't just allow such women to have healthy, genetically related children. It frees their lineage from the disease. Implement this fix in one generation, and the children, grandchildren, and all their progeny are disease-free.
I find it incredibly offensive to say that women should be forced to condemn their children to suffer from a preventable disease, or be prevented from bearing genetically-related children, simply because some people think the cure is "unnatural".
I guess it's sure as hell is a good thing 100 years ago we didn't have a suffering wet blanket of liability tossed over every fucking creative idea man has nowadays.
The FAA of today would have never let the Wright brothers leave the fucking ground. The OSHA of today would have never let Franklin play with electricity. See what happens when you continue to stifle innovation with liability. We will die as a species. And quickly.
I hate it when liability gets in the way of innovation. We humans aren't able to evolve any further with that kind of shit going on.
See, this is why I'm excited about drones. As long as they're not carrying people, and not big enough to kill people, we can continue to make rapid advances in intelligence, reliability, efficiency, and so forth. Then, when we have to face the regulators, we've got a much better baseline of reliability and performance to start from, and we've also got an established base population of the things. That, I think, improves the odds for those trying to push through the regulatory molasses.
Then you have to factor in that this material will be the strongest material used in space to date; it should be quite resistant to those effects.
I don't have the numbers handy, but I'm thinking the ribbon material is a couple orders of magnitude at best stronger than conventional materials, while impact energy is MANY orders of magnitude higher than the "strength" in question.
To put it another way, if an impact dumps enough energy to raise several cubic millimeters of material to a five-figure Kelvin temperature, the "material strength" becomes somewhat irrelevant. Vapor/plasma doesn't resist tension very well.
In fact, I'd think that stronger materials would receive more transferred energy from an impactor as it's punching through. You'd just have to count on having enough material left to hold things together.
Flying cars will not happen when power-plants get powerful enough, or efficient enough, or reliable enough.
Flying cars will not happen when the FAA comes up with rules to regulate vehicles that are both airworthy and road-worthy.
Flying cars most emphatically will not happen when flying-car startups courting venture capital say they'll happen.
Nope. Flying cars will happen when drones have become ubiquitous enough, trusted enough, and large enough that people start to say, "Hey! If I can hire a drone to carry 250 pounds of cargo across the state for fifty bucks, knowing that it'll show up within 30 minutes, make the trip in an hour, and have less than a one-in-a-million chance of dropping it along the way -- why can't I hire it to carry ME?"
Or the short-story version, Fast Times at Fairmont High, which appeared in one of the IEEE journals, won a Hugo in 2002, and has since appeared in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. It touches on many of the same themes as Rainbows End, but it's a quicker read.
I don't think so. Sure, it's better if you can avoid pay cuts, but:
1. Stay at current employer, getting an average 2%/yr increase.
2. Go to a start-up for 30% less with a good chance of 15%/yr increases and/or hefty bonuses.
3. Go contract, where the true relation between contract pay and pay-plus-benefits is obscured. You earn more per hour or year, but don't get subsidized for healthcare, matched for retirement, or paid for time off.
4. Take a pay cut without a guarantee of better raises, but a guarantee of learning more relevant and in-demand skills. Think of it as grad school with a really great stipend.
I would argue that there's no clear one-size-fits-all rule for choosing among these alternatives. You have to evaluate your own priorities and do your own risk assessment.
And there's always choice 5:
5. Take less money for a job that makes you happier, or doesn't age you as quickly.
"Broadband" means multiple signal on the same wire. It's the opposite of baseband, like ethernet.
No, and no.
In one technical sense, broadband means covering a wide range of frequencies, and baseband means the range of frequencies starts at zero.
The terms have different meanings in other contexts, but the important one here is "broadband = high-speed" (by virtue of supporting a wide spectral range, not that legislators are expected to understand that). "Basic" means "simple", "unadorned" or "low-end". Nobody said anything about "baseband".
Slashdot Mirror
I'd love to live in a tropical paradise, but so would lots of other people. That drives up the cost of living and/or leads to overcrowding.
First, you seem to assume that "more people" (ignoring the fact that birth rates are already decreasing) will mean "resources will be stripped that much faster", without creating new jobs or new tax revenue. You also seem to assume that people will reproduce more ("multiple families") as they live longer. That doesn't match what we see happening in the real world today.
Finally, if you "assume they will have solved" age-related diseases, why do you rely on those diseases as your main argument against longevity?
Imagine a whole population of polymaths as people learn at their own pace over 100s of years. 20 years as a bar tender. 20 years as a carpenter. 20 years as a fishermen. Life time on life time bleeding into each other.
Its a good thing.
No, no, no! The only way for a species to progress is for its individual members, with all their hard-won experience and wisdom, to each suffer and die after a fairly short lifespan. That's why rabbit culture is so far ahead of our own.
And if we stopped entropy, cell detioration would not occur. It's about as likely, I'm afraid. Telomeres are a molecular _answer_ to DNA deterioration, preenting the connection of one DNA molecule to another at the end points. And some types of system damage are cumulative, especially since scar tissue accumulates and regrowth of neural tissue has never been mastered.
"Has never been mastered"? What kind of argument is that?
Telomeres are one answer to DNA deterioration. It's folly to think that there are no others. Evolution is not a system for finding optimal solutions in bounded time. Or are you arguing that we're already optimally designed?
Overflow from the men's room flooding the server room, with lots of high-voltage cables lying around under the raised floor. Fastest system shutdown I've ever seen an admin execute; pulling the main breaker will do that.
I was set on a career in chemistry before I discovered computers in high school. I count it as one of the luckiest breaks in my life. See, I've always tended toward absent-mindedness and clumsiness. In Computer Science, you frequently have an Undo option, and failing that you can go to backups. In Chemistry, not so much. There's a good chance I never would've survived grad school.
True. If what you want to run on XP is an old stand-alone game, you should be in fine shape.
In my experience, though, the vast majority of even non-technical users "want it to do" things on "the Internet". Even my elderly parents don't pine for the Good Old Days before email and the Web; indeed, those are the things that finally drove them to get a PC (running XP).
Yes, I'm sure Grandma will get right on that.
You seem entirely unfamiliar with the concept of "security updates". Even if your computer "does what you want it to do and does it well", you may wake up one morning to find that it's doing what a stranger wants it to do.
Clarify, please, the difference between this and -- oh, I don't know -- someone hacking the electronic systems that already control your car's brakes, or throttle, or traction control?
Are you kidding? I'm having trouble thinking of an application that wouldn't benefit from this type of feedback. A few, off the top of my head:
Tactile feedback on a keyboard yields a huge improvement in speed and accuracy.
Tactile feedback on buttons helps confirm that you're hitting the right one, and successfully activating it.
Tactile feedback on scrolling can give you another channel for judging speed or position.
Lack of tactile feedback is one of the single biggest impediments to "virtual control" usability. I don't know if this approach is the magic bullet, but I welcome all research in this direction.
I'm pretty sure saying "there's a reason why species go extinct" is begging all sorts of teleological questions. Humans are a part of the natural (occurring in nature) evolutionary process, and so is this effort. Unless you want to argue that humans are somehow outside or beyond the natural universe...?
I can't see this working out well. Probably only a small number of individuals could be resurrected, simply because of lack of good DNA samples, and I bet a lot of errors would be introduced in de-extinction given current tech.
Genetic diversity, therefore, in the de-extinct species would be incredibly poor and any second generation would likely be rather sickly and not resistant to diseases. Either that or a continuous and very difficult (impossible?) genetic engineering effort would have to be involved in restoring genetic diversity to the species.
They address this briefly in the article. They intend to perturb the genome to introduce variability. I don't know whether they'd do this by introducing traits from the host species, or just more-efficiently permuting the variation from existing individual samples, or whether we've actually reached the point where we can synthesize variation based on our understanding of allele function in other species.
Some of the arguments against "de-extinction" (there's got to be a better term) puzzle me.
"Why go through all the trouble just to have the animal go extinct all over again?" First, perhaps we're now in a position to avoid the stupid actions that drove extinction the first time -- in the case of the passenger pigeon, and perhaps even the mammoth, over-hunting. Second, this argument would seem to apply equally to species that aren't extinct at all, but merely endangered. Whey go to any arbitrary amount of effort to protect a species, when it's likely to go extinct (eventually) no matter what we do?
"It's likely to become a new disease vector." This happens all the time anyhow. As the article points out, restoring a species that competes with current "pest" species (rodents and deer) may well reduce transmission of diseases like Lyme that are currently increasing.
I'd like to see some discussion that focuses on the differences between "de-extinction" and restoration of endangered-but-not-quite-extinct species. I'd also like to see some discussion about efforts like the American Chestnut Foundation, which is working to undo the profound damage from the early-20th-century arrival of chestnut blight in the US. Our forests have adapted to the loss of the chestnut, and its re-introduction would surely cause another ecological upheaval. Does anyone see this as a dangerous undertaking? If not, why not?
A picture is worth a thousand words, but most sets of 1000 words can't be succinctly described by a single picture.
Similarly, while I'm sure that you can write a few lines of Wolfram and do amazing things, I wonder how often you can set out to do an amazing thing and end up with a few lines of Wolfram. Maybe the answer is "pretty often", which would be wonderful. But I'm waiting to hear from some outside users.
This is a solution doesn't just allow such women to have healthy, genetically related children. It frees their lineage from the disease. Implement this fix in one generation, and the children, grandchildren, and all their progeny are disease-free.
I find it incredibly offensive to say that women should be forced to condemn their children to suffer from a preventable disease, or be prevented from bearing genetically-related children, simply because some people think the cure is "unnatural".
I guess it's sure as hell is a good thing 100 years ago we didn't have a suffering wet blanket of liability tossed over every fucking creative idea man has nowadays.
The FAA of today would have never let the Wright brothers leave the fucking ground. The OSHA of today would have never let Franklin play with electricity. See what happens when you continue to stifle innovation with liability. We will die as a species. And quickly.
I hate it when liability gets in the way of innovation. We humans aren't able to evolve any further with that kind of shit going on.
See, this is why I'm excited about drones. As long as they're not carrying people, and not big enough to kill people, we can continue to make rapid advances in intelligence, reliability, efficiency, and so forth. Then, when we have to face the regulators, we've got a much better baseline of reliability and performance to start from, and we've also got an established base population of the things. That, I think, improves the odds for those trying to push through the regulatory molasses.
Then you have to factor in that this material will be the strongest material used in space to date; it should be quite resistant to those effects.
I don't have the numbers handy, but I'm thinking the ribbon material is a couple orders of magnitude at best stronger than conventional materials, while impact energy is MANY orders of magnitude higher than the "strength" in question.
To put it another way, if an impact dumps enough energy to raise several cubic millimeters of material to a five-figure Kelvin temperature, the "material strength" becomes somewhat irrelevant. Vapor/plasma doesn't resist tension very well.
In fact, I'd think that stronger materials would receive more transferred energy from an impactor as it's punching through. You'd just have to count on having enough material left to hold things together.
Also known as "The Celebration of Cocaine, one Hell of a Drug".
Flying cars will not happen when power-plants get powerful enough, or efficient enough, or reliable enough.
Flying cars will not happen when the FAA comes up with rules to regulate vehicles that are both airworthy and road-worthy.
Flying cars most emphatically will not happen when flying-car startups courting venture capital say they'll happen.
Nope. Flying cars will happen when drones have become ubiquitous enough, trusted enough, and large enough that people start to say, "Hey! If I can hire a drone to carry 250 pounds of cargo across the state for fifty bucks, knowing that it'll show up within 30 minutes, make the trip in an hour, and have less than a one-in-a-million chance of dropping it along the way -- why can't I hire it to carry ME?"
Nope, there's absolutely no point in thinking about the future, except of course to assume that it'll be just like the present.
Or the short-story version, Fast Times at Fairmont High, which appeared in one of the IEEE journals, won a Hugo in 2002, and has since appeared in The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge. It touches on many of the same themes as Rainbows End, but it's a quicker read.
Excellent choice, although your memory of the plot and basic themes differs greatly from mine.
It's absolutely eerie to read this story and realize it was written over a century ago.
I don't think so. Sure, it's better if you can avoid pay cuts, but:
1. Stay at current employer, getting an average 2%/yr increase.
2. Go to a start-up for 30% less with a good chance of 15%/yr increases and/or hefty bonuses.
3. Go contract, where the true relation between contract pay and pay-plus-benefits is obscured. You earn more per hour or year, but don't get subsidized for healthcare, matched for retirement, or paid for time off.
4. Take a pay cut without a guarantee of better raises, but a guarantee of learning more relevant and in-demand skills. Think of it as grad school with a really great stipend.
I would argue that there's no clear one-size-fits-all rule for choosing among these alternatives. You have to evaluate your own priorities and do your own risk assessment.
And there's always choice 5:
5. Take less money for a job that makes you happier, or doesn't age you as quickly.
"Broadband" means multiple signal on the same wire. It's the opposite of baseband, like ethernet.
No, and no.
In one technical sense, broadband means covering a wide range of frequencies, and baseband means the range of frequencies starts at zero.
The terms have different meanings in other contexts, but the important one here is "broadband = high-speed" (by virtue of supporting a wide spectral range, not that legislators are expected to understand that). "Basic" means "simple", "unadorned" or "low-end". Nobody said anything about "baseband".
I'd like to hear more about this.