I'm not denying it's possible for humans to eventually do this, but we have no evidence it is. We don't even have a hypothetical means to doing so. That isn't prophecy, that's evidence.

That said, I quite believe it is possible by an entity which does have such a hypothetical means to do so, by virtue of having all the necessary "data", the necessary "engineering" knowledge, and the ability to construct a suitable alternate substrate (or "body", if you prefer). The class of humanity has a much harder constraint here--they with certainty don't have all the necessary "data" regarding an individual's pre-existing consciousness in order to "reconstruct" it. That in itself, and there is no apparent plausible means by which human technology could regarding people who have already died, is a primary distinction here.

If it clarifies, you can take my position as considering the soul as an entity within the category of information.

I'm using "information" broadly and particularly to distinguish personal identity from the substrate on which it resides, that is, the physical body.

It is not sensible to speak of "humanity" continuing to exist in a context where one believes the extent of personhood to be constrained to their body, and none of the referenced bodies will, with certainty, functionally exist. As of now, zero bodies representing that notion of "humanity" will exist for long. As of the hypothetical future, zero of those bodies will exist for long, either. The only thing that persists is the information on how bodies are constructed, from a Naturalist, that is to say, "scientific materialist" perspective. And such people tend not to like to talk about things where there is no particular necessary material implementation, and no material implementation that persists. That there is much -more- to a human being is not something I'm denying, rather I'm noting that this isn't something proponents of Naturalism really get to claim or talk about.

As for AI, yes, I agree that we don't have a clue how to implement actual intelligence. That doesn't mean there is no entity that does, however.

California was debating requiring a serial number on home made guns independent of how they were made.

Actually, the legislature passed that. But, in a fit of sanity, governor Jerry Brown vetoed it.

Anyone familiar with California politics will realize how extrordinary that is. B-)

It is very easy for a collection to have properties that its individual elements do not.

Which of the theses are you objecting to here? Your statement here is "trivially true" in that individual parts of, say, an automobile do not have the same properties as the whole, in that you can't drive the engine, but that is definitely not what 1) asserts. It asserts that the properties of the totality of the parts is equivalent to the properties of the whole. 5) asserts that a mental predicate cannot be derived from purely physical descriptions, while simple math is certainly your best shot at this, describing five objects physically does not get you to the particular inference of "five"--there are many other abstractions derivable, regardless of what the objects are--"red" in the case of five apples, for instance. There still remains no direct inference from the physical description to a corresponding abstraction.

So a particular mental state can be assigned to a particular set of neurons firing

Okay, do so. Say, "freedom". The particular set of neurons firing, applicable to all cases, that is, all brains. Say, an EEG where we can know that's the correct corresponding state, and -only- that particular state or abstraction. As the writeup notes, "caused by" is not relevant to the question, -correspondence- is.

As for the question of attempting to save "humanity" being meaningful, I never suggested otherwise. It is methodology and priority that is at hand.

Tetris, the last BLOCKBUSTER.

Agreed about anecdotes. However, I can say that I have to reboot my Windows 7 PC weekly because of serious degradation in performance. I have installed a fair bit of software (the PATH can no longer be extended) but there's only about three games (Freeciv, Kerbal Space Program, Elite: Dangerous) and no apps, toolbars or junk. The rest of the software on there? MariaDB, Ingres, GRASS, QGIS (OSGEO is basically Cygwin, so I've now three incompatible Cygwin distros on Windows), HOL 4, Active Python, Active Perl, Erlang, Rust, Blender, PoVRay, BMRT - the sort of stuff you'd expect to find on any PC, nothing fancy.

And Netscape. Which is a horrible resource hog and is honestly not usable in its current form. I have abandoned all efforts to get Chrome usable. I'll probably deinstall both and switch to Amaya. Which barely does anything, but it does it tolerably.

I had a win98 install that lasted almost a decade but it took a fair bit of effort to hold back the entropy (I resisted upgrading because of one win98 game...). NT was definitely a landmark in stability as was XP. I've been on Win7 at home and work for a couple of years now. I've been doing C/C++ development regularly for the last 25ys as a job, a bad pointer would often bring Win98 to it's knees, not so much with NT/XP and I've never managed to crash Win7 with bad code. In fact Win7 has crashed on me exactly twice, once when the SSD died, and another time when the video card started smoking.

From the POV of system stability you could line up today's popular O/S's, throw a dart blindfolded, and be still be sure to hit a decent general purpose O/S. This doesn't mean they are flawlessly designed, however most of the bitching I see from geeks is just the geek not understanding how things work before attempting to "fix" the "problem", and most of the bitching I hear from non-geeks is about the non-geek's ignorance of how malware got onto their machine. .

You mean to tell me that the US doesn't even trust the other Five Eyes nations' spy agencies to be able to do this?*

*Yes, I know, to get round legal restrictions, it was very normal for the US to spy on the citizens of the other four and to exchange that data for information collected on US citizens by other members of Five Eyes. However, we now know all the agencies DO spy on their own citizens, routinely. So the US can ask GCHQ to wiretap British citizens in Britain, it doesn't need to spy on Britain itself. This behaviour suggests wheels within wheels.

You mean to tell me that the US isn't all caught up in the US-UK "Special Relationship" stuff?**

**Most Americans were unaware there even was one and get horribly confused when the British talk about it.

Linux is indeed better. Not because of Open Source (the code doesn't care) but because it has fewer bugs (about 0.1% of the bugs per kloc), non-intrusive strong security (rated EAL 5+ on conformant hardware, conforms to B2 Orange Book standards), superior multi-processor support, superior memory management and superior networking.

Graphics? Not an OS issue. That's a GUI issue. Never confuse how something gets data with what it then does with it. The GUI is not central to Windows (as demonstrated by console mode startup, but should be obvious to anyone running it as a headless server). The core OS functions are, and always have been, resource management, virtualization, security and stability. (Filesystems are virtual layers on top of physical disks, so are resource management and virtualization.)

Linux is better at the things an OS is meant to do. Windows has an adequate GUI, but the OS is abysmal. Besides sales, the only reason the game industry likes Windows is that it has useful libraries - DirectX (an alternative to the functions the GUI itself provides) and easy access to GPU functions (bypassing the OS altogether, running on bare metal).

The reason Linux doesn't have these? Look in the mirror. The face you see was quite capable of working on GGI, KGI or Linux Framebuffers, of helping in the Berlin project, of submitting patches for SDL or Avagadro, or even hacking Wine to improve support for DirectX, CUDA or other graphical features.

I'm no innocent myself, but I own up to my guilt, I don't blame the OS (which IS innocent).

M$ did that to Xenix too hard and sim links eveerywhere

Bingo

My mobile phone is more powerful than my first mini-tower, IBM compatible PC. The processor is more powerful and there's more onboard RAM than the hard-disk of said PC. That PC did well enough for all my coursework programming projects and all my write-ups including my honours project. If you want to play the latest games or edit HD video you need a full spec PC, anything else... not so much.

Windows 10 IS Windows 9. Microsoft engineers are even still calling it Windows 9. The source tree is the same, there have been no major changes.

What has happened is that Windows 9 has been getting very bad press and is still riddled with bugs. Instead of releasing a version number nobody will buy and would only have to patch almost immediately anyway, OR getting slagged off for Yet Another Delayed Release, Microsoft is renaming it version 10 and delaying the release until the bugs are sorted.

You will observe Microsoft has been talking up Windows 9 for some time, but now all talk (and apparently all memory) of it has ceased. Newspapers suffering amnesia is amost acceptable. Slashdotters??? WTF??? I'm sorry, but there is no-one in or around IT that has a single, solitary excuse.

There have been cases of Boeing 777s and modernized 737s developing unexplained system faults. Do not be so sure that RFI was not to blame. These have had much worse reliability than other Boeing models in recent years and as no other faults have been offered by Boeing as explanation, it is illogical to simply dismiss the one fault we know about as unrelated to the unusual number of abnormalities and crashes specific to these two models.

Obviously, Boeing has no interest in being honest about the problems they know about, be they software or hardware. Nor are they likely to Open Source anything, so there is no possibility of scrutiny by an independent party.

Simple logic (and self-preservation) says they have an unattributed defect capable of causing catastrophic failure, and a defect that can potentially cause catastrophic failure, therefore fixing the defect is essential.

The cost? The cost is insignificant. Boeing is hardly poor and is quite capable of covering the airlines' cost as this is a manufacturing defect. The airlines? They're making enough money that they can afford riots on board when seats are tilted. Besides, this is the cost of doing business. There's a price for bad decisions, all other sectors (except, apparently, banks) are expected to take the rough with the smooth. If several go bust because they chose unwisely, that's how life in business goes. You pay your money, you take your choice. Besides, they'd still be doing better than the German in Last Crusade.

If I went into business and made bad choices, would you be telling people to ignore my expenses? No? Good. If I'm not fit for purpose as a businessman, I've no business expecting support. So why should Ryanair, a notoriously incompetent company, deserve better? Because they're too big to fail? Not a good reason.

All you need are some windows that open in flight. Problem solved.