What "risk"? If you're dead, it's all meanigless anyway, so you might just as well give yourself the funds for the slight possibility of being revived (and invested in a way that helps keep the world running smoothly)
As for more failure-proof way: I'd say procreating like rabbit with as many woman as possible beats your suggestion of creating a clone...he will also die one day. Yeah, children won't be as close in temperament/etc. as your clone might possibly be, but...
a) at least your DNA will be more succesfull
b) IMHO that doesn't matter much anymore:
The urge of preserving our thoughts in offspring is a relict of past times when your close relatives were practically the only people that would "carry on" your ideas, experiences, etc. But now we can be much more far reaching in our cultural influence if we so desire (and are able). And it's disconnected from the success of our DNA.
You were legally dead according to the law at the time you died and when you "used" the funds paid by insurance company to finance your cryogenic preservantion.
A technicality, sure. It could be quite easily changed by lobbyists at some point in the far future (likely when the problem will surface "at the other end"), sure. But with no easy "out" in our case - it appears it would require the abolision of paremia lex retro non agit. Which would be far less trivial...
Unless the life insurance deals are already worded in "permament death" way, etc....
Yeah, I hope for some time for one thing regarding the topic - scaling virtual machines!
Flawless game running (you can use OS that was all the rage at the time of game release...and optimally let the VM create link in host that automatically launches guest + game), and no toying trying to modify windowing system to use those filters; virtual machine handles those (preferably in another thread/etc.)
There are virtual machines under GPL (perhaps they are not the fastest, but for older games...). There are GPL emulators with cfilter code for the taking. I hope it's not if but when this will happen.
Generally I agree with you, but saying "the number of quality films being made each year (on average) has been steadily going downhill since 1939" is too much. It might be at most correct to say that proportion of quality films was higher back then - though I wouldn't say even this, it's most likely "only good things are remembered" at work.
And adding to your last point - going with 3D instead of 2D is a bit of a vicious cycle. Yes, you need it now to attach wider audience, to sell more...to recoup the development costs which are much higher largely due to 3D.
For me, the main potential benefit for such "low power" GFX chips is their low power draw, which might give total silence with passive cooling or near silence with large, slow & quiet fan.
But practically all cheap cards come with small and whining cooling fans nowadays... (and no, finding an aftermarket solution for such card if no passive ones are readily available (nvm that they are often...a bit more expensive) is not exactly a viable option due to large, comparativelly, additional cost)
Integrated GFX at least comes with a passive cooling as a standard feature... (c'mon, they can do it with almost microscopic heatsinks on integrated GFX, they can't with such cards?...)
You know, when reading your (upmodded, in main article view) post, apparently praising the education system / mindset that was present in the past, I realised something.
It were...people from around your generation that participated in the changes for "worse". How did that happen?...
Perseids are a bit more friendly in this regard. And shouldn't you be more bothered about the temperature anyway? I'm across the Baltic, probably around 1500 km to the south, and even here it's frakking cold, especially when somebody wants to look at meteor shower (which to me also means mostly stationary, on open space, without many obstructions for the wind...)
a) is correct only to some degree, especially in families of related religions (duh, they evolved from partly common roots, in similar circumstances; in humans with similar social structures). But when looking at broad range of mythologies, it's obvious they are generally contradictory; saved in one will become damned in most other.
b)...unless we got to the stage of globalisation, free flow of ideas. See, the dialogue between faiths that you (probably) mention is just a blatant attempt to minimise the harm of people having less confidence in their own faith because they see so many others...FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY (usually it was 2, 3 tops, religions that were aware of each other; and even then typically the "others" were simply subhuman savages...). It's quite natural that the preachers will try to convince themselves and worshippers that it's just, for example, a great plan showing grandiose of gods, revelations tailoret to different people.
But that only strenghtens my points (also in other post in this thread, not only in parent to yours)
If you choose the "correct" dogma based on internal mental states (which are, undoubtedly, also influenced by dogmas), this doesn't mean anything about how valid your choices are (ESPECIALLY if you don't keep them COMPLETELLY to yourself; if you choose to influence the surroundings while acting on them). Actually, that means YOU are creating those mental states. You are creating your gods, not the other way around.
I fully expceted this to happen. I live in post-Soviet country, and the two deciding factors in such cases are:
a) will we be able to pretend that we're qualified to learn "computers"? (many IT teachers are total crap; usually they are sport, music, etc. teachers with some loophole or BS retraining course that allows them to "teach" IT; vast majority of people who would be qualified simply prefer much better jobs)
b) how much will be the unofficial financial gain for me? (this doesn't have to mean outright corruption; much bigger problem, on all levels, is that professional qualifications are often judged by "what was the financial worth of projects that this person implemented?" Which ends up in tremendous waste or resources that benefits only those who implemented them originally, and moved on since to...waste more resources in other places)
And my place isn't even corrput so much as Russia, supposedly...
Actually, it is currently my understanding that gods are (also) an expression of human desire to control the uncontrollable. Gods aren't the most important thing in any religion, humans are. So of course the former will follow what the latter want and expect.
Notice that practically every faith has some way to control gods. Various rituals, typically prayer, sometimes sacrifice, luckily usually also "proper" code of conduct (if only majority of worshippers would actually follow its most fundamental messages...)
But most importantly - gods always have some excuse for times when they apparently didn't grant wishes. "I didn't pray enough", "I wasn't good enough", "my sacrifice wasn't enough", "gods are testing me" (the last seems contrary to my main point, but actually isn't - being convinced that gods care enough to do such tests is extremelly egocentric). Those explanations show that, deeply, worshippers think that they control the situtation.
The other poster adressed the absurdity of "everything must have a cause except for the first thing that caused everything" and attaching to this concept human values and wishes.
There's one thing left, your list of great fathers of science that were religious.
You DO realise that in their times following dominant (and oficially "the one") religion was the only way of obtaining broad education, right? That not being able to publish if they converted to Paganism or atheism was the least of their worries? (as for Georges Lemaitre, it's only natural that he proposed a hypothesis that fit nicely with his dogmas; and luckily turned out to be roughly correct...how many other weren't?)
So that there's a deity is up to the church to prove, and not for the science to disprove.
Not exactly, at least not in principle. The official positions of those believers that don't want to appear bigoted is "faith, belief is acceptance of something without facts o support it"
Unfortunatelly, even them muddle the water afterwards. Often by holding science to similarly low stadards, based in ill-concieved understanding of "science can't prove anything 100% either". Or, as in this case, projecting an image that their dogmas and science can be intermingled.
You seem to paint it like enlightened religious people are perfectly OK? Consider the amount of waste of concious thought that goes even only into their rationalisations. Or that they give fundamentalists more power, by essentially agreing with them in arguably the most important thing in life (how do I got there? What should I do? What awaits me in the future?), by nurturing the same basic ideas.
As for aliens, their potential religion and what we might do about it...well, integration wasn't exactly what we were doing throughout history (at least not officially; sure, Christanity is essentially Pagan customs + changed underlying mythology, but the shift was quite unpleasant to many people; also, religions seem to be that adaptive only when they aren't firmly established).
But more importantly - you rally can't assume they will have any religion, at least not in the form that we would recognise as such.
For example our religions originate, obviously, from what we are: smart, fragile, singular intelligences hugely dependant on interactions with other individuals and with powerfull surroundings. A form of worship that strenghtens bonds, recognises the overhelming power of nature and attempts to tame it is quite natural in those circumstances.
But consider, say, a collective mind. Perhaps in a form which essentially means that everything it is aware of is also a part of its functioning. With the external nature being simply what is totally unknown to it, something which must and can (with effort) be tamed for proper functioning of such intelligence. It's not far fetched to imagine that in such circumstances you would get, translated to our terms, "I am good god, everything else is evil"
As a matter of fact...our technical civilisation, when looked as a whole, seems to go towards this approach. Perhaps it's part of why religions get weaker and weaker. But we don't seem to call this "new aproach" a religion, right?
There are more options than dishonesty. Remember that religions are a complex web of intermingling ideas, activities and concepts; which DO change. Eventually, only the strongest such systems survive.
And essentially that's what I was talking about, perception. To which he didn't quite live up, IMHO (and yes, a pope should be held to stricter standards)
Perhaps more than that - it might be an effort to slightly deceive their worshippers, similar in goal to creationism -> "intelligent design" shift, but sensible, consistent and honest enough (in the scope of what it discusses) that it won't become a source of ridicule.
And it will accomplish one important thing - it will assure their followers that religion and rationality aren't at odds. Which they do anyway, but need more specific examples in this time and age, when the social structure isn't held together by their church anymore, when church is far, far from the only way to obtain education (factors which WERE extremelly important for the progress of our civilisation...in the past. "Dark ages", contrary to popular intellectual dishonesty, were also times of great progress, and church played large part in that. Educational institutions set up by church gave us many great fathers of science (which were also quite religious by our standards, as required in their time). But it isn't so anymore...)
Well, science, scientific method, certainly aims to determine that something has happened (or haven't). That something was present...or wasn't. Yes, "as far as we can tell", but determination of existence is at the heart of experimentation. it has very specific standards.
Religions...don't give you anything above blank state. For starters, which dogmas should you follow? Surely "my parents followed it" isn't ANY indicator of corectness of this one particular myth, right?
"Good" pope only in how he was universally perceived by worshippers, of course? It wasn't exactly all roses with him... (can it even be with the pope?)
Contemplate how many people died and will die of AIDS because of him, for starters. Or, more generally, how many people can die because nurturing religion has detrimental effects for scientific progress. Also, he wasn't exactly at odds with Ratzinger, quite the contrary.
As for his influence on the fall of Soviet Block...it's not really inconcievable to anybody but the most blinded worshippers that he was, as are all religious people, a tool of particular mindset/system of memes. Why would they choose a Pole right then?... Besides, it's not all roses with this also. Poland remaining for longer one of the most backwards countries in the EU, regarding religion, is part of his legacy. I should know, I was also born there and still live there.
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What "risk"? If you're dead, it's all meanigless anyway, so you might just as well give yourself the funds for the slight possibility of being revived (and invested in a way that helps keep the world running smoothly)
As for more failure-proof way: I'd say procreating like rabbit with as many woman as possible beats your suggestion of creating a clone...he will also die one day. Yeah, children won't be as close in temperament/etc. as your clone might possibly be, but...
a) at least your DNA will be more succesfull
b) IMHO that doesn't matter much anymore:
The urge of preserving our thoughts in offspring is a relict of past times when your close relatives were practically the only people that would "carry on" your ideas, experiences, etc. But now we can be much more far reaching in our cultural influence if we so desire (and are able). And it's disconnected from the success of our DNA.
You were legally dead according to the law at the time you died and when you "used" the funds paid by insurance company to finance your cryogenic preservantion.
A technicality, sure. It could be quite easily changed by lobbyists at some point in the far future (likely when the problem will surface "at the other end"), sure. But with no easy "out" in our case - it appears it would require the abolision of paremia lex retro non agit. Which would be far less trivial...
Unless the life insurance deals are already worded in "permament death" way, etc....
Yeah, I hope for some time for one thing regarding the topic - scaling virtual machines!
Flawless game running (you can use OS that was all the rage at the time of game release...and optimally let the VM create link in host that automatically launches guest + game), and no toying trying to modify windowing system to use those filters; virtual machine handles those (preferably in another thread/etc.)
There are virtual machines under GPL (perhaps they are not the fastest, but for older games...). There are GPL emulators with cfilter code for the taking. I hope it's not if but when this will happen.
Generally I agree with you, but saying "the number of quality films being made each year (on average) has been steadily going downhill since 1939" is too much. It might be at most correct to say that proportion of quality films was higher back then - though I wouldn't say even this, it's most likely "only good things are remembered" at work.
And adding to your last point - going with 3D instead of 2D is a bit of a vicious cycle. Yes, you need it now to attach wider audience, to sell more...to recoup the development costs which are much higher largely due to 3D.
With such cards you're buying also low power draw (now, if only that was actually seriously utilised with passive cooling as standard...)
For me, the main potential benefit for such "low power" GFX chips is their low power draw, which might give total silence with passive cooling or near silence with large, slow & quiet fan.
But practically all cheap cards come with small and whining cooling fans nowadays... (and no, finding an aftermarket solution for such card if no passive ones are readily available (nvm that they are often...a bit more expensive) is not exactly a viable option due to large, comparativelly, additional cost)
Integrated GFX at least comes with a passive cooling as a standard feature... (c'mon, they can do it with almost microscopic heatsinks on integrated GFX, they can't with such cards?...)
"Horrible"? That's saying too much. It's simply quite different, targeted mainly at hundreds of millions of feature phones.
You know, when reading your (upmodded, in main article view) post, apparently praising the education system / mindset that was present in the past, I realised something.
It were...people from around your generation that participated in the changes for "worse". How did that happen?...
50 bytes of RAM per CPU?...
Perseids are a bit more friendly in this regard. And shouldn't you be more bothered about the temperature anyway? I'm across the Baltic, probably around 1500 km to the south, and even here it's frakking cold, especially when somebody wants to look at meteor shower (which to me also means mostly stationary, on open space, without many obstructions for the wind...)
What you are talking about:
a) is correct only to some degree, especially in families of related religions (duh, they evolved from partly common roots, in similar circumstances; in humans with similar social structures). But when looking at broad range of mythologies, it's obvious they are generally contradictory; saved in one will become damned in most other.
b) ...unless we got to the stage of globalisation, free flow of ideas. See, the dialogue between faiths that you (probably) mention is just a blatant attempt to minimise the harm of people having less confidence in their own faith because they see so many others...FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY (usually it was 2, 3 tops, religions that were aware of each other; and even then typically the "others" were simply subhuman savages...). It's quite natural that the preachers will try to convince themselves and worshippers that it's just, for example, a great plan showing grandiose of gods, revelations tailoret to different people.
But that only strenghtens my points (also in other post in this thread, not only in parent to yours)
If you choose the "correct" dogma based on internal mental states (which are, undoubtedly, also influenced by dogmas), this doesn't mean anything about how valid your choices are (ESPECIALLY if you don't keep them COMPLETELLY to yourself; if you choose to influence the surroundings while acting on them). Actually, that means YOU are creating those mental states. You are creating your gods, not the other way around.
...in fact, forget about the hookers! (this is Russia, mind you ;p )
I fully expceted this to happen. I live in post-Soviet country, and the two deciding factors in such cases are:
a) will we be able to pretend that we're qualified to learn "computers"? (many IT teachers are total crap; usually they are sport, music, etc. teachers with some loophole or BS retraining course that allows them to "teach" IT; vast majority of people who would be qualified simply prefer much better jobs)
b) how much will be the unofficial financial gain for me? (this doesn't have to mean outright corruption; much bigger problem, on all levels, is that professional qualifications are often judged by "what was the financial worth of projects that this person implemented?" Which ends up in tremendous waste or resources that benefits only those who implemented them originally, and moved on since to...waste more resources in other places)
And my place isn't even corrput so much as Russia, supposedly...
Actually, it is currently my understanding that gods are (also) an expression of human desire to control the uncontrollable. Gods aren't the most important thing in any religion, humans are. So of course the former will follow what the latter want and expect.
Notice that practically every faith has some way to control gods. Various rituals, typically prayer, sometimes sacrifice, luckily usually also "proper" code of conduct (if only majority of worshippers would actually follow its most fundamental messages...)
But most importantly - gods always have some excuse for times when they apparently didn't grant wishes. "I didn't pray enough", "I wasn't good enough", "my sacrifice wasn't enough", "gods are testing me" (the last seems contrary to my main point, but actually isn't - being convinced that gods care enough to do such tests is extremelly egocentric). Those explanations show that, deeply, worshippers think that they control the situtation.
...and both things were very intermingled throughout most of recorded history. Still are at too many places.
The other poster adressed the absurdity of "everything must have a cause except for the first thing that caused everything" and attaching to this concept human values and wishes.
There's one thing left, your list of great fathers of science that were religious.
You DO realise that in their times following dominant (and oficially "the one") religion was the only way of obtaining broad education, right? That not being able to publish if they converted to Paganism or atheism was the least of their worries? (as for Georges Lemaitre, it's only natural that he proposed a hypothesis that fit nicely with his dogmas; and luckily turned out to be roughly correct...how many other weren't?)
So that there's a deity is up to the church to prove, and not for the science to disprove.
Not exactly, at least not in principle. The official positions of those believers that don't want to appear bigoted is "faith, belief is acceptance of something without facts o support it"
Unfortunatelly, even them muddle the water afterwards. Often by holding science to similarly low stadards, based in ill-concieved understanding of "science can't prove anything 100% either". Or, as in this case, projecting an image that their dogmas and science can be intermingled.
You seem to paint it like enlightened religious people are perfectly OK? Consider the amount of waste of concious thought that goes even only into their rationalisations. Or that they give fundamentalists more power, by essentially agreing with them in arguably the most important thing in life (how do I got there? What should I do? What awaits me in the future?), by nurturing the same basic ideas.
As for aliens, their potential religion and what we might do about it...well, integration wasn't exactly what we were doing throughout history (at least not officially; sure, Christanity is essentially Pagan customs + changed underlying mythology, but the shift was quite unpleasant to many people; also, religions seem to be that adaptive only when they aren't firmly established).
But more importantly - you rally can't assume they will have any religion, at least not in the form that we would recognise as such.
For example our religions originate, obviously, from what we are: smart, fragile, singular intelligences hugely dependant on interactions with other individuals and with powerfull surroundings. A form of worship that strenghtens bonds, recognises the overhelming power of nature and attempts to tame it is quite natural in those circumstances.
But consider, say, a collective mind. Perhaps in a form which essentially means that everything it is aware of is also a part of its functioning. With the external nature being simply what is totally unknown to it, something which must and can (with effort) be tamed for proper functioning of such intelligence. It's not far fetched to imagine that in such circumstances you would get, translated to our terms, "I am good god, everything else is evil"
As a matter of fact...our technical civilisation, when looked as a whole, seems to go towards this approach. Perhaps it's part of why religions get weaker and weaker. But we don't seem to call this "new aproach" a religion, right?
There are more options than dishonesty. Remember that religions are a complex web of intermingling ideas, activities and concepts; which DO change. Eventually, only the strongest such systems survive.
Yup, you're just seing evolution in action...
And essentially that's what I was talking about, perception. To which he didn't quite live up, IMHO (and yes, a pope should be held to stricter standards)
But they still imagine him as "man", right?
Perhaps more than that - it might be an effort to slightly deceive their worshippers, similar in goal to creationism -> "intelligent design" shift, but sensible, consistent and honest enough (in the scope of what it discusses) that it won't become a source of ridicule.
And it will accomplish one important thing - it will assure their followers that religion and rationality aren't at odds. Which they do anyway, but need more specific examples in this time and age, when the social structure isn't held together by their church anymore, when church is far, far from the only way to obtain education (factors which WERE extremelly important for the progress of our civilisation...in the past. "Dark ages", contrary to popular intellectual dishonesty, were also times of great progress, and church played large part in that. Educational institutions set up by church gave us many great fathers of science (which were also quite religious by our standards, as required in their time). But it isn't so anymore...)
Well, science, scientific method, certainly aims to determine that something has happened (or haven't). That something was present...or wasn't. Yes, "as far as we can tell", but determination of existence is at the heart of experimentation. it has very specific standards.
Religions...don't give you anything above blank state. For starters, which dogmas should you follow? Surely "my parents followed it" isn't ANY indicator of corectness of this one particular myth, right?
"Good" pope only in how he was universally perceived by worshippers, of course? It wasn't exactly all roses with him... (can it even be with the pope?)
Contemplate how many people died and will die of AIDS because of him, for starters. Or, more generally, how many people can die because nurturing religion has detrimental effects for scientific progress. Also, he wasn't exactly at odds with Ratzinger, quite the contrary.
As for his influence on the fall of Soviet Block...it's not really inconcievable to anybody but the most blinded worshippers that he was, as are all religious people, a tool of particular mindset/system of memes. Why would they choose a Pole right then?... Besides, it's not all roses with this also. Poland remaining for longer one of the most backwards countries in the EU, regarding religion, is part of his legacy. I should know, I was also born there and still live there.