Primarily because consciousness exists during sleep, it just gets a bit differenty. If your consciousness didn't exist during ones sleep cycle there'd be phenomena like parasomnias that wouldn't happen and being awakened at the wrong point in the sleep cycle could have disastrous effects.
I believe you'll find your description here is a direct contradiction of the definition of sleep, which implies that one is unconscious. (Dreaming is a grey area, granted, but you're not constantly dreaming while you sleep). Consciousness is an activity, like walking. You don't have to always be walking, you can stop, and then start again later. Likewise, you can stop being conscious, and being awoken has no disastrous effect, you simply pick it up again.
...in the case of a transfer the essential bits of me would still be dead.
There are no "essential bits". Do you have a non-magical argument for you point, or does this really boil down to your religious belief in "essential bits"?
The problem is that the continuity of existence you perceive as "you" will end the moment your original body is destroyed. The new body and mind will be identical to the original in every way--except that the conscious existence of the original is gone.
Everyone else will see that person as you, but from your own perspective, you're dead.
Well, yes and no. From your own perspective, you're in a new body, too. For a while, there were two of you, but now there's just the one. You're confusing the issue by suggesting there was ever only the one of you, which is now dead. For a while, "your own perspective" was in fact two different perspectives.
The original is gone, sure, but so is the person I was last year. I'm still alive, despite the fact that the old me is long gone. This is no different, really. There is no non-magical justification for the point of view that I'm not the same person I would be if all my atoms were replaced with new copies (and indeed, as a living biological being, this is occurring as I sit here and type this while digesting my latest slice of pizza). To somehow expect it to be a different result if it occurs at a different rate (e.g. all at once, in a machine that vaporizes me at point A and reconstructs me at point B) is bizarre. What does the rate have to do with it? There's no magic to be lost in the process. I suspect you think there's more to being you than there actually is, if you think the "copy" it any less you than you are.
They support all their OSes for 10 years from release minimum. XP has been extended 3 years past that. That is quite reasonable.
Sure. And if they aren't willing to continue selling and supporting it beyond that, they should just release the code and let users provide their own support if they wish. That's quite reasonable, too.;)
Yeah, it's a whole "meh" for me. I finally am running Windows 7, after buying a new computer in November which came with it installed. My old box still has Windows XP (and Ubuntu) on it, and it still works fine. My new box has Windows 7 on it, and it works fine too. I don't hate Win7, so I'm not going to downgrade the new box, and I don't hate WinXP, so I'm not going to upgrade the old box. Eventually, I'll just make it Ubuntu-only I suppose. In any case, I'm "meh" either way... they both do what they're supposed to do just fine. I do like 7's prettier look and improved taskbar, but not enough to pay for the upgrade on the other box...
This seems like a job for computers. They don't have to recognize what an image is; they just have to recognize that it's "sufficiently anomalous to what is typical of the lunar landscape". If nothing else, use image recognition to flag "interesting" areas for further inspection by a human being.
Alas, this is precisely the kind of task that, in comparison to humans, computers suck terribly badly at. By depending on the computer to flag "interesting" first, you're substantially reducing the odds of spotting something interesting.
Well nice going Boxee, you've just alienated THE MAJORITY OF YOUR FANBASE that ignore the expensive glorified trinkets w/ HDMI cables sticking out of them in favor of self-built microATX, laptop, or straight-up desktop setups.
How much do said users pay Boxee? Just curious how much money they stand to lose if they entirely lose the self-built crowd of fans...
I used to do this, except with Charter Business when I lived in St. Cloud. It works, and it's kinda nice having your own server right there, but for the same cost you can get much better bandwidth to a server hosted in a professional hosting center, and a lot of nice services to boot, and frankly after a while the novelty of hosting my own servers in my own home wore off and it became more of a hassle that I could live without. I was reluctant to move all my essential stuff to some server I'll never even see, but I couldn't be happier now. I'd never go back to self-hosting.
Honestly if this game didn't have STAR WARS in the name no one would care.
Interestingly enough, that's the main reason I don't. I'd love a good sci-fi MMO, but it would have to be either original or based on a good and interesting sci-fi universe. I'd love a Babylon 5 MMO, I'm sure. Maybe Dune? That might be cool. Instead we get crap based on Star Trek, or even worse, Star Wars, the worst schlock ever foisted upon the public whose only redeeming value was as eye-candy. (Seriously, just watch the movies with the volume off -- you can appreciate the eye-candy without being inflicted by the absurd story and cringe-worthy dialog.)
Well, yes. Guild Wars wasn't designed to be an MMORPG (the creators initially referred to it as a CORPG -- "cooperative (or competitive) online RPG"). Everyone mistook it for and insisted upon calling it an MMO anyhow, and eventually they stopped attempting to correct people. But yes, in terms of gameplay, it was all instanced -- they basically took the "chat rooms" of Diablo II Battle.net realms and moved them in-game into cities, but it was otherwise like D2 realm play -- you left the city and were in your own instance of the zone with only your teammates, and possibly a few enemy teams if it was PvP. There was no persistent world. At the end of the day, it was no more an MMO than Diablo II Battle.net realms had been an MMO, because that was the model they were basing it on. It should be noted that they released just shortly after WoW. They had no idea just how popular the MMO market was going to become, and thus it's understandable why they weren't planning on making one to begin with. GW2 is basically their attempt to take their ideas and making an actual MMO out of them -- it's probably what GW would have been if they'd realized an MMO was the way to go.
As for the trinity effect, the gameplay in GW won over every similar game I've tried precisely because there were no tanking per se. It was pretty much impossible for one character to draw everyone's aggro (there are no "aggro" skills in the game), nor any characters suited to the role of simply soaking damage while everyone else dishes it out safely. Tanking in that sense simply doesn't exist in the game. They still had and needed healers, but short of body blocking there was no real way to keep creeps off the "squishies" -- the usual tactic for protecting healers and caster was to block and try to delay enemies reaching them, and when that inevitably failed, to simply quickly kill whatever was attacking them. It did help that Warriors had the highest consistent DPS, rather than the lowest as in the case in games where proper tanking exists, and as such could usually hold an enemy's attention once they got it, but since all battles were basically group on group, that wasn't of huge value.
You're right, but it still doesn't change the fact that cosmetics are practically real life version of Photoshop, and both are used to fake stuff.
Wow, what an incredibly idiotic statement.
Photoshop is being used to make something in a photograph look differently from how it looks in real life. Cosmetics change the way you look in real life. They don't change the way you look without cosmetics, just like clothing doesn't change the way you look without clothes, but that's not the point.
If one were to take your idiotic argument to its conclusion, dieting and exercising are practically real life versions of Photoshop. After all, they make you look differently than you'd look if you didn't use them, right? This argument is no less idiotic when applied to clothing or make-up than it is in this case. There's nothing wrong with taking steps to change how you look, it's only deceptive if you don't take those steps, but digitally manipulate the photo to make it look like you did (e.g. add imaginary make-up, make yourself thinner, etc.)
Since they are talking about habitable / life bearing areas under ground, wouldn't you need to also subtract the volume of water from the total volume of the earth to get an accurate comparison?
Only if they neglected to do so when they came up with the original volume figures being cited, in which case, you're trying to correct inaccuracies in the original figure -- which is fine to do if the original figures were inaccurate. But why are we assuming that?
Point in fact, I'm sure the 1% figure isn't perfectly accurate to begin with. Making the correction you're making is basically introducing "false precision" to your calculation, whether they took the factor you're considering into account originally or not.
The red spots on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus is Methane. The gas giant planets are giant Esso stations in the sky.
Unfortunately located at the bottom of deep gravity wells. You definitely don't want to stop there to fill up, although if you can someone fill up in passing (atmospheric skimming?) maybe you can slingshot back out with full fuel tanks without having to burn too much of it on the way back out.
It always amazes me how things like these can be lost.
In more barbaric times, storing large amounts of data was expensive. Saving every last bit wasn't a matter of course, it was a virtual impossibility (at least to do economically).
That's because in Greenpeace-land (the imaginary universe members live in), if you don't build that plant, people just stop using as much power. They're not intentionally ("conveniently") leaving that bit out, they're actually delusional enough to believe it won't happen.
No, it's very rational to fear stupid, self-centered directors, regulators and administrators who don't bother to enforce safety standards, outright lie about adherence to said standards, and then lie to the public about the real problems.
It's not rational to fear nuclear power itself.
So what you're saying it we shouldn't fear nuclear power itself, we should simply fear nuclear power as it is inevitably implemented by fallible human beings. Got it. I'll be more than happy to admit that it's irrational to fear nuclear power plants built and operated by angels. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it's rational to fear nuclear power.
This would be like fearing a Zippo because someone had the bright idea of using one by a gas station.
No, it's like fearing a toddler who's just dug out daddy's loaded.44 Magnum and is running around the house with it.
Two words: Mass Spectrometry [...] It seems sort of ridiculous that there is a debate over it.
OMG, how is it they never thought of this?!/sarcasm
Why is it the stupider someone is, the most certain they are other people are overlooking "the obvious"? I can understand not knowing the details of why a particular idea wouldn't work, but how oblivious to your own ignorance do you have to be to figure that when the experts aren't using a particular idea, it can't be there are reasons it won't work that you aren't aware of, and rather you instead come to the conclusion that the experts understand their own field less well than you do based on what you learned "Back in High School"? The mind boggles...
Many of the so-called myths they test, and the methods they devise to test them, are completely predictable by anyone with any common sense...
No matter how predictable something seems, you do not know it until it's been tested. The history of science has a long list of people who proved the so-called obvious to be false when actually tested. The majority of the time, of course, what seems obvious proves to be correct, but the smug person who claims to have known that without having to test it in fact knows nothing at all...
So either we're unique (fairly likely), ~8.8 billion years isn't long enough for any other species anywhere in the Milky Way to have kicked off colonisation (almost certainly)
ftfy
Given the timescales on which evolution seems to occur (billions of years to go from the start of like to the start of multicellular life on Earth, for example, and no reason to suspect that's atypical), we may very well be the first, and it may be a few billion years before the second comes along. Add to that the absence of FTL travel, despite the dreams of sci-fi geeks everywhere, and it's almost certain no one has kicked off interstellar colonization, and frankly unlikely anyone (including us) ever will on a large scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Primarily because consciousness exists during sleep, it just gets a bit differenty. If your consciousness didn't exist during ones sleep cycle there'd be phenomena like parasomnias that wouldn't happen and being awakened at the wrong point in the sleep cycle could have disastrous effects.
I believe you'll find your description here is a direct contradiction of the definition of sleep, which implies that one is unconscious. (Dreaming is a grey area, granted, but you're not constantly dreaming while you sleep). Consciousness is an activity, like walking. You don't have to always be walking, you can stop, and then start again later. Likewise, you can stop being conscious, and being awoken has no disastrous effect, you simply pick it up again.
...in the case of a transfer the essential bits of me would still be dead.
There are no "essential bits". Do you have a non-magical argument for you point, or does this really boil down to your religious belief in "essential bits"?
The problem is that the continuity of existence you perceive as "you" will end the moment your original body is destroyed. The new body and mind will be identical to the original in every way--except that the conscious existence of the original is gone.
Everyone else will see that person as you, but from your own perspective, you're dead.
Well, yes and no. From your own perspective, you're in a new body, too. For a while, there were two of you, but now there's just the one. You're confusing the issue by suggesting there was ever only the one of you, which is now dead. For a while, "your own perspective" was in fact two different perspectives.
The original is gone, sure, but so is the person I was last year. I'm still alive, despite the fact that the old me is long gone. This is no different, really. There is no non-magical justification for the point of view that I'm not the same person I would be if all my atoms were replaced with new copies (and indeed, as a living biological being, this is occurring as I sit here and type this while digesting my latest slice of pizza). To somehow expect it to be a different result if it occurs at a different rate (e.g. all at once, in a machine that vaporizes me at point A and reconstructs me at point B) is bizarre. What does the rate have to do with it? There's no magic to be lost in the process. I suspect you think there's more to being you than there actually is, if you think the "copy" it any less you than you are.
They support all their OSes for 10 years from release minimum. XP has been extended 3 years past that. That is quite reasonable.
Sure. And if they aren't willing to continue selling and supporting it beyond that, they should just release the code and let users provide their own support if they wish. That's quite reasonable, too. ;)
I just don't care.
Yeah, it's a whole "meh" for me. I finally am running Windows 7, after buying a new computer in November which came with it installed. My old box still has Windows XP (and Ubuntu) on it, and it still works fine. My new box has Windows 7 on it, and it works fine too. I don't hate Win7, so I'm not going to downgrade the new box, and I don't hate WinXP, so I'm not going to upgrade the old box. Eventually, I'll just make it Ubuntu-only I suppose. In any case, I'm "meh" either way... they both do what they're supposed to do just fine. I do like 7's prettier look and improved taskbar, but not enough to pay for the upgrade on the other box...
This seems like a job for computers. They don't have to recognize what an image is; they just have to recognize that it's "sufficiently anomalous to what is typical of the lunar landscape". If nothing else, use image recognition to flag "interesting" areas for further inspection by a human being.
Alas, this is precisely the kind of task that, in comparison to humans, computers suck terribly badly at. By depending on the computer to flag "interesting" first, you're substantially reducing the odds of spotting something interesting.
Well nice going Boxee, you've just alienated THE MAJORITY OF YOUR FANBASE that ignore the expensive glorified trinkets w/ HDMI cables sticking out of them in favor of self-built microATX, laptop, or straight-up desktop setups.
How much do said users pay Boxee? Just curious how much money they stand to lose if they entirely lose the self-built crowd of fans...
blah blah blah
You forgot to add, "Get off my lawn!"
I used to do this, except with Charter Business when I lived in St. Cloud. It works, and it's kinda nice having your own server right there, but for the same cost you can get much better bandwidth to a server hosted in a professional hosting center, and a lot of nice services to boot, and frankly after a while the novelty of hosting my own servers in my own home wore off and it became more of a hassle that I could live without. I was reluctant to move all my essential stuff to some server I'll never even see, but I couldn't be happier now. I'd never go back to self-hosting.
Their sole existence is based on commercials and advertisements, not good service.
I thought it was based on cheap prices. I've used them, but I've never once seen a commercial or advertisement for them.
Honestly if this game didn't have STAR WARS in the name no one would care.
Interestingly enough, that's the main reason I don't. I'd love a good sci-fi MMO, but it would have to be either original or based on a good and interesting sci-fi universe. I'd love a Babylon 5 MMO, I'm sure. Maybe Dune? That might be cool. Instead we get crap based on Star Trek, or even worse, Star Wars, the worst schlock ever foisted upon the public whose only redeeming value was as eye-candy. (Seriously, just watch the movies with the volume off -- you can appreciate the eye-candy without being inflicted by the absurd story and cringe-worthy dialog.)
Well, yes. Guild Wars wasn't designed to be an MMORPG (the creators initially referred to it as a CORPG -- "cooperative (or competitive) online RPG"). Everyone mistook it for and insisted upon calling it an MMO anyhow, and eventually they stopped attempting to correct people. But yes, in terms of gameplay, it was all instanced -- they basically took the "chat rooms" of Diablo II Battle.net realms and moved them in-game into cities, but it was otherwise like D2 realm play -- you left the city and were in your own instance of the zone with only your teammates, and possibly a few enemy teams if it was PvP. There was no persistent world. At the end of the day, it was no more an MMO than Diablo II Battle.net realms had been an MMO, because that was the model they were basing it on. It should be noted that they released just shortly after WoW. They had no idea just how popular the MMO market was going to become, and thus it's understandable why they weren't planning on making one to begin with. GW2 is basically their attempt to take their ideas and making an actual MMO out of them -- it's probably what GW would have been if they'd realized an MMO was the way to go.
As for the trinity effect, the gameplay in GW won over every similar game I've tried precisely because there were no tanking per se. It was pretty much impossible for one character to draw everyone's aggro (there are no "aggro" skills in the game), nor any characters suited to the role of simply soaking damage while everyone else dishes it out safely. Tanking in that sense simply doesn't exist in the game. They still had and needed healers, but short of body blocking there was no real way to keep creeps off the "squishies" -- the usual tactic for protecting healers and caster was to block and try to delay enemies reaching them, and when that inevitably failed, to simply quickly kill whatever was attacking them. It did help that Warriors had the highest consistent DPS, rather than the lowest as in the case in games where proper tanking exists, and as such could usually hold an enemy's attention once they got it, but since all battles were basically group on group, that wasn't of huge value.
You're right, but it still doesn't change the fact that cosmetics are practically real life version of Photoshop, and both are used to fake stuff.
Wow, what an incredibly idiotic statement.
Photoshop is being used to make something in a photograph look differently from how it looks in real life. Cosmetics change the way you look in real life. They don't change the way you look without cosmetics, just like clothing doesn't change the way you look without clothes, but that's not the point.
If one were to take your idiotic argument to its conclusion, dieting and exercising are practically real life versions of Photoshop. After all, they make you look differently than you'd look if you didn't use them, right? This argument is no less idiotic when applied to clothing or make-up than it is in this case. There's nothing wrong with taking steps to change how you look, it's only deceptive if you don't take those steps, but digitally manipulate the photo to make it look like you did (e.g. add imaginary make-up, make yourself thinner, etc.)
Since they are talking about habitable / life bearing areas under ground, wouldn't you need to also subtract the volume of water from the total volume of the earth to get an accurate comparison?
Only if they neglected to do so when they came up with the original volume figures being cited, in which case, you're trying to correct inaccuracies in the original figure -- which is fine to do if the original figures were inaccurate. But why are we assuming that?
Point in fact, I'm sure the 1% figure isn't perfectly accurate to begin with. Making the correction you're making is basically introducing "false precision" to your calculation, whether they took the factor you're considering into account originally or not.
The red spots on Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus is Methane. The gas giant planets are giant Esso stations in the sky.
Unfortunately located at the bottom of deep gravity wells. You definitely don't want to stop there to fill up, although if you can someone fill up in passing (atmospheric skimming?) maybe you can slingshot back out with full fuel tanks without having to burn too much of it on the way back out.
In Mars most living spaces are likely going to be underground...
Millions of years of evolution and human technological advancement to get us to another planet... where we can become cavemen again. XD
Especially when compared to the number deaths caused by mining and oil dilling.
Not in proportion to the people doing those jobs, no. Astronaut is still quite a bit more dangerous.
It always amazes me how things like these can be lost.
In more barbaric times, storing large amounts of data was expensive. Saving every last bit wasn't a matter of course, it was a virtual impossibility (at least to do economically).
That's because in Greenpeace-land (the imaginary universe members live in), if you don't build that plant, people just stop using as much power. They're not intentionally ("conveniently") leaving that bit out, they're actually delusional enough to believe it won't happen.
No, it's very rational to fear stupid, self-centered directors, regulators and administrators who don't bother to enforce safety standards, outright lie about adherence to said standards, and then lie to the public about the real problems.
It's not rational to fear nuclear power itself.
So what you're saying it we shouldn't fear nuclear power itself, we should simply fear nuclear power as it is inevitably implemented by fallible human beings. Got it. I'll be more than happy to admit that it's irrational to fear nuclear power plants built and operated by angels. Meanwhile, back in the real world, it's rational to fear nuclear power.
This would be like fearing a Zippo because someone had the bright idea of using one by a gas station.
No, it's like fearing a toddler who's just dug out daddy's loaded .44 Magnum and is running around the house with it.
And the L and - keys are pretty far from R... o.O
Hitting the key next to the intended one is only one of the many kinds of typos that commonly occur. It doesn't even constitute the majority...
So, MicroSoft hired Bill Gates long after they were a strong and solid company? He had nothing to do with them at all in the beginning? I am confused.
Very confused, apparently, if you think what OP said in any way implied that.
Two words: Mass Spectrometry [...] It seems sort of ridiculous that there is a debate over it.
OMG, how is it they never thought of this?! /sarcasm
Why is it the stupider someone is, the most certain they are other people are overlooking "the obvious"? I can understand not knowing the details of why a particular idea wouldn't work, but how oblivious to your own ignorance do you have to be to figure that when the experts aren't using a particular idea, it can't be there are reasons it won't work that you aren't aware of, and rather you instead come to the conclusion that the experts understand their own field less well than you do based on what you learned "Back in High School"? The mind boggles...
Many of the so-called myths they test, and the methods they devise to test them, are completely predictable by anyone with any common sense...
No matter how predictable something seems, you do not know it until it's been tested. The history of science has a long list of people who proved the so-called obvious to be false when actually tested. The majority of the time, of course, what seems obvious proves to be correct, but the smug person who claims to have known that without having to test it in fact knows nothing at all...
So either we're unique (fairly likely), ~8.8 billion years isn't long enough for any other species anywhere in the Milky Way to have kicked off colonisation (almost certainly)
ftfy
Given the timescales on which evolution seems to occur (billions of years to go from the start of like to the start of multicellular life on Earth, for example, and no reason to suspect that's atypical), we may very well be the first, and it may be a few billion years before the second comes along. Add to that the absence of FTL travel, despite the dreams of sci-fi geeks everywhere, and it's almost certain no one has kicked off interstellar colonization, and frankly unlikely anyone (including us) ever will on a large scale.