On the other hand, Al Qaeda has convinced other countries to leave Iraq through their actions.
Not entirely convinced. There are plenty of good reasons to get the hell out of Iraq: it's hugely expensive and very unlikely to end in a way that can be considered a 'win', so best to cut losses as early as possible. Can al-Qa'eda claim the credit for this? Only if al-Qa'eda == the Iraqi Resistance, which is not the case; things are a lot more complicated there.
The nearest they can get, I think, is to claim that they're responsible for Spain's withdrawal from Iraq. But the war in Iraq was already enormously unpopular in Spain, and the Spanish government was in a precarious position. al-Qa'eda might certainly claim that their bombings in Madrid brought about the fall of that government and hence the Spanish withdrawal, but I'd say that government was doomed anyway and that Spain was already on its way out. Don't give the terrorists too much credit here.
My guess would be about half a million illegal firearms in the UK.
One gun per hundred people? That's a damn high estimate. Including BBs and replica guns, maybe, but real bullet-firing deadly pistols? No. Even back when the things were legal there weren't that many around. Your average British crook prefers a knife; gunplay is mostly confined to a few urban drug gangs.
Or did, until you allowed yourself to be disarmed.
I am always amused by this fantasy on the part of the American right that the British public was ever armed. Handguns were banned after some fuckwit shot up a school. About 50,000 people were affected - or rather less than one in a thousand of the British population.
We let guns be banned because practically none of us have ever had guns, or ever had any inclination to want such things.
Remember that by British standards, American politics is right wing, or far-right.
Peter Cook put it best:
"American politics is very simple. They have the Republican Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party."
What you call a far-left bleeding-heart liberal we call a filthy Tory.
Which is great for more games like The Sims (Wii Sims), Nintendogs, Cooking Mama, and casual RPGs, but not so great if you're a hard-core FPS/Sports gamer
Nintendo have never really made very many FPS games anyway - Metroid's about all. It's not as if they're going to try to stop people making FPS games for Wii. There are some decent-but-flawed ones out at the moment, and I'm convinced it's only a matter of time before someone comes out with a game that's Goldeneye good. My problem with the entire console FPS genre has always been that a gamepad is never anywhere near as good as mouse and keyboard. Goldeneye and Halo try, but in terms of control the best I've had on a console was DS Metroid Prime. Why? Because it has a proper pointer! And Wiimote + Nunchuck ought to be at least as good as Mouse + Keyboard for this kind of thing.
Hopefully Lucas Arts will build a game for the Wii that takes full advantage of the motion detection, rumble, and audio capabilities of the WiiMote. Yes, I do mean single and multi-player light-saber duals.
That was about the first thing I thought of when I heard what Nintendo were planning with the Revolution. Having played with one for a few months now, I doubt it'd be as cool as we hoped. The wiimote isn't precise enough when pointing away from the screen; that's OK on Wii Sports, where the motions are usually always along the same arc, but wouldn't work for full, free lightsaber action.
Plus, the game would probably suck quite badly. Fact is, we're none of us actually Jedi. Most of us aren't trained fencers, either. If we can push a button to carry out a pre-programmed cool move, we're good, and if we can get more pre-programmed cool moves as we level up, that's great. But if we're required to actually carry out the cool moves ourselves, we'd suck at it, get frustrated, declare that the game sucks, and play something else. Hence the likes of Twilight Princess and Red Steel not going for full 1:1 swordplay with the wiimote - it would be really damn hard to use, and would spoil our fun.
He gets shot walking out of a courthouse? I kinda thought he would have sacraficed himself for the greater good. Or died a glorious death in combat against the forces of evil. Pretty lame way to kill him off in my opinion.
Kennedy metaphor, anybody? Symbol of American idealism shot down by lone nut?
I guess it's hard to market a character so closely identified with the most hated nation since Nazi Germany.
That's Captain America's point. He stands for what America was, not what it is now. That's why he's been leading the rebel faction throughout Civil War. Captain America's death is symbolic of the death of the American principles and ideals for which he fought for so long. If America has become a monster, then either Captain America must defeat it, or he must die fighting it, because to do otherwise would be to negate his own identity.
Plus, it always shifts a shitload of comics and gets mainstream press attention when you kill off a big name like this. Even if you then just casually bring him back to life a few months later.
Because everybody who's racist is on the "right?" WTF?
No, but this particular racist seems to be very much of the right-wing variety. 'Immigrants are all violent criminals' is a right-wing excuse for racism; that, or that they're undermining cultural values or something, or just in plain nationalistic terms. Those of a more socialistic bent would be more likely to excuse racism in terms of immigrants undercutting union rates and pricing the native population out of the job market.
Scientists have unfortunately low credibility among the public in providing an honest assessment of the importance of their work. University basements are full of bright people who think their own projects are the most important things on earth and everyone should pay attention to them. Too many scientists knowing exaggerate the consequences of their work in an effort to promote their own careers. The result is a public growing increasingly jaded to claims of global catastrophe - a boy who cried wolf problem. Shame on the scientists.
True enough. If we were to spend trillions on a vast, high-profile project to protect ourselves against some theoretical perceived threat on what later turns out to be flimsy or outright fraudulent evidence, and that threat then turns out not to have existed in the first place - why, it would be the most appalling embarrassment. The people responsible for providing the misleading evidence and incorrect assessments would never be believed again, the politicians who funded their project would have to resign en masse as a matter of principle, or if not then they wouldn't stand a chance at the next election.
I'm certainly glad our leaders have the wisdom to avoid any such scenario.
The so-called "happy slappers" are a serious problem in the UK and continental Europe. Perhaps you're not familiar with who they are, or what they do. Let me tell you. The vast majority of them are the children of immigrants and refugees who moved to Europe from countres in Africa, Central Asia, India and the Middle East. Of course, there are domestic "happy slappers", but they tend to be in the minority.
Nice to see such blatant racist propaganda get to +5. I'll bookmark this post and reference it next time someone makes the laughable claim that/. is biased to the left...
It's really a shame that liberties have gotten so restricted in Europe that a burglar can sue the farmer who sat up in the night with a shotgun and shot him, after being robbed multiple times in a row. The criminal won, and that farmer is now in an English prison.
The burglar in question was running away from the scene when the farmer, Tony Martin, shot him in the back. He didn't sue, being too dead to do so; this was a criminal case. Tony Martin served three years for manslaughter and is now free.
I have a 1Gig AthlonMP 2800+ system with an old Radeon 9800 card and the game is quite playable. You can't use super-high graphic detail, and might have to choose your world size so that it fits in your available RAM, but it can be done!
Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce FX 5200: shitty performance even with everything turned right down. Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 7600GS: perfectly good performance with all the graphical toys on, although the huge world grinds to a halt in the modern era. If I play on smaller worlds so that it doesn't devour all the memory, no problem at all.
I still think it's disgusting that a Civilization game requires a badass video card, but it is very pretty:-)
Today, Russia is starting to 'dream' again about world domination. Putin already acknowledges that U.S.'s interests are starting to clash with their state interests in Europe. If they could support the Taliban, Iran or the Moujahedin without us noticing, they would!
I doubt that's Russia's game. I also doubt any veterans of the Afghan wars would go near a Russian government agent, other than to behead him. The Russians made themselves really unpopular back in the day.
But I notice Putin's going after a lot of the big energy oligarchs. Partly because they're just so rich that they're a rival power base, but also I think because he wants to control Russian oil and gas more directly. Remember how Russia strongarmed Ukraine a couple of years ago, and Belarus more recently, using their control of the gas pipelines as leverage? With the expansion of the EU into the east, Russia just saw all its old allies join up with the West and leave Moscow behind. Now the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, they're all in the EU, and Russian influence over the ex-Soviet states even further east is waning. But Russian control of their fuel supplies might still keep them in line.
willing to sacrifice entire nation for megalomaniac goals -check
That's the bit I don't agree with. Iran would like to be rid of Israel, I believe that, but I don't believe the Iranian leadership are insane enough to launch a nuclear first strike even if they could, and I'm not aware that there's anything like the same cult of loyalty to the leadership that we find in North Korea. Open war with Israel or with the United States would mean total ruin for Iran, and the government and the people both know it. Much of the population consists of veterans of the long and horrible war with Iraq. I don't think anyone there wants that again.
Iran's playing a dangerous game here, but I'm not thinking in War On Terror terms about them. I'm thinking in Cold War terms. They're playing the same games the Russians used to - backing factions in unstable regions who are ideologically compatible. This isn't Islamic extremism, this is good political sense. I'm nowhere near as worried about Iran as I am about North Korea, because I believe the Iranians are sane and rational.
Not to mention that Iran is widely known to fund and train terroristic organisations. Not the kind Bush scared everyone when he needed excuse for Iraq, but the real guys - Hezbollah, Hamas... how'd you feel about one or both of those getting an ICBM with a nuclear warhead at their disposal?
An ICBM is of no use to a terrorist. It requires ground facilities, fuelling, maintenance, basically a whole sophisticated infrastructure. When it takes off it does so on top of a great big plume of very hot gas which gets spotted by every infrared monitoring satellite on that side of the planet. So when the bomb goes off and we look for who's to blame, the answer's not hard to find. They're wonderful for nation states, for superpowers, but they're no good for terrorists in any way.
A terrorist with a nuke will put it on a cargo ship and set it off in the harbour. Worry if you will about Iran giving a bomb to terrorists - though I doubt they'd be such fools as to do so, since such hardliners have little love for the relatively secular government in Tehran - but giving them intercontinental missiles isn't plausible at all. My guess is that Iran will want these rockets first as a deterrent against US / Israeli aggression, and second as a means of increasing their regional influence in the long term.
They'll probably also want to orbit a few spysats if they can. Keep an eye on events in Iraq.
By no one's definition of the term could creatures who place a truckload of high explosives into a crowded marketplace and blow hundreds of people to meat chunks be considered human.
And since we are talking about post-bio entities, while it is POSSIBLE that one entity could reproduce itself more than all others - assuming NO other entity does this AND that the one entity CAN out-reproduce ALL other entities combined no matter how reproductive THEY are - that is STILL (probably) irrelevant to any other entity's survival vis-a-vis it's position in the universe.
It's relevant to us, though. If only one entity decides to replicate en masse, it will undoubtedly fill the galaxy. If more than one decides to do so, they will fill the galaxy between them. The only case in which Fermi's paradox does not hold is if none at all decide to do so, ever - otherwise, the question arises again, where are they?
Natural selection does NOT operate on post-bio entities. Reproduction is entirely under the control of postbio entities, because it is not biological. Not only that, but mutation per se can be totally controlled or eliminated, if desired. What you are calling "natural selection" is simply the rate of reproduction. The rate of reproduction is not the definition of natural selection. Natural selection involves mutation and adaptation to the environment as well
I wouldn't say that. Mutation is a source of variation. Natural selection simply determines which varieties reproduce and which do not, and hence by the differential survival and reproduction rate determines which variants fill the world and which vanish into obscurity or extinction. It doesn't matter whether it's mutation, or Monolith aliens, or self-directed genetic engineering which provides variety, the resultant structure still faces the test of natural selection. The population will end up numerically dominated by the most successful reproducers.
For a postbio entity, rationality WILL set ALL goals. It's possible to consider a postbio entity with emotions or even emotional goals, but if such goals are significant in controlling the entity's behavior, it may or will be at a disadvantage compared to more rational entities.
How does rationality set all goals? I just don't see it. Rational thought is a process that takes given conditions, applies processing that we call logic, and arrives at a conclusion regarding those conditions. For instance, given 'I dislike getting wet', and also given 'It is raining outside' and 'I want to go outside soon', I might rationally conclude 'I should take an umbrella'. Taking an umbrella is a rational thing to do if my goal is to go outside in the rain without getting wet. So rationality has set me one goal: to find my umbrella. But that's just a step towards my more distant goal: to go outside without getting wet. Maybe I like the rain and enjoy being wet; in that case it's irrational to go and fetch my umbrella before going out.
In addition, it's quite possible to do extremely sub-optimal things for perfectly rational reasons. Think about the Prisoner's Dilemma, for instance. The optimal outcome in that game is the result of a totally illogical play.
The presupposition is always that these entities are 1) biological; 2) consumptive of exponential resources; 3) aggressively competitive. There is nothing to support any of that for postbio entities. It's pure speculation from a biological basis.
At the very least your entities must think. That takes energy. Energy is a finite resource in this universe. Given a greater energy supply, an entity can do more thinking. Is increasing one's capacity for thought a rational goal? If so, then our entities will all be looking to lay claim to ever-greater supplies of energy. Since the supply of energy is finite, they might well end up competing for it.
I suspect no postbio entity would reproduce itself directly. That WOULD be creating competing entities - unless there was some technological way to either produce a "group mind" - in which case there is STILL only a single entity no matter how many "bodies" it has - or somehow control or design the copies such that they cannot compete. Having
Well, [i]Maniac Mansion[/i] used text only for dialogue: 'DON'T BE A TUNA HEAD!' or for feedback on an action: 'THAT DOESN'T SEEM TO WORK' or 'OH NO, RADIOACTIVE STEAM! AAARRRGGGHHH!' [i]Zelda 2[/i] used even less, being more action-oriented, but again it was all dialogue: 'I AM ERROR', 'THE TOWN IS DEAD. LOOK EAST IN WOODS' or 'WITH BOOTS I COULD WALK ON THE WATER'.
These games are done a disservice by the description 'not entirely text'. They're not even mostly text. State of the art at the time was primarily visual, but using text for dialogue because there wasn't anything like the amount of data available that synthesised speech would require.
Your description brought to mind the later Infocom games of the early eighties, which would still display pages and pages of description for each area, but would also display a small picture of it. A 'not entirely text' Maniac Mansion would have a placeholder picture of Weird Ed and the description: "You are in Weird Ed's bedroom, which is decorated with assorted sports pennants, model spaceships from Star Wars, and commando memorabilia. Weird Ed is here. You see a hamster and a piggy bank. Weird Ed says "Halt! Who goes there? Are you in league with the evil purple meteor, or have you come here to help me defeat him?"
And by the way, 256 colours is plenty for a good story. Maniac Mansion managed with 16. We didn't get thousands of colours outside the Amiga crowd until the mid-nineties. I think it's voiceovers you're looking for here - that had to wait for CD-ROM, in order to store them all.
"Hello, little computer. I respect you... even though you only have 64k of memory." - Bernard Bernoulli, Day of the Tentacle, in 256 colour VGA, 1993.
Your concept presumes "evolution", which presupposes a biological basis. Once a species reaches a level where they are not biological, evolution becomes irrelevant. The species - in fact, even the term "species" really isn't appropriate - controls its own development consciously.
You can never escape evolution. Perhaps you can direct your own development - use genetic engineering, cybernetics, computer consciousness upload, whatever, instead of just waiting for the right mutation to come along - but mutation isn't the whole of evolution.
If I, as a post-biological entity, choose to modify myself in such a way that I reproduce myself less frequently than other post-biological entities, then I guarantee that the future will contain fewer post-biological entities like myself. If I modify myself such as to never reproduce at all, then all there will ever be is myself.
Natural selection still operates no matter how clever you are: whether by blind mutation or by intelligent design, if on average you have more surviving children (or copies or clones or whatever it is) than the rest, then the future will contain more like you.
In the same manner, Transhumans don't have "urges". "Urges" are biological requirements. A fully rational hyperintelligence doesn't run on "urges."
Very well: perhaps we can restate that as 'goals', then? Rationality doesn't set your objectives, it just tells you how best to go about achieving them. Maybe Transhuman A's goal is to watch the sun grow old, and in that case it is rational for him to simply sit here, watch and wait. But maybe Transhuman B's goal is to convert as much as possible of the nonliving, nonsentient matter of the universe into others like himself, perhaps because he thinks it terribly wasteful that so much of the universe is sitting idle. In that case his rational course of action is to go forth, be fruitful and multiply.
And whether you call this evolution or freely chosen development, the fact remains that a million years later Transhuman A will still be sat there alone staring at the sun, while the rest of the galaxy is full of Transhuman B's descendants. Your chances of ever meeting Transhuman A are vanishingly small, because there's only one of him and quadrillions of Transhuman B.
If even a single one of these hypothetical entities chooses a goal that involves creating copies of itself, and then copies of copies, then there's nothing to stop it filling the galaxy. Exponential growth will mean that its numbers swamp those of the non-breeders, leaving them so rare as to be statistically insignificant.
Are you so sure that no such entity, ever, will do this?
Slashdot Mirror
Not entirely convinced. There are plenty of good reasons to get the hell out of Iraq: it's hugely expensive and very unlikely to end in a way that can be considered a 'win', so best to cut losses as early as possible. Can al-Qa'eda claim the credit for this? Only if al-Qa'eda == the Iraqi Resistance, which is not the case; things are a lot more complicated there.
The nearest they can get, I think, is to claim that they're responsible for Spain's withdrawal from Iraq. But the war in Iraq was already enormously unpopular in Spain, and the Spanish government was in a precarious position. al-Qa'eda might certainly claim that their bombings in Madrid brought about the fall of that government and hence the Spanish withdrawal, but I'd say that government was doomed anyway and that Spain was already on its way out. Don't give the terrorists too much credit here.
One gun per hundred people? That's a damn high estimate. Including BBs and replica guns, maybe, but real bullet-firing deadly pistols? No. Even back when the things were legal there weren't that many around. Your average British crook prefers a knife; gunplay is mostly confined to a few urban drug gangs.
I am always amused by this fantasy on the part of the American right that the British public was ever armed. Handguns were banned after some fuckwit shot up a school. About 50,000 people were affected - or rather less than one in a thousand of the British population.
We let guns be banned because practically none of us have ever had guns, or ever had any inclination to want such things.
Peter Cook put it best:
"American politics is very simple. They have the Republican Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party, and the Democratic Party, which is basically like our Conservative Party."
What you call a far-left bleeding-heart liberal we call a filthy Tory.
Nintendo have never really made very many FPS games anyway - Metroid's about all. It's not as if they're going to try to stop people making FPS games for Wii. There are some decent-but-flawed ones out at the moment, and I'm convinced it's only a matter of time before someone comes out with a game that's Goldeneye good. My problem with the entire console FPS genre has always been that a gamepad is never anywhere near as good as mouse and keyboard. Goldeneye and Halo try, but in terms of control the best I've had on a console was DS Metroid Prime. Why? Because it has a proper pointer! And Wiimote + Nunchuck ought to be at least as good as Mouse + Keyboard for this kind of thing.
That was about the first thing I thought of when I heard what Nintendo were planning with the Revolution. Having played with one for a few months now, I doubt it'd be as cool as we hoped. The wiimote isn't precise enough when pointing away from the screen; that's OK on Wii Sports, where the motions are usually always along the same arc, but wouldn't work for full, free lightsaber action.
Plus, the game would probably suck quite badly. Fact is, we're none of us actually Jedi. Most of us aren't trained fencers, either. If we can push a button to carry out a pre-programmed cool move, we're good, and if we can get more pre-programmed cool moves as we level up, that's great. But if we're required to actually carry out the cool moves ourselves, we'd suck at it, get frustrated, declare that the game sucks, and play something else. Hence the likes of Twilight Princess and Red Steel not going for full 1:1 swordplay with the wiimote - it would be really damn hard to use, and would spoil our fun.
Kennedy metaphor, anybody? Symbol of American idealism shot down by lone nut?
That's Captain America's point. He stands for what America was, not what it is now. That's why he's been leading the rebel faction throughout Civil War. Captain America's death is symbolic of the death of the American principles and ideals for which he fought for so long. If America has become a monster, then either Captain America must defeat it, or he must die fighting it, because to do otherwise would be to negate his own identity.
Plus, it always shifts a shitload of comics and gets mainstream press attention when you kill off a big name like this. Even if you then just casually bring him back to life a few months later.
No, but this particular racist seems to be very much of the right-wing variety. 'Immigrants are all violent criminals' is a right-wing excuse for racism; that, or that they're undermining cultural values or something, or just in plain nationalistic terms. Those of a more socialistic bent would be more likely to excuse racism in terms of immigrants undercutting union rates and pricing the native population out of the job market.
According to what I'm told every time I watch a DVD, these scholars were in fact stealing books.
True enough. If we were to spend trillions on a vast, high-profile project to protect ourselves against some theoretical perceived threat on what later turns out to be flimsy or outright fraudulent evidence, and that threat then turns out not to have existed in the first place - why, it would be the most appalling embarrassment. The people responsible for providing the misleading evidence and incorrect assessments would never be believed again, the politicians who funded their project would have to resign en masse as a matter of principle, or if not then they wouldn't stand a chance at the next election.
I'm certainly glad our leaders have the wisdom to avoid any such scenario.
Nice to see such blatant racist propaganda get to +5. I'll bookmark this post and reference it next time someone makes the laughable claim that /. is biased to the left...
The burglar in question was running away from the scene when the farmer, Tony Martin, shot him in the back. He didn't sue, being too dead to do so; this was a criminal case. Tony Martin served three years for manslaughter and is now free.
Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce FX 5200: shitty performance even with everything turned right down. Athlon XP 2000+, 512MB RAM, GeForce 7600GS: perfectly good performance with all the graphical toys on, although the huge world grinds to a halt in the modern era. If I play on smaller worlds so that it doesn't devour all the memory, no problem at all.
I still think it's disgusting that a Civilization game requires a badass video card, but it is very pretty :-)
Well, no, not quite. It was ignored because they were old, degraded and not capable of causing mass destruction.
Weapons of A Rather Nasty Toxic Puddle On The Floor don't really cut it, now, do they?
The Lobstermen are the worst ones. They just will not die. And the ones who keep mind controlling my operatives.
Well, them and the Sea Devils - they used to give Jon Pertwee a terrible time.
I doubt that's Russia's game. I also doubt any veterans of the Afghan wars would go near a Russian government agent, other than to behead him. The Russians made themselves really unpopular back in the day.
But I notice Putin's going after a lot of the big energy oligarchs. Partly because they're just so rich that they're a rival power base, but also I think because he wants to control Russian oil and gas more directly. Remember how Russia strongarmed Ukraine a couple of years ago, and Belarus more recently, using their control of the gas pipelines as leverage? With the expansion of the EU into the east, Russia just saw all its old allies join up with the West and leave Moscow behind. Now the Baltic states, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, they're all in the EU, and Russian influence over the ex-Soviet states even further east is waning. But Russian control of their fuel supplies might still keep them in line.
That's the bit I don't agree with. Iran would like to be rid of Israel, I believe that, but I don't believe the Iranian leadership are insane enough to launch a nuclear first strike even if they could, and I'm not aware that there's anything like the same cult of loyalty to the leadership that we find in North Korea. Open war with Israel or with the United States would mean total ruin for Iran, and the government and the people both know it. Much of the population consists of veterans of the long and horrible war with Iraq. I don't think anyone there wants that again.
Iran's playing a dangerous game here, but I'm not thinking in War On Terror terms about them. I'm thinking in Cold War terms. They're playing the same games the Russians used to - backing factions in unstable regions who are ideologically compatible. This isn't Islamic extremism, this is good political sense. I'm nowhere near as worried about Iran as I am about North Korea, because I believe the Iranians are sane and rational.
An ICBM is of no use to a terrorist. It requires ground facilities, fuelling, maintenance, basically a whole sophisticated infrastructure. When it takes off it does so on top of a great big plume of very hot gas which gets spotted by every infrared monitoring satellite on that side of the planet. So when the bomb goes off and we look for who's to blame, the answer's not hard to find. They're wonderful for nation states, for superpowers, but they're no good for terrorists in any way.
A terrorist with a nuke will put it on a cargo ship and set it off in the harbour. Worry if you will about Iran giving a bomb to terrorists - though I doubt they'd be such fools as to do so, since such hardliners have little love for the relatively secular government in Tehran - but giving them intercontinental missiles isn't plausible at all. My guess is that Iran will want these rockets first as a deterrent against US / Israeli aggression, and second as a means of increasing their regional influence in the long term.
They'll probably also want to orbit a few spysats if they can. Keep an eye on events in Iraq.
I don't know... sounds very human indeed to me.
It's relevant to us, though. If only one entity decides to replicate en masse, it will undoubtedly fill the galaxy. If more than one decides to do so, they will fill the galaxy between them. The only case in which Fermi's paradox does not hold is if none at all decide to do so, ever - otherwise, the question arises again, where are they? Natural selection does NOT operate on post-bio entities. Reproduction is entirely under the control of postbio entities, because it is not biological. Not only that, but mutation per se can be totally controlled or eliminated, if desired. What you are calling "natural selection" is simply the rate of reproduction. The rate of reproduction is not the definition of natural selection. Natural selection involves mutation and adaptation to the environment as well
I wouldn't say that. Mutation is a source of variation. Natural selection simply determines which varieties reproduce and which do not, and hence by the differential survival and reproduction rate determines which variants fill the world and which vanish into obscurity or extinction. It doesn't matter whether it's mutation, or Monolith aliens, or self-directed genetic engineering which provides variety, the resultant structure still faces the test of natural selection. The population will end up numerically dominated by the most successful reproducers.
For a postbio entity, rationality WILL set ALL goals. It's possible to consider a postbio entity with emotions or even emotional goals, but if such goals are significant in controlling the entity's behavior, it may or will be at a disadvantage compared to more rational entities.
How does rationality set all goals? I just don't see it. Rational thought is a process that takes given conditions, applies processing that we call logic, and arrives at a conclusion regarding those conditions. For instance, given 'I dislike getting wet', and also given 'It is raining outside' and 'I want to go outside soon', I might rationally conclude 'I should take an umbrella'. Taking an umbrella is a rational thing to do if my goal is to go outside in the rain without getting wet. So rationality has set me one goal: to find my umbrella. But that's just a step towards my more distant goal: to go outside without getting wet. Maybe I like the rain and enjoy being wet; in that case it's irrational to go and fetch my umbrella before going out.
In addition, it's quite possible to do extremely sub-optimal things for perfectly rational reasons. Think about the Prisoner's Dilemma, for instance. The optimal outcome in that game is the result of a totally illogical play.
The presupposition is always that these entities are 1) biological; 2) consumptive of exponential resources; 3) aggressively competitive. There is nothing to support any of that for postbio entities. It's pure speculation from a biological basis.
At the very least your entities must think. That takes energy. Energy is a finite resource in this universe. Given a greater energy supply, an entity can do more thinking. Is increasing one's capacity for thought a rational goal? If so, then our entities will all be looking to lay claim to ever-greater supplies of energy. Since the supply of energy is finite, they might well end up competing for it.
I suspect no postbio entity would reproduce itself directly. That WOULD be creating competing entities - unless there was some technological way to either produce a "group mind" - in which case there is STILL only a single entity no matter how many "bodies" it has - or somehow control or design the copies such that they cannot compete. Having
These games are done a disservice by the description 'not entirely text'. They're not even mostly text. State of the art at the time was primarily visual, but using text for dialogue because there wasn't anything like the amount of data available that synthesised speech would require.
Your description brought to mind the later Infocom games of the early eighties, which would still display pages and pages of description for each area, but would also display a small picture of it. A 'not entirely text' Maniac Mansion would have a placeholder picture of Weird Ed and the description: "You are in Weird Ed's bedroom, which is decorated with assorted sports pennants, model spaceships from Star Wars, and commando memorabilia. Weird Ed is here. You see a hamster and a piggy bank. Weird Ed says "Halt! Who goes there? Are you in league with the evil purple meteor, or have you come here to help me defeat him?"
And by the way, 256 colours is plenty for a good story. Maniac Mansion managed with 16. We didn't get thousands of colours outside the Amiga crowd until the mid-nineties. I think it's voiceovers you're looking for here - that had to wait for CD-ROM, in order to store them all.
"Hello, little computer. I respect you... even though you only have 64k of memory." - Bernard Bernoulli, Day of the Tentacle, in 256 colour VGA, 1993.
In 1987? Sid Meier's Pirates! came out in 1987. So did Maniac Mansion. And Zelda II.
You can never escape evolution. Perhaps you can direct your own development - use genetic engineering, cybernetics, computer consciousness upload, whatever, instead of just waiting for the right mutation to come along - but mutation isn't the whole of evolution.
If I, as a post-biological entity, choose to modify myself in such a way that I reproduce myself less frequently than other post-biological entities, then I guarantee that the future will contain fewer post-biological entities like myself. If I modify myself such as to never reproduce at all, then all there will ever be is myself.
Natural selection still operates no matter how clever you are: whether by blind mutation or by intelligent design, if on average you have more surviving children (or copies or clones or whatever it is) than the rest, then the future will contain more like you.
In the same manner, Transhumans don't have "urges". "Urges" are biological requirements. A fully rational hyperintelligence doesn't run on "urges."
Very well: perhaps we can restate that as 'goals', then? Rationality doesn't set your objectives, it just tells you how best to go about achieving them. Maybe Transhuman A's goal is to watch the sun grow old, and in that case it is rational for him to simply sit here, watch and wait. But maybe Transhuman B's goal is to convert as much as possible of the nonliving, nonsentient matter of the universe into others like himself, perhaps because he thinks it terribly wasteful that so much of the universe is sitting idle. In that case his rational course of action is to go forth, be fruitful and multiply.
And whether you call this evolution or freely chosen development, the fact remains that a million years later Transhuman A will still be sat there alone staring at the sun, while the rest of the galaxy is full of Transhuman B's descendants. Your chances of ever meeting Transhuman A are vanishingly small, because there's only one of him and quadrillions of Transhuman B.
If even a single one of these hypothetical entities chooses a goal that involves creating copies of itself, and then copies of copies, then there's nothing to stop it filling the galaxy. Exponential growth will mean that its numbers swamp those of the non-breeders, leaving them so rare as to be statistically insignificant.
Are you so sure that no such entity, ever, will do this?
Does anyone use decimetres for anything? Milli, yes, centi certainly, but I've never heard 'decimetre' used in the wild.
And shame on you for posing trick questions anyway. That one's worthy of Starfleet Academy. How many cubic decimetres to the litre, indeed!