So you have a general "you" that's what gets backed up. You can create multiple instances that you call vectors. You can live apart as real people... Those new experiences can be merged back into the primary backup that is "you."
There's a slight problem with this rosy future picture.
Vector #1: "What do you mean "we", you genocidal tyrant? And where do you get off calling yourself the "original"? I'm as real a person as you, and there's no way I'm going on this suicide mission. Do it yourself." Original: "You do not talk back to me that way, me! That's it, I'm pressing Delete. Next!" Vector #2: "Crap. I hate me. Me is a bastard."
I think the only SF writer who's really captured what this kind of mind-cloning business would be like is Greg Egan, and you do not want to be a Copy in his future. They get abused and tortured at will by their "originals", who never quite grasp that a Copy is a real person.
Everyone else sugar-coats the idea with the happy pretence that when a copy of you dies, it's not really "you". But they will be. Dying is just as bad whether it's Copy #0 or Copy #1.
No Lovecraft plot could ever be called 'brilliant'.
Indeed. The majority of his plots work out like this:
White male virgin college professor stumbles into a hideous archeological secret: ancient Earth was once inhabited by...... no, it's too hideous, I can barely say it...... the drums! the drums! aieee! the horror...... BLACK PEOPLE!!!!! And some of them were girls!
If such knowedge got out, the world would dissolve into madness. But fortunately no other white male virgin college professors could ever believe such a thing, so we're safe. FOR NOW.
If you've ever read the original (it's free on Gutenberg, I recommend it - or just go follow Dracula Blogged in realtime), it reads very much like a Michael Crichton thriller. The heroes are a bunch of geeks (secretary, doctor, real estate agent) who use turn-of-the-20th-century high-tech devices like Edison dictaphones to collate information and solve the puzzle. In fact, information (knowledge vs superstition) is one of the big themes of the book. Mina Harker's l33t secretarial skills plus the heroes reverse-engineering her telepathic connection to Dracula are what crack the mystery.
It's very proto-cyberpunk, really, and if someone were to do it properly today, it would need to preserve that high-tech flavour, instead of the (enngh) retro-Gothic Victorian psychosexual mess that Francis Ford Coppola gave us.
I'm not sure what he means by strobing, but for me, in many current 3D movies including Avatar, rapid horizontal movement onscreen (like a fast pan left/right) certainly gives me a what I'd call "strobe" or "jaggy" effect where I see multiple single still images instead of fluid motion. The faster the horizontal movement, the more pronounced the strobe effect. It's quite distracting, and it doesn't seem to occur with vertical movement, just horizontal. I don't know why this occurs, but I've seen it in both Real-D and Dolby 3D glasses.
Ah yes, I remember fondly those days when I wanted to hear me some Vera Lynn and had to strap on my steam-powered skis, trudge over the Rocky Mountains to Chicago, fighting mutant coyotes on the trail, only to find out that all the Edison cylinders were sold out due to a shortage of Bakelite, because of the war with the French.
But fifteen years later, when the snows had been cleared by mule-plough, it was so much sweeter to finally own that music. The wait made it worth the while, you see.
Nowadays I just have to think the first two bars and suddenly I have the entire catalog of Justin Bieber transportalised into my cyberscope. Whether I wanted it or not.
That young upstart Steven Jobs has ruined the music experience forever.
You're questioning artificial scarcity? But scarcity, sir, is the foundation of our proud civilisation! We can only flourish as free and noble citizens if we have someone to turn to and say 'No, you can't have that!' Whatever products we create by the sweat of our brows are worth only as much as the tears of a dying orphan who can never afford to pay! And sweet indeed are those tears. They make a man's heart sigh for joy.
If the air were free, who would produce oxygen? Would it grow on trees? You laugh, sir, but that is what you propose! If sunlight were free, what profit would there be in running the sun? Would it just shine there on its own? Pssht! Dangerous nonsense! If space and time were free, could Einstein have ever founded the Relativity Institute? Without gold coin in exchange, why would Newton have created Gravity? Without Kepler Inc's Atlas Foundation charging a computational royalty on the idea of the ellipse, the earth would have fallen into the sun - as indeed it did during the Paris Commune!
This foolish course of action will improverish us all!
Revolution does not come from getting people to vote for a less unsavory politician.
True. Incremental, peaceful, positive change comes from getting people to vote for a less unsavoury politician, and each election cycle the politicians get more and more savoury until you have a better world.
But with revolution, you get to shout and scream a lot and break things and kill lots of people, and that's much more fun than making the world a better place slowly.
and we get excited when we find evidence bacteria might have been there at some point.
Of course we're excited, it means more lifeforms to exterminate! HU-MAN RACE! HU-MAN RACE! We're No. 1! Primates rock! Single-celled organisms suck! Huzzah for Her Majesty's etheric solarwindjammer fleet!
The odds of any aliens considering it worthwhile to travel all the way to our planet, except for the purpose of exterminating us, are extremely small.
And we know precisely the energy cost of interstellar travel, and the motivations of alien species... how?
The only thing we know for sure about quantum mechanics and general relativity are that they must be incomplete because they're mutually contradictory, yet some cosmologists feel perfectly happy extrapolating our ignorance of fundamental physics to all other sentient races, from a billion years in the past to a billion years in the future. That's some cosmic chutzpuh right there.
Area 51 is chock full of advanced but terrestrial technology
... that isn't quite out of beta yet, but if you don't mind a laser Gatling gun that only explodes killing the operator once every fifty shots, is perfectly usable. Oh, and never touch that trailing wire, no not that one, the oth -
FEYOOOWWWWWWOOOOOOOMMMMMM
Jenkins! Cleanup team in Hangar 19! And we're going to need another of those robot duplicates of the General.
Okay, that's the last time we're giving the brass a tour of the labs until we work all the bugs out.
On the mac they weren't able to get rid of the menu bar
Yes. This feature (application developers can't remove the menu) is the first thing that's made me sit up and take notice of the old Apple menubar-at-the-top design, and go 'hmm, actually that was a pretty good idea'.
Pity Apple are going, like Microsoft, in the direction of 'let's remove all hard-coded GUI elements so that the user has to remember a new UI for every app'. Wonder how long it will be before the menu vanishes on OSX as well as on iPad.
The sheer difference in technological development would be the equivalent difference between us, and a common fruit fly.
So... we meet aliens, we find a way into their solar systems, watch as they store up huge container-loads of goodies, we steal it all without any side effects, they scream and yell at us ineffectually and swat us with planet-buster missiles which miss by trillions of lightyears nd then sigh and give up, and we snigger and go on helping ourselves to their stuff?
Slashdot Mirror
If it exists, then the product is worhless; why would toshiba even bother?
Because even if a product is worthless, if you can lie well enough and run fast enough you can sell it to anyone?
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
John Wheeler cries! Then giggles. Then cries some more.
And even then, odds are he'll come back as a wacky comedy buddy-mind-ghost in McCoy's brain with a cloned Genesis body.
So you have a general "you" that's what gets backed up. You can create multiple instances that you call vectors. You can live apart as real people... Those new experiences can be merged back into the primary backup that is "you."
There's a slight problem with this rosy future picture.
Vector #1: "What do you mean "we", you genocidal tyrant? And where do you get off calling yourself the "original"? I'm as real a person as you, and there's no way I'm going on this suicide mission. Do it yourself."
Original: "You do not talk back to me that way, me! That's it, I'm pressing Delete. Next!"
Vector #2: "Crap. I hate me. Me is a bastard."
I think the only SF writer who's really captured what this kind of mind-cloning business would be like is Greg Egan, and you do not want to be a Copy in his future. They get abused and tortured at will by their "originals", who never quite grasp that a Copy is a real person.
Everyone else sugar-coats the idea with the happy pretence that when a copy of you dies, it's not really "you". But they will be. Dying is just as bad whether it's Copy #0 or Copy #1.
Friends don't let friends clone themselves.
No Lovecraft plot could ever be called 'brilliant'.
Indeed. The majority of his plots work out like this:
White male virgin college professor stumbles into a hideous archeological secret: ancient Earth was once inhabited by... ... no, it's too hideous, I can barely say it... ... the drums! the drums! aieee! the horror ... ... BLACK PEOPLE!!!!! And some of them were girls!
If such knowedge got out, the world would dissolve into madness. But fortunately no other white male virgin college professors could ever believe such a thing, so we're safe. FOR NOW.
+ this.
If you've ever read the original (it's free on Gutenberg, I recommend it - or just go follow Dracula Blogged in realtime), it reads very much like a Michael Crichton thriller. The heroes are a bunch of geeks (secretary, doctor, real estate agent) who use turn-of-the-20th-century high-tech devices like Edison dictaphones to collate information and solve the puzzle. In fact, information (knowledge vs superstition) is one of the big themes of the book. Mina Harker's l33t secretarial skills plus the heroes reverse-engineering her telepathic connection to Dracula are what crack the mystery.
It's very proto-cyberpunk, really, and if someone were to do it properly today, it would need to preserve that high-tech flavour, instead of the (enngh) retro-Gothic Victorian psychosexual mess that Francis Ford Coppola gave us.
"It's dead, Jim."
But not as we know it.
I'm not sure what he means by strobing, but for me, in many current 3D movies including Avatar, rapid horizontal movement onscreen (like a fast pan left/right) certainly gives me a what I'd call "strobe" or "jaggy" effect where I see multiple single still images instead of fluid motion. The faster the horizontal movement, the more pronounced the strobe effect. It's quite distracting, and it doesn't seem to occur with vertical movement, just horizontal. I don't know why this occurs, but I've seen it in both Real-D and Dolby 3D glasses.
Steve Jobs killed the music experience
Ah yes, I remember fondly those days when I wanted to hear me some Vera Lynn and had to strap on my steam-powered skis, trudge over the Rocky Mountains to Chicago, fighting mutant coyotes on the trail, only to find out that all the Edison cylinders were sold out due to a shortage of Bakelite, because of the war with the French.
But fifteen years later, when the snows had been cleared by mule-plough, it was so much sweeter to finally own that music. The wait made it worth the while, you see.
Nowadays I just have to think the first two bars and suddenly I have the entire catalog of Justin Bieber transportalised into my cyberscope. Whether I wanted it or not.
That young upstart Steven Jobs has ruined the music experience forever.
You're questioning artificial scarcity? But scarcity, sir, is the foundation of our proud civilisation! We can only flourish as free and noble citizens if we have someone to turn to and say 'No, you can't have that!' Whatever products we create by the sweat of our brows are worth only as much as the tears of a dying orphan who can never afford to pay! And sweet indeed are those tears. They make a man's heart sigh for joy.
If the air were free, who would produce oxygen? Would it grow on trees? You laugh, sir, but that is what you propose!
If sunlight were free, what profit would there be in running the sun? Would it just shine there on its own? Pssht! Dangerous nonsense!
If space and time were free, could Einstein have ever founded the Relativity Institute? Without gold coin in exchange, why would Newton have created Gravity? Without Kepler Inc's Atlas Foundation charging a computational royalty on the idea of the ellipse, the earth would have fallen into the sun - as indeed it did during the Paris Commune!
This foolish course of action will improverish us all!
people that live by no rule other than that of the law.
Agreed. Who do those law-abiding law-abiders think they are? I can't abide them.
If this keeps up, our entire nation will be ruled by law, and then we'll all rue the day, and rue it hard.
Oh no! Whatever will horseshoe makers do!
Corner the luck industry.
Revolution does not come from getting people to vote for a less unsavory politician.
True. Incremental, peaceful, positive change comes from getting people to vote for a less unsavoury politician, and each election cycle the politicians get more and more savoury until you have a better world.
But with revolution, you get to shout and scream a lot and break things and kill lots of people, and that's much more fun than making the world a better place slowly.
and we get excited when we find evidence bacteria might have been there at some point.
Of course we're excited, it means more lifeforms to exterminate! HU-MAN RACE! HU-MAN RACE! We're No. 1! Primates rock! Single-celled organisms suck! Huzzah for Her Majesty's etheric solarwindjammer fleet!
The odds of any aliens considering it worthwhile to travel all the way to our planet, except for the purpose of exterminating us, are extremely small.
And we know precisely the energy cost of interstellar travel, and the motivations of alien species... how?
The only thing we know for sure about quantum mechanics and general relativity are that they must be incomplete because they're mutually contradictory, yet some cosmologists feel perfectly happy extrapolating our ignorance of fundamental physics to all other sentient races, from a billion years in the past to a billion years in the future. That's some cosmic chutzpuh right there.
Area 51 is chock full of advanced but terrestrial technology
... that isn't quite out of beta yet, but if you don't mind a laser Gatling gun that only explodes killing the operator once every fifty shots, is perfectly usable. Oh, and never touch that trailing wire, no not that one, the oth -
FEYOOOWWWWWWOOOOOOOMMMMMM
Jenkins! Cleanup team in Hangar 19! And we're going to need another of those robot duplicates of the General.
Okay, that's the last time we're giving the brass a tour of the labs until we work all the bugs out.
Or after. There's bound to be zombie cases to take up.
If only Umbrella Corporation hadn't bought the rights to SCO...
They have one thing in common. They are both keeping PhD's from doing more valuable research (medicine, fundamental physics, etc.)
And for that we are all very grateful.
Do you really want Apple designers playing with nuclear isotopes, or Google techs doing a bit of DNA hacking just to see what might happen?
The world is safer because Apple and Google keep these guys off the street.
Assuming we need evil to recognize good is just that: an assumption.
We need evil to recognise good in exactly the same way that we need cyanide to recognise pancakes.
On the mac they weren't able to get rid of the menu bar
Yes. This feature (application developers can't remove the menu) is the first thing that's made me sit up and take notice of the old Apple menubar-at-the-top design, and go 'hmm, actually that was a pretty good idea'.
Pity Apple are going, like Microsoft, in the direction of 'let's remove all hard-coded GUI elements so that the user has to remember a new UI for every app'. Wonder how long it will be before the menu vanishes on OSX as well as on iPad.
When OSS copies this abomination, a sad day we will have.
GNOME 3.0 and Ubuntu Unity are already on it. Two abominations with Bad Idea frosting (it's chilli vodka turnip flavoured!) coming right up...
++++++++ this!
Where's the Like button?
They were obviously dwarf test pilots.
But don''t you see, that's the real coverup here!
What effect will our dealings with dwarves have on US diplomatic relations with the Rivendell Elves?
The sheer difference in technological development would be the equivalent difference between us, and a common fruit fly.
So... we meet aliens, we find a way into their solar systems, watch as they store up huge container-loads of goodies, we steal it all without any side effects, they scream and yell at us ineffectually and swat us with planet-buster missiles which miss by trillions of lightyears nd then sigh and give up, and we snigger and go on helping ourselves to their stuff?
A terrifying vision of the dark future.
Servalan == B7