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Comment Re:The wetware should become hardware (Score 1) 182

When we fully understand it, wetware will likely be most efficient form of hardware. Nature tends to favor efficiency for a given environment, we need to borrow this efficiency and adjust it for a different environment. Something like neuron-like nets driven by nano-based neurotransmitters implemented in ceramics?

Comment Re:We design our hardware, why not wetware? (Score 1) 182

"This rock" is a short form for a "single planet we live on". I am talking about extinction-level events. If we have two planets with sustainable human population, then humanity could survive a lot more adverse events.

Based on geological record, civilization-ending events are rather frequent on cosmological scale. If our civilization is to survive for more than couple thousand years, we have to concern ourselves with such possibilities.

Comment We design our hardware, why not wetware? (Score 2) 182

Evolution got us this far, but to go further we will have to take it into our hands. We need to become smarter, live longer, and be more rational. It will take forever and a day to get there natural way. By then all resources will be gone and we will forever be stuck on this rock.

Comment Recently had hybrid loaner (Score 1) 622

I recently had some extensive work done on my non-hybrid car, thankfully all under warranty. My car is vanilla gasoline engine with a manual gearbox. I was given exact same model car as a loaner but with a hybrid drive and CTV.

Well, the hybrid had stop-and-go feature, had regenerative bakes and and new engine grill shutters for supposedly better highway mileage. Over a week of communing, it saved me about 5$ in gas. Underwhelming to say the least, especially when hybrid is at $5000 premium over my model. While I enjoyed eery quietness in electric-only mode, it hardly ever stayed there, and overall fuel savings are just not there. This could be because hybrid system was "strapped" into regular car, and unlike say Prius, that was designed around being hybrid.

I am not averse to electric or hybrid power trains, but I think present EV/hybrid offerings in sub-$100K category are underwhelming. When it is time to replace my car, based on loaner experiences, I would not be considering hybrid version.

Comment Re:Welcome to corporate future (Score 1) 255

Now imagine that almost everyone communicates only via printed pamphlets, but pamphlet-printing business controlled by one censorious individual eager to push his agenda to the detriment of others. Could freedom of speech exists in such hypothetical society?

In Twitter case there isn't "someone else has to do it for you", they are 'common carrier' for speech and nothing more. Starting now and moving forward online communication is more prevalent than in-person speech. It isn't inconceivable to imagine dystopian future where everyone communicates using only 'social' media, and few corporations determine what is acceptable. In such future nobody has freedom of speech, and we get there with unwise individuals pushing for "Right to not get offended".

Comment Welcome to corporate future (Score 0) 255

>>>"Freedom of expression means little"

So if your platform is Twitter, you don't have freedom of speech. With all social media controlled by this or that corporation, this means that you don't have any freedom of speech in that media. If that main mode of communication, then you don't have that freedom, period.

Freedom of speech could only exist when people everyone hates can say things that everyone disagrees with.

Comment Re:Have we solved all human rights issues? (Score 1) 336

We absolutely have to prioritize where our limited resources are going, or we will not get maximum possible benefit once they are spent.

We shouldn't care about granting chimps personhood, not when there are actual humans in our country, like incarcerated felons, that still lack dignified humane treatment. We shouldn't provide any foreign aid based on humanitarian grounds (ignoring influence-buying aspect for now) when we still have starving children in our country. We shouldn't engage in TSA-sponsored security theater when getting run over while riding your bicycle is 10^6 times more likely than getting killed by a hijacked plane. We also shouldn't care about 0.001% incidence of campus rape when young black male mortality from homicide is into 20% range.

Unfortunately, we do no live in a rational world.

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