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Comment by rootbear | Hacker News Reader

Well, it's a stretch, but when I saw Die Hard I just barely caught the BSD reference when they log into the CEO's terminal. I found a screen shot on flickr:

https://www.flickr.com/photos/armenws/9516176127/

That's a pretty hackerish reference for a film made in 1988 that wasn't particularly about computers or tech. There was probably a BSD fan at the company that created the computer screens. FreeBSD 9.2 had a tribute to this in it's boot screen:

https://mebsd.com/make-build-your-freebsd-word/freebsd-9-2-d...

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Damn you did your research. I approve.

Everyone who dies has probably used a smart phone or the internet so lets start the avalanche!

Your ignorant statement is not even accurate.

Well, everyone who has ever lived has also died.

Not me!

You have that backwards. Everyone who has ever died had previously lived.

Besides that, all people still currently living have not died.

>You have that backwards.

Parent didn't put it in time terms. Just noted that everyone who ever lived, has also died ("A && B", as opposed to "A then B").

>Besides that, all people still currently living have not died.

Yes, though one could say that those people are still "living", not yet in a state having "lived" (past tense), as parent put it.

I've lived. I'm currently living, but I used to, too.

You haven't "lived" (period) until you're dead, and it's settled.

You might have e.g. "lived in London" (if you don't know, so it's a settled thing and a specific period of your life). Or "I've lived in poverty", etc.

But "I've lived", period, without such a qualifier is not that common or useful when one is still alive.

If you truly want to argue that the verb tense chosen means "Everyone who ever lived [and then died] has died," then the statement becomes a tautology: "Everyone who has died has died."

All true equivalency statements are tautologies -- since both sides "resolve" to the same thing. That doesn't mean they are useless.

In this case, though, it's not "Everyone who has died has died", but "To have lived means you're dead".

The same way that "to be a corpse means that you've died". That's not a tautology (it's not "to be a corpse means you're a corpse"), just informs us of a prerequisite for the other thing to happen.

I think that you lack consensus on the meaning that can be drawn from use of the past tense.

Either way, the statement as given does not support the unstated implication that everyone now living will eventually die.

Well there are still >7 billion people that don't fit your categorization, which means only 93% of people who have lived have died. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fact-or-fiction-li...

The article seems to say that the estimate of all who have lived is about 106 billion, so the number of currently-alive is estimated at about 6% of those who have ever lived.

Arthur C. Clarke wrote "Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living." I wondered if that ratio needed updating. It does, but not, it seems, in the direction I expected.

The article is from 2007; the earth's population has increased to 7 billion now.

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