Something appears quite clear to me: We might build machines or maybe software that perfectly emulates the complete human behaviour; maybe they will even do a lot of things better than we ever could. But a machine will _never_ have this special feeling about itself called consciousness. This is not a matter of pure brain power (even great human idiots _do_ have self-consciousness!), but kind of a natural miracle we will never be able to understand or even to emulate! Of course we could bring up software agents that can _act_ like having consciousness, but they're never really going have it. BTW even if we allow machines to make "their own decisions" (like pointed out in Kaczinsky's manifesto) - wouldn't it be decisions within the bounds that we will code into their software? Even if there are "learning" machines, they can only "learn" what they are allowed to by their programmers. Concerning the man/machine mixtures like - let's say - the BORG or ROBOCOP: The difference between these features and the ones naturally given to us would be that the electronical "improvements" would have to be applied "manually" to any new-born human being, while the natural ones are given to us by birth.
(Of course, all of this doesn't imply that we might already be living in the Matrix - if a long-term evolution of machines has already taken place and they pretend to us that it hasn't *g*)
From a moral" point of view, of course, you're absolutely right. But the prob is that you have to see this thing from a historical point of view. When the Internet was installed in the first place, it was a US-only show. So back that time there had to be no such thing as country-TLD's. BTW.com domains are "traditionally" considered as US domains, which is right most of the time, but on the other hand _anyone_ can register a.com domain. (As a European, I do own several of them *g*)
IMHO, you don't pay continuously for "owning" a domain. What you pay for is to stay registered in DNS servers - without which, of course, just "owning" a domain would be useless. This means that you "acquire" the domain for a "life time" (let's see if this system will still exist in 5 or 10 years), but you have to pay a yearly fee to stay registered/connected.
Well, don't they know anyway? If it was only the fact if there will never be a new version which makes people purchase the current version, no-one would ever buy software at all. Everybody knows that "some day, there's going to be a new version." And an early pre-Alpha developers' debug version (aren't most of M$'s products like this even in the state of first public release?) is _not_ the same as the final release. I'd rather trust NT4 with the latest Service Pack installed than W2K without even the first bugfix (if I trusted M$'s Operating Systems at all, but that's another topic...)
I really agree that it has to be 8/28/888. Besides, there was another great event like that just a few time ago: 11/19/1999 was the last odd day (odd DIGITS only) until 1/1/3111!!
Slashdot Mirror
Something appears quite clear to me: We might build machines or maybe software that perfectly emulates the complete human behaviour; maybe they will even do a lot of things better than we ever could. But a machine will _never_ have this special feeling about itself called consciousness. This is not a matter of pure brain power (even great human idiots _do_ have self-consciousness!), but kind of a natural miracle we will never be able to understand or even to emulate!
Of course we could bring up software agents that can _act_ like having consciousness, but they're never really going have it.
BTW even if we allow machines to make "their own decisions" (like pointed out in Kaczinsky's manifesto) - wouldn't it be decisions within the bounds that we will code into their software? Even if there are "learning" machines, they can only "learn" what they are allowed to by their programmers.
Concerning the man/machine mixtures like - let's say - the BORG or ROBOCOP: The difference between these features and the ones naturally given to us would be that the electronical "improvements" would have to be applied "manually" to any new-born human being, while the natural ones are given to us by birth.
(Of course, all of this doesn't imply that we might already be living in the Matrix - if a long-term evolution of machines has already taken place and they pretend to us that it hasn't *g*)
oops sorry!
&qoutmoral" should have been "moral" of course!
From a moral" point of view, of course, you're absolutely right. But the prob is that you have to see this thing from a historical point of view. When the Internet was installed in the first place, it was a US-only show. So back that time there had to be no such thing as country-TLD's. BTW .com domains are "traditionally" considered as US domains, which is right most of the time, but on the other hand _anyone_ can register a .com domain. (As a European, I do own several of them *g*)
IMHO, you don't pay continuously for "owning" a domain. What you pay for is to stay registered in DNS servers - without which, of course, just "owning" a domain would be useless. This means that you "acquire" the domain for a "life time" (let's see if this system will still exist in 5 or 10 years), but you have to pay a yearly fee to stay registered/connected.
Well, don't they know anyway?
If it was only the fact if there will never be a new version which makes people purchase the current version, no-one would ever buy software at all. Everybody knows that "some day, there's going to be a new version." And an early pre-Alpha developers' debug version (aren't most of M$'s products like this even in the state of first public release?) is _not_ the same as the final release. I'd rather trust NT4 with the latest Service Pack installed than W2K without even the first bugfix (if I trusted M$'s Operating Systems at all, but that's another topic...)
Regards
Neo42
I really agree that it has to be 8/28/888. Besides, there was another great event like that just a few time ago: 11/19/1999 was the last odd day (odd DIGITS only) until 1/1/3111!!