While I appreciate the humor of the comment the problem is that I was running the strace's using chrome (quite non-Apple) and Linux (also non-Apple as I believe the MacOS and presumably iPhone/iPad OS are evolutions from Mach (which served as the base for NeXT systems to the best of my recollection) on a libflashplayer.so plugin (directly from Adobe). So the only excuse for Adobe (Flash) is that they generally have no clue (or interest) across a variety of operating systems/hardware -- another nail in the coffin of non-open source monopolistic software solutions.
Just because you somehow managed to force (or by market trends got) people to adopt it doesn't mean its a good, much less the best, solution -- (witness Windows).
1. Though in fairness to Microsoft, one could attribute the current problems with Windows (host of viruses to the world) as being due to the fact that the primary host hardware for Windows 95 was the non-memory managed 8086 (and related hardware). So in theory one could blame much of the current "state-of-the-world" as we know it on choices made by Intel.
If Adobe Flash (which Adobe did not even develop BTW) were an really usable product, e.g. open source, able to be enhanced by the end-user, GREEN(!) and secure they would have a case to stand on (in critiquing Apple).
But Apple has a very good point with respect to their two main products -- the iPhone and the iPad. These are *battery* based devices and power consumption is a major concern. Right now I've got a "single process" [1] chrome session with the libflashplayer.so sub-process running and playing *NOTHING* the Flash Process is sucking down 25+% of my CPU (Pentium IV Prescott) [2]. This isn't just chrome, one sees the same behavior in Firefox its just more difficult to see because it runs as a single process.
GREEN programs take steps to minimize their CPU consumption, recognize when they are doing nothing and adapt, allow the O.S. to go into various power saving modes (ACPI, P4-clockmod adjustments, suspend to ram, etc.) and as far as I can tell Flash is designed so as to prevent that. If one strace's the chrome flash plugin process one discovers that in 10 seconds it issues 56,000 system calls -- 53,000 (95%) of them are useless gettimeofday() calls. Maybe Flash hoping that someone has requested that it play something... Seems like Adobe doesn't know what a "poll()" call is useful for.
So I'll do my best to avoid Flash entirely on the basis of its CPU use and CO2 emissions footprint and not even bother to open the potential security problems can-o-worms.
1. A "single process" chrome session is more often a 4-5 process session (given extensions, plugins, etc.) but it is far better (from a memory use standpoint) than the typical 35-process sessions one gets under Linux once one has exceeded the Google/Chrome "imposed" process limit. 2. Fortunately one can either "kill -s STOP" or entirely kill the libflashplayer.so plugin and chrome will keep right on functioning (with the possible informational messages in certain tabs/windows that there was a problem with Flash. Often times it isn't even clear that those tabs/windows were using Flash.
This isn't accurate, nor is it new. "Suddenly, I wondered, what if we could assemble materials like the abalone does -- but not be limited to one element?" The problem with this is that abalone isn't limited to a single element. All organisms which produce common shells are dealing with molecules of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Many plankton produce silica shells (SiO2). Some magnetotactic bacteria produce magnetite crystals (Fe3O4). There are ~20 proteins in the human genome involved in manipulating or using selenium (Se) not to mention many more involved in dealing with iron (Fe), copper (Cu) and sulfur (S).
Life has actively used available resources (in terms of ions or molecules) for several billion years. Nor is it new that one could use biological systems to assemble nanoscale parts. That was anticipated in a paper I wrote in 2001 [1] and if one goes back in Drexler's writings the concepts were clear in papers he wrote as early as 1981 (bacteria and eukaryotic cells are nanoscale manufacturing plants -- though not general purpose nanoassemblers). Further the applications for synthetic genomes and nanoscale assembly were seen and incorporated into a business plan as early as 2002 (Robiobotics, LLC). Unfortunately, in terms of fund raising, that was about the same time as the dotcom crash and all the VC's were trying to seek out a rock to hide under.
Re:Planetary visits are an obsolete idea
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Gardening On Mars
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· Score: 1
I didn't say we should literally dematerialize it, I said we should disassemble it. There are multiple paths for doing this [1,2]. All of the planets are at the bottom of various sized gravity wells -- if you have sufficient energy to move the matter out of the well you can "quickly" disassemble the planet. If one has a significant fraction of the Sun's power available (~10^26 W) then the disassembly of Mars takes ~176 days [3]. In actual practice it is likely to take longer due to the fact that one would have to divert power from Matrioshka Brain "thought" into planetary disassembly so there is a fair amount of politics involved ("whether to think or disassemble that is the question..."). The likely path in our solar system disassembles the asteroids first and then uses the swarm resulting from that to bootstrap the disassembly of Mars and/or Mercury. I discuss this further in the chapter "Under Construction" from the collection of essays in "Year Million". In solar systems lacking an asteroid belt one would probably start with the planet closest to the star (e.g. Mercury) since it has the largest planetary solar insolation as starting energy base.
Yes, I agree that humans have pursued a lot of things just for the fun of it. On the other hand I take a fairly "moral" approach here. Humanity looses ~40+ million lives a year due to aging. If the long term choices include saving that number of lives (each year) and providing them with either multi-thousand year lifespans (in biological form) or multi-billion year lifespans (as minds uploaded into a Matrioshka Brain) vs. sending a few dozen people to drive around or build "Quonset huts" on Mars then I chose the first as a more noble goal. One can easily incorporate the "colonization" adventure into a Matrioshka Brain vision -- just survey Mars completely before you disassemble it (or as you disassemble it) and construct a simulation of it to play on/in once ones mind is uploaded (you have seen the Matrix series I presume). Or if you were addicted to playing in a "real" world reconstruct a Mars-like mini-planetoid with the leftovers from the Mars disassembly process (there is likely to be a lot of iron and oxygen left over from inner planet disassembly which isn't particularly useful from a nanotechnology standpoint). People who are choosing romantic colonization notions need to reconcile whether to dedicate intellectual and financial resources to those notions or whether they should be used to solve real problems (people lacking choices with respect to how, when and if they die). My personal preference is solving real problems.
1. Incineration, highly parallelized rail gun launches, extreme mountain building, spinning up the planet, etc. Kaku's approach to building a "Death Star" (really "Stars" if you want to disassemble the planet quickly), as seen on the Science Channel, is close -- he just doesn't realize that you can have the entire solar power output at your disposal if you have nanotechnology enabled solar power satellite construction methods. 2. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/DeathStar.html 3. http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/OSETI3/4273-32.html
Planetary visits are an obsolete idea
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Gardening On Mars
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The entire concept of planetary visits, colonies, etc. is the one of the most out-of-date (read waste-of-time) ideas currently circulating. The only people that promote it are those with misguided romantic ideas about humans exploring Mars as they did the Earth in the 16th-18th centuries. They should be discarded as out of date given that (a) humans are not designed (due to insufficient and error prone DNA repair systems in their genome) to endure long term space voyages or planetary habitation outside of the magnetosphere of the Earth (where high radiation doses are a constant threat); (b) progress in robotics and AI is likely to make sending robotic explorers much more productive and less hazardous than sending humans by 2030; and (c) if we pushed on molecular nanotechnology just a little harder by 2030 we would be disassembling Mars for material to build the Matrioshka Brain rather than thinking about growing food on it for colonists (no point building a farm if you are only going to disassemble it).
I like the romantic exploration ideas just as much as the next person -- but it just isn't justified given current rates of technological progress. It is also worth pointing out if we ever get to the point where we modify our genomes (or those of astronaut explorers) to be radiation tolerant we can also engineer them to be lack-of-gravity tolerant [1]. In which case living at the bottom of a gravity well makes no sense -- instead we should be migrating to O'Neill style colonies or long term interstellar "arks" (presumably to remove the "single-point-of-failure" problem humanity faces by living on a single planet or around a single star).
1. Modifying large numbers of cells to be radiation & lack-of-gravity tolerant in adults will be very hard (read nearly impossible) without molecular nanotechnology (e.g. chromallocytes) in adults. The only way to do this correctly is to breed a new species of human designed for space environments. Unless you can engineer them to mature much faster (doubtful) that implies you need to take transgenic-human-birth-dates + ~25-30 years before one can seriously consider long term exploration/colonization efforts.
If you've ever visited LLNL you would know that its over the hills from Oakland/Hayward, effectively in the Imperial Valley -- where there is lots of land to build things on (which is why it takes up football fields). Now on the other hand if you one was building it in Manhattan you would go down and not out (think of the foundations for the World Trade Center buildings. The arrangement of the lasers is fairly arbitrary -- one can go down or up nearly as easily as spreading out.
In reality it comes down to a cost trade-off between normal conducting transmission lines, superconducting transmission lines (which have been and are being built today) and land costs at a distance vs. construction costs of digging a large hole or a moderately sized skyscraper. We could significantly decrease our long term energy costs by using wind/solar into a superconducting grid augmented by pumped water storage (or batteries/capacitors if those end up being cheaper). There is no reason that electricity should not be relatively "free" if we accept the early lifetime investment costs and build the required infrastructure.
One doesn't need to illuminate every single coastline. One would get most of the benefit by illuminating high population density regions, regions likely to generate larger waves due to offshore slopes, etc. The calculations could be done in advance based on historical records, known likely origination sources for the quakes, etc. The laser beam steering technology exists (due to research in targeted laser beam weapons).
One also doesn't need a nuclear reactor. The Japanese are planning to launch a solar power satellite in the next decade or two (the general technology for SPS has been around for decades). Alternatively one could simply use a moderately large array of solar cells and dump the energy into a capacitor bank (or a high temperature or gas pressure vessel that could dump the energy into a turbine on demand). It is worth noting that for highly redundant solid state components, they could be launched using the recently proposed undersea "rail-gun" (est. cost $1-2B?) on an ongoing basis and assembled in-orbit (presumably using robots). No need for human involvement in space, human rated space vehicles, etc.
However, for this to be a "serious" proposal, one would want to cost-out a comparison with a semi-permanent high altitude solar powered UAV (50-100,000 ft). Since they could remain above critical areas and would involve extremely intermittent signals (perhaps using both radio and "light" [1]) and could receive signals faster than satellites at higher altitudes. There has to be a tradeoff between satellites, balloons and UAVs but I've never seen an analysis.
1. Note that these would also be a good alternate solution to Telco/3G/4G cell/Cable/Fiber/WiMax Internet access (the more competition the lower the prices are likely to be) but the power demands are greater due to the "always on" requirements.
Well, a few days ago, I had a dream where my father and I had a conversation with Bill Gates (*really*) [1]. When I woke up I thought "What a cool dream, what brought that about?" I put it down to having watched the TED conference presentation by Bill a few months ago, articles I have read about his house (where the conversation took place) a few years ago and the general separation (2-3 degrees) that I have from him [2]. I can contrast this "memory" (which might better be called a synthetic pseudo-experience) with a ~17 year old memory of a diner at Larry Ellison's house that included Steve Jobs and others. The advantage of the 2nd "memory" is that there were sufficient additional people present and external evidence (I probably have the charge records of flying from Seattle to S.F. and have the email exchanges setting up the diner) so that I have a relatively high confidence that the diner really took place in physical reality rather than just the reality of thoughts bouncing around in my head [3].
So, are NDE "real"? Quite probably for some people, particularly those who may have spent a significant fraction of their lives participating in or holding on to a particular perception of "reality". Are they "significant"? Perhaps only if you use them constructively in the remainder of your life. Otherwise I'd tend to place them in the same category as my conversation with Bill.
1. Over the last few years my dreams have become more complex and my ability to recall them seems to be increasing. I tend to put this down to some combination of possible mental changes from a variety of drugs, natural aging and simply having the time to sleep more than other periods of my life. 2. My ability to "make stuff up" to fill in the blanks in dreams amazes me. I put it down to the fact that I've lived 50+ years in a relatively fixed framework (non-changing laws of physics, relatively "normal" people around me, etc.) so the reality that my brain "expects" is pretty fixed. If I could harness the ability of my brain to "make up good (borderline plausible) stories" for my dreams in my waking reality I'd be a famous fiction author. 3. Generally speaking acting on the basis of the validity of the external reality rather than the internal reality saves me the trouble of having someone come and bail out of jail the next time I encounter Bill and nonchalantly walk up to him saying "Yo Bill, what's happenin?".
Simple, the "electrical waves" to which you refer are the propagation of ion current flows, esp. Na+ and K+ along the neurons in the brain. Just because one cannot detect such propagation of local charge differentials does *not* mean that all chemical activity, esp. the pumping of Na+/K+ due to local ATP pools has ceased. Indeed if one's brain is not *FROZEN* there is going to be chemical activity (there is probably even some chemical activity above liquid nitrogen temperatures) -- which may be a reason why one can get better brain recovery even with no heartbeat and no electrical activity if one cools it down before attempting a reboot. (Brain rebooting is a complex interaction of proper chemical reactions and improper (harmful) chemical reactions.)
The problem is with the current definition of "DEAD" [1]. You are not DEAD until the information content (organization) of ones brain has been damaged beyond the capability of any technology to recover. Currently the two most probable (frequent) methods for making one really dead are disassembly by incineration (cremation) and disassembly by consumption (allowing fungi/bacteria to consume a body). The next most common methods probably involves brain crushing injuries such as in earthquakes, industrial accidents, etc.
So long as proper brain (neuronal) organization exists and most of the proper cellular structure is in place YOU ARE NOT DEAD -- you are simply "shut-down". I've got a 10+ year old 8086 based computer sitting downstairs. It runs either Windows 98 or Linux depending on how I boot it. It isn't normally "dead", its simply "off". You should read a bit more about brain/neuron physiology and cell biology to understand this. Also education regarding cryonic preservation and the future capabilities offered by robust molecular nanotechnology would be useful.
1. The current definition of "dead" and therefore "NDE" is based on the very limited definition roughly equal to "beyond the probable restoration of significant levels of functioning using *currently* known medical technologies" [2]. 2. If one is cynical about it one might consider how prevalent the trend is to promote declaring people with fully organized brains as "dead" so as to enable the harvesting of organs for organ transplants (which surgeons and hospitals do make money from). In contrast an alternative would be to have both the supposedly "dead" individual as well as the individual(s) likely to die should they not receive an organ transplant undergo cryonic suspension [3]. 3. A third nearer term alternative, which is currently unapproved, would be hydrogen sulfide "anesthetic" preservation which appears to have certain "suspended animation" properties (may retard overall metabolic rate) and thus give people an increased opportunity for technology to "catch up" with their condition(s).
Hell, I've got 15+ years of experience with computers and some big name corporations (e.g. Time Inc & Oracle) in my resume. I'd be willing to do the job of two of the consultants for half as much.
The real question here is *who* is responsible for the project and is employing these people (who clearly seem to have no interest in getting the job done)? For example, if two or three individuals can rewrite a relatively robust DBMS (Oracle) in less than 2 years (circa 1983-84, the Oracle Version 3-->4 rewrite) having this many people not getting the job done in a decade screams to me of incompetence.
Those prices seem cheap enough that people who want to integrate topics into "merged" newsfeeds (e.g. Science Daily or PhysOrg) will have no problem paying the price and extracting what little information the "news" source provides. Of course since all the "news" in science generally comes out either via university press releases or journal article abstracts (or increasingly open source journal articles, e.g. PLoS, sometimes PNAS, etc.) there is little value added one can find from public papers. It would appear that public papers would seem to be relegated into dealing with either local news, some increasingly rare investigative journalism or editorial pieces by informed writers. Ultimately the papers have to deal with "fair use" particularly if the repackagers are integrating from multiple sources.
If I'm reading this correctly, the vulnerability is in WOFF fonts (what is a WOFF font?) and possibly allows some heap corruption. How do these various "exploits" actually get the Firefox code to execute out of the heap? I.e. one presumably has to either scribble on some known call-back function address in the heap, or somehow scribble on the stack (so Firefox/Seamonkey functions return to the exploit code in the heap) and isn't the data in the heap non-executable (at least under Linux)? I would expect that anyone trying to exploit vulnerabilities such as this would be causing the browser to abort (due to SEGV's or other severe faults) and would drive users away from accessing such pages.
So are these many "exploits" one hears about mostly sound and fury or are there serious risks? [In contrast to say something like an SQL injection attack where a person with reasonable knowledge of SQL could compromise insecure servers.]
While I agree that conservation is a good idea -- we should become the most efficient civilization we can be -- there are approaches other than insisting that we all survive on a few thousand calories of energy per day (prehistoric human energy resource levels) [minor dig towards people who want to be *really* green intended] that could work much better.
For example, we could implement molecular nanotechnology as fast as we can (say a 20 year plan -- which people such as Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas who actually known something about the topic believe is feasible). Robust molecular nanotechnology would allow us to transition from a sub-Kardashev Level I civilization (<< 10^13 W) to a Kardashev Level II civilization (~10^26 W) within a period of a few weeks to months (if you don't believe me go read the papers that I have written about the engineering of Matrioshka Brains). Reworking figures from Wikipedia [1], we are still at an energy consumption level more than 3 orders of magnitude less than a KT I level and 13 orders of magnitude less than a KT II level. As current projections [2] only put the world's population at ~9 billion by 2040-2050, that would increase energy demand only by a factor of ~1.5 (assuming increasing living standards and presumably energy demand are roughly offset by increases in energy efficiency). Given that 1.5x is much less than 1000x (or 10 trillion x) I don't see the need for draconian energy conservation requirements. I do however see the need for an aggressive R&D program for real molecular nanotechnology (not the nano-wanna-be technology which one tends to hear about currently which is primarily nanoscale materials science and not really *technology*).
The problem is simply deciding to build the required facilities and incorporate the cost of making the radioactive material non-radioactive into the cost of producing electricity (which I suspect is the toughest hurdle).
It is also worth noting that if real molecular nanotechnology were available the "separation" part of the equation (producing a stream of pure radioactive isotope ions) would be much easier (and presumably cheaper). All concern regarding long term storage of radioactive isotopes is completely pointless since we will have the technology within this century to completely get rid of them.
This seems to be a fantasy riding on the broomstick of a certain young English wizard (to name a few). In the age of modern technology, one needs to not only make something "invisible" in the realm of visible wavelengths -- one also has to hide its radar signature, its infrared signature (good luck doing that if you've got any significant computing capabilities on board), its magnetic signature and presumably its mass (gravimetric) signature.
If you can't do all of those things you are only "undetectable" to primitive (read "nontechnological") humans and not any relatively simplistic robots, sensor assisted humans or airborne drones.
Hmmm.... I don't own an MP3 player. Any MP3 files I might have are stored on my hard disk drive. If I wanted to play them on an MP3 player I'd probably build one myself (plans are available on the Internet) and store the MP3s on a USB drive. Surprising that they are stopping at simple MP3 players (which tend to be overpriced anyway) and not going after any and all data storage devices.
Granted. But the atomic bomb was empirically impossible before July 16, 1945. Walking on the moon was impossible before July 20, 1969. And look at the effort into making those realities! Basing what you do on what is empirically known is highly problematic, esp. if one has any perspective on The Singularity.
However recognizing that one could shift costs on the order of $500,000 per person for end-of-life care to $150K - $50K for cryonic suspension and realizing that this probably involves 1-2 million people per year (U.S.) [1] one is probably talking a savings of *several hundred billion dollars per year* if people would simply accept cryonic suspension as valid path [2]. Yes, the people have to be allowed to die sooner. But dying later may significantly reduce the chances of recovery in the case that cryonics works out (due to cancer destroying tissues, strokes or heart attacks destroying brain tissue, etc.) with some highly questionable benefit in those "borrowed time" weeks/months/years.
1. Current U.S. deaths per year is 2.4+ million [CDC | CIA Worldfactbook] 2. Indeed one has to wonder why insurance companies and the government do not have active programs encouraging people to select the cryonic suspension path vs. the life extension with poor quality and high expenses path? [The examples cited previously are cases where there was no empirical "proof" that a path would work. But at least in the cryonic suspension case one can cite examples where the path could be much better than the one we are currently following.]
Agreed with respect to "letting the patient die", since in order to undergo cryonic suspension one has to be pronounced clinically "dead". However clinically "dead" is a moving target. Once, several decades ago, you were dead if your heart stopped. That is no longer true. And while there are cases currently where one is *really* dead, e.g. incineration in a fire (cooking the brain) or skull being crushed in an earthquake (scrambling the brain), but between where we are now ("dead" subject to "brain death beyond hope of recovery") and where we may someday be, e.g. brain death due to irrecoverable loss of information, there is a *lot* of room which is highly dependent on the technologies available to restore or extract information. I am a hard core computer scientist in that if I still have the information and can effectively run it (now or someday) -- I am not dead. Substrates are important to some but not to me -- which points out another area where there is a lack of discussion -- would you give up your body and/or appearance if you could continue living? Not enough discussion about that in the realm of "how much should we, as a society, be willing to spend to keep someone alive" [1]?
1. It is worth noting that to have a serious discussion in this area one has to debate the ethics of the value of a human life -- and be willing to defend the value of an 90 y.o. individual with Alzheimer's vs. the value of an Olympic Gold Medal winner. One has to begin to wrestle not with "all men are created equal" but whether or not the value of a life has an expiration date.
After 250+ comments I am surprised that there is no discussion of a 3rd path, e.g. cryonic suspension. Ralph Merkle often presents a 2x2 decision matrix with "cryonics works / doesn't work" on one axis and "choose / don't choose cryonics" on the other axis. In only one of those boxes does one come out surviving. Yes, in one box, one comes out as "stupid" (cryonics doesn't work + choose cryonics) -- but asserting the negative (cryonics doesn't work) is a very hard thing to prove (esp. when asserting the alternatives -- disassembly by cremation or microbes are fairly certain to "not work").
Given that current prices (which I haven't checked lately) were of the order of $30-$50K for head/brain preservation and $130-$150K for whole body preservation it looks like the costs are 4+x cheaper for allowing a hospice path "death" followed by immediate cryonic suspension vs. the current medical paradigm of pulling out all the stops (no restrictions on costs) end-of-life care for people who are certain to die (and have presumably a low quality of life during that period).
I would request that you not even think about responding to this post in a "cryonics won't work" vein unless you really know what you are speaking about (meaning you really understand nanotechnology and nanomedicine and have a good working knowledge of cell biology and current cryonic suspension (vitrification) processes -- the information is out there on the WWW if one bothers to educate oneself). By and large I consider the current medical community to be guilty of malpractice if they only present the two "standard" paths (hospice care vs. full medical intervention) and leave out cryonic suspension. It is interesting that in the current debate regarding controlling health care costs that cryonic suspension has not come up in the discussion as an alternative.
And by "real" functionality, I mean full support for open standards for video & audio w/o Flash, support for really large long term sessions (dozens of windows, hundreds of tabs, running for weeks) without consuming all the CPU (which Mozilla based browsers tend to do) or memory (which Chrome tends to do) on your machine, robust Javascript, Flash and Ad blocking (to prevent outsiders from using your computer as part of the cloud for their own purposes) and most of all "Green-ness" -- do long running browser sessions, particularly large ones, effectively "degrade" all of the tabs, windows and Javascripts (which have no "current" use because nobody is actually *looking* at them) so their CPU use is minimized and they are paged out? [Thus allowing ones OS to minimize power & memory use and hopefully minimize any data transmission charges (for browsers being used over 3G/4G networks)).
And for the people who don't understand the emphasis in retaining large sessions, you have probably never tried to restart a large session (which can take 10+ minutes of maxed DSL bandwidth and 15-20 minutes of maxed CPU time -- the browser being largely unresponsive during that period). You may have also have never tried to restart an old session only to find that the pages in which you were interested no longer existed. (Yes there are ways around these problems but they require plugins and/or large personal save page storage areas.
Cough, no, because I am running a Linux system with a variety of browsers (epiphany, galeon, Firefox, Chromium) and I simply do not run MS software (and to read the ongoing saga, lucky me), why does/. even bother to track these items? We know the MS users are brain-dead (they hover under a belief that the software doesn't have bugs or is secure and that will protect them -- how wrong they are.).
I have no misconceptions that Linux based software is any more secure -- but I rest in confidence that epiphany, galeon, Firefox and Chromium are *all* open source -- and if there is a security problem within them I can update and take advantage of it within hours -- not months as Microsoft seems inclined to do.
Using closed source software is akin to laying oneself out on the Washington Mall and saying, hey "rape me". Its not so bad "I'll recover".
Fortunately, many of the sites I frequent, such as/. or many bugzilla based systems, or even the NIH NCBI databases (up until recently) did not require JS to function reasonably well. I would assert that any site that requires JS to present itself has not thought things through very well. HTML is a passive presentation language, it simply presents information on ones machine as distributed by the provider. That works very well -- be it from/. to bug databases to Wikipedia to Google. One only has to inject JS if one wants to enhance that. E.g. Menus or pseudo-new-windows, or doing some arithmetic in the browser. Those are "+" features -- they are not required to present information. Now one can argue all day about whether the internet is about presenting information or selling you something (its the same debate with advertisements on TV -- which have expanded from 1m every 15 minutes to ~2m every 10 minutes). I choose freedom, the only things which I should have to read/watch are those which I select and demand. Anything inflicted upon me is IMO evil and I would do well to remove it from my life by whatever means.
Yes, I did not go to the website (truth in assertions). And I would not have selected KDE (people who want to run heavy window managers are allowed their choices -- though I would not choose them). I am basing my opinions on the fact that I run a Gnome desktop and it works reasonably well and I have parts of a KDE system installed (on Gentoo) and have no interest in installing the rest of it. There is a point where one just says "no". If there were a KDE LW (LightWeigt) I might consider it but when one talks about an install chewing up hundreds of megabytes on ones hard drive -- one has to begin to consider just saying no.
But why should I have to execute an insecure program in an insecure lanaguage (go on -- Justify to me why Javascript is reallly secure -- esp. when I consider it unlikely that you have read the source code for each of the various implementations in each of the various browsers on your machine). When you have read the code, and you are willing to assert that it is secure (under the threat of liabilty of lawsuits that you claimed something which was fiction) -- then I will begin to take you seriously.
Until then, executing remotely written Javacript on my own computer, i.e. you are letting people program your computer, is for me a largely forbidden act. Because in short there are are a large number of individuals who are either stupid or untrustable. And I do not want either of those groups to be executing code on my machine.
Agreed. I've got NoScript running in most of my Firefox sessions so don't run into Flash problems that often (as Javascript is often used to start Flash) but in working a little with chrome and the FlashBlock extension that seems to be an even better approach.
Now the question will be whether there will be a way to disable the nasty HTML5 video options when advertisers start to abuse those as well. Video should always be "at the user's discretion", precisely because there are probably hundreds of millions of PC's scattered around the world which simply don't have the hardware to be able to show video without it "killing the system" (even running a Pentium IV, I have problems with video on any VT / hardware combination that didn't happen to get the Xorg -> Kernel DRI interface (and that is only one of my VTs)).
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While I appreciate the humor of the comment the problem is that I was running the strace's using chrome (quite non-Apple) and Linux (also non-Apple as I believe the MacOS and presumably iPhone/iPad OS are evolutions from Mach (which served as the base for NeXT systems to the best of my recollection) on a libflashplayer.so plugin (directly from Adobe). So the only excuse for Adobe (Flash) is that they generally have no clue (or interest) across a variety of operating systems/hardware -- another nail in the coffin of non-open source monopolistic software solutions.
Just because you somehow managed to force (or by market trends got) people to adopt it doesn't mean its a good, much less the best, solution -- (witness Windows).
1. Though in fairness to Microsoft, one could attribute the current problems with Windows (host of viruses to the world) as being due to the fact that the primary host hardware for Windows 95 was the non-memory managed 8086 (and related hardware). So in theory one could blame much of the current "state-of-the-world" as we know it on choices made by Intel.
If Adobe Flash (which Adobe did not even develop BTW) were an really usable product, e.g. open source, able to be enhanced by the end-user, GREEN(!) and secure they would have a case to stand on (in critiquing Apple).
But Apple has a very good point with respect to their two main products -- the iPhone and the iPad. These are *battery* based devices and power consumption is a major concern. Right now I've got a "single process" [1] chrome session with the libflashplayer.so sub-process running and playing *NOTHING* the Flash Process is sucking down 25+% of my CPU (Pentium IV Prescott) [2]. This isn't just chrome, one sees the same behavior in Firefox its just more difficult to see because it runs as a single process.
GREEN programs take steps to minimize their CPU consumption, recognize when they are doing nothing and adapt, allow the O.S. to go into various power saving modes (ACPI, P4-clockmod adjustments, suspend to ram, etc.) and as far as I can tell Flash is designed so as to prevent that. If one strace's the chrome flash plugin process one discovers that in 10 seconds it issues 56,000 system calls -- 53,000 (95%) of them are useless gettimeofday() calls. Maybe Flash hoping that someone has requested that it play something... Seems like Adobe doesn't know what a "poll()" call is useful for.
So I'll do my best to avoid Flash entirely on the basis of its CPU use and CO2 emissions footprint and not even bother to open the potential security problems can-o-worms.
1. A "single process" chrome session is more often a 4-5 process session (given extensions, plugins, etc.) but it is far better (from a memory use standpoint) than the typical 35-process sessions one gets under Linux once one has exceeded the Google/Chrome "imposed" process limit.
2. Fortunately one can either "kill -s STOP" or entirely kill the libflashplayer.so plugin and chrome will keep right on functioning (with the possible informational messages in certain tabs/windows that there was a problem with Flash. Often times it isn't even clear that those tabs/windows were using Flash.
This isn't accurate, nor is it new. "Suddenly, I wondered, what if we could assemble materials like the abalone does -- but not be limited to one element?" The problem with this is that abalone isn't limited to a single element. All organisms which produce common shells are dealing with molecules of calcium carbonate (CaCO3). Many plankton produce silica shells (SiO2). Some magnetotactic bacteria produce magnetite crystals (Fe3O4). There are ~20 proteins in the human genome involved in manipulating or using selenium (Se) not to mention many more involved in dealing with iron (Fe), copper (Cu) and sulfur (S).
Life has actively used available resources (in terms of ions or molecules) for several billion years. Nor is it new that one could use biological systems to assemble nanoscale parts. That was anticipated in a paper I wrote in 2001 [1] and if one goes back in Drexler's writings the concepts were clear in papers he wrote as early as 1981 (bacteria and eukaryotic cells are nanoscale manufacturing plants -- though not general purpose nanoassemblers). Further the applications for synthetic genomes and nanoscale assembly were seen and incorporated into a business plan as early as 2002 (Robiobotics, LLC). Unfortunately, in terms of fund raising, that was about the same time as the dotcom crash and all the VC's were trying to seek out a rock to hide under.
1. Bradbury, R.J. "Protein Based Assembly of Nanoscale Parts" (2001).
http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/Papers/PBAoNP.html
I didn't say we should literally dematerialize it, I said we should disassemble it. There are multiple paths for doing this [1,2]. All of the planets are at the bottom of various sized gravity wells -- if you have sufficient energy to move the matter out of the well you can "quickly" disassemble the planet. If one has a significant fraction of the Sun's power available (~10^26 W) then the disassembly of Mars takes ~176 days [3]. In actual practice it is likely to take longer due to the fact that one would have to divert power from Matrioshka Brain "thought" into planetary disassembly so there is a fair amount of politics involved ("whether to think or disassemble that is the question..."). The likely path in our solar system disassembles the asteroids first and then uses the swarm resulting from that to bootstrap the disassembly of Mars and/or Mercury. I discuss this further in the chapter "Under Construction" from the collection of essays in "Year Million". In solar systems lacking an asteroid belt one would probably start with the planet closest to the star (e.g. Mercury) since it has the largest planetary solar insolation as starting energy base.
Yes, I agree that humans have pursued a lot of things just for the fun of it. On the other hand I take a fairly "moral" approach here. Humanity looses ~40+ million lives a year due to aging. If the long term choices include saving that number of lives (each year) and providing them with either multi-thousand year lifespans (in biological form) or multi-billion year lifespans (as minds uploaded into a Matrioshka Brain) vs. sending a few dozen people to drive around or build "Quonset huts" on Mars then I chose the first as a more noble goal. One can easily incorporate the "colonization" adventure into a Matrioshka Brain vision -- just survey Mars completely before you disassemble it (or as you disassemble it) and construct a simulation of it to play on/in once ones mind is uploaded (you have seen the Matrix series I presume). Or if you were addicted to playing in a "real" world reconstruct a Mars-like mini-planetoid with the leftovers from the Mars disassembly process (there is likely to be a lot of iron and oxygen left over from inner planet disassembly which isn't particularly useful from a nanotechnology standpoint). People who are choosing romantic colonization notions need to reconcile whether to dedicate intellectual and financial resources to those notions or whether they should be used to solve real problems (people lacking choices with respect to how, when and if they die). My personal preference is solving real problems.
1. Incineration, highly parallelized rail gun launches, extreme mountain building, spinning up the planet, etc. Kaku's approach to building a "Death Star" (really "Stars" if you want to disassemble the planet quickly), as seen on the Science Channel, is close -- he just doesn't realize that you can have the entire solar power output at your disposal if you have nanotechnology enabled solar power satellite construction methods.
2. http://www.stardestroyer.net/Empire/Tech/Beam/DeathStar.html
3. http://www.aeiveos.com:8080/~bradbury/MatrioshkaBrains/OSETI3/4273-32.html
The entire concept of planetary visits, colonies, etc. is the one of the most out-of-date (read waste-of-time) ideas currently circulating. The only people that promote it are those with misguided romantic ideas about humans exploring Mars as they did the Earth in the 16th-18th centuries. They should be discarded as out of date given that (a) humans are not designed (due to insufficient and error prone DNA repair systems in their genome) to endure long term space voyages or planetary habitation outside of the magnetosphere of the Earth (where high radiation doses are a constant threat); (b) progress in robotics and AI is likely to make sending robotic explorers much more productive and less hazardous than sending humans by 2030; and (c) if we pushed on molecular nanotechnology just a little harder by 2030 we would be disassembling Mars for material to build the Matrioshka Brain rather than thinking about growing food on it for colonists (no point building a farm if you are only going to disassemble it).
I like the romantic exploration ideas just as much as the next person -- but it just isn't justified given current rates of technological progress. It is also worth pointing out if we ever get to the point where we modify our genomes (or those of astronaut explorers) to be radiation tolerant we can also engineer them to be lack-of-gravity tolerant [1]. In which case living at the bottom of a gravity well makes no sense -- instead we should be migrating to O'Neill style colonies or long term interstellar "arks" (presumably to remove the "single-point-of-failure" problem humanity faces by living on a single planet or around a single star).
1. Modifying large numbers of cells to be radiation & lack-of-gravity tolerant in adults will be very hard (read nearly impossible) without molecular nanotechnology (e.g. chromallocytes) in adults. The only way to do this correctly is to breed a new species of human designed for space environments. Unless you can engineer them to mature much faster (doubtful) that implies you need to take transgenic-human-birth-dates + ~25-30 years before one can seriously consider long term exploration/colonization efforts.
If you've ever visited LLNL you would know that its over the hills from Oakland/Hayward, effectively in the Imperial Valley -- where there is lots of land to build things on (which is why it takes up football fields). Now on the other hand if you one was building it in Manhattan you would go down and not out (think of the foundations for the World Trade Center buildings. The arrangement of the lasers is fairly arbitrary -- one can go down or up nearly as easily as spreading out.
In reality it comes down to a cost trade-off between normal conducting transmission lines, superconducting transmission lines (which have been and are being built today) and land costs at a distance vs. construction costs of digging a large hole or a moderately sized skyscraper. We could significantly decrease our long term energy costs by using wind/solar into a superconducting grid augmented by pumped water storage (or batteries/capacitors if those end up being cheaper). There is no reason that electricity should not be relatively "free" if we accept the early lifetime investment costs and build the required infrastructure.
One doesn't need to illuminate every single coastline. One would get most of the benefit by illuminating high population density regions, regions likely to generate larger waves due to offshore slopes, etc. The calculations could be done in advance based on historical records, known likely origination sources for the quakes, etc. The laser beam steering technology exists (due to research in targeted laser beam weapons).
One also doesn't need a nuclear reactor. The Japanese are planning to launch a solar power satellite in the next decade or two (the general technology for SPS has been around for decades). Alternatively one could simply use a moderately large array of solar cells and dump the energy into a capacitor bank (or a high temperature or gas pressure vessel that could dump the energy into a turbine on demand). It is worth noting that for highly redundant solid state components, they could be launched using the recently proposed undersea "rail-gun" (est. cost $1-2B?) on an ongoing basis and assembled in-orbit (presumably using robots). No need for human involvement in space, human rated space vehicles, etc.
However, for this to be a "serious" proposal, one would want to cost-out a comparison with a semi-permanent high altitude solar powered UAV (50-100,000 ft). Since they could remain above critical areas and would involve extremely intermittent signals (perhaps using both radio and "light" [1]) and could receive signals faster than satellites at higher altitudes. There has to be a tradeoff between satellites, balloons and UAVs but I've never seen an analysis.
1. Note that these would also be a good alternate solution to Telco/3G/4G cell/Cable/Fiber/WiMax Internet access (the more competition the lower the prices are likely to be) but the power demands are greater due to the "always on" requirements.
Well, a few days ago, I had a dream where my father and I had a conversation with Bill Gates (*really*) [1]. When I woke up I thought "What a cool dream, what brought that about?" I put it down to having watched the TED conference presentation by Bill a few months ago, articles I have read about his house (where the conversation took place) a few years ago and the general separation (2-3 degrees) that I have from him [2]. I can contrast this "memory" (which might better be called a synthetic pseudo-experience) with a ~17 year old memory of a diner at Larry Ellison's house that included Steve Jobs and others. The advantage of the 2nd "memory" is that there were sufficient additional people present and external evidence (I probably have the charge records of flying from Seattle to S.F. and have the email exchanges setting up the diner) so that I have a relatively high confidence that the diner really took place in physical reality rather than just the reality of thoughts bouncing around in my head [3].
So, are NDE "real"? Quite probably for some people, particularly those who may have spent a significant fraction of their lives participating in or holding on to a particular perception of "reality". Are they "significant"? Perhaps only if you use them constructively in the remainder of your life. Otherwise I'd tend to place them in the same category as my conversation with Bill.
1. Over the last few years my dreams have become more complex and my ability to recall them seems to be increasing. I tend to put this down to some combination of possible mental changes from a variety of drugs, natural aging and simply having the time to sleep more than other periods of my life.
2. My ability to "make stuff up" to fill in the blanks in dreams amazes me. I put it down to the fact that I've lived 50+ years in a relatively fixed framework (non-changing laws of physics, relatively "normal" people around me, etc.) so the reality that my brain "expects" is pretty fixed. If I could harness the ability of my brain to "make up good (borderline plausible) stories" for my dreams in my waking reality I'd be a famous fiction author.
3. Generally speaking acting on the basis of the validity of the external reality rather than the internal reality saves me the trouble of having someone come and bail out of jail the next time I encounter Bill and nonchalantly walk up to him saying "Yo Bill, what's happenin?".
Simple, the "electrical waves" to which you refer are the propagation of ion current flows, esp. Na+ and K+ along the neurons in the brain. Just because one cannot detect such propagation of local charge differentials does *not* mean that all chemical activity, esp. the pumping of Na+/K+ due to local ATP pools has ceased. Indeed if one's brain is not *FROZEN* there is going to be chemical activity (there is probably even some chemical activity above liquid nitrogen temperatures) -- which may be a reason why one can get better brain recovery even with no heartbeat and no electrical activity if one cools it down before attempting a reboot. (Brain rebooting is a complex interaction of proper chemical reactions and improper (harmful) chemical reactions.)
The problem is with the current definition of "DEAD" [1]. You are not DEAD until the information content (organization) of ones brain has been damaged beyond the capability of any technology to recover. Currently the two most probable (frequent) methods for making one really dead are disassembly by incineration (cremation) and disassembly by consumption (allowing fungi/bacteria to consume a body). The next most common methods probably involves brain crushing injuries such as in earthquakes, industrial accidents, etc.
So long as proper brain (neuronal) organization exists and most of the proper cellular structure is in place YOU ARE NOT DEAD -- you are simply "shut-down". I've got a 10+ year old 8086 based computer sitting downstairs. It runs either Windows 98 or Linux depending on how I boot it. It isn't normally "dead", its simply "off". You should read a bit more about brain/neuron physiology and cell biology to understand this. Also education regarding cryonic preservation and the future capabilities offered by robust molecular nanotechnology would be useful.
1. The current definition of "dead" and therefore "NDE" is based on the very limited definition roughly equal to "beyond the probable restoration of significant levels of functioning using *currently* known medical technologies" [2].
2. If one is cynical about it one might consider how prevalent the trend is to promote declaring people with fully organized brains as "dead" so as to enable the harvesting of organs for organ transplants (which surgeons and hospitals do make money from). In contrast an alternative would be to have both the supposedly "dead" individual as well as the individual(s) likely to die should they not receive an organ transplant undergo cryonic suspension [3].
3. A third nearer term alternative, which is currently unapproved, would be hydrogen sulfide "anesthetic" preservation which appears to have certain "suspended animation" properties (may retard overall metabolic rate) and thus give people an increased opportunity for technology to "catch up" with their condition(s).
Hell, I've got 15+ years of experience with computers and some big name corporations (e.g. Time Inc & Oracle) in my resume. I'd be willing to do the job of two of the consultants for half as much.
The real question here is *who* is responsible for the project and is employing these people (who clearly seem to have no interest in getting the job done)? For example, if two or three individuals can rewrite a relatively robust DBMS (Oracle) in less than 2 years (circa 1983-84, the Oracle Version 3-->4 rewrite) having this many people not getting the job done in a decade screams to me of incompetence.
Those prices seem cheap enough that people who want to integrate topics into "merged" newsfeeds (e.g. Science Daily or PhysOrg) will have no problem paying the price and extracting what little information the "news" source provides. Of course since all the "news" in science generally comes out either via university press releases or journal article abstracts (or increasingly open source journal articles, e.g. PLoS, sometimes PNAS, etc.) there is little value added one can find from public papers. It would appear that public papers would seem to be relegated into dealing with either local news, some increasingly rare investigative journalism or editorial pieces by informed writers. Ultimately the papers have to deal with "fair use" particularly if the repackagers are integrating from multiple sources.
If I'm reading this correctly, the vulnerability is in WOFF fonts (what is a WOFF font?) and possibly allows some heap corruption. How do these various "exploits" actually get the Firefox code to execute out of the heap? I.e. one presumably has to either scribble on some known call-back function address in the heap, or somehow scribble on the stack (so Firefox/Seamonkey functions return to the exploit code in the heap) and isn't the data in the heap non-executable (at least under Linux)? I would expect that anyone trying to exploit vulnerabilities such as this would be causing the browser to abort (due to SEGV's or other severe faults) and would drive users away from accessing such pages.
So are these many "exploits" one hears about mostly sound and fury or are there serious risks? [In contrast to say something like an SQL injection attack where a person with reasonable knowledge of SQL could compromise insecure servers.]
While I agree that conservation is a good idea -- we should become the most efficient civilization we can be -- there are approaches other than insisting that we all survive on a few thousand calories of energy per day (prehistoric human energy resource levels) [minor dig towards people who want to be *really* green intended] that could work much better.
For example, we could implement molecular nanotechnology as fast as we can (say a 20 year plan -- which people such as Ralph Merkle and Robert Freitas who actually known something about the topic believe is feasible). Robust molecular nanotechnology would allow us to transition from a sub-Kardashev Level I civilization (<< 10^13 W) to a Kardashev Level II civilization (~10^26 W) within a period of a few weeks to months (if you don't believe me go read the papers that I have written about the engineering of Matrioshka Brains). Reworking figures from Wikipedia [1], we are still at an energy consumption level more than 3 orders of magnitude less than a KT I level and 13 orders of magnitude less than a KT II level. As current projections [2] only put the world's population at ~9 billion by 2040-2050, that would increase energy demand only by a factor of ~1.5 (assuming increasing living standards and presumably energy demand are roughly offset by increases in energy efficiency). Given that 1.5x is much less than 1000x (or 10 trillion x) I don't see the need for draconian energy conservation requirements. I do however see the need for an aggressive R&D program for real molecular nanotechnology (not the nano-wanna-be technology which one tends to hear about currently which is primarily nanoscale materials science and not really *technology*).
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_resources_and_consumption
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_growth
We have known how to do it for several decades. Scientists at Los Alamos have an active program on using accelerators to transmute nuclear waste, e.g. http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/science21/ATW.html and books have been published on the topic, e.g. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=4912
The problem is simply deciding to build the required facilities and incorporate the cost of making the radioactive material non-radioactive into the cost of producing electricity (which I suspect is the toughest hurdle).
It is also worth noting that if real molecular nanotechnology were available the "separation" part of the equation (producing a stream of pure radioactive isotope ions) would be much easier (and presumably cheaper). All concern regarding long term storage of radioactive isotopes is completely pointless since we will have the technology within this century to completely get rid of them.
This seems to be a fantasy riding on the broomstick of a certain young English wizard (to name a few). In the age of modern technology, one needs to not only make something "invisible" in the realm of visible wavelengths -- one also has to hide its radar signature, its infrared signature (good luck doing that if you've got any significant computing capabilities on board), its magnetic signature and presumably its mass (gravimetric) signature.
If you can't do all of those things you are only "undetectable" to primitive (read "nontechnological") humans and not any relatively simplistic robots, sensor assisted humans or airborne drones.
Hmmm.... I don't own an MP3 player. Any MP3 files I might have are stored on my hard disk drive. If I wanted to play them on an MP3 player I'd probably build one myself (plans are available on the Internet) and store the MP3s on a USB drive. Surprising that they are stopping at simple MP3 players (which tend to be overpriced anyway) and not going after any and all data storage devices.
Broken model --> Broken solutions.
Granted. But the atomic bomb was empirically impossible before July 16, 1945. Walking on the moon was impossible before July 20, 1969. And look at the effort into making those realities! Basing what you do on what is empirically known is highly problematic, esp. if one has any perspective on The Singularity.
However recognizing that one could shift costs on the order of $500,000 per person for end-of-life care to $150K - $50K for cryonic suspension and realizing that this probably involves 1-2 million people per year (U.S.) [1] one is probably talking a savings of *several hundred billion dollars per year* if people would simply accept cryonic suspension as valid path [2]. Yes, the people have to be allowed to die sooner. But dying later may significantly reduce the chances of recovery in the case that cryonics works out (due to cancer destroying tissues, strokes or heart attacks destroying brain tissue, etc.) with some highly questionable benefit in those "borrowed time" weeks/months/years.
1. Current U.S. deaths per year is 2.4+ million [CDC | CIA Worldfactbook]
2. Indeed one has to wonder why insurance companies and the government do not have active programs encouraging people to select the cryonic suspension path vs. the life extension with poor quality and high expenses path? [The examples cited previously are cases where there was no empirical "proof" that a path would work. But at least in the cryonic suspension case one can cite examples where the path could be much better than the one we are currently following.]
Agreed with respect to "letting the patient die", since in order to undergo cryonic suspension one has to be pronounced clinically "dead". However clinically "dead" is a moving target. Once, several decades ago, you were dead if your heart stopped. That is no longer true. And while there are cases currently where one is *really* dead, e.g. incineration in a fire (cooking the brain) or skull being crushed in an earthquake (scrambling the brain), but between where we are now ("dead" subject to "brain death beyond hope of recovery") and where we may someday be, e.g. brain death due to irrecoverable loss of information, there is a *lot* of room which is highly dependent on the technologies available to restore or extract information. I am a hard core computer scientist in that if I still have the information and can effectively run it (now or someday) -- I am not dead. Substrates are important to some but not to me -- which points out another area where there is a lack of discussion -- would you give up your body and/or appearance if you could continue living? Not enough discussion about that in the realm of "how much should we, as a society, be willing to spend to keep someone alive" [1]?
1. It is worth noting that to have a serious discussion in this area one has to debate the ethics of the value of a human life -- and be willing to defend the value of an 90 y.o. individual with Alzheimer's vs. the value of an Olympic Gold Medal winner. One has to begin to wrestle not with "all men are created equal" but whether or not the value of a life has an expiration date.
After 250+ comments I am surprised that there is no discussion of a 3rd path, e.g. cryonic suspension. Ralph Merkle often presents a 2x2 decision matrix with "cryonics works / doesn't work" on one axis and "choose / don't choose cryonics" on the other axis. In only one of those boxes does one come out surviving. Yes, in one box, one comes out as "stupid" (cryonics doesn't work + choose cryonics) -- but asserting the negative (cryonics doesn't work) is a very hard thing to prove (esp. when asserting the alternatives -- disassembly by cremation or microbes are fairly certain to "not work").
Given that current prices (which I haven't checked lately) were of the order of $30-$50K for head/brain preservation and $130-$150K for whole body preservation it looks like the costs are 4+x cheaper for allowing a hospice path "death" followed by immediate cryonic suspension vs. the current medical paradigm of pulling out all the stops (no restrictions on costs) end-of-life care for people who are certain to die (and have presumably a low quality of life during that period).
I would request that you not even think about responding to this post in a "cryonics won't work" vein unless you really know what you are speaking about (meaning you really understand nanotechnology and nanomedicine and have a good working knowledge of cell biology and current cryonic suspension (vitrification) processes -- the information is out there on the WWW if one bothers to educate oneself). By and large I consider the current medical community to be guilty of malpractice if they only present the two "standard" paths (hospice care vs. full medical intervention) and leave out cryonic suspension. It is interesting that in the current debate regarding controlling health care costs that cryonic suspension has not come up in the discussion as an alternative.
And by "real" functionality, I mean full support for open standards for video & audio w/o Flash, support for really large long term sessions (dozens of windows, hundreds of tabs, running for weeks) without consuming all the CPU (which Mozilla based browsers tend to do) or memory (which Chrome tends to do) on your machine, robust Javascript, Flash and Ad blocking (to prevent outsiders from using your computer as part of the cloud for their own purposes) and most of all "Green-ness" -- do long running browser sessions, particularly large ones, effectively "degrade" all of the tabs, windows and Javascripts (which have no "current" use because nobody is actually *looking* at them) so their CPU use is minimized and they are paged out? [Thus allowing ones OS to minimize power & memory use and hopefully minimize any data transmission charges (for browsers being used over 3G/4G networks)).
And for the people who don't understand the emphasis in retaining large sessions, you have probably never tried to restart a large session (which can take 10+ minutes of maxed DSL bandwidth and 15-20 minutes of maxed CPU time -- the browser being largely unresponsive during that period). You may have also have never tried to restart an old session only to find that the pages in which you were interested no longer existed. (Yes there are ways around these problems but they require plugins and/or large personal save page storage areas.
Cough, no, because I am running a Linux system with a variety of browsers (epiphany, galeon, Firefox, Chromium) and I simply do not run MS software (and to read the ongoing saga, lucky me), why does /. even bother to track these items? We know the MS users are brain-dead (they hover under a belief that the software doesn't have bugs or is secure and that will protect them -- how wrong they are.).
I have no misconceptions that Linux based software is any more secure -- but I rest in confidence that epiphany, galeon, Firefox and Chromium are *all* open source -- and if there is a security problem within them I can update and take advantage of it within hours -- not months as Microsoft seems inclined to do.
Using closed source software is akin to laying oneself out on the Washington Mall and saying, hey "rape me". Its not so bad "I'll recover".
Fortunately, many of the sites I frequent, such as /. or many bugzilla based systems, or even the NIH NCBI databases (up until recently) did not require JS to function reasonably well. I would assert that any site that requires JS to present itself has not thought things through very well. HTML is a passive presentation language, it simply presents information on ones machine as distributed by the provider. That works very well -- be it from /. to bug databases to Wikipedia to Google. One only has to inject JS if one wants to enhance that. E.g. Menus or pseudo-new-windows, or doing some arithmetic in the browser. Those are "+" features -- they are not required to present information. Now one can argue all day about whether the internet is about presenting information or selling you something (its the same debate with advertisements on TV -- which have expanded from 1m every 15 minutes to ~2m every 10 minutes). I choose freedom, the only things which I should have to read/watch are those which I select and demand. Anything inflicted upon me is IMO evil and I would do well to remove it from my life by whatever means.
Yes, I did not go to the website (truth in assertions). And I would not have selected KDE (people who want to run heavy window managers are allowed their choices -- though I would not choose them). I am basing my opinions on the fact that I run a Gnome desktop and it works reasonably well and I have parts of a KDE system installed (on Gentoo) and have no interest in installing the rest of it. There is a point where one just says "no". If there were a KDE LW (LightWeigt) I might consider it but when one talks about an install chewing up hundreds of megabytes on ones hard drive -- one has to begin to consider just saying no.
But why should I have to execute an insecure program in an insecure lanaguage (go on -- Justify to me why Javascript is reallly secure -- esp. when I consider it unlikely that you have read the source code for each of the various implementations in each of the various browsers on your machine). When you have read the code, and you are willing to assert that it is secure (under the threat of liabilty of lawsuits that you claimed something which was fiction) -- then I will begin to take you seriously.
Until then, executing remotely written Javacript on my own computer, i.e. you are letting people program your computer, is for me a largely forbidden act. Because in short there are are a large number of individuals who are either stupid or untrustable. And I do not want either of those groups to be executing code on my machine.
Agreed. I've got NoScript running in most of my Firefox sessions so don't run into Flash problems that often (as Javascript is often used to start Flash) but in working a little with chrome and the FlashBlock extension that seems to be an even better approach.
Now the question will be whether there will be a way to disable the nasty HTML5 video options when advertisers start to abuse those as well. Video should always be "at the user's discretion", precisely because there are probably hundreds of millions of PC's scattered around the world which simply don't have the hardware to be able to show video without it "killing the system" (even running a Pentium IV, I have problems with video on any VT / hardware combination that didn't happen to get the Xorg -> Kernel DRI interface (and that is only one of my VTs)).