sodiumphosphate

Fuck religion.

I just leave the desktop function turned off and use Finder and terminals. I prefer a plain black background.

Off-topic, but I will say it again anyway: I really wish I could disable all window decoration and personalize the way windows are managed like you can in many X11 window managers.

( I miss using compiz standalone on Arch. )

Who's to say that wriggling on the floor in a virtual reality simulation isn't the next Pilates or Yoga? Also, the girl referred to her jogging gamification and navigation app.

Isn't it plausible that many more people would exercise with the added encouragement training that such technology could provide?

Streamlining mundane activities frees time for more interesting ones. Augmented reality might enhance human interaction, rather than diminish it.

Anyway, I appreciate your thoughtful comment, but I thought I could counter it with some devil's advocacy.

Duh.

Here, here. I've been considering options for adding ambiance to my game, and I think this paulstretch thing is very interesting.

I hope this fad of moving everything into the web browser ends soon.

Seriously, the 'toilet seat problem' is merely a side effect of the toilet lid cultural ignorance problem.

I can't help but think that the volunteers would have to be crazy to sign up for this. What happens when you confine four crazy people to a small capsule and shoot them off to a dead planet to eat freeze-dried survival rations for the rest of their lives?

There are some brief mentions around the site and in the video about financing it through media coverage.

You not only misstate my assumptions, but seem to miss my point entirely.

Here is my point: the original human will not experience continuity, therefore it's instinct for self-preservation will not be satisfied. The best it can hope for is to take comfort in knowing that a copy will survive. Personally, this does not comfort me.

I don't doubt the possibility of a very high fidelity copy and supporting simulation, for all intents and purposes. I also think there may be sound reasons to pursue it. But I don't think it will benefit those who are copied, beyond any positive thoughts and feelings it may give them before they die.

Being selfish and programmed for self-preservation, I desire physical immortality instead. I have no interest in donating a copy of my memories to a simulation project.

I hope this clears it up; my interest is quickly waning, and I have work to do.

I think that the experience of continuity is what makes these things entirely different.

It is the experience of continuity that satisfies my hard-wired desire for self-preservation.

Granted that consciousness is not fully understood, can we not agree that it is entirely manifest in the brain? I mean, you don't believe that human consciousness somehow survives the body after brain death, do you?

Even if the cloned memories could be streamed from your brain into a running simulation, allowing a memory of crossing the threshold from the physical world to the digital one to be created in the simulation, the 'patient' will not have this experience. The patient will still have to experience death.

Going further, let's imagine that we want it really, really badly. Let's destroy each neuron immediately after taking it's state and pushing it into the stream, so that the whole process of uploading and death are completely synchronized and nothing of the patient's consciousness remains afterward.

I'm sorry, but I still do not think that the patient will experience being uploaded into a computer. It will only experience having it's brain fried until death. For the clone, the memory might just be glorious, like some Hollywood special effect sequence, but personally I find this wholly unsatisfying.

I'm not saying it shouldn't be done, either. I'm only saying that I suspect some people may have the wrong perspective about it. If you sign up for this procedure, you are not signing up for immortality, but merely to donate a copy of your memories to whomever is running the simulation.

You would be like an organ donor, but instead of saving a life, you'd be feeding your mind to the new Zombie Second Life.

It would not benefit you, but it might benefit someone else.

As for me, I'm a selfish, arrogant bastard with a desire for physical immortality and superhuman capabilities.

While it does make for some entertaining fiction, and may provide some benefits to the living, I do not believe that 'uploading' is a desirable experience.

In fact, I don't believe that one can experience it at all. Imagine the procedure (for a conscious person): your brain is connected to a computer interface and a copy of your mind is taken. Great. Now there is a digital copy of your mind. So what? You still get to die.

Consciousness is mortally bound to the physical body, and will die along with it regardless of how many mental copies are made.

I much prefer the idea of human metamorphosis. I want to inject nanorobots into my body which will transform it gradually, cell by cell into an improved synthetic one. In this way, immortality and superhumanity can be achieved without loss of continuity. I imagine the experience would be one of waking up a little better (stronger, smarter, etc.) every morning until the cells are all upgraded.

I don't read enough these days because of chronic eyestrain, but if you are aware of anything dealing with this concept of human metamorphosis, fiction or otherwise, I would appreciate a link. It's something I would like to read about (if it's even been dealt with), someday when I have time (and don't have a headache).

I'm pessimistic about this type of technology because it isn't "you" that we are talking about; it's a copy of you; you still get to die, and I don't think that knowing a copy of your mind exists will be of any real comfort.

It can do whatever it pleases with impunity, and for whatever reason, as long as it sufficiently invokes the bogeyman.

Ketamine?

Entomophagy.

It's features include pink buttons and smooth jazz videos.

Correct. The shaded version makes it very clear; it's merely an H with a twist.

This is exactly the kind of endless stream of intellectually stimulating but mostly infeasible ideas that manifest in the mind of an intelligent person who consumes a certain amount of cannabinoids.

( I'm not saying it's necessarily a bad thing. )

The human race excels at engineering shovels and hammers, knives and other primitive tools; for anything more complex than that our capabilities are still pretty much infantile.

Give it a few thousand years. If we can manage to survive it, the miserable suckiness of our software will taper off.

Crashed chrome on my late 2011 Macbook Pro.

Stop refreshing; you have more than a month to get it.

I really enjoyed reading this.

I don't really remember being disappointed with toys, but my parents do remember me taking them all apart almost immediately. I had a vast assortment of parts, which I used to build and rebuild and rebuild again all sorts of little robots and Rube Goldbergish things.

Care to hazard a guess as to what I did with my first car at age 16? Yeah, pretty much the same thing. Every computer I've ever owned? Yes, those as well.

As an adult (technically) I manage to collect and routinely discard massive heaps of techno-garbage.

Actually, I may never grow up; I create video games.

I guess I'm still searching for the magic; I know it has to be in there somewhere.

Oh and James, turtles are amphibians (not reptiles) :p

Excellent advice!

I just discovered this entirely by accident, because I grew tired of killing sox every time I played another audio source (and restarting it afterward).

Also, turning off the white noise is very uncomfortable once you've become accustomed to hearing it all the time.

I used various tiling window managers on Linux, and really admired Awesome (probably because I was writing a lot of Lua at the time), but I ended up settling on Compiz (standalone) as my favorite environment.

In standalone Compiz, I had window decoration disabled and quick shortcuts to maximize vertically, horizontally, or both, and back. Most of the time I kept windows maximized and switched between them with a shortcut. It was simple, fast, and nicely animated.

I really wish this kind of thing could be done in OSX. 86 the title bar and it's cute little buttons. Set quick key combos to resize windows. ⌘-click anywhere in a window and drag to move it.

Make fullscreen apps work properly with multiple monitors. Hide the menu bar whenever you want to, like the dock.

Why does window management suck on OSX? Even Windows has it beat in that area.

Sure, that's the best way, but most people cannot do it; they risk being late for work, or in my case, getting the kids to school. (Actually, to be honest, my only risk is in not having as much time as I'd like before the kids wake up.)

A good second choice seems to be using something like 'Sleep Cycle' for iPhone, or one of these fancy new wristband accelerometer gizmos. I've had good success with Sleep Cycle, myself.

The article suggests that it's natural to take two four hour sleep sessions, intermediated by a one to two hour break.

I think that this bears out to what many of us are experiencing, and the idea to consider is simply to stop worrying about it and embrace it. The 'second sleep' is likely getting cut short, because we are not budgeting for the break.

I consistently tend to find myself daydreaming during this part of the night, anxious (as the article notes) about not sleeping. So personally, I'm just going to continue doing this without worry, and budget time for it. Duh, right? Why didn't I think of that before? It makes perfect sense now after reading the article.

I may even go wild and actually get up and do things for an hour or two every night, you know, for science.

Many thanks to the poster.

Why do some smart people believe in nonsense?

I'm no psychologist, but I speculate it has something to do with emotion-driven self-deception.

Everything about it is shocking; it's a testament to the depths of human stupidity.

All it needs now is a cult of religious devotees, and then it will truly be perfection incarnate.