Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Brain tissue, once dead or severely damaged, can't realistically be restored the way it was, in much the same way that you can't restore a paper than has been burned. "You" is the structure of your brain. Even if damaged parts could be replaced with healthy new neurons, the old structure would be gone, which may change you in any number of ways (lost memories, lost skills, changed personality).
Every time one of your cells divides there is a small risk of a (series of) horrible mutation(s) that kills you, which would include the T-cells mentioned in TFA. However untreated leukemia is guaranteed to kill you. Choose.
> There is no real reason why something written in Python or Ruby couldn't be compiled to a binary with the same performance as something written in C/C++.
Yes, there is. Because Python and Ruby use dynamic typing, the compiler gets to make fewer assumptions about the code, and it has to check types during runtime. You may end up with a binary that has performance that is close to C/C++, but for almost all cases you'll never quite get there. Having said that, it usually doesn't really matter if your code runs half (or even 1/10th) as fast as a comparable C/C++ implementation unless you're doing heavy number crunching or your code is used extremely often and does not spend most of its time waiting for IO.
Are you suggesting all reports that indicate the USA is not in fact the #1 most awesome free country are the product of "self-identified intellectuals" with an ax to grind? Yeah, compared to "perhaps the USA is not #1 in all it's endeavours" your grand conspiracy sounds much more reasonable.
> Despite the US's flaws, the first amendment is the strongest protection of free expression in the world.
Is it? I mean it's fairly decent and all, and maybe it is even the best in theory (although I didn't compare US law to any of the other ~200 countries that exist) but given the fact that the US are hardly even near the top of lists such as the Press Freedom Index, perhaps it doesn't really work all that well in practice.
> Clock skew (When clock is sent, it takes x microseconds to traverse the chip) scales exponentially. 10% at 1ghz is 100mhz skew; 10% at 3ghz is 300mhz skew.
So when you triple the clockspeed, you triple the skew? That sounds... linear, and not exponential at all.
It sounds quite doable to me. All http requests are independent and thus can be evaluated in parallel by whatever number of machines they're willing to throw at the problem. Finding out if any single http request is in their database in 1ms should be trivial.
That makes sense, here in the Netherlands we have sidewalks pretty much everywhere, and it is considered a responsibility of the drivers not to hit cyclists and pedestrians rather than the other way round (even by law: be default the operator of the motor vehicle is blamed and has to pay all damage to his own vehicle and at least 50% of the damage caused to the other party, unless the pedestrian or cyclist was being deliberately reckless). We really like bicycles, and we're very lenient when it comes to jaywalking. Cultural differences are funny that way.
Surely in most places the difference in risk would be negligible? Perhaps it might make a small difference in a bad neighbourhood at night. Stranger rape is relatively rare and only about 4% of rapes occur outdoors.
Many religious people who believe in infinite punishment (hell) still sin. If the prospect of infinite punishment can be insufficient deterrence, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that increasing punishment does not always make a deterrent significantly more effective? Would it not be better to research ways to increase deterrence that do not rely on merely increasing punishment?
> So, if someone is being problematic, you punish him lightly so that he notices he's being a jerk and start behaving; if he does something more serious, you ostracize him temporarily (this ostracism can be literal in small enough societies, as you literally make the person get out of the village/tribe/whatever and taste living on his own, without the benefit of community support, so that he can start grasping how very much important being in it is -- and if he dies while "out", well, that's his problem);
You do realize you are describing reform, right? Becoming less of a jerk and grasping the importance of being part of society are both ways for the problematic person to change for the better (from society's perspective).
> The second, and newest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is to reform the criminal.
"Reforming the criminal" is not a new notion, the new notion is that increasingly severe punishment alone is not sufficient to lead to effective reform.
Your argument assumes that 'total longer lived life' is most important when determining the practicality of an action. By that reasoning it would be best to force everyone to reproduce as often as possible (e.g. by banning contraceptives) and to keep brain-dead people on life-support indefinitely.
I think it's obvious there are more issues to consider than just 'total lived life'. For instance, the effect of losing the mother on her friends and family. The effect on the child that has to grow up without a mother (and perhaps with the thought that they were to some degree complicit in her death). And, from a very heartless economic perspective, it would mean the loss of a tax-payer, likely before she had the chance to pay back (through taxes) the money that society had invested in raising and educating her.
Funny how you refer to it as "Land of the Free" while at the same time telling someone to go live somewhere else for having a different opinion. I take it by "Free", you mean "free to do only things that I approve of"?
> I remember reading somewhere, I think it was in a book by neurologist Antonio Damasio, that consciousness does not exist without the flesh. In patients who are cut off from all sensory input the brain more or less shuts down. In emotional reactions the physical response (a shiver, a smile on your face) happens *before* you feel the emotion, and is even needed to feel it. It seems that part of your brain makes your body do something, another part observes your body and makes you feel something based on that. That's how I remember it, anyway.
Are you suggesting a person would (temporarily) stop experiencing emotions if one were to (temporarily) paralyse their face?
You keep saying that a lot in this thread, but no, you are not 'free to do so'. From EA's terms of service: - Unless expressly authorized by EA, you may not sell, buy, trade or otherwise transfer your Account or any personal access to EA Services, Content or Entitlements, including by use of auction websites.
Who cares? Even today it's possible for someone to either steal a police car or change their car to closely resemble one. People are at least as easy to fool as a computer, usually significantly more so. When a car with sirens is behind you and signals you to pull over, do you ignore it? "It might have been a fake police car!" is probably not considered a good excuse in court.
People with the resources and motivation to hack your car will also be able to acquire a car as described above.
> One feature of x86 is that, save for a specialized SSE streaming store instruction, any store made by one core is immediately visible to all the other cores—even when the old value was already in a core's cache.
Can you provide a source for that? Because as far as I'm aware cores can pretty much decide to perform stores in any order and at any time they like, and memory is only shared in the lowest layer of cache (usually L3). If what you say is true, it would kind of defeat the purpose of instructions such as http://siyobik.info/main/reference/instruction/MFENCE this.
Slashdot Mirror
Brain tissue, once dead or severely damaged, can't realistically be restored the way it was, in much the same way that you can't restore a paper than has been burned. "You" is the structure of your brain. Even if damaged parts could be replaced with healthy new neurons, the old structure would be gone, which may change you in any number of ways (lost memories, lost skills, changed personality).
Assuming the robot is capable of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_learning , you most certainly can teach it.
Every time one of your cells divides there is a small risk of a (series of) horrible mutation(s) that kills you, which would include the T-cells mentioned in TFA. However untreated leukemia is guaranteed to kill you. Choose.
> There is no real reason why something written in Python or Ruby couldn't be compiled to a binary with the same performance as something written in C/C++.
Yes, there is. Because Python and Ruby use dynamic typing, the compiler gets to make fewer assumptions about the code, and it has to check types during runtime. You may end up with a binary that has performance that is close to C/C++, but for almost all cases you'll never quite get there. Having said that, it usually doesn't really matter if your code runs half (or even 1/10th) as fast as a comparable C/C++ implementation unless you're doing heavy number crunching or your code is used extremely often and does not spend most of its time waiting for IO.
That would depend entirely on the area of the brain that is affected.
Are you suggesting all reports that indicate the USA is not in fact the #1 most awesome free country are the product of "self-identified intellectuals" with an ax to grind? Yeah, compared to "perhaps the USA is not #1 in all it's endeavours" your grand conspiracy sounds much more reasonable.
> Despite the US's flaws, the first amendment is the strongest protection of free expression in the world.
Is it? I mean it's fairly decent and all, and maybe it is even the best in theory (although I didn't compare US law to any of the other ~200 countries that exist) but given the fact that the US are hardly even near the top of lists such as the Press Freedom Index, perhaps it doesn't really work all that well in practice.
By that line of reason you have to pay the UK when you use a computer, as they were invented by Charles Babbage.
> Clock skew (When clock is sent, it takes x microseconds to traverse the chip) scales exponentially. 10% at 1ghz is 100mhz skew; 10% at 3ghz is 300mhz skew.
So when you triple the clockspeed, you triple the skew? That sounds... linear, and not exponential at all.
That's fascinating, my ping to google.com is 21ms. According to your post there must be no routers between me and google.
Perhaps you mean microseconds instead of milliseconds?
It sounds quite doable to me. All http requests are independent and thus can be evaluated in parallel by whatever number of machines they're willing to throw at the problem. Finding out if any single http request is in their database in 1ms should be trivial.
That makes sense, here in the Netherlands we have sidewalks pretty much everywhere, and it is considered a responsibility of the drivers not to hit cyclists and pedestrians rather than the other way round (even by law: be default the operator of the motor vehicle is blamed and has to pay all damage to his own vehicle and at least 50% of the damage caused to the other party, unless the pedestrian or cyclist was being deliberately reckless). We really like bicycles, and we're very lenient when it comes to jaywalking. Cultural differences are funny that way.
Surely in most places the difference in risk would be negligible? Perhaps it might make a small difference in a bad neighbourhood at night. Stranger rape is relatively rare and only about 4% of rapes occur outdoors.
> It's nice if people will exercise outside- but it isn't as safe (especially for women)
Why would it be especially unsafe for women?
> Every 7 minutes of exercise adds 1 minute to your life. Not to mention all the other benefits.
Sounds like a net loss to me.
Many religious people who believe in infinite punishment (hell) still sin. If the prospect of infinite punishment can be insufficient deterrence, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that increasing punishment does not always make a deterrent significantly more effective? Would it not be better to research ways to increase deterrence that do not rely on merely increasing punishment?
> So, if someone is being problematic, you punish him lightly so that he notices he's being a jerk and start behaving; if he does something more serious, you ostracize him temporarily (this ostracism can be literal in small enough societies, as you literally make the person get out of the village/tribe/whatever and taste living on his own, without the benefit of community support, so that he can start grasping how very much important being in it is -- and if he dies while "out", well, that's his problem);
You do realize you are describing reform, right? Becoming less of a jerk and grasping the importance of being part of society are both ways for the problematic person to change for the better (from society's perspective).
> The second, and newest, is the notion that the punitive branch goal is to reform the criminal.
"Reforming the criminal" is not a new notion, the new notion is that increasingly severe punishment alone is not sufficient to lead to effective reform.
Your argument assumes that 'total longer lived life' is most important when determining the practicality of an action. By that reasoning it would be best to force everyone to reproduce as often as possible (e.g. by banning contraceptives) and to keep brain-dead people on life-support indefinitely.
I think it's obvious there are more issues to consider than just 'total lived life'. For instance, the effect of losing the mother on her friends and family. The effect on the child that has to grow up without a mother (and perhaps with the thought that they were to some degree complicit in her death). And, from a very heartless economic perspective, it would mean the loss of a tax-payer, likely before she had the chance to pay back (through taxes) the money that society had invested in raising and educating her.
Doesn't true freedom include the option to give up that freedom?
Funny how you refer to it as "Land of the Free" while at the same time telling someone to go live somewhere else for having a different opinion. I take it by "Free", you mean "free to do only things that I approve of"?
> I remember reading somewhere, I think it was in a book by neurologist Antonio Damasio, that consciousness does not exist without the flesh. In patients who are cut off from all sensory input the brain more or less shuts down. In emotional reactions the physical response (a shiver, a smile on your face) happens *before* you feel the emotion, and is even needed to feel it. It seems that part of your brain makes your body do something, another part observes your body and makes you feel something based on that. That's how I remember it, anyway.
Are you suggesting a person would (temporarily) stop experiencing emotions if one were to (temporarily) paralyse their face?
You think the goal of "the terrorists" is to make you lose your privacy online? You're insane. Hint: nobody hates you for your 'freedom'.
Marco Borsato http://www.nu.nl/achterklap/2163591/marco-borsato-heeft-belasting-ontdoken.html
He settled for about two million euros.
You keep saying that a lot in this thread, but no, you are not 'free to do so'. From EA's terms of service:
- Unless expressly authorized by EA, you may not sell, buy, trade or otherwise transfer your Account or any personal access to EA Services, Content or Entitlements, including by use of auction websites.
Who cares? Even today it's possible for someone to either steal a police car or change their car to closely resemble one. People are at least as easy to fool as a computer, usually significantly more so. When a car with sirens is behind you and signals you to pull over, do you ignore it? "It might have been a fake police car!" is probably not considered a good excuse in court.
People with the resources and motivation to hack your car will also be able to acquire a car as described above.
> One feature of x86 is that, save for a specialized SSE streaming store instruction, any store made by one core is immediately visible to all the other cores—even when the old value was already in a core's cache.
Can you provide a source for that? Because as far as I'm aware cores can pretty much decide to perform stores in any order and at any time they like, and memory is only shared in the lowest layer of cache (usually L3). If what you say is true, it would kind of defeat the purpose of instructions such as http://siyobik.info/main/reference/instruction/MFENCE this.