As others have mentioned, this is an old idea, that we might live in a simulation. Anybody ever see "Close To The Truth" episodes on TV? I remember an early one talked about this quite a bit (It'ss a show that has folks like Ray Kurzweil, Alan Guth, and Leonard Susskind as guests, as well as theologians.) I don't remember who, but somebody on that show said that if any one from some universe ever has the ability to do a simulation and follows through, then the odds are that we are in a simulation, because 'most' universes would be simulations.

However, the big question to me is, is the universe discrete or not? Physicists, correct me if I'm wrong, but quantum stuff seems to suggest that it is discrete, while Einstein Space Time seems to be continuous. Continuousness would mean you really could have a perfect circle in the universe for example, with a diameter to circumference ration of pi, and that could not be simulated by a Turing machine style computer.

I once saw a TV documentary, I think it was "The Body In Question", Jonathan Miller was definitely the guy demonstrating. He put some sort of breathing equipment on his face, so that he kept breathing the same air over and over, except there was something to absorb the carbon dioxide. So he never felt bad. He tried doing arithmetic and stuff, and gradually lost the ability, finally, just before he passed out, helpers came and took it off and started giving him extra oxygen.

That looked like the cleanest, most painless, method of execution I could imagine, and I don't know why it's never been tried.

You can name something 'university' and have another university next to it. Why not the same with universes. Both words come from a Latin expression that meant something like 'turned into one' or maybe 'rolled into one'. A 'university' was a sort of guild as in a guild of students, or students and teachers. Universe was probably meant to imply 'the whole deal' all of existence when it was first applied, just as 'the world' suggested there was only one world. Now 'the world' is 'our world' as opposed to say Mars. 'The Universe' is 'our universe'. I think most people know what is meant by the word 'multiverse', or 'other universe' don't they? (Or do they? Hmmm.) Maybe the word 'cosmos' should be reserved for the whole deal, all of existence.

When I saw 'daily pot use' I thought first of cooking pots, that maybe this was some anthropological post about when humans first started cooking, then I thought maybe it was about sitting instead of squatting when answering a certain call of nature (also anthropological, presumably the 'pot' method can lead to varicose veins in the legs, so why not other things.)

But I guess your average slashdotter would assume 'pot' was for good old Mary Jane.

'Maybe what SHOULD be done is allow two certificates...from the "trusted" certificate authority...and then a second that can be self-generated by that other end to actually encrypt'

Sounds like a good idea to me. Somebody mod the anonymous coward up. (Unless somebody sees a flaw in AC's arg and can point it out.)

A couple of books I read recently come to mind. "My Life as a Pimp" by Iceberg Slim, and "The Valachi Papers". The reason is these books tell about the seamy side of life from the inside out. Iceberg Slim was quite literate. Joe Valachi was barely literate but he was intelligent and interviewed by an excellent writer, Peter Maas. A lot of "The Sopranos" comes from "The Valachi Papers".

So much for the unsavory; In the 'savory' department I'd recommend "Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin" and "Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave",
"Act One" by Moss Hart is another autobiographical classic, by a successful American playwright of the 1st half of the 20th century.

"...because privacy matters. Privacy is what allows us to determine who we are and who we want to be."

Y'know, when I read that, for some reason the first thing I thought of was James Brown, the singer/composer/dancer. I watched a documentary about him once, and remember that as a child, he would go off by himself and be in his own head. I think that's where a lot of his creativity came from. Maybe I just identified with that and maybe a lot of people don't care. But yes, I think privacy matters.

Looked at from a different point of view, I remember reading, as a layman, about a hypothesis of Darwinism that many big changes in evolution came from isolated, what one might call protected, environments where something analogous to human activies of design and 'working out the bugs' could happen.

Isn't one of the 4 freedoms supposed to be 'Freedom from Fear'? I think there's always a little bit of fear, or at least anxiety, when you don't have privacy.

"Does it serve the users well?" is a question that needs to be asked from time to time when developing code as a way of keeping perspective. But the point of the rules and guidelines is to find ways to achieve that goal. Whether the rules and guidelines actually serve their own users well is another question.

There was a slashdot article about a Turing Test for Free Will not too long ago http://science.slashdot.org/story/13/10/21/199213/physicist-unveils-a-turing-test-for-free-will/

I made a post there, but it was late and I didn't realize I wasn't logged in so it was lost as an anonymous coward post (Probably just as well. Like I said, it was late.) Anyway, along comes this post about Time as 'emergent'. So, for a 'Godlike' observer, the Universe is Static. I see a connection to the Turing Test Free Will article, but can I explain it now that it's morning and I've had my coffee. Only one way to find out:

If for a Godlike observer there is no time, then everything is predetermined. It's like that Calvinist notion that if God is omniscient then He must know the future, and know who will go to heaven, etc. But that means people can't have any effect on the future, no true Free Will, only an illusion of it.

This would also be evidence for 'Superdeterminism' http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superdeterminism/.

I personally find these thoughts leading to the idea that the universe might be a kind of rule 110 machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110. I like the idea of Free Will, but this doesn't cause me a lot of angst over Superdetermism because, supposing the universe is a sort of rule 110 thing. Within universe, you have to live it out and the future becomes the past. No matter how far you go in the Future, that will eventually be the fixed, immutable Past. But you will have 'lived it', and nothing could have worked it out and predicted it ahead of you. Even this Omniscient God (if there were one) could only 'know' the Future by cranking up some meta out-of-universe computer, to speed up the computation and beat the regular old Universe to some future point, but then the version of me running in that meta computer would be doing the living so it wouldn't matter. God or the Master Programmer or whoever could still only know me by waiting for me to live things out for myself.

One could extrapolate that the 4D universe is just a black hole in a 5D universe then. Maybe go up to as many dimensions as String theory expects.

Some posters have already touched on this, and I might have modded them up instead of posting myself if I had mod points right now, but, since I don't...

I'm thinking about this as a secular humanist/Darwinist not a believer in some form of Zoroastrian/Hindu/Judeo-Christian-Islamic religion, so, what do I expect in a million years? Humans like myself still running the world? Evolved super-humans? Or aritificial intelligences that owe their existence to human beings and are the heirs of humans as much, if not more, than humans are the heirs and owe their existence to the first primates.

Are we supposed to have machines of superior intelligence that take care of us? Keeping us in super high tech zoos that are like earthly paradises to us? Are we supposed to have merged with the machines somehow?

I don't know the answers to these questions, but I suspect humans will be only a memory, hopefully a a grateful memory. Hopefully, there is some 'point' to exiistence, and our heirs will be moving towards fulfilling that 'point'. ( I'm being as deliberately vague about this point as I can. If you don't get what I mean by it, don't worry, it's not important.)

I was going to put 'the high road' in my subject line, but then I realized there might be other 'high roads' some of them even 'higher'. Later I'll try to say a little about why it's a 'higher road', but first I'll say why I can 'afford' to go the linux route.

I worked in the Unix world from the early 80s. I was a programmer and a lot of my work involved porting code from one flavor/architecture of Unix to another, things like Xenix, BSD 4.2, System V, HPUX, so when Linux came along and I got my first distro, slackware on 50 diskettes (two of them mislabeled), I was used to having to figure things out when I replaced Dos and Windows 3.1 on my no-name brand laptop with its 33 MHZ CPU, 250 Megabyte Hard drive and 4 meg of RAM. Over the years I did my share of struggling to get apps to work, being sure to buy compatible modems and later ethernet cards, TV capture cards, etc, finding the right incantations to get a modem connection to an ISP where tech support had never heard of linux and didn't feel obliged to give you the time of day if you weren't running WIndows or a Mac.

I was very proud of the fact that I got the Netscape browser to work on my linux system and (o mirabile dictu) I actually got a short contract job to work at Netscape only a few weeks later! I remember telling the interviewer I used Netscape under Linux and he looked at me for a second and said, "So do I". I think that was 1995 but I'd have to go check and I'm not going to bother.

(I STILL HAVE TO PUT UP WITH frustrations here in the linux world, EVEN IN THIS POST! I was on slackware 14, using Seamonkey. I logged in to slashdot as shoor, but when I actually tried to post I got a smarmy message about how they didn't know if I was human and I should log in! Now I'm trying ubuntu and we'll see if it works.)

So why I didn't I take what might have been the easier path and just go with Microsoft? I was aware of some unsavory things about Microsoft's way of doing things. I realize that this is the business world and there are plenty of people from all walks of life who wouldn't think twice about the ethics or morality or whatever if they had the same opportunities as the bosses at Microsoft, so I'm not posting to get on that old soapbox. It's been so long that I don't know that I could even remember accurately the details, and if I got something wrong, I'm sure there'd be plenty of people eager to flame me over it. Even back in the 90s, when people would come to me for advice, I'd be straight with them and say Linux had a big learning curve and there were things you wouldn't find on it. I can get away with keeping my 'virtue' because I don't have the same needs as a lot of people. I'm not a big gamer for instance, and have mostly only experimented with games that could run under Wine, usually getting them when they were out of date and cheap. I don't need fancy spreadsheets or whatever. I actually do casual writing with emacs and vi (and no, I don't endorse emacs for anyone who hasn't already gone through the learning curve, but my fingers know the hot keys now, so I use it.) I used to prepare fancy hard copy stuff like resumes using TeX too.

But I hated Microsoft! I was around in the 70s, when the hobbyist computer world exploded, and people wondered where it was going, and there was excitement at all the cool prospects. I did contract work on somebody's CP/M based system and had an Ohio Scientific Superboard II with a 6502 microprocessor (same as in the Apple) and my brother homebrewed a system from the 8080 bug book. But then IBM came out with the PC with its miserable Intel 8086 CPU (when the Motorola 68000 and Zilog Z8000 had already come out) and suddenly it seemed like the only game in town was that with Dos!

I wonder if I still have my 6502 manual anywhere. My brother and I had an Ohio Scientific Superboard 2 and I programmed the game of life on it in assembly. Saved the code off to an audio cassette using Kansas City Standard (that part was my brother's doing, he was the hardware guy). That pre and post indexed addressing through page zero was pretty cool, but the 8 bit stack pointer... Well, it meant you had to be careful.

I would assume that these black holes are still on the scale of light years apart, and this cloud stretches across an area a few times the orbit of pluto. Something doesn't add up.