No you don't need a TPM to do it - that was what the GP claimed and with which I disagreed too - and a read-only media like a DVD can also be used for the same purpose as its very nature is also a form of a "hardware write-protect switch", which is what I was talking about in general.
I also mentioned that TPM is used mainly to enforce compliance with manufacturer's demands, most frequently as a part of a DRM scheme of some kind, like that in game consoles and its usefulness in general purpose PCs is questionable, to say the least.
So I am not sure what your point is. Are you replying to the right post?
Yes, the human civilization will most likely survive the end of oil but the point is that US and Canada and other similar societies will not survive in any shape or form resembling their current one. And the transition will be absolutely traumatic, more so if preparations for it are delayed to the very last moment, which is the ultimate goal of unleashing all the apologists, deniers and other useful idiots, for it also proffers vast profit and power gain opportunities to a select few.
Just consider the way the "west", and US and Canada in particular, have structured their societies, wholly dependent on suburban sprawl, big-box shopping centers and placed in a way that no replacement for semi-trailer deliveries are possible. Building communities that can take advantage of rail, light rail and other forms of efficient transport is radically different from what has been going on for nearly a century now. And it will take many, many decades to reverse this stupidity, a time which will not be granted by the end of cheap oil.
This is the point which most of us who see the writing on the wall are making.
Talking about gas and nuclear fusion while nonchalantly waving away all the issues that end of oil brings is in the least irresponsible and at most downright malicious.
pretty obviously if its just a few in the vast majority there's no issue
Particularly if you are using one of those "minority" choices. Hell, if 3000+ sports and celebrity-related themes work (all counted amongst the "addons"), who cares about the "minority" complicated stuff that is likely to break with wanton changes?! Everyone knows that "regular users" just want pretty and shiny things and cool version numbers! In fact they apparently all want Chrome too, so Mozilla is adoringly porting all the features of Chrome, irrespective of their quality, into Firefox! Oh and every "regular user" wants the UI to change every two weeks. Sooner and more completely if possible! Not to mention that all changes must involve "minimalism", i.e. removing something useful! Otherwise it doesn't count.
As long as the Lady Gaga Fantasy Football Theme and the Facebook integration does not break its a new major version two days after new Chrome release, at the latest, from now on!
Personally, I still have not regained many addons that I had in 3.6 so your mileage may vary. The aggravating circumstance is that addons on OS X are nowhere near as well supported as on other OSes.
This doesn't look so good when you realize that 3000+ are themes and the like. It is the most complex (and useful) addons that break and of those it is far more then 6%. More like 40%.
Translation: "Stupid users want to keep their stupid plugins! Ha! What do these idiots know?! We the developers, not some moron users, just know better what users really want! Didn't we tell them that all of their stuff is optional (to us)?! Well, we will just shove our choices down their throats and they will like it! Or else!... Wait, what happened?! They all left! What's going on?!"
Well, the version number and slavish adoration of everything Chrome, followed by desperate attempts to mimic every last feature of it, no matter how idiotic, cumbersome or buggy.
Bonus points for their belligerent defense of their deeply emotional Chrome fetish which they then attempt to dress up as "innovation" and "serving ordinary users" (as if "ordinary users" clamored to have everything change on them every two weeks).
What they missed, apparently, is that Google, with its few billion bucks to spare, can afford to fool around with minor experiments like Chrome and even alienate its users while doing so because in the end if Chrome turns out to be a total dud abandoned by everyone, Google will just release Titanium or Aluminum or some such, or just cancel the whole thing in favour of some other experiment.
Mozilla on the other hand cannot afford pissing off its user base because its user base is all it has.
TPM was (and is) a disastrous idea from the point of view of freedom of choice for users of general purpose computers.
TPM (or similar systems) are on the other hand a key element in "walled garden" proprietary environments, such as mobile devices and other embedded systems.
Universal adoption of TPM on PCs would inevitably change them from a "general purpose" into a "walled garden" proprietary environment. Microsoft one. There is not even a faintest doubt about that.
Fortunately a mere "read only" copy of software integrity checker and repair system (writing of which is controlled by a simple hardware switch) is quite sufficient to repair pretty much any problem conceivable involving root kits, if the user follows sane procedures.
Hmm, you can generate electricity from gas and pretty soon cars are going to go electric for most commuter journeys at least.
Actually, that's laughable. People seem to imagine that post-oil (i.e. post insanely cheap high density energy) world will be just like the one we have now, except with electric cars.
Its not going to happen.
The amounts of energy involved plus the materials needed for batteries (plus all the plastic in cars) are just completely out of reach for such a scenario. Oil was a unique resource because it combined huge energy density with ease of storage and use. The next "best" method is many orders of magnitude less useful.
That is why building a civilization based on endless availability of a very unique and very finite resource is such a completely bone-headed move.
You can also run cars directly from gas.
See above. Energy density is far less and renders its use for long-range road based transport (a mainstay of US economy) completely impractical - your gas tanks for a semi-trailer would take up 50% of the cargo. Then there is the fact that liquified gas is more volatile than gasoline. Huge tanks + volatility + any collision = a car bomb that would make any Taliban bomber green with envy.
And that's not even mentioning other obvious problems: natural gas is also a fossil fuel that will run out. Kicking the can down the road a "solution" does not make.
You have a point about plastics but the main issue is energy and we have plenty of coal and gas for that. With cheap enough energy we could recycle a lot of the buried plastic if we needed to. Anyway if we reduce the demand for burning oil we have more left for plastics.
Which of course brings to forefront yet another problem with fossil fuels: pollution and CO2 emissions. In short, the "western way of life" predicated upon mindless consumerism is simply unsustainable. It is unsustainable because it is hugely wasteful of all sorts of resources, including environment. There is no escape from this. If you try to substitute one failing piece of it to prop it up, another one will immediately fail in its place.
Oil in fertilisers is a bit of a myth. We don't really need oil to produce fertilisers, we just need energy so again coal or gas would do fine.
No, we don't "need" oil there, just as we don't "need" diesel fuel and gasoline to power countless semi-trailers hauling lettuce from California to Toronto, but the problem is that of cost and practicality. If we stop using oil to produce fertilizers, their cost will skyrocket and in addition to increases in energy costs for transport it will cause food prices to exhibit exponential growth. And that is a wee bit of a problem, don't you think?
I'm pretty sure that Thorium or Pebble Bed reactors combined with renewables will keep us going till Fusion comes along and solves our energy problems.
Not going to happen. Nuclear energy, in addition to a myriad of safety issues is simply uneconomical. People seem not to realize that the entire nuclear energy industry is so heavily subsidized already that if those subsidies were removed, the price per kW would be higher than that from a set of crooked, dusty solar panels and a wobbly wind generator.
And then there are the other tiny problems such as totally untested and unproven nature of the thorium system and cracked pebbles, huge graphite fires if oxygen enters the reactor space and many times greater amounts of radioactive waste of the pebble system, in addition to hot-spots and other issues. And nuclear energy, viciously rationed by the "haves" of the world is yet another contention point between the rich countries and the remaining 4/5th of the population of the globe. Any attempt to breach nuclear monopolies will immediately trigger accusations of weaponization. It does not he
The "hate" comes from dealing with all of these mindless zealots of the "Western way of life" who just plain refuse to acknowledge all evidence, no matter how many kinds of obvious, "safe" in their supremely arrogant conviction that "markets" will somehow (via a divine intervention, most likely) bail them out in the end from the results of their own gullibility, greed and short-sightedness. It is they who are making the eventual reckoning so much, much harder. It is a small wonder then that I wish it would be them who get to pay the most.
I am afraid however that unfortunately, as always, it will be everyone who pays, not just the assholes who made it happen.
Gas is useless at fulfilling most of the demands of the current, wasteful societal schemes in the so-called "developed" countries. It cannot be readily used to power transportation at anything resembling gasoline's density levels and it is much, much more difficult to use as a source of polymers for plastics, which people constantly forget that petroleum is used extensively for. Look around you and see how much of your daily life depends on very cheap plastic. Then there is use of oil in development of fertilizers upon which (in addition to insanely cheap energy) most of the world's food supply depends....
These "reserves" are a tiny fraction of what would be required to maintain the Western (US and Canada in particular) macMansion suburbia "standard of living" predicated upon gargantuan waste of energy to sustain its mindless "consumerism" of disposable plastic crap and on top of that they are utterly uneconomical to extract with energy ratios of energy spent to energy returned in the range of something like 1:3, which when transportation and other costs are added looks more like a break-even point, rendering the entire exercise pointless (a light crude well of the long-gone glory days of the early mid-20th century had a ratio of around 1:100). And that's before even considering the environmental impact, which in the case of some of these "reserves" means utter wasteland and desolation.
In other words these are desperate pipe dreams of people who finally see on the horizon the day of reckoning for all the decades of utter, complete, total stupidity and waste, coming fast, and are attempting the old ostrich maneuver: "if I pretend hard enough, it won't happen... will it?!".
It is well know that there are vast, untapped, oil reserves all over the world. The largest of which happen to lie in the US. We could easily increase production if many of the bans on oil drilling in the US were lifted.
That's right! There are "vast" "untapped" seas of oil everywhere! And beneath that, there is more "vastly untapped" oil! Some rocks, then more oil! Infinite supply of energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years to be consumed and consumed and consumed so that it can be all used up in a few centuries... no wait! God would never let it happen! How would all them born-again Christian Texan Oil company magnates get their righteously owed due?! (or alternatively, how would Allah's chosen families of the house of Saud get theirs?!)
And its only because these unreasonable tree-huggers and pinko-commies wont let the Glorious and Righteous Oil Men to drill and drill everywhere until the entire landscape is covered in Glorious Oil Wells, horizon to horizon, instead of them sissy trees and the like, that the prices ever go up! Bastards! Off with them bushes and shrubbery, off with them fish, make way for The Towers that Squirt Black Gold, The Liquid Glory of Supreme Greed at All Costs!
And bonus! There is more! If you squint just right you will see that God (or Allah, if that's your vice) provided for the future (with the somewhat unlikely help of the Soviets) too when the center of the Earth somehow runs dry at the end of slurping tubes of the Glorious And Magnificent Oil Men!
So while all these godless commie tree-huggers panic, real God-fearing men like you should all get a bigger Hummer. 48litre displacement, 26 cylinder one.
Or bigger.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, you've been, just a little bit, a totally gullible victim of the ever more whiny and panicky propaganda courtesy of the utterly blind and irresponsible greed of oil-men and die-hard ideologues of this supposed cure-all system called "Capitalism" who are ever more desperate to hide the fact that their activities (and the long cause-effect chains of these activities) are nothing less than some of the most wasteful and destructive actions in the entire history of mankind, no? Oh and that little small problem: the entire planet's biosphere in total never had enough biomass to account for all of these "vast and untapped" oil "reserves", never you mind in the time-frame during which accumulation of fossil fuels occurred. And that doesn't even include factors such as the amounts of the solar energy thus trapped and the efficiency of the entire process.
Outside of the demented fantasies of oil companies and all those whose comfortable life-style depends on insane actions of irreparably destroying reserves accumulated over period near a billion of years in just a tiny percentile of that time, oil is running out. Permanently. The energy trapped within (along with the base materials for polymers) is nearly gone. And because, thanks to idiots like you, most of the Western world is dependent on wholly insane prices of what is ultimately a unique and irreplaceable material, any shortages of this material will cause societal upheavals the like the world has never seen.
I just hope that all these apologists like you get to live to see that day and get a full, violent brunt of the reckoning when it comes. Right in your faces.
Except that the standard install media is not an app-store interface, so you're golden:)
No, you are still screwed because downloading 4gig of crap is not an option. At best you will have an old OS which can never be upgraded unless you relocate or send your equipment to someone hundreds of miles away to do it for you.
But even that is the "old way of doing things", to disappear soon. Apple is talking about doing away with physical installation media altogether so all new equipment will come with "use high bandwidth connection" (or "Reorganize your miserable life around OUR product - its the MOST important thing ever! At least until our next, Even Shinier and More Hip, product comes out... Consume! Conform!") or "get lost" options (or "You Baaaad consumer, you! What's with you? Do you want Out Glorious Intangible Economy to fail?! Do you? Do you!?").
Future Apple "desktop" products will apparently feature 100% non-user serviceable approach, ala iPads. There is even talk on Apple forums about a move away from Intel and to ARM for all of their formerly "desktop" products such as MacBooks and iMacs.
In my opinion it is inevitable. Modern "capitalist" (ha!) "economy" has proven time and time again that thinking customers is not where the real money is and for every professional who has demanding technological requirements there is 1000 fools ready to part with their money, their privacy and their freedom in general, no questions asked, this very instant.... as long as your crap is Shiny And Trendy enough.
1) Insert standard install media that came with your machine
2) Run the app store updater process.
Works real well when the "standard install media" is little more than an app store interface and you are on a boat, live in a remote location or just in an average US rural county where dial-up is the only option...
Any computer system that requires a semi-permanent fat-ass Internet connection so it can function as a glorified cash register for an ever more authoritarian corporation is a non-starter to all those millions of people who just happened not to devolve into Starbucks-latte-sipping hipsters in Seattle who are oh-so-trendily stuffing every most incriminating and idiotic minutia of their lives into "clouds" so that it is now finally trivial for some lawyer one year hence to sue their asses into the ground at their next divorce, not to mention all those three-letter-agencies out there who just love to have the goods on everyone.
Done.
Indeed done. Quite finished. Your privacy and freedom, the Idiotbook/Twit-ster/Cloud Generation. Stick a fork in them...
Suppose that consciousness is a combination of natural and supernatural processes. Reversibly begin replacing neurons with equivalent electronic replacements until consciousness is lost, replace the neuron to restore consciousness, and continue replacing other neurons. If supernatural processes are required for consciousness a minimal set of neurons will be found that are required to interface with the supernatural.
This is outright silly. There is no "threshold" of consciousness. It is not a binary on/off situation wherein at some finite point one is "conscious" and at another, just one disconnected synapse off, a "thoughtless brute". It doesn't work that way. Instead consciousness appears to be an emergent property that has a whole continuum of possible forms. Given that we cannot even agree on how to measure it, other than the extremes: people = (mostly) conscious, amoeba = not so much, we have no hope at present to even reliably test for it. Many animals for example exhibit various behavioral patterns that we associate with human "consciousness". Are they conscious? Self aware? Experiments seem to confirm that some animals indeed are. But many people disagree. So what criteria do you use to determine that some entity is conscious?
In light of this your "experimental" method is utterly useless.
If consciousness requires non-deterministic changes in the universe in order to exist then it would imply that those changes are not actually non-deterministic; they are determined by the requirements of consciousness.
This particular argument is called "circular reasoning". Not to mention that you are completely confused as to the meaning of "non deterministic". By this token placing bets on outcomes of individual quantum events makes them "deterministic" because you can place quite solidly determined (beforehand even!) bets on them and thus the events are "determined" by the contents of your wallet... no?
And I won't even get into the idea that consciousness is "deterministic". I mean show me two people out of the billions of members of humanity out there who would react to some stimuli in the exact same way (and I mean exact as in the same motion, the same facial expression, the same nervous ticks, the same eye movements etc.)....
This would mean the universe has some extra laws we didn't know about but by using the above procedure we could almost certainly determine what they are.
Since your base assumptions about the nature of consciousness are completely off, the only thing your "experiment" is likely to determine is the level of arrogance in your making of bold proclamations.
Information is directly related to the representation of quantum states of matter. The more ordered a given physical state, the more information necessary to represent it.
I note how neatly you evaded defining what information is and what its properties are...
By creating scientific tools we can extend our ability to model to almost limitless precision and accuracy and extend our knowledge of the Universe.
Except for that nasty old curmudgeon Heisenberg and his wholly rude principle! Would it not be for him, the perfectly-fitting cosmic cogs would be whirring merrily and tiny little levers would be clicking, clicketey-clicky-click in a perfect, well oiled clockwork, just ripe for you to map on a giant blueprint... damn him, that old crank!
"Uncertainty" he says! What sort of clockwork it is where one has to roll dice while blind-folded and one can only "know" probabilities of events instead of actual outcomes! So much for "limitless precision"!
I don't know where the practical limits on our ability to model lie but they appear to be limited by computational power and not by epistemology.
True, but if you had an "Ask Google to help you choose" on that prompt which would go to Google security analysis page which would then do lookups and run through Google maintained databases to identify the host and give the user advice as to what to do, this would be negated quite easily.
This would allow the user to choose if he wants more security (Google's advice) at the expense of Google knowing where he connects, or to let him/her make their own decisions.
Even better would be to borrow from the Blackberry model, and if an app is about to use a service that is going to charge, prompt the user who/what/when/where/why/how/how much they will be billed for, and allow them to say "yes, don't bother me again", "yes", "no", or "hell no, this app can never do this".
I would go further: any app that attempts outbound connections should result in a prompt indicating the app, the server its trying to connect to and the protocol info, ala ZoneAlarm on Windows or LittleSnitch on OS X, whereby the user can answer "Yes, this time", "Yes, forever", "No, this time", "Hell no, disable this process permanently". This should be a standard feature of any consumer OS that expects to run apps that can establish connections outside. Even a dolt user would balk at his new fancy notepad app trying to connect to cmndnctrl.hackmyass.ru...
The reason for this is painfully obvious: malware with no connectivity is pointless. The market for pointless malware is a domain of kooks and lunatics, not professional criminals and thus a tiny fraction of the danger and nuisance.
Why this simple solution is not implemented in a system like Android is beyond me.
The people of California voted for the representatives who approved this tax.
You assume that:
Democracy in California is operational, i.e. informed citizenry votes for people who will actually represent its interests. It isn't, by a long shot.
The US republic, as designed in its constitution, is functional in accordance with that constitution. It isn't, not even remotely.
Democracy in general, as a process of governance, is workable on the scale of modern nation-states and in the presence of modern technology that is being used to subvert it. It isn't and no one has any idea how to fix it.
In fact the term "democracy" has become an Orwellian linguistic misdirection designed to occupy the minds of fools with irrelevant theatrics all the while making slaves believe that they are "free" but somehow, by pure coincidence - no doubt, they just happen to keep "voting" to deepen their slavery and expand the power and wealth of their masters...
This has nothing whatsoever to do with bashing Windows (although XP is a particularly funny idea in the context of nuclear facilities) but with the fact that no consumer-grade desktop OS is suitable for truly mission-critical applications. That also includes OS X as well as many popular Linux flavours.
That is because such systems are impossible to security audit, due to their sprawling complexity, which is a show-stopper in such environments (at least when total idiots are not in charge).
Anywhere where there is a demand for a high grade of reliability and rock-solid security, vastly trimmed-down subsets of an OS and GUI rendering systems that can be formally audited are used. Which usually means either BSD/Linux or some other commercial flavour of *nix like QNX, because such systems are written in a way that makes them easier to analyse at this level.
So you can leave your mindless "our team good! their team bad!" fanboi nonsense at the door.
Great use of sarcasm there, building on XP having had also over a decade of most obnoxious and prolific malware, ranging from mail worms through trojans all the way to self-replicating root-kits not to mention most numerous and spectacular security holes in the entire software industry.
And more to the point, it is also the only publicly known system to have been successfully compromised specifically to sabotage nuclear facilities....
Consciousness is either a product of the natural physical world or it is supernatural.
I am not commenting on the subject of "supernatural" at all but I could not resist pointing out that your argument is simply a False Dichotomy fallacy. For example, a third choice (which you took pains to avoid mentioning) is a combination of the two. Hence some level (even major) of susceptibility to the phenomena you mentioned but not necessarily duplicability by physical means alone, i.e. no sentient, self-conscious AI possible in that kind of scenario because of the missing "supernatural" component, which could be very small compared to the overall system size but critical for its function.
And "supernatural" can be replaced by "non-deterministic processes underlying the physical universe" and you now got a whole new level of possibilities having nothing whatsoever to do with religion as such processes can be scientifically explored, statistically analyzed but would not necessarily be replicable or even practically usable because they could depend on some systemic properties that preclude their operation in some types of data-processing systems. This would not preclude development of AI but could for example preclude all AI that is not raised as a child would and which has to by definition have major character flaws... etc and so on. Many, many other combinations of factors are possible leading to many other kinds of possible outcomes.
This also ties directly into a discussion of what is "knowable", i.e. limits of knowledge and limits of the scientific method and empiricism, a huge discussion in its own right, which brings me to another point...
My personal problem with all these, rather arrogant in my view, assumptions so obvious in many posts here, assumptions that we know enough about the processes of consciousness to even make predictions as to its true nature is the fact that we are, so far, utterly clueless as to true nature of the very foundations upon which to make any such guesses, that is the nature of information itself (and therefore the nature and properties of concepts like knowledge, its limits, limits in its acquisition methods etc).
No one knows what it is, what its true properties are, we have only some inkling as to some limitations about its transmission, some types of its transformations and some methods of its storage. And our modest success in making machines that perform some limited kinds of processing and transmission of information has gone to some people's heads. Big time. And now they are off out there somewhere waaay past any conceivable limits of their competence level, making bold proclamations about things they are patently clueless about. I think a large dose of humility and copious amounts of basic research are in order before bold predictions of any kind are being made.
This reminds of the stories of the days when Newtonian physics was king and absolutely everything and anything was being confidently theorized to be a form of "clockwork" - all the way to the whole Universe being just a gigantic collection of meshing cogs...
No one is restricting the mental capacity of anyone. Oh, you mean that those who write the books have to do so for free or at a loss, because the learner's right to learn is more important?
No, it means that they have to find a method of making a living that does not involve imposing slavery on others. No one is asking them to work for free. What you are trying here is a logical fallacy called "False Dichotomy". Look it up.
Isn't that slavery as well, just of a different group? Now you could say that there's no reason for people to use those $150 textbooks when others would do, and that's certainly right. For some reason students, parents who pay the bills, etc have not demanded that professors use lower-priced materials. I don't think it's any surprise that textbook prices are astronomical without such outcry. The professors seem to think that the extra-high content of those books should be the only factor in what course textbooks they use.
Of course the professors, for some decades now, are running an ever more boldfaced and unapologetic scam whereby they profit handsomely from changing the cover color (so that they can be easily spotted) and 3 letters or so in each year's textbook and then demanding that students all buy the "new" version each year. Naturally, them being "authors" or "co-authors" of the textbook in question, no matter how lousy and half-assed, results in significant cash-flow at larger institutions. And even if they are not the "authors", grateful publishers make sure they receive some gifts of note. Each scratching the others back and all that. Professors demand these "extra-high content books" because they... err... "wrote" them! (I am being generous here, having seen some of these "textbooks" its a gross abuse of the word "write" to describe the process involved. Cut-and-pasted them haphazardly is more like it.)
And so then - shock! surprise! - these professors somehow fail to be at the forefront of the reform movement to kick the parasitic publishers out...
All of these "alternatives" are pretty much useless to anyone who used Skype to call land-lines overseas from a country other then the US.
Sure, there are million and one of peer-to-peer "chat" apps, ranging from text only to full video. But its all pointless if the other end has just an old plain telephone and the going long-distance rate is $4 a minute.
That is why Skype is a huge deal for a lot of people. Software "openness", while very nice, does bring very little to the table where the functionality is controlled by international deals with telephone companies.
And no, SIP is not an alternative either. This kludgy junk-pile of a "protocol" is so NAT unfriendly as to make it functionally useless for anyone who does not want to maintain their own Asterisk server complete with a commercial, fixed IP address.
Slashdot Mirror
No you don't need a TPM to do it - that was what the GP claimed and with which I disagreed too - and a read-only media like a DVD can also be used for the same purpose as its very nature is also a form of a "hardware write-protect switch", which is what I was talking about in general.
I also mentioned that TPM is used mainly to enforce compliance with manufacturer's demands, most frequently as a part of a DRM scheme of some kind, like that in game consoles and its usefulness in general purpose PCs is questionable, to say the least.
So I am not sure what your point is. Are you replying to the right post?
You misunderstand completely.
Yes, the human civilization will most likely survive the end of oil but the point is that US and Canada and other similar societies will not survive in any shape or form resembling their current one. And the transition will be absolutely traumatic, more so if preparations for it are delayed to the very last moment, which is the ultimate goal of unleashing all the apologists, deniers and other useful idiots, for it also proffers vast profit and power gain opportunities to a select few.
Just consider the way the "west", and US and Canada in particular, have structured their societies, wholly dependent on suburban sprawl, big-box shopping centers and placed in a way that no replacement for semi-trailer deliveries are possible. Building communities that can take advantage of rail, light rail and other forms of efficient transport is radically different from what has been going on for nearly a century now. And it will take many, many decades to reverse this stupidity, a time which will not be granted by the end of cheap oil.
This is the point which most of us who see the writing on the wall are making.
Talking about gas and nuclear fusion while nonchalantly waving away all the issues that end of oil brings is in the least irresponsible and at most downright malicious.
Particularly if you are using one of those "minority" choices. Hell, if 3000+ sports and celebrity-related themes work (all counted amongst the "addons"), who cares about the "minority" complicated stuff that is likely to break with wanton changes?! Everyone knows that "regular users" just want pretty and shiny things and cool version numbers! In fact they apparently all want Chrome too, so Mozilla is adoringly porting all the features of Chrome, irrespective of their quality, into Firefox! Oh and every "regular user" wants the UI to change every two weeks. Sooner and more completely if possible! Not to mention that all changes must involve "minimalism", i.e. removing something useful! Otherwise it doesn't count.
As long as the Lady Gaga Fantasy Football Theme and the Facebook integration does not break its a new major version two days after new Chrome release, at the latest, from now on!
No?
Personally, I still have not regained many addons that I had in 3.6 so your mileage may vary. The aggravating circumstance is that addons on OS X are nowhere near as well supported as on other OSes.
This doesn't look so good when you realize that 3000+ are themes and the like. It is the most complex (and useful) addons that break and of those it is far more then 6%. More like 40%.
Except there are still piles of addons that did not make it from 3.6 to 4, never you mind 5. More so if you are on OS X.
As to 4 to 5, there are about 256 or so addons that broke, according to Mozilla team themselves.
You just outed yourself as a homework-avoiding troll. Well done, Sir.
Translation: "Stupid users want to keep their stupid plugins! Ha! What do these idiots know?! We the developers, not some moron users, just know better what users really want! Didn't we tell them that all of their stuff is optional (to us)?! Well, we will just shove our choices down their throats and they will like it! Or else! ... Wait, what happened?! They all left! What's going on?!"
Well, the version number and slavish adoration of everything Chrome, followed by desperate attempts to mimic every last feature of it, no matter how idiotic, cumbersome or buggy.
Bonus points for their belligerent defense of their deeply emotional Chrome fetish which they then attempt to dress up as "innovation" and "serving ordinary users" (as if "ordinary users" clamored to have everything change on them every two weeks).
What they missed, apparently, is that Google, with its few billion bucks to spare, can afford to fool around with minor experiments like Chrome and even alienate its users while doing so because in the end if Chrome turns out to be a total dud abandoned by everyone, Google will just release Titanium or Aluminum or some such, or just cancel the whole thing in favour of some other experiment.
Mozilla on the other hand cannot afford pissing off its user base because its user base is all it has.
TPM was (and is) a disastrous idea from the point of view of freedom of choice for users of general purpose computers.
TPM (or similar systems) are on the other hand a key element in "walled garden" proprietary environments, such as mobile devices and other embedded systems.
Universal adoption of TPM on PCs would inevitably change them from a "general purpose" into a "walled garden" proprietary environment. Microsoft one. There is not even a faintest doubt about that.
Fortunately a mere "read only" copy of software integrity checker and repair system (writing of which is controlled by a simple hardware switch) is quite sufficient to repair pretty much any problem conceivable involving root kits, if the user follows sane procedures.
Actually, that's laughable. People seem to imagine that post-oil (i.e. post insanely cheap high density energy) world will be just like the one we have now, except with electric cars.
Its not going to happen.
The amounts of energy involved plus the materials needed for batteries (plus all the plastic in cars) are just completely out of reach for such a scenario. Oil was a unique resource because it combined huge energy density with ease of storage and use. The next "best" method is many orders of magnitude less useful.
That is why building a civilization based on endless availability of a very unique and very finite resource is such a completely bone-headed move.
See above. Energy density is far less and renders its use for long-range road based transport (a mainstay of US economy) completely impractical - your gas tanks for a semi-trailer would take up 50% of the cargo. Then there is the fact that liquified gas is more volatile than gasoline. Huge tanks + volatility + any collision = a car bomb that would make any Taliban bomber green with envy.
And that's not even mentioning other obvious problems: natural gas is also a fossil fuel that will run out. Kicking the can down the road a "solution" does not make.
Which of course brings to forefront yet another problem with fossil fuels: pollution and CO2 emissions. In short, the "western way of life" predicated upon mindless consumerism is simply unsustainable. It is unsustainable because it is hugely wasteful of all sorts of resources, including environment. There is no escape from this. If you try to substitute one failing piece of it to prop it up, another one will immediately fail in its place.
No, we don't "need" oil there, just as we don't "need" diesel fuel and gasoline to power countless semi-trailers hauling lettuce from California to Toronto, but the problem is that of cost and practicality. If we stop using oil to produce fertilizers, their cost will skyrocket and in addition to increases in energy costs for transport it will cause food prices to exhibit exponential growth. And that is a wee bit of a problem, don't you think?
Not going to happen. Nuclear energy, in addition to a myriad of safety issues is simply uneconomical. People seem not to realize that the entire nuclear energy industry is so heavily subsidized already that if those subsidies were removed, the price per kW would be higher than that from a set of crooked, dusty solar panels and a wobbly wind generator.
And then there are the other tiny problems such as totally untested and unproven nature of the thorium system and cracked pebbles, huge graphite fires if oxygen enters the reactor space and many times greater amounts of radioactive waste of the pebble system, in addition to hot-spots and other issues. And nuclear energy, viciously rationed by the "haves" of the world is yet another contention point between the rich countries and the remaining 4/5th of the population of the globe. Any attempt to breach nuclear monopolies will immediately trigger accusations of weaponization. It does not he
The "hate" comes from dealing with all of these mindless zealots of the "Western way of life" who just plain refuse to acknowledge all evidence, no matter how many kinds of obvious, "safe" in their supremely arrogant conviction that "markets" will somehow (via a divine intervention, most likely) bail them out in the end from the results of their own gullibility, greed and short-sightedness. It is they who are making the eventual reckoning so much, much harder. It is a small wonder then that I wish it would be them who get to pay the most.
I am afraid however that unfortunately, as always, it will be everyone who pays, not just the assholes who made it happen.
Gas is useless at fulfilling most of the demands of the current, wasteful societal schemes in the so-called "developed" countries. It cannot be readily used to power transportation at anything resembling gasoline's density levels and it is much, much more difficult to use as a source of polymers for plastics, which people constantly forget that petroleum is used extensively for. Look around you and see how much of your daily life depends on very cheap plastic. Then there is use of oil in development of fertilizers upon which (in addition to insanely cheap energy) most of the world's food supply depends ....
Except, of course, its complete nonsense.
These "reserves" are a tiny fraction of what would be required to maintain the Western (US and Canada in particular) macMansion suburbia "standard of living" predicated upon gargantuan waste of energy to sustain its mindless "consumerism" of disposable plastic crap and on top of that they are utterly uneconomical to extract with energy ratios of energy spent to energy returned in the range of something like 1:3, which when transportation and other costs are added looks more like a break-even point, rendering the entire exercise pointless (a light crude well of the long-gone glory days of the early mid-20th century had a ratio of around 1:100). And that's before even considering the environmental impact, which in the case of some of these "reserves" means utter wasteland and desolation.
In other words these are desperate pipe dreams of people who finally see on the horizon the day of reckoning for all the decades of utter, complete, total stupidity and waste, coming fast, and are attempting the old ostrich maneuver: "if I pretend hard enough, it won't happen ... will it?!".
That's right! There are "vast" "untapped" seas of oil everywhere! And beneath that, there is more "vastly untapped" oil! Some rocks, then more oil! Infinite supply of energy accumulated over hundreds of millions of years to be consumed and consumed and consumed so that it can be all used up in a few centuries ... no wait! God would never let it happen! How would all them born-again Christian Texan Oil company magnates get their righteously owed due?! (or alternatively, how would Allah's chosen families of the house of Saud get theirs?!)
So its Oil! Oil! Oil! Oil all the way down!
And its only because these unreasonable tree-huggers and pinko-commies wont let the Glorious and Righteous Oil Men to drill and drill everywhere until the entire landscape is covered in Glorious Oil Wells, horizon to horizon, instead of them sissy trees and the like, that the prices ever go up! Bastards! Off with them bushes and shrubbery, off with them fish, make way for The Towers that Squirt Black Gold, The Liquid Glory of Supreme Greed at All Costs!
And bonus! There is more! If you squint just right you will see that God (or Allah, if that's your vice) provided for the future (with the somewhat unlikely help of the Soviets) too when the center of the Earth somehow runs dry at the end of slurping tubes of the Glorious And Magnificent Oil Men!
So while all these godless commie tree-huggers panic, real God-fearing men like you should all get a bigger Hummer. 48litre displacement, 26 cylinder one.
Or bigger.
Then again, maybe, just maybe, you've been, just a little bit, a totally gullible victim of the ever more whiny and panicky propaganda courtesy of the utterly blind and irresponsible greed of oil-men and die-hard ideologues of this supposed cure-all system called "Capitalism" who are ever more desperate to hide the fact that their activities (and the long cause-effect chains of these activities) are nothing less than some of the most wasteful and destructive actions in the entire history of mankind, no? Oh and that little small problem: the entire planet's biosphere in total never had enough biomass to account for all of these "vast and untapped" oil "reserves", never you mind in the time-frame during which accumulation of fossil fuels occurred. And that doesn't even include factors such as the amounts of the solar energy thus trapped and the efficiency of the entire process.
Outside of the demented fantasies of oil companies and all those whose comfortable life-style depends on insane actions of irreparably destroying reserves accumulated over period near a billion of years in just a tiny percentile of that time, oil is running out. Permanently. The energy trapped within (along with the base materials for polymers) is nearly gone. And because, thanks to idiots like you, most of the Western world is dependent on wholly insane prices of what is ultimately a unique and irreplaceable material, any shortages of this material will cause societal upheavals the like the world has never seen.
I just hope that all these apologists like you get to live to see that day and get a full, violent brunt of the reckoning when it comes. Right in your faces.
No, you are still screwed because downloading 4gig of crap is not an option. At best you will have an old OS which can never be upgraded unless you relocate or send your equipment to someone hundreds of miles away to do it for you.
But even that is the "old way of doing things", to disappear soon. Apple is talking about doing away with physical installation media altogether so all new equipment will come with "use high bandwidth connection" (or "Reorganize your miserable life around OUR product - its the MOST important thing ever! At least until our next, Even Shinier and More Hip, product comes out... Consume! Conform!") or "get lost" options (or "You Baaaad consumer, you! What's with you? Do you want Out Glorious Intangible Economy to fail?! Do you? Do you!?").
Future Apple "desktop" products will apparently feature 100% non-user serviceable approach, ala iPads. There is even talk on Apple forums about a move away from Intel and to ARM for all of their formerly "desktop" products such as MacBooks and iMacs.
In my opinion it is inevitable. Modern "capitalist" (ha!) "economy" has proven time and time again that thinking customers is not where the real money is and for every professional who has demanding technological requirements there is 1000 fools ready to part with their money, their privacy and their freedom in general, no questions asked, this very instant .... as long as your crap is Shiny And Trendy enough.
Works real well when the "standard install media" is little more than an app store interface and you are on a boat, live in a remote location or just in an average US rural county where dial-up is the only option...
Any computer system that requires a semi-permanent fat-ass Internet connection so it can function as a glorified cash register for an ever more authoritarian corporation is a non-starter to all those millions of people who just happened not to devolve into Starbucks-latte-sipping hipsters in Seattle who are oh-so-trendily stuffing every most incriminating and idiotic minutia of their lives into "clouds" so that it is now finally trivial for some lawyer one year hence to sue their asses into the ground at their next divorce, not to mention all those three-letter-agencies out there who just love to have the goods on everyone.
Indeed done. Quite finished. Your privacy and freedom, the Idiotbook/Twit-ster/Cloud Generation. Stick a fork in them...
This is outright silly. There is no "threshold" of consciousness. It is not a binary on/off situation wherein at some finite point one is "conscious" and at another, just one disconnected synapse off, a "thoughtless brute". It doesn't work that way. Instead consciousness appears to be an emergent property that has a whole continuum of possible forms. Given that we cannot even agree on how to measure it, other than the extremes: people = (mostly) conscious, amoeba = not so much, we have no hope at present to even reliably test for it. Many animals for example exhibit various behavioral patterns that we associate with human "consciousness". Are they conscious? Self aware? Experiments seem to confirm that some animals indeed are. But many people disagree. So what criteria do you use to determine that some entity is conscious?
In light of this your "experimental" method is utterly useless.
This particular argument is called "circular reasoning". Not to mention that you are completely confused as to the meaning of "non deterministic". By this token placing bets on outcomes of individual quantum events makes them "deterministic" because you can place quite solidly determined (beforehand even!) bets on them and thus the events are "determined" by the contents of your wallet ... no?
And I won't even get into the idea that consciousness is "deterministic". I mean show me two people out of the billions of members of humanity out there who would react to some stimuli in the exact same way (and I mean exact as in the same motion, the same facial expression, the same nervous ticks, the same eye movements etc.) ....
Since your base assumptions about the nature of consciousness are completely off, the only thing your "experiment" is likely to determine is the level of arrogance in your making of bold proclamations.
I note how neatly you evaded defining what information is and what its properties are...
Except for that nasty old curmudgeon Heisenberg and his wholly rude principle! Would it not be for him, the perfectly-fitting cosmic cogs would be whirring merrily and tiny little levers would be clicking, clicketey-clicky-click in a perfect, well oiled clockwork, just ripe for you to map on a giant blueprint... damn him, that old crank!
"Uncertainty" he says! What sort of clockwork it is where one has to roll dice while blind-folded and one can only "know" probabilities of events instead of actual outcomes! So much for "limitless precision"!
True, but if you had an "Ask Google to help you choose" on that prompt which would go to Google security analysis page which would then do lookups and run through Google maintained databases to identify the host and give the user advice as to what to do, this would be negated quite easily.
This would allow the user to choose if he wants more security (Google's advice) at the expense of Google knowing where he connects, or to let him/her make their own decisions.
I would go further: any app that attempts outbound connections should result in a prompt indicating the app, the server its trying to connect to and the protocol info, ala ZoneAlarm on Windows or LittleSnitch on OS X, whereby the user can answer "Yes, this time", "Yes, forever", "No, this time", "Hell no, disable this process permanently". This should be a standard feature of any consumer OS that expects to run apps that can establish connections outside. Even a dolt user would balk at his new fancy notepad app trying to connect to cmndnctrl.hackmyass.ru ...
The reason for this is painfully obvious: malware with no connectivity is pointless. The market for pointless malware is a domain of kooks and lunatics, not professional criminals and thus a tiny fraction of the danger and nuisance.
Why this simple solution is not implemented in a system like Android is beyond me.
You assume that:
In fact the term "democracy" has become an Orwellian linguistic misdirection designed to occupy the minds of fools with irrelevant theatrics all the while making slaves believe that they are "free" but somehow, by pure coincidence - no doubt, they just happen to keep "voting" to deepen their slavery and expand the power and wealth of their masters...
This has nothing whatsoever to do with bashing Windows (although XP is a particularly funny idea in the context of nuclear facilities) but with the fact that no consumer-grade desktop OS is suitable for truly mission-critical applications. That also includes OS X as well as many popular Linux flavours.
That is because such systems are impossible to security audit, due to their sprawling complexity, which is a show-stopper in such environments (at least when total idiots are not in charge).
Anywhere where there is a demand for a high grade of reliability and rock-solid security, vastly trimmed-down subsets of an OS and GUI rendering systems that can be formally audited are used. Which usually means either BSD/Linux or some other commercial flavour of *nix like QNX, because such systems are written in a way that makes them easier to analyse at this level.
So you can leave your mindless "our team good! their team bad!" fanboi nonsense at the door.
Mod the guy funny!
Great use of sarcasm there, building on XP having had also over a decade of most obnoxious and prolific malware, ranging from mail worms through trojans all the way to self-replicating root-kits not to mention most numerous and spectacular security holes in the entire software industry.
And more to the point, it is also the only publicly known system to have been successfully compromised specifically to sabotage nuclear facilities....
Oh, wait ... you were serious?!
I am not commenting on the subject of "supernatural" at all but I could not resist pointing out that your argument is simply a False Dichotomy fallacy. For example, a third choice (which you took pains to avoid mentioning) is a combination of the two. Hence some level (even major) of susceptibility to the phenomena you mentioned but not necessarily duplicability by physical means alone, i.e. no sentient, self-conscious AI possible in that kind of scenario because of the missing "supernatural" component, which could be very small compared to the overall system size but critical for its function.
And "supernatural" can be replaced by "non-deterministic processes underlying the physical universe" and you now got a whole new level of possibilities having nothing whatsoever to do with religion as such processes can be scientifically explored, statistically analyzed but would not necessarily be replicable or even practically usable because they could depend on some systemic properties that preclude their operation in some types of data-processing systems. This would not preclude development of AI but could for example preclude all AI that is not raised as a child would and which has to by definition have major character flaws ... etc and so on. Many, many other combinations of factors are possible leading to many other kinds of possible outcomes.
This also ties directly into a discussion of what is "knowable", i.e. limits of knowledge and limits of the scientific method and empiricism, a huge discussion in its own right, which brings me to another point...
My personal problem with all these, rather arrogant in my view, assumptions so obvious in many posts here, assumptions that we know enough about the processes of consciousness to even make predictions as to its true nature is the fact that we are, so far, utterly clueless as to true nature of the very foundations upon which to make any such guesses, that is the nature of information itself (and therefore the nature and properties of concepts like knowledge, its limits, limits in its acquisition methods etc).
No one knows what it is, what its true properties are, we have only some inkling as to some limitations about its transmission, some types of its transformations and some methods of its storage. And our modest success in making machines that perform some limited kinds of processing and transmission of information has gone to some people's heads. Big time. And now they are off out there somewhere waaay past any conceivable limits of their competence level, making bold proclamations about things they are patently clueless about. I think a large dose of humility and copious amounts of basic research are in order before bold predictions of any kind are being made.
This reminds of the stories of the days when Newtonian physics was king and absolutely everything and anything was being confidently theorized to be a form of "clockwork" - all the way to the whole Universe being just a gigantic collection of meshing cogs...
No, it means that they have to find a method of making a living that does not involve imposing slavery on others. No one is asking them to work for free. What you are trying here is a logical fallacy called "False Dichotomy". Look it up.
Of course the professors, for some decades now, are running an ever more boldfaced and unapologetic scam whereby they profit handsomely from changing the cover color (so that they can be easily spotted) and 3 letters or so in each year's textbook and then demanding that students all buy the "new" version each year. Naturally, them being "authors" or "co-authors" of the textbook in question, no matter how lousy and half-assed, results in significant cash-flow at larger institutions. And even if they are not the "authors", grateful publishers make sure they receive some gifts of note. Each scratching the others back and all that. Professors demand these "extra-high content books" because they ... err... "wrote" them! (I am being generous here, having seen some of these "textbooks" its a gross abuse of the word "write" to describe the process involved. Cut-and-pasted them haphazardly is more like it.)
And so then - shock! surprise! - these professors somehow fail to be at the forefront of the reform movement to kick the parasitic publishers out...
Color me utterly flabbergasted!
All of these "alternatives" are pretty much useless to anyone who used Skype to call land-lines overseas from a country other then the US.
Sure, there are million and one of peer-to-peer "chat" apps, ranging from text only to full video. But its all pointless if the other end has just an old plain telephone and the going long-distance rate is $4 a minute.
That is why Skype is a huge deal for a lot of people. Software "openness", while very nice, does bring very little to the table where the functionality is controlled by international deals with telephone companies.
And no, SIP is not an alternative either. This kludgy junk-pile of a "protocol" is so NAT unfriendly as to make it functionally useless for anyone who does not want to maintain their own Asterisk server complete with a commercial, fixed IP address.