Suppose you PROBE there is no soul, because, physically, no soul is needed. Maybe the problem was the definition of soul. What forces a "god" not to revive us (no revive us, but maybe undie-us), in an inmortal way, if we've done the things well?
I think that was the point in the movie AI, and I haven't figured out that as of yet, I just understood it. We don't need to HAVE a "physical" soul, complementary to ourselves and separate from ourselves, to actually have a soul.
In brief, we do HAVE a soul, and it is us, we are our souls, and that soul is what makes us us. He just need to discover what IS us exactly, and that would be our soul. And nobody could EVER probe we will not live forever in heaven if we do the right thing. God (or whoever has enough power... aliens?) could reinstantiate us and in a way we'll never die.
So the thing is, we are our soals, everything else are just attachments. The question is: what is us?
Suppose you magically disappear, maybe some alien frooze a spehere of matter that contained you, so no electron or any matter of any kind are moving, you are just paused. Are you dead? Nobody knows, except the aliens.
Suppose you just dissapear (say, are vanished from physical reality). Well, you will never know if you are dead, or just frozen. Anyway, you would have no opinion on this regard, but others would consider you 100% dead. Of course, if you knew you'd vanish, you still would not know if you will die. So, are you really dead? Nobody knows.
Suppose wake up one morning and there is "another you" sleeping with you. Which one is you? Suppose one dies. Are you dead? According to your idea od what is "you", you will never know if you are dead (the "real" you).
All this seems to go nowhere, but it does try to go somewhere. The point is there really is NO you at all. There's a circular reasoning built in each of us humans that defines what we think it's AS (or "you"). Well, bad news, we ARE NOT. I mean, we are, but we are not what we think we are, there's no unity in us. We are a bunch of matter scatted, that runs a system that attaches a self-concious module in circular fashion to our particular instance of existance, as opposed to our "type" (the problem is our type is constantly redefined on the go, as our experiences and reasonings are part of us).
To ANY outsider (non human like) a perfect clone of us that is transfered our memories, reasoning and values would obviously be regarded as US as well ("Oh, he mutated there!!"). And it would be us, only that we would be using other matter to exist.
We regard ourselves as US as long as our particular instance of existance never ends. Whenever our particular instance of existance is supposed to have a finite end, we regard ourselves as mortals. So the trick to imortality is to devise ways in which we'd all agree our "instance of exitance" has never stopped beign, and that "WE (whatever we are now)" is the same "evolved or not" instance of the past US.
But the important thing to have in mind is that we really aren't. We are just matter flowing in a very elegant and complex structure. Any sufficiently advanced creature would regard us as non-being, or being just a simple machine, just as we think viruses are not beigns, or that "vaccum cleaners", cars or "simple AI" are not beings at all, but "machines".
Anyway, don't pass the world and let's allow the illusion to ontinue to enlighten our suffering souls!;)
You still have to chose GTK (GTK#) or MFC (Windows.Forms)...so you are at the same place you started today.
Mono will either help GTK or MFC grow, it will probably help MFC more that it will help GTK. If you where a company, would you rather write an app in GTK# so that I would looks weird under Windows or use MFC and hope someone does the famous "MFC2GTK mappings as in SWT"?:)
Yes, and the market is composed of buyers and sellers. They are NOT mandating what privates should buy or sell, they are just stating what they want to buy (thatincludes they want the souces, for security, auditing and avoid getting locked into propietary stuff).
I don't see a problem with that. You can buy whatever you like with your money. Let them buy what they think is best for their country. Well bought OSS is better than surrendering the dollars to foreign monopolies.
It's stupid to have to sell apples and cars to the US, so that they allow you to copy Windows and Office, so you can mail your friends, surf the net and write a document/spreadsheet. Actually, that's what 90% of the users in the world do. I REPEAT: It's stupid to have to export real stuff (as in "I CAN'T COPY APPLES"!) to be able to use a copy a Windows and Office. It's even more stupid if you have to pay for the 90% of the same functionality over and over and over again, and in the process funding that developer so that they can conquer and lock more more markets.
The US can do what they want, if they want to have uncompetitive companies on every field except software, they can mandate that the goverment, the states, schools and every company use propietary stuff (MS, Oracle, etc, etc).
Microsoft/Oracle/etc earning "locally" come from...guess what... USA companies lossing revenues!! No earning comes out of thin air, the only part that comes out of thin air is when you carge this monopoly software to South Africa or Peru. If you are not charging those countries, they you are transfering General Motors, AOL and everyone elses money to the monopolists and the law buyers.
Words are meaningless stupid and ugly, ideas are intriguing.
In Neal's books that's the case. But ideas are not novels. Sorry, I just don't agree a book or world can be told without a good story to make it believable.
Ideas are not scarce. Usefull, intriguing and well deployed universes and stories are, especially, if they have some ground on which to stand.
Sorry, I really don't mind people having Neal as a God. I didn't like it, personal taste. If you are looking for cool ideas (technological ones) and some cyberpunk parody and poetry, Neal is the best...
Well, I can only say I didn't like it as a story, but I enjoyed many interesting "partial views" like the nanotech world, or forgetting about material stuff (printing "Goods"). I liked other things too, but as a story I found it going nowhere specific, just "progresing in time", like a soap opera. I don't like hi style either, but yes, that only means I have different taste, and I can say with 99% confidence that those books are classics, so they must have some value.... somewhere:)
Anyone who doesn't grasp Snow Crash is technically and aesthetically retarded.
It was really a book for people that like to think of the future as Fanstasyland...I am pretty sure you lack the most basic skills necesary to grasp the complete incoherence and bad taste of Neal (it really isn't your fault though, you didn't have a choice).
Oh, I wouldn't know that. I thought it was meant to be believable...it was not. I didn't know I was supposed to be a parody!
I love Douglas Adam's humour, I also like in-book jokes from Avimov, Simmons and specially, Clarke's way to include jokes but instead of making the story's world unbelievable, they make the characters more real and human! If I was told Neal was Science Parody I may have enjoyed a little bit, maybe!
What happens when they need functionality that the open source world doesn't offer.
That doesn't happen. Open Source is not a kind of product, but what under what conditions you will accept to purchase software. If the seller never let's you own the software you are funding then the Goverment can't buy it (not even to self support it if the developer drops the product).
Remember, there are hundreds of rules that must be followed if you want to be a goverment provider. This is just one more of the requirements, and one that makes a lot of sense.
Why pay billions every year to end up owning nothing, getting more dependant on a foreing monopolist. Putting billions and billions on open source will really be a bargain: nobody can charge you ever again for it, nor force you to upgrade, nor lock you into it. And the pools of countries investing in Open Source ("Public Goods") will grow, and these funds are "additive"...
MS has done great things, and keeps doing great things, but "the world" no longer wants to pay the monopolistic rent, they realized they want to pay for the cost of production. And they get "National Security", a local software develoment markets and a better current account as a bonus.
BEWARE of The Diamond Age.... there is NO ending. When I first read it i tough I had a defective book...but heck, I was there at page 713...and technically, it WAS end of story. But all the things that came before, all the tiny details about EVERYTHING, including an infants "digital" book that told us some kind of "customizable" sad cinderella that lasted chapters, was there for no reason at all, except to show how cool the technology was and how sensitive the author could get....
Be carefull if you buy it! You might want to try other book before...for sure (but still, it's better than Snow Crash...I couldn't get past page 40 or something like that)!
Confirms me I was wise to stop reading after reading all the ridiculous "deliver the pizza late and you are a dead deliveryman" thingie. That was the most stupid thing I read in years, from page 1 to page...what was it...page 30??
Well, I read The Dimaond Age, and I like the world and insight, but there was no story behing it, nothing interesting or believable at all. The end was really bad, no wonder it was the first book I got rid off with relief (I gave it to a friend on his birthday...).
But I had already bought Snow Crash. Well, I found it so hilariously ridiculous and stupid, it's now been granted the "I can't read this" gold medal. Ok, I am nobody, but god, I never really have that sensation where you feel you are the only one that thinks author X really really sucks. I mean, I like Asimov and every classic, including Neuromancer and a lot of strage stuff. But Snow Crash and Diamond Age? I really find them uttely low quality novels with some nice futurism insight.
Therefore, I put it to you that by definition there is indeed an "internet economy".
Yes, and the company that sets up the phorum pay taxes for their exmployees or hardware, the telecommters pay they taxes as well, just like ordinary workers and people downloading music pay for taxes as well.
The problem here is WHO collects those taxes. If I am hired as telecommuter, not many taxes apply in for the contractor (they can buy at as an "international service from a single person individual"), and I locally, can try to not report the sale as much as I could.
The war now will be who collects the taxes...and how to make sure they can't be avoided, the Internet has made some taxes difficult or impossible to track...
Not 100% accurate. You are assuming the buyer of Red Hat expects to keep profit from selling their distribution. They might as well buy Red Hat in an attempt to hamper linux's future, missusing the patents and forcing many companies to stop using Linux.
If (North) Americans stop buying chinesse stuff china will collapse, not the inverse. China must buy food and many other vital suppies.
Now, the 2 billion population of china is a different beast. As China grows, we'll reach the day when china is the biggest single buyer of many products... (not single seller).
Good tip, but trusting the values to cookies is not recommended. I tend to only use sessions, and have a local variable userid that can only be changed by autenticating. SQL statements include the userid where applicable, and since only stripts can change them I feel secure. If I want some extra security (for the user, not me) I record and compare the remote IP (or the one that the proxies tell me) everytime with the autenticated IP. SSL would help, but I will it's too much for some cases.
I don't know, my digital camera takes 5MB pictures in uncompressed mode. The pro cameras now approach 20MB uncompressed. I wouldn't make a lot of difference if you use a mac or a PC, _granted you have more than enough ram_. And RAM is as cheap as alcohol these days. You can have a 2 GB PC for $300 or less...
Gimp can be used on any plataform (well, many...including Windows of course), so eventually it should make no difference. You could also run Photoshop under Linux with WINE...so...and since the hardware can be the same as Windows (yours probably is, as well as mine) then it should be a bit slower.
So... I don't even know if the thread makes sense at all, unless people are retouching 1GB photos...
Slashdot Mirror
And why exactly would you want to do that?
... or ... because we have all eggs in just one basquet now? ... or ... because the space is big and interesting?
Because we can?
The answer is not 48! (couldn't resist!)
Suppose you PROBE there is no soul, because, physically, no soul is needed. Maybe the problem was the definition of soul. What forces a "god" not to revive us (no revive us, but maybe undie-us), in an inmortal way, if we've done the things well?
I think that was the point in the movie AI, and I haven't figured out that as of yet, I just understood it. We don't need to HAVE a "physical" soul, complementary to ourselves and separate from ourselves, to actually have a soul.
In brief, we do HAVE a soul, and it is us, we are our souls, and that soul is what makes us us. He just need to discover what IS us exactly, and that would be our soul. And nobody could EVER probe we will not live forever in heaven if we do the right thing. God (or whoever has enough power... aliens?) could reinstantiate us and in a way we'll never die.
So the thing is, we are our soals, everything else are just attachments. The question is: what is us?
Suppose you magically disappear, maybe some alien frooze a spehere of matter that contained you, so no electron or any matter of any kind are moving, you are just paused. Are you dead? Nobody knows, except the aliens.
;)
Suppose you just dissapear (say, are vanished from physical reality). Well, you will never know if you are dead, or just frozen. Anyway, you would have no opinion on this regard, but others would consider you 100% dead. Of course, if you knew you'd vanish, you still would not know if you will die. So, are you really dead? Nobody knows.
Suppose wake up one morning and there is "another you" sleeping with you. Which one is you? Suppose one dies. Are you dead? According to your idea od what is "you", you will never know if you are dead (the "real" you).
All this seems to go nowhere, but it does try to go somewhere. The point is there really is NO you at all. There's a circular reasoning built in each of us humans that defines what we think it's AS (or "you"). Well, bad news, we ARE NOT. I mean, we are, but we are not what we think we are, there's no unity in us. We are a bunch of matter scatted, that runs a system that attaches a self-concious module in circular fashion to our particular instance of existance, as opposed to our "type" (the problem is our type is constantly redefined on the go, as our experiences and reasonings are part of us).
To ANY outsider (non human like) a perfect clone of us that is transfered our memories, reasoning and values would obviously be regarded as US as well ("Oh, he mutated there!!"). And it would be us, only that we would be using other matter to exist.
We regard ourselves as US as long as our particular instance of existance never ends. Whenever our particular instance of existance is supposed to have a finite end, we regard ourselves as mortals. So the trick to imortality is to devise ways in which we'd all agree our "instance of exitance" has never stopped beign, and that "WE (whatever we are now)" is the same "evolved or not" instance of the past US.
But the important thing to have in mind is that we really aren't. We are just matter flowing in a very elegant and complex structure. Any sufficiently advanced creature would regard us as non-being, or being just a simple machine, just as we think viruses are not beigns, or that "vaccum cleaners", cars or "simple AI" are not beings at all, but "machines".
Anyway, don't pass the world and let's allow the illusion to ontinue to enlighten our suffering souls!
You still have to chose GTK (GTK#) or MFC (Windows.Forms)...so you are at the same place you started today.
:)
Mono will either help GTK or MFC grow, it will probably help MFC more that it will help GTK. If you where a company, would you rather write an app in GTK# so that I would looks weird under Windows or use MFC and hope someone does the famous "MFC2GTK mappings as in SWT"?
Great thread I must say, started a little bit...and turned into a quite Insightfull one. Cya arround!
Yes, and the market is composed of buyers and sellers. They are NOT mandating what privates should buy or sell, they are just stating what they want to buy (thatincludes they want the souces, for security, auditing and avoid getting locked into propietary stuff).
I don't see a problem with that. You can buy whatever you like with your money. Let them buy what they think is best for their country. Well bought OSS is better than surrendering the dollars to foreign monopolies.
It's stupid to have to sell apples and cars to the US, so that they allow you to copy Windows and Office, so you can mail your friends, surf the net and write a document/spreadsheet. Actually, that's what 90% of the users in the world do. I REPEAT: It's stupid to have to export real stuff (as in "I CAN'T COPY APPLES"!) to be able to use a copy a Windows and Office. It's even more stupid if you have to pay for the 90% of the same functionality over and over and over again, and in the process funding that developer so that they can conquer and lock more more markets.
The US can do what they want, if they want to have uncompetitive companies on every field except software, they can mandate that the goverment, the states, schools and every company use propietary stuff (MS, Oracle, etc, etc).
Microsoft/Oracle/etc earning "locally" come from...guess what... USA companies lossing revenues!! No earning comes out of thin air, the only part that comes out of thin air is when you carge this monopoly software to South Africa or Peru. If you are not charging those countries, they you are transfering General Motors, AOL and everyone elses money to the monopolists and the law buyers.
Words are meaningless stupid and ugly, ideas are intriguing.
In Neal's books that's the case. But ideas are not novels. Sorry, I just don't agree a book or world can be told without a good story to make it believable.
Ideas are not scarce. Usefull, intriguing and well deployed universes and stories are, especially, if they have some ground on which to stand.
Sorry, I really don't mind people having Neal as a God. I didn't like it, personal taste. If you are looking for cool ideas (technological ones) and some cyberpunk parody and poetry, Neal is the best...
Well, I can only say I didn't like it as a story, but I enjoyed many interesting "partial views" like the nanotech world, or forgetting about material stuff (printing "Goods"). I liked other things too, but as a story I found it going nowhere specific, just "progresing in time", like a soap opera. I don't like hi style either, but yes, that only means I have different taste, and I can say with 99% confidence that those books are classics, so they must have some value .... somewhere :)
Anyone who doesn't grasp Snow Crash is technically and aesthetically retarded.
It was really a book for people that like to think of the future as Fanstasyland...I am pretty sure you lack the most basic skills necesary to grasp the complete incoherence and bad taste of Neal (it really isn't your fault though, you didn't have a choice).
Oh, I wouldn't know that. I thought it was meant to be believable...it was not. I didn't know I was supposed to be a parody!
I love Douglas Adam's humour, I also like in-book jokes from Avimov, Simmons and specially, Clarke's way to include jokes but instead of making the story's world unbelievable, they make the characters more real and human! If I was told Neal was Science Parody I may have enjoyed a little bit, maybe!
What happens when they need functionality that the open source world doesn't offer.
That doesn't happen. Open Source is not a kind of product, but what under what conditions you will accept to purchase software. If the seller never let's you own the software you are funding then the Goverment can't buy it (not even to self support it if the developer drops the product).
Remember, there are hundreds of rules that must be followed if you want to be a goverment provider. This is just one more of the requirements, and one that makes a lot of sense.
Why pay billions every year to end up owning nothing, getting more dependant on a foreing monopolist. Putting billions and billions on open source will really be a bargain: nobody can charge you ever again for it, nor force you to upgrade, nor lock you into it. And the pools of countries investing in Open Source ("Public Goods") will grow, and these funds are "additive"...
MS has done great things, and keeps doing great things, but "the world" no longer wants to pay the monopolistic rent, they realized they want to pay for the cost of production. And they get "National Security", a local software develoment markets and a better current account as a bonus.
... his premises outshine his endings
BEWARE of The Diamond Age.... there is NO ending. When I first read it i tough I had a defective book...but heck, I was there at page 713...and technically, it WAS end of story. But all the things that came before, all the tiny details about EVERYTHING, including an infants "digital" book that told us some kind of "customizable" sad cinderella that lasted chapters, was there for no reason at all, except to show how cool the technology was and how sensitive the author could get....
Be carefull if you buy it! You might want to try other book before...for sure (but still, it's better than Snow Crash...I couldn't get past page 40 or something like that)!
Confirms me I was wise to stop reading after reading all the ridiculous "deliver the pizza late and you are a dead deliveryman" thingie. That was the most stupid thing I read in years, from page 1 to page...what was it...page 30??
Well, I read The Dimaond Age, and I like the world and insight, but there was no story behing it, nothing interesting or believable at all. The end was really bad, no wonder it was the first book I got rid off with relief (I gave it to a friend on his birthday...).
But I had already bought Snow Crash. Well, I found it so hilariously ridiculous and stupid, it's now been granted the "I can't read this" gold medal. Ok, I am nobody, but god, I never really have that sensation where you feel you are the only one that thinks author X really really sucks. I mean, I like Asimov and every classic, including Neuromancer and a lot of strage stuff. But Snow Crash and Diamond Age? I really find them uttely low quality novels with some nice futurism insight.
Simmons, Dan
Hyperion
What, are Corporations not allowed any rights, because public opinion says they're evil?
Who gives them right? The society, or some other small group of guys? There lies your answer...
Man, some one needs to go back to 'Programming 101'. void functions do not return values.
Man, someone needs to go back to 'Grammar 101'.
Therefore, I put it to you that by definition there is indeed an "internet economy".
Yes, and the company that sets up the phorum pay taxes for their exmployees or hardware, the telecommters pay they taxes as well, just like ordinary workers and people downloading music pay for taxes as well.
The problem here is WHO collects those taxes. If I am hired as telecommuter, not many taxes apply in for the contractor (they can buy at as an "international service from a single person individual"), and I locally, can try to not report the sale as much as I could.
The war now will be who collects the taxes...and how to make sure they can't be avoided, the Internet has made some taxes difficult or impossible to track...
Not 100% accurate. You are assuming the buyer of Red Hat expects to keep profit from selling their distribution. They might as well buy Red Hat in an attempt to hamper linux's future, missusing the patents and forcing many companies to stop using Linux.
Destructive buyouts are not _that_ rare...
The very existence of DEATH TO SCO, Inc. would drive down SCO's stock price, which would make it even easier to acquire.
It would drive the price UP, not down, and SCO shareholders would be very happy to see such a company created.
A large comunity of activists can do a lot of things, but the last thing they want to do is benefit the "agressor".
If (North) Americans stop buying chinesse stuff china will collapse, not the inverse. China must buy food and many other vital suppies.
... (not single seller).
Now, the 2 billion population of china is a different beast. As China grows, we'll reach the day when china is the biggest single buyer of many products
Good tip, but trusting the values to cookies is not recommended. I tend to only use sessions, and have a local variable userid that can only be changed by autenticating. SQL statements include the userid where applicable, and since only stripts can change them I feel secure. If I want some extra security (for the user, not me) I record and compare the remote IP (or the one that the proxies tell me) everytime with the autenticated IP. SSL would help, but I will it's too much for some cases.
I don't know, my digital camera takes 5MB pictures in uncompressed mode. The pro cameras now approach 20MB uncompressed. I wouldn't make a lot of difference if you use a mac or a PC, _granted you have more than enough ram_. And RAM is as cheap as alcohol these days. You can have a 2 GB PC for $300 or less...
Gimp can be used on any plataform (well, many...including Windows of course), so eventually it should make no difference. You could also run Photoshop under Linux with WINE...so...and since the hardware can be the same as Windows (yours probably is, as well as mine) then it should be a bit slower.
... I don't even know if the thread makes sense at all, unless people are retouching 1GB photos...
So