Not sure why you got modded insightful. Space is almost a perfect vacuum, and the vast majority of the matter out there will be hydrogen with very little else. Even if there was DNA floating around in space, it would get destroyed by the radiation that's out there. If the probe can make it out of our atmosphere without getting contaminated with DNA then it will make it to Mars without encountering any DNA.
> (or even if their existence is a health risk for you).
Yes you can, we call that 'self-defense'. If someone attacks you with lethal force that person is an immediate health risk and in most places you are allowed to use lethal force in return to end this health risk.
I can't really be bothered to RTFA, but depending on their approach you may end up with memory T-cells afterwards, which would mean the immune system would reactivate whenever the virus makes a return. In effect, you would acquire an immunity.
No. Since there is no reason to assume the presence of these nanobots, it doesn't make sense to speculate about their motives. Occam's razor is your friend.
> My knowledge of thermodynamics - especially the concept of entropy - tells me the Universe, left to its own, should run down.
It's running down as we speak. All stars will eventually burn out, and while new stars are still being created, eventually the universe will run out of usable hydrogen and all will go dark. To the best of our knowledge nobody is adding energy to the universe, and the only reason we've made it so far is because we started out with enormous amounts of energy about 13-14 billion years ago.
> However, yes, parents are not always 'highly' informed and educated on all issues. Are you seriously suggesting that a person needs to be in order to make a decision?
If the stakes are high enough, that does seem like a reasonable position to take. If your child has appendicitis, will you remove it yourself, or visit a hospital with a highly informed and educated specialist to do the surgery for you? Are you better qualified because nobody knows your child better?
> nb. The 'three CPUs' thing isn't done for detection of hardware faults it's for software faults. The idea is to get three different programmers to write three different programs with a specified output. You then compare the outputs of the programs and if one is different it's likely to be a bug.
Why would you need three CPUs when you can just have three threads that run on any number of CPUs?
> Any remotely liberation/private ownership society would not dare mess with someone's body even after death.
Why is that? There is no meaningful concept of ownership when you're dead. I could easily imagine a society where private ownership is important but respecting the wishes of the deceased is not. If dead people could keep all their stuff, most of the world would have been owned by dead people for thousands of years.
> Do you have secret fantasies of being Hitler? > instead of being a Nazi. > By the way, by acting like such a Nazi I fail to see how the nazis have anything to do with the subject of organ donation, they didn't harvest their prisoners, nor did they have (as far as I'm aware) any special policies concerning organ donation.
> Truth be told I really don't feel like there's an organ shortage. Yeah, I read there is one, but I don't feel it. Well you wouldn't feel the shortage unless you were missing vital organs, would you? Do you or anyone in your immediate vicinity require a new organ? If not, then no, of course you wouldn't "feel" it. Since you like the Nazis so much, let's put it this way: many Germans in Nazi Germany had probably heard rumours that Jews were not being treated very nicely, but they didn't really feel it, and that made it okay to ignore.
> Maybe if you could show me more than numbers and stats, maybe mention a few cases of people who died because they could not get an organ, I'd be more aware of the issue. You would prefer a few anecdotes over a proper study? Wilfully ignorant much? Besides, you mention in your post that you don't care about strangers, so why should you care about those cases of people who died?
> If you are listed as a donor, doctors are more likely to kill you (or more exactly: to let you die) to get your organs for somebody who seems more sympathetic (somebody younger or somebody who has a family, etc). If doctors knew just how incredibly unsympathetic you are, they'd probably let you die regardless of your donor status.
> I'd rather have my organs preserved and given to a family member in 10 years should they need them. So you *do* wish to donate your organs. That's cool. I take it you're also going to pay the hospital for keeping your brain-dead body alive for 10 years for an eventuality that is unlikely to ever occur?
> Why should I care about strangers when I have family to think about? Ostensibly because you are part of a society where people care about the suffering of others. Those strangers have friends and family too.
> Why should I be forced to give my organs to a dumb teenager who got hurt by doing something stupid? GP was talking about an opt-out system, where you would (as the name suggests) have the option of opting out, so nobody is forcing you to do anything. And many people make stupid mistakes in their youth, that doesn't mean they won't grow up to be good and productive people. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the organ receiver will be a teenager, nor that their need for an organ is self-inflicted.
> Or a fucktard who decided to smoke and now needs new lungs? It's interesting how you seem to think all people in need of a new organ are somehow criminals and idiots who are entirely responsible for the situation they find themselves in. You are blaming the victims.
> I know that people who are responsible for their own problems don't get priority in organ donations, but once every dead person donates organs, even the idiots who injured themselves will have organs available. And that's great, isn't it? If there are so many organs available that we can even save the idiots, you can safely donate your organs in the knowledge that when your family members require an organ, a donor will be found.
> I'm happy if they can find organs, I might actually be willing to donate my own, but I don't want to be forced. Like I said, it's 'opt-out', which means you aren't forced.
> It's my body and you have no right to it. You think I'm selfish? Fuck you! MY BODY. MINE. MINE! MINE! MINE! Yeah whatever. If your body is so important to you, I'm sure you are willing to make a one-time investment of 15 minutes to opt-out.
I can't imagine how that makes much of a difference in your particular scenario. Java applications generally don't randomly start using all your cpus. Even if the whole server were to be rewritten in a different language, it's behaviour would still be the same. The best case scenario would be slightly shorter lag spikes. An easy fix would be for the server to unload all chunks and pause when there are no players around, which would eliminate your idle-server memory and cpu use. The implementation language is irrelevant.
Having said that, it would be interesting to see if minecraft servers could benefit from SSE and CUDA/OpenCL, especially for things like liquids, fire, sand and gravel. Probably not. Even if it worked, such optimizations would be overkill (but awesome!).
Minecraft really isn't made to support those things. Chunks are 16 by 16 by 256 and don't stack vertically, so that rather limits manoeuvrability. Also given that space is mostly empty it really wouldn't make sense to use the minecraft level format, which isn't very sparse...
While there are no doubt ways to hack around such builtin limitations, it would probably be easier, faster, and vastly more efficient performance-wise to create a new game engine.
> Get a family of fruit flies. Put them in complete darkness -- no light, but feed them everything they need.
So where exactly is the selective pressure? The fruit flies have everything they need: they are not being selected for not having eyes, so there is no reason at all to expect their eyes to disappear.
> 90% of what we believe about evolution is incorrect
No, 90% of what YOU believe about evolution is incorrect.
> Don't you think you're being a bit elitist by assuming that intelligence isn't equally distributed among mankind? Intellectual jobs are jobs like all the others. Remember that we're not talking about designing a nuclear power plant here, we're talking about IP in general. My grandfather didn't finish elementary school, and was a carpenter. In his spare time, he made paintings and acted in the local theatre.
Intelligence in known to be unequally distributed. Perhaps you meant to say 'creativity'?
> forcing someone to give up their organs is just as, if not more, despicable as trying to force celibacy on someone by denying them access to contraceptives. people have to be free to make their own choices.
Except this entire conversation is in the context of *donors*, who by definition have given their consent, so it doesn't make any sense to accuse me of forcing people.
> Well, donors don't get paid in the US, either (and the article didn't say that).
And I never suggested there were paid. I was using the blood donor example to illustrate how removing financial incentives can benefit objectivity and honesty. If you had read a little more thoroughly, you might have noticed the "non-profit for all parties involved" part, which would at the very least include the doctor and the hospital.
> The article said that a body generates about $2 million in income for various parties (hospital, surgeons, etc.).
And presumably it did so to suggest there is financial incentive to harvest organs, which would lead one to conclude that someone is making a profit (otherwise there would be no financial incentive), and that someone is either the doctor or someone who might influence the doctor.
> Think of it like this: If you're the owner of a toy store, and you got free toys because the next-door shop shut down (died), you'll still be asking full price when you sell them, and your customers will pay it.
In your example the owner of the toy store has a financial incentive to kill his neighbour, the badness of which is exactly the point I'm trying to make;)
What I'm suggesting is that the toy making next door should state in his will that he leaves you his toys, but you're not allowed to make a profit on them, which would remove your financial incentive to murder him. Of course since you want to make a profit you would just get rid of his toys, but for organs supply and demand are different and it involves saving lives.
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Informative
No, try reading the rest of the thread. I was talking about severe brain trauma in the context of the scenario of OP, who spoke about being brain-dead. The brain changes constantly, and my brain tomorrow won't be the same as my brain today, that hardly means I think I deserve to die tomorrow. I am not suggesting we kill everyone who loses the ability to juggle as the result of a major concussion. I just think that if we start replacing parts of the brain of a person with severe brain-trauma to a degree where the resulting person is pretty much indistinguishable from someone who has had a complete brain transplant (if such a thing were possible) we've abandoned 'curing the patient' and crossed into mad-scientist 'create new life' territory, and we're still using the body as an organ donor, but we're donating all the organs to the new person.
Besides, saying there are 'quite a few people who disagree with me' is irrelevant. If you have an opinion on any (semi-)controversial subject there will be billions who will disagree with you. I'm not interested in a popularity contest, if you disagree try giving an argument that is not based on pulling my words out of context and misinterpreting them.
Of course there would be situations where it's not clear how much the original person would change when using the miracle brain regeneration device, but I think the brain-death scenario is not one of those situations, so please don't go all Loki's Wager on me.
> I want to donate my organs, consider me dead if I'm 80% brain-dead
What does that even mean? 80% brain-dead? If only 20% of your brain is still functional you're no less dead than compared to 0% functional. Try randomly destroying 4 out of every 5 transistors on your CPU and see how it runs.
> If we say an average doctor's salary is 200k per year that means each person they certify creates 10 years worth of salary to be distributed around the hospital staff and surrounding industries. Even if the doctor himself is not being pressured to certify brain death, others in the hospital certainly are under pressure.
In my country (the Netherlands) people don't get paid for donating blood, so the incentive to donate too often and lie about disease and other risk factors is significantly reduced. Perhaps making organ donation non-profit for all parties involved would help remove money from the equation for doctors?
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
> Even if the person is no longer you, They still have a right to live.
Except that person doesn't exist until the brain is repaired. Before you perform the magic brain-restoration procedure there is no person 'inhabiting' the body, so the right to live does not apply. The act of repairing the brain to a useful state would be the act of creating the new person, and why would you create one new person (who, depending on the severity of the former brain damage, may have no skills and/or memories) when you can harvest some organs and preserve the lives of several already existing people? Why create a new person and effectively donate all the organs to him/her?
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure why you got modded insightful. Space is almost a perfect vacuum, and the vast majority of the matter out there will be hydrogen with very little else. Even if there was DNA floating around in space, it would get destroyed by the radiation that's out there. If the probe can make it out of our atmosphere without getting contaminated with DNA then it will make it to Mars without encountering any DNA.
> (or even if their existence is a health risk for you).
Yes you can, we call that 'self-defense'. If someone attacks you with lethal force that person is an immediate health risk and in most places you are allowed to use lethal force in return to end this health risk.
> In other words, you disagree with the majority of your voters?
The majority of voters did not vote for Wilders, so what's your point again?
I can't really be bothered to RTFA, but depending on their approach you may end up with memory T-cells afterwards, which would mean the immune system would reactivate whenever the virus makes a return. In effect, you would acquire an immunity.
> Kind of mindfucking isn't it?
No. Since there is no reason to assume the presence of these nanobots, it doesn't make sense to speculate about their motives. Occam's razor is your friend.
> My knowledge of thermodynamics - especially the concept of entropy - tells me the Universe, left to its own, should run down.
It's running down as we speak. All stars will eventually burn out, and while new stars are still being created, eventually the universe will run out of usable hydrogen and all will go dark. To the best of our knowledge nobody is adding energy to the universe, and the only reason we've made it so far is because we started out with enormous amounts of energy about 13-14 billion years ago.
> However, yes, parents are not always 'highly' informed and educated on all issues. Are you seriously suggesting that a person needs to be in order to make a decision?
If the stakes are high enough, that does seem like a reasonable position to take. If your child has appendicitis, will you remove it yourself, or visit a hospital with a highly informed and educated specialist to do the surgery for you? Are you better qualified because nobody knows your child better?
> nb. The 'three CPUs' thing isn't done for detection of hardware faults it's for software faults. The idea is to get three different programmers to write three different programs with a specified output. You then compare the outputs of the programs and if one is different it's likely to be a bug.
Why would you need three CPUs when you can just have three threads that run on any number of CPUs?
Wouldn't it make more sense to shoot the head? Shooting the chest would damage organs.
> Any remotely liberation/private ownership society would not dare mess with someone's body even after death.
Why is that? There is no meaningful concept of ownership when you're dead. I could easily imagine a society where private ownership is important but respecting the wishes of the deceased is not. If dead people could keep all their stuff, most of the world would have been owned by dead people for thousands of years.
> Do you have secret fantasies of being Hitler?
> instead of being a Nazi.
> By the way, by acting like such a Nazi
I fail to see how the nazis have anything to do with the subject of organ donation, they didn't harvest their prisoners, nor did they have (as far as I'm aware) any special policies concerning organ donation.
> Truth be told I really don't feel like there's an organ shortage. Yeah, I read there is one, but I don't feel it.
Well you wouldn't feel the shortage unless you were missing vital organs, would you? Do you or anyone in your immediate vicinity require a new organ? If not, then no, of course you wouldn't "feel" it.
Since you like the Nazis so much, let's put it this way: many Germans in Nazi Germany had probably heard rumours that Jews were not being treated very nicely, but they didn't really feel it, and that made it okay to ignore.
> Maybe if you could show me more than numbers and stats, maybe mention a few cases of people who died because they could not get an organ, I'd be more aware of the issue.
You would prefer a few anecdotes over a proper study? Wilfully ignorant much? Besides, you mention in your post that you don't care about strangers, so why should you care about those cases of people who died?
> If you are listed as a donor, doctors are more likely to kill you (or more exactly: to let you die) to get your organs for somebody who seems more sympathetic (somebody younger or somebody who has a family, etc).
If doctors knew just how incredibly unsympathetic you are, they'd probably let you die regardless of your donor status.
> I'd rather have my organs preserved and given to a family member in 10 years should they need them.
So you *do* wish to donate your organs. That's cool. I take it you're also going to pay the hospital for keeping your brain-dead body alive for 10 years for an eventuality that is unlikely to ever occur?
> Why should I care about strangers when I have family to think about?
Ostensibly because you are part of a society where people care about the suffering of others. Those strangers have friends and family too.
> Why should I be forced to give my organs to a dumb teenager who got hurt by doing something stupid?
GP was talking about an opt-out system, where you would (as the name suggests) have the option of opting out, so nobody is forcing you to do anything. And many people make stupid mistakes in their youth, that doesn't mean they won't grow up to be good and productive people. Moreover, there is no reason to believe that the organ receiver will be a teenager, nor that their need for an organ is self-inflicted.
> Or a fucktard who decided to smoke and now needs new lungs?
It's interesting how you seem to think all people in need of a new organ are somehow criminals and idiots who are entirely responsible for the situation they find themselves in. You are blaming the victims.
> I know that people who are responsible for their own problems don't get priority in organ donations, but once every dead person donates organs, even the idiots who injured themselves will have organs available.
And that's great, isn't it? If there are so many organs available that we can even save the idiots, you can safely donate your organs in the knowledge that when your family members require an organ, a donor will be found.
> Explain why I should give a fuck about these people?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compassion
> I'm happy if they can find organs, I might actually be willing to donate my own, but I don't want to be forced.
Like I said, it's 'opt-out', which means you aren't forced.
> It's my body and you have no right to it. You think I'm selfish? Fuck you! MY BODY. MINE. MINE! MINE! MINE!
Yeah whatever. If your body is so important to you, I'm sure you are willing to make a one-time investment of 15 minutes to opt-out.
> you actually managed to convince me not to dona
I can't imagine how that makes much of a difference in your particular scenario. Java applications generally don't randomly start using all your cpus. Even if the whole server were to be rewritten in a different language, it's behaviour would still be the same. The best case scenario would be slightly shorter lag spikes. An easy fix would be for the server to unload all chunks and pause when there are no players around, which would eliminate your idle-server memory and cpu use. The implementation language is irrelevant.
Having said that, it would be interesting to see if minecraft servers could benefit from SSE and CUDA/OpenCL, especially for things like liquids, fire, sand and gravel. Probably not. Even if it worked, such optimizations would be overkill (but awesome!).
I think Lua would be a better choice, this seems like one of those use-cases it was designed for.
Minecraft really isn't made to support those things. Chunks are 16 by 16 by 256 and don't stack vertically, so that rather limits manoeuvrability. Also given that space is mostly empty it really wouldn't make sense to use the minecraft level format, which isn't very sparse...
While there are no doubt ways to hack around such builtin limitations, it would probably be easier, faster, and vastly more efficient performance-wise to create a new game engine.
> Get a family of fruit flies. Put them in complete darkness -- no light, but feed them everything they need.
So where exactly is the selective pressure? The fruit flies have everything they need: they are not being selected for not having eyes, so there is no reason at all to expect their eyes to disappear.
> 90% of what we believe about evolution is incorrect
No, 90% of what YOU believe about evolution is incorrect.
That should be 'fill' the timeline. I seem to be quite skilled at making typos that my spell-checker can't catch lately.
Perhaps they could scrape all dates from wikipedia and will the timeline with links to millions of articles.
> Don't you think you're being a bit elitist by assuming that intelligence isn't equally distributed among mankind? Intellectual jobs are jobs like all the others. Remember that we're not talking about designing a nuclear power plant here, we're talking about IP in general. My grandfather didn't finish elementary school, and was a carpenter. In his spare time, he made paintings and acted in the local theatre.
Intelligence in known to be unequally distributed. Perhaps you meant to say 'creativity'?
> forcing someone to give up their organs is just as, if not more, despicable as trying to force celibacy on someone by denying them access to contraceptives. people have to be free to make their own choices.
Except this entire conversation is in the context of *donors*, who by definition have given their consent, so it doesn't make any sense to accuse me of forcing people.
> Well, donors don't get paid in the US, either (and the article didn't say that).
And I never suggested there were paid. I was using the blood donor example to illustrate how removing financial incentives can benefit objectivity and honesty. If you had read a little more thoroughly, you might have noticed the "non-profit for all parties involved" part, which would at the very least include the doctor and the hospital.
> The article said that a body generates about $2 million in income for various parties (hospital, surgeons, etc.).
And presumably it did so to suggest there is financial incentive to harvest organs, which would lead one to conclude that someone is making a profit (otherwise there would be no financial incentive), and that someone is either the doctor or someone who might influence the doctor.
> Think of it like this: If you're the owner of a toy store, and you got free toys because the next-door shop shut down (died), you'll still be asking full price when you sell them, and your customers will pay it.
In your example the owner of the toy store has a financial incentive to kill his neighbour, the badness of which is exactly the point I'm trying to make ;)
What I'm suggesting is that the toy making next door should state in his will that he leaves you his toys, but you're not allowed to make a profit on them, which would remove your financial incentive to murder him. Of course since you want to make a profit you would just get rid of his toys, but for organs supply and demand are different and it involves saving lives.
No, try reading the rest of the thread. I was talking about severe brain trauma in the context of the scenario of OP, who spoke about being brain-dead. The brain changes constantly, and my brain tomorrow won't be the same as my brain today, that hardly means I think I deserve to die tomorrow. I am not suggesting we kill everyone who loses the ability to juggle as the result of a major concussion. I just think that if we start replacing parts of the brain of a person with severe brain-trauma to a degree where the resulting person is pretty much indistinguishable from someone who has had a complete brain transplant (if such a thing were possible) we've abandoned 'curing the patient' and crossed into mad-scientist 'create new life' territory, and we're still using the body as an organ donor, but we're donating all the organs to the new person.
Besides, saying there are 'quite a few people who disagree with me' is irrelevant. If you have an opinion on any (semi-)controversial subject there will be billions who will disagree with you. I'm not interested in a popularity contest, if you disagree try giving an argument that is not based on pulling my words out of context and misinterpreting them.
Of course there would be situations where it's not clear how much the original person would change when using the miracle brain regeneration device, but I think the brain-death scenario is not one of those situations, so please don't go all Loki's Wager on me.
> I want to donate my organs, consider me dead if I'm 80% brain-dead
What does that even mean? 80% brain-dead? If only 20% of your brain is still functional you're no less dead than compared to 0% functional. Try randomly destroying 4 out of every 5 transistors on your CPU and see how it runs.
Perhaps your organs will save the life of a child who will invent a brain repair technology 30 years from now ;)
> If we say an average doctor's salary is 200k per year that means each person they certify creates 10 years worth of salary to be distributed around the hospital staff and surrounding industries. Even if the doctor himself is not being pressured to certify brain death, others in the hospital certainly are under pressure.
In my country (the Netherlands) people don't get paid for donating blood, so the incentive to donate too often and lie about disease and other risk factors is significantly reduced. Perhaps making organ donation non-profit for all parties involved would help remove money from the equation for doctors?
> Even if the person is no longer you, They still have a right to live.
Except that person doesn't exist until the brain is repaired. Before you perform the magic brain-restoration procedure there is no person 'inhabiting' the body, so the right to live does not apply. The act of repairing the brain to a useful state would be the act of creating the new person, and why would you create one new person (who, depending on the severity of the former brain damage, may have no skills and/or memories) when you can harvest some organs and preserve the lives of several already existing people? Why create a new person and effectively donate all the organs to him/her?