The US changed drastically in that time; it wasn't the loss of rose-tinted glasses on your part. It has been hard to watch the descent for Americans old enough to clearly remember (even with a starkly realistic look and cold, hard facts) what life was like.
While I'm not a huge fan of cloud services, they *do* provide me with one huge benefit: the sync/backup service I use provides live versioning, so when something goes horribly wrong on a document that I don't notice until several saves have gone by, I can easily restore it. The only comparable programs I've found either tapped my drive/CPU near-constantly enough to slow the system down or required extensive manual configuration.
SpiderOak has had client-only encryption/decryption using 2048-bit RSA & 256-bit AES for its sync/backup/versioning service for years -- I believe ever since they opened in late 2007. That sure sounds like what this newcomer is touting, except that SpiderOak also has free 2GB accounts with live versioning, and uses binary executables on all platforms to do the encryption/decryption (Lockbox uses a Java web client, which I thought was a security no-no).
FWIW, I don't get jack out of pointing out SpiderOak. I've just been really relieved that it has restored documents that I completely fucked up (live versioning FTW) and think it's seriously overlooked/underrated.
If an American manages to get SSI or SSDI, it means they truly are disabled -- it takes a hell of a lot of paperwork, costly medical record copies, etc. during which getting even a tiny part-time show-up-when-you-can job wrecks your chances, and the government automatically rejects the first 2-3 times the paperwork is submitted, with a turnaround time of 9-12 months per submission.
In addition to that, if it's SSI (for people like me that became disabled too young to have the work/income credits for SSDI), the amount you have to live on is so low that nobody remotely sane would choose it, given the highest amount in the country comes out to approx. $850/month and *any* income or assistance they manage to catch in their increasingly frequent is promptly taken out of the check.
I've known a few thousand disabled people at this point with a wild variety of mental, developmental, physical, etc. diagnoses and none of us want to be in this situation. Oh, and being legally disabled just means that the person's impairment won't let them show up & perform reliably enough to stay hired. It doesn't mean they're unable to walk, talk, think, or whatever just as normally as anyone else, as just about any organ system can develop disabling problems -- which can be embarrassing enough in nature that the person will give you a BS explanation unless you're a close friend/relative -- and those problems might only show up a few times a month, just enough to fuck up the ability to keep/hold a job.
You nailed it, but missed a few factors.:) One is that when you're poor, you can save your ass off and the first emergency purchase you make -- things that won't faze someone with a normal income -- will most likely wipe out most or all of your savings. Another is that with extremely limited income, when you buy something, it's probably going to be cheap (or used and cheap) out of necessity and won't last half as long as the "nice" brands, creating a vicious cycle that costs the person more in the long run.
Also, based on experience as a soda fan living in poverty, you overestimated the drink cost, so the person's hypothesis is even father out of whack. The norm I've seen among the other low-income people I know is: we buy multiple 12-pack boxes when they're on sale for $2.50-$3.00/box, not including tax or "recycling" fee. (The larger boxes still cost roughly double, but only hold 20 cans.) At the $2.50/box price, if I drink one of those $0.21 sodas each day, that's only about $76 per year, far less than you're figuring on.
Until relatively recently, toys *were* synonymous with children. That's the main reason that terms like "sex toys" or "adult toys" has a qualifying term before the word "toys" -- it indicates that they're exceptions to the rule, akin to someone specifying they're a "retro-gamer" because the term "gamer" normally refers to somebody that's into the current generation of consoles.
Do you mean University of California, Berkeley?:) I don't think that there's a separate university in Berkeley these days, but in all honesty, after some of the things I saw in Berkeley as a Cal undergrad in the 90s, it wouldn't surprise me.
Peaceful American protesters in the 1960s *normally* didn't have to worry about heavily-armed forces showing up expressly to force them to leave, spraying them (even if they were sitting still) in the face with pepper spray, instigating fights, or seizing the cameras/phones of anyone (including journalists) they saw recording the incidents. The media also was still making an attempt back then to give accurate reports to the American public, and not using propaganda tactics to turn the public against the protesters by painting a wildly-inaccurate picture of who was protesting or what they believed in.
Don't get me wrong, I have immense respect for what my parents' generation managed, and even chose my college in part because of it. But the police back then knew that the media wasn't under government's thumb yet, so any brutal behavior would be accurately reported to the public and turn it in favor of the protesters much, much faster than happened.
The real differences in how the American public reacted in the 60s compared to now are ones like this: -- In the 60s, there was a strong, thriving middle class that believed in caring for fellow citizens. In the 00s/10s, economic problems have resulted in a small middle class of people a few steps from ruin, living in an "every man/woman for themselves" economic survival mode.
-- In the 60s, media/television had little-to-no violence, so seeing or hearing about it shocked and horrified citizens. In the 00s/10s, violence is so common in the media that people simply don't react to it, or have a reaction based on Hollywood-movie logic where people are only punished if they deserve it.
--In the 60s, most citizens rightly felt that their actions could make a difference. In the 00s/10s, there's a profound, earned sense of helplessness and despair, no real belief that even a large group of people can make a difference; even the largest protests in the country's history won't have an impact on the government's choices now.
Hey, at least "their's" is 99% right... You could've written the painfully fucked-up: "they'res" like I saw on a post recently.
These are the tricks someone told me a long time ago for basic apostrophe use: 1) Replace other letters/spaces: it is --> it's 2) Owned by 1 entity: has all but *1* letter before it --> jythie's 3) Owned by 2+ entities: has all letters before it --> cowards'
Perhaps a crushed spine, but no disconnected vital organs.
Provided they wouldn't be likely to kill me before surgeons could fix things up, I think I'd rather go with a few disconnected vital organs. It's a lot harder to heal spinal cord/nerve damage enough to avoid at least part of the body being in serious pain long-term, and that kind of pain is a real bitch to get under control.
Logically speaking, yes: I have philosophical ideals and believe strongly in holding myself to a system of ethics I feel is right -- those have been true since I was 11-12 years old, yet I'm no longer a member of any religion (including the one that I grew up with) because I'm also agnostic.
For that matter, the primary gap between the different religions is which god(s) they believe in, and what rules they feel their god(s) want them to follow. The main difference between all of them and an atheist is that the atheist doesn't have a god & feels the rules come from mankind.
Capitalism and communism are economic designs, and whether someone thinks either is a great/awful idea isn't related to their views on religion. I'd like to know what on Earth you think a religious economic system would be, if you believe those two polar-opposites must both be atheist. You do know that extremely religious people in the USA are as likely to be cut-throat capitalists as much as any agnostic or atheist, right?
People in my city fought overdevelopment, big box stores (only recently lost that war), and car dealerships -- but as we discovered from the mid-90s onward, citizens are effectively powerless when the city council is in developers' pockets and everyone you elect to get rid of them turns around and does the same regardless of party affiliation. Sadly, all of that development meant a lot of McMansion types started moving here in the late 90s that don't have the interest in dark night skies or being close to nature that previous generations did, so now it's doubly difficult...
Agreed. I grew up listening to Sears Point/Sonoma Raceway on summer nights and looking out my window at the countless stars in our seemingly black skies... 20+ years later, the sound of the races gives me a pleasant relaxed feeling, but 10+ years of having a city council in developers' pockets (claiming "progress" means turning every square inch of carefully-preserved open land into buildings/concrete) has caused such severe rapid growth that the night sky is now merely dark blue and has depressingly few stars.
All the uni has to do is only accept the top nn% of students, taking the rep of each student's alma mater and the student's other accomplishments (including having the persistence & drive to have overcome major obstacles to their education) into account -- basically what the top American universities do, as many no longer require SAT scores.
That method tends to work much better for identifying which students are bright, willing to study and work hard than relying on standardized testing. A lot of this is simply that being talented at taking standardized tests, studying how to perform well on them, certain disabilities affecting performance with a question type (like essay or multiple-choice), and so forth can have a *huge* impact on the test results. That's why so many major universities have stopped requiring SAT scores and rely more on the student's history.
Also, don't forget that a college education wasn't intended to be vocational or a matter of fact memorization as in high school, which is what online classes are good for -- and a student is missing out on the main purpose if he/she is handling college that way. College is best for giving the student the personal experience & knowledge that they'd otherwise have to travel the world for a few years to achieve, and that we can't truly learn just through reading, watching videos, or communicating remotely -- it takes dealing with different kinds of people on a daily basis when still young enough to have malleable beliefs, reacting to ideas they'd never considered, seeing others react and discussing it at length... The person returns home a much wiser, more knowledgeable citizen that is harder for politicians or charismatic authority figures to manipulate, better-equipped to handle personal or societal crises, more able to see the most likely long-term results if a politician is elected or law is passed, far more capable of grasping why people do things or act in ways they'd never consider & knowing how to help or deal with them...
Or, as someone I saw put it once: it's the training-wheels period for being a great adult citizen likely to improve their society, not just live in it.
Maybe it would be better for you to say that you'll be willing to help foot the bill for *vocational* education, as that's more the kind of "college" you're thinking of -- it's remotely not as beneficial for society as a genuine education is (IF done right via having students take a wide variety of classes they might otherwise overlook), but it'll churn out more obedient, good employees.
Why, what makes LO's team more worthy? Both suites are in active development, have a distinctly different focus (AOO for general use, LO adds features** for science/math projects) -- and, most importantly, the OO team is responsible for all of the core general-use changes that LO customizes & builds upon. It would make logical sense that the core product aimed at general users would continue having its traditional name, while the derivative (whether it's Libre- or Go-) takes a different newer one.
**which cause a massive performance hit on older hardware; my systems can run multiple 30kb odt files in AOO smoothly, but one instance of one document of any size in LO causes it to slow to a crawl. If the LO people left because they weren't being allowed to do *that* to OO, then it's for the better all around that they created their own derivative project.
(I'm not commenting on the actions of the US with this, as a side note.)
A crime is a crime is a crime! Or are you saying there are good crimes and bad crimes?
Yes and no. As a staring point: the vast majority of people recognize that there are different degrees of crime, usually based on the amount of harm done -- for example, it's worse for soldiers to kill & rape civilians than it is to take some of their belongings. Both actions are bad and qualify as crimes most of the time, but they're not "a crime is a crime" by any measure.
People that have reached the later stages of moral/ethical development also recognize that sometimes a "crime" means violating a law that would insist upon the person doing or allowing something harmful. In these cases, the "crimes" are a matter of violating laws that either demand we do something objectively bad (like turning in a sick little old lady for eating marijuana brownies to treat nausea), or refrain from doing something that will prevent a truly bad outcome (the Heinz dilemma, of whether a man should steal outrageously overpriced drugs to save his sick wife's life, is a classic example).
In addition to that, sometimes laws defining crimes are arbitrary and shift to suit the ruling force in that place at that moment. Some places make it a horrible crime to not be heterosexual, others outlaw whistleblowers identifying corruption in government, or for an adult of sound mind to be in a consensual relationship with someone of a different skin color... If "a crime is a crime is a crime" were true, then being gay, murdering people, and stealing kids' lunch money would all be equivalent, which obviously isn't very logical!
I think the focus is just on the electrical/water problem, and possibly how it will affect the technological industries there, so the sad reality that people & animals are suffering is considered irrelevant since this is about tech news. (I could be wrong, but that's how I interpreted it, since Slashdot tends to only cover disasters if it involves science and/or technology in some way.)
Wake them up to what? And what of all of the people in SF that either are already aware of whatever you're thinking of, too young/old/unwell for it to matter, visitors (like parents staying at the Ronald McDonald House while their kids are hospitalized at UCSF for weeks at a time), working or volunteering in the city but living far away?
I was thinking of a legion of H1Bs running on human-size hamster wheels, providing the power required to keep Facebook's equipment going in third-world nations that don't have a reliable energy grid, or alternately to keep the California servers going without having to pay PG&E or buy/maintain solar equipment.
Second, why would anybody want to revive some corpses at huge expense when making a few children more is so much easier?
On an impersonal level, they'd do it from curiosity, love of 'impossible' challenges, the urge to use a particular related talent in a new/interesting way, a drive to become famous, greed. On the more personal level, they'd be acting on the wish to preserve/'save' somebody that they already know, care about, and/or admire, whether the individual was "great" in society's eyes or just in the eyes of others around them.
Also, you'd evidently be surprised how many people have those urges so strongly that it replaces/overrides any interest they may have had in reproducing, regardless of how they feel about children in general; in rare cases, it's so powerful that it takes the place of the drives to find a long-term mate and/or have sex. As I once saw one such person remark: why on Earth would I cast aside someone that has already proven to be an asset to others' lives in favor of spending my time/energy gambling on the crappy odds of producing an individual that, with 20+ years of massive effort & money, *might* turn out to be remotely as worthy?
Slashdot Mirror
Set your browser's monospace font to either a standard non-mono font or a nicer mono font, then you won't be tortured by it.
The US changed drastically in that time; it wasn't the loss of rose-tinted glasses on your part. It has been hard to watch the descent for Americans old enough to clearly remember (even with a starkly realistic look and cold, hard facts) what life was like.
While I'm not a huge fan of cloud services, they *do* provide me with one huge benefit: the sync/backup service I use provides live versioning, so when something goes horribly wrong on a document that I don't notice until several saves have gone by, I can easily restore it. The only comparable programs I've found either tapped my drive/CPU near-constantly enough to slow the system down or required extensive manual configuration.
SpiderOak has had client-only encryption/decryption using 2048-bit RSA & 256-bit AES for its sync/backup/versioning service for years -- I believe ever since they opened in late 2007. That sure sounds like what this newcomer is touting, except that SpiderOak also has free 2GB accounts with live versioning, and uses binary executables on all platforms to do the encryption/decryption (Lockbox uses a Java web client, which I thought was a security no-no).
FWIW, I don't get jack out of pointing out SpiderOak. I've just been really relieved that it has restored documents that I completely fucked up (live versioning FTW) and think it's seriously overlooked/underrated.
If an American manages to get SSI or SSDI, it means they truly are disabled -- it takes a hell of a lot of paperwork, costly medical record copies, etc. during which getting even a tiny part-time show-up-when-you-can job wrecks your chances, and the government automatically rejects the first 2-3 times the paperwork is submitted, with a turnaround time of 9-12 months per submission.
In addition to that, if it's SSI (for people like me that became disabled too young to have the work/income credits for SSDI), the amount you have to live on is so low that nobody remotely sane would choose it, given the highest amount in the country comes out to approx. $850/month and *any* income or assistance they manage to catch in their increasingly frequent is promptly taken out of the check.
I've known a few thousand disabled people at this point with a wild variety of mental, developmental, physical, etc. diagnoses and none of us want to be in this situation. Oh, and being legally disabled just means that the person's impairment won't let them show up & perform reliably enough to stay hired. It doesn't mean they're unable to walk, talk, think, or whatever just as normally as anyone else, as just about any organ system can develop disabling problems -- which can be embarrassing enough in nature that the person will give you a BS explanation unless you're a close friend/relative -- and those problems might only show up a few times a month, just enough to fuck up the ability to keep/hold a job.
You nailed it, but missed a few factors. :) One is that when you're poor, you can save your ass off and the first emergency purchase you make -- things that won't faze someone with a normal income -- will most likely wipe out most or all of your savings. Another is that with extremely limited income, when you buy something, it's probably going to be cheap (or used and cheap) out of necessity and won't last half as long as the "nice" brands, creating a vicious cycle that costs the person more in the long run.
Also, based on experience as a soda fan living in poverty, you overestimated the drink cost, so the person's hypothesis is even father out of whack. The norm I've seen among the other low-income people I know is: we buy multiple 12-pack boxes when they're on sale for $2.50-$3.00/box, not including tax or "recycling" fee. (The larger boxes still cost roughly double, but only hold 20 cans.) At the $2.50/box price, if I drink one of those $0.21 sodas each day, that's only about $76 per year, far less than you're figuring on.
Until relatively recently, toys *were* synonymous with children. That's the main reason that terms like "sex toys" or "adult toys" has a qualifying term before the word "toys" -- it indicates that they're exceptions to the rule, akin to someone specifying they're a "retro-gamer" because the term "gamer" normally refers to somebody that's into the current generation of consoles.
"University of Berkeley, California"
Do you mean University of California, Berkeley? :) I don't think that there's a separate university in Berkeley these days, but in all honesty, after some of the things I saw in Berkeley as a Cal undergrad in the 90s, it wouldn't surprise me.
Peaceful American protesters in the 1960s *normally* didn't have to worry about heavily-armed forces showing up expressly to force them to leave, spraying them (even if they were sitting still) in the face with pepper spray, instigating fights, or seizing the cameras/phones of anyone (including journalists) they saw recording the incidents. The media also was still making an attempt back then to give accurate reports to the American public, and not using propaganda tactics to turn the public against the protesters by painting a wildly-inaccurate picture of who was protesting or what they believed in.
Don't get me wrong, I have immense respect for what my parents' generation managed, and even chose my college in part because of it. But the police back then knew that the media wasn't under government's thumb yet, so any brutal behavior would be accurately reported to the public and turn it in favor of the protesters much, much faster than happened.
The real differences in how the American public reacted in the 60s compared to now are ones like this:
-- In the 60s, there was a strong, thriving middle class that believed in caring for fellow citizens. In the 00s/10s, economic problems have resulted in a small middle class of people a few steps from ruin, living in an "every man/woman for themselves" economic survival mode.
-- In the 60s, media/television had little-to-no violence, so seeing or hearing about it shocked and horrified citizens. In the 00s/10s, violence is so common in the media that people simply don't react to it, or have a reaction based on Hollywood-movie logic where people are only punished if they deserve it.
--In the 60s, most citizens rightly felt that their actions could make a difference. In the 00s/10s, there's a profound, earned sense of helplessness and despair, no real belief that even a large group of people can make a difference; even the largest protests in the country's history won't have an impact on the government's choices now.
Hey, at least "their's" is 99% right... You could've written the painfully fucked-up: "they'res" like I saw on a post recently.
These are the tricks someone told me a long time ago for basic apostrophe use:
1) Replace other letters/spaces: it is --> it's
2) Owned by 1 entity: has all but *1* letter before it --> jythie's
3) Owned by 2+ entities: has all letters before it --> cowards'
I'm deeply glad I wasn't drinking anything when I read that -- it has to be the funniest one-word post I've seen in a very, very long time.
Perhaps a crushed spine, but no disconnected vital organs.
Provided they wouldn't be likely to kill me before surgeons could fix things up, I think I'd rather go with a few disconnected vital organs. It's a lot harder to heal spinal cord/nerve damage enough to avoid at least part of the body being in serious pain long-term, and that kind of pain is a real bitch to get under control.
Logically speaking, yes: I have philosophical ideals and believe strongly in holding myself to a system of ethics I feel is right -- those have been true since I was 11-12 years old, yet I'm no longer a member of any religion (including the one that I grew up with) because I'm also agnostic.
For that matter, the primary gap between the different religions is which god(s) they believe in, and what rules they feel their god(s) want them to follow. The main difference between all of them and an atheist is that the atheist doesn't have a god & feels the rules come from mankind.
Capitalism and communism are economic designs, and whether someone thinks either is a great/awful idea isn't related to their views on religion. I'd like to know what on Earth you think a religious economic system would be, if you believe those two polar-opposites must both be atheist. You do know that extremely religious people in the USA are as likely to be cut-throat capitalists as much as any agnostic or atheist, right?
Dozens of schools are shot up wry year in the u.s.
Citation needed; AFAIK, that actually only happens once every decade or so, it's not the norm by any measure.
People in my city fought overdevelopment, big box stores (only recently lost that war), and car dealerships -- but as we discovered from the mid-90s onward, citizens are effectively powerless when the city council is in developers' pockets and everyone you elect to get rid of them turns around and does the same regardless of party affiliation. Sadly, all of that development meant a lot of McMansion types started moving here in the late 90s that don't have the interest in dark night skies or being close to nature that previous generations did, so now it's doubly difficult...
Agreed. I grew up listening to Sears Point/Sonoma Raceway on summer nights and looking out my window at the countless stars in our seemingly black skies... 20+ years later, the sound of the races gives me a pleasant relaxed feeling, but 10+ years of having a city council in developers' pockets (claiming "progress" means turning every square inch of carefully-preserved open land into buildings/concrete) has caused such severe rapid growth that the night sky is now merely dark blue and has depressingly few stars.
All the uni has to do is only accept the top nn% of students, taking the rep of each student's alma mater and the student's other accomplishments (including having the persistence & drive to have overcome major obstacles to their education) into account -- basically what the top American universities do, as many no longer require SAT scores.
That method tends to work much better for identifying which students are bright, willing to study and work hard than relying on standardized testing. A lot of this is simply that being talented at taking standardized tests, studying how to perform well on them, certain disabilities affecting performance with a question type (like essay or multiple-choice), and so forth can have a *huge* impact on the test results. That's why so many major universities have stopped requiring SAT scores and rely more on the student's history.
Also, don't forget that a college education wasn't intended to be vocational or a matter of fact memorization as in high school, which is what online classes are good for -- and a student is missing out on the main purpose if he/she is handling college that way. College is best for giving the student the personal experience & knowledge that they'd otherwise have to travel the world for a few years to achieve, and that we can't truly learn just through reading, watching videos, or communicating remotely -- it takes dealing with different kinds of people on a daily basis when still young enough to have malleable beliefs, reacting to ideas they'd never considered, seeing others react and discussing it at length... The person returns home a much wiser, more knowledgeable citizen that is harder for politicians or charismatic authority figures to manipulate, better-equipped to handle personal or societal crises, more able to see the most likely long-term results if a politician is elected or law is passed, far more capable of grasping why people do things or act in ways they'd never consider & knowing how to help or deal with them...
Or, as someone I saw put it once: it's the training-wheels period for being a great adult citizen likely to improve their society, not just live in it.
Maybe it would be better for you to say that you'll be willing to help foot the bill for *vocational* education, as that's more the kind of "college" you're thinking of -- it's remotely not as beneficial for society as a genuine education is (IF done right via having students take a wide variety of classes they might otherwise overlook), but it'll churn out more obedient, good employees.
To be somewhat fair, they did base it on HyperCard or a compatible program, which is American (and at the time seemed genuinely amazing).
Why, what makes LO's team more worthy? Both suites are in active development, have a distinctly different focus (AOO for general use, LO adds features** for science/math projects) -- and, most importantly, the OO team is responsible for all of the core general-use changes that LO customizes & builds upon. It would make logical sense that the core product aimed at general users would continue having its traditional name, while the derivative (whether it's Libre- or Go-) takes a different newer one.
**which cause a massive performance hit on older hardware; my systems can run multiple 30kb odt files in AOO smoothly, but one instance of one document of any size in LO causes it to slow to a crawl. If the LO people left because they weren't being allowed to do *that* to OO, then it's for the better all around that they created their own derivative project.
(I'm not commenting on the actions of the US with this, as a side note.)
A crime is a crime is a crime! Or are you saying there are good crimes and bad crimes?
Yes and no. As a staring point: the vast majority of people recognize that there are different degrees of crime, usually based on the amount of harm done -- for example, it's worse for soldiers to kill & rape civilians than it is to take some of their belongings. Both actions are bad and qualify as crimes most of the time, but they're not "a crime is a crime" by any measure.
People that have reached the later stages of moral/ethical development also recognize that sometimes a "crime" means violating a law that would insist upon the person doing or allowing something harmful. In these cases, the "crimes" are a matter of violating laws that either demand we do something objectively bad (like turning in a sick little old lady for eating marijuana brownies to treat nausea), or refrain from doing something that will prevent a truly bad outcome (the Heinz dilemma, of whether a man should steal outrageously overpriced drugs to save his sick wife's life, is a classic example).
In addition to that, sometimes laws defining crimes are arbitrary and shift to suit the ruling force in that place at that moment. Some places make it a horrible crime to not be heterosexual, others outlaw whistleblowers identifying corruption in government, or for an adult of sound mind to be in a consensual relationship with someone of a different skin color... If "a crime is a crime is a crime" were true, then being gay, murdering people, and stealing kids' lunch money would all be equivalent, which obviously isn't very logical!
I think the focus is just on the electrical/water problem, and possibly how it will affect the technological industries there, so the sad reality that people & animals are suffering is considered irrelevant since this is about tech news. (I could be wrong, but that's how I interpreted it, since Slashdot tends to only cover disasters if it involves science and/or technology in some way.)
Wake them up to what? And what of all of the people in SF that either are already aware of whatever you're thinking of, too young/old/unwell for it to matter, visitors (like parents staying at the Ronald McDonald House while their kids are hospitalized at UCSF for weeks at a time), working or volunteering in the city but living far away?
Google's in Mountain View, about 40 miles from SF, so it shouldn't be affected.
I was thinking of a legion of H1Bs running on human-size hamster wheels, providing the power required to keep Facebook's equipment going in third-world nations that don't have a reliable energy grid, or alternately to keep the California servers going without having to pay PG&E or buy/maintain solar equipment.
Forgot to close the quote tag...trying again:
Second, why would anybody want to revive some corpses at huge expense when making a few children more is so much easier?
On an impersonal level, they'd do it from curiosity, love of 'impossible' challenges, the urge to use a particular related talent in a new/interesting way, a drive to become famous, greed. On the more personal level, they'd be acting on the wish to preserve/'save' somebody that they already know, care about, and/or admire, whether the individual was "great" in society's eyes or just in the eyes of others around them.
Also, you'd evidently be surprised how many people have those urges so strongly that it replaces/overrides any interest they may have had in reproducing, regardless of how they feel about children in general; in rare cases, it's so powerful that it takes the place of the drives to find a long-term mate and/or have sex. As I once saw one such person remark: why on Earth would I cast aside someone that has already proven to be an asset to others' lives in favor of spending my time/energy gambling on the crappy odds of producing an individual that, with 20+ years of massive effort & money, *might* turn out to be remotely as worthy?