OT: That list is incomplete and has a few things changed or that he never actually said. You want "25 things I have learned in 50 years" from his book Dave Barry Turns 50.
Until your car reports to the police that you are sleeping, distracted, or inebriated while inside the vehicle. Your car then nicely pulls over and won't let you out until they police arrive.
That's pretty much exactly the opposite of what he was saying -- that if the car itself can count as the driver, then there's nothing to report, because the person isn't driving at all. It isn't illegal to be any of those three things as a passenger right now.
Even better (and more likely) as you head to that rally supporting the first amendment, your car simply refuses to go and takes you to the local strip mall.
This is just ridiculous FUD / trolling at this point. No one would buy a car that would do this. There's no market for it.
They didn't, really. If you click through the "next" links in the lower-left, you'll eventually see that North Korea claimed that they had zero fatalities, just like Uzbekistan, another tyrannical state, claimed (i.e. take both with a grain of salt).
Another panel notes that underreporting is a major issue in the developing world and that Pakistan's claimed rate is significantly under what experts estimate. The reason we don't have anything to contradict North Korea is the lack of free data you allude to.
It's a poorly edited summary. As I posted above in response to a similar comment, the full text shows that they're trying to change the perception that because traffic deaths are accidental that they're unavoidable.
When I saw the link, I thought it meant "road skill", but the page makes it clear that they mean "roads kill". Which is, frankly, nonsense. Roads are completely harmless. Now if they had written "cars kill" then they would at least have an argument (although not a sound one, IMHO, because it is bad driving or other stupid behaviour on the road that kills). But I'm pretty sure that the number of people killed by roads is negligible.
Well, if you're going to nitpick, then I'm afraid we have to go deeper. After all, it should be pointed out that the worst death rates are in developing countries where motorbikes and motorscooters are a dominant form of transportation. No cars involved, so "cars kill" is incomplete.
Death by car is random and suddenâ"which, unfortunately, means it tends to fall into the category of "accidental," and hence, unpreventable. But with traffic deaths set to outpace AIDS/HIV and malaria in the developing world, the UN is trying to change that perceptionâ"and this shocking interactive map ought to help.
The U.N. is trying to change perception that traffic deaths are unpreventable.
That's not the thesis it was meant to be a control FOR.
If I recall correctly, your thesis was that diets filled with manufactured foods was the real culprit behind their weight gain, and the lack of wild animal weight gain proves the point. If you compare wild animals and those fed off of processed foods, you fail to control for the vary external factors that this study raises as possible culprits.
If that wasn't your thesis, then please explain what bringing up the African wildcat was supposed to illustrate.
The "dog" doesn't have to be a favored side that they're betting on. Neither side may be appealing to them, but they most certainly care about the progress of the civil war and whether or not it turns into a greater regional conflict that will suck them in.
How does focusing on a species that lives in national parks in an unindustrialized part of the world negate the notion that environmental impacts other than process food which are endemic to modern, industrial life have an influence on weight gain?
Your proposed "control" fails to differentiate between diet and non-diet influences by removing both from the equation. It's essentially irrelevant to the thesis at hand.
With CoreOS, the idea is to build an OS that you can instantly replace whenever you like, without breaking the software applications that run on it.
Google has long done this sort of thing on desktops and laptops. The search giant built its web browser, Chrome, so that it can automatically update the thing whenever it likes, and it eventually extended this arrangement to ChromeOS, which revolves around the Chrome browser. If you own a Chromebook, you get a new operating system every six weeks or so â" and all you have to do is reboot your machine. [...] Part of the trick is that Polviâ(TM)s team has pared a server operating system down to the bare minimum. The thing doesnâ(TM)t include all the bells and whistles youâ(TM)ll find in other server OSes, including most versions of Linux, and it cleanly separates the OS from the applications that run atop it.
With CoreOS, all applications sit inside âoecontainersâ â" little bubbles of software code that include everything an application needs to run. These containers then latch onto the main OS through the simplest of interfaces. That means you can easily move applications from OS to OS and from machine to machine â" much as you move shipping containers from boat to boat and train to train â" but it also means you can easily update the OS without disturbing the applications. âoeThe way weâ(TM)re able to consistently update the OS â" and be nimble â" is to make sure we have a consistent way of running applications,â Polvi says.
This isn't a discussion on the engineering of the gas or the dispursement methods used, just a news article.
Because nerds aren't all clinical sociopaths more interested in the method of killing than the fact of it.
Plus, being a nerd is all about caring about some important, intellectual topic that the mainstream doesn't see the point in compared to who the latest pop star is sleeping with. Few things are nerdier than international policy, even though most of it is carried about by non-nerds. (Kind of like baseball.)
You need to look up a little place called the Golan Heights and its history and tell me again that Israel has no security interests in Syria. They've actually traded shots a few times over this neutral territory since the war began, after Syria sent in a few tanks last November.
That's even without Hezbollah and Iran's involvement with Syria. Remember that both got involved in the Lebanese Civil War on opposite sides, and Israel basically kicked Syria's ass. As neighbors of Israel, Syria is a huge issue and one that has a choice between bad (Assad as a proxy of Iran) and worse (a country run by Sunni militants).
The US should do what even the Israelis are doing, and stay out of it.
You mean like the air and missile strikes they've launched on Syrian government forces aimed at preventing supplies being sent to Hezbollah in Lebanon in January, May, and July of this year?
For the most part Israel isn't taking sides per se, but they aren't staying out of it at all.
There is NO evidence of an obesity rise in WILD stocks of ANY of these animals.
I'm pretty sure the article said, "As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas." (emphasis added)
I'm pretty sure feral rats are wild animals, though they do feed off of human food. Of course, if you want to eliminate any species that eats human food, you're also going to reduce or eliminate almost all the other potential influences listed in the article -- regulated indoor temperature, excessive light exposure, exposure to industrial chemicals, exposure to the Ad-36 virus or to M. smithii, etc.
After seeing the way the rebels run around cutting everyone's heads off and all that jazz I don't really blame the Assad regime for using chemical weapons. IF THIS WERE TRUE that is.
Chemical weapons are indiscriminate. Did the children in the video deserve to be gassed for the actions of rebels?
Answering this question is a basic litmus test of humanity.
Water is a poison, as is oxygen. Actually, glucose is also a poison by these standards.
Yes, they are. But as always, it's the dose that makes the poison. You can die from drinking too much water, breathing an atmosphere that's too rich in oxygen, or consuming too much sucrose. Of course, you can also suffer ill effects short of death with lower doses and can suffer no harm at all with even lower doses.
The real question is whether or not fructose is regularly consumed at levels that cause negative health effects. Evidence says that it is.
When you take a common food staple and label is as a poison at the beginning of your argument you lose all credibility.
I won't say all credibility if you actually read the argument, but I would accuse the GP of hyperbole and of overly dramatic presentation.
To the outside world these two would behave as you would, but where is the conscious you. The one that's staring that the computer screen right now. How does that duplicate or even what the hell is that.
If you're religious, it's complicated. Most likely the old you died, the soul went to whatever it earned in life, and the new bodies are just new people with new souls (if cloned/manufactured people even have souls; point of doctrinal conflict), burdened with memories of another person. Just in the same way someone who has taken brain damage hasn't lost their soul (at least as far as my faith states), though they are notably a different person. To be fair, religion hasn't really caught up to brain science despite over a century of knowing that much of what we used to call demonic possession is just damage to the meat; there's a reason a lot of people of faith fear its consequences.
If you're not religious, then "you" are just information, and both of you are "you." At least in so much as you are the same person you've always been despite the fact that each new experience changes you. Consciousness is just a byproduct of your brain structure and the experiences that built it. It's the whole "ship of Theseus" problem. How much can you replace before you're no longer the same person?
Besides, you talk about "that duplicate," but aren't you both duplicates at that point? There is no "real" you anymore, and arguable there never was -- just a lack of copies to illustrate the fact. To ascribe some essential nature beyond that point is to speak of souls, or irrational sentiment at least.
Sometimes, I wish my own beliefs were as simple as a purely materialistic explanation would give, but choosing a truth based on what you wish it to be is the opposite of reason. Which is a funny thing for someone who believes in God to say, I suppose. Well, I suppose I have to be rational in my irrationality.:-)
As i said its not about safety its about control.But some people cant grasp the concept.
If you want "control" without caring about safety, then you're just a danger to yourself and others.
Whatever, it's not like anyone is forcing you to take a driverless car. The people designing them know they have to drive on a road with all the usual inattentive roadhogs around them. Frankly, you should be happy since they'll make everyone around you less of a threat, so you can reap the benefits even if you refuse to aid with your own money.
Of course, it's funny/sad that if this was just about control and self-determination that you felt the need to slander engineers as a huge safety threat compared to drivers and paint them as some huge threat you can never trust. And now we've moved on to deflection phase and pretending that was never what was talked about. Some people are just incapable of admitting that they were wrong.
Every time I see these kinds of "debate" tactics used in politics and even in trivial discussions like this, I feel a little bit of my faith in humanity die.
Miraculous, maybe, but not the magic which cryonics requires.
Bah. Sufficiently advanced technology, and all. Nothing about cryonics is impossible like FTL travel, just difficult -- possibly impractically so -- but I don't think we're at nearly at the level to know for sure about that, yet. The best thing about cryonics is that you can just keep waiting until it is known.
And that is analogous to bringing a hundreds of years old dead person with extensive cell damage back to life, how exactly?
It's a sign of incremental progress. What seems miraculous today will seem mundane tomorrow.
Getting shot in the heart only has about a 70-80% mortality rating currently, and getting shot elsewhere is down to about 5% on average. Compare to what things were like only 150 years ago; we don't even have to saw anyone's limbs off to save people from gangrene anymore. What would surgeons of that time period think of what we can claim to do today? Would they be as incredulous of our powers to fight disease and repair broken bodies as we would be of a proposed future culture's ability to repair (or simply sidestep the issue of) cellular damage?
Building a brain from scratch to match an dead, probably aged, and possibly damage brain sounds nightmarishly difficult. But we've tackled seemingly impossible challenges before. We've put people in space, written messages with single atoms for pixels, created matter not found in nature, and edited living beings to produce drugs for our benefit. I'm not going to write off humanity's ability to pull it off, especially when it will benefit the people who do invent it just as much as the previous ages' dead. After all, the ability to revive the dead will require the ability to rejuvenate or preserve the living first. The corpsicles will just be fringe beneficiaries along for the ride.
When will the games that make it worth owning launch?
I can't remember a single launch title in the past two generations that made me want to buy the system when it came out. Launch titles are always "me too" games, ports, and sequels that can be churned out quickly with a handful of "in house" quirky games as exceptions, especially nowadays since video game budgets have gotten out of control. I haven't seen an awesome launch title since the 16-bit generation (e.g. Super Mario World).
Medical advancements in our own lifetimes, much less our grandparents' and great-grandparents' have been just short of miraculous already.
Just look at how gunshot fatalities have been decreasing over the past couple of decades despite the fact that the gunshot attack rate has gone up by half. 25 years ago, all we could do for a heart attack victim was to give them something for the pain and some lidocane, and now with advances in clot removers and stints, we've dropped heart attack fatalities by 40%. The stuff we can do with genomics, stems cells, and personalized medicine were once the things of science fiction. HIV is now an expensive nuisance rather than the killer of a whole subculture. We have surgical robots that allow us to go in through little holes rather than than slice a person open like a turkey. We've gone from EEG to fMRI, and we're pushing towards resolving the brain to the neuron level.
We have even more impressive tech coming down the pipeline. The human connectome project, studies into the human microbiome, cancer screening by saliva or smell, cloning and 3d printing of replacement organs, spinal nerve regrowth agents, etc. At least two of those are directly relevant to future restoration: mapping the brain and reconstructing tissues. It may be quite a while before we can construct a new brain to order (if it is ever possible), but I don't want to outright call it impossible based on the myopic lens of what is possible today.
As for the other two problems, the latter is the major sociological issue I mentioned, but I'm sure someone will want to reanimate people at least as a curiosity. And if something goes wrong with the storage center, then you're no worse off than you were without it (i.e, you're still dead, and you couldn't take the money with you anyway).
That's the point of our contention really. After all, 6 million people make mistakes each year in America, and that kills 30,000-40,000 of us each year. I figure there's no way that lawmakers will let driverless cars reach the public until they can do far better than that, but I find that a pretty low bar.
i dont care I'm calling it the Google car will be a failure because people dont want auto driven cars same as Google glasses will be a failure. This statement will be around for decades so we will see who is right.
Then we'll see. I'm sure there will be people who want to stick to manual drive forever, just like there are people who insist on stick shifts despite automatics having caught up quite well. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean that no one will. Hell, just see how hard it is to find an automatic compared to a manual these days. (Hint, many cars including top end sports cars don't even have manual as an option.) There will always be Luddites and people who over-estimate their own competence behind the wheel.
We'll see who is right with time. Assuming one of us isn't killed by one of those other drivers on the road, that is.
The whole premise of cryogenics is ludicrous anyway.
How so? The basic premise of preserving the brain for later medical advances is sound; it's the implementation details and social impacts that make it difficult.
The first video was loudly derided by the entire comments section and you post another one?
It's not generally a credible way to start a discussion by telling the reader to assume that everyone agrees with you; the briefest of glances at the comment section reveals many equally highly moderated posts by people who do not. Most of the quickly posted, top level responses were in this category, but in most articles that's where you just find the people who didn't think about it too much before getting in their word. (Not that I'm immune to that one, I'll admit.)
If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it[...] The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
P.S. Yes, I know I shouldn't have said "frozen." Freezing implies ice formation, which means destruction of the cell structure. A large part of cryonics is avoiding that while still preserving the tissues against decay. I was speaking off the cuff and forgot to be more precise. I know someone's going to rag me for it anyway.
Care to explain immortality after death to me? Just how does that work? I die, yet I'm immortal?
The religious answer is generally that there is some essential component of you (i.e. a soul) that persists after death and enjoys some sort of continued existence after death, most commonly with an element or reward or punishment for how you lived in life. It isn't "you" that dies when your flesh does.
The scientific answer is that death is merely a broad word for a set of bodily failures that lead to the breakdown and dissolution of the biological machinery that sustains your consciousness and/or metabolism. As science advances, we roll back those defects and in some cases cure them.
Many wounds that were inevitably fatal are imminently curable now. Gut wounds used to ensure a horrible death due to sepsis. Antibiotics stopped that. Heart wounds used to ensure bleeding to death. Blood transplants and open-heart surgery stopped that. We are now at the point that we have to base death on the cessation and decay of the brain.
Soon, we may have to refine that to a question of information loss. If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it, then we may later be able to restore it or copy the information (i.e "you") off of it to another medium. And given advances in repairing the body, even "irreversible" may be subject to redefinition over time. The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
And once restored in a new body, what reason is there to expect that you can't be periodically backed up in case of the worst? If you can die and still live, then are you not immortal for all practical purposes?
But this is, of course, all highly unproven technology. Scientific or not, it's still essentially a leap of faith. However, if you don't have a religious reason to believe that you will live on in some other fashion after death, and you've got the money to spare for it then it seems like a much fairer wager than Pascal's.
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OT: That list is incomplete and has a few things changed or that he never actually said. You want "25 things I have learned in 50 years" from his book Dave Barry Turns 50.
Snopes has the debunking, if you're curious.
Until your car reports to the police that you are sleeping, distracted, or inebriated while inside the vehicle. Your car then nicely pulls over and won't let you out until they police arrive.
That's pretty much exactly the opposite of what he was saying -- that if the car itself can count as the driver, then there's nothing to report, because the person isn't driving at all. It isn't illegal to be any of those three things as a passenger right now.
Even better (and more likely) as you head to that rally supporting the first amendment, your car simply refuses to go and takes you to the local strip mall.
This is just ridiculous FUD / trolling at this point. No one would buy a car that would do this. There's no market for it.
They didn't, really. If you click through the "next" links in the lower-left, you'll eventually see that North Korea claimed that they had zero fatalities, just like Uzbekistan, another tyrannical state, claimed (i.e. take both with a grain of salt).
Another panel notes that underreporting is a major issue in the developing world and that Pakistan's claimed rate is significantly under what experts estimate. The reason we don't have anything to contradict North Korea is the lack of free data you allude to.
It's a poorly edited summary. As I posted above in response to a similar comment, the full text shows that they're trying to change the perception that because traffic deaths are accidental that they're unavoidable.
When I saw the link, I thought it meant "road skill", but the page makes it clear that they mean "roads kill". Which is, frankly, nonsense. Roads are completely harmless. Now if they had written "cars kill" then they would at least have an argument (although not a sound one, IMHO, because it is bad driving or other stupid behaviour on the road that kills). But I'm pretty sure that the number of people killed by roads is negligible.
Well, if you're going to nitpick, then I'm afraid we have to go deeper. After all, it should be pointed out that the worst death rates are in developing countries where motorbikes and motorscooters are a dominant form of transportation. No cars involved, so "cars kill" is incomplete.
Here's the full paragraph it mangled:
Death by car is random and suddenâ"which, unfortunately, means it tends to fall into the category of "accidental," and hence, unpreventable. But with traffic deaths set to outpace AIDS/HIV and malaria in the developing world, the UN is trying to change that perceptionâ"and this shocking interactive map ought to help.
The U.N. is trying to change perception that traffic deaths are unpreventable.
That's not the thesis it was meant to be a control FOR.
If I recall correctly, your thesis was that diets filled with manufactured foods was the real culprit behind their weight gain, and the lack of wild animal weight gain proves the point. If you compare wild animals and those fed off of processed foods, you fail to control for the vary external factors that this study raises as possible culprits.
If that wasn't your thesis, then please explain what bringing up the African wildcat was supposed to illustrate.
How about you counter GP's claim by actually naming the dog? [...] If you can not name the dog, just admit Israel has no dog in the fight.
I don't think you understand what the phrase means. It doesn't mean to have a favored side. It just means that you "have a stake in the outcome of the problem at hand" or if you have no dog in a fight, then "you are not concerned and will not be affected either way by the outcome of something." Here, have a few more citations.
The "dog" doesn't have to be a favored side that they're betting on. Neither side may be appealing to them, but they most certainly care about the progress of the civil war and whether or not it turns into a greater regional conflict that will suck them in.
How does focusing on a species that lives in national parks in an unindustrialized part of the world negate the notion that environmental impacts other than process food which are endemic to modern, industrial life have an influence on weight gain?
Your proposed "control" fails to differentiate between diet and non-diet influences by removing both from the equation. It's essentially irrelevant to the thesis at hand.
With CoreOS, the idea is to build an OS that you can instantly replace whenever you like, without breaking the software applications that run on it.
Google has long done this sort of thing on desktops and laptops. The search giant built its web browser, Chrome, so that it can automatically update the thing whenever it likes, and it eventually extended this arrangement to ChromeOS, which revolves around the Chrome browser. If you own a Chromebook, you get a new operating system every six weeks or so â" and all you have to do is reboot your machine.
[...]
Part of the trick is that Polviâ(TM)s team has pared a server operating system down to the bare minimum. The thing doesnâ(TM)t include all the bells and whistles youâ(TM)ll find in other server OSes, including most versions of Linux, and it cleanly separates the OS from the applications that run atop it.
With CoreOS, all applications sit inside âoecontainersâ â" little bubbles of software code that include everything an application needs to run. These containers then latch onto the main OS through the simplest of interfaces. That means you can easily move applications from OS to OS and from machine to machine â" much as you move shipping containers from boat to boat and train to train â" but it also means you can easily update the OS without disturbing the applications. âoeThe way weâ(TM)re able to consistently update the OS â" and be nimble â" is to make sure we have a consistent way of running applications,â Polvi says.
That's what's being promised. Sounds ambitious.
This isn't a discussion on the engineering of the gas or the dispursement methods used, just a news article.
Because nerds aren't all clinical sociopaths more interested in the method of killing than the fact of it.
Plus, being a nerd is all about caring about some important, intellectual topic that the mainstream doesn't see the point in compared to who the latest pop star is sleeping with. Few things are nerdier than international policy, even though most of it is carried about by non-nerds. (Kind of like baseball.)
Israel doesn't have a dog in this fight.
You need to look up a little place called the Golan Heights and its history and tell me again that Israel has no security interests in Syria. They've actually traded shots a few times over this neutral territory since the war began, after Syria sent in a few tanks last November.
That's even without Hezbollah and Iran's involvement with Syria. Remember that both got involved in the Lebanese Civil War on opposite sides, and Israel basically kicked Syria's ass. As neighbors of Israel, Syria is a huge issue and one that has a choice between bad (Assad as a proxy of Iran) and worse (a country run by Sunni militants).
The US should do what even the Israelis are doing, and stay out of it.
You mean like the air and missile strikes they've launched on Syrian government forces aimed at preventing supplies being sent to Hezbollah in Lebanon in January, May, and July of this year?
For the most part Israel isn't taking sides per se, but they aren't staying out of it at all.
There is NO evidence of an obesity rise in WILD stocks of ANY of these animals.
I'm pretty sure the article said, "As were laboratory macaques, chimpanzees, vervet monkeys and mice, as well as domestic dogs, domestic cats, and domestic and feral rats from both rural and urban areas." (emphasis added)
I'm pretty sure feral rats are wild animals, though they do feed off of human food. Of course, if you want to eliminate any species that eats human food, you're also going to reduce or eliminate almost all the other potential influences listed in the article -- regulated indoor temperature, excessive light exposure, exposure to industrial chemicals, exposure to the Ad-36 virus or to M. smithii, etc.
After seeing the way the rebels run around cutting everyone's heads off and all that jazz I don't really blame the Assad regime for using chemical weapons. IF THIS WERE TRUE that is.
Chemical weapons are indiscriminate. Did the children in the video deserve to be gassed for the actions of rebels?
Answering this question is a basic litmus test of humanity.
Water is a poison, as is oxygen. Actually, glucose is also a poison by these standards.
Yes, they are. But as always, it's the dose that makes the poison. You can die from drinking too much water, breathing an atmosphere that's too rich in oxygen, or consuming too much sucrose. Of course, you can also suffer ill effects short of death with lower doses and can suffer no harm at all with even lower doses.
The real question is whether or not fructose is regularly consumed at levels that cause negative health effects. Evidence says that it is.
When you take a common food staple and label is as a poison at the beginning of your argument you lose all credibility.
I won't say all credibility if you actually read the argument, but I would accuse the GP of hyperbole and of overly dramatic presentation.
To the outside world these two would behave as you would, but where is the conscious you. The one that's staring that the computer screen right now. How does that duplicate or even what the hell is that.
If you're religious, it's complicated. Most likely the old you died, the soul went to whatever it earned in life, and the new bodies are just new people with new souls (if cloned/manufactured people even have souls; point of doctrinal conflict), burdened with memories of another person. Just in the same way someone who has taken brain damage hasn't lost their soul (at least as far as my faith states), though they are notably a different person. To be fair, religion hasn't really caught up to brain science despite over a century of knowing that much of what we used to call demonic possession is just damage to the meat; there's a reason a lot of people of faith fear its consequences.
If you're not religious, then "you" are just information, and both of you are "you." At least in so much as you are the same person you've always been despite the fact that each new experience changes you. Consciousness is just a byproduct of your brain structure and the experiences that built it. It's the whole "ship of Theseus" problem. How much can you replace before you're no longer the same person?
Besides, you talk about "that duplicate," but aren't you both duplicates at that point? There is no "real" you anymore, and arguable there never was -- just a lack of copies to illustrate the fact. To ascribe some essential nature beyond that point is to speak of souls, or irrational sentiment at least.
Sometimes, I wish my own beliefs were as simple as a purely materialistic explanation would give, but choosing a truth based on what you wish it to be is the opposite of reason. Which is a funny thing for someone who believes in God to say, I suppose. Well, I suppose I have to be rational in my irrationality. :-)
I have it. A good book, though I did not know it was a series and now must investigate / buy. Thanks for the recommendation.
As an aside, if you like tabletop RPGs, I recommend Eclipse Phase, which borrows heavily from the same concept, with the same use of "sleeving" into new bodies and cortical backups as a major element of the setting. Altered Carbon is one of the books that inspired the setting and its terminology.
As i said its not about safety its about control.But some people cant grasp the concept.
If you want "control" without caring about safety, then you're just a danger to yourself and others.
Whatever, it's not like anyone is forcing you to take a driverless car. The people designing them know they have to drive on a road with all the usual inattentive roadhogs around them. Frankly, you should be happy since they'll make everyone around you less of a threat, so you can reap the benefits even if you refuse to aid with your own money.
Of course, it's funny/sad that if this was just about control and self-determination that you felt the need to slander engineers as a huge safety threat compared to drivers and paint them as some huge threat you can never trust. And now we've moved on to deflection phase and pretending that was never what was talked about. Some people are just incapable of admitting that they were wrong.
Every time I see these kinds of "debate" tactics used in politics and even in trivial discussions like this, I feel a little bit of my faith in humanity die.
Miraculous, maybe, but not the magic which cryonics requires.
Bah. Sufficiently advanced technology, and all. Nothing about cryonics is impossible like FTL travel, just difficult -- possibly impractically so -- but I don't think we're at nearly at the level to know for sure about that, yet. The best thing about cryonics is that you can just keep waiting until it is known.
And that is analogous to bringing a hundreds of years old dead person with extensive cell damage back to life, how exactly?
It's a sign of incremental progress. What seems miraculous today will seem mundane tomorrow.
Getting shot in the heart only has about a 70-80% mortality rating currently, and getting shot elsewhere is down to about 5% on average. Compare to what things were like only 150 years ago; we don't even have to saw anyone's limbs off to save people from gangrene anymore. What would surgeons of that time period think of what we can claim to do today? Would they be as incredulous of our powers to fight disease and repair broken bodies as we would be of a proposed future culture's ability to repair (or simply sidestep the issue of) cellular damage?
Building a brain from scratch to match an dead, probably aged, and possibly damage brain sounds nightmarishly difficult. But we've tackled seemingly impossible challenges before. We've put people in space, written messages with single atoms for pixels, created matter not found in nature, and edited living beings to produce drugs for our benefit. I'm not going to write off humanity's ability to pull it off, especially when it will benefit the people who do invent it just as much as the previous ages' dead. After all, the ability to revive the dead will require the ability to rejuvenate or preserve the living first. The corpsicles will just be fringe beneficiaries along for the ride.
When will the games that make it worth owning launch?
I can't remember a single launch title in the past two generations that made me want to buy the system when it came out. Launch titles are always "me too" games, ports, and sequels that can be churned out quickly with a handful of "in house" quirky games as exceptions, especially nowadays since video game budgets have gotten out of control. I haven't seen an awesome launch title since the 16-bit generation (e.g. Super Mario World).
Usually the good games come over the year after.
Medical advancements in our own lifetimes, much less our grandparents' and great-grandparents' have been just short of miraculous already.
Just look at how gunshot fatalities have been decreasing over the past couple of decades despite the fact that the gunshot attack rate has gone up by half. 25 years ago, all we could do for a heart attack victim was to give them something for the pain and some lidocane, and now with advances in clot removers and stints, we've dropped heart attack fatalities by 40%. The stuff we can do with genomics, stems cells, and personalized medicine were once the things of science fiction. HIV is now an expensive nuisance rather than the killer of a whole subculture. We have surgical robots that allow us to go in through little holes rather than than slice a person open like a turkey. We've gone from EEG to fMRI, and we're pushing towards resolving the brain to the neuron level.
We have even more impressive tech coming down the pipeline. The human connectome project, studies into the human microbiome, cancer screening by saliva or smell, cloning and 3d printing of replacement organs, spinal nerve regrowth agents, etc. At least two of those are directly relevant to future restoration: mapping the brain and reconstructing tissues. It may be quite a while before we can construct a new brain to order (if it is ever possible), but I don't want to outright call it impossible based on the myopic lens of what is possible today.
As for the other two problems, the latter is the major sociological issue I mentioned, but I'm sure someone will want to reanimate people at least as a curiosity. And if something goes wrong with the storage center, then you're no worse off than you were without it (i.e, you're still dead, and you couldn't take the money with you anyway).
Get over it man people make mistakes[...]
That's the point of our contention really. After all, 6 million people make mistakes each year in America, and that kills 30,000-40,000 of us each year. I figure there's no way that lawmakers will let driverless cars reach the public until they can do far better than that, but I find that a pretty low bar.
i dont care I'm calling it the Google car will be a failure because people dont want auto driven cars same as Google glasses will be a failure. This statement will be around for decades so we will see who is right.
Then we'll see. I'm sure there will be people who want to stick to manual drive forever, just like there are people who insist on stick shifts despite automatics having caught up quite well. Just because you don't want it doesn't mean that no one will. Hell, just see how hard it is to find an automatic compared to a manual these days. (Hint, many cars including top end sports cars don't even have manual as an option.) There will always be Luddites and people who over-estimate their own competence behind the wheel.
We'll see who is right with time. Assuming one of us isn't killed by one of those other drivers on the road, that is.
The whole premise of cryogenics is ludicrous anyway.
How so? The basic premise of preserving the brain for later medical advances is sound; it's the implementation details and social impacts that make it difficult.
The first video was loudly derided by the entire comments section and you post another one?
It's not generally a credible way to start a discussion by telling the reader to assume that everyone agrees with you; the briefest of glances at the comment section reveals many equally highly moderated posts by people who do not. Most of the quickly posted, top level responses were in this category, but in most articles that's where you just find the people who didn't think about it too much before getting in their word. (Not that I'm immune to that one, I'll admit.)
If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it[...] The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
P.S. Yes, I know I shouldn't have said "frozen." Freezing implies ice formation, which means destruction of the cell structure. A large part of cryonics is avoiding that while still preserving the tissues against decay. I was speaking off the cuff and forgot to be more precise. I know someone's going to rag me for it anyway.
Care to explain immortality after death to me? Just how does that work? I die, yet I'm immortal?
The religious answer is generally that there is some essential component of you (i.e. a soul) that persists after death and enjoys some sort of continued existence after death, most commonly with an element or reward or punishment for how you lived in life. It isn't "you" that dies when your flesh does.
The scientific answer is that death is merely a broad word for a set of bodily failures that lead to the breakdown and dissolution of the biological machinery that sustains your consciousness and/or metabolism. As science advances, we roll back those defects and in some cases cure them.
Many wounds that were inevitably fatal are imminently curable now. Gut wounds used to ensure a horrible death due to sepsis. Antibiotics stopped that. Heart wounds used to ensure bleeding to death. Blood transplants and open-heart surgery stopped that. We are now at the point that we have to base death on the cessation and decay of the brain.
Soon, we may have to refine that to a question of information loss. If we can freeze the brain before any irreversible damage is done to it, then we may later be able to restore it or copy the information (i.e "you") off of it to another medium. And given advances in repairing the body, even "irreversible" may be subject to redefinition over time. The nice thing is that once your brain is frozen, we have all the time in the world to figure out how to undo whatever did you in.
And once restored in a new body, what reason is there to expect that you can't be periodically backed up in case of the worst? If you can die and still live, then are you not immortal for all practical purposes?
But this is, of course, all highly unproven technology. Scientific or not, it's still essentially a leap of faith. However, if you don't have a religious reason to believe that you will live on in some other fashion after death, and you've got the money to spare for it then it seems like a much fairer wager than Pascal's.