I would point out that one of the benefits of AJAX is the ability to connect to Java on the server side, so I don't see how this is somehow going to cause Java to go away...
JavaScript also does not anywhere NEAR the available class libraries of Java.
These are complementary technologies, not opposing ones.
None of which alters my primary point: none of these people will be immortal in either the classic sense or the physical sense. Citing "consensus" and experimentation is completely irrelevant to the point.
The end result is the same: the only way to be immortal in the sense of continuity of a single mental system is upgrade in place. Any other attempt to achieve immortality is just "fool's gold".
Did you see the picture of Gerri Willis on the same page? Va-va-voom!
As an aside, as an ironic twist on BofA and "identify theft", when I was at my bank robbery sentencing hearing, the Presentence Investigation report said that BofA was unable to confirm I had ever been an employee there, either by name or by SSN, despite my having worked there for two and a quarter years. My attorney brought this up to the judge, saying we could supply former supervisor names, etc. The judge dismissed it as unimportant, saying "It makes you real confident about how they keep track of your money."
Re:As Usual, The Metaphysical Problem is Glossed O
on
Download Your Brain
·
· Score: 1
Yes, it is, from an external perspective. I'm not interested in solipsist nonsense about how it "feels" or how it appears to my individual consciousness.
I'm Neo. I take the pill that wakes me up to reality. And the reality is - a duplicate of me is not me, no matter how IT happens to feel about it.
The Star Trek novels "Price of the Phoenix" and "Fate of the Phoenix" dealt with this issue rather well. The conclusion was a person IS his continuity, which is another way of saying a person is his trajectory in space-time. Being an exact duplicate of someone else gives you no claim on anything he has, no matter how you are forced to feel about it due to the fact that your entire existence up to a minute ago was his.
First, I am a RADICAL Transhumanist. Much more so than most of the Extropians.
Your first part is correct. Nanobots or some similar technology could indeed exactly simulate the functioning of my brain. And then by taking over, one (or more) neurons at a time, they could establish continuity and I would still be me.
As soon as you COPY that process to ANOTHER platform, you have REPLICATED, NOT MOVED "me".
If you reread Hans Moravec's initial exposition of this process in Mind Children, he explicitly suggested disassembling the physical brain, simulating it on the computer platform and disposing of the "waste matter" - which happens to be ME. This is when I first realized that people don't have a clue about this.
"You" are BOTH a structure AND a structure with a specific location in space-time. "You" can only exist in ONE PLACE AT A TIME - otherwise the other system is not "you", it is a copy or a simulation or any other term that describes the structure accurately. It doesn't matter if that structure EXACTLY duplicates you down to the bare atoms - it's still not "you" because "you" IS (excuse the grammar!) a location in space-time.
A system is a system with a specific location (range of effect is not necessarily "location".) It doesn't matter if that system is embedded in another system, or able to communicate across lightyears with zero latency, it still has a location. Other than quantum nonlocality, I know of no theory of physics that suggests otherwise.
There's nothing religious about this - it's purely plain three-dimensional physics.
I repeat, the ONLY way to insure immortality is to UPGRADE IN PLACE. If you want to then gain more capability, you just keep upgrading in place. No need to "move" anywhere. Nanotech will make this trivial.
Notice that I am NOT complaining about whether making such duplicates is a bad thing. It might or might not be - see the "Price of the Phoenix" and "Fate of the Phoenix" Star Trek novels for suggestions about that. In fact, having a cross-sex exact nanotech duplicate of myself might be fun! I'm merely saying that the only way to insure YOUR existence is to upgrade in place.
Everybody loves them in Europe - from Ireland to England to France to Germany to Spain to Italy!
I was just watching one of their 2004 concerts in Benidorm, Spain. Somebody threw a teddy bear up on the stage for Andrea (she gets a LOT of teddy bears - at the Ischgl performance, there was a stack of 3 or 4 of them on the drum riser!). Jim started playing a piano ditty, she started dancing with the teddy bear. The audience began singing "Ole! Ole!" and the rest of the band then jumped in and played along. She ended the dance by mooning the crowd.
You gotta love 'em!
As Usual, The Metaphysical Problem is Glossed Over
on
Download Your Brain
·
· Score: 1
Namely, what happens to your physical brain?
If it dies, YOU'RE DEAD - regardless of what's running on the computer.
Every single downloader advocate I've heard ignores the fact that "you" have a unique space-time location. Duplicate that location and you're merely duplicated yourself. That is NOT "immortality" of any sort. It's merely REPLICATION.
The ONLY way to achieve immortality is to transmogrify the body and brain IN PLACE (with non-stop, fault-tolerant, failure-tolerant, restartable, and 'resurrectable' procedures).
Otherwise all you're doing is building a copy - YOU are still going to die.
Morons.
And this is what passes for "Transhumanism" among idiots like the Extropians.
Yes, I've heard that getting a RHCE is really tough. Supposedly you have to pass a test where the monitors mess up a functioning Red Hat server installation and you have to debug and fix it.
On a par with the Cisco CCIE test, apparently, which very few applicants pass the first time, if at all.
NOTHING Steve Ballmer says matters since his strings are pulled by Bill - and NOTHING HE says matters as it's all bullshit on a par with ANYTHING George Bush says.
Well, I predict Microsoft will not matter in ten years.
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised since most Americans are sheep who would bend over and get an anal probe before buying something they wanted, especially if someone in authority told them to.
"Land of the free and home of the brave" Hah!
Land of the brainwashed and home of the gutless punks.
All of whom are loudly proclaiming how America is the Empire.
George Lucas, now we KNOW you can't write because you just wrote down what's in the papers every day.
Bush would equal Palpatine IF he wasn't such an inarticulate boob - and he didn't have AIDS (ever notice the recurring facial edemas on Bush) from his gay boyfriends like Jeff Gannon. (It would help if he could throw lightning, too.)
Moron, most people don't choose, because the vast majority of Windows users have NEVER HEARD of Linux.
Yes, the average user is a moron who can't read newspapers or surf the Web or even watch TV news, apparently...
Just about every person outside of my computer classes at City College (and most of them in the Windows classes) have never heard of Linux. If they have, they're amazed it has a GUI interface.
Showed off Xandros screenshots from their Web site to a female classmate just this Monday. She'd never heard of Linux before listening to me all semester compare Windows 2003 Server to Linux. (The teacher and I have fun insulting each other's OS choices - he's a cool Windows-only consultant.)
The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that
* exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation
* engages in corporatism
* implements totalitarianism
Anything else you want to know?
I'd say all of these fit right in with the current administration's attitude and behavior.
and once I got the right extensions (especially keyconfig so I could keep using the "z" key to go back a page, and a download extension to get the stupid FireFox downloads window out of my face - the settings option to open it and then close it after downloads simply doesn't work), everything seems to be pretty much as good as Opera was.
It still sucks, but that's because all browsers suck - nothing against FireFox per se.
Wells Fargo was telling me some months ago every time I went to their site that "only Internet Explorer would be supported" after such-and-such a date.
That date came and went.
FireFox works fine. So did Opera.
I sent them an email explaining how IE was the least secure POS on the Internet and FireFox had, at the time, millions of downloads, some of whom were presumbly in Silicon Valley and probably customers of theirs, and they replied that they were "evaluating" FireFox and Opera, but it was a lot of work keeping up with browser market changes.
Or the sordid tale of chemical weapons transfer to Saddam Hussein courtesy of our Leader's father, Ronald Reagan, and our current Secretary of Defense.
Also untouched by the current fascist Justice Department - big surprise.
Meanwhile, a Federal court just threw out Sibel Edmond's appeal to have her "national security" gag order eliminated. You remember Sibel? She's the FBI translator who says that if she is ever allowed to testify in court, "senior elected officials" of the US government "will go to jail." (Hint: How many "senior elected officials" do we have in Washington? Uhm, I think the Senate, the Congress, and the White House?)
So Ashcroft gagged her.
In the hearing, she and her lawyers were ushered out of the room and guarded while "Justice" Department attorneys huddled with the judge. Then they were called in, and the case was dismissed - with no reason given by the judge.
Slashdot Mirror
Rather than try to extort $20 million from Citibank, now we're reduced to extorting $200.
What's next - a virus that says, "Brother, can you spare a dime?"
I would point out that one of the benefits of AJAX is the ability to connect to Java on the server side, so I don't see how this is somehow going to cause Java to go away...
JavaScript also does not anywhere NEAR the available class libraries of Java.
These are complementary technologies, not opposing ones.
You are utterly clueless about reality.
No problem - reality will re-adjust your thinking in due time.
None of which alters my primary point: none of these people will be immortal in either the classic sense or the physical sense. Citing "consensus" and experimentation is completely irrelevant to the point.
The end result is the same: the only way to be immortal in the sense of continuity of a single mental system is upgrade in place. Any other attempt to achieve immortality is just "fool's gold".
Did you see the picture of Gerri Willis on the same page? Va-va-voom!
As an aside, as an ironic twist on BofA and "identify theft", when I was at my bank robbery sentencing hearing, the Presentence Investigation report said that BofA was unable to confirm I had ever been an employee there, either by name or by SSN, despite my having worked there for two and a quarter years. My attorney brought this up to the judge, saying we could supply former supervisor names, etc. The judge dismissed it as unimportant, saying "It makes you real confident about how they keep track of your money."
"I'm sure the comments on this story will be incredibly insightful."
This circuitry must be right next to the part of the brain that governs the ability to get a date.
fry my balls here in San Francisco!
Or maybe some guy in China...
Yes, it is, from an external perspective. I'm not interested in solipsist nonsense about how it "feels" or how it appears to my individual consciousness.
I'm Neo. I take the pill that wakes me up to reality. And the reality is - a duplicate of me is not me, no matter how IT happens to feel about it.
The Star Trek novels "Price of the Phoenix" and "Fate of the Phoenix" dealt with this issue rather well. The conclusion was a person IS his continuity, which is another way of saying a person is his trajectory in space-time. Being an exact duplicate of someone else gives you no claim on anything he has, no matter how you are forced to feel about it due to the fact that your entire existence up to a minute ago was his.
Wrong.
First, I am a RADICAL Transhumanist. Much more so than most of the Extropians.
Your first part is correct. Nanobots or some similar technology could indeed exactly simulate the functioning of my brain. And then by taking over, one (or more) neurons at a time, they could establish continuity and I would still be me.
As soon as you COPY that process to ANOTHER platform, you have REPLICATED, NOT MOVED "me".
If you reread Hans Moravec's initial exposition of this process in Mind Children, he explicitly suggested disassembling the physical brain, simulating it on the computer platform and disposing of the "waste matter" - which happens to be ME. This is when I first realized that people don't have a clue about this.
"You" are BOTH a structure AND a structure with a specific location in space-time. "You" can only exist in ONE PLACE AT A TIME - otherwise the other system is not "you", it is a copy or a simulation or any other term that describes the structure accurately. It doesn't matter if that structure EXACTLY duplicates you down to the bare atoms - it's still not "you" because "you" IS (excuse the grammar!) a location in space-time.
A system is a system with a specific location (range of effect is not necessarily "location".) It doesn't matter if that system is embedded in another system, or able to communicate across lightyears with zero latency, it still has a location. Other than quantum nonlocality, I know of no theory of physics that suggests otherwise.
There's nothing religious about this - it's purely plain three-dimensional physics.
I repeat, the ONLY way to insure immortality is to UPGRADE IN PLACE. If you want to then gain more capability, you just keep upgrading in place. No need to "move" anywhere. Nanotech will make this trivial.
Notice that I am NOT complaining about whether making such duplicates is a bad thing. It might or might not be - see the "Price of the Phoenix" and "Fate of the Phoenix" Star Trek novels for suggestions about that. In fact, having a cross-sex exact nanotech duplicate of myself might be fun! I'm merely saying that the only way to insure YOUR existence is to upgrade in place.
Everybody loves them in Europe - from Ireland to England to France to Germany to Spain to Italy!
I was just watching one of their 2004 concerts in Benidorm, Spain. Somebody threw a teddy bear up on the stage for Andrea (she gets a LOT of teddy bears - at the Ischgl performance, there was a stack of 3 or 4 of them on the drum riser!). Jim started playing a piano ditty, she started dancing with the teddy bear. The audience began singing "Ole! Ole!" and the rest of the band then jumped in and played along. She ended the dance by mooning the crowd.
You gotta love 'em!
Namely, what happens to your physical brain?
If it dies, YOU'RE DEAD - regardless of what's running on the computer.
Every single downloader advocate I've heard ignores the fact that "you" have a unique space-time location. Duplicate that location and you're merely duplicated yourself. That is NOT "immortality" of any sort. It's merely REPLICATION.
The ONLY way to achieve immortality is to transmogrify the body and brain IN PLACE (with non-stop, fault-tolerant, failure-tolerant, restartable, and 'resurrectable' procedures).
Otherwise all you're doing is building a copy - YOU are still going to die.
Morons.
And this is what passes for "Transhumanism" among idiots like the Extropians.
Excuse me, but how are they going to copy Linux code running on it, when Linux cluster code has been around for years?
If they could do, they would have done it.
And the increase in unit sales wouldn't be enough to pay for Gate's shoe shines. How many Linux buffs running clusters do you think there are?
As for free advertisement, it's far MORE a free advertisement for how Linux can run on anything and turn it into something useful.
"Switching now would be insane."
Wrong.
"It's not a choice of which one is 'better' (for one of any number of reasons) but which one works best for us."
Which is totally and completely illogical on the face of the statement.
It's like saying "Smoking cigarettes is not about whether it gives me cancer, but about whether it works best for me."
What the fuck is "best", if you're spending more and getting less than you could with something else.
I see here someone protecting his fucking job, not doing what is truly "best" for his company.
And THIS is why Windows is still dominant in corporations. That simple.
Yes, I've heard that getting a RHCE is really tough. Supposedly you have to pass a test where the monitors mess up a functioning Red Hat server installation and you have to debug and fix it.
On a par with the Cisco CCIE test, apparently, which very few applicants pass the first time, if at all.
You're a "latex lover"?
You sure you want to admit that?
You live in San Francisco (like me)?
(Sorry, couldn't resist! Yes, I know what LaTeX is)
when all his three-CPU XBoxes become Linux clusters!
Bwahahahahaha!!!
First of all, "even the most computer illiterate" CANNOT do these things on Windows without help, as I have seen many times.
Second, ALL of the cited tasks can be done on Linux just as easily as on Windows.
is "News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters".
NOTHING Steve Ballmer says matters since his strings are pulled by Bill - and NOTHING HE says matters as it's all bullshit on a par with ANYTHING George Bush says.
Well, I predict Microsoft will not matter in ten years.
Where's my headline?
Actually, I wouldn't be surprised since most Americans are sheep who would bend over and get an anal probe before buying something they wanted, especially if someone in authority told them to.
"Land of the free and home of the brave" Hah!
Land of the brainwashed and home of the gutless punks.
All of whom are loudly proclaiming how America is the Empire.
George Lucas, now we KNOW you can't write because you just wrote down what's in the papers every day.
Bush would equal Palpatine IF he wasn't such an inarticulate boob - and he didn't have AIDS (ever notice the recurring facial edemas on Bush) from his gay boyfriends like Jeff Gannon. (It would help if he could throw lightning, too.)
Nonetheless, he's trying.
Moron, most people don't choose, because the vast majority of Windows users have NEVER HEARD of Linux.
Yes, the average user is a moron who can't read newspapers or surf the Web or even watch TV news, apparently...
Just about every person outside of my computer classes at City College (and most of them in the Windows classes) have never heard of Linux. If they have, they're amazed it has a GUI interface.
Showed off Xandros screenshots from their Web site to a female classmate just this Monday. She'd never heard of Linux before listening to me all semester compare Windows 2003 Server to Linux. (The teacher and I have fun insulting each other's OS choices - he's a cool Windows-only consultant.)
From WikiPedia:
Definition
The word fascism has come to mean any system of government resembling Mussolini's, that
* exalts nation and sometimes race above the individual
* uses violence and modern techniques of propaganda and censorship to forcibly suppress political opposition
* engages in severe economic and social regimentation
* engages in corporatism
* implements totalitarianism
Anything else you want to know?
I'd say all of these fit right in with the current administration's attitude and behavior.
You can't see that, you're a moron.
"What steps might the U.S. take to attempt to counter it?"
Or maybe - dump Bill Gates? (A "Senior Asshole".)
and once I got the right extensions (especially keyconfig so I could keep using the "z" key to go back a page, and a download extension to get the stupid FireFox downloads window out of my face - the settings option to open it and then close it after downloads simply doesn't work), everything seems to be pretty much as good as Opera was.
It still sucks, but that's because all browsers suck - nothing against FireFox per se.
Funny?
Wells Fargo was telling me some months ago every time I went to their site that "only Internet Explorer would be supported" after such-and-such a date.
That date came and went.
FireFox works fine. So did Opera.
I sent them an email explaining how IE was the least secure POS on the Internet and FireFox had, at the time, millions of downloads, some of whom were presumbly in Silicon Valley and probably customers of theirs, and they replied that they were "evaluating" FireFox and Opera, but it was a lot of work keeping up with browser market changes.
In other words, they couldn't care less.
Or the sordid tale of chemical weapons transfer to Saddam Hussein courtesy of our Leader's father, Ronald Reagan, and our current Secretary of Defense.
Also untouched by the current fascist Justice Department - big surprise.
Meanwhile, a Federal court just threw out Sibel Edmond's appeal to have her "national security" gag order eliminated. You remember Sibel? She's the FBI translator who says that if she is ever allowed to testify in court, "senior elected officials" of the US government "will go to jail." (Hint: How many "senior elected officials" do we have in Washington? Uhm, I think the Senate, the Congress, and the White House?)
So Ashcroft gagged her.
In the hearing, she and her lawyers were ushered out of the room and guarded while "Justice" Department attorneys huddled with the judge. Then they were called in, and the case was dismissed - with no reason given by the judge.
Welcome to "Night and Fog"...