So you're saying I should buy a $500 iPad and pay $10/year to read a website novel that I might not even like?

So you're saying I should buy a $30,000 car and pay $3/gallon to drive it?

Well, if you want to stay true to the analogy, it's more like paying $30,000 for a car, $3/gal to drive it, and there's only one road in existence.

And you don't know how long it is or where it leads.

I don't think the claim is entirely implausible; 25MB of code may well suffice to simulate the human brain if it was written in something like brainfuck.

I do however disagree with the assertion:

The genome is not the program; it's the data.

The difficulty in truly understanding the genome is that it's both program and data.

At least in the US, we are not at the stage yet where the military can openly admit that they are beginning an ongoing operation whose objective is to slaughter civillians en masse, and not expect to get an overwhelmingly negative response frmo the public....

That's because they can just label them "terrorists" instead of "civilians".

Arguing on slashdot makes you ________.

-1 Troll?

warantee

Is that a malamanteau?

No, we just wish he was incarcerated.

PS. I think the word you were actually looking for is "incarnate", but nice Freudian slip.

What if eventually any job you can do can be done better and more cheaply by an AI? What should happen to you then?

Then the job should be done by an AI, and you should train for a job that can't be so economically automated. It's not like this issue hasn't come up before with the advent of robotic assembly lines and, well, any kind of automation technology ever.

Or setting a precedent that just because some people are stupid/ignorant it's OK to mistreat them (see the electroshock proponents above).

We're not just talking about general ignorance/stupidity here; we're talking about someone's ability to do their job. If they lack that ability then they should be trained further or replaced. It's that simple.

Sure, if you take something which doesn't belong to you (and without permission of course) you are a thief.

However, making a perfect duplicate of something without diminishing the original is not the same as taking it.