StarDestroyer.Net BBS

Literally all the resistance I've seen in response to OWS has boiled down to framing their message as "no message" or, worst case, a blank-check "they hate capitalism!", and then using that to justify brutal crackdowns. Because hey, they're just filthy latte-sipping hippies that ...

It is a fact that people with high cognitive abilities rarely get involved in a fight or competition to dominate other people. Matters of domination and exploitation seem more alien to them. I guess by becoming smarter humans will also become less prone to inducing suffering on others; it will also...

They're cognitive biases.

REAMDE is classic Stephenson so far, but it's so damn long I might have return it before I finish :( Does it have his classic "I ran out of words and must end things RFN" endings? Believe it or not, it actually has a conclusion and then an epilogue where things sorta tie together after th...

To what end? What is his angle here? We all know what Paterno stood to lose back then - money, fame, recognition, power etc. But what would McQuery have to gain by purposefully diluting what he said to Paterno? Could it be simple face-saving? I mean, he's getting a ton of flak now for "not doi...

An adept author could go to town with any of those concepts and make an interesting story of out it. Then again, an adept author is going to come at a novel-length story with more than Mike Tyson's Punch-Out as a premise and source of dramatic tension. If you're after a match-up, I think Hitler with...

That would have been a really fun premise, and it adds a double meaning to that "you will adapt to service us" line. It still doesn't get rid of the Borg Queen or the assimilation fetish that came out of nowhere, but man, thinking back to when the Borg were faceless monoliths, that's an ex...

I wonder if I could have helped had it been faster, or perhaps they did reach him but wasn't enough to get him to stop or give a response. Or perhaps it was too late but he would have ignored them anyway. Or perhaps he closed it down immediately after sending and couldn't receive a response no matt...

I have no argument with those points.

SGU had horrible characterisation and utterly boring plotting; that's what doomed it. I came into it as a neutral viewer and left after the fifth or sixth episode I think. It may have had potential but frankly if by a certain point you haven't shown me SOMETHING that's good why would I stick around...

If they'd made Enterprise as a real prequel you'd just have nerds whining about how it's not 'real star trek'. Nerds say they want different shit but the reality is it won't fly on TV, because your audience is unimaginative and can't handle the ambiguous or unfamiliar. SGU was a fresh take on that p...

Why would you need to "make decisions independent of brain activity" for there to be free will? I have no idea; I was asking (mostly rhetorical) questions to pare down why I find the concept so difficult to express. Whether or not you're a product of deterministic physics (or indeterminis...

the concept of 'free will' is meaningless, inconsistent noise (or obviously wrong, like lordofchange13's dictionary definition). I think that this hits the nail on the head; the discussion has centered on not only a poorly-defined term, but one which may not have any meaningful definition in the fi...

Jesus Metahive. Antimatter is like a battery; high density power storage. It doesn't generate power becuase you won't get as much out as you had to put in. The huge multi-kilometre mirrors and solar systems are where the power is generated. Stop nitpicking. Also, by that definition nothing ever gen...

It's almost like literature is somehow resistant to an obsessive need for rigorous classification into rigid categories.

How could this be?*

* Note to nerds: this is sarcasm.

It's about the process of decision making. In each step, the driver had a reason to make a new decision: either something changed, causing him to react to to the change, or someone pointed out an error in his original plan. Applying this to transhumanism: we're already humans, so making the decisio...

It got exactly what it wanted, though: the threats removed and itself frozen back in the ice to be found again. Maybe not its ideal of "build UFO, leave planet" or "eat biosphere", but from its point of view it damn sure came out ahead compared to the human protagonists. In eithe...

The only reason it got caught imitating the dogs was because a MacReady happened to be up after hours. It was smart enough to wait several hours until it could assume everyone was asleep. That's not "stupid", that's a mistake, and not even that big a deal since it still won in the end.

I think the Buddhists really have it right here. They don't stress over nerd-determinism the way our thought process leads us to do, where we need Right Answers measured to the last electron shell and nothing else suffices, but that viewpoint is fundamentally incompatible with what "personhood&...

Yes, but it is exactly this illusion or magic trick that counts. Dying and getting my brain sliced in order to get a copy of me ressurected in a computer or robot body sounds to me like a drastic breaking of this illusion. It's the process that matters. If you break it, that person ceases to exist ...

Citation needed. What definition of "I" are you using, for which when I am uploaded, "I" die and "pseudo-I" replaces me? Why does he need a citation? He's just making the point that a copy of your mind being simulated on a computer is a different consciousness than the...

I don't know if it would be. I'm fairly skeptical of robust nanotech of a fantastic nature, not because I don't want it to work, but because I want to see somebody build something close to it before I gush over it. That said, I don't think guys like Drexler or Freitas are invoking magic, either, and...

I don't argue with any of that. Not only do I not argue with it, I'm confused as to how it's even remotely relevant to the example of protein-based "tiny machines with minimal heat tolerance" operating just fine within the temperature range of a human body. It'd be pretty stupid not to loo...

Consciousness is only an illusion of continuity in the first place, and a big part of that is the cultural belief that we have discrete, eternal souls. Once you get past the dualism and realize that consciousness is entirely a product of neurological activity, it's easier to see that what we think o...

And living cells are NOT examples of molecular machinery, living cells are orders of magnitude beyond the molecular scale. I think you're missing the point here. At the fundamental level, what is DNA replication, transcription, and protein synthesis? A living cell is nothing but molecular machinery...