This highlights the needs for more open source/public software. Whether it is voting machines or spyware scanners. Some things can't reliably be left to commercial vendors with closed source.
I'll agree that germline genetic engineering is likely to be a path to radical life extension, but it's hardly the only one. The technology that will be required to perform the cellular level repairs necessary to revive cryonics patients will almost certainly make life extension trivial, so I don't think that'll be an issue. We'll be able to rejuvinate the elderly well before we're able to revive "cryonauts".
Just repairing cells is not the issue, AFAIK. The way I understand it, aging happens because cells have a built in reproductive clock. And once that starts running down, you WILL age no matter how much you artificially repair or rejuvinate existing cells. They'll simply die off and not reproduce.
Your second point is something that I hear a lot, and I don't really understand why. A cryonicist won't be alone. He'll have the support structure and camaraderie of all of the other cryonicists, who will be making the same adjustments and living through the same adventure.
Ok, but it sounds more like a support group than a group of friends.;-)
And if by some fluke I am the only one? I still prefer it to oblivion.
Would you? Plenty of people commit suicide out of shear loneliness. If "oblivion" is really what happens when you die, then your preference to avoid it is kind of moot, don't you think? What is the point of fearing something that you'll never, by definition, actually experience?
Yeah, spinning a habitat is pretty cheap. Especially when you habitat is not in interstellar space.. the Sun provides more energy than you can use. It's so damn easy and so much better to live in space that it is a travesty that it has been over 30 years since O'Neil worked it all out for us and we're still sitting here on this rock. We're still suffering poor crops and unpredictable weather. We're still burning fossil fuels and making radioactive wastes. We're still struggling with flus and parasites and living under the threat of imminent death of the species by planet killing meteors.
How do you know it is easy/better living in space? Because some guy wrote up some sci-fi making it look possible? Seems to me that living in a space colony would be pretty damn difficult... and confining. Maybe compared to Mars it woudl be OK, I dunno, but I can't imagine it beiing any easier/better than living down here on Earth. I don't know where YOU live, but Oregon, where I live, is f'ng beautiful and I wouldn't trade it for a space colony. Sure, I'd visit a space station/colony given the chance, but I find it unlikely that I'd actually want to live there.
Or you could just get to the future only to find that you have to be genetically engineered from birth to live that superlong life and end up looking like as fool as you age, all alone with no friends or family, while everyone else is holding at 19 and partying all the time. But I guess I'm a pessimist sometimes.:-)
What's wrong with a little gravity? You'd probably end up spending a lot of resources trying to recreate it on a long term space colony, might as well take advantage of the natural gravity of Mars. But I guess the advantage of a space station/colony gravity is that it is "optional." Mmmm, weightless sex. Sounds fun.
The question was, what is the difference between courage and stupidity (as both might be considered a byproduct of alcohol consumption). And the answer is: Stupidity is nearly always bad. Courage is not.
Corn is only high in sugar compared to other crops that can be grown in mass quantities in the continental U.S.
So it makes sense that corn is used for ethanol in the continental US. What's the problem?
he only reason your food is sweetened with HFCS are trade barriers and tariffs approximately double the price of sugar -- barriers that persist mostly as a result of corn lobby demands.
The only reason? HFCS has desirable qualities for food producers/processors (I try to avoid the stuff, personally)
My experiences with Linux show it suffers big time from process hogs, especially IO process hogs, such as when you copy large directories, even with the low-latency desktop kernel options enabled, so don't think it's just a Windows problem.
My experience with Linux has been the exact opposite. I could easily start a kernel compile in the background, for example, and hardly even notice it on the desktop. But then, I'm not using GNOME or KDE. Just XFCE or another relatively simple window manager. So maybe that makes a difference. Windows, on the other hand, totally bogs down when you unzip are large archive or something. *shrug*
Are you serious? The idea is to have all your programs running all the time, and interact with them whenever you want with instantaneous response. Not to mention that most apps people run nowadays either are servers (P2P, LAN Shares, etc), clients that sit around listening to servers (IM) or querying them with frequent regularity (Email Client). And the progression is towards having personal servers that you can connect to using either a local or remote client.
Are YOU serious? Not one of those applications/services you mention requires much CPU. A single CPU with a good scheduler can easily handle all of that with good responsiveness and little or no loss in overall performance. Well, in the case of Windows XP, it woudl also help to have a sane virtual memory system. A lot of the responsiveness problems you see on Win XP machines (Vista may have addressed this) is because Windows likes to swap apps out to disk when you minimize them. It has very little to do with available CPU power.
As for applications - if you're running 5 applications, multi-cores will help without recompiling assuming the kernel's scheduler is reasonably sane and kernel writers are getting smarter at writing different schedulers.
Presumably if you actually have cores to run a program on, a good scheduler woudl not be required. Schedulers are important when you're trying to share one CPU with many threads.
For most people, "running" an application means just having it sit there in the background idle. Very few people would actually have 5 application running (in the sense of taking up CPU time). And even when they're running a single application, it is usually doesn't use 100% CPU. I can really only think of a few common tasks that might actually push a CPU. Ripping CDs, processing home videos, and perhaps Photoshop. But really intensive photoshop work is usually reserve for professionals.
So really, you need individual applications to implement threading on large scale in order to really take advantage of all those cores.
It isn't the CPU that gets deadlocked. It is usually two or more processes waiting on each other from events or resources. So no matter how many core you have, if explorer.exe deadlocks, it deadlocks. No number of cores will fix that. Fortunately you can usually just kill the offending processes unless it happens with some system critical process or inside the kernel or something.
+ (development cost + distribution cost + promotion cost + maintenance cost) / (number of units sold)
That is the value for the producer, not the consumer. They're different. Each consumer has a different way of deciding how valuable a product is to them and it has absolutely nothing to do with how much the producer put into development, advertising, or the number of units sold. That stuff isn't the consumer's problem. The consumer is thinking about things like warranties, technical support, usefulness of product.
Now, that may be vanishingly small, but it's not 0. And, as a good American^h^h^h^h^h^h^h^h citizen of a capitalist country, you surely don't expect any organisation to do it for no benefit, do you? Better add profit into the equation too...
Honestly, I don't know what I expect from an organization. Some are for profit, some are non-profit, some are just loosely connected volunteers who just do it for fun (open source). How a producer benefits is not my problem. I'm not responsible for ensuring that any particular business model is viable or successful. Sorry, but I'm not goign to play the "good capitalist." If a software company really wants me to pay for their product, they need to offer some value above and beyond the 1's and 0's on the installation media. Maybe some good documentation or good technical support. Perhaps do it like Apple and bundle the software with nice hardware and charge a premium. Or they can go the copy protection route and make it too much of a pain in the ass to copy.
Correct. The design of a Ford Mustang is Ford's intellectual property, and it would both be wrong and illegal for you to copy it (even using a Star Trek replicator and your own raw materials) without compensating Ford for the time and money they spent designing the car. This is what patent protection is all about. Ford has patents on their car design.
Sure, but patents expire. And even then, I believe fair use allows me to reproduce patented ideas/designs privately. I just can't redistribute them or claim them as my own. Though I could be wrong. IANAL. Patent and copyright law are pretty complex and they're getting more and more draconian every year (see DMCA for example).
When you purchase just about any product these days, you're not just paying for the raw materials and the effort of molding those materials into the final product. You're paying some percentage of the design cost. The percentage you pay is based on the manufactorer's estimate of how many copies of the thing they'll sell. If they underestimate how many copies they'll sell, they get more profit. If they overestimate, they take a loss. The more popular the product, the lower the percentage of the design cost the consumer ends up paying.
Yeah, I understand that process of capitalism and compensation. Thanks. But it is irrelevent. I am not responsible for ensuring that a particular business model is viable. Sorry. You might as well try to argue that I am morally obligated to watch advertisements on TV because that is how the broadcasters are compensated. And such an argument would be absurd.
For software, this issue of product design is more obvious as the design costs greatly outweigh all other production costs. Except for that, software isn't really much different from any other designed product. Products without any design cost are usually considered "commodities".
Agreed.
You are morally bankrupt to claim that there is nothing wrong with making an unauthorized copy of software (or of Ford's design for their Mustang).
At this point I'm just happy to have some agreement (though I'm not sure you're the same person I was talking to earlier) that software is no different than hardware in principle. I feel I am well within my rights to create a replica of the Mustang for my own personal use if I so choose, and by extension, I believe that the same goes for software. The law may say otherwise, but I've never been known to let a few laws tell me right from wrong.
You are taking something of theirs without compensating them. Most reasonable people call that stealing.
No, you're wrong. "Taking" something means that they no longer have which was taken. Copying is not taking. You'd have to show that they were necessarily deprived of something by my actions. Fact is that I would probably never buy a Mustang if I had to pay the full dealer price. So nothing is stolen.
I would agree that unauthorized copying is at least disrespectful. And I did point out that I do pay for at least some software.
Okay, how can I put this so that you might actually get it through your head?
You might start by describing the essential difference between a CD which contains information in its optical pits and grooves and a car which contains information in its design. Please, look at this objectively. Don't just go along with whatever the law happens to say or what software companies want you to believe because their business models depend on it. Remember, you have absolutely no obligation to ensure that anyone else's business model is viable or makes sense.
When you make a copy of someone's software, you're not making something that looks like their software or has the functionality of their software
How else would you define "copy?"
like you would be doing in the case of building a computer or building your own car.
By your argument against copying software, an exact replica of a Ford Mustang would not by my "own" car. It would be Ford's car and I would have to pay them for it even though I made it.
Face it, the only difference between copying software and copying a car is that software is usually trivial to copy. A computer or a car is not. The only reason peopel don't copy cars or computers is because it is cost prohibitive. It is actually cheaper to just buy a Mustang at a car dealer than it would be to make a replica yourself. But I guarantee you that if Star Trek replicator technology ever became as common as DVD burners are today, you'd see people copying physical objects left and right (given enough raw materials, of course).
You're making a copy of THEIR software. THEIR software that cost THEM *TIME AND MONEY* to create.
You're making a copy, you're not actually taking their software. They still have the source code. Tell me why I should care how much time and money it took them to design it?
If I went into their computers, made a copy of the source, and then deleted it from their systems then you might make a case for theft (and perhaps other crimes). But short of that, you're just copying... using your own tools (computer) and media (CD, harddrive, etc)
If THEY want to allow people to copy it, that's one thing. However, *you* making a copy of THEIR stuff is another thing altogether.
Is that like when a black person says "nigger," it is OK, but if a white person says it, it is not?
Come on. You're just making baseless assertions. Show me the essential difference between making a knockoff of a car and a copy of software besides the fact that making the copy of software is generally trivial. Software companies are certainly free to take steps to ensur that copying is as difficult as possible, but there's still nothing morally wrong with making a the copy. This isn't to say that I never pay for software or and don't respect license. There are a few reason why I might pay for software. None of them include a moral obligation:
1) When using a copy is not trivial. For example, if it requires a hardware dongle or happens to have some difficult to crack encryption.
2) When i respect the company/programmers and feel charitable.
3) When the benefits of using the software don't outweigh the potential legal problems from a broken legal/legislative system (DMCA being the prime example of brokenness)
If you want something that looks or behaves like what they made without paying them for it, code it your own bloody self.
I will, but I'll just "code" it by copying the 1's and 0's from the CD. Would it make you feel better if I typed it in by hand like those old books full of BASIC programs?
But you don't have any control over the web server software, AFAIK. That can be very important to getting a Rails app running just the way you need/want.
I think one of the reasons PHP is so universal is that it is dead simple to setup. Just install mod_php and you're pretty much done. Other languages and frameworks are a lot more complicated.
He doesn't care just as long as he gets his "free" car.
But that's just it, it wouldn't be free at all. It would likely cost me a lot in raw materials and tools and possibly labor (unless I had that Star Trek replicator).
After all, it would only cost him for the materials, so why doesn't it just cost for the materials for the person who origionally made it, right?
You're right. I don't care how much it costs the person who originally made it. Why should I? If I could make it myself for less than I would pay at the store, I would. It would just be a knockoff (or in the case of a hypothetical Star Trek replicator, a perfect copy). Nothing wrong with knockoffs unless they're being misrepresented as the genuine article to people who would buy them.
Actually, there are cases where I would pay extra for an original, genuine item. FOr example, if I wanted a warranty and/or customer support. But either way, the value of the item (to me) has nothing to do with how much it took to design it.
How about we take this a little closer to home (and more realistic). Would it be wrong to build a personal computer that looked and functioned just like a Dell? The Dell corporation puts some money into designing Dells, right? So aren't you morally obligated to purchase a Dell if you want a computer that looks and functions like a Dell? Of course not! You're free to build whatever kind of PC you want. And that includes making a Dell "knockoff." Just don't call Dell expecting them to support it.
I brought that point up in the initial reply to him, and he basically ignored it. Most of the people like him do.
I didn't ignore it. I explained by analogy why it is irrelevent. The only reason software is special is that copying software is so darn trivial. So we make up special "intelletual property" laws (which are fundamentally broken, IMO) to compensate. The law does not define morality.
And what about the time and money spent on designing the car?
What about it? Are you suggesting that just because someone spent resources designing the car, it is wrong to make a clone of one with your own raw materials and tools? That is absurd. I'm not personally responsible for ensuring that a particular business model is viable. If I could trivially make an exact clone of a Ford Mustang, I would. And I would have no moral problems doing it.
I dunno, I hear Dreamhost, the big Ruby on Rails host, really blows. If you want good support, at least for Ruby/Rails, you're much better off getting a Private Virtual Server. That way everything is just the way you want it (OS and all) and you get root access.
Slashdot Mirror
This highlights the needs for more open source/public software. Whether it is voting machines or spyware scanners. Some things can't reliably be left to commercial vendors with closed source.
-matthew
Just repairing cells is not the issue, AFAIK. The way I understand it, aging happens because cells have a built in reproductive clock. And once that starts running down, you WILL age no matter how much you artificially repair or rejuvinate existing cells. They'll simply die off and not reproduce.
Ok, but it sounds more like a support group than a group of friends.
Would you? Plenty of people commit suicide out of shear loneliness. If "oblivion" is really what happens when you die, then your preference to avoid it is kind of moot, don't you think? What is the point of fearing something that you'll never, by definition, actually experience?
-matthew
Yeah, like I said, fun.
I didn't say it would be easy. Just fun trying. Where's your sense of adventure, man!
This is a more general problem that would need to be solved... not limited to sex.
-matthew
How do you know it is easy/better living in space? Because some guy wrote up some sci-fi making it look possible? Seems to me that living in a space colony would be pretty damn difficult... and confining. Maybe compared to Mars it woudl be OK, I dunno, but I can't imagine it beiing any easier/better than living down here on Earth. I don't know where YOU live, but Oregon, where I live, is f'ng beautiful and I wouldn't trade it for a space colony. Sure, I'd visit a space station/colony given the chance, but I find it unlikely that I'd actually want to live there.
-matthew
Or you could just get to the future only to find that you have to be genetically engineered from birth to live that superlong life and end up looking like as fool as you age, all alone with no friends or family, while everyone else is holding at 19 and partying all the time. But I guess I'm a pessimist sometimes. :-)
-matthew
What's wrong with a little gravity? You'd probably end up spending a lot of resources trying to recreate it on a long term space colony, might as well take advantage of the natural gravity of Mars. But I guess the advantage of a space station/colony gravity is that it is "optional." Mmmm, weightless sex. Sounds fun.
-matthew
The question was, what is the difference between courage and stupidity (as both might be considered a byproduct of alcohol consumption). And the answer is: Stupidity is nearly always bad. Courage is not.
-matthew
Yes, often times fear is irrational and counterproductive... even pathological in the case of phobias.
-matthew
So it makes sense that corn is used for ethanol in the continental US. What's the problem?
The only reason? HFCS has desirable qualities for food producers/processors (I try to avoid the stuff, personally)
-matthew
I use WinZip, not Explorer.
-matthew
Compared to what? Can't be too poor of a source if it is used to sweeten a good portion of the foods we eat. High Fructose *Corn* Syrup, anyone?
-matthew
My experience with Linux has been the exact opposite. I could easily start a kernel compile in the background, for example, and hardly even notice it on the desktop. But then, I'm not using GNOME or KDE. Just XFCE or another relatively simple window manager. So maybe that makes a difference. Windows, on the other hand, totally bogs down when you unzip are large archive or something. *shrug*
-matthew
Are YOU serious? Not one of those applications/services you mention requires much CPU. A single CPU with a good scheduler can easily handle all of that with good responsiveness and little or no loss in overall performance. Well, in the case of Windows XP, it woudl also help to have a sane virtual memory system. A lot of the responsiveness problems you see on Win XP machines (Vista may have addressed this) is because Windows likes to swap apps out to disk when you minimize them. It has very little to do with available CPU power.
-matthew
Oh, and games, of course!
-matthew
Presumably if you actually have cores to run a program on, a good scheduler woudl not be required. Schedulers are important when you're trying to share one CPU with many threads.
For most people, "running" an application means just having it sit there in the background idle. Very few people would actually have 5 application running (in the sense of taking up CPU time). And even when they're running a single application, it is usually doesn't use 100% CPU. I can really only think of a few common tasks that might actually push a CPU. Ripping CDs, processing home videos, and perhaps Photoshop. But really intensive photoshop work is usually reserve for professionals.
So really, you need individual applications to implement threading on large scale in order to really take advantage of all those cores.
-matthew
It isn't the CPU that gets deadlocked. It is usually two or more processes waiting on each other from events or resources. So no matter how many core you have, if explorer.exe deadlocks, it deadlocks. No number of cores will fix that. Fortunately you can usually just kill the offending processes unless it happens with some system critical process or inside the kernel or something.
-matthew
That is the value for the producer, not the consumer. They're different. Each consumer has a different way of deciding how valuable a product is to them and it has absolutely nothing to do with how much the producer put into development, advertising, or the number of units sold. That stuff isn't the consumer's problem. The consumer is thinking about things like warranties, technical support, usefulness of product.
Honestly, I don't know what I expect from an organization. Some are for profit, some are non-profit, some are just loosely connected volunteers who just do it for fun (open source). How a producer benefits is not my problem. I'm not responsible for ensuring that any particular business model is viable or successful. Sorry, but I'm not goign to play the "good capitalist." If a software company really wants me to pay for their product, they need to offer some value above and beyond the 1's and 0's on the installation media. Maybe some good documentation or good technical support. Perhaps do it like Apple and bundle the software with nice hardware and charge a premium. Or they can go the copy protection route and make it too much of a pain in the ass to copy.
-matthew
Sure, but patents expire. And even then, I believe fair use allows me to reproduce patented ideas/designs privately. I just can't redistribute them or claim them as my own. Though I could be wrong. IANAL. Patent and copyright law are pretty complex and they're getting more and more draconian every year (see DMCA for example).
Yeah, I understand that process of capitalism and compensation. Thanks. But it is irrelevent. I am not responsible for ensuring that a particular business model is viable. Sorry. You might as well try to argue that I am morally obligated to watch advertisements on TV because that is how the broadcasters are compensated. And such an argument would be absurd.
Agreed.
At this point I'm just happy to have some agreement (though I'm not sure you're the same person I was talking to earlier) that software is no different than hardware in principle. I feel I am well within my rights to create a replica of the Mustang for my own personal use if I so choose, and by extension, I believe that the same goes for software. The law may say otherwise, but I've never been known to let a few laws tell me right from wrong.
No, you're wrong. "Taking" something means that they no longer have which was taken. Copying is not taking. You'd have to show that they were necessarily deprived of something by my actions. Fact is that I would probably never buy a Mustang if I had to pay the full dealer price. So nothing is stolen.
I would agree that unauthorized copying is at least disrespectful. And I did point out that I do pay for at least some software.
-matthew
You might start by describing the essential difference between a CD which contains information in its optical pits and grooves and a car which contains information in its design. Please, look at this objectively. Don't just go along with whatever the law happens to say or what software companies want you to believe because their business models depend on it. Remember, you have absolutely no obligation to ensure that anyone else's business model is viable or makes sense.
How else would you define "copy?"
By your argument against copying software, an exact replica of a Ford Mustang would not by my "own" car. It would be Ford's car and I would have to pay them for it even though I made it.
Face it, the only difference between copying software and copying a car is that software is usually trivial to copy. A computer or a car is not. The only reason peopel don't copy cars or computers is because it is cost prohibitive. It is actually cheaper to just buy a Mustang at a car dealer than it would be to make a replica yourself. But I guarantee you that if Star Trek replicator technology ever became as common as DVD burners are today, you'd see people copying physical objects left and right (given enough raw materials, of course).
You're making a copy, you're not actually taking their software. They still have the source code. Tell me why I should care how much time and money it took them to design it?
If I went into their computers, made a copy of the source, and then deleted it from their systems then you might make a case for theft (and perhaps other crimes). But short of that, you're just copying... using your own tools (computer) and media (CD, harddrive, etc)
Is that like when a black person says "nigger," it is OK, but if a white person says it, it is not?
Come on. You're just making baseless assertions. Show me the essential difference between making a knockoff of a car and a copy of software besides the fact that making the copy of software is generally trivial. Software companies are certainly free to take steps to ensur that copying is as difficult as possible, but there's still nothing morally wrong with making a the copy. This isn't to say that I never pay for software or and don't respect license. There are a few reason why I might pay for software. None of them include a moral obligation:
1) When using a copy is not trivial. For example, if it requires a hardware dongle or happens to have some difficult to crack encryption.
2) When i respect the company/programmers and feel charitable.
3) When the benefits of using the software don't outweigh the potential legal problems from a broken legal/legislative system (DMCA being the prime example of brokenness)
I will, but I'll just "code" it by copying the 1's and 0's from the CD. Would it make you feel better if I typed it in by hand like those old books full of BASIC programs?
-matthew
But you don't have any control over the web server software, AFAIK. That can be very important to getting a Rails app running just the way you need/want.
I think one of the reasons PHP is so universal is that it is dead simple to setup. Just install mod_php and you're pretty much done. Other languages and frameworks are a lot more complicated.
-matthew
But that's just it, it wouldn't be free at all. It would likely cost me a lot in raw materials and tools and possibly labor (unless I had that Star Trek replicator).
You're right. I don't care how much it costs the person who originally made it. Why should I? If I could make it myself for less than I would pay at the store, I would. It would just be a knockoff (or in the case of a hypothetical Star Trek replicator, a perfect copy). Nothing wrong with knockoffs unless they're being misrepresented as the genuine article to people who would buy them.
Actually, there are cases where I would pay extra for an original, genuine item. FOr example, if I wanted a warranty and/or customer support. But either way, the value of the item (to me) has nothing to do with how much it took to design it.
How about we take this a little closer to home (and more realistic). Would it be wrong to build a personal computer that looked and functioned just like a Dell? The Dell corporation puts some money into designing Dells, right? So aren't you morally obligated to purchase a Dell if you want a computer that looks and functions like a Dell? Of course not! You're free to build whatever kind of PC you want. And that includes making a Dell "knockoff." Just don't call Dell expecting them to support it.
I didn't ignore it. I explained by analogy why it is irrelevent. The only reason software is special is that copying software is so darn trivial. So we make up special "intelletual property" laws (which are fundamentally broken, IMO) to compensate. The law does not define morality.
-matthew
What about it? Are you suggesting that just because someone spent resources designing the car, it is wrong to make a clone of one with your own raw materials and tools? That is absurd. I'm not personally responsible for ensuring that a particular business model is viable. If I could trivially make an exact clone of a Ford Mustang, I would. And I would have no moral problems doing it.
I dunno, I hear Dreamhost, the big Ruby on Rails host, really blows. If you want good support, at least for Ruby/Rails, you're much better off getting a Private Virtual Server. That way everything is just the way you want it (OS and all) and you get root access.
I'm not going to bother with a language flamewar, but suffice to say that I think PHP is a boring, ugly language.
Be that as it may, it is still a boring, ugly language that I wouldn't be sad to see it go "End of Life." That's all.