C++ destructors can be used to deallocate any memory, or do other stuff that cannot go wrong. But they cannot be used to release any resources, like sockets, streams, files, connections, etc.
More precisely, destructors can't be used to perform any operation which (a) may fail and (b) could be handled by the calling code (retry, communicate it to the user, attempt some thing else, etc.). If the calling code can't do anything about the failure anyway, then it really doesn't matter that the destructor has no good way to communicate it.
It didn't say "cause", it was noted as a correlation. Two different things.
Different but related things. If you see a correlation, there is some cause for the correlation. "A correlated with B" doesn't mean "A causes B" or "B causes A", but it does imply that there is at least one causal chain that includes both A and B.
You almost certainly understand this, but I often see people taking the position that "correlation != causation" to mean that they are completely unrelated.
"I can't imagine a reason to lower ticket prices."
MY FUCKING TAX DOLLARS PAID FOR THAT STADIUM AND THAT'S THE END OF STORY.
That's not a reason to lower ticket prices. That's a reason to either (a) stop paying for stadiums with tax dollars or (b) tax the tickets so that taxpayers recoup the expense.
But as long as the stadiums are full of people who willingly bought the tickets, there's no reason to lower ticket prices.
It didn't all come from Apple. The latest leaked photos include pictures of Kim Kardashian and she uses a blackberry and doesn't have an iCloud account.
So... what you're saying is that Apple hacked her blackberry in order to leak her photos? Dastardly indeed!
(Honestly, given the Kardashians' history, my first guess is that she leaked them herself in order not to be left out when all the other celebrity photos were retrieved from their hacked iCloud accounts.)
Teachers and counsellors often don't want the kids they work with to be able to easily find them on facebook, so they use fake names. I have many friends who do this. So far they haven't been affected by any rule enforcement.
Well, that's one solution. Another is for them to use their real name on Facebook and a fake name in class... some hilarious options come to mind.
I don't think colonizing before terraforming (assuming we even bother) is putting the cart before the horse, unless you assume that the only way humans can live is on an Earth-like planet. Why should we limit ourselves that way? As for needing more advanced technology, the way you push technology forward is by trying to solve specific problems. Basic research is also useful, but directed, focused efforts get farther, faster.
The point is that freedom of speech and association are far, far more important than the ability to carry cool looking guns, in terms of actually getting anything done politically.
Up to a point, that's true. But you simply raise the same question again: Are you arguing that since we're letting some of our rights slip we should also let the 2A go? Or do you believe that if we ignored the 2A that would some how make it easier to defend freedom of speech and association? I'd argue that it would help to undermine them, by providing yet another precedent showing that the "living Constitution" means whatever we want it to, making it meaningless.
The US's privately held arsenal has so far been useless in preventing the creation of a semi-fascist state.
Because it hasn't yet gotten bad enough to justify large-scale rebellion. Let us hope that it never does.
I think that the right to keep and bear arms serves two functions in this respect. The first is that it preserves at least a semblance of the ability to resist tyranny by force. The subtler and perhaps more important function is as a bellwether... and a trigger.
On October 9, 2001, the FAA published the first of a series of Special Federal Aviation Regulations (SFARs) to expedite the modification of cockpit doors in the U.S. fleet. This Phase I fix included installation of steel bars and locking devices.
No mandatory door locks before 9/11.
Yes, but the claim was that prior to 9/11 pilots were asking that locks be installed and that airlines refused the expense. I was asking for a citation supporting those claims -- that pilots asked and airlines refused.
Oh, I see the problem. You've internalized Republican wingnut derp. Only a wingnut would hold being a community organizer against someone.
I'm not a Republican, but even I can see that you've misunderstood the complaint. He's not holding having been a community organizer against Barack Obama, he's implying that community organizer is the role in which Obama belongs, i.e. that he's not competent to be the president and that he should therefore go back to what he knows how to do.
It is if we are permitted to keep our own information secret from law enforcement except when compelled to deliver it by warrant.
That's an interesting statement, because some US courts have ruled that we cannot be so compelled because it violates the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination.
I see three options:
1. Makers of devices are required to provide back doors for law enforcement access. This was part of the idea of the Clipper chip... which was a total flop because no one wanted to buy it, and Congress didn't get around to (or didn't dare to) compel usage.
2. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, but people can be held in contempt for refusing to provide access to officials with a warrant. Some US courts have taken this position.
3. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, and fifth amendment protection prevents requiring people to provide law enforcement access. Some US courts have taken this position.
So, which should we aim for? I think 1 is clearly not a good idea, not least because providing a LE backdoor that can't be exploited by malicious actors is far easier said than done. 2 is what you suggested. 3 is what many on slashdot believe they prefer.
Personally, I lean towards 3, though I can see arguments for 2.
Won't be long before Google and Microsoft follow suit.
Google has never had the ability to decrypt an encrypted Android phone. The key encryption key is derived from the user's password (plus salt), so a brute force search of possible passwords can recover it, but Google hasn't ever had any special back door. If you use a good password, no one is going to be able to get in without your assistance.
(I'm a member of Google's Android security team. Not speaking as an official representative, mind you, but anyone can look at the code and see exactly how it works, so no official statement could appreciably differ.)
Several years before 9/11, pilots were asking that the cockpits be made more secure by installing a $200 lock on the pilot's side of the door giving access to the cockpit. Airlines complained that it would be too expensive.
And unlike Earth where you can simply reboot society via going outside and farming a little plot of land, you can't do that on Mars!
You can't necessarily do that on Earth, either. Earth as it is right now, sure. But it hasn't always been like it is now... in fact it mostly hasn't been like it is now, and it's guaranteed that it won't always be like it is now. Changes can happen with lightning speed, too. A supervolcano eruption, a meteor strike... or even just climate change. What would happen if the planet suddenly reverted to "Snowball Earth", with 30 feet of surface ice covering the equatorial oceans?
We're eventually going to have to learn to either (a) sustain human life in extreme conditions or (b) engineer the planet's climate, deflect rocks, suck the energy from supervolcanos, etc., or else we'll die. Learning to live on Mars, or in space for that matter, without constant support from Earth is a Good Idea.
Or are you under the illusion that this one amendment is sacrosanct while they crap all over the rest of it?
Are you arguing that because they crap all over the rest of the Bill of Rights, we should allow them to crap all over the second as well? Really?
Obviously, the correct solution is to required our government to obey all of the law -- and in the extreme (and unlikely, I think) event that we fail to achieve that via political processes, we'll have to make use of our arms to retake control (our arms and the unwillingness of the US military to fight fellow citizens; both are necessary). The "crapping all over all the rest of it" makes holding onto the second amendment vastly more important, not less.
like i said a few comments back, you've been watching too much sci-fi and have no concept of how this stuff is actually made
I've been consistently ignoring such snide remarks and I'm going to continue doing so... but my willingness to be so patient with your snark is wearing thin. Cut it out or I'll simply stop responding.
As for whether or not I know "how this stuff is actually made", you might consider that I'm a professional software engineer with 25 years' experience, currently working for Google. I know quite a lot about how "this stuff is actually made", including familiarity with current machine learning techniques, since I'm a guy who makes it. I also personally know a couple of people who've worked on Watson (I worked for IBM for 15 years, including on Watson Labs research projects)... and they agree with my perspective on this question: AI is clearly possible; we don't yet know how to create it because we don't understand intelligence.
***we already understand "artificial intelligence" it's just code***
You can argue in exactly the same way that programmers in the 1950s understood how to implement knowledge graphs. Or computer vision. Or voice recognition. After all... they're "just code". Never mind that programmers of that era had no conception of the modern algorithms needed to actually make those things work. What they lacked wasn't just horsepower, but fundamental understanding of the problems and the solution. They couldn't build a computer system capable of driving a car that was infeasible only because it couldn't compute quickly enough, they couldn't build such a system at all.
the notion that "artificial intelligence" is something that we can 100% "undesrtand" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what "artificial intelligence" actually is...it's just software running on hardware, all programed by humans
Certainly it will be software running on hardware, all programmed by humans. Humans that understand what intelligence actually is and how it works... something that we don't yet know. To get a little more specific, it appears that human "intelligence" is actually a collection of several different components, with several emergent properties. It's long been thought that "self-awareness" is the key emergent property, but many animals have self-awareness and yet lack the crucial ability that makes humans distinct.
The current best thinking is that the distinction is a particular form of creativity. Specifically, the ability to create abstract explanations. We certainly know how to write computer programs that manipulate abstractions, but they're abstractions of the programmer's creation, not of the program's. We need to learn how to write software that is able to create and criticize its own conjectured solutions to problems. We do not yet know how to do that.
We know it's possible, because we possess computers that can do it. In our heads.
I linked you to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...you should at least have a cursory undestanding of how civil rights works in the US...it's absolutely ridiculous that you think I need to proffer up some sort of link to prove humans have free will
There are several misunderstandings implicit in this sentence.
First, I didn't ask for a link to prove humans have free will. You mentioned current legal definitions of free will. I asked for a cite to explain what such legal definitions are.
Second, you seem to think that civil rights are somehow related to free will. I don't see any such link. It's perfectly possible to have free will without having any civil rights, and it's equally possible to have civil rights without free will. I suppose you're trying to argue that we have established systems of human rights in order to protect the expression of free will... but that's clearly a second or third-order effect.
As said this could be an interesting device. But I'm not really sure what this will allow anyone to do.
The point isn't what you can do with it, the point is that it's fun to build it and to experiment with all of the sensors. Perhaps that experimentation will spark some ideas for building things that actually are useful, but even that's a second-order concern.
Apple Pay isn't new. It's just another spin on what Google and ISIS (now SoftCard) did before it. The reason PayPal didn't change the world was because the financial industry is owned by the banks, and they don't allow it to be changed except in the ways they want. Many have attempted to bypass them, or undermine them, and none have succeeded. PayPal didn't do it in the past and isn't going to in the future. Neither is Apple.
ChromeCast isn't exactly setting the world on fire.
It's the #1 best-selling electronics device on Amazon, and I believe it has held that spot continuously ever since it was released. It's also one of Best Buy's top sellers. Every non-geek I know who has one loves it. I don't know if that equates to "setting the world on fire", but it's been pretty darned successful.
While I'm a big fan of open source, that approach has real and obvious problems.
The problems show themselves just as much in software as anywhere else. e.g. People would much prefer to create new code than do code reviews or write tests, so defects in open source software linger around for a decade or two.
Exactly. The approach does have a lot of benefits, but there are some negatives as well.
Both Windows (7) and Linux (Ubuntu 14 and Crunchbang).
The problem with the UI isn't with window managers or other technical parts; it's the design of the UI.
The way an excessive amount of buttons are seemingly randomly slapped together in a toolbar.
Meh. I don't think it's that random and in any case I have no trouble whatsoever with finding the buttons I need on any platform.
The way dialogs and popups don't follow platform styling.
Who cares? Okay, so it's prettier if it follows the platform styling, but the style has no impact on usability.
The way it defaults to a multi-window environment.
This is only a problem if you lack a good window manager with proper focus-follows-mouse behavior. On Linux, I prefer the multi-window environment. It's much more flexible, especially if your workflow includes needing to interact frequently with other apps.
"no" is the answer, if you use legal definitions of 'free will' (or concepts similar to in practice)
Cite?
ook, we're just going to have to agree to disagree about how actually feasable what you describe really is...it's just so far out there...it really is, from an engineering and psychology perspective, about as likely as humans being able to travel across the whole universe and through time
Nonsense. There is a fundamental difference between something that is barred by the laws of physics and something that is perfectly possible, but just beyond our current ability. Oh, it's possible that we'll discover new physics that make supralight and time travel possible (it's even possible that the same discovery will enable both), but it's more likely, I think, that both are simply disallowed by the laws of nature.
Construction of brains, however, is incontrovertibly not barred by any physical laws... because it's done many times every day.
if what you describe ever really is even on the horizon and we see that it may be done, then, IMHO, we can have a reason to have this debate for real
I don't think it's far off at all. I suspect that we'll understand and be able to construct artificial intelligence before we can replicate a human brain, but I don't think either is more than 100 years away.
idk if humans would even still be 'human' in an evolutionary sense by the time we could do what you describe
It's perfectly conceivable that we'll have achieved sufficient mastery of genetic engineering to begin modifying ourselves in non-trivial ways by then, so you may be right. But this, also, is not so far away.
If I can't otherwise have sewage treatment -- yes, definitely.
And the 10,000 other, similar, issues? There are lots of things that need to be done but no one really wants to do. If the solution is that everyone must do those things themselves then we lose much of the advantages of specialization.
Slashdot Mirror
C++ destructors can be used to deallocate any memory, or do other stuff that cannot go wrong. But they cannot be used to release any resources, like sockets, streams, files, connections, etc.
More precisely, destructors can't be used to perform any operation which (a) may fail and (b) could be handled by the calling code (retry, communicate it to the user, attempt some thing else, etc.). If the calling code can't do anything about the failure anyway, then it really doesn't matter that the destructor has no good way to communicate it.
There must be some correlation between the level of someone's certainty and the odds of them being wrong.
I'm completely, absolutely certain that this is true.
It didn't say "cause", it was noted as a correlation. Two different things.
Different but related things. If you see a correlation, there is some cause for the correlation. "A correlated with B" doesn't mean "A causes B" or "B causes A", but it does imply that there is at least one causal chain that includes both A and B.
You almost certainly understand this, but I often see people taking the position that "correlation != causation" to mean that they are completely unrelated.
"I can't imagine a reason to lower ticket prices."
MY FUCKING TAX DOLLARS PAID FOR THAT STADIUM AND THAT'S THE END OF STORY.
That's not a reason to lower ticket prices. That's a reason to either (a) stop paying for stadiums with tax dollars or (b) tax the tickets so that taxpayers recoup the expense.
But as long as the stadiums are full of people who willingly bought the tickets, there's no reason to lower ticket prices.
It didn't all come from Apple. The latest leaked photos include pictures of Kim Kardashian and she uses a blackberry and doesn't have an iCloud account.
So... what you're saying is that Apple hacked her blackberry in order to leak her photos? Dastardly indeed!
(Honestly, given the Kardashians' history, my first guess is that she leaked them herself in order not to be left out when all the other celebrity photos were retrieved from their hacked iCloud accounts.)
Teachers and counsellors often don't want the kids they work with to be able to easily find them on facebook, so they use fake names. I have many friends who do this. So far they haven't been affected by any rule enforcement.
Well, that's one solution. Another is for them to use their real name on Facebook and a fake name in class... some hilarious options come to mind.
I don't think colonizing before terraforming (assuming we even bother) is putting the cart before the horse, unless you assume that the only way humans can live is on an Earth-like planet. Why should we limit ourselves that way? As for needing more advanced technology, the way you push technology forward is by trying to solve specific problems. Basic research is also useful, but directed, focused efforts get farther, faster.
The point is that freedom of speech and association are far, far more important than the ability to carry cool looking guns, in terms of actually getting anything done politically.
Up to a point, that's true. But you simply raise the same question again: Are you arguing that since we're letting some of our rights slip we should also let the 2A go? Or do you believe that if we ignored the 2A that would some how make it easier to defend freedom of speech and association? I'd argue that it would help to undermine them, by providing yet another precedent showing that the "living Constitution" means whatever we want it to, making it meaningless.
The US's privately held arsenal has so far been useless in preventing the creation of a semi-fascist state.
Because it hasn't yet gotten bad enough to justify large-scale rebellion. Let us hope that it never does.
I think that the right to keep and bear arms serves two functions in this respect. The first is that it preserves at least a semblance of the ability to resist tyranny by force. The subtler and perhaps more important function is as a bellwether... and a trigger.
The FAA requirement for a lock on the door was only issued after 9/11
On October 9, 2001, the FAA published the first of a series of Special Federal Aviation Regulations (SFARs) to expedite the modification of cockpit doors in the U.S. fleet. This Phase I fix included installation of steel bars and locking devices.
No mandatory door locks before 9/11.
Yes, but the claim was that prior to 9/11 pilots were asking that locks be installed and that airlines refused the expense. I was asking for a citation supporting those claims -- that pilots asked and airlines refused.
Oh, I see the problem. You've internalized Republican wingnut derp. Only a wingnut would hold being a community organizer against someone.
I'm not a Republican, but even I can see that you've misunderstood the complaint. He's not holding having been a community organizer against Barack Obama, he's implying that community organizer is the role in which Obama belongs, i.e. that he's not competent to be the president and that he should therefore go back to what he knows how to do.
It is if we are permitted to keep our own information secret from law enforcement except when compelled to deliver it by warrant.
That's an interesting statement, because some US courts have ruled that we cannot be so compelled because it violates the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination.
I see three options:
1. Makers of devices are required to provide back doors for law enforcement access. This was part of the idea of the Clipper chip... which was a total flop because no one wanted to buy it, and Congress didn't get around to (or didn't dare to) compel usage.
2. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, but people can be held in contempt for refusing to provide access to officials with a warrant. Some US courts have taken this position.
3. Makers of devices don't have to provide back doors, and fifth amendment protection prevents requiring people to provide law enforcement access. Some US courts have taken this position.
So, which should we aim for? I think 1 is clearly not a good idea, not least because providing a LE backdoor that can't be exploited by malicious actors is far easier said than done. 2 is what you suggested. 3 is what many on slashdot believe they prefer.
Personally, I lean towards 3, though I can see arguments for 2.
Won't be long before Google and Microsoft follow suit.
Google has never had the ability to decrypt an encrypted Android phone. The key encryption key is derived from the user's password (plus salt), so a brute force search of possible passwords can recover it, but Google hasn't ever had any special back door. If you use a good password, no one is going to be able to get in without your assistance.
(I'm a member of Google's Android security team. Not speaking as an official representative, mind you, but anyone can look at the code and see exactly how it works, so no official statement could appreciably differ.)
Several years before 9/11, pilots were asking that the cockpits be made more secure by installing a $200 lock on the pilot's side of the door giving access to the cockpit. Airlines complained that it would be too expensive.
Cite?
And unlike Earth where you can simply reboot society via going outside and farming a little plot of land, you can't do that on Mars!
You can't necessarily do that on Earth, either. Earth as it is right now, sure. But it hasn't always been like it is now... in fact it mostly hasn't been like it is now, and it's guaranteed that it won't always be like it is now. Changes can happen with lightning speed, too. A supervolcano eruption, a meteor strike... or even just climate change. What would happen if the planet suddenly reverted to "Snowball Earth", with 30 feet of surface ice covering the equatorial oceans?
We're eventually going to have to learn to either (a) sustain human life in extreme conditions or (b) engineer the planet's climate, deflect rocks, suck the energy from supervolcanos, etc., or else we'll die. Learning to live on Mars, or in space for that matter, without constant support from Earth is a Good Idea.
Or are you under the illusion that this one amendment is sacrosanct while they crap all over the rest of it?
Are you arguing that because they crap all over the rest of the Bill of Rights, we should allow them to crap all over the second as well? Really?
Obviously, the correct solution is to required our government to obey all of the law -- and in the extreme (and unlikely, I think) event that we fail to achieve that via political processes, we'll have to make use of our arms to retake control (our arms and the unwillingness of the US military to fight fellow citizens; both are necessary). The "crapping all over all the rest of it" makes holding onto the second amendment vastly more important, not less.
like i said a few comments back, you've been watching too much sci-fi and have no concept of how this stuff is actually made
I've been consistently ignoring such snide remarks and I'm going to continue doing so... but my willingness to be so patient with your snark is wearing thin. Cut it out or I'll simply stop responding.
As for whether or not I know "how this stuff is actually made", you might consider that I'm a professional software engineer with 25 years' experience, currently working for Google. I know quite a lot about how "this stuff is actually made", including familiarity with current machine learning techniques, since I'm a guy who makes it. I also personally know a couple of people who've worked on Watson (I worked for IBM for 15 years, including on Watson Labs research projects)... and they agree with my perspective on this question: AI is clearly possible; we don't yet know how to create it because we don't understand intelligence.
***we already understand "artificial intelligence" it's just code***
You can argue in exactly the same way that programmers in the 1950s understood how to implement knowledge graphs. Or computer vision. Or voice recognition. After all... they're "just code". Never mind that programmers of that era had no conception of the modern algorithms needed to actually make those things work. What they lacked wasn't just horsepower, but fundamental understanding of the problems and the solution. They couldn't build a computer system capable of driving a car that was infeasible only because it couldn't compute quickly enough, they couldn't build such a system at all.
the notion that "artificial intelligence" is something that we can 100% "undesrtand" shows a fundamental misunderstanding of what "artificial intelligence" actually is...it's just software running on hardware, all programed by humans
Certainly it will be software running on hardware, all programmed by humans. Humans that understand what intelligence actually is and how it works... something that we don't yet know. To get a little more specific, it appears that human "intelligence" is actually a collection of several different components, with several emergent properties. It's long been thought that "self-awareness" is the key emergent property, but many animals have self-awareness and yet lack the crucial ability that makes humans distinct.
The current best thinking is that the distinction is a particular form of creativity. Specifically, the ability to create abstract explanations. We certainly know how to write computer programs that manipulate abstractions, but they're abstractions of the programmer's creation, not of the program's. We need to learn how to write software that is able to create and criticize its own conjectured solutions to problems. We do not yet know how to do that.
We know it's possible, because we possess computers that can do it. In our heads.
I linked you to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights...you should at least have a cursory undestanding of how civil rights works in the US...it's absolutely ridiculous that you think I need to proffer up some sort of link to prove humans have free will
There are several misunderstandings implicit in this sentence.
First, I didn't ask for a link to prove humans have free will. You mentioned current legal definitions of free will. I asked for a cite to explain what such legal definitions are.
Second, you seem to think that civil rights are somehow related to free will. I don't see any such link. It's perfectly possible to have free will without having any civil rights, and it's equally possible to have civil rights without free will. I suppose you're trying to argue that we have established systems of human rights in order to protect the expression of free will... but that's clearly a second or third-order effect.
Third, you seem to think I'm ques
As said this could be an interesting device. But I'm not really sure what this will allow anyone to do.
The point isn't what you can do with it, the point is that it's fun to build it and to experiment with all of the sensors. Perhaps that experimentation will spark some ideas for building things that actually are useful, but even that's a second-order concern.
This.
What happened to the slashdot of old?
Apple Pay isn't new. It's just another spin on what Google and ISIS (now SoftCard) did before it. The reason PayPal didn't change the world was because the financial industry is owned by the banks, and they don't allow it to be changed except in the ways they want. Many have attempted to bypass them, or undermine them, and none have succeeded. PayPal didn't do it in the past and isn't going to in the future. Neither is Apple.
First, it has nothing to do with Alibaba's IPO and everything to do with Apple's new one touch payment.
How so?
Does BubbleUPNP not work for you?
ChromeCast isn't exactly setting the world on fire.
It's the #1 best-selling electronics device on Amazon, and I believe it has held that spot continuously ever since it was released. It's also one of Best Buy's top sellers. Every non-geek I know who has one loves it. I don't know if that equates to "setting the world on fire", but it's been pretty darned successful.
While I'm a big fan of open source, that approach has real and obvious problems.
The problems show themselves just as much in software as anywhere else. e.g. People would much prefer to create new code than do code reviews or write tests, so defects in open source software linger around for a decade or two.
Exactly. The approach does have a lot of benefits, but there are some negatives as well.
Both Windows (7) and Linux (Ubuntu 14 and Crunchbang). The problem with the UI isn't with window managers or other technical parts; it's the design of the UI. The way an excessive amount of buttons are seemingly randomly slapped together in a toolbar.
Meh. I don't think it's that random and in any case I have no trouble whatsoever with finding the buttons I need on any platform.
The way dialogs and popups don't follow platform styling.
Who cares? Okay, so it's prettier if it follows the platform styling, but the style has no impact on usability.
The way it defaults to a multi-window environment.
This is only a problem if you lack a good window manager with proper focus-follows-mouse behavior. On Linux, I prefer the multi-window environment. It's much more flexible, especially if your workflow includes needing to interact frequently with other apps.
"no" is the answer, if you use legal definitions of 'free will' (or concepts similar to in practice)
Cite?
ook, we're just going to have to agree to disagree about how actually feasable what you describe really is...it's just so far out there...it really is, from an engineering and psychology perspective, about as likely as humans being able to travel across the whole universe and through time
Nonsense. There is a fundamental difference between something that is barred by the laws of physics and something that is perfectly possible, but just beyond our current ability. Oh, it's possible that we'll discover new physics that make supralight and time travel possible (it's even possible that the same discovery will enable both), but it's more likely, I think, that both are simply disallowed by the laws of nature.
Construction of brains, however, is incontrovertibly not barred by any physical laws... because it's done many times every day.
if what you describe ever really is even on the horizon and we see that it may be done, then, IMHO, we can have a reason to have this debate for real
I don't think it's far off at all. I suspect that we'll understand and be able to construct artificial intelligence before we can replicate a human brain, but I don't think either is more than 100 years away.
idk if humans would even still be 'human' in an evolutionary sense by the time we could do what you describe
It's perfectly conceivable that we'll have achieved sufficient mastery of genetic engineering to begin modifying ourselves in non-trivial ways by then, so you may be right. But this, also, is not so far away.
If I can't otherwise have sewage treatment -- yes, definitely.
And the 10,000 other, similar, issues? There are lots of things that need to be done but no one really wants to do. If the solution is that everyone must do those things themselves then we lose much of the advantages of specialization.