you can thank the socialist left for this situation... libertarians think the government and all it's associated minions should just stay the fuck away from all that, which is the way it should be
it's only a problem for transgender welfare bums... working people don't actually have to deal with government organisations that often (they deal with the private sector, which doesn't demand as much personal information as government)
i only need to fill in forms when i sing up for a new service, which isn't very often
Maybe you're problem is that you're reading web blogs written by a retard "neuroscientist" (obviously self-titled because it otherwise doesn't really mean much), so your claim about historians is full of shit, and you keep linking to the same blog over and over again, which kinda says that your bullshit isn't widely accepted.
if you sincerely think windows has more polish (or whatever it is you want in an OS) that's fine... i never implied you should use Linux, but when you say things like "You will fail." does imply that you have at least some degree of ignorance that I don't share.
i would love to see a US government reaction to a proposal by Facebook to build a datacenter in Siberia... of course it wouldn't happen... maybe it would start another cold war, which would also be good for datacenters:)
if they just plonked their datacenter on antarctic ice it would eventually melt into the ice and would create its own ice chest when the water above it refreezed... it would be even cooler if they made the datacenter as a huge pyramid that reconfigured itself every 10 minutes
it's easy to forget about survival in a world where you don't have to forage for food or build a campfire, but really we are still doing that just in different ways. most "first world" citizens go to work to earn money to buy food and shelter, not because they want to but because they must to survive. if survival was no longer a factor you wouldn't need to think about food or shelter at all. this is a very simple and obvious example of course, but if you look more closely at everything we do you will see that we are always striving to increase our fitness for survival. it is in our nature.
And why would we want to eliminate negative human psychological traits?
Keep that in mind next time you feel the desire to remove "negative" human traits
i was merely trying to clarify the op. i wasn't implying that human nature should be genetically altered (i actually also called that a fairytale in my previous post). learn to read, dipshit.
Either humans would figure out how to limit population voluntarily or they wouldn't and there'd be a die-off with wiser survivors. Either way, you end up with a population of immortal people who control their population
Another thing that is ignored is the vast pool of experience that would build up in an immortal society and the ability for small groups to do projects that span long periods of time.
nice fairytale. apparently you don't understand human nature at all.
That's the problem with movie quotes. They're made in the context of a fantasy.
i quoted it because it is actually a reflection of reality. but if you think not merely because it was from a movie that's fine; don't let me stop you from being a fool.
Humanity has become much less violent, much more intelligent, and much more productive over the last few centuries.
no it hasn't. you just happen to be a member of the more privileged ignorant few at the top of the socioeconomic tree (even if you aren't "rich" remember that there are more than 6 billion people on the planet, many of which are living in what you and I would consider to be poverty). the problem with the position you are in is that there is a natural tendency to "switch off" to much of the negative aspects that don't directly impact you. also, while you have access to a wealth of information, you only access a tiny portion of it and that portion is dependent on your own biases (naturally you will only read/watch/listen to what you want to). countries like the united states and australia are very lucky in that they hold certain freedoms in high regard and have justice and political systems to enforce that (on the most part). even if our politicians or the rothchilds or aliens are controlling us, at least we mostly live in peace and relative prosperity (we have ready access to food/clean water/warmth/education). a large percentage of the people of the world are living in poverty, and the very fact that you and I aren't helping them is a sign of the imbalances of human nature. we hold ourselves in higher regard than those in poverty for any number of reasons to try to justify our prosperous existence, but at the end of the day it is the seven sins that prevents us from correcting the imbalances. it is in our nature to be this way. i'm not saying it should be genetically removed or that we should be any different (the latter would be futile anyway), but ignorance of human nature doesn't by any means imply that it has changed at all.
What you call "the seven sins" has important biological and social functions. And competition and self-interest are as important as cooperation for progress. The kind of people you are trying to design would be less efficient than what we currently have.
yes. exactly, but you have misunderstood me; i'm not trying to "design" anything or even suggest that we should be "designing" human nature; in fact much of my previous post was dedicated to justifying why genetic manipulation of that nature would be a bad thing. i was merely trying to clarify what i thought the op was getting at.
the way you think of human evolution and enhancement is like the old eugenicists
and the ways you have misinterpreted my previous post is like a preschooler
But life has only become more peaceful and in general a lot has improved
what fairytale are you living in? humanity is just as bad as it always has been. we have used technological development to come up with new ways to take advantage of each other. human nature hasn't changed at all though.
i think the op was implying that rather than spending trillions of dollars trying to get into space and live forever against all the problems of humanity, developing genetic technology to eliminate negative human psychological traits (such as the seven sins) will create a much more cooperative and productive society to achieve goals like space exploration much more efficiently. i personally think it's also a fairytale, but no less a fairytale than thinking humans living forever would create a better world. it would actually make the world much much worse; medicines, food and clean water would very quickly become a scarcity, and in cities population density would skyrocket to the point where poilce would be overwhelmed by an explosion in crime rates. public transport would grind to a halt, queues for everything would extend ad infinitum to the point where even basic grocery shopping would eventually become impractical. roads would be in gridlock, pollution would grow to toxic levels, etc etc etc. you might say expanding our horizons to space will solve all these problems, but it would merely create the same problems in space. unless you implemented population control similar to that in china or you implemented forced sterilization after x children, then growth would be unsustainable very quickly. the problem with control measures is that they conflict with western ideals and would adversely affect freedoms and liberties that are taken for granted, which would then likely have an adverse impact on the desire to live longer.
nature is a very good engineer. survival of the fittest is an excellent growth control measure. humans like to think we are very high up in the evolutionary tree because we may be able to bypass evolutionary controls by artificially increasing the fitness of the human race, but that also introduces the possibility that we aren't really fit at all if we are stupid enough to engineer ourselves with unintended consequences that ultimately lead to our premature extinction.
"If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now... you're selling it, you wanna sell it." - Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
"Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun." - Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
you can think what you like of course, but windows fanbois have been claiming that linux will fail soon as much as linux fanbois have been claiming that it will soon be year of the linux desktop.
neither will fail, and if you measure success the same way that microsoft does (profit) then linux is a huge success.
ultimately microsoft will do whatever makes them money regardless of what their fan base believes, and there is money in linux so microsoft also wants their finger in the linux pie... do you think microsoft would have ever offered linux guests on azure if there wasn't a demand for it and they couldn't make a tonne of money?
a very small minority of them (the richest ones) pay almost all of it
i call bs. can you back this up with anything?
fair enough the rich pay a lot of tax, but they also make a lot of money. i'm not saying it's unfair (i'm actually on their side), but does a rich guy paying say 40% of $50 million make him any more a "taxpayer" than a guy who pays 30% of $50k? (the percentages are just for example) the guy on $300k deserves no less credit for his contribution to the american communist regime than the guy on $1 million.
the guy on $1 million pays a lot of tax, but he also makes a lot, and he has more disposable income to spend on fancy accountants to make sure he takes advantage of every loophole and every tax break he can.
Linux might run the world, but for the majority of my work and a lot of my entertainment, it's in front of a computer. And goodness knows I'd hate it to be running Linux with the state of distros these days.
and that entertainment most likely relies on a router with linux and your internet connection probably relies on any number of linux dns servers, web servers, database servers, etc (esp. if you use any google services).
eventually microsoft's dominance will wane (it is already beginning to) and it's financial resources will too, and their development will take a hit. without regular new releases that consumers have come to expect from tech giants (thanks to apple and samsung etc) microsoft will lose out to younger generations who are increasingly tech savvy and demanding of new features. meanwhile open source resources are increasing, not only because of more and more voluntarily involvement from individual developers, but also because of increasing reliance on open source by corporate interests there is increasing support in the corporate sector to improve the quality of open source software that keeps the world ticking (especially in data centers).
the goal posts are moving every day at an increasing rate. it's not merely because i decided to move them, but the world demands that they move. windows is a legacy in a world where legacy can be made in a matter of months. linux distributions face the same risk and if linux weren't continually evolving it would become legacy too. windows 8 will keep microsoft going for a while, but even with oem dominance i think even microsoft would concede that windows 8 hasn't been the runanway success they need to sustain the empire.
in many cases the only things keeping people and companies chained to the windows ecosystem is their reliance on products from companies like adobe and autodesk, but when markets for those products on other operating systems build inertia to the point where adobe and autodesk can justify maintaining builds for those operating systems, then users will migrate to whatever is cheaper. microsoft will try for all it's worth to hold on with coercion and back room deals, but at the end of the day money talks and bullshit walks, and eventually microsoft will be left by the wayside because their business model won't work for windows any more.
eventually there will be a version of microsoft office for linux and i think that will help keep microsoft alive. they may even develop new products to compete with products from other companies. microsoft just won't be anything like the monopoly it used to be, which is good.
The "tax payers" will just have to drown their sorrows in champagne and caviar
regardless of how much tax each person pays, by far the majority number of tax payers aren't the sort that could afford anything like caviar
if you want to target the rich, target the rich. tax payers aren't rich, and rich people are very good at not paying much tax... "rich" and "tax" aren't entirely mutually exclusive, but it is enough so that taking a poke at tax payers is really taking a poke at the majority of the working middle class
Slashdot Mirror
you can thank the socialist left for this situation... libertarians think the government and all it's associated minions should just stay the fuck away from all that, which is the way it should be
it's only a problem for transgender welfare bums... working people don't actually have to deal with government organisations that often (they deal with the private sector, which doesn't demand as much personal information as government)
i only need to fill in forms when i sing up for a new service, which isn't very often
that's bit-ist
Maybe you're problem is that you're reading web blogs written by a retard "neuroscientist" (obviously self-titled because it otherwise doesn't really mean much), so your claim about historians is full of shit, and you keep linking to the same blog over and over again, which kinda says that your bullshit isn't widely accepted.
if you sincerely think windows has more polish (or whatever it is you want in an OS) that's fine... i never implied you should use Linux, but when you say things like "You will fail." does imply that you have at least some degree of ignorance that I don't share.
nah i can't be... the sentences are intelligible and there's no mention of "open sores"
holy fucking shitbags!!! Microsoft makes shoes!!!! where can i get a pair so i can wear them with my debian t-shirt :)
it was however more informative than your reply
i would love to see a US government reaction to a proposal by Facebook to build a datacenter in Siberia... of course it wouldn't happen... maybe it would start another cold war, which would also be good for datacenters :)
Do we know what they use for heatsinks, fans, or maybe water cooling components?
they probably just open the windows
you should be more concerned about the datacenter chugging out endless clouds of stupid
i think it largely depends on how many datacenters it takes to change a light bulb
if they just plonked their datacenter on antarctic ice it would eventually melt into the ice and would create its own ice chest when the water above it refreezed... it would be even cooler if they made the datacenter as a huge pyramid that reconfigured itself every 10 minutes
could be worse... they could be running on ASSp
go ahead and enjoy your blissful ignorance then
Humans are long past the "evolve to survive" tactic
so if you really think we're past the whole evolving to survive tactic, why would we even be talking about immortality?
maybe you should look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs
you'll find that survival is still the big one at the bottom that always comes first
it's easy to forget about survival in a world where you don't have to forage for food or build a campfire, but really we are still doing that just in different ways. most "first world" citizens go to work to earn money to buy food and shelter, not because they want to but because they must to survive. if survival was no longer a factor you wouldn't need to think about food or shelter at all. this is a very simple and obvious example of course, but if you look more closely at everything we do you will see that we are always striving to increase our fitness for survival. it is in our nature.
And why would we want to eliminate negative human psychological traits?
Keep that in mind next time you feel the desire to remove "negative" human traits
i was merely trying to clarify the op. i wasn't implying that human nature should be genetically altered (i actually also called that a fairytale in my previous post). learn to read, dipshit.
Either humans would figure out how to limit population voluntarily or they wouldn't and there'd be a die-off with wiser survivors. Either way, you end up with a population of immortal people who control their population
Another thing that is ignored is the vast pool of experience that would build up in an immortal society and the ability for small groups to do projects that span long periods of time.
nice fairytale. apparently you don't understand human nature at all.
That's the problem with movie quotes. They're made in the context of a fantasy.
i quoted it because it is actually a reflection of reality. but if you think not merely because it was from a movie that's fine; don't let me stop you from being a fool.
Humanity has become much less violent, much more intelligent, and much more productive over the last few centuries.
no it hasn't. you just happen to be a member of the more privileged ignorant few at the top of the socioeconomic tree (even if you aren't "rich" remember that there are more than 6 billion people on the planet, many of which are living in what you and I would consider to be poverty). the problem with the position you are in is that there is a natural tendency to "switch off" to much of the negative aspects that don't directly impact you. also, while you have access to a wealth of information, you only access a tiny portion of it and that portion is dependent on your own biases (naturally you will only read/watch/listen to what you want to). countries like the united states and australia are very lucky in that they hold certain freedoms in high regard and have justice and political systems to enforce that (on the most part). even if our politicians or the rothchilds or aliens are controlling us, at least we mostly live in peace and relative prosperity (we have ready access to food/clean water/warmth/education). a large percentage of the people of the world are living in poverty, and the very fact that you and I aren't helping them is a sign of the imbalances of human nature. we hold ourselves in higher regard than those in poverty for any number of reasons to try to justify our prosperous existence, but at the end of the day it is the seven sins that prevents us from correcting the imbalances. it is in our nature to be this way. i'm not saying it should be genetically removed or that we should be any different (the latter would be futile anyway), but ignorance of human nature doesn't by any means imply that it has changed at all.
What you call "the seven sins" has important biological and social functions. And competition and self-interest are as important as cooperation for progress. The kind of people you are trying to design would be less efficient than what we currently have.
yes. exactly, but you have misunderstood me; i'm not trying to "design" anything or even suggest that we should be "designing" human nature; in fact much of my previous post was dedicated to justifying why genetic manipulation of that nature would be a bad thing. i was merely trying to clarify what i thought the op was getting at.
the way you think of human evolution and enhancement is like the old eugenicists
and the ways you have misinterpreted my previous post is like a preschooler
But life has only become more peaceful and in general a lot has improved
what fairytale are you living in? humanity is just as bad as it always has been. we have used technological development to come up with new ways to take advantage of each other. human nature hasn't changed at all though.
i think the op was implying that rather than spending trillions of dollars trying to get into space and live forever against all the problems of humanity, developing genetic technology to eliminate negative human psychological traits (such as the seven sins) will create a much more cooperative and productive society to achieve goals like space exploration much more efficiently. i personally think it's also a fairytale, but no less a fairytale than thinking humans living forever would create a better world. it would actually make the world much much worse; medicines, food and clean water would very quickly become a scarcity, and in cities population density would skyrocket to the point where poilce would be overwhelmed by an explosion in crime rates. public transport would grind to a halt, queues for everything would extend ad infinitum to the point where even basic grocery shopping would eventually become impractical. roads would be in gridlock, pollution would grow to toxic levels, etc etc etc. you might say expanding our horizons to space will solve all these problems, but it would merely create the same problems in space. unless you implemented population control similar to that in china or you implemented forced sterilization after x children, then growth would be unsustainable very quickly. the problem with control measures is that they conflict with western ideals and would adversely affect freedoms and liberties that are taken for granted, which would then likely have an adverse impact on the desire to live longer.
nature is a very good engineer. survival of the fittest is an excellent growth control measure. humans like to think we are very high up in the evolutionary tree because we may be able to bypass evolutionary controls by artificially increasing the fitness of the human race, but that also introduces the possibility that we aren't really fit at all if we are stupid enough to engineer ourselves with unintended consequences that ultimately lead to our premature extinction.
"If I may... Um, I'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. You read what others had done and you took the next step. You didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. You stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now... you're selling it, you wanna sell it." - Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
"Don't you see the danger, John, inherent in what you're doing here? Genetic power is the most awesome force the planet's ever seen, but you wield it like a kid that's found his dad's gun." - Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park
you can think what you like of course, but windows fanbois have been claiming that linux will fail soon as much as linux fanbois have been claiming that it will soon be year of the linux desktop.
neither will fail, and if you measure success the same way that microsoft does (profit) then linux is a huge success.
ultimately microsoft will do whatever makes them money regardless of what their fan base believes, and there is money in linux so microsoft also wants their finger in the linux pie... do you think microsoft would have ever offered linux guests on azure if there wasn't a demand for it and they couldn't make a tonne of money?
http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/manage/linux/
a very small minority of them (the richest ones) pay almost all of it
i call bs. can you back this up with anything?
fair enough the rich pay a lot of tax, but they also make a lot of money. i'm not saying it's unfair (i'm actually on their side), but does a rich guy paying say 40% of $50 million make him any more a "taxpayer" than a guy who pays 30% of $50k? (the percentages are just for example) the guy on $300k deserves no less credit for his contribution to the american communist regime than the guy on $1 million.
the guy on $1 million pays a lot of tax, but he also makes a lot, and he has more disposable income to spend on fancy accountants to make sure he takes advantage of every loophole and every tax break he can.
Half the "taxpayers" pay no income taxes at all
eh?
if someone doesn't pay taxes, they aren't a taxpayer (by definition). maybe you're thinking of voters or citizens or some other generic term.
Linux might run the world, but for the majority of my work and a lot of my entertainment, it's in front of a computer. And goodness knows I'd hate it to be running Linux with the state of distros these days.
and that entertainment most likely relies on a router with linux and your internet connection probably relies on any number of linux dns servers, web servers, database servers, etc (esp. if you use any google services).
eventually microsoft's dominance will wane (it is already beginning to) and it's financial resources will too, and their development will take a hit. without regular new releases that consumers have come to expect from tech giants (thanks to apple and samsung etc) microsoft will lose out to younger generations who are increasingly tech savvy and demanding of new features. meanwhile open source resources are increasing, not only because of more and more voluntarily involvement from individual developers, but also because of increasing reliance on open source by corporate interests there is increasing support in the corporate sector to improve the quality of open source software that keeps the world ticking (especially in data centers).
the goal posts are moving every day at an increasing rate. it's not merely because i decided to move them, but the world demands that they move. windows is a legacy in a world where legacy can be made in a matter of months. linux distributions face the same risk and if linux weren't continually evolving it would become legacy too. windows 8 will keep microsoft going for a while, but even with oem dominance i think even microsoft would concede that windows 8 hasn't been the runanway success they need to sustain the empire.
in many cases the only things keeping people and companies chained to the windows ecosystem is their reliance on products from companies like adobe and autodesk, but when markets for those products on other operating systems build inertia to the point where adobe and autodesk can justify maintaining builds for those operating systems, then users will migrate to whatever is cheaper. microsoft will try for all it's worth to hold on with coercion and back room deals, but at the end of the day money talks and bullshit walks, and eventually microsoft will be left by the wayside because their business model won't work for windows any more.
eventually there will be a version of microsoft office for linux and i think that will help keep microsoft alive. they may even develop new products to compete with products from other companies. microsoft just won't be anything like the monopoly it used to be, which is good.
The "tax payers" will just have to drown their sorrows in champagne and caviar
regardless of how much tax each person pays, by far the majority number of tax payers aren't the sort that could afford anything like caviar
if you want to target the rich, target the rich. tax payers aren't rich, and rich people are very good at not paying much tax... "rich" and "tax" aren't entirely mutually exclusive, but it is enough so that taking a poke at tax payers is really taking a poke at the majority of the working middle class
Scott Torborg and Star Simpson
how trekkie