nova

Just think of all the money, power and influence behind intellectual property. It's a huge tool of wealth concentration. A few companies literally own almost all human culture: literature, music, movies, even science papers. For ever.

They're setting an example. It's like messing with the kings of old (and not that old). You'll end with your head on a spike, for everyone to see.

Hopefully things will turn for the better and people of the future will see our outlawing of non-commercial sharing of data as one of those stupid things the troglodytes of the 21th century did. But IP will die a slow and ugly death.

I'm glad that our civilized governments would avoid such blatant sexism and instead mandate electronic tracking for all citizens, irrespective of gender. For our protection.

If that fraction is representable as an exact "decimal" number in base b that means that p/q = m/b^n = m * b^(-n), where m and n are integers too. For example, 3/4 = 75/10^2 or 0.75 in decimal, 3/2^2 or 0.11 in binary.

That means p * b^n = m * q. We said p and q have no common factors, so all of q's factors go into b^n. That means that q divides b^n, or in other words:

p/q is representable as an exact "decimal" number in base b if and only if q divides some power of b.

For example, 0.1 is 1/10. But there is no power of 2 which is divisible by 10, so 0.1 is not exactly representable in binary.

As another example, 1/3=0.33333.... because there is no power of 10 divisible by 3.

And the cost could be shared among the developed countries. And we could direct research towards causes and cures, instead of just treatments.

Drugs get made, researchers paid, companies compete on merit and enjoy a steady income instead on gambling on the next Viagra, we stop killing people in poor countries who can't afford monopolistic prices, and there is one less reason for having patents at all.

And in more accessible industries, where knowledge is abundant, costs low and independent reinvention highly probable, patents stall and block and create monopolies and in general cause economic damage in wasted time and money.

Man, we sure got a sweet deal out of this.

Copyright is more than enough for software, medical research should be directly funded by the goverments (just like weapons manufacturers or big public infrastructures), and the rest just on trade secrets.

We are now in a interconnected world, rich with information. Independent reinvention is extremely easy. The risk of some genius taking his great, great, unique discovery to the grave because of the lack of patents is tiny compared with the economic, scientific and technological damage of this constant hemorrhage of time, money and energy that is the patent system.

No more insurmountable entry barriers for entrepreneurs, no more monopolies, no more trolls, no more unnecessary roundabouts to avoid using obvious patents. The only one to lose would be the patent lawyers.

Forget the romantic fairy tale of the poor lonely inventor robbed of his great idea by big business. Using patents in court is extremely expensive, he couldn't afford them anyway. Patents are guns for big guys.

And no mention to the goodness of the free market. Patents are government-granted monopolies. You couldn't be furthest from a free, competitive model of an economy. Patents are not capitalism, they resemble more some feudal privilege taken from the middle ages.

Just noting that ints are 16 bits wide in AVR-GCC, unless you use the -mint8 option which violates C standards.

Just imagine that, in the normal course of things, a person at time t is constantly being copied into a slightly different new person at t+dt and then destroyed. There is a causal connection and thus an inheritance of memories, but not single "essence about yourself" being conserved.

With current technology we only have a directed linear graph, like o -> o -> o -> ... . With uploading tech this graph will fork into two paths, but neither of them can claim to be "the original", because there is no such thing.

I mean, maybe this concept of "personal identity" is simply wrong. It's an illusion because currently threads of causality on people are linear, but that's just a technological limitation.

If by consciousness you mean introspection or self-modeling or something like that then consciousness is definitely real. But it's just a property that some minds have, and that someday will probably be analyzed and replicated in silico.

But if you mean some kind of special conserved "essence" that makes you "you" in addition of your memories... then yes, it's probably just an illusion.

Which is a disturbing thought, I admit.

Imagine I have a magical device with which I can "stop time", or more precisely, stop movement of all particles except mine. In the beginning I am at our right. I stop time, move leisurely to your left and resume time.

What you see is me teleporting from your right to your left. You don't feel "trapped in a body who can't move", because your neurons are also magically frozen. Your consciousness feel continuous, even is you have been "suspended" for a while, because your memories are properly structured. Consciousness is not "something else", it is a property of your memories. (The blog post on lesswrong.com about timeless physics is important to see this point of view, I think, even if you don't buy the theory).

So if my copy is mathematically identical then there is nothing else left. There is no extra consciousness stuff that the "original" has and the "copy" does not.

Sorry, I really can't explain myself better. I'd suggest reading the link provided.

The argument about a copy being "identical to me but it's not me" is a very natural and intuitive reaction, but it's probably wrong. A very illuminating explanation is http://lesswrong.com/lw/pm/identity_isnt_in_specific_atoms and related posts.

I'll try a personal approach: imagine a country with no computers, no photocopiers, no presses, and a very strict law that forbids making copies of books which is indoctrinated from birth. There is only one copy of each literary creation, guarded in the National Library.

We can imagine that the people of that country have a very hard time to distinguish between "The Lord of the Rings" in an abstract sense and material object #1434 stored in the second floor, section Fantasy. For them LOTR is just that set of paper and ink. Even if someone secretly made a copy, letter by letter, it will be "just a copy", not the "true" LOTR. That's quite obvious to them.

And in a sense that's a bit our current situation with people (not exactly, because books are static and people aren't). We can't scan people-as-information out of people-as-protein-body and store them as people-as-silicon-body, so we mix the concepts. But it's just confusion due to technological limitations.

So in a sense we DO have souls, but it's a mathematical or information-theoretical soul, not a metaphysical one. It's always bound to a material instantation, but that concrete physical manifestation is not the same as the dynamic, interactive information process a person is.

So if technology advances enough we'll be able to copy a person, and it'll make no sense to ask which of them is really "you". Both are.

IMHO, it is not. Current copyright law means restrictions on the copy of data. A free internet means freedom to interchange data.

So either we lose the free net, or we push for a deep reform of IP laws, something like that the law should only restrict for-profit infringement.

ø : empty set, 1 : {ø}, A : nonempty set, ~= : isomorph to.

A^ø ~= 1, because there is only one function ø->A, the empty function.

ø^A ~= ø, because there is no function with empty codomain and nonempty domain.

ø^ø ~= 1, because there is again one function ø->ø, the empty one.

So yes, 0^0 = 1.

Why, do you think there's something to lose?

Our best shot at preserving the pattern of information that makes your identity as a person, or just rotting/reduced to ashes.

Mainly because getting fat is not the only thing that happens to us when we eat thing we didn't evolve to eat.

Probably, the worst thing about HFCS is its cheapness, so they put it on everything.

Me too. Probably the most important book I've read in my life. I lost the 12 kg I didn't need and I only regret I don't have a time machine to tell my younger self to stop eating all those damn sugary crap and grains for breakfast.

So what. We didn't start eating them until a few thousands years ago. The only reason to eat grains is that they are cheap. Better to save on other things.

No milk forever

Why? The previous book (GCBC) itself talks about how well Masais are, living basically on milk and blood, and it's an indictment of bad science research (cholesterol and sat fat paranoia) and a suggestion on where the problem or part of it could be (sugar and refined carbohydrates)

"Good Calories, Bad Calories", by Gary Taubes, on nutrition and health.

"The Blank Slate", by Steven Pinker, on human nature.