In many ways, the article and various/. comments made here are a great reminder of exactly how much personal data some of us even WILLINGLY put out there on the web. It's not that way for everyone, but I'm sure plenty of/. users, for example, have done enough stuff on the net that someone could put together a pretty good profile of the person from a Google search and some simple digging into what's found there, without having to go into anything fancy.
Heck, I'm just thinking about what I've done, and wonder how much someone could pull up about me from everything I've made available. It's a little strange to think about.
First, a nitpick - when you say "In fact, I would find it plausible that the earliest life forms on this planent may have been immortal.", you mean "unbounded lifespan" instead of immortal - cause they're still mortal, just that their various cellular mechanisms don't degrade or stop working along some sort of genetic schedule.
Second, you're right, there would be evolutionary pressures against such life. By a generation dying off and making room for the next in regards to resources, it does help the overall forward evolution of the species.
And as long as the genes in a lifeform allow it to live to reproductive age, and allow it to reproduce, then if the gene shuts off after a certain amount of time, there's no real harm - there is no evolutionary pressure against a gene that doesn't take effect/cease to work post-reproduction, and if it offers other benefits, the gene would propagate.
But I don't think any of that is truly relevant anymore.
Why? We as a species have come to a point that we no longer need to use evolutionary success as a guide as to the value of something. We have gained the technology to overcome various evolved features. Because we have evolved brains and bodies that allow us to understand the world around us and change it. And that ability is the strongest survival characteristic we have.
Unbounding human lifespans will lead to new problems. But it will also lead to new opportunities. And perhaps we'll do some of this growing up you say we need to do when we can live longer, when people have more time to gain experiences, to consider ideas, and the like.
I was being sarcastic toward the post I replied to.
I don't see any difference between curing illness and curing aging. I don't think there's anything 'unnatural and wrong' about doing so, and look foward to what life is going to be like at the turn of the next milennium.
As in, yes, I do expect them to figure out how to stop/reverse/compensate for aging in my lifetime.
You really think that you'd get bored after only a couple hundred years?
Think about all the things you could do.
Work in a career for 50 years, then retire for a decade and work on hobbies, then go back to school and learn something new, then move on to that new career for another 50 years, and so on.
Take a few years to backpack around various parts of the world.
Save up the money to live without working for a while, and dedicate yourself to solving some age-old problem, or becoming great at some form of art.
Heck, learn to focus your attention on one thing for long periods of time, to work against that feeling of boredom.
I can't possibly imagine getting bored of life so quickly. Especially with how much things are changing right now - and they'll only change faster as things go forward.
Of course. Aging is the process of the body breaking down, and if they cure aging, it's going to mean that your body stays in it's prime for a not longer. It doesn't mean we're going to spend 1000 years getting more and more frail - because people COULDN'T live 1000 years doing so, the body would fall apart completely before then.
I don't see why everyone assumes that extending lifespans by huge amounts would result in extending just the tail end over that time. Damn Tithonus Syndrome.
There is a reason for people not being able to see well.
There is a reason people can't communicate with each other over long distances.
Just because something has been a certain way, doesn't mean it's SUPPOSED to be that way. Sometimes, things just are the way they are. That is, until they change.
Should the technology become available, you don't have to extend your life. You can live without all this fancy technology. BTW - you don't go to the hospital and stuff, do you? There is a reason for people dying from diseases, after all, and curing them would be unnatural and wrong.
So, that means I can now download BitTorrents with all the fun of completely mislabeled torrents, incomplete versions being passed on, and seeing 50 slightly different versions of the same things available with only a couple people offering up most of them, so you end up with a ton of half-downloaded versions of things because people went offline, and you finally give up and try another version, only to see the same thing happen?
I have a KVM switch on my desk, but because I have a dual monitor setup, I hardly ever use it, finding it easier and more efficient to just remote desktop into the machine, and show that desktop on one of the two monitors.
I still have instant access to both monitors, useful when I need to open a document or scroll through it, copy/paste between the two machines, or talk to a cow-orker on IM about something while working on the secondary machine.
I have seen something that women find multi-monitor setups to be more helpful in productivity than men do, so that might have something to do with the differences in opinion.
Re:Movies while working are newsworthy & produ
on
A Dual Monitor Experiment
·
· Score: 4, Informative
How about both?
I have a dual-monitor setup, with multi-desktop ability. I hate the thought of having to go back to working on a single monitor - fortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
It's especially useful when I'm doing a remote desktop into another machine - one monitor shows my machine, the other the remote machine. I have a switchview that will let me select between the machines, but I rarely use it because it is just more useful to have them both accessible at the same time.
It's done in partnership with EA, so they are only using characters from EA games. It's the same group of games they used for the video game music videos that have been made - which are actually pretty cool, if I must say, even if most of the music sucks. (The video for "Stacy's Mom" is absolutely great)
Yeah, but you see, if they mention that, then they can't pretend that they're smarter and more efficient than all of NASA and Lockheed-Martin and everyone put together. Now you've gone and shattered their illusions of being so smart that they could personally replace NASA.
At least they can all continue to pretend they write better code than anyone at Microsoft.
Bull. Trying to make it sound like approval voting is TOUGHER than ranking the candidates is very much a distortion.
If you know the 'rankings' you'd give the candidates, and then have to vote approval voting, all you have to do is decide where the cutoff point is, and vote for everyone you rank higher than that.
But I don't need rankings. All I need to do is go in and think to myself 'would I mind seeing this person in office'? If so, then vote for them, otherwise, don't. I don't need to look over eight candidates and decide which order I want to put them in, no wait, switch these two around, oops, I forgot to mark a '3' and went from '2' to '4', damnit.
First, Math Against Tyranny is a great article that demonstrates much of the value of the electoral college. It was enough to convince me of the value of it, and convert me from anti-EC to pro-EC.
Second, I agree that IRV is more complex than we'd like to see in a voting system. I would rather see approval voting implemented, as it is just as simple as the current method, and gives much more valuable results.
Note that you don't need to remove the EC to implement a better voting system like approval voting.
Exactly. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for a non-luddite, intelligent person to be against the way that GM crops are currently being handled in the world.
The problem is that if the luddites come up with concrete reasons, then you have things that can be solved, and they will no longer have reasons to be against them. They they're forced to either accept them, or rail against them for no reason whatsoever.
I have serious issues with Monsanto and the way everthing is handled. I don't have a problem with GM in theory - it's just the practice that has me upset.
I know that this is enough to make me never again touch a Diebold ATM if I can help it.
It also makes me wonder if my credit union has any Diebold equipment, and what it would take for them to change to a company that doesn't demonstrate total incompetence in designing secure, auditable systems.
That is one reason I will likely never bother with any of these mass-market graphical MMORPG games for any type of play that involves role-playing. Sure, I played Diablo II for quite a while, but never with any intention or expectation of RP, though I know that's not quite a MMORPG.
I'm busy MUDding for that, where you can expect RP on a MUD that has no means for OOC chat because they don't want it at all. Where I have no real plans to get to know the person behind any of the characters because I want to keep the RP as honest as possible.
There just isn't real RP on any game with a large player base, and it just isn't going to happen. Not enough people to police it, to make sure people stick to high standards.
And if 50% of MMORPG gamers believe they're there to RP, you're right, they have absolutely no clue what it is.
Until you've had to do something in a game that was not what you wanted to do, but was the appropriate path for a character, then you haven't RPed. (I have had to do so, and even had to contact another player OOC to help create an event to keep my character from doing something I REALLY did not want to happen)
While I still come around E2 some, I decided that if I was going to play a text-based game, I'd really play a text-based game, and found myself playing over on Achaea, where at least they admit it's a game.
And the level powers on Achaea are a lot more fun.
Approval Voting is also by far better than the current scheme, and is both easier to use for the voters, and easier to process the results.
I would be happy with either one, however. I'm almost tempted to vote for him just for wanting someone in office to help fix the voting system. That's one of very few reasons I'd consider it, though.
It is really important that we find a better voting scheme, to fix the incredible brokenness of the current system.
Yes, OSS allows anyone who wants to look at the source. Honestly, do that many people do so? Not really. With enough eyes, true, all bugs are shallow. But I doubt there is anything even close to 'enough' for any software past the simplest of apps.
OSS doesn't usually enjoy the same level of testing that commercial software does. Good commercial software (emphasis on GOOD) has a large, dedicated testing team that has put a lot of time and effort into developing various tools, well-documented test plans, huge suites of test cases, regular automated test runs that catch introduced bugs quickly, and so in. It is the rare OSS project that has anything close to this.
I honestly bet that an OSS project that went through a full commercial development and testing process would be the one to grab the best of both worlds, and really demonstrate quality, but I don't see much of that happening.
And, in those days, a malicious data file would cause an app to produce bad output or just crash. There was no execution of arbitrary code from data files.
Remember, just because nobody exploited such apps does not mean that such a thing was possible. The fact that an app would crash on a bad data file tells us that it was extremely likely that the data was attempting to be executed. People just hadn't really figured out how to use that to run arbitrary code at that point.
It's recently been spread around that Kryptonite U-locks that use cylindrical keys can very easily be picked - thus that those locks should be treated as useless. Does this mean that they recently made a change that made this possible? Nope - someone tested a 15 year old lock, and it was just as vunerable. Just that nobody (or very few) knew how to pick them then.
I bet if we went back and started trying to manipulate those 'old apps' you mention with carefully crafted data files, we'd find they are vunerable, and don't merely 'crash' in all cases.
The thing is that there are a few ways to handle variable-length buffers that eliminate all buffer overruns. There are hundreds of ways to handle them that allow for possible overruns. And the differences between the two groups can be extremely, extremely minor.
And all it takes is the tiniest of holes, and people can exploit it. There are even buffer overflow exploits that have been found for code compiled under a system that adds some pretty robust overflow checking means to the compiled code, and also for code running on a system that disables execution in data area. Seriously. I've seen the examples.
Nothing has changed in the way applications are programmed that now allows this to happen. What has happened is that people have just become more skilled in manupulating such situations. The possibilities were always there, it's just been more recent that people have been able to take advantage of them - and made such errors more visible.
Slashdot Mirror
In many ways, the article and various /. comments made here are a great reminder of exactly how much personal data some of us even WILLINGLY put out there on the web. It's not that way for everyone, but I'm sure plenty of /. users, for example, have done enough stuff on the net that someone could put together a pretty good profile of the person from a Google search and some simple digging into what's found there, without having to go into anything fancy.
Heck, I'm just thinking about what I've done, and wonder how much someone could pull up about me from everything I've made available. It's a little strange to think about.
First, a nitpick - when you say "In fact, I would find it plausible that the earliest life forms on this planent may have been immortal.", you mean "unbounded lifespan" instead of immortal - cause they're still mortal, just that their various cellular mechanisms don't degrade or stop working along some sort of genetic schedule.
Second, you're right, there would be evolutionary pressures against such life. By a generation dying off and making room for the next in regards to resources, it does help the overall forward evolution of the species.
And as long as the genes in a lifeform allow it to live to reproductive age, and allow it to reproduce, then if the gene shuts off after a certain amount of time, there's no real harm - there is no evolutionary pressure against a gene that doesn't take effect/cease to work post-reproduction, and if it offers other benefits, the gene would propagate.
But I don't think any of that is truly relevant anymore.
Why? We as a species have come to a point that we no longer need to use evolutionary success as a guide as to the value of something. We have gained the technology to overcome various evolved features. Because we have evolved brains and bodies that allow us to understand the world around us and change it. And that ability is the strongest survival characteristic we have.
Unbounding human lifespans will lead to new problems. But it will also lead to new opportunities. And perhaps we'll do some of this growing up you say we need to do when we can live longer, when people have more time to gain experiences, to consider ideas, and the like.
d00d, saige is a ch1x0r. :)
I have the license plate to prove it.
I was being sarcastic toward the post I replied to.
I don't see any difference between curing illness and curing aging. I don't think there's anything 'unnatural and wrong' about doing so, and look foward to what life is going to be like at the turn of the next milennium.
As in, yes, I do expect them to figure out how to stop/reverse/compensate for aging in my lifetime.
You really think that you'd get bored after only a couple hundred years?
Think about all the things you could do.
Work in a career for 50 years, then retire for a decade and work on hobbies, then go back to school and learn something new, then move on to that new career for another 50 years, and so on.
Take a few years to backpack around various parts of the world.
Save up the money to live without working for a while, and dedicate yourself to solving some age-old problem, or becoming great at some form of art.
Heck, learn to focus your attention on one thing for long periods of time, to work against that feeling of boredom.
I can't possibly imagine getting bored of life so quickly. Especially with how much things are changing right now - and they'll only change faster as things go forward.
Of course. Aging is the process of the body breaking down, and if they cure aging, it's going to mean that your body stays in it's prime for a not longer. It doesn't mean we're going to spend 1000 years getting more and more frail - because people COULDN'T live 1000 years doing so, the body would fall apart completely before then.
I don't see why everyone assumes that extending lifespans by huge amounts would result in extending just the tail end over that time. Damn Tithonus Syndrome.
There is a reason for people not flying.
There is a reason for people not being able to see well.
There is a reason people can't communicate with each other over long distances.
Just because something has been a certain way, doesn't mean it's SUPPOSED to be that way. Sometimes, things just are the way they are. That is, until they change.
Should the technology become available, you don't have to extend your life. You can live without all this fancy technology. BTW - you don't go to the hospital and stuff, do you? There is a reason for people dying from diseases, after all, and curing them would be unnatural and wrong.
So, that means I can now download BitTorrents with all the fun of completely mislabeled torrents, incomplete versions being passed on, and seeing 50 slightly different versions of the same things available with only a couple people offering up most of them, so you end up with a ton of half-downloaded versions of things because people went offline, and you finally give up and try another version, only to see the same thing happen?
Gee, where do I sign up?
Hey, there's nothing wrong with sending information on every song you play somewhere, as long as it's the right place.
I have a KVM switch on my desk, but because I have a dual monitor setup, I hardly ever use it, finding it easier and more efficient to just remote desktop into the machine, and show that desktop on one of the two monitors.
I still have instant access to both monitors, useful when I need to open a document or scroll through it, copy/paste between the two machines, or talk to a cow-orker on IM about something while working on the secondary machine.
I have seen something that women find multi-monitor setups to be more helpful in productivity than men do, so that might have something to do with the differences in opinion.
How about both?
I have a dual-monitor setup, with multi-desktop ability. I hate the thought of having to go back to working on a single monitor - fortunately, I don't see that happening anytime soon.
It's especially useful when I'm doing a remote desktop into another machine - one monitor shows my machine, the other the remote machine. I have a switchview that will let me select between the machines, but I rarely use it because it is just more useful to have them both accessible at the same time.
It's done in partnership with EA, so they are only using characters from EA games. It's the same group of games they used for the video game music videos that have been made - which are actually pretty cool, if I must say, even if most of the music sucks. (The video for "Stacy's Mom" is absolutely great)
Yeah, but you see, if they mention that, then they can't pretend that they're smarter and more efficient than all of NASA and Lockheed-Martin and everyone put together. Now you've gone and shattered their illusions of being so smart that they could personally replace NASA.
At least they can all continue to pretend they write better code than anyone at Microsoft.
Bull. Trying to make it sound like approval voting is TOUGHER than ranking the candidates is very much a distortion.
If you know the 'rankings' you'd give the candidates, and then have to vote approval voting, all you have to do is decide where the cutoff point is, and vote for everyone you rank higher than that.
But I don't need rankings. All I need to do is go in and think to myself 'would I mind seeing this person in office'? If so, then vote for them, otherwise, don't. I don't need to look over eight candidates and decide which order I want to put them in, no wait, switch these two around, oops, I forgot to mark a '3' and went from '2' to '4', damnit.
IRV is a more complicated approval.
First, Math Against Tyranny is a great article that demonstrates much of the value of the electoral college. It was enough to convince me of the value of it, and convert me from anti-EC to pro-EC.
Second, I agree that IRV is more complex than we'd like to see in a voting system. I would rather see approval voting implemented, as it is just as simple as the current method, and gives much more valuable results.
Note that you don't need to remove the EC to implement a better voting system like approval voting.
Exactly. There are plenty of legitimate reasons for a non-luddite, intelligent person to be against the way that GM crops are currently being handled in the world.
The problem is that if the luddites come up with concrete reasons, then you have things that can be solved, and they will no longer have reasons to be against them. They they're forced to either accept them, or rail against them for no reason whatsoever.
I have serious issues with Monsanto and the way everthing is handled. I don't have a problem with GM in theory - it's just the practice that has me upset.
Sounds like Trogdor would have an easy time winning swimming meets, if he decided to go that route.
Or would his little wings cause too much drag and counteract the properly-shaped body?
I know that this is enough to make me never again touch a Diebold ATM if I can help it.
It also makes me wonder if my credit union has any Diebold equipment, and what it would take for them to change to a company that doesn't demonstrate total incompetence in designing secure, auditable systems.
That is one reason I will likely never bother with any of these mass-market graphical MMORPG games for any type of play that involves role-playing. Sure, I played Diablo II for quite a while, but never with any intention or expectation of RP, though I know that's not quite a MMORPG.
I'm busy MUDding for that, where you can expect RP on a MUD that has no means for OOC chat because they don't want it at all. Where I have no real plans to get to know the person behind any of the characters because I want to keep the RP as honest as possible.
There just isn't real RP on any game with a large player base, and it just isn't going to happen. Not enough people to police it, to make sure people stick to high standards.
And if 50% of MMORPG gamers believe they're there to RP, you're right, they have absolutely no clue what it is.
Until you've had to do something in a game that was not what you wanted to do, but was the appropriate path for a character, then you haven't RPed. (I have had to do so, and even had to contact another player OOC to help create an event to keep my character from doing something I REALLY did not want to happen)
While I still come around E2 some, I decided that if I was going to play a text-based game, I'd really play a text-based game, and found myself playing over on Achaea, where at least they admit it's a game.
And the level powers on Achaea are a lot more fun.
Approval Voting is also by far better than the current scheme, and is both easier to use for the voters, and easier to process the results.
I would be happy with either one, however. I'm almost tempted to vote for him just for wanting someone in office to help fix the voting system. That's one of very few reasons I'd consider it, though.
It is really important that we find a better voting scheme, to fix the incredible brokenness of the current system.
I'm starting to buy this idea less and less.
Yes, OSS allows anyone who wants to look at the source. Honestly, do that many people do so? Not really. With enough eyes, true, all bugs are shallow. But I doubt there is anything even close to 'enough' for any software past the simplest of apps.
OSS doesn't usually enjoy the same level of testing that commercial software does. Good commercial software (emphasis on GOOD) has a large, dedicated testing team that has put a lot of time and effort into developing various tools, well-documented test plans, huge suites of test cases, regular automated test runs that catch introduced bugs quickly, and so in. It is the rare OSS project that has anything close to this.
I honestly bet that an OSS project that went through a full commercial development and testing process would be the one to grab the best of both worlds, and really demonstrate quality, but I don't see much of that happening.
And, in those days, a malicious data file would cause an app to produce bad output or just crash. There was no execution of arbitrary code from data files.
Remember, just because nobody exploited such apps does not mean that such a thing was possible. The fact that an app would crash on a bad data file tells us that it was extremely likely that the data was attempting to be executed. People just hadn't really figured out how to use that to run arbitrary code at that point.
It's recently been spread around that Kryptonite U-locks that use cylindrical keys can very easily be picked - thus that those locks should be treated as useless. Does this mean that they recently made a change that made this possible? Nope - someone tested a 15 year old lock, and it was just as vunerable. Just that nobody (or very few) knew how to pick them then.
I bet if we went back and started trying to manipulate those 'old apps' you mention with carefully crafted data files, we'd find they are vunerable, and don't merely 'crash' in all cases.
The thing is that there are a few ways to handle variable-length buffers that eliminate all buffer overruns. There are hundreds of ways to handle them that allow for possible overruns. And the differences between the two groups can be extremely, extremely minor.
And all it takes is the tiniest of holes, and people can exploit it. There are even buffer overflow exploits that have been found for code compiled under a system that adds some pretty robust overflow checking means to the compiled code, and also for code running on a system that disables execution in data area. Seriously. I've seen the examples.
Nothing has changed in the way applications are programmed that now allows this to happen. What has happened is that people have just become more skilled in manupulating such situations. The possibilities were always there, it's just been more recent that people have been able to take advantage of them - and made such errors more visible.