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China

Chinese Firm Approved To Raise World's Tallest Building In 90 Days 307

kkleiner writes "The long anticipated Chinese construction project called Sky City, a 220-story building that can house 30,000 people, has finally received approval from the central government to break ground. The firm Broad Sustainable Building previously constructed a prefab 30-story building in 15 days, but for Sky City, they have an even more aggressive schedule: 90 days to build 2,750 feet into the air. Once completed, the building will be a place for people to both live and work, with recreational facilities, theaters, a school, and a hospital all within the structure."

Comment Airplane mode and OsmocomBB (Score 5, Informative) 259

I would say a good start is to just use the airplane mode of your phone. That should disable your RF transmitter. But of course you wont be notified when the network is paging your IMSI. The save option is to use a phone with OsmocomBB, a free software implementation of the GSM stack: http://bb.osmocom.org/trac/ It has limited functionality (no GPRS working at the moment) but at least you know exactly would your phone is doing. With that, you can even run CatcherCatcher, which is able to detect IMSI catchers: http://opensource.srlabs.de/projects/catcher The supported phones are a bit outdated, mostly old Motorola phones. But there is one supported smartphone: the Openmoko Freerunner. It is pretty usable these days and is fully supported by Debian. I love it, but you will need to tinker - a lot.

Comment Re:a bit misleading (Score 1) 225

That's what I thought as well. This is what you are looking for: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/science/rock-paper-scissors.html Humans really suck at being random. This Karate game is very similar: http://www.masterbaboon.com/2009/05/my-ai-reads-your-mind-and-kicks-your-ass-part-2/ It blows you mind how well you can be predicted.

Comment Re:Why stop at 150 ? (Score 1) 904

You do not touch my point. You seem to agree that a conscious entity arises due to information evolving over time. Let us keep this assumption.

For the sake of the argument let us further assume that everything you described is actually possible and that you can transform into a conscious entity experiencing infinite subjective time. Even then entropy flies in the face of your argument. The problem is that you cannot conserve information indefinitely - even if you try with all the resources in the world. Sure, you would have a conscious being experiencing time continuously. But after waiting sufficiently long that entity would have absolutely no information about the present day. It wouldn't share any information with you. This does not only include memories but also behavioral patterns, world views and so forth. That being could have evolved from any other being living today, you wouldn't be able to tell. Thus, that being won't be you given any sane definition of identity. You would be gone for sure.

Several of your other assumptions are very strong. Everything you describe is discrete: computation steps, finite state machines. The brain is not discrete and simulating it exactly using a finite state machine is impossible. You might argue that you can simulate it with arbitrary precision given enough resources and that might be sufficient depending on your notion of identity. It is my personal belief that this is impractical. (As a side note I am convinced that the notion of an evolving consciousness per se is all rubbish anyway; if you could generate an exact copy of yourself, which one would be 'you', the copy or the original? None, obviously. Consciousness is fixed to a point in time.)

In any case information degradation is a fundamental problem for immortality.

Comment Re:Why stop at 150 ? (Score 1) 904

I'm not worried about the human body. I'm worried about the information that represents 'you'. You would have a dynamical system (your consciousness) evolving over the millennia which at the end would have nothing in common with the 'you' of today. I agree that there is an implicit materialistic assumption about the self, though.

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