I agree 100%, but the issue might be bigger than that: the PC, due to saturation and the advent of FOSS, was beginning to be too mature (read it "too good for the consumer"), so the manufacturers and the software giants have to find something new. If it means saying goodbye to microsoft, fucking up the PC with drm and pushing always connected mobile and a new OS, so be it.

Microsoft as a company is not yet in trouble, as much as I wish they had never existed. They can reinvent themselves and make money again, not by technical merits but by marketing skills.

Whales could walk and serpents could talk. No problems whatsoever.

If I understood it, it makes sense, but I think it might end up looking too similar to a simple random generated behavior.

Have you tried thinking about life as an evolutionary process (evolution vs. creation is a fake dichotomy...)? the characteristics of living creatures (as the Genesis goes: grow, multiply, populate the earth which implies adapting to different conditions) can be viewed as a good solution to the "how to last longer" problem.

In other words, given enough time and interactions between matter, the structures that result from those interactions should behave like living ones.
Those that are not stable disappear, those that do not grow or multiply or populate get eventually wiped out.
Note that the interactions do not need to resemble the real world, as many artificial life experiments insist on. Genetic algorithms are more in line with the idea, see http://www.ai-junkie.com/ga/intro/gat1.html

One could apply this to decision making systems (or whatever else).

As a side note my idea of layers of abstraction do not depend on the abstraction itself, but on who generates what.
That is, our 3d world scientist can think up an abstract 60 dimension world (in fact they do it), yet the abstraction is dependent from ours just like a 2d conways game of life, so it resides in the same layer of abstraction.

You're right, forget about the phone, too.

I have second hand cards, and very few problems myself, but when somebody puts a thing on sale for quite some $$$, I expect the damn thing to deliver.

You are very right, grandparent poster has a good point.

The solution: a free phone with an android environment , but in a sandbox.
So all the pretty android apps can ask for my sms, mail history, photos, sd, wife and pet, and I can choose what to feed them. For serious work instead I use the GNU/Linux environment.

Jolla are you listening? you are close to a killer phone, wait it's a killer home pc when technology lets it. Think about it.

> If you had $500 to buy a phone, what would you choose?
I'd choose the $50 phone that does all that I need, the rest for blackjack and hookers. In fact, forget about the blackjack.

Sounds like a compiler warning to me, all things must be referred when they are defined, that is inside their scope.
All reasoning pertaining to a meta world are faith based. Faith in a religion, or faith in the applicability of one's reasoning.

And what do you have against talking snakes? After all we tend to sin because we let our short term survival programming override some more long term and more olistic perception. Some reptilian heritage maybe? So, the biblical satan uses primitive urges to make humans make a step that condemns them, the step is getting aware of good and evil (when you're not mature enough, I guess). If you are not aware you are not responsible. That's why the biblical jhvh tells them "if you eat the fruit you will die", it's because of sin.

The snake doesn't need to talk or be physically there, either. Dissociated people hear voices, it's a medical fact. So, out of the symbolism, it's the reptilian part of the brain, (possibly driven by an evil spirit whatever that means) that bring Eve to disobedience.

Now this is only one of many possible interpretations, the point is not whether it is true, the point is that there are scenarios where it makes sense to use a snake even if genesis were completely made up.

The field of ideas is separate from what we call reality, so in any case, I was not considering Plato. It's quicker to turn the problem upside down.

In the context of a videogame, I am my avatar. I might be picking my nose while the avatar nukes a city, my behavior has no whatsoever effect except for my inputs to the game. So, are we going to call real my nose picking, which cannot be detected at all and has no whatsoever bearing to the action, or are we going to call real whatever happens in the game? We are going to choose the second. Our reality is still important, it is the only thing that permits the videogame to exist as an abstraction. just like the kingdom of a god has bearing in our reality, if any exists.

Or let's consider a simulation, a game of chess. the universe in the game of checkers is the board, from the point of view of the pawn, that is called reality. Interactions have definitive consequences just like real stuff does for us. In fact nothing else is real for the pawn, we sure are not real, because in the abstraction called a game of chess, the nature of the player is irrelevant, there are only moves.

Reality for a Conway's game of life creature is about cells being empty or full, nothing more, nothing less is real.

Reality for us is all the things we can directly or indirectly or potentially experience. What makes reality behave like this? an ARBITRARY set of rules and who knows what more. A god behind those rules? we cannot tell.

Reality is the name given to an abstraction by agents belonging to that same level of abstraction. Simulation is what has one more level of abstraction. The creator hypothetically resides in one less level of abstraction.

> you then have to explain the existence of a separate universe in which the simulation is running

That would be a rather popular but huge mistake, you have absolutely NO DATA about the "meta" world that might host the simulation, so you cannot say anything about it.

There is no recursion because the context is undefinable, "Who created the creator" is a question without meaning, you might as well ask "when purple the creator", because in the contest you make the question, the term Who is undefined, the verb Created is undefined. Thinking that logic, or better, the common binary logic employed by us, is a principle equally valid in any meta world is an ugly assumption.

The meta world can be modeled by binary logic, or by the principle of no contradiction, or by any other construct which we use for proofs pertaining to our universe? who knows. Those are very useful things in this universe, but they were formalized in, and for, this universe. You can surely think about an abstraction where binary logic and no contradiction are useless or wrong (I leave this as an exercise).

The abstract function is fascinating OTOH, I still ascribe it to details of implementation of the universe though, religions deal with the meta instead.

No, gringo, nothing Italian in this way of rescuing the ship.

The Italian way is:
- "Mario! that ship!"
- "What!"
- "It has to go before it crumbles down!".
- "OK Luigi! [half an hour passes] DONE!"
- "Done what?"
- "I got rid of the ship, by tomorrow it is disappeared, hordes of people will have taken it apart!"
- "How come?"
- "I wrote a big sign on it: PROPERTY OF STATE, DO NOT TOUCH ANYTHING!"
- "HAHAHA GENIUS! IT WON'T SURVIVE THE NEXT HOUR!"
- "HAHAHA I HOPE SO! YOU OWE ME A DRINK!"

THE END

where do you live, what version of locksmith you got? can you mail me a recent one? KTHXBYE

That's nice, have fun!

> Now kiddies, Ritalin yourselves!
Fixed that for you.

Newspeak, here we come! UNTABLETED!!!!!

In other word, you visit a page using http, aka hyper text transport protocol, you got served some hypertext, AND YOU COMPLAIN???

If the author of the web were here, it would get mad. What was his name, Steve Jobs or something like that....