"Perhaps it would be like knowing you were once another person, but not remembering what it was like."
Interesting and creepy; until we have the set of Tinker toys to find out... If the physical structure can be faithfully reproduced then we can find out just how useful memory is to make you "you." I've read any number of fiction and research papers on some of this and find it fascinating and scary all at once. I hope that curiosity leads to answers that don't freak us out too much.
Sure, and good conjecture, but only applies if one constrains life to passivity. It's all hand-waving at the moment but I see no reason to exclude Dyson-style engineering, for instance, and that just for starters. Star burning out, or changing into a displeasing phase? Crunch a few into one another, engineer a new star. Extreme? Yes, but to conclude we'll not learn to do new and interesting things defies history.
"while waiting for "something interesting to happen"" - make your own interesting if tired of waiting. Play.
If all, assholes included of whatever age, exist as human minds in avatar bodies with a human brain or an inorganic analogue of a human brain or eventually as a human mind in a non-physical brain rendered as a software construct, there ought to be plenty of room. The issue then becomes do all minds have physical bodies, or do all or some large fraction exist in virtual spaces.
Barring senility and the like, I would prefer to continue living in a better body or a simulacrum so's I could work on a few things and also stick around to see how some things turn out. One of the annoying things of natural life is that just when one starts making real inroads on becoming the person they'd like to be the body craps out taking the mind with it.
Yes, well, that's fine and I'm glad for you; however, I believe we're talking generally of softwares - OS, programs, media.
For instance, who owns your operating system? Your browser?
And only going by memory here, but if your deed is not freehold then your land ownership carries conditions. Well, all deeds carry conditions, but freehold is the least encumbered. Most people end up with quit claim. What deed do you have?
I set up a black and white darkroom in '68, used it sporadically for the few years I lived at that place. While I probably should have spent more time learning by doing and all that, maybe gotten a bit serious about photography, I can't fault the simple learning and fun of it. B&W is simple, easy, and if the whimsy strikes, captivating.
Never got into color, too much expense and relative hassle. Only did it at the labs I worked at.
You deserve some up mods for insight and goodly info. Thanks.
I saw too many pictures in Life magazine of the aftermath of the "bullet visas" issued by the Grupo. Some of them were brought to mind by your post; it's not as though I think I needed more unsettling things to take to slumber with me, but have to be glad that to this day the power held in them can keep me awake.
As I get older I know less of importance; one thing that sticks is "be nice to each other." There's far too much of the other going around, wherever it's done by some humans to others. It's a troubling thing to think that for too many, their lives are so small that finding ways to hurt others is somehow important to them.
Just on this matter, I've had little trouble figuring out if the several ACs posting about having lived in SU and Russia have done so or not. But I sin against/. wisdom by having read a bit about the subject matter to start with, and having known a handful or two of people who have lived there at various times.
The key to solving scarcity in most forms is energy. Provide plentiful energy at ludicrously low prices, many problems vanish. The issue would then become heat dissipation.
Near-term, not much we can do but continue to integrate the 'green' stuff, include methane/CO2, with rapid shift to thorium-cycle nukes. Mid-term, add in solar-power satellites. Indeterminate - fusion (as several experts point out, it's more a matter of $ than when). I'll leave off more far-afield things. In all cases, a reasonable blend is to be preferred to all-or-nothing. Part of any blend is recognizing fit of source to scale of demand, balanced by impact on us.
That's part of the point, I think; nobody has to like cleaning toilets. So long as everyone cleans a toilet or two, it's not an onerous chore because the load is spread out - and no one need do it as a full-time job. Heck, if all one had to do was clean a few toilets a day, it'd be as much a break as anything else. It's just not that tough a chore - unless some idiot left a mess they were too proud or too sadistic to deal with themselves.
Any job can become unbearable if there is no respite.
Generational thing, yes; also, I fear, a thinking thing. Not that the latter hasn't some connection to the former. More recent generations don't seem to have the tools needed to gain enough perspective to even think to ask why there might be something amiss with broad-scale data gathering on a nations' subjects - er, citizens. I may sound a broken record on this but one looming distinction is that the Baby Boomers are the last generation where a majority read books.
The newer few generations seem to read very little at all, and what they do read is often small stuff. Half the bright lights here seem to have trouble enough with reading comprehension just slogging through a summary - let alone demonstrate ability to read and digest a whole big large ginormous one- or two-page article. All that reading takes, you know, _time_. Time lost to reading, which could be much better spent doing myriad things.
Besides, who the fuck cares what some bearded old has-been slightly-famous once for something or other thinks about something? Privacy? What's that? Gotta be fifty or so just to know what it means, anymore.
Yupper, surrender gleefully such privacy as may be somehow overlooked - government data slurping keeps us safe from things, such as those bombs in Boston.
As for comments on who's doing what where, all it takes is a splitter on a trunk - see Narus et al in relation the original AT&T secret room from a few years back. ISPs and such don't have to hand over shit, it doesn't really matter. Please note, though, and re-read carefully all the quotes from the named nine companies: "no direct access." Doesn't say squat about other-than-direct access. So it can be had both ways.
This isn't the first time the concept of electro- brain- pleasure-stimulation has turned up here, and I still can't recall the title, author or particulars of a short story I read somewhen back in late '60s, maybe early '70s. "Victims" plugged the something-something into a socket 'twixt back of ear and base of skull; the tech was bootleg of legit-use stuff. The setting was on Earth, circa roughly the turn of century - the date might've not been given, but one scene was at a run-down rooming house, another at a private home and both seemed just a seedy version of the time of writing. Any help for an old man's peripatetic recall gratefully accepted.
Bill, you've been making spot on comments all day. Tnx.
Seems to me there is much left out of Civics classes these days. If one doesn't read history, lessons come harder if there's no clue they need to be learned.
Not quite, I think. Even after a program gets free, honest people still tend to pay for their copy especially if support may be involved. Further, studies show that a large percentage of downloaders will pay for something after they copy it, for a variety of reasons. Finally, related to first, a free copy does not imply an unsold copy (except unto the deluded); some will always copy, some will copy and buy, some will buy first.
Credit for one's work is a whole 'nuther thing. Copying is separate from plagiarism, as others have pointed out. I haven't the right words - but it is a heinous thing to claim another's work as your own.
Two of my elder cousins had a wire recorder, taped stuff off radio mid- late-'50s. My uncle had brought the recorder back from a lab he'd worked at during the War. It was a commercial model (company, I can't remember). I though it was an ingenious bit of engineering at the time (I was what, 8yrs. old?)
I don't know the exact kind of stuff needed, but it should be readily possibly to differentiate the recorded places on the wire, then on to the scheme for encoding. It would have to be fairly simple given one-dimension to work with. But I can see that to do so usefully would be decidedly un-trivial.
A small point viz. torture - there are several largely identical definitions in common use; the one from the U.N. is as handy as another. In it and the rest there is a blanket CYA exception for law enforcement and similar people such that they may use whatever force or technique is necessary to achieve compliance so long as it does not result in permanent injury. Interpretation and subsequent training and practice might well vary on that last bit.
I know this well, having had it applied to me four years ago. Reading the fine print afterwards was educational, as was the experience. Did its application on me contribute in some way to a later DVT from which I've yet to recover? Who knows? Who gives a shit? The individuals who were involved, including the doctor who was there, are covered.
I do not recommend discovering any of this firsthand.
For the getting of names thing, that will be trivial. The only tricky bit is if for a particular call someone else was using your phone.
True. Covered in another response nearby. I expect some people think sending a letter or form to the IRS somewhat different to posting a comment or picture on a social site. I'm only guessing, of course, based on what little I see of some of the people that I know who use FB or similar. It's hard to fathom, but seems to me the average Jane or Joe simply doesn't think about things with as much sophistication or forethought that many here seem to do.
Ah. Well, my bad; gimme a whoosh, then. I could well be still missing the point; it's a talent I don't ask for.
Still, if one was moving from FB to a FB clone, it'd stand to reason they might want to re-create in part or whole what they had. I'd guess doing so would only have to make sense to them and no one else, but it might be as simple as being able to continue from where they'd left off and doing so from a familiar, comfortable, pleasing arrangement of stuff and history.
Well. That's really not the issue anyway. Being able to get one's online stuff is. I mean, I've read the fine print yadda yadda crap on a number of sites but whatever the terms, in the mind of the average user, I think the feeling is that "If I post it, it's mine." and not being able to take at least a copy seems wrong to them. Now I think on it, does to me also. Even if the comeback is that if one wanted the stuff a copy should have been made at the time of posting. It's a cold world, true, but how many really like being told, "You should have thought of that beforehand." Or worse, "Hey, the TOS says you post it, we own it."
I got tired of clicking "older" and hadn't even gotten past February. Nowhere did I see a link or button to d/l all one's posts. Also found a slew of topic posts mixed in for unknown reasons.
So unless someone has "the key", getting your posts - however far back they may go - off/. is a non-trivial exercise.
A little disturbing? I'd say a whole lot disturbing - locking out open protocols for closed ones disturbs and dis-enfranchises participants; disrupts, rejects, and disables open communication for the poor bargain of yet another closed system of sets of walled-off users. Maybe it makes some kind of short-term business sense, otherwise seems fucking stupid to me.
The open exchange of ideas is reduced to walled-off ghettos of gossip.
Slashdot Mirror
"Perhaps it would be like knowing you were once another person, but not remembering what it was like."
Interesting and creepy; until we have the set of Tinker toys to find out... If the physical structure can be faithfully reproduced then we can find out just how useful memory is to make you "you." I've read any number of fiction and research papers on some of this and find it fascinating and scary all at once. I hope that curiosity leads to answers that don't freak us out too much.
Sure, and good conjecture, but only applies if one constrains life to passivity. It's all hand-waving at the moment but I see no reason to exclude Dyson-style engineering, for instance, and that just for starters. Star burning out, or changing into a displeasing phase? Crunch a few into one another, engineer a new star. Extreme? Yes, but to conclude we'll not learn to do new and interesting things defies history.
"while waiting for "something interesting to happen"" - make your own interesting if tired of waiting. Play.
If all, assholes included of whatever age, exist as human minds in avatar bodies with a human brain or an inorganic analogue of a human brain or eventually as a human mind in a non-physical brain rendered as a software construct, there ought to be plenty of room. The issue then becomes do all minds have physical bodies, or do all or some large fraction exist in virtual spaces.
Barring senility and the like, I would prefer to continue living in a better body or a simulacrum so's I could work on a few things and also stick around to see how some things turn out. One of the annoying things of natural life is that just when one starts making real inroads on becoming the person they'd like to be the body craps out taking the mind with it.
Yes, well, that's fine and I'm glad for you; however, I believe we're talking generally of softwares - OS, programs, media.
For instance, who owns your operating system? Your browser?
And only going by memory here, but if your deed is not freehold then your land ownership carries conditions. Well, all deeds carry conditions, but freehold is the least encumbered. Most people end up with quit claim. What deed do you have?
I set up a black and white darkroom in '68, used it sporadically for the few years I lived at that place. While I probably should have spent more time learning by doing and all that, maybe gotten a bit serious about photography, I can't fault the simple learning and fun of it. B&W is simple, easy, and if the whimsy strikes, captivating.
Never got into color, too much expense and relative hassle. Only did it at the labs I worked at.
Best Buy sells toilets?
You deserve some up mods for insight and goodly info. Thanks.
I saw too many pictures in Life magazine of the aftermath of the "bullet visas" issued by the Grupo. Some of them were brought to mind by your post; it's not as though I think I needed more unsettling things to take to slumber with me, but have to be glad that to this day the power held in them can keep me awake.
As I get older I know less of importance; one thing that sticks is "be nice to each other." There's far too much of the other going around, wherever it's done by some humans to others. It's a troubling thing to think that for too many, their lives are so small that finding ways to hurt others is somehow important to them.
Just on this matter, I've had little trouble figuring out if the several ACs posting about having lived in SU and Russia have done so or not. But I sin against /. wisdom by having read a bit about the subject matter to start with, and having known a handful or two of people who have lived there at various times.
Jeez, mcgrew, you're on a roll. Speak it, dude.
The key to solving scarcity in most forms is energy. Provide plentiful energy at ludicrously low prices, many problems vanish. The issue would then become heat dissipation.
Near-term, not much we can do but continue to integrate the 'green' stuff, include methane/CO2, with rapid shift to thorium-cycle nukes.
Mid-term, add in solar-power satellites.
Indeterminate - fusion (as several experts point out, it's more a matter of $ than when). I'll leave off more far-afield things.
In all cases, a reasonable blend is to be preferred to all-or-nothing. Part of any blend is recognizing fit of source to scale of demand, balanced by impact on us.
That's part of the point, I think; nobody has to like cleaning toilets. So long as everyone cleans a toilet or two, it's not an onerous chore because the load is spread out - and no one need do it as a full-time job. Heck, if all one had to do was clean a few toilets a day, it'd be as much a break as anything else. It's just not that tough a chore - unless some idiot left a mess they were too proud or too sadistic to deal with themselves.
Any job can become unbearable if there is no respite.
Generational thing, yes; also, I fear, a thinking thing. Not that the latter hasn't some connection to the former. More recent generations don't seem to have the tools needed to gain enough perspective to even think to ask why there might be something amiss with broad-scale data gathering on a nations' subjects - er, citizens. I may sound a broken record on this but one looming distinction is that the Baby Boomers are the last generation where a majority read books.
The newer few generations seem to read very little at all, and what they do read is often small stuff. Half the bright lights here seem to have trouble enough with reading comprehension just slogging through a summary - let alone demonstrate ability to read and digest a whole big large ginormous one- or two-page article. All that reading takes, you know, _time_. Time lost to reading, which could be much better spent doing myriad things.
Besides, who the fuck cares what some bearded old has-been slightly-famous once for something or other thinks about something? Privacy? What's that? Gotta be fifty or so just to know what it means, anymore.
Yupper, surrender gleefully such privacy as may be somehow overlooked - government data slurping keeps us safe from things, such as those bombs in Boston.
As for comments on who's doing what where, all it takes is a splitter on a trunk - see Narus et al in relation the original AT&T secret room from a few years back. ISPs and such don't have to hand over shit, it doesn't really matter. Please note, though, and re-read carefully all the quotes from the named nine companies: "no direct access." Doesn't say squat about other-than-direct access. So it can be had both ways.
This isn't the first time the concept of electro- brain- pleasure-stimulation has turned up here, and I still can't recall the title, author or particulars of a short story I read somewhen back in late '60s, maybe early '70s. "Victims" plugged the something-something into a socket 'twixt back of ear and base of skull; the tech was bootleg of legit-use stuff. The setting was on Earth, circa roughly the turn of century - the date might've not been given, but one scene was at a run-down rooming house, another at a private home and both seemed just a seedy version of the time of writing. Any help for an old man's peripatetic recall gratefully accepted.
Bill, you've been making spot on comments all day. Tnx.
Seems to me there is much left out of Civics classes these days. If one doesn't read history, lessons come harder if there's no clue they need to be learned.
Not quite, I think. Even after a program gets free, honest people still tend to pay for their copy especially if support may be involved. Further, studies show that a large percentage of downloaders will pay for something after they copy it, for a variety of reasons. Finally, related to first, a free copy does not imply an unsold copy (except unto the deluded); some will always copy, some will copy and buy, some will buy first.
Credit for one's work is a whole 'nuther thing. Copying is separate from plagiarism, as others have pointed out. I haven't the right words - but it is a heinous thing to claim another's work as your own.
Nope, gotcha, thanks, for your courtesy and patience as well.
Two of my elder cousins had a wire recorder, taped stuff off radio mid- late-'50s. My uncle had brought the recorder back from a lab he'd worked at during the War. It was a commercial model (company, I can't remember). I though it was an ingenious bit of engineering at the time (I was what, 8yrs. old?)
I don't know the exact kind of stuff needed, but it should be readily possibly to differentiate the recorded places on the wire, then on to the scheme for encoding. It would have to be fairly simple given one-dimension to work with. But I can see that to do so usefully would be decidedly un-trivial.
I'm glad y'all at least gave it a try.
"If enough people collude..."
That's a huge if. For the rest, I'm guessing good pattern analysis will out.
In some cases it's worse - they'll do what they will that can be gotten away with whether it's legal or no. News stories on this have been plentiful.
A small point viz. torture - there are several largely identical definitions in common use; the one from the U.N. is as handy as another. In it and the rest there is a blanket CYA exception for law enforcement and similar people such that they may use whatever force or technique is necessary to achieve compliance so long as it does not result in permanent injury. Interpretation and subsequent training and practice might well vary on that last bit.
I know this well, having had it applied to me four years ago. Reading the fine print afterwards was educational, as was the experience. Did its application on me contribute in some way to a later DVT from which I've yet to recover? Who knows? Who gives a shit? The individuals who were involved, including the doctor who was there, are covered.
I do not recommend discovering any of this firsthand.
For the getting of names thing, that will be trivial. The only tricky bit is if for a particular call someone else was using your phone.
True. Covered in another response nearby. I expect some people think sending a letter or form to the IRS somewhat different to posting a comment or picture on a social site. I'm only guessing, of course, based on what little I see of some of the people that I know who use FB or similar. It's hard to fathom, but seems to me the average Jane or Joe simply doesn't think about things with as much sophistication or forethought that many here seem to do.
Ah. Well, my bad; gimme a whoosh, then. I could well be still missing the point; it's a talent I don't ask for.
Still, if one was moving from FB to a FB clone, it'd stand to reason they might want to re-create in part or whole what they had. I'd guess doing so would only have to make sense to them and no one else, but it might be as simple as being able to continue from where they'd left off and doing so from a familiar, comfortable, pleasing arrangement of stuff and history.
Well. That's really not the issue anyway. Being able to get one's online stuff is. I mean, I've read the fine print yadda yadda crap on a number of sites but whatever the terms, in the mind of the average user, I think the feeling is that "If I post it, it's mine." and not being able to take at least a copy seems wrong to them. Now I think on it, does to me also. Even if the comeback is that if one wanted the stuff a copy should have been made at the time of posting. It's a cold world, true, but how many really like being told, "You should have thought of that beforehand." Or worse, "Hey, the TOS says you post it, we own it."
One might want a copy of their stuff on their own storage media for reference or safe-keeping. For instance.
I got tired of clicking "older" and hadn't even gotten past February. Nowhere did I see a link or button to d/l all one's posts. Also found a slew of topic posts mixed in for unknown reasons.
So unless someone has "the key", getting your posts - however far back they may go - off /. is a non-trivial exercise.
A little disturbing? I'd say a whole lot disturbing - locking out open protocols for closed ones disturbs and dis-enfranchises participants; disrupts, rejects, and disables open communication for the poor bargain of yet another closed system of sets of walled-off users. Maybe it makes some kind of short-term business sense, otherwise seems fucking stupid to me.
The open exchange of ideas is reduced to walled-off ghettos of gossip.