We'll never have a brain-machine interface like the one you're talking about, though.
We most likely will, it would just require advanced nanotechnology and a much better understanding of brain physiology than we have now (easier said than done, I know). Although it would likely happen decades after systems that just tie a display into the optic nerve and the input into basic nerve impulses or muscle movements.
"Never" is an extremely broad statement to make, given the time scale it implies. The only way I could really see it being true barring some unforseen insurmountable technical difficulty is if, by the time the technology is avaialable, traditional biological brains have been improved upon in other mediums to the extent that there's no point making advanced interfaces for them, except for nostalgic/historical purposes. I'd imagine it would still be done by someone, though.
Obama's really been dead for nearly 10 years of a lung infection.
I find it interesting that you state this as a verifiable fact, rather than a loosely-supported at best supposition. You do realized that believing any story wholeheartedly as long as it differs from that of the official sources is still being overly credulous, right?
Did you get amnesia during the Bush presidency and only wake up at Obama's inaguration? Because that's the only explanation I can think of for this statement.
he's working on killing the constitution
killing off freedoms and way of life previously lived in the US
Care to explain what you mean by this, or should I just continue assuming you're kind of hyperbolic and insane?
Bleeding-heart socialism is another--thinking that because the wealthy have more property than they need to live comfortably, it's okay to keep seizing their money in ever increasing amount to fund an endlessly increasing number of entitlements for the lower classes
A) This hasn't happened - look at the historical tax rates in the US compared to now.
B) You act like "welfare" is the only thing tax revenues are ever spent on, and that rich people gain no benefit from not living in a Mad-Max anarchist hellscape. They get to keep their heads and have their property rights protected and contracts enforced, among other things.
C) If the Tocqueville quote is always true, why are so many people (including middle- and lower-income ones) concerned about the national debt?
Divorced from everyone else, more economic freedom seems like a good thing; ideally we could provide for the common good with nothing but voluntary charity for welfare, roads, etc., with no forced fees, but as a practical matter, as this point in our technological development, you're just advocating feudalism. You should also define your terms. You clearly regard progressive taxation as a violation of "fairness" and property rights, so what would you be happy with? A flat percentage from everyone? A flat *amount* from everyone? No taxes at all?
#2 Scientists (*cough* physicists) would stop being so dang dogmatic.
The first part was so vague and general as to be useless, but for this part I'll bite: Go ahead, tell us about your perpetual motion machine/reformulation of General Relativity/antigravity machine/theory of everthing that the mean old dogmatic scientists refuse to believe. You are of course the first person in history to come up with such a thing and assume no one takes you seriously only because of small-mindedness rather than the inherent flaws and mistaken assumptions of your model. Or it may be a more general objection, and you're just mad at them for not believing in ESP and ghosts.
Because your name here fits you so well (wandering idiot), we thought we'd all let you know that you can stop trying to play "smart" now already, as we know you're an idiot. You even said it yourself, wandering idiot, lmao!
What? Seriously, what?
The subject line isn't mine, it's the grandparent poster's. And I'm not sure what my self deprecating username has to do with anything (all people are idiots, as judged by the amout of possible knowledge in the universe). Do you really think you're going to insult me by repeating the handle I picked myself?
...You're the host file guy, aren't you? Yay, I have a/. enemy!
Perhaps YOU can get "on topic", instead of trying the 2 oldest troll tricks in the book, of "I can't read your writing" &/or "you're crazy", etc./et al?
Has it ever occurred to you that there's a reason you get so many responses claiming your posts are hard to read and that you're probably insane? (Hint: They are, and you are, or at least do a good impression of it)
I'm not sure what you're going on about in the rest of it. I never complained that your post was off topic, just incredibly badly formatted. That doesn't take a PhD to notice, just basic reading comprehension. The fact that you think it requires a doctorate to not mash Caps Lock and double-quote at random probably says something, I'm not sure what (because your posts are insane, and don't present your intentions well, however much sense they probably make inside your own head). I'm guessing you were trying to make some type of satirical point.
I don't think this thread is all that off-topic, involving as it does the perception of trollishness, after all. Myself, I'm wondering if you're even capable of writing like a normal person, because if so you're avoiding doing so seemingly out of spite, which seems like kind of a trollish thing to do. Just try it once. Type a few sentences and capitalize only the first letter of the first word. Don't worry, you won't melt.
We've made it too easy to live off of the government. I know one couple in their 30s who live rent free in a two bedroom house, have no children, have not had a job in years, have two newer model cars, big screen TV, game systems, and can afford to go out drinking and eating.
[Citation needed]
Do they have savings from when they worked? Do they have a rich uncle who died? Are they on disability from a workplace accident? Did they win the lottery? Are they running up 10's of thousands in credit card debt?
I don't think you actually know anything about the welfare system and its limitations. Maybe you should actually talk to your neighbors and ask them what they're doing, instead of being mad at how they took yer jerb^H^H^H munnies. That, or you just made up the story out of whole cloth because it fits your worldview and is easier to deal with than examining situations from actual reality.
And if people get a "citizen's wage" or "basic income" or whatever you want to call it for doing nothing then production is pretty unlikely to keep up, since there's no incentive to produce.
Sure there is. To be able to buy more stuff than the guranteed income allows, or just because it's something they enjoy doing. The more boring and tedious jobs can hopefully be taken over by automation, or else have their reimbursement raised due to the scarcity of people willing to do them once no one is required to do so out of basic necessity. I don't have many fundamental objections to the idea, as long as the principle that one is never penalized overall for trying to earn more is in place (as opposed to the "gap" problems that can happen in some aspects of the welfare system).
Is... is English your first language? I have a hard time imagining a native speaker thinking that type of random empHASIS gets their point across better. Seriously, use proper sentence structure, stop peppering your posts with parenthetical "lol's", lay off the caps lock, and forget the bold tag even exists, because you clearly don't know how to use it. Perhaps then you can spend more time actually discussing the superiority of hosts file blocking, or whatever you're on about, and less time defending yourself from people who think you're an insane troll.
You won't be able to pinpoint one specific thing or set of things that turns people gay, but we are talking about preference to a function that doesn't even need a partner to complete. It's a learned behavior just as certain colors are favorable to some and not others.
Why do you assume color preference can't possibly have any genetic component? And the first sentence seems to be gibberish, so perhaps you could restate it.
Yes, yes, we know capitalizing your name differently allows you to magically not pay any taxes, because... well, no one can work out what the hell you Freeman-on-the-land folks are basing your theories on, so let's just call it an insanity defense.
Plants don't have nervous systems, brains, consciousness, the ability to feel pain, etc. your argument fails pathetically. You do realize humans are mammals as well, right?
Politicians are telling bankers how to bank, and car makers how to run car companies. Haven't you spotted the trend yet?
It's an inefficient parasite that kills its host, but this parasite has gotten too big. But politicians think we should "tone down the rhetoric", too. So don't complain, just shut up and pay your taxes unless you want bad things to happen.
You're right, there's never been any need for any financial regulations so that companies aren't forced to screw everyone over in highly unethical ways to avoid falling behind their competitors who are doing so, at all. Never.
I'm not sure if it's your simplistic libertarianism or your bad bilogical metaphors that are more irritating. GM wouldn't have needed major government investment if they hadn't gotten themselves into such a hole to begin with. The government's already sold off half its shares, and the company's doing better, but of course you don't care about real-world results, only ideology. I predict you calling me a "sheeple" in 3... 2... 1...
I looked up the book in your sig, because it sounded interesting and I thought it might be an overview of how the nervous and biochemical systems spread throughout the body influence cognition, but instead it's just Cartesian Dualism. Again. It was perhaps forgivable in the times before we had MRI, knew what neurons are, or had an extensive body of literature on the effects of physiological damage on cognition, but at this point it's just a bit silly.
Did the authors at least abuse and intentionally misunderstand quantum physics in the process? That seems to be the method currently in fashion for those who really, really, want to believe that we are fundamentally different from all other forms of matter in the universe (I don't lump Penrose in with them, as he at least knows the physics, although his conclusions seem misguided).
In short, your opinions on scientific matters are suspect. Particle physics research does seem to be at something of a plateau currently in terms of real-world applications, but if we discover and then find some way to manipulate Higgs bosons down the line, or something of the sort, calling the LHC useless will look extremely myopic.
Oh, ok, you're just an idiot, then. Go look up the actual numbers involved in the IPv6 address space before you start calling people "hilariously dillusioned". Also, dillusioned isn't a word, I believe you were looking for "delusional".
Meanwhile, I hope you realize that even IPv6 isn't a permanent solution nor is it intended to be, right? It's a substantially larger block of addresses, but that doesn't mean the use of those addresses is going to last as long as IPv4.
Are you high, or are you just really, really bad at math? It's "permanent" in that human society would have to become something fundamentally different than any currently foreseeable form to even begin the possibility of exhausting the space, by which point computers as we know then would probably be obsolete anyway. IPv6 isn't some "640K should be enough for anyone" shortsighted type of thinking, we could literally give every atom in everyone's bodies its own address and still be nowhere close to using them up.
A new theory by people with styrofoam for brains, most likely. Take a look at how many people have US Top Secret clearances, especially with the expanded military/intelligence sector after 9/11, then look at how easy it is to publish things on the internet, and the only question is why this didn't happen even sooner in a big way.
But wait, common sense and rationality are just conspiracies by the Trilateral Commission! They've gotten to me too! OH NOES!!1
However it WILL be legal to divvy up the available bandwidth evenly and give every user a guaranteed minimum amount.
Dear god, do you know *anything* about telecommunications? If you want absolutely guaranteed bandwidth regardless of congestion, you're going to be paying something like T1 prices for internet service (around $300/month just for basic 1.5 Mbit). Service providers can estimate a certain amount of bandwidth under most conditions, but making it anything close to an actual guarantee under all circumstances requires a lot of redundancies, and provisioning for maximum theoretical usage by all clients at once rather than anything approaching real-world patterns. I'm sorry if actual reality strikes you as "bullshit arguments".
If you want to take market pricing out of it and socialize the entire infrastucture, that's a different matter, although that still has its own problems, and would be a huge undertaking either way.
Well, your simplistic and impractical opinions make me think you're incompetent to hold any job involving anything more complex than a toaster, and even then you'd probably get the darkness setting wrong.
I was mostly on his side. Then I saw how you capitalized the first three letters of his name, and I was all like "whoa man, fuck this guy". You even threw in the word "sheeple", favored phrase of all who put forth unsubstatiated claims as the unimpeachable gospel. Your peerless rhetorical technique has won me over, sir!
Slashdot Mirror
We'll never have a brain-machine interface like the one you're talking about, though.
We most likely will, it would just require advanced nanotechnology and a much better understanding of brain physiology than we have now (easier said than done, I know). Although it would likely happen decades after systems that just tie a display into the optic nerve and the input into basic nerve impulses or muscle movements.
"Never" is an extremely broad statement to make, given the time scale it implies. The only way I could really see it being true barring some unforseen insurmountable technical difficulty is if, by the time the technology is avaialable, traditional biological brains have been improved upon in other mediums to the extent that there's no point making advanced interfaces for them, except for nostalgic/historical purposes. I'd imagine it would still be done by someone, though.
(Also, I assume you meant "Osama" in the above post, otherwise you're so far off the deep end you can't even see the edge of the pool)
Obama's really been dead for nearly 10 years of a lung infection.
I find it interesting that you state this as a verifiable fact, rather than a loosely-supported at best supposition. You do realized that believing any story wholeheartedly as long as it differs from that of the official sources is still being overly credulous, right?
he did kill the economy
Did you get amnesia during the Bush presidency and only wake up at Obama's inaguration? Because that's the only explanation I can think of for this statement.
he's working on killing the constitution
killing off freedoms and way of life previously lived in the US
Care to explain what you mean by this, or should I just continue assuming you're kind of hyperbolic and insane?
Bleeding-heart socialism is another--thinking that because the wealthy have more property than they need to live comfortably, it's okay to keep seizing their money in ever increasing amount to fund an endlessly increasing number of entitlements for the lower classes
A) This hasn't happened - look at the historical tax rates in the US compared to now.
B) You act like "welfare" is the only thing tax revenues are ever spent on, and that rich people gain no benefit from not living in a Mad-Max anarchist hellscape. They get to keep their heads and have their property rights protected and contracts enforced, among other things.
C) If the Tocqueville quote is always true, why are so many people (including middle- and lower-income ones) concerned about the national debt?
Divorced from everyone else, more economic freedom seems like a good thing; ideally we could provide for the common good with nothing but voluntary charity for welfare, roads, etc., with no forced fees, but as a practical matter, as this point in our technological development, you're just advocating feudalism. You should also define your terms. You clearly regard progressive taxation as a violation of "fairness" and property rights, so what would you be happy with? A flat percentage from everyone? A flat *amount* from everyone? No taxes at all?
#2 Scientists (*cough* physicists) would stop being so dang dogmatic.
The first part was so vague and general as to be useless, but for this part I'll bite: Go ahead, tell us about your perpetual motion machine/reformulation of General Relativity/antigravity machine/theory of everthing that the mean old dogmatic scientists refuse to believe. You are of course the first person in history to come up with such a thing and assume no one takes you seriously only because of small-mindedness rather than the inherent flaws and mistaken assumptions of your model. Or it may be a more general objection, and you're just mad at them for not believing in ESP and ghosts.
Could we possibly produce enough stuff from this planet that we actually effect the sun in any meaning full way?
Considering we could throw the entire Earth into the sun and it wouldn't make much difference in mass, I'm going to say no.
Because your name here fits you so well (wandering idiot), we thought we'd all let you know that you can stop trying to play "smart" now already, as we know you're an idiot. You even said it yourself, wandering idiot, lmao!
...You're the host file guy, aren't you? Yay, I have a /. enemy!
What? Seriously, what?
The subject line isn't mine, it's the grandparent poster's. And I'm not sure what my self deprecating username has to do with anything (all people are idiots, as judged by the amout of possible knowledge in the universe). Do you really think you're going to insult me by repeating the handle I picked myself?
Perhaps YOU can get "on topic", instead of trying the 2 oldest troll tricks in the book, of "I can't read your writing" &/or "you're crazy", etc./et al?
Has it ever occurred to you that there's a reason you get so many responses claiming your posts are hard to read and that you're probably insane? (Hint: They are, and you are, or at least do a good impression of it)
I'm not sure what you're going on about in the rest of it. I never complained that your post was off topic, just incredibly badly formatted. That doesn't take a PhD to notice, just basic reading comprehension. The fact that you think it requires a doctorate to not mash Caps Lock and double-quote at random probably says something, I'm not sure what (because your posts are insane, and don't present your intentions well, however much sense they probably make inside your own head). I'm guessing you were trying to make some type of satirical point.
I don't think this thread is all that off-topic, involving as it does the perception of trollishness, after all. Myself, I'm wondering if you're even capable of writing like a normal person, because if so you're avoiding doing so seemingly out of spite, which seems like kind of a trollish thing to do. Just try it once. Type a few sentences and capitalize only the first letter of the first word. Don't worry, you won't melt.
We've made it too easy to live off of the government. I know one couple in their 30s who live rent free in a two bedroom house, have no children, have not had a job in years, have two newer model cars, big screen TV, game systems, and can afford to go out drinking and eating.
[Citation needed]
Do they have savings from when they worked? Do they have a rich uncle who died? Are they on disability from a workplace accident? Did they win the lottery? Are they running up 10's of thousands in credit card debt?
I don't think you actually know anything about the welfare system and its limitations. Maybe you should actually talk to your neighbors and ask them what they're doing, instead of being mad at how they took yer jerb^H^H^H munnies. That, or you just made up the story out of whole cloth because it fits your worldview and is easier to deal with than examining situations from actual reality.
And if people get a "citizen's wage" or "basic income" or whatever you want to call it for doing nothing then production is pretty unlikely to keep up, since there's no incentive to produce.
Sure there is. To be able to buy more stuff than the guranteed income allows, or just because it's something they enjoy doing. The more boring and tedious jobs can hopefully be taken over by automation, or else have their reimbursement raised due to the scarcity of people willing to do them once no one is required to do so out of basic necessity. I don't have many fundamental objections to the idea, as long as the principle that one is never penalized overall for trying to earn more is in place (as opposed to the "gap" problems that can happen in some aspects of the welfare system).
God, take your stupid "capitalization changes everything you stupid sheeple" nonsense elsewhere, please.
And look up herd immunity while you're at it.
Is... is English your first language? I have a hard time imagining a native speaker thinking that type of random empHASIS gets their point across better. Seriously, use proper sentence structure, stop peppering your posts with parenthetical "lol's", lay off the caps lock, and forget the bold tag even exists, because you clearly don't know how to use it. Perhaps then you can spend more time actually discussing the superiority of hosts file blocking, or whatever you're on about, and less time defending yourself from people who think you're an insane troll.
You won't be able to pinpoint one specific thing or set of things that turns people gay, but we are talking about preference to a function that doesn't even need a partner to complete. It's a learned behavior just as certain colors are favorable to some and not others.
Why do you assume color preference can't possibly have any genetic component? And the first sentence seems to be gibberish, so perhaps you could restate it.
Yes, yes, we know capitalizing your name differently allows you to magically not pay any taxes, because... well, no one can work out what the hell you Freeman-on-the-land folks are basing your theories on, so let's just call it an insanity defense.
Plants don't have nervous systems, brains, consciousness, the ability to feel pain, etc. your argument fails pathetically. You do realize humans are mammals as well, right?
Politicians are telling bankers how to bank, and car makers how to run car companies. Haven't you spotted the trend yet?
It's an inefficient parasite that kills its host, but this parasite has gotten too big. But politicians think we should "tone down the rhetoric", too. So don't complain, just shut up and pay your taxes unless you want bad things to happen.
You're right, there's never been any need for any financial regulations so that companies aren't forced to screw everyone over in highly unethical ways to avoid falling behind their competitors who are doing so, at all. Never.
I'm not sure if it's your simplistic libertarianism or your bad bilogical metaphors that are more irritating. GM wouldn't have needed major government investment if they hadn't gotten themselves into such a hole to begin with. The government's already sold off half its shares, and the company's doing better, but of course you don't care about real-world results, only ideology. I predict you calling me a "sheeple" in 3... 2... 1...
-- You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
I looked up the book in your sig, because it sounded interesting and I thought it might be an overview of how the nervous and biochemical systems spread throughout the body influence cognition, but instead it's just Cartesian Dualism. Again. It was perhaps forgivable in the times before we had MRI, knew what neurons are, or had an extensive body of literature on the effects of physiological damage on cognition, but at this point it's just a bit silly.
Did the authors at least abuse and intentionally misunderstand quantum physics in the process? That seems to be the method currently in fashion for those who really, really, want to believe that we are fundamentally different from all other forms of matter in the universe (I don't lump Penrose in with them, as he at least knows the physics, although his conclusions seem misguided).
In short, your opinions on scientific matters are suspect. Particle physics research does seem to be at something of a plateau currently in terms of real-world applications, but if we discover and then find some way to manipulate Higgs bosons down the line, or something of the sort, calling the LHC useless will look extremely myopic.
Oh, ok, you're just an idiot, then. Go look up the actual numbers involved in the IPv6 address space before you start calling people "hilariously dillusioned". Also, dillusioned isn't a word, I believe you were looking for "delusional".
Meanwhile, I hope you realize that even IPv6 isn't a permanent solution nor is it intended to be, right? It's a substantially larger block of addresses, but that doesn't mean the use of those addresses is going to last as long as IPv4.
Are you high, or are you just really, really bad at math? It's "permanent" in that human society would have to become something fundamentally different than any currently foreseeable form to even begin the possibility of exhausting the space, by which point computers as we know then would probably be obsolete anyway. IPv6 isn't some "640K should be enough for anyone" shortsighted type of thinking, we could literally give every atom in everyone's bodies its own address and still be nowhere close to using them up.
A new theory says Wikileaks is run by the CIA.
A new theory by people with styrofoam for brains, most likely. Take a look at how many people have US Top Secret clearances, especially with the expanded military/intelligence sector after 9/11, then look at how easy it is to publish things on the internet, and the only question is why this didn't happen even sooner in a big way.
But wait, common sense and rationality are just conspiracies by the Trilateral Commission! They've gotten to me too! OH NOES!!1
However it WILL be legal to divvy up the available bandwidth evenly and give every user a guaranteed minimum amount.
Dear god, do you know *anything* about telecommunications? If you want absolutely guaranteed bandwidth regardless of congestion, you're going to be paying something like T1 prices for internet service (around $300/month just for basic 1.5 Mbit). Service providers can estimate a certain amount of bandwidth under most conditions, but making it anything close to an actual guarantee under all circumstances requires a lot of redundancies, and provisioning for maximum theoretical usage by all clients at once rather than anything approaching real-world patterns. I'm sorry if actual reality strikes you as "bullshit arguments".
If you want to take market pricing out of it and socialize the entire infrastucture, that's a different matter, although that still has its own problems, and would be a huge undertaking either way.
Well, your simplistic and impractical opinions make me think you're incompetent to hold any job involving anything more complex than a toaster, and even then you'd probably get the darkness setting wrong.
Tootles!
Nothing in your writing style suggests he was in any way incorrect in implying that you're crazy.
You might want to fix that.
I was mostly on his side. Then I saw how you capitalized the first three letters of his name, and I was all like "whoa man, fuck this guy". You even threw in the word "sheeple", favored phrase of all who put forth unsubstatiated claims as the unimpeachable gospel. Your peerless rhetorical technique has won me over, sir!
...
Go die in a fire.