If someone made a copy of you and the copy died would you be dead Consider a teleporter that in teleporting, took your current body apart atom by atom, then put it back atom by atom at the destination (with different atoms). If the teleporter did not recreate your body, you would be dead, so the process is killing you. However your consciousness lives on, in what is ostensibly the same body, with the same memory. We would consider this you not dying, because you are ongoing in the same state as when you lived.
Now what happens if, when teleporting, not one, but multiple copies are created at different locations. These are all equally you. "You" is no longer a single entity. Each is spawned with their own memory, like spawning multiple processes - each thinks it is the same as the parent.
So I would that say if you asked the person who is alive if he were dead, he would say no, but if you asked the person who was dead if he were dead, he wouldn't say anything.
Firstly, you aren't taking (in the sense of "moving") something without permission. If I want file X i think the program that you run is much more akin to cp than mv. You are copying something without permission, not moving it (which gives the sense of deprivation).
Secondly, files are numbers. You can't stop people copying numbers. You can't stop people performing operations on numbers. You cannot own a number. It is not for you to give consent to people having a number. It is an idea. You cannot own an idea, because an idea is not property. To be property it must both take effort to make and have some kind of scarcity. It's why we don't own air (yet), but we do buy clean water. Numbers have no scarcity. There is nothing to stop their transfer. Therefore any law that tries to prevent it will be an ineffective law. Asking people to not copy numbers is akin to asking people not to talk about ideas. It is depriving people of the freedom of thought. You can pass laws to prevent it, but you would need a division of thought police to enforce the laws.
But what about your ability to earn money from numbers? Well, you can only give it out for a certain sum (when it has scarcity because no body knows what the number is), figure out some smart way so that the operation to view the number has to pass through you, or ask people nicely. But once you have told people about a number, there is nothing you can do to stop other people telling others.
Its not about what you consider fair. You cannot expect to hang on to a life in a older time, when the cost of performing a copying operation was enough barrier to prevent the spreading of ideas. You need to adjust your business practices to the reality at hand, not the "reality" you would prefer.
So maybe it isn't as relevant to the rest of the world, but it's also the 9th aniversary of KDE's founding today. I doubt whether Matthias Ettrich planned it so, but three cheers for the windows that are free for the masses!
Is there any benefits we gain from pigeon-holing something into names such as "planet"? Vocabulary is good and defining things is important but how exactly does calling something a planet help? Given that top scientists can't figure it out, its going to confuse the rest of us.
I mean, is it worth investigating planets but not asteroids? Do planets have some divine importance that other things do not, or is it just a hangover from older times when we couldn't see these things so easily and didn't know that there was much difference between the two.
In fact, is the number of planets that an important statistic about a solar system? Wouldn't it be better to have other measures like non-star mass and the number of discrete bodies of a system and then label the bodies based on their (more specific) type: To say that our solar system has 10 planets doesn't tell you as much as saying we have 4 gas giants and 4 liquidy-rocky bodies and a number of cold stones.
It just seems like we are trying to shoe horn old lingo into a more modern era where we have found things to be not so black and white. Leave a simple definition stand that most people can live by and if people are interested we can tell them a lie that is more closer to the truth.
* Full-disclosure update: When we first wrote these "10 things" four years ago, we included the phrase "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." Over time we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer -- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -- and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. This doesn't mean we've changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus (to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects).
Caching? Doesn't anybody cache anymore? All you need to do is check the date stamp, or the filesize, or have a 2 byte hash somewhere, so the 20k page gets reduced to a 2k rss feed, which gets reduced to a 2B hash. Surely there'd be a bandwidth saving there?
I am not a Quantum physicist, but surely if its stable for a second that should be long enough to copy it across onto conventional storage? You only need to look at Schrodinger's cat once to know its alive, anymore seems redundant.
The person doing the mobile phone mustn't have had predictive text. I'm not a fast typer at all, but I beat the morser handily. Not believing it I tried again. And still won. I'm sure someone can give me a good description in information theory how much information you have to send on the mobile, versus typing each character. Sure the speeds may be different, but if you have good compression by having background information in the domain at hand, you have a good advantage.
Has anyone ever given any thought to mobile phone lettering layout? It would make it much faster if the most used letters were interspersed with the least used: if "aes" were the letters on one key, it wouldn't be able to ambiguify them. But if you had a common, a middly used, and a rare, like "emx" then it would make things much more efficient.
Current mobile keyboards are the querty of our time. A "Dvorak" mobile pad with predictive text would kick anything that came its way!
Did anyone from Wikipedia even think of this? With firefox's publicity at its first release, Open Source has shown they can do this, but unless it gets on with the Cheese that appeals to most people, its going to stay as the 10%, and not the 90% that we'd like to think it deserves.
Slashdot Mirror
The original paper about this must be getting a bit old. Time to bring out a new one!
Firstly, you aren't taking (in the sense of "moving") something without permission. If I want file X i think the program that you run is much more akin to cp than mv. You are copying something without permission, not moving it (which gives the sense of deprivation).
Secondly, files are numbers. You can't stop people copying numbers. You can't stop people performing operations on numbers. You cannot own a number. It is not for you to give consent to people having a number. It is an idea. You cannot own an idea, because an idea is not property. To be property it must both take effort to make and have some kind of scarcity. It's why we don't own air (yet), but we do buy clean water. Numbers have no scarcity. There is nothing to stop their transfer. Therefore any law that tries to prevent it will be an ineffective law. Asking people to not copy numbers is akin to asking people not to talk about ideas. It is depriving people of the freedom of thought. You can pass laws to prevent it, but you would need a division of thought police to enforce the laws.
But what about your ability to earn money from numbers? Well, you can only give it out for a certain sum (when it has scarcity because no body knows what the number is), figure out some smart way so that the operation to view the number has to pass through you, or ask people nicely. But once you have told people about a number, there is nothing you can do to stop other people telling others.
Its not about what you consider fair. You cannot expect to hang on to a life in a older time, when the cost of performing a copying operation was enough barrier to prevent the spreading of ideas. You need to adjust your business practices to the reality at hand, not the "reality" you would prefer.
I just loaded it in Explorer (Firefox support coming soon...) and it crashed it. Well, at least Windows stays true to form, whatever the platform!
So maybe it isn't as relevant to the rest of the world, but it's also the 9th aniversary of KDE's founding today. I doubt whether Matthias Ettrich planned it so, but three cheers for the windows that are free for the masses!
Is there any benefits we gain from pigeon-holing something into names such as "planet"? Vocabulary is good and defining things is important but how exactly does calling something a planet help? Given that top scientists can't figure it out, its going to confuse the rest of us.
I mean, is it worth investigating planets but not asteroids? Do planets have some divine importance that other things do not, or is it just a hangover from older times when we couldn't see these things so easily and didn't know that there was much difference between the two.
In fact, is the number of planets that an important statistic about a solar system? Wouldn't it be better to have other measures like non-star mass and the number of discrete bodies of a system and then label the bodies based on their (more specific) type: To say that our solar system has 10 planets doesn't tell you as much as saying we have 4 gas giants and 4 liquidy-rocky bodies and a number of cold stones.
It just seems like we are trying to shoe horn old lingo into a more modern era where we have found things to be not so black and white. Leave a simple definition stand that most people can live by and if people are interested we can tell them a lie that is more closer to the truth.
It go on to say:
* Full-disclosure update: When we first wrote these "10 things" four years ago, we included the phrase "Google does not do horoscopes, financial advice or chat." Over time we've expanded our view of the range of services we can offer -- web search, for instance, isn't the only way for people to access or use information -- and products that then seemed unlikely are now key aspects of our portfolio. This doesn't mean we've changed our core mission; just that the farther we travel toward achieving it, the more those blurry objects on the horizon come into sharper focus (to be replaced, of course, by more blurry objects).
What do you know? Its been done already:
http://www.rsscache.com/
Caching? Doesn't anybody cache anymore? All you need to do is check the date stamp, or the filesize, or have a 2 byte hash somewhere, so the 20k page gets reduced to a 2k rss feed, which gets reduced to a 2B hash. Surely there'd be a bandwidth saving there?
I am not a Quantum physicist, but surely if its stable for a second that should be long enough to copy it across onto conventional storage? You only need to look at Schrodinger's cat once to know its alive, anymore seems redundant.
Now that have fried fried server, I'm sure she'll have a lot more to work with.
if only she could turn the /. effect into something tangible she'd be rich!
The person doing the mobile phone mustn't have had predictive text. I'm not a fast typer at all, but I beat the morser handily. Not believing it I tried again. And still won. I'm sure someone can give me a good description in information theory how much information you have to send on the mobile, versus typing each character. Sure the speeds may be different, but if you have good compression by having background information in the domain at hand, you have a good advantage. Has anyone ever given any thought to mobile phone lettering layout? It would make it much faster if the most used letters were interspersed with the least used: if "aes" were the letters on one key, it wouldn't be able to ambiguify them. But if you had a common, a middly used, and a rare, like "emx" then it would make things much more efficient. Current mobile keyboards are the querty of our time. A "Dvorak" mobile pad with predictive text would kick anything that came its way!
It only works if they've been posted a couple fempto seconds apart.
I always think "Shut up! Shut up! Cut his Mike."
Did anyone from Wikipedia even think of this? With firefox's publicity at its first release, Open Source has shown they can do this, but unless it gets on with the Cheese that appeals to most people, its going to stay as the 10%, and not the 90% that we'd like to think it deserves.
Step 1. Have economy collapse.
Step 2. Sign Kyoto.
Step 3. Profit