You might enjoy reading Kim Stanley Robinson's last novel Aurora which muses that life might be a planetary phenomenon: human beings are inextricably tied to Earth's biosphere and can never move beyond it. Even large generational starships might be unable to maintain a viable biosphere as waste like salt begins building up in the wrong places. (KSR was spurred to write Aurora in part by the critical backlash against his idealistic vision of terraforming in his famous Mars trilogy of two decades ago).
So if the Singularity never happens and human beings can never transition to machine bodies from biological ones, we're not going anywhere.
Why don't you correctly attribute your quotes? The attribution to Mark Twain is spurious, and anyone familiar with his style and 19th-century American English in general could sense that something was off in calling this a Twain quotation.
Who gives a fuck? How does this affect anyone at all? I don't know anyone who has or needs anywhere close to this amount if storage.
I can definitely imagine needing the 15TB one in a few years. After being more of a classical literature and music person for most of my life, I've been getting into film. The canon of great films consists of hundreds of titles, at least. In the past you'd have to be lucky to live in a developed country with a well-stocked library, or have a truly massive disposable income to buy all the DVDs yourself. But people today have an incredible opportunity, regardless of their means or location, to educate themselves about this (or any other) art form thanks to torrent communities.
When you're downloading Bluray rips at full quality, where a single film can be 25GB, then storage space starts filling up quickly. One could delete after viewing to save space, but who knows, maybe someday you'll want to watch a particular title again or show it to a friend or loved one, and at that point there might not be any seeders left on the torrent. So, if storage gets cheap enough, then it's worth keeping it all on disk.
There was an interesting article about Japan's increasing number of abandoned homes due to the contraction of the population. One problem that this brings is that people who do want to live in their ancestral home or move out to the country, may not be able to get utilities provided, because it simply costs too much to maintain utility infrastructure for so few inhabitants.
There is also the issue of finding enough caretakers for the increasing elderly when the workforce is ever smaller. Unwilling to invite mass immigration, Japan has tried to invest in robotics in elderly care, but these efforts might not be enough.
Ah, yes, Freenet, where once quantum computing breaks commonly used encryption algorithms, everyone is going to be revealed to be hosting child porn (unwittingly, but still) on their computers. Yeah, sounds like a really worthwhile network.:rolleyes:
He suggests instead focussing on the neediest people first, possibly by subsidizing jobs programs.
In today's world of increasing automation, how many of those jobs are essentially going to be makework? Or part of marketing efforts that try to convince people they need something frivolous that they don't have? Is the current economic system so inevitable or desirable that those things are preferable to just letting people stay home?
In his most recent novel The Peripheral, about a near-future America, William Gibson also envisioned one's mobile phone eventually being usable a virtual-reality headset. Since so much functionality (bank cards, photography) is being integrated into the mobile phone, then it seems a safer bet for a company than trying to introduce awkward standalone hardware into the market.
If you're using Tor instead of something like Freenet, you deserve what's coming.
Freenet, where once quantum computing breaks commonly used encryption algorithms, everyone is going to be revealed to be hosting child porn (unwittingly, but still) on their computers. Yeah, sounds like a really worthwhile network.:rolleyes:
Some have suggested that self-driving cars will lead to a decline in personal vehicle ownership. Instead, people will rent a car from a membership pool when they need it, paying a simple fee per use or per month instead of bearing all the costs of insurance, inspection and registration on themselves.
And if I had the time, I certainly wouldn't be wasting it watching movies, aka pop-culture training.
It has been over a century since cinema has been recognized as a valid form of art. Sturgeon's law applies, of course, but among works of film are some timeless contributions to world culture. Why do you assume that people who buy such a home theatre would only be watching vacuous pop-culture films in it? Men like Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni had their own fancy home theatres, and the films they screened for themselves and their guests were mainly the work of their fellow auteurs.
The Mises Institute is the very same organization that has, repeatedly, praised Somalia for its lack of a central government and supposedly free market, leading to enormous facepalm for the rest of the libertarian world. Surely you could have found a better link to support your point.
That part of my comment was designed more to preempt comments making that claim, which have popped up in previous discussions of Russia's internet policy.
apparently are uncomprehending of the fact that the Internet is not just inside Russia or controlled by Russia.
The Russian government already has a well-mapped plan to isolate the country's internet by 2020, roughly following the Chinese model. Of course, there will always be ways around restrictions, but the aim is not to completely wall off the country, it is to ensure that the vast majority of the population can be kept under tabs and that it doesn't see too many things that the state doesn't like.
I'm very happy that Russian legislation doesn't apply to the rest of the world. Nonetheless, claiming that this law is only a problem for Russia and needn't bother us here, tends to obscure the fact that there are at least a couple of hundred thousand people in Russia who are just like us, and it's sad if our nerd peers there suffer.
I'll read PDFs and use audiobooks on devices that won't delete my library whenever they want
I have owned a Kindle now for three years (upgraded to the Paperwhite last year) and have never bought an ebook -- everything that I read comes from pirated ebook communities or Project Gutenburg. Since the moment I took the Kindle out of the box, it has been in airplane mode, so it doesn't connect to anything outside. Kindles have been problematic if you use them to read content purchased from Amazon, but if you simply don't do that, they are great and reliable e-readers.
Did you read the article? Don't assume that he's a "little", "low-rent" conman. He may well be in a country where the scams he is pulling off, net him an income that allow him to live very comfortably and have considerable pull in local society. And in many developing countries, the line between "businessman" and "conman" is far more blurry than people in North America or Western Europe might think.
This is only relevant to companies that have assets or personnel in Russia.
The Russian government already has a plan to isolate the Russian internet by 2020, modeled roughly after China's internet. At that point, foreign services may be reachable inside Russia only if they agree to establish assets and personnel in Russia, and they might agree to laws like this as the cost of doing business.
See, this is exactly my point. Instead of wasting time with these theoretical discussions and analogies, why not just fileshare more and encourage your friends to do the same?
First of all, American copyright law does not mean zip in Sweden.
Apparently it means something in Finland.
Your attempts to claim that American copyright law don't apply to torrent sites are as much a waste of time and energy as defending "sovereign citizen" ideas. In the latter case, the taxman is still going to get you, and in the case of filesharing, civil judgments -- if not criminal sentences that are upheld -- are still going to plague at least some people out there. Instead of trying to make filesharing seem legal, I think it would be more productive for society to simply go ahead and do it regardless of its legality. Now that millions and millions of people are sharing whatever they want without thinking about the legality of it, legal hassles on a tiny, tiny minority of them hardly serve as a deterrent.
I would like to know this as well. When I was a teenager and first read Larry Niven's story "The Borderlands of Sol" (namely when it was republished in the collection Crashlander), where a gravity detector plays a role in the story, I assumed this was a real technology. After all, ways to detect electromagnetic waves or particle radiation had long been around. I thought nothing of it for a couple of decades, and then was surprised to read the news a while back of the "first ever detection of gravitational waves".
Because the business model of a number of tablet makers is giving you little on-device storage so that you start using their cloud storage service, which gives them an opportunity to sell you an additional service or sell your data to advertisers, duh.
Slashdot Mirror
So if the Singularity never happens and human beings can never transition to machine bodies from biological ones, we're not going anywhere.
Why don't you correctly attribute your quotes? The attribution to Mark Twain is spurious, and anyone familiar with his style and 19th-century American English in general could sense that something was off in calling this a Twain quotation.
I can definitely imagine needing the 15TB one in a few years. After being more of a classical literature and music person for most of my life, I've been getting into film. The canon of great films consists of hundreds of titles, at least. In the past you'd have to be lucky to live in a developed country with a well-stocked library, or have a truly massive disposable income to buy all the DVDs yourself. But people today have an incredible opportunity, regardless of their means or location, to educate themselves about this (or any other) art form thanks to torrent communities.
When you're downloading Bluray rips at full quality, where a single film can be 25GB, then storage space starts filling up quickly. One could delete after viewing to save space, but who knows, maybe someday you'll want to watch a particular title again or show it to a friend or loved one, and at that point there might not be any seeders left on the torrent. So, if storage gets cheap enough, then it's worth keeping it all on disk.
There was an interesting article about Japan's increasing number of abandoned homes due to the contraction of the population. One problem that this brings is that people who do want to live in their ancestral home or move out to the country, may not be able to get utilities provided, because it simply costs too much to maintain utility infrastructure for so few inhabitants.
There is also the issue of finding enough caretakers for the increasing elderly when the workforce is ever smaller. Unwilling to invite mass immigration, Japan has tried to invest in robotics in elderly care, but these efforts might not be enough.
Ah, yes, Freenet, where once quantum computing breaks commonly used encryption algorithms, everyone is going to be revealed to be hosting child porn (unwittingly, but still) on their computers. Yeah, sounds like a really worthwhile network. :rolleyes:
In today's world of increasing automation, how many of those jobs are essentially going to be makework? Or part of marketing efforts that try to convince people they need something frivolous that they don't have? Is the current economic system so inevitable or desirable that those things are preferable to just letting people stay home?
In his most recent novel The Peripheral , about a near-future America, William Gibson also envisioned one's mobile phone eventually being usable a virtual-reality headset. Since so much functionality (bank cards, photography) is being integrated into the mobile phone, then it seems a safer bet for a company than trying to introduce awkward standalone hardware into the market.
When building Firefox from source (I don't know about Chromium), you can easily choose the authorities that you wish to allow.
Freenet, where once quantum computing breaks commonly used encryption algorithms, everyone is going to be revealed to be hosting child porn (unwittingly, but still) on their computers. Yeah, sounds like a really worthwhile network. :rolleyes:
You can build Chromium and Firefox from source and see for yourself.
Some have suggested that self-driving cars will lead to a decline in personal vehicle ownership. Instead, people will rent a car from a membership pool when they need it, paying a simple fee per use or per month instead of bearing all the costs of insurance, inspection and registration on themselves.
It has been over a century since cinema has been recognized as a valid form of art. Sturgeon's law applies, of course, but among works of film are some timeless contributions to world culture. Why do you assume that people who buy such a home theatre would only be watching vacuous pop-culture films in it? Men like Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni had their own fancy home theatres, and the films they screened for themselves and their guests were mainly the work of their fellow auteurs.
The Mises Institute is the very same organization that has, repeatedly, praised Somalia for its lack of a central government and supposedly free market, leading to enormous facepalm for the rest of the libertarian world. Surely you could have found a better link to support your point.
That part of my comment was designed more to preempt comments making that claim, which have popped up in previous discussions of Russia's internet policy.
The Russian government already has a well-mapped plan to isolate the country's internet by 2020, roughly following the Chinese model. Of course, there will always be ways around restrictions, but the aim is not to completely wall off the country, it is to ensure that the vast majority of the population can be kept under tabs and that it doesn't see too many things that the state doesn't like.
I'm very happy that Russian legislation doesn't apply to the rest of the world. Nonetheless, claiming that this law is only a problem for Russia and needn't bother us here, tends to obscure the fact that there are at least a couple of hundred thousand people in Russia who are just like us, and it's sad if our nerd peers there suffer.
Format shifting falls under fair use in some jurisdictions. Not a crime.
$55 is a pathetic recompense for losing the ability to rip one's own SACDs.
I have owned a Kindle now for three years (upgraded to the Paperwhite last year) and have never bought an ebook -- everything that I read comes from pirated ebook communities or Project Gutenburg. Since the moment I took the Kindle out of the box, it has been in airplane mode, so it doesn't connect to anything outside. Kindles have been problematic if you use them to read content purchased from Amazon, but if you simply don't do that, they are great and reliable e-readers.
Did you read the article? Don't assume that he's a "little", "low-rent" conman. He may well be in a country where the scams he is pulling off, net him an income that allow him to live very comfortably and have considerable pull in local society. And in many developing countries, the line between "businessman" and "conman" is far more blurry than people in North America or Western Europe might think.
The Russian government already has a plan to isolate the Russian internet by 2020, modeled roughly after China's internet. At that point, foreign services may be reachable inside Russia only if they agree to establish assets and personnel in Russia, and they might agree to laws like this as the cost of doing business.
OpenStreetMap is ultimately just a database that you can feed to whatever renderer you please. Even the OSM website offers several tile sets.
See, this is exactly my point. Instead of wasting time with these theoretical discussions and analogies, why not just fileshare more and encourage your friends to do the same?
Apparently it means something in Finland.
Your attempts to claim that American copyright law don't apply to torrent sites are as much a waste of time and energy as defending "sovereign citizen" ideas. In the latter case, the taxman is still going to get you, and in the case of filesharing, civil judgments -- if not criminal sentences that are upheld -- are still going to plague at least some people out there. Instead of trying to make filesharing seem legal, I think it would be more productive for society to simply go ahead and do it regardless of its legality. Now that millions and millions of people are sharing whatever they want without thinking about the legality of it, legal hassles on a tiny, tiny minority of them hardly serve as a deterrent.
I would like to know this as well. When I was a teenager and first read Larry Niven's story "The Borderlands of Sol" (namely when it was republished in the collection Crashlander), where a gravity detector plays a role in the story, I assumed this was a real technology. After all, ways to detect electromagnetic waves or particle radiation had long been around. I thought nothing of it for a couple of decades, and then was surprised to read the news a while back of the "first ever detection of gravitational waves".
Because the business model of a number of tablet makers is giving you little on-device storage so that you start using their cloud storage service, which gives them an opportunity to sell you an additional service or sell your data to advertisers, duh.