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Comment "Pirating" is good-the "owners" are lousy stewards (Score 5, Interesting) 158

Jerry Pournelle, the late science fiction author, said on a TWIT podcast that his publishers had, really! lost a number of his books that had not been in print for many years. Libraries didn't have the books, NO ONE had the books. But, TA-DA, book scanning "pirates" *had* scanned the books and gladly zapped him the copies, which he put back on sale and were making him a nice bit of income.

Comment Re:proper (Score 1) 109

I don't think rational thought has much to do with it. Humans pattern match, they don't really think much.
The FDA is covering its ass, and in so doing will cause the deaths of...millions? With the capabilty here, they will literally make millions of people live and die in agony, to cover their mandate and "save" us.

Comment Re:We need a new class of IP protections for perso (Score 3, Insightful) 146

They'll ignore it, or the contract for your phone will require you click through an agreement to let them do as they will. Even if that fails, they'll do it anyway. A fine here and there is nothing compared to the powe of knowing where every person, car, motorcycle and eventually bicycle on the planet is. It's THE power, knowing where everyone is, what they read, what they say, and who they associate with. Every nation on the planet, every corporation, every secret and public police will never let this go. Ever notice how Wikileaks is the only new org on the planet that gets real leaks? There is a reason for that. They brag openly to reporters they don't need a warrant to know who's been talking to them. We are sewn shut.

Comment We've been screaming about this since 2001 (Score 3, Interesting) 146

Or at least I have. I remember being screamed and voted down on Slashdot because I was insisting the GPS and other location data was being accessed and would be given out to just about anyone, panic monger and paranoid lunatic that I am.
Amazing how people don't want to see what is right in front of them.

Comment Personal computing? It's dead. (Score 1) 159

In the beginning was the One Box, with many terminals, and that's what the "cloud" is: mainframes and centralized control. Personal computing died in 2001 when all Intel/AMD chips encrypted the BIOS. "Your" computer isn't yours. It belongs to whomever rolls up the BIOS, in the end. Hacking that encryption is a DMCA crime, and a violation of some contract you "signed", though many will pop up and say it isn't.
If you own a PC made before 2001, you may have a personal computer. After that, PCs and portable computing belong to corporations.
It's been long enough, more than, for a couple of generations to not have heard of any of this. And they won't going forward. This is the aquarium water they breathe.
I recall in Heinlein's "Friday", Friday Jones asked the networked computer she had been using for research a simple question: Who owns you? In a refreshing display of honesty, it refused to answer the question. Heinlein was a deep one.

Comment Re:Summary missing key detail (Score 1) 150

The brains are being artificially deadened by the blockers in the solution, per the article. They are probably thinking about what happens if they took those out...

No reason for a brain to die. Supply it with what it needs, and it can stay alive...who know how long. If you can feed the auditory and retinal input, you'd have something that has no haptic reality, but can still think, see, hear. Neural cybernetic links are doable.

Death as we always define it is nonsense. If the brain is alive, death doesn't come. We let the brain die when the body dies because of traditions so laser-etched into our souls that the body is the person. You don't die when your heart stops. The heart is a pump. You die when your brain dies. Sobering to think that the newly-dead person you are seeing in front of you maintains consciousness for a minute or so, in the dark and quiet we all get to greet at the end.

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