Immortality is NOT a benefit, not to yourself, and not to the world population.
I was hoping someone would make that point. To amplify: The extropy.org FAQ's response to this issue seems to be "Continuing to die to prevent overpopulation is like not curing a child's toothache because then it would eat too much". There are two problems with this reasoning.
First of all, the analogy is badly flawed in that the consequences are completely disproportionate: They're comparing overeating with increasing resource scarcity resulting in, at best, mass starvation and deterioration of living conditions or, at worst, global war over said resources.
The second problem is that it states that the solution to both problems is lowering birth rates. Since the birth rate would have to decrease in proportion with the available extension of human lifespans, the result for immortality (excluding natural causes) would be a birth rate of near zero, meaning complete genetic stagnation of the species. Anyone with an understanding of evolution will tell you that this is a recipe for disaster, since it halts the genetic mixing that sexual reproduction provides as a guard against decimation of the population by agents such as disease and other environmental changes.
In short, renewal is an indispensable part of the survival of any species; it would be highly unwise to do away with it as a way of making immortality possible. Besides, I think by and large the attraction of immortality is very superficial -- I submit, only half-jokingly, the case of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.
I was about to say: Ironic they're simultaneously inducting the rapist and the victim
And don't anyone start whining about how a movie can never be exactly the same as the novel it's based on -- first of all it was a short story, and second the entire premise of the movie was changed from a logic play on Hofstadterish self-reference to a run-of-the-mill "I was framed!" whodunit.
And don't even get me started on the product placement.
Would you prefer to have everything like NYTimes.com instead?
Damn it all to hell, TEXT ADS! In a space on the side of the screen! Google figured this out years ago, how long is it going to take for the penny to drop with the rest of these bozos? How hard is it to understand that maximizing annoyances your potential customer base is not good for business?
Seriously. Why does this have to be so difficult? The fact that people are developping countermeasures to your advertising should be lighting a bulb, however dim, somewhere in your mind. What could it mean? Whatever could it mean?
"For more about nukes, gold, and global organized crime, see Thieves World by Claire Sterling."
Oy! Hasn't someone revoked her author's license yet? I would have thought that her credibility went down the drain with her ludicrous "Time of the Assassins", detailing her theory of the fictional KGB/bulgarian plot to kill the pope in the early eighties.
Too many people have short memories...
I can't find a web reference with a big name on it, but this is a good rundown:
Certainly, the "plot to kill the pope" became big grist for the Reaganite propaganda mill. (A book during this time, Claire Sterling's Terror Network , drew a vast web of conspiracy, suggesting the KGB controlled terrorist groups ranging from the IRA in Ireland, to the ETA in Spain, to the PLO in Lebanon, to the FMLN in El Salvador. Why the Communists would support terrorist groups espousing such ideologies as nationalism, ethnic or racial separatism, or Islamic fundamentalism was never made clear. For Sterling, it was alI simply a matter of their united hatred for the "West" and its foul values of democracy, liberty, and justice.) The plot was used as a classic case example of the so-called Soviet "web of terrorism", and was one of the main justifications for a whole series of recriminations, 'anti-terrorist' legislation, and crackdowns on domestic groups.
It's right in front of your eyes, yet still you can't see it.
Grandparent: unless the story furthers the goal of making you even more freightened.
You: The top two stories on CNN. The headline and the one on the top right. 1. Blasts rock Baghdad, kill 20 2. Putin: Iran not developing nukes
I don't see how stories about insurgents in Iraq (essentially equivalent to terrorists, and spun as a threat to the US) and nukes in Iran disprove the original point.
As to people being naturally more interested in their local news, well, sure. But the tendancy is far more pronounced in the USA. There may be any number of reasons for it, but it's certainly the case. Let's compare the top stories on news.bbc.co.uk, for example: Aside from the Baghdad explosion, the top two stories are about Nepal and the Congo.
Open Source software is not as easy to use as most MS products, and in many cases the documentation isn't very good either.
Maybe that's true in the context of the point-and-click desktop (although there's an argument to be made that Windows is only "easier" because everyone learns it first). And even then, necessary admin tasks are certainly not easier -- when something breaks, it tends to stay broken until the next reinstall. Unless you're a "wizard".
This goes double for running a web server. People who point-and-click their way through IIS may get *something* up, in the same way that most people could figure out "apachectl start" with the same amount of effort, but I'd hardly call either of those results a "secure" web server.
Server security is difficult, and making it look easy with some nice GUIs isn't doing anyone any favours.
I agree that the Salvation Army is a very efficient and honest organization in general, but they need to be more careful about certain things, in particular what they do with donated second-hand clothes:
Fortunately, we fundamental christian fanatics do not live by the old testament. We live by the new testament. You know, the part where God sends his son to earth to die for the foriveness of sins... At that point in history (yes, Jesus' existance is a historically verified fact) a relationship with God became available to everyone.
As a curious onlooker (agnostic) may I ask the following: If he's supposed to be perfect, why would God change his covenant with humanity? Shouldn't he have gotten it right the first time? And if different times call for different rules, how do you know the rules in 2004 are still the same? How do you know you haven't missed a messiah? Like maybe the muslims have it right and Mohammed was a prophet of God? For that matter, maybe there've been a dozen since then.
Being offended by a nipple is about equivalent to kids on the playground freaking out about "cooties." It's okay for young children to suck on the goddamned things, but not to see them?
I'm clearly up too late. This sentence caused me to spend about 10 seconds trying to figure out under what circumstances young children would be sucking on cooties.
Hmmmm... but why was the original poster asking specifically for connectors for plenum? Is the outer jacket so much thicker that the arse end of a regular RJ45 won't close down onto it?
Just curious...
Note 1: I don't actually live in new york. But I grew up there. I miss the pizza. And the bagels.
Bagels? I assume by "bagels" you mean doughnut-shaped white bread, because that's what they are in NYC. Now that is sad.
What you want to do is come to Montreal sometime and look up the St. Viateur bakery. Faubourg Ste. Catherine will do in a pinch. They make bagels the way the Universe intended: First boil the dough in honeyed water, *then* bake for a nice crispy crust.
p.s. Maybe this is flamebait? Ah well, if so it'd make a nice change of pace from Emacs vs. vi, KDE vs. Gnome etc. We can do smoked meat next.
According to CNN, sales dropped about 7.5% from 2002 levels of 32.2 billion to 2003 sales of 32.0 billion
Forgive the offtopiccage, but wtf? That's 0.6% not 7.5%. Those are the figures quoted in the article, too, no typos. No wonder these clowns managed to lose $50M with those kinds of math skills...
I don't know what kind of job he's doing, but in any case what I was trying to do was point out the inconsistency: If he thinks giving up on being LUG president is the correct way to deal with Linux use in the military, why not take it to its logical conclusion and "opt out" of participation in the war completely?
I'm not saying it's the best way (see first bullet in my post) -- far from it -- but at least it would be consistent.
It's when good people stand up for their values is when the world becomes a better place.
I agree completely; see paragraph 2 in my original post. Did you even finish reading it before replying? Perhaps I should've been clearer on the inconsistency point.
Look at it this way: Is giving up work completely a resonable action? No, not really.
How about moving? He wouldn't be supporting the US military at all were he living in, say, Switzerland. Hell, I'll even make it easier for him and pick an English-speaking country: Canada?
As much as I admire people making choices based on convinctions and conscience, and as much as I wish more people did, this guy can't really have thought things through or he'd realize:
Perhaps leaving in a huff is not the best way to accomplish his aims;
Even if it were, as a taxpayer he's probably contributing more to the war than as the head of a LUG;
There's no reason Linux couldn't have been used for much, much more evil things than the invasion of Iraq, ever since it has existed. ie, there's nothing new here.
Also, check out that Winspire Success Seminar site. Seminars pertaining to the foot and ankle? That's weird.
Weird? You'd be amazed at the kind of seemingly trivial things to which people will devote enormous energy. I work in the trade show business, so I have some idea. Just as a random sampler, let's take a look at
GES Expo's list of events
(note that this is just for April). Some highlights:
"National Association of Basketball Coaches"
"Washington State Dental Laboratory Association Inc."
"GALVATECH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ZINC & ZINC ALLOY COAT"
"HOME MACHINE QUILTING SHOW"
"National Candle Association"
Oh, And my personal favourite, on page 5:
"NATIONAL TATTOO ASSOCIATION"
Some people's livelihoods depend on unbelievably specialized things you and I basically never think about... Oh, and to keep on topic, there the "Linux Desktop Summit" run by Lindows/Linspire in there. Which of course is of paramount importance, right?
...the song that goes through the whole thing is set to the melody of Joaquin Rodrigo's 'Concierto del Aranguez'
Wow, good ear. Concierto de Aranjuez is one of my favourite pieces, but I didn't pick it up at all with the slower tempo and vocals. In fact when I first read your post I thought "what the hell is this numbskull talking about?"
Something like that might work, but not quite as obvious as what you're describing -- the hypothetical pirate would merely have to edit the movie by blacking out the code, and poof, it's untraceable again.
However, I could see something subtler -- some sort of complex steganography, fractional-second differences in the length of certain scenes (credit roll time?) etc. etc. Could be done...
Loki's Alpha Centauri shipped with two versions of the binaries, eg smacx and smacx.dynamic. The former is statically linked and doesn't depend on any shared libraries or installed compilers, only on the executable format. So as long as Linux supports the ELF format the non-dynamic version of Alpha Centauri will run.
I would assume that they did the same for other games, but don't know for sure. It might be more difficult for 3d games; would it be possible to link against a "universal" OpenGL lib?
An excellent C14 dating summary
on
The Chronoliths
·
· Score: 1
Basically it measures the amount of time since the subject stopped absorbing new C14 from the atmosphere, which in most cases means when it died. (So the post which claims attempting carbon dating on a living organism yielded a "very old" result doesn't make sense.)
So it's been proven to work (see link) but there are lots of assumptions involved and it's very easy to apply it to inappropriate situations. For the "chronoliths" example, it wouldn't work because a) they presumably were never alive (or absorbing atmospheric C14) and b) Even if they had been, there wouldn't be a magic "backwards jump" due to time travel.
I've started to have a much more aggravating problem -- spammers using the email address of an old account of mine for the From: of their spam! I know because undeliverable mails are being returned to me. Is it just me, or is this a new low even by spammer standards?
I'm in the middle of dredging through the headers trying to figure out what the company ultimately responsible is, but even if I manage to find out, I'm not sure what to do with the information. I want blood.
Any suggestions?
Slashdot Mirror
To wit.
The verbal abuse is just an added bonus.
I was hoping someone would make that point. To amplify: The extropy.org FAQ's response to this issue seems to be "Continuing to die to prevent overpopulation is like not curing a child's toothache because then it would eat too much". There are two problems with this reasoning.
First of all, the analogy is badly flawed in that the consequences are completely disproportionate: They're comparing overeating with increasing resource scarcity resulting in, at best, mass starvation and deterioration of living conditions or, at worst, global war over said resources.
The second problem is that it states that the solution to both problems is lowering birth rates. Since the birth rate would have to decrease in proportion with the available extension of human lifespans, the result for immortality (excluding natural causes) would be a birth rate of near zero, meaning complete genetic stagnation of the species. Anyone with an understanding of evolution will tell you that this is a recipe for disaster, since it halts the genetic mixing that sexual reproduction provides as a guard against decimation of the population by agents such as disease and other environmental changes.
In short, renewal is an indispensable part of the survival of any species; it would be highly unwise to do away with it as a way of making immortality possible. Besides, I think by and large the attraction of immortality is very superficial -- I submit, only half-jokingly, the case of Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged.
And don't anyone start whining about how a movie can never be exactly the same as the novel it's based on -- first of all it was a short story, and second the entire premise of the movie was changed from a logic play on Hofstadterish self-reference to a run-of-the-mill "I was framed!" whodunit.
And don't even get me started on the product placement.
Damn it all to hell, TEXT ADS! In a space on the side of the screen! Google figured this out years ago, how long is it going to take for the penny to drop with the rest of these bozos? How hard is it to understand that maximizing annoyances your potential customer base is not good for business?
Seriously. Why does this have to be so difficult? The fact that people are developping countermeasures to your advertising should be lighting a bulb, however dim, somewhere in your mind. What could it mean? Whatever could it mean?
I agree, I would be delighted to see SCOXQ.
You forgot one.
Oy! Hasn't someone revoked her author's license yet? I would have thought that her credibility went down the drain with her ludicrous "Time of the Assassins", detailing her theory of the fictional KGB/bulgarian plot to kill the pope in the early eighties.
Too many people have short memories...
I can't find a web reference with a big name on it, but this is a good rundown:
Certainly, the "plot to kill the pope" became big grist for the Reaganite propaganda mill. (A book during this time, Claire Sterling's Terror Network , drew a vast web of conspiracy, suggesting the KGB controlled terrorist groups ranging from the IRA in Ireland, to the ETA in Spain, to the PLO in Lebanon, to the FMLN in El Salvador. Why the Communists would support terrorist groups espousing such ideologies as nationalism, ethnic or racial separatism, or Islamic fundamentalism was never made clear. For Sterling, it was alI simply a matter of their united hatred for the "West" and its foul values of democracy, liberty, and justice.) The plot was used as a classic case example of the so-called Soviet "web of terrorism", and was one of the main justifications for a whole series of recriminations, 'anti-terrorist' legislation, and crackdowns on domestic groups.
Grandparent: unless the story furthers the goal of making you even more freightened.
You: The top two stories on CNN. The headline and the one on the top right. 1. Blasts rock Baghdad, kill 20 2. Putin: Iran not developing nukes
I don't see how stories about insurgents in Iraq (essentially equivalent to terrorists, and spun as a threat to the US) and nukes in Iran disprove the original point.
As to people being naturally more interested in their local news, well, sure. But the tendancy is far more pronounced in the USA. There may be any number of reasons for it, but it's certainly the case. Let's compare the top stories on news.bbc.co.uk, for example: Aside from the Baghdad explosion, the top two stories are about Nepal and the Congo.
Care to rebut?
Maybe that's true in the context of the point-and-click desktop (although there's an argument to be made that Windows is only "easier" because everyone learns it first). And even then, necessary admin tasks are certainly not easier -- when something breaks, it tends to stay broken until the next reinstall. Unless you're a "wizard".
This goes double for running a web server. People who point-and-click their way through IIS may get *something* up, in the same way that most people could figure out "apachectl start" with the same amount of effort, but I'd hardly call either of those results a "secure" web server.
Server security is difficult, and making it look easy with some nice GUIs isn't doing anyone any favours.
This may be of interest to you.
iBook? Warm feeling? That's your scrotum burning!
As a curious onlooker (agnostic) may I ask the following: If he's supposed to be perfect, why would God change his covenant with humanity? Shouldn't he have gotten it right the first time? And if different times call for different rules, how do you know the rules in 2004 are still the same? How do you know you haven't missed a messiah? Like maybe the muslims have it right and Mohammed was a prophet of God? For that matter, maybe there've been a dozen since then.
Genuinely curious, I'm not trolling...
I'm clearly up too late. This sentence caused me to spend about 10 seconds trying to figure out under what circumstances young children would be sucking on cooties.
The classic informed rant against record label greed was written in 1993 by Steve Albini.
Required reading for anyone angry at the RIAA.
Hmmmm... but why was the original poster asking specifically for connectors for plenum? Is the outer jacket so much thicker that the arse end of a regular RJ45 won't close down onto it? Just curious...
Bagels? I assume by "bagels" you mean doughnut-shaped white bread, because that's what they are in NYC. Now that is sad.
What you want to do is come to Montreal sometime and look up the St. Viateur bakery. Faubourg Ste. Catherine will do in a pinch. They make bagels the way the Universe intended: First boil the dough in honeyed water, *then* bake for a nice crispy crust.
p.s. Maybe this is flamebait? Ah well, if so it'd make a nice change of pace from Emacs vs. vi, KDE vs. Gnome etc. We can do smoked meat next.
Forgive the offtopiccage, but wtf? That's 0.6% not 7.5%. Those are the figures quoted in the article, too, no typos. No wonder these clowns managed to lose $50M with those kinds of math skills...
I don't know what kind of job he's doing, but in any case what I was trying to do was point out the inconsistency: If he thinks giving up on being LUG president is the correct way to deal with Linux use in the military, why not take it to its logical conclusion and "opt out" of participation in the war completely?
I'm not saying it's the best way (see first bullet in my post) -- far from it -- but at least it would be consistent.
It's when good people stand up for their values is when the world becomes a better place.
I agree completely; see paragraph 2 in my original post. Did you even finish reading it before replying? Perhaps I should've been clearer on the inconsistency point.
How about moving? He wouldn't be supporting the US military at all were he living in, say, Switzerland. Hell, I'll even make it easier for him and pick an English-speaking country: Canada?
As much as I admire people making choices based on convinctions and conscience, and as much as I wish more people did, this guy can't really have thought things through or he'd realize:
Weird? You'd be amazed at the kind of seemingly trivial things to which people will devote enormous energy. I work in the trade show business, so I have some idea. Just as a random sampler, let's take a look at GES Expo's list of events (note that this is just for April). Some highlights:
- "National Association of Basketball Coaches"
- "Washington State Dental Laboratory Association Inc."
- "GALVATECH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ZINC & ZINC ALLOY COAT"
- "HOME MACHINE QUILTING SHOW"
- "National Candle Association"
Oh, And my personal favourite, on page 5:- "NATIONAL TATTOO ASSOCIATION"
Some people's livelihoods depend on unbelievably specialized things you and I basically never think about... Oh, and to keep on topic, there the "Linux Desktop Summit" run by Lindows/Linspire in there. Which of course is of paramount importance, right?...the song that goes through the whole thing is set to the melody of Joaquin Rodrigo's 'Concierto del Aranguez'
Wow, good ear. Concierto de Aranjuez is one of my favourite pieces, but I didn't pick it up at all with the slower tempo and vocals. In fact when I first read your post I thought "what the hell is this numbskull talking about?"
But of course, you're absolutely right.
Something like that might work, but not quite as obvious as what you're describing -- the hypothetical pirate would merely have to edit the movie by blacking out the code, and poof, it's untraceable again.
However, I could see something subtler -- some sort of complex steganography, fractional-second differences in the length of certain scenes (credit roll time?) etc. etc. Could be done...
I would assume that they did the same for other games, but don't know for sure. It might be more difficult for 3d games; would it be possible to link against a "universal" OpenGL lib?
Basically it measures the amount of time since the subject stopped absorbing new C14 from the atmosphere, which in most cases means when it died. (So the post which claims attempting carbon dating on a living organism yielded a "very old" result doesn't make sense.)
So it's been proven to work (see link) but there are lots of assumptions involved and it's very easy to apply it to inappropriate situations. For the "chronoliths" example, it wouldn't work because a) they presumably were never alive (or absorbing atmospheric C14) and b) Even if they had been, there wouldn't be a magic "backwards jump" due to time travel.
I've started to have a much more aggravating problem -- spammers using the email address of an old account of mine for the From: of their spam! I know because undeliverable mails are being returned to me. Is it just me, or is this a new low even by spammer standards?
I'm in the middle of dredging through the headers trying to figure out what the company ultimately responsible is, but even if I manage to find out, I'm not sure what to do with the information. I want blood.
Any suggestions?