It's what my company does, and it works great. Except those of us that use Firefox. (Though that wouldn't be a problem if the security dept. supported non-IE browsers.

I agree with everything except your conclusion regarding it not benefiting the economy. Competition on the global scale does indeed benefit the global economy. Global is the keyword. Proof is the rising wages in the countries where outsourcing work is going. You've got to remember that there is an enormous wage gap between the western world and the more poverty stricken world. Competion--in this case of labor--is doing what comppetiton does best: making the commodity more efficient to produce on the whole.

That's not to imply it doesn't suck for us developers in the States. But the fact is a $3 cut in our pay doesn't have anywhere near the effect a $3 increase on pay has on someone in India or China.

In the end globalization will benefit everyone in the world. It's like when computers became popular; no one can deny they were good for everyone ultimately. But in the beginning it sure did suck for the people who made and used typewriters.

The idea is that to make a higher profit, to be more efficient, one has to serve the demands of the customer to gain the business required to make a higher profit. The instances where this idea stands at odds with those in the "real world" are usually examples of sectors that are highly regulated by the government, raising the barrier to entry and preventing competition.

Take hot dogs... you might be able to make your machines more efficient at making hot dogs than the next guy, but that won't help your profit margins if your hot dogs taste like dog shit. The nasty tasting hot dog manufacturer might then use the strong arm of government to enact legislation outlawing one of his competitors' ingredients. (In the end, all hot dogs are pretty fucking unhealthy, but that point is missed by the politicians wanting to look health-conscious to their constituents.) The nasty tasting hot dog manufacturer might also push to have its brand of hot dogs be served exclusively in schools for the lunch entree on "hot dog Tuesdays".

Take out the corporatism element of government-sanctioned monopolies, and you get the best tasting AND most affordable hot dog becoming "top dog" as it were. Does "top dog" afford some luxuries not existing in the mom-and-pop businesses? Sure. But as long as the barrier to entry is low, regulation is not crippling, the market will tend toward the collective desires of the customer.

The problem is so often the collective customer is an idiot.

Could you not forsee a time when computers and robots have become so advanced that they contain all the knowledge, experience, and wisdom of several human doctors, thereby being programmed with theoretically hundreds of years of real world experience? Humans make mistakes; computers can too, and when they do sure it's really really bad especially if they're cutting you open, but given the right engineering and advancement so that the chances of a robot screwing up is infinitesimal small compared to that of a human screwing up, I'd take a robotic surgeon over a human one any day. Of course I'd want the robot supervised to throw an abort switch in case the bastard goes into an infinite loop or something.

The logic and decision-making skills that doctors learn that give them the ability to work on many different, although basically similar, "models" could theoretically be programmed into the robot. Along with robot precision and speed, the choice is obvious to me.

There might be a good point in there, but it's blinded by your arrogant entitled attitude.

That would suck if it's the former. If you hate when people bitch about getting the flu after they get the flu shot, just wait...

... I don't care what age I go.

I drink, and I like it.
I smoke (cannabis), and I like it.
I smoke (tobacco) sometimes, and I like it.
I really enjoy good food, and maybe I overindulge sometimes.

I'm 23, going on 24, and if I make it to 60 under the same quality of life I have now, I'll be peachy fucking keen.

My mother has Crohn's, and it almost killed her. So I can sympathize with what you are going through.

Have you ever considered medicinal marijuana? I've only done preliminary research, but it seems like it's something worth trying. At the very least, it might help your quality of living so that you won't want to end it.

I implore you, if you are so desperate as to take your own life, to first consider the psychological aid of Psilocybin (aka, "magic") mushrooms. They have done wonders for others with chronic illnesses like cancer, and if not changing your mind completely, they might just put you at mental and spiritual ease before euthanasia. At least give it some research.

Good luck to whatever you do.

The problem with that is that updated life expectancies seem to apply only to newborns. After all, if I lived through all the shit that plagues humanity, that's going to decrease my life expectancy. The newborns, never living through it due to technological and social advances, are unscathed and as a result have a higher expectancy than I.

So unless technological advances can erase past destructive experience (damage to lungs from second hand smoke, for instance), updated life expectancies have little to no relevance to us already living.

If I make a copy of a program on my computer, the two copies are not the same instance. In other words: you will still die, but your clone will continue to live in its electronic brain.

Same thing. Of course I'm a pantheist.

..if you define pain as a physiological response to damaging stimuli. Animals need that in order to survive.

The question is does their form of pain "hurt"? We'll never know that. After all, we don't even know why pain hurts for us humans; all we know is that it does indeed hurt and is not something we like to experience (unless you're masochistic).

This problem is at root a philosophical one. It's impossible to know how things are through the eyes of another. See qualia. I don't know what red looks like to you, nor do I know how a flame touching your finger feels like to you. I can guess, because we have similar physical and mental faculties, but it's still just a guess.

There's a pretty good chance.

Err... paging == swapping.

Need more caffeine. ;)

Yes.

Yep, by default (while still in pre-alpha at least) it runs without paging.