... people will start throwing themselves in front of trains. Which traumatizes train drivers and at least inconveniences everyone else on the train.
Suicide is a cultural problem, not one of availability (or unavailability) of certain means. The suicide rate of, say, the US and Germany is pretty much the same, despite guns being much more accessible in the former than the latter. However, the train network is much more developed in the latter.
People should, however, be educated about really shitty ways of killing yourself, like overdosing on acetaminophen and the like.
The banks in countries with FATCA treaties will ask for US person status whenever you try to open an account, and you don't want to get caught make false statements. Also, the banks are usually obliged to look for more and less obvious signs of US persons among their customers, like frequent money transfers to or from the US. Lastly, the banks customer representatives must report any customers of which they know that they are US persons.
Also, have a look at the possible fines for violating FBAR requirements. It's crazy stuff.
Thanks to the new FATCA regime imposed upon the world, banks in NZ are tying to detect her US citizenship so her details and financial info can shared with the NZ IRD who will then pass it on to the US IRS.
You're lucky! Where I live, banks have realized that they can avoid the whole FATCA rigmarole by not accepting US persons as customers. You want a securities account? Great. Oh, you're a US person? Sorry.
This US person "disease" also spreads via power of attorney. You're not a US person, but your spouse is and you gave him or her power of attorney over your accounts? Well, you better revoke that or have your accounts cancelled.
Being a US person (which isn't the same as a US citizens, but usually US citizens are also US persons) will make dealing with foreign banks very, very painful. Thanks to FATCA (google it), foreign banks will just refuse to deal with US persons (or at least refuse to give them more than a regular checking account. No stock market accounts, etc). This goes as far as threatening to cancel the accounts of non-US-person spouse if US-person other spouse has power of attorney over these acounts. Don't laugh, this happened to me.
Also, there's FBAR - foreign bank account report. A US person must report any and all of their foreign accounts, even if they don't owe any taxes. Should you happen to forget that, the fine can be as high as the maximum value of each account - for every year that you forgot to file.
There is a huge difference between repairing trauma damage and repairing a clean planned surgical cut.
These guys aren't planning to repair a surgical cut, they're planning to graft the spinal cords of two different bodies together.
Maybe they should try to fix a regular decapitation first. Put the head back on the same body and prove that most of the nervous connections still work.. Even that would be worthy of a Nobel prize in medicine.
Do heart transplants involve cutting the organ in halft and putting it back together?
This isn't like pursuing heart transplants before being able to fix each and every heart defect. It's like pursuing heart transplants before being able to do surgical sutures.
Right now, we can't even repair spinal cord injuries where head and body belong to the same person. Once that becomes a routine medical procedure, we might think about head transplants and how to solve the problems associated with them.
Seriously, are the people who cleam this serious? I don't think so.
Reminds me of a competition to program a computer player for the classic Asteroids a few years ago.
The best entries, however, didn't rely on AI, but on the fact that the RNG of the arcade game isn't random. Once the Asteroids-bot figured out the internal state of the RNG, it could basically use hyperspace to make targetted jumps (and never one that lead to the destruction of the ship), shoot at asteroids that haven't appeared yet and various other tricks. It was very impressive to watch one of these bots in action.
If, at some point, we have the capability to travel 0.8 ly (which probably includes keeping a spacecraft operational for decades), it's probably not very difficult to scale it up to 8.0 ly.
Unfortunately, our current capability is probably closer to 0.000008 ly than to 0.8 ly.
'Fittest' must mean ' most fit in a certain environment', but how is that measured?
Producing more offspring that manages to procreate.
'Most fit' must can only be meaured as the ones 'that survive'.
No, survival is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion. Reproduction rate is what actually counts. If there are two groups with different reproduction rates, the larger one will eventually become completely dominant, especially when the two groups start getting into conflicts about resources.
Instead of the company going through that hassle, why can't these 100 users find another game?!
Maybe they like this particular game? I'd love the chance to play City of Heroes or Earth&Beyond again. I wouldn't mind paying for that opportunity, either.
Few users means this game is not that much fun anymore.
Dictating what other people have to consider "fun" is ridiculous.
This is just a super lame excuse to trick/force companies to share their code for nothing/free.
They could keep a server running. Or charge for the server module. Their choice.
That's bullshit. The code belongs to the copyright holder to do as he/she sees fit during the copyrighted phase, they should not lose it.
Sorry, copyright law was supposed to beneficial for both the public (which profits through the promotion of, er, the sciences and useful arts) and the creator of the work (who has an easier time monetizing it). Using copyright to force the public to stop using the old stuff and spend money on the new stuff is flat-out abuse of copyright law and should not fall under its protections.
Recorded copyright law goes back to the 1700's in England,...
The 1700's are about a few thousand years after authors started producing works in writing, and about a really, really long time after the first cave paintings (which, under todays copyright laws, would absolutely qualify as protected works). So, copyright laws are a recent phenomenon compared to the type of activity they apply to.
... printing privileges date back to the 1400's in Venice.
Printing privileges were more about using a certain technology and less about the intellectual property of the produced works. Copying a work by hand wasn't covered by printing privileges.
That's roughly 500 years of precedent.
Really short when compared to more mature laws, e.g. laws against theft and murder. Those have been around for thousands of years.
Or are you somehow saying that laws more recent than that lack validity?
They lack maturity. And, had such laws been in place during the time of the Roman Empire, we'd still be stuck in the Dark Ages. That's obviously not the case for laws against theft and murder.
This must be from an American perspective. The history of copyright law is, compared to other types of law, so short that it really doesn't have much history.
If copyright laws had history, we would have lost a lot more works of authors from antiquitity to, say, Mozart, than we actually did. Had the concept of copyright existed 2000 years ago, building up culture (for lack of a better word) would have been impossible.
Also, copyright laws should promote the sciences and useful arts, at least that's how it's worded in the US. Using them to deprive the public of (commercial or noncommercial) access to the work is against the spirit of copyright law.
But, our language and consciousness are so dependent on the concept of time that we lack the language to describe a state of being without it.
Photon. Time is nonexistent.
Or $TIMELESS_DEITY. Time exists, but has about as much meaning as the time index of a video. It makes more sense to watch everything in proper order, but you're free to watch the thing in reverse if you like.
But time-ordered sequences of events are only possible after t=0.
Imagine you're a CPU and your perception of time is in clock cycles. Would you be able to give an ordered sequence of events of all the things that happen before your clock generator starts, e.g. voltage ramp-ups, etc?
If the universe always existed, then we don't know that entropy is always increasing. Maybe the universe always existed, but there is some mechanism that causes entropy to cycle between increasing and decreasing?
Considering that entropy might decrease leads to some fairly strange scenarios, e.g.:
Time travel. Not in the usual sense, but the state of the universe becoming identical (with exceptions) to an earlier state. For anyone but an outside observer (another spooky concept) or someone who is, in fact, different in both points in time, the effect would look like time travel.
There could be multiple "incarnation" of one and the same person at various points in time, maybe billions or even trillions of years apart. In fact, there might be a version of you that remembers reading this paragraph, at a time where slashdot did not or will not exist. Mind-boggling? Yep.
On the other hand, there would be nothing that has a lasting effect, as negative delta-S allows complete reversal of any process.
Obviously if entropy is always increasing, and the universe is of infinite age, then certainly there would be no organization today, right?
I wanted to ask the same question, but then I remembered asymptotic functions. Going back in time, entropy would decrease, but the rate this decrease could become smaller smaller as one regards points that are farther back in time.
However, this would imply that for most of the previous eternity, the universe wasn't doing all that much.
tl;dr: The second law requires delta-S to be positive, but it can be arbitrarily small.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're paranoid and don't lock every single door in your house, including the bedroom door, before you go to sleep, you're doing it wrong.
In the long run, everyone dies.
Suicide is a cultural problem, not one of availability (or unavailability) of certain means. The suicide rate of, say, the US and Germany is pretty much the same, despite guns being much more accessible in the former than the latter. However, the train network is much more developed in the latter.
People should, however, be educated about really shitty ways of killing yourself, like overdosing on acetaminophen and the like.
Also, have a look at the possible fines for violating FBAR requirements. It's crazy stuff.
They will lose the ability to do meaningful banking in countries that have signed FATCA-treaties with the US.
They'll have to submit FBARs.
etc...
You're lucky! Where I live, banks have realized that they can avoid the whole FATCA rigmarole by not accepting US persons as customers. You want a securities account? Great. Oh, you're a US person? Sorry.
This US person "disease" also spreads via power of attorney. You're not a US person, but your spouse is and you gave him or her power of attorney over your accounts? Well, you better revoke that or have your accounts cancelled.
Also, there's FBAR - foreign bank account report. A US person must report any and all of their foreign accounts, even if they don't owe any taxes. Should you happen to forget that, the fine can be as high as the maximum value of each account - for every year that you forgot to file.
Spinal nerves are a completely different beast than peripheral nerves. The latter do regrow on their own, slowly. The former don't.
Mine's right below the tumor that caused it. Neurological crap is some of the worst crap.
These guys aren't planning to repair a surgical cut, they're planning to graft the spinal cords of two different bodies together.
Maybe they should try to fix a regular decapitation first. Put the head back on the same body and prove that most of the nervous connections still work.. Even that would be worthy of a Nobel prize in medicine.
The same is true for curing cancer, every genetic disorder, and every viral disease.
Also, we don't even know if a solution exists.
This isn't like pursuing heart transplants before being able to fix each and every heart defect. It's like pursuing heart transplants before being able to do surgical sutures.
Seriously, are the people who cleam this serious? I don't think so.
The best entries, however, didn't rely on AI, but on the fact that the RNG of the arcade game isn't random. Once the Asteroids-bot figured out the internal state of the RNG, it could basically use hyperspace to make targetted jumps (and never one that lead to the destruction of the ship), shoot at asteroids that haven't appeared yet and various other tricks. It was very impressive to watch one of these bots in action.
Delivered by spring-loaded injector disguised as an umbrella.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
Unfortunately, our current capability is probably closer to 0.000008 ly than to 0.8 ly.
Producing more offspring that manages to procreate.
'Most fit' must can only be meaured as the ones 'that survive'.
No, survival is a necessary, but not a sufficient criterion. Reproduction rate is what actually counts. If there are two groups with different reproduction rates, the larger one will eventually become completely dominant, especially when the two groups start getting into conflicts about resources.
Yeah. Human civilization would be nice if it didn't involve all those people.
Maybe they like this particular game? I'd love the chance to play City of Heroes or Earth&Beyond again. I wouldn't mind paying for that opportunity, either.
Few users means this game is not that much fun anymore.
Dictating what other people have to consider "fun" is ridiculous. This is just a super lame excuse to trick/force companies to share their code for nothing/free.
They could keep a server running. Or charge for the server module. Their choice.
That's bullshit. The code belongs to the copyright holder to do as he/she sees fit during the copyrighted phase, they should not lose it.
Sorry, copyright law was supposed to beneficial for both the public (which profits through the promotion of, er, the sciences and useful arts) and the creator of the work (who has an easier time monetizing it). Using copyright to force the public to stop using the old stuff and spend money on the new stuff is flat-out abuse of copyright law and should not fall under its protections.
The 1700's are about a few thousand years after authors started producing works in writing, and about a really, really long time after the first cave paintings (which, under todays copyright laws, would absolutely qualify as protected works). So, copyright laws are a recent phenomenon compared to the type of activity they apply to.
Printing privileges were more about using a certain technology and less about the intellectual property of the produced works. Copying a work by hand wasn't covered by printing privileges.
That's roughly 500 years of precedent.
Really short when compared to more mature laws, e.g. laws against theft and murder. Those have been around for thousands of years. Or are you somehow saying that laws more recent than that lack validity?
They lack maturity. And, had such laws been in place during the time of the Roman Empire, we'd still be stuck in the Dark Ages. That's obviously not the case for laws against theft and murder.
This must be from an American perspective. The history of copyright law is, compared to other types of law, so short that it really doesn't have much history.
If copyright laws had history, we would have lost a lot more works of authors from antiquitity to, say, Mozart, than we actually did. Had the concept of copyright existed 2000 years ago, building up culture (for lack of a better word) would have been impossible.
Also, copyright laws should promote the sciences and useful arts, at least that's how it's worded in the US. Using them to deprive the public of (commercial or noncommercial) access to the work is against the spirit of copyright law.
Photon. Time is nonexistent.
Or $TIMELESS_DEITY. Time exists, but has about as much meaning as the time index of a video. It makes more sense to watch everything in proper order, but you're free to watch the thing in reverse if you like.
But time-ordered sequences of events are only possible after t=0.
Imagine you're a CPU and your perception of time is in clock cycles. Would you be able to give an ordered sequence of events of all the things that happen before your clock generator starts, e.g. voltage ramp-ups, etc?
Considering that entropy might decrease leads to some fairly strange scenarios, e.g.:
And if time is mentioned, it's always interesting to ask "in what frame of reference"?
If there are any photons left over from shortly after the big bang, they would state that the universe just began seconds ago.
I wanted to ask the same question, but then I remembered asymptotic functions. Going back in time, entropy would decrease, but the rate this decrease could become smaller smaller as one regards points that are farther back in time.
However, this would imply that for most of the previous eternity, the universe wasn't doing all that much.
tl;dr: The second law requires delta-S to be positive, but it can be arbitrarily small.