Not true at all. There have been cases in history where hardware could fail because of a certain execution in software. So, what if your Operating System causes a hardware fault.. Say a flaw in windows causes a certain part of the motherboard to over heat and it causes a fire which burns a house down and kills two adults and 3 children. Should they be liable then?
The hardware manufacturer. At no point should safety be driven by software. The hardware should be designed so that any exception cases do not produce a safety hazard. If a hardware manufacturer placed a product into the market and one of the machine states would cause a hazard, they would be liable. If the hardware can burn, shock, or do anything hazardous, it is up to the hardware to mitigate that problem.
If I were running a business, the cert is a good way of filtering out those who can't even pass a simple test.
Why do I not use certifications? Because the tests invariably cost money, and I would not expect anyone to play the "Certification Lotto" in order to get a job. If I had to get a certification for all the areas I have a skill in, it would cost me well in excess of $10,000.
I'd rather look at their work experience and then if they have the relevant work experience, then I'll bring them in to talk to the subject matter experts. If they interview well, they will likely get the offer. After that we have the 30 day trial to evaluate their performance under a typical workload. If they can get through all that, then they are worthy of the job.
OK, the on orbit system will then need 2x the fuel to propel the carrier. 1 unit goes towards the carrier to propel it, the other unit goes in the oppposite direction to counteract the first units reaction so that the in-orbit device stays in orbit.
I see how the plasma beam can be confined in the lab, but how do they steer it in the earth's varying magnetic field? Or the target planet's magnetic field (like Jupiter's). It would be like trying to use a squirtgun in a gusty breeze.
The m2p2 system on the crew carrier deflects the plasma beam which causes thrust.
How does this system slow down? Imagine a kid blowing his toy sailboat away from shore.
I know these ion type propulsion engines are very efficient, but they also do not have the thrust that more conventional chemical engines have. So they are well suited for robotic missions where the mission time can take years without any problems. But multiyear trips in space for people are still problematic, what with all the food and supplies that needs to be carried.
A stalemate is a stalemate. A defeat is a defeat. You seem to associate not winning as a defeat. In any case, wins, defeats, and stalemates are often in the eye of the beholder, depending on how you look at it.
Korea Example: America won because it beat back the North Korean invasion and returned the borders very nearly to their pre-war lines. America lost because it did not overthrow the North Korean goernment and install a democratic one (or reunite it under democracy).
Side note: Postulate (1) Eisenhower lost the North Korean conflict because he did not reunite it under a democracy. Postulate (2) Eisenhower should be criticized for doing so. How do we apply the lessons of Korea in Iraq, so we avoid the same outcome?
Bush is the one who has converted "stalemate defeat" into "nuclear blackmail defeat", which is much more serious.
How exactly did this happen? What did Bush do to the North Koreans, other than ratcheting up the rhetoric a bit? I know we cut foriegn aid to them, but that was happening under Clinton's government, too. Should we appease the North Koreans by giving them what they want?
That's like having a spare tire inside your regular tires.
Hard drives don't generally fail because the magnetic region on the platter cannot be used. It is more often crashed heads, broken motors, or bad controller boards. None of which would be helped by your scheme.
A raid array on a notebook would help the travelling salesman who has to present tomorrow. The rest of us would simply be annoyed because now we have a greater probability of something failing in our computers. You're better off reducing the chances of failure and doing external backups.
Heck, you can get small external hard drives that are the size of a pack of smokes that can be used to back up that critical data. Or a USB Flash device, if your critical data is not that large.
And the idea that Vietnam wasn't Nixon's war even more than it was Johnson's is a sick joke.
Who "owns" a war?
From your other post: You know, the continuing stalemate in Korea (that's festered into nuclear blackmail) and the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, both run by Bush's predecessor Republican presidents, Eisenhower and Nixon.
All I was trying to point out was that in your list of presidents who were responsible for past wars, you conveniently omitted the Democrats who started them.
Note: I am not a Republican or trying to in any way make one side look better than the other. Both parties are responsible for those conflicts.
So what happens if you gather solar power in space and use it to propel your orbiter? You could use a MagBeam to do it.
The MagBeam still requires fuel. MagBeam is a plasma engine, which means that material is ionized and ejected out the back of engine to provide the thrust. This material still must be carried aloft. The advantage of the plasma engine is that it can eject the fuel at a much higher velocity than typical rockets. Also, you have to power the engine in order to make the plasma. You can do this with solar, but you have problems. (1) Can't move in the dark, and (2) Solar energy systems have mass which needs to be added to your engine weight as well.
Cryogenic rockets using H2 and O2 as fuels are efficient because the ejected material (H20)is relatively light and can be ejected at a decent rate of speed (about 2500 m/sec IIRC). Also, you can pump a lot of material into the engine to get high thrust. This is where the ion/plasma engines need a lot of help. In order to dump more material, you need a lot more power. So much that the engine becomes infeasable.
The nuclear plasma engines solve this problem by creating hydrogen plasma at very high velocities and are quite efficient. But the radiation shielding needed to make the crew survive negates the advantages on manned spacecraft.
I do agree that there is room for innovation. Government projects tend to be bloated due to all the paperwork, so private industry should be able to come up with something, now that investors are throwing some cash at it.
Another way to explain it is this, which might be better for folks not familiar with the innards of telco equpment.
The telephone system has an A/D converter at the other end of your line which is 8 bits wide and is sampled at 8kHz. This gives you a digital bandwidth of 64kbps. However, the phone system uses one of these bits for "in-band" signaling, in which the local exchange communicates with the remote exchange. So that leaves you with 7 bits at 8kHz, which is your theoretical 56kbps.
The uplink signal from your modem is synchonized to the sampling of the line at the A/D converter, so the modem does not have to send tones that are decoded, but rather simply puts a signal level on the line which the A/D converter decodes. The telco sends this sampled data to the destination via digital connections.
At the destination, the receving gear realizes this is from a 56k modem (because of the negotiations) and so it interpets the data as digital data. It gets the 8 bits at 8kHz, but the least significant bit is always the same value (the in-band signal is not passed on to the connection). So the receiver ignores the LSB and generates the data based on the other 7 bits. This is opposed to the modem having to process the signal as if it were analog data, like in a 33.6k modem.
You can only receive at 33.6k, which is an analog signal, because the telco equipment always decodes the incoming digital data back into an analog data stream.
My dad used to tell me that you could turn off a lawnmower by pissing on the sparkplug. Fortuneately I am the skeptical type (probably due to my father's joking nature) which prevented me from trying it out.
But my friend's father didn't share his sense of humor.
This system may be using a PPC and running Linux, but that does not mean that it is a simple PC. More likely than not, this is a very complex real-time system with many processors. The Linux is probably only used for the user interface area to give the user a somewhat familiar interface to the system. The software that the user commands is probably highly specialized to run on the particular hardware it is built on. Redesigning systems like this is not as trivial as being able to "just change processors, recompile, and you are back in business". Especially with a government contract, you will probably find it easier to pay a premium on buying end-of-life parts rather than designing a new system.
I was in college at this time and we often used deathmatch Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom to determine who would clean the kitchen sink.
I was sure glad that "Chef Jeff" had a 486 against my fresh Pentium 60.
As far as mishaps go, my worst was when I bought an external USB drive not too long ago. I plugged it into my system, formatted and mounted it and backed up my data to it. Everything was fine until the hurricane strikes and the power is off (for a week). When the system comes back up I get the "unable to load boot sector" message from the BIOS. Try reloading the bootsector, but that didn't work as it could not find the kernel. So, figuring something is wrong with the drive I reinstall - only to discover that the BIOS boots on USB drives before SATA. All my data goes right down the tubes (because I formatted the partition first). Fortuneately it was just backup data and the original stuff was untouched on the SATA drive.
I guess what I am trying to say is that when people become dependant on government programs, they are less likely to take steps to get off those programs. Not only that, but the rules of government programs create a significant barrier that serve to lock the person into their situation. This is certianly not an improvement.
I have some personal experience with this. I have seen how government programs might keep you from sliding back any further, but they also lock you in and keep you from climbing out of the hole. Climbing out of the hole is much more difficult than staying put, and most people take the path of least resistance. My gripe is that we should help people climb out, not stay put. It is better for everyone.
From what I have heard, at least from our local politicians, this is a marketing ploy to show the world what how techno-cool your city is. Mayors tend to have these grandiose schemes that they feel will have people clamoring to get into their city. This extra publicity and talk may attract more tourists and businesses to the area, which ultimately boosts tax revenue. Not because they have free wifi, but because everyone is simply talking about City X.
The poor rarely benefit from government programs. More often than not the programs simply make life slightly more bearable instead of actually improving their lives.
Orlando is too spread out. The system was deployed in the Lake Eola area, where most (relatively wealthy) people already have faster and better connections. About the only benefit to the system was so that a few yuppies near the park could get internet on their lunchbreaks. They came nowhere near providing inexpensive access for the poor. If they wanted that, they would have placed it over by the Arena.
Even if you advertised the hell out of it, 95% of the tax paying residents of the county could not access it. And if they expanded coverage, then the bill would have skyrocketed.
This is not against the users, but rather people who use Linux in their name. "Linux Journal" would be subject to this, but "Red Hat" (Note that Linux is not in their name).
I want *REAL TIME* *HUMAN* eye-coverage. That's why. Speeding cameras, red-light cameras, etc are all inappropriate extensions of police states.
If we cannot afford to staff enough people to catch the violaters then tough.
According to your argument, would it be appropriate to have people looking over our every move? Perhaps an officer on every streetcorner? What happens if society changes to the point where it is feasable for the government to be able to afford this option?
If you are relying on financial infeasability, then your argument is a straw man and does not address the real issue of public surveillance.
Also, the cameras in question are viewed by a human dispatcher. So a human is watching things using an aid. The aid offers no more information than the naked eye.
You need to explain why the government cannot observe our behavior in public, en masse, not criticize the particular method they choose to use. That is what I want to know.
Why can't the government put an officer in a location and watch for people breaking the law?
I'm curious why you do not want video cameras in public, where anyone with eyeballs can observe and document your behavior, but yet as soon as we close the door, and expect some privacy, we lose that privacy. Why is it not OK to monitor public spaces?
A store may be within its rights to place cameras in dressing rooms, but I think they would suffer more from lost business than from the theft they are preventing. They would also expose themselves to lawsuits when the dressing room footage ended up on the internet.
You also suffer from the falicy that any biomass is intended to be food. With the exception of milk and fruit, everything we eat was a creature or plant that had other ideas.
I said "a lot of food comes from biomass that was not intended to be food, but rather perform some other function" not "any biomass is intended to be food". Food is a subset of biomass. I did not intend for anyone to think that all biomass is food.
The idea I was trying to get out is that we may be moving towards food stock that is designed to satisfy our nutritional needs instead of us having to satisfy our needs by eating many different types of food. This way we can select from an array of foods by our taste preference, knowing that our nutritional needs are taken care of, because they are engineered into the product.
And I'm not talking about bland food wafers that are all the same. I'm assuming that they will be able to design variety in taste and texture so that they can replicate many of the foods you buy in the store. The only difference is that these foods will be designed to feed us, and not perform some other function.
If i were to eat meat, i'd prefer it to be free-range. It can only be healthier.
One of the benefits mentioned in the article is the ability to tailor the meat for human consumption by removing undesireable traits, like bad fatty acids and such. They could also add dietary suppliments to the meat as well. They could probably make the artificial meat much healtier than the "free range" stuff.
Remember, cow muscle evolved to move the cow around, not to feed people. In fact a lot of food comes from biomass that was not intended to be food, but rather perform some other function.
I did a little "reliability analysis" for some telecom equipment a while ago, so I am semi-informed (not a guru).
There are two terms that often get interchanged, when they shouldn't. Reliability is the ability of the system to run without repairs. Availability is the ability of the system to do its job.
So the large monolithic system can be built out of very good (and expensive) components that do not fail as much as commodity hardware. This will lead to fewer failures and better reliability.
The commodity hardware can be arranged so that redundancy ensures that if on component fails, then another will take its load. Since the damaged component needs to be serviced, the reliability is lower, although the availiability of the system is the same.
Reliability is used by planners to determine the labor costs in keeping a system running. Availability is used by planners to make uptime predictions and to take measures to provide a certian level of service.
Two similiar numbers that are used for different purposes.
So why is it that a "trans-human" cannot do any of these? Sure the mechanisms to do them might be a little different, but many of these things derive meaning from our perceptions of them, not from the fact that the sensations arrive on "wet neurons".
Or to take it point-by-point
touch and feel - tactile sensors are not unheard of. listen - nor are microphones. Eat - Every system needs fuel. Sleep - Every system needs downtime for repairs make love - a combination of the above "inputs" sing - not a problem to produce sound waves. do all of these human things - Again, the humanity of these things is generally attributed to the thought process behind them, no the actual mechanism. What's the difference between a human song and a whale song?
Having non-biological bodies will make these people different and they will certainly have different experiences, but it is just an extreme case of the parapalegic who relies on machinery for much of his/her needs. It is a fuzzy line, not a firm one.
Slashdot Mirror
Not true at all. There have been cases in history where hardware could fail because of a certain execution in software. So, what if your Operating System causes a hardware fault.. Say a flaw in windows causes a certain part of the motherboard to over heat and it causes a fire which burns a house down and kills two adults and 3 children. Should they be liable then?
The hardware manufacturer. At no point should safety be driven by software. The hardware should be designed so that any exception cases do not produce a safety hazard. If a hardware manufacturer placed a product into the market and one of the machine states would cause a hazard, they would be liable. If the hardware can burn, shock, or do anything hazardous, it is up to the hardware to mitigate that problem.
If I were running a business, the cert is a good way of filtering out those who can't even pass a simple test.
Why do I not use certifications? Because the tests invariably cost money, and I would not expect anyone to play the "Certification Lotto" in order to get a job. If I had to get a certification for all the areas I have a skill in, it would cost me well in excess of $10,000.
I'd rather look at their work experience and then if they have the relevant work experience, then I'll bring them in to talk to the subject matter experts. If they interview well, they will likely get the offer. After that we have the 30 day trial to evaluate their performance under a typical workload. If they can get through all that, then they are worthy of the job.
OK, the on orbit system will then need 2x the fuel to propel the carrier. 1 unit goes towards the carrier to propel it, the other unit goes in the oppposite direction to counteract the first units reaction so that the in-orbit device stays in orbit.
I see how the plasma beam can be confined in the lab, but how do they steer it in the earth's varying magnetic field? Or the target planet's magnetic field (like Jupiter's). It would be like trying to use a squirtgun in a gusty breeze.
The m2p2 system on the crew carrier deflects the plasma beam which causes thrust.
How does this system slow down? Imagine a kid blowing his toy sailboat away from shore.
I know these ion type propulsion engines are very efficient, but they also do not have the thrust that more conventional chemical engines have. So they are well suited for robotic missions where the mission time can take years without any problems. But multiyear trips in space for people are still problematic, what with all the food and supplies that needs to be carried.
The stalemate in Korea is a defeat for the US.
A stalemate is a stalemate. A defeat is a defeat. You seem to associate not winning as a defeat. In any case, wins, defeats, and stalemates are often in the eye of the beholder, depending on how you look at it.
Korea Example:
America won because it beat back the North Korean invasion and returned the borders very nearly to their pre-war lines.
America lost because it did not overthrow the North Korean goernment and install a democratic one (or reunite it under democracy).
Side note: Postulate (1) Eisenhower lost the North Korean conflict because he did not reunite it under a democracy. Postulate (2) Eisenhower should be criticized for doing so. How do we apply the lessons of Korea in Iraq, so we avoid the same outcome?
Bush is the one who has converted "stalemate defeat" into "nuclear blackmail defeat", which is much more serious.
How exactly did this happen? What did Bush do to the North Koreans, other than ratcheting up the rhetoric a bit? I know we cut foriegn aid to them, but that was happening under Clinton's government, too. Should we appease the North Koreans by giving them what they want?
That's like having a spare tire inside your regular tires.
Hard drives don't generally fail because the magnetic region on the platter cannot be used. It is more often crashed heads, broken motors, or bad controller boards. None of which would be helped by your scheme.
A raid array on a notebook would help the travelling salesman who has to present tomorrow. The rest of us would simply be annoyed because now we have a greater probability of something failing in our computers. You're better off reducing the chances of failure and doing external backups.
Heck, you can get small external hard drives that are the size of a pack of smokes that can be used to back up that critical data. Or a USB Flash device, if your critical data is not that large.
And the idea that Vietnam wasn't Nixon's war even more than it was Johnson's is a sick joke.
Who "owns" a war?
From your other post:
You know, the continuing stalemate in Korea (that's festered into nuclear blackmail) and the humiliating defeat in Vietnam, both run by Bush's predecessor Republican presidents, Eisenhower and Nixon.
All I was trying to point out was that in your list of presidents who were responsible for past wars, you conveniently omitted the Democrats who started them.
Note: I am not a Republican or trying to in any way make one side look better than the other. Both parties are responsible for those conflicts.
The Korean conflict was started by Truman and Vietman was mostly a Kennedy and Johnson war.
Eisenhower and Nixon both ended their respective conflicts.
(H20)is relatively light and can be ejected at a decent rate of speed (about 2500 m/sec IIRC).
Oops! It is 4500 m/sec. 2500 m/sec is the solid rocket booster thrust (approx).
So what happens if you gather solar power in space and use it to propel your orbiter? You could use a MagBeam to do it.
The MagBeam still requires fuel. MagBeam is a plasma engine, which means that material is ionized and ejected out the back of engine to provide the thrust. This material still must be carried aloft. The advantage of the plasma engine is that it can eject the fuel at a much higher velocity than typical rockets. Also, you have to power the engine in order to make the plasma. You can do this with solar, but you have problems. (1) Can't move in the dark, and (2) Solar energy systems have mass which needs to be added to your engine weight as well.
Cryogenic rockets using H2 and O2 as fuels are efficient because the ejected material (H20)is relatively light and can be ejected at a decent rate of speed (about 2500 m/sec IIRC). Also, you can pump a lot of material into the engine to get high thrust. This is where the ion/plasma engines need a lot of help. In order to dump more material, you need a lot more power. So much that the engine becomes infeasable.
The nuclear plasma engines solve this problem by creating hydrogen plasma at very high velocities and are quite efficient. But the radiation shielding needed to make the crew survive negates the advantages on manned spacecraft.
I do agree that there is room for innovation. Government projects tend to be bloated due to all the paperwork, so private industry should be able to come up with something, now that investors are throwing some cash at it.
Another way to explain it is this, which might be better for folks not familiar with the innards of telco equpment.
The telephone system has an A/D converter at the other end of your line which is 8 bits wide and is sampled at 8kHz. This gives you a digital bandwidth of 64kbps. However, the phone system uses one of these bits for "in-band" signaling, in which the local exchange communicates with the remote exchange. So that leaves you with 7 bits at 8kHz, which is your theoretical 56kbps.
The uplink signal from your modem is synchonized to the sampling of the line at the A/D converter, so the modem does not have to send tones that are decoded, but rather simply puts a signal level on the line which the A/D converter decodes. The telco sends this sampled data to the destination via digital connections.
At the destination, the receving gear realizes this is from a 56k modem (because of the negotiations) and so it interpets the data as digital data. It gets the 8 bits at 8kHz, but the least significant bit is always the same value (the in-band signal is not passed on to the connection). So the receiver ignores the LSB and generates the data based on the other 7 bits. This is opposed to the modem having to process the signal as if it were analog data, like in a 33.6k modem.
You can only receive at 33.6k, which is an analog signal, because the telco equipment always decodes the incoming digital data back into an analog data stream.
My dad used to tell me that you could turn off a lawnmower by pissing on the sparkplug. Fortuneately I am the skeptical type (probably due to my father's joking nature) which prevented me from trying it out.
But my friend's father didn't share his sense of humor.
What was that movie anyway???
Spies Like Us.
This system may be using a PPC and running Linux, but that does not mean that it is a simple PC. More likely than not, this is a very complex real-time system with many processors. The Linux is probably only used for the user interface area to give the user a somewhat familiar interface to the system. The software that the user commands is probably highly specialized to run on the particular hardware it is built on. Redesigning systems like this is not as trivial as being able to "just change processors, recompile, and you are back in business". Especially with a government contract, you will probably find it easier to pay a premium on buying end-of-life parts rather than designing a new system.
I was in college at this time and we often used deathmatch Wolfenstein 3-D and Doom to determine who would clean the kitchen sink.
I was sure glad that "Chef Jeff" had a 486 against my fresh Pentium 60.
As far as mishaps go, my worst was when I bought an external USB drive not too long ago. I plugged it into my system, formatted and mounted it and backed up my data to it. Everything was fine until the hurricane strikes and the power is off (for a week). When the system comes back up I get the "unable to load boot sector" message from the BIOS. Try reloading the bootsector, but that didn't work as it could not find the kernel. So, figuring something is wrong with the drive I reinstall - only to discover that the BIOS boots on USB drives before SATA. All my data goes right down the tubes (because I formatted the partition first). Fortuneately it was just backup data and the original stuff was untouched on the SATA drive.
I guess what I am trying to say is that when people become dependant on government programs, they are less likely to take steps to get off those programs. Not only that, but the rules of government programs create a significant barrier that serve to lock the person into their situation. This is certianly not an improvement.
I have some personal experience with this. I have seen how government programs might keep you from sliding back any further, but they also lock you in and keep you from climbing out of the hole. Climbing out of the hole is much more difficult than staying put, and most people take the path of least resistance. My gripe is that we should help people climb out, not stay put. It is better for everyone.
From what I have heard, at least from our local politicians, this is a marketing ploy to show the world what how techno-cool your city is. Mayors tend to have these grandiose schemes that they feel will have people clamoring to get into their city. This extra publicity and talk may attract more tourists and businesses to the area, which ultimately boosts tax revenue. Not because they have free wifi, but because everyone is simply talking about City X.
The poor rarely benefit from government programs. More often than not the programs simply make life slightly more bearable instead of actually improving their lives.
Orlando is too spread out. The system was deployed in the Lake Eola area, where most (relatively wealthy) people already have faster and better connections. About the only benefit to the system was so that a few yuppies near the park could get internet on their lunchbreaks. They came nowhere near providing inexpensive access for the poor. If they wanted that, they would have placed it over by the Arena.
Even if you advertised the hell out of it, 95% of the tax paying residents of the county could not access it. And if they expanded coverage, then the bill would have skyrocketed.
This is offtopic, but I hate it when I see things like "Wikipedia confirms".
Wikipedia is great and all, but if I'm looking for definitive information, I'd rather not go to a place where anyone can change the content.
This is not against the users, but rather people who use Linux in their name. "Linux Journal" would be subject to this, but "Red Hat" (Note that Linux is not in their name).
I want *REAL TIME* *HUMAN* eye-coverage. That's why. Speeding cameras, red-light cameras, etc are all inappropriate extensions of police states.
If we cannot afford to staff enough people to catch the violaters then tough.
According to your argument, would it be appropriate to have people looking over our every move? Perhaps an officer on every streetcorner? What happens if society changes to the point where it is feasable for the government to be able to afford this option?
If you are relying on financial infeasability, then your argument is a straw man and does not address the real issue of public surveillance.
Also, the cameras in question are viewed by a human dispatcher. So a human is watching things using an aid. The aid offers no more information than the naked eye.
You need to explain why the government cannot observe our behavior in public, en masse, not criticize the particular method they choose to use. That is what I want to know.
Why can't the government put an officer in a location and watch for people breaking the law?
I'm curious why you do not want video cameras in public, where anyone with eyeballs can observe and document your behavior, but yet as soon as we close the door, and expect some privacy, we lose that privacy. Why is it not OK to monitor public spaces?
A store may be within its rights to place cameras in dressing rooms, but I think they would suffer more from lost business than from the theft they are preventing. They would also expose themselves to lawsuits when the dressing room footage ended up on the internet.
You also suffer from the falicy that any biomass is intended to be food. With the exception of milk and fruit, everything we eat was a creature or plant that had other ideas.
I said "a lot of food comes from biomass that was not intended to be food, but rather perform some other function" not "any biomass is intended to be food". Food is a subset of biomass. I did not intend for anyone to think that all biomass is food.
The idea I was trying to get out is that we may be moving towards food stock that is designed to satisfy our nutritional needs instead of us having to satisfy our needs by eating many different types of food. This way we can select from an array of foods by our taste preference, knowing that our nutritional needs are taken care of, because they are engineered into the product.
And I'm not talking about bland food wafers that are all the same. I'm assuming that they will be able to design variety in taste and texture so that they can replicate many of the foods you buy in the store. The only difference is that these foods will be designed to feed us, and not perform some other function.
If i were to eat meat, i'd prefer it to be free-range. It can only be healthier.
One of the benefits mentioned in the article is the ability to tailor the meat for human consumption by removing undesireable traits, like bad fatty acids and such. They could also add dietary suppliments to the meat as well. They could probably make the artificial meat much healtier than the "free range" stuff.
Remember, cow muscle evolved to move the cow around, not to feed people. In fact a lot of food comes from biomass that was not intended to be food, but rather perform some other function.
I did a little "reliability analysis" for some telecom equipment a while ago, so I am semi-informed (not a guru).
There are two terms that often get interchanged, when they shouldn't. Reliability is the ability of the system to run without repairs. Availability is the ability of the system to do its job.
So the large monolithic system can be built out of very good (and expensive) components that do not fail as much as commodity hardware. This will lead to fewer failures and better reliability.
The commodity hardware can be arranged so that redundancy ensures that if on component fails, then another will take its load. Since the damaged component needs to be serviced, the reliability is lower, although the availiability of the system is the same.
Reliability is used by planners to determine the labor costs in keeping a system running. Availability is used by planners to make uptime predictions and to take measures to provide a certian level of service.
Two similiar numbers that are used for different purposes.
So why is it that a "trans-human" cannot do any of these? Sure the mechanisms to do them might be a little different, but many of these things derive meaning from our perceptions of them, not from the fact that the sensations arrive on "wet neurons".
Or to take it point-by-point
touch and feel - tactile sensors are not unheard of.
listen - nor are microphones.
Eat - Every system needs fuel.
Sleep - Every system needs downtime for repairs
make love - a combination of the above "inputs"
sing - not a problem to produce sound waves.
do all of these human things - Again, the humanity of these things is generally attributed to the thought process behind them, no the actual mechanism. What's the difference between a human song and a whale song?
Having non-biological bodies will make these people different and they will certainly have different experiences, but it is just an extreme case of the parapalegic who relies on machinery for much of his/her needs. It is a fuzzy line, not a firm one.