No, they couldn't. If you were to make a copy without destroying the original (as would be just as likely with this sort of 'transporter') the original is still you. The copy is still a copy, no matter how perfect. Your consciousness is in the original, not the copy, and certainly not in both.
And in any event, only a complete idiot would step onto that transporter. Either that, or someone who's seen one too many eps of Star Trek.
Oh really, that's just rich. I must have "gaps in [my] heart" because the question of religion doesn't interest me. Replace the word 'religion' with the word 'golf' and you'll get some idea of just how ludicrous this statement is.
Or not. Given your stance I somehow doubt you could see my point of view.
You're leaving out the possibility of 'none' being the equivalent of 'god who?', as a previous post so eloquently put it.
It seems the religious or the strongly anti-religious are incapable of believing that there are people in the world who simply don't care about the question at all. I'm one of them; pondering the existence of god, gods, whatever is of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. I simply *don't care*. Not even a little bit.
If someone believes in a religion, that's fine, no skin off my back so long as they don't harass me with their beliefs. If someone doesn't, same thing goes; believe what you like, just don't try to recruit me. Because - *I don't care*. Really. Honest. The question is of no value in my world, and therefore of less than trivial interest.
Why do people find that hard to believe? There are a great many things that people don't care about and spend little, if any, time thinking about. Why should religion be any different?
These questions don't require any sort of religious belief, or even any extended thought concerning religion at all. Philosophy and religion are not the same thing.
I don't really see the point of a multiple-mailbox argument. You can set up any number of webmail accounts you like (e.g., @yahoo.com) within a few minutes and access them from anywhere in the world.
I have @home cable and never use the 3 or 4 or however many mail accounts came with it (I only activated one of them because I had to when I signed up). I use webmail (yahoo, wildmail, operamail, etc.) exclusively precisely because it doesn't matter where I am or what system I'm using - I can still get to my mail so long as I have an internet connection. Why bother with AOL-specific, or any ISP-specific, mail accounts?
And thank the gods they aren't. Star Trek-style transporters don't move an object from one place to another, nor would this application of the technology do so even if it were viable. It would essentially 'take a picture' of the exact state of an object and recreate it at the destination point, *destroying the original*.
These transporters are essentially high-tech ways to fax a copy of the original from one place to another. The original doesn't go anywhere; it's disassembled and destroyed. It doesn't matter if some of the original atoms or energy is used to contruct the copy, *it's still a copy*.
So if you were to step into a transporter like this (and you can't, because such a thing can't really be built) you'd be committing suicide. Your copy might think it's you, but it isn't; it's a copy. *You* would be dead - irrevocably dead.
Transporters are one of the most hare-brained schemes I've ever seen. Who in their right mind would consent to being killed so that his copy could be reconstructed at some other location? That's insanity any way you cut it.
I've heard people say "well, I'd still think I was the original" and I want to slam their heads into a wall a few dozen times repeating the phrase "*you* wouldn't think anything! *You* would be dead! The *copy* would think it's the original, but *you* wouldn't be thinking a goddamn thing at all because *you* wouldn't exist anymore!"
If transporters ever did become a reality you wouldn't see me stepping on one. Ever.
I used to be a great proponent of breaking up MS, but after reviewing anti-trust action history I don't think it'd amount to a hill of beans. MS (in all of its various parts) would still go about acting as a single company, violating more laws and generating more court cases along the way. And after our last presidential election I've pretty much lost faith in the court system anyway.
Rather, I hope the U.S. government does nothing more than let MS off with a stern warning. Why? Because *Microsoft is it's own worst enemy*. Just take a look at the pricing scheme for Windows XP, the silly anti-piracy activation scheme, and the attempt to lock everyone into using certain MS-approved media formats. All of these things *piss people off*. If Microsoft thinks it can get away with this crap then it will continue to piss people off even more as time goes by.
The more people that get pissed off, the more around the fringes that dump MS and move to Linux. As the annoyances wear on this fringe gets bigger and bigger until...eventually the hundredth monkey is reached. And MS finds itself in a world of hurt as even those who've put up with it's crap for years jump ship, eroding away all but the staunchest of user bases.
Let MS do the dirty deeds. They may turn a profit in the short run, but in the long they'll do more to destroy themselves than any anti-trust action ever could. MS, like the RIAA and others, has already provent that it can't adapt; let it flail against the asteroid until it hits ground zero.
Stability? Are you joking? MS Office crashes regularly and in such a great variety of ways I'm still seeing new ways for it to die, after all of these years.
I work with several hundred Win machines every day - don't tell *me* that Office is more stable than Linux-based offerings; in my experience it's quite a bit *less* stable than the Linux equivalents. And while my evidence may be anecdotal it's in complete contradiction to your statements.
Of course, if you have some empirical evidence to offer up in support of your claims....
My preference would be for a 'Johnny Mnemonic' kind of interface. No keyboard, no mouse, just 3D video glasses and data gloves. You could use a variety of objects to do different actions (standard or set up as you please), or call up a keyboard or a mouse by 'touching' those icons if/when you thought it necessary or convenient.
Example: looking through the glasses you see a superimposed 'screen', of any size since you can fill the entire visual field if you so desire. You can also see your disembodied hands when you lift them into your visual field (but if below that line, you could drink a cup of coffee while reading the news without triggering a selection).
To the left and right of the screen would be a selection of icons that you could 'tap', opening up submenus of more icons or choices that would allow you to run programs, etc. These icons could either be whatever the industry standard is or icons that you've set up yourself, with your own menu choices. Two of these icons would be 'mouse' and 'keyboard'. Tap 'mouse' and one of your hands becomes a mouse pointer, tap 'keyboard' and a standard virtual keyboard pops up at the bottom of your field of vision which you can type on (and if you can't touch type, that's fine - remember, you can see your virtual hands while they're in your LOS).
Minimal equipment, as customizable as you could possibly want, and you can summon up virtual keyboards and mice with a simple gesture.
Your argument is flawed from the outset. Programmers can read; they know the terms of the GPL. Programmers have brains, and therefore at least the potential for critical thinking; they can see how the GPL might be applied to their code.
Given that, everyone who uses the GPL does so with open eyes, aware that their code might be employed or even resold by a for-profit corporation. That's obvious right from the beginning.
Yet many tens of thousands of people still choose the GPL as their license of choice. Clearly they have a different take on the GPL than you do. The GPL suits them just fine, which is why they choose it in the first place.
Because the cpu cycles are mine to do with as I please? I paid for the computer; I'll decide how it's to be used. If you don't approve of my choices, that's just too damned bad, now isn't it?
Just took another look at the AtheOS screen site. The developers have really been plugging away; of the so-called 'niche' OS's this one seems to be the most consistent in it's progress, and doing things in a reasonable, well-ordered fashion.
Plus, the desktop GUI is alot easier on the eyes than any I've seen in Linux (shallow, I know, but I don't care - I want my GUI to *look nice*). The KDE and GNOME folks could buy a clue or two from AtheOS in this department. Love Linux, but it's clear that the various GUI's could really use some artistic help.
So long as it's GPL'd I wouldn't care, assuming it can do the job as well as (or better than) Linux. From what I've seen of it the interface is much nicer and slicker than either the KDE or Gnome desktops.
If, however, it isn't GPL'd and I can't use it under the terms of the GPL, or do with the source code as I see fit, I wouldn't care how well it outperformed Linux. My frustrations with closed-source OS's has gotten to the point where I just won't use them, period.
Or perhaps consider replacing the ignorant losers who can't be bothered to learn how to use an email client, or who dismiss email because it isn't as 'important' as an actual letter (it wasn't around in the days of their youth, therefore it doesn't count).
Really, we've got to get some Congress critters who aren't living in the middle of the last century. It says something about the hope of success concerning internet laws when Congress itself demonstrably ignores email and pays attention only to paper.
Laws against murder aren't contrary to the 1st Amendment. Clearly, being killed violates one's right to free speech, religion, freedom of the press, and especially freedom of assembly.
So what? The same could be said of any college boy's apartment, yet (sadly) I don't see any laws banning college boys, their drunken revelries, or their moronic "it's-all-about-the-base" music from community neighborhoods.
Sounds like these people aren't bad neighbors. They couldn't be, or other laws could be used to shut them down. But weren't, because the only thing a bunch of uptight assholes could come up with was an attack on their web-based business.
I'll trade the circumspect hookers for a house full of male college students any day of the week.
Somebody modded this 'insightful'? The moderator must've been smoking crack.
As for the writer, maybe he doesn't realize that *every programmer in the world*, as well as just about every scientist, 'freeloads' off the knowledge that others have acquired. That's kind of the point of the system: so you don't have to reinvent the wheel, axle, or wagon, but rather can move on to steam-power locomotives.
Reading the manual is great. Having an asshole with a pole rammed up his ass accusing people of 'freeloading off the knowledge of others' forgets that *he too* is a freeloader by his own definition and thus worthy of nothing but contempt.
The fact that AOL lingo made it into a draft irc terminology document doesn't change the fact that 'chat rooms' belongs to AOL and should be left with that horrific POS 'service'.
But that still doesn't answer my question. Is AOL the home of terrorists as much as it's the home of pedophiles?
What I'd like to see is a shot at a distributed supercomputer cluster utilizing the spare cpu cycles of computers on high-speed internet connections (cable or DSL). Since efficiency would be remarkably degraded by slow communication times and the fact that many of these computers would be running Office (ahem), you'd have to scale up at least one order of magnitude.
Technically I can't see why this wouldn't be feasible. It would be beyond SETI and protein folding in that the 'control center' could change what problem was being worked on at any time. It may not be incredibly practical compared to setting up specific machines in a single large room, but it would be free and have a potential user base in the hundreds of thousands or millions.
Imagine: instead of the same SETI screen output time and again, you'd get a message on your SS saying "would you like to see what your computer is working on right now? How about high-pressure fluid dynamics in environment x?"
Swap "Linux" and "Windows" and you get the exact same attitude that Windows users dish out whenever their precious OS suffers the slightest bit of criticism.
Both sides of the debate have their share of idiots and fanatics. But fanatics of any stripe are still fools, morons, and goatse.cx'ers.
Regardless of whether they drool over pictures of Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates.
Max
p.s. frankly, Linus is cuter, and Linux has a cooler mascot.
Slashdot Mirror
No, they couldn't. If you were to make a copy without destroying the original (as would be just as likely with this sort of 'transporter') the original is still you. The copy is still a copy, no matter how perfect. Your consciousness is in the original, not the copy, and certainly not in both.
And in any event, only a complete idiot would step onto that transporter. Either that, or someone who's seen one too many eps of Star Trek.
Max
Oh really, that's just rich. I must have "gaps in [my] heart" because the question of religion doesn't interest me. Replace the word 'religion' with the word 'golf' and you'll get some idea of just how ludicrous this statement is.
Or not. Given your stance I somehow doubt you could see my point of view.
Max
You're leaving out the possibility of 'none' being the equivalent of 'god who?', as a previous post so eloquently put it.
It seems the religious or the strongly anti-religious are incapable of believing that there are people in the world who simply don't care about the question at all. I'm one of them; pondering the existence of god, gods, whatever is of absolutely no interest to me whatsoever. I simply *don't care*. Not even a little bit.
If someone believes in a religion, that's fine, no skin off my back so long as they don't harass me with their beliefs. If someone doesn't, same thing goes; believe what you like, just don't try to recruit me. Because - *I don't care*. Really. Honest. The question is of no value in my world, and therefore of less than trivial interest.
Why do people find that hard to believe? There are a great many things that people don't care about and spend little, if any, time thinking about. Why should religion be any different?
Max
These questions don't require any sort of religious belief, or even any extended thought concerning religion at all. Philosophy and religion are not the same thing.
Max
I don't really see the point of a multiple-mailbox argument. You can set up any number of webmail accounts you like (e.g., @yahoo.com) within a few minutes and access them from anywhere in the world.
I have @home cable and never use the 3 or 4 or however many mail accounts came with it (I only activated one of them because I had to when I signed up). I use webmail (yahoo, wildmail, operamail, etc.) exclusively precisely because it doesn't matter where I am or what system I'm using - I can still get to my mail so long as I have an internet connection. Why bother with AOL-specific, or any ISP-specific, mail accounts?
Max
Jeez, I'm a geek. And you're right, I don't use AIM to chat with dirty old men (like myself) who pose as young, nubile women.
No, I do it the old-fashioned way: face-to-face. Which sometimes leads to sex with more than just your hand.
You should try it sometime.
Max
And thank the gods they aren't. Star Trek-style transporters don't move an object from one place to another, nor would this application of the technology do so even if it were viable. It would essentially 'take a picture' of the exact state of an object and recreate it at the destination point, *destroying the original*.
These transporters are essentially high-tech ways to fax a copy of the original from one place to another. The original doesn't go anywhere; it's disassembled and destroyed. It doesn't matter if some of the original atoms or energy is used to contruct the copy, *it's still a copy*.
So if you were to step into a transporter like this (and you can't, because such a thing can't really be built) you'd be committing suicide. Your copy might think it's you, but it isn't; it's a copy. *You* would be dead - irrevocably dead.
Transporters are one of the most hare-brained schemes I've ever seen. Who in their right mind would consent to being killed so that his copy could be reconstructed at some other location? That's insanity any way you cut it.
I've heard people say "well, I'd still think I was the original" and I want to slam their heads into a wall a few dozen times repeating the phrase "*you* wouldn't think anything! *You* would be dead! The *copy* would think it's the original, but *you* wouldn't be thinking a goddamn thing at all because *you* wouldn't exist anymore!"
If transporters ever did become a reality you wouldn't see me stepping on one. Ever.
Max
I used to be a great proponent of breaking up MS, but after reviewing anti-trust action history I don't think it'd amount to a hill of beans. MS (in all of its various parts) would still go about acting as a single company, violating more laws and generating more court cases along the way. And after our last presidential election I've pretty much lost faith in the court system anyway.
Rather, I hope the U.S. government does nothing more than let MS off with a stern warning. Why? Because *Microsoft is it's own worst enemy*. Just take a look at the pricing scheme for Windows XP, the silly anti-piracy activation scheme, and the attempt to lock everyone into using certain MS-approved media formats. All of these things *piss people off*. If Microsoft thinks it can get away with this crap then it will continue to piss people off even more as time goes by.
The more people that get pissed off, the more around the fringes that dump MS and move to Linux. As the annoyances wear on this fringe gets bigger and bigger until...eventually the hundredth monkey is reached. And MS finds itself in a world of hurt as even those who've put up with it's crap for years jump ship, eroding away all but the staunchest of user bases.
Let MS do the dirty deeds. They may turn a profit in the short run, but in the long they'll do more to destroy themselves than any anti-trust action ever could. MS, like the RIAA and others, has already provent that it can't adapt; let it flail against the asteroid until it hits ground zero.
Max
Stability? Are you joking? MS Office crashes regularly and in such a great variety of ways I'm still seeing new ways for it to die, after all of these years.
I work with several hundred Win machines every day - don't tell *me* that Office is more stable than Linux-based offerings; in my experience it's quite a bit *less* stable than the Linux equivalents. And while my evidence may be anecdotal it's in complete contradiction to your statements.
Of course, if you have some empirical evidence to offer up in support of your claims....
Max
And something like 90% of the US public show favor for one of the most brain-dead presidents in U.S. history.
Yep, that public opinion is something special....
Max
My preference would be for a 'Johnny Mnemonic' kind of interface. No keyboard, no mouse, just 3D video glasses and data gloves. You could use a variety of objects to do different actions (standard or set up as you please), or call up a keyboard or a mouse by 'touching' those icons if/when you thought it necessary or convenient.
Example: looking through the glasses you see a superimposed 'screen', of any size since you can fill the entire visual field if you so desire. You can also see your disembodied hands when you lift them into your visual field (but if below that line, you could drink a cup of coffee while reading the news without triggering a selection).
To the left and right of the screen would be a selection of icons that you could 'tap', opening up submenus of more icons or choices that would allow you to run programs, etc. These icons could either be whatever the industry standard is or icons that you've set up yourself, with your own menu choices. Two of these icons would be 'mouse' and 'keyboard'. Tap 'mouse' and one of your hands becomes a mouse pointer, tap 'keyboard' and a standard virtual keyboard pops up at the bottom of your field of vision which you can type on (and if you can't touch type, that's fine - remember, you can see your virtual hands while they're in your LOS).
Minimal equipment, as customizable as you could possibly want, and you can summon up virtual keyboards and mice with a simple gesture.
Max
Your argument is flawed from the outset. Programmers can read; they know the terms of the GPL. Programmers have brains, and therefore at least the potential for critical thinking; they can see how the GPL might be applied to their code.
Given that, everyone who uses the GPL does so with open eyes, aware that their code might be employed or even resold by a for-profit corporation. That's obvious right from the beginning.
Yet many tens of thousands of people still choose the GPL as their license of choice. Clearly they have a different take on the GPL than you do. The GPL suits them just fine, which is why they choose it in the first place.
Max
Because the cpu cycles are mine to do with as I please? I paid for the computer; I'll decide how it's to be used. If you don't approve of my choices, that's just too damned bad, now isn't it?
Max
Just took another look at the AtheOS screen site. The developers have really been plugging away; of the so-called 'niche' OS's this one seems to be the most consistent in it's progress, and doing things in a reasonable, well-ordered fashion.
Plus, the desktop GUI is alot easier on the eyes than any I've seen in Linux (shallow, I know, but I don't care - I want my GUI to *look nice*). The KDE and GNOME folks could buy a clue or two from AtheOS in this department. Love Linux, but it's clear that the various GUI's could really use some artistic help.
Max
I'd forgotten that the ones removed had pre-selected themselves. You're right, on all counts.
Max
So long as it's GPL'd I wouldn't care, assuming it can do the job as well as (or better than) Linux. From what I've seen of it the interface is much nicer and slicker than either the KDE or Gnome desktops.
If, however, it isn't GPL'd and I can't use it under the terms of the GPL, or do with the source code as I see fit, I wouldn't care how well it outperformed Linux. My frustrations with closed-source OS's has gotten to the point where I just won't use them, period.
Max
Or perhaps consider replacing the ignorant losers who can't be bothered to learn how to use an email client, or who dismiss email because it isn't as 'important' as an actual letter (it wasn't around in the days of their youth, therefore it doesn't count).
Really, we've got to get some Congress critters who aren't living in the middle of the last century. It says something about the hope of success concerning internet laws when Congress itself demonstrably ignores email and pays attention only to paper.
Max
A question explored in the first movie. Unrealistically, only one person chose to return to the Matrix.
I think in real life just about everyone would choose to return, and probably try to kill anyone who got in their way.
Humanity likes 'safety', even when the aforementioned 'safety' is a load of horseshit.
Max
Laws against murder aren't contrary to the 1st Amendment. Clearly, being killed violates one's right to free speech, religion, freedom of the press, and especially freedom of assembly.
Max
So what? The same could be said of any college boy's apartment, yet (sadly) I don't see any laws banning college boys, their drunken revelries, or their moronic "it's-all-about-the-base" music from community neighborhoods.
Sounds like these people aren't bad neighbors. They couldn't be, or other laws could be used to shut them down. But weren't, because the only thing a bunch of uptight assholes could come up with was an attack on their web-based business.
I'll trade the circumspect hookers for a house full of male college students any day of the week.
Max
Somebody modded this 'insightful'? The moderator must've been smoking crack.
As for the writer, maybe he doesn't realize that *every programmer in the world*, as well as just about every scientist, 'freeloads' off the knowledge that others have acquired. That's kind of the point of the system: so you don't have to reinvent the wheel, axle, or wagon, but rather can move on to steam-power locomotives.
Reading the manual is great. Having an asshole with a pole rammed up his ass accusing people of 'freeloading off the knowledge of others' forgets that *he too* is a freeloader by his own definition and thus worthy of nothing but contempt.
Max
The fact that AOL lingo made it into a draft irc terminology document doesn't change the fact that 'chat rooms' belongs to AOL and should be left with that horrific POS 'service'.
But that still doesn't answer my question. Is AOL the home of terrorists as much as it's the home of pedophiles?
Max
What I'd like to see is a shot at a distributed supercomputer cluster utilizing the spare cpu cycles of computers on high-speed internet connections (cable or DSL). Since efficiency would be remarkably degraded by slow communication times and the fact that many of these computers would be running Office (ahem), you'd have to scale up at least one order of magnitude.
Technically I can't see why this wouldn't be feasible. It would be beyond SETI and protein folding in that the 'control center' could change what problem was being worked on at any time. It may not be incredibly practical compared to setting up specific machines in a single large room, but it would be free and have a potential user base in the hundreds of thousands or millions.
Imagine: instead of the same SETI screen output time and again, you'd get a message on your SS saying "would you like to see what your computer is working on right now? How about high-pressure fluid dynamics in environment x?"
Max
chat rooms? The internet doesn't have 'chat rooms' - those exist only on AOL.
The internet has IRC channels, IM, ICQ, etc., but not 'chat rooms'.
So I'm curious: did these guys use the internet to coordinate their activities, or AOL? The two are *not* one and the same.
Max
Swap "Linux" and "Windows" and you get the exact same attitude that Windows users dish out whenever their precious OS suffers the slightest bit of criticism.
Both sides of the debate have their share of idiots and fanatics. But fanatics of any stripe are still fools, morons, and goatse.cx'ers.
Regardless of whether they drool over pictures of Linus Torvalds or Bill Gates.
Max
p.s. frankly, Linus is cuter, and Linux has a cooler mascot.