The Associated Worlds

As per (2), they probably have a perpetual license. So call the local fab shop.

Honestly, iPhones suffer less planned obsolescence than Androids.

16:24

I mean, you still get OS updates for I think 5 years.

it's possible to refuse to sell perpetual licenses, right?

Sure. It’s just unlikely to be a good idea outside some very special circumstance.

I think in the comic the character’s body got discontinued and the new version is a bit more expensive than the insurance payout Questionable Content - https://www.questionablecontent.net/view.php?comic=3910

limited run food items comes to mind

16:28

QC doesn't have fabbers all over the place though, Zar

Not really a good comparison

16:28

Bodies are (well usually) long term use investments

[non-perpetual licenses to fab] It’s basically the physical-property version of pay-per-view, and no-one wants that either. (edited)

1

16:32

Also — “discontinued” in general is a tricky concept when most companies don’t do their own manufacturing. You’re usually buying a recipe and a license to fab from it, and at the end of the copyright period, the former goes into the public knowledge pool and the latter stops being needed.

1

in short, you don't buy a body, you buy a blueprint for the body.

Yep.

then after 144 years the blueprint becomes free

16:36

...so cheapskates are walking around in bodies over a century out of date. Do they get mocked or have to deal with old school parts?

Or their classics

Although - one of the reasons these tend to be perpetual licenses is that you’re paying for all the fancy personalization work that overlays your personal genome-bits on the generic class template, which is the up-front cost of most bodies. (That doesn’t hit the public domain; just the generic template. People can’t clone you freely after 144 years.)

1

barring intentional releases of your gene-code, presumably

Indeed.

does any of the above change for non-fleshy bodies? Since an all chrome style wouldn't need to deal with personal genome bits

16:40

relevant mainly for non-eldrae members of the Empire

Well, there tend to be equivalents to them. Clankies are still people, after all, and don’t want to look exactly like everyone else wearing the same model. Conformity is for robots.

@Overmind I ment that as in that Eldrae minds locate their primary locus in a virtual substrate, with the physical body being an abendage. Not any particular dislike of changing sleeves for the job, or egocasting for the occasion.

Ah, gotcha.

...to clarify because I may have worded poorly, I ment the above as what the Eldrae at large don‘t seem to be.

16:56

Obviously there will be some for whom bodies are Avatars and the primary locus are on larger, inmobile virtuality substrates.

16:57

Chances are more than a few spacecraft FCs, I‘d imagine.

The big entry on that list are cikrieth lifestylers and fusions-of-self. Even though they’re all technically peer forks, it’s easier to keep synched with yourself if you keep an authoritative version on a high-bandwidth server cluster somewhere.

1

17:21

As a bonus, that one of you can take over all the computationally-intensive, infomorph-friendly background tasks.

1

How do the Eldrae view someone who believes that they are worthless, or can't do anything right, or just has terrible self-esteem?

Broken. In need of repair.

How would they go about fixing that?

Psychedesign. Minds are software; as such, they can be debugged.

How do they deal with being completely out of their depth, skill-wise or equipment-wise? (edited)

Can someone refuse to consent their depression being fixed?

Why? Because they're not of sound mind?

fraudulently declaring someone not of sound mind and editing their brain is a play with a potentially very high payoff if you can somehow get away with it.

Police: tackle @o11o1

just for venturing the potential as something the courts would want to not enable?

Police: untackle @o11o1

18:05

I bet that they have AI systems to attempt to find ridiculously convoluted loopholes in the law anyway.

18:05

(So they can be patched before release)

one hopes

18:06

otherwise you'd just have a zero-day sniffer

"Oops, we accidentally legalized murder."

probably through some sort of long chain of clever categorization

Laws are not suicide pacts

What does that mean?

presumably that even if it's legal by a chain of technicalities, the judge might invoke common sense anyway (edited)

A case of the spirit of the law and not just the technical meanings

What happens in the failure-mode where you don't have any insurance, but have a bunch of liquid funds? I suppose you have to hope a friend/family member wakes you up so you can pay them back?

Put it in your will

23:40

Or just designate a competent executor

Are you legally dead in that context?

23:51

Like, mindstate is intact, resources requires to re-instantiate exist.

23:51

The issue is lack of formal consent to use one for the other?

If you don't have insurance, you might not HAVE a mindstate to reinstantiate

This seems improbable to me; it's quite easy to keep backups yourself, or for your stack to be retrived trivially.

since I get the impression the insurance companies aren't just holding the funds, they're holding the data itself

Since we're mostly considering accidental deaths, not ones due to enemy action.

@Tassadar By growing taller . @o11o1 Yes, unless it constitutes the kind of pernicious irrationality that the Guardians of Our Harmony intervene to fix, which fixage has been pre-consented to.

01:45

@Archon If you have a bunch of liquid funds, you really should have bought some insurance, or taken out a reinstantiation bond, or set up a smart contract, or something . Your will can continue being done while you're temporarily dead, but only if you bothered to express it beforehand.

I think the one exception might be "I just got instantiated, using my pre-set up smart contract, and then got involved in a fatal flitter explosion on the way to set up a new one".

And @Morgrim Moon is closest, here - most people who don't have special requirements are getting a package when they get incarnation insurance that includes backup storage. But whether they do or not, it's usually your incarnation insurer that takes care of orchestrating all the legal and practical steps in between "pick up your stack/notification of irrecoverability from the paramedics' file room" and "you walk out the door in a fresh new body", along with all the permutations which may include things like "hiring a soul-repo agent to go fish your stack out of the middle of a war zone/a pile of radioactive rubble on a fossil world halfway between archaeology and eschatology/Don Meningo's fish tank". One way or another, you need someone or someorg or something to do that for you, 'cause it can't do itself. (edited)

1

So if you're in a bloody brutal war that some Imperial tourists/mercs/smugglers/whatever non-government forces are getting messed up with, buy yourself some good will by telling your troops to retrieve stacks as well as dogtags when possible. Then you can offer to send a can of them back 'home' and look like Slightly More Civilised chaps when the repoman comes knocking

unrelated eep: I've managed to accidentally flip the Earth sideways in this game and unlike mucking about with rotatational direction it seems spin axis does not correct itself. So now I'm trying to get the planet the right way up again

02:03

(it has no impact on gameplay)

@Morgrim Moon terragenesis?

As in what I'm playing or what I've done?

playin

02:48

soundzzz

nah, Cell to Singularity

@Morgrim Moon As long as you aren't stupid enough to try holding them hostage or for ransom or something stupid like that.

true. But if you said "sorry we're deploying at the moment, give us a week to move the camp and we'll get a safe landing zone for you" that would probably be accepted, assuming it could be backed with evidence. Heck, I could see someone sarcastically suggesting 'unless you want to come down and help' and the agent actually does, much to many people's surprise.

@Morgrim Moon I started playing that myself, and my Earth’s just done the same thing.

when you get to Singularity for the first time, take it from the tech tree immediately and reset; if you take it from the top box like every subsequent time it currently glitches and you don't get your metabits until your next reset

I wonder how Our Gracious Host’s Elves would react to Amazon’s plan to create worker cages

05:08

Okay, they’d probably just point out it was a patent for a safety device to be used around high speed robots

how'd they get that patent?

You know, I think there’s a little bit of double bind for you if you’re a manager

"put either the machine, the worker or both" in a cage is current industry practice, hardly novel

Either you make the safety roll cage and everyone moans as they are now about how you’re literally making a slavecage

05:10

Or you don’t and some worker gets themselves maimed, and everyone instead moans about how evil Corporate didn’t even install basic safety measures (edited)

05:12

I hate megacorpery as much as the next dude, but you at least have choice in voluntaryism

To describe it as succinctly as possible: Aurelia is a capitalist ‘monarchy’ with a metal-backed currency, an ethno-exclusionary culture (shades of Japan) and a siege mentality that creates extreme militarization (1/10 persons is in the armed forces)

17:52

To be fair, they basically are The Subculture That Cannot Be Named in the Kuiper belt, where Jovian separatist fleets etc. threaten sovereignty

17:53

Free movement is possible, but the prevailing culture is reluctant to explore the greater extremes of trans human experience due to a focus on originality and physical substance

The Aurelian flavor of bioconservatism unconditionally embraces immortality and belike, it's just that forks and all the more batshit stuff are seen as bizarre and distasteful

“Jeans are old pants you buy new”

what other clothing is sold pre-ripped ?

Australia has just declared subtitle websites as piracy

22:01

:(

What. Link, please.

And said that if an official dvd isn't released here so is watching anime. Which is a massive problem when English localisations are done for US region codes.

22:03

Australians are expected to buy the Japanese version - same code, you see - then download a subtitle file

I'm guessing you have a legislature full of old white guys who;ve never watched an anime

https://www.zdnet.com/article/australian-court-orders-blocking-of-subtitle-piracy-sites/

Australian court orders blocking of subtitle piracy sites | ZDNet

Roadshow has successfully argued that subtitle files infringe copyright law.

22:05

Roadshow called for it. So that and certain big dogs wanting to bully smaller rivals out of the market

ah, so in the courts

No. Passed the courts, blocking now in progress

22:07

Kissanime is now illegal in Australia

also crunchyroll?

aaaaaaaahhhhh

22:09

Crunchyroll should be legal, I hope. Also, why should a government have the right to make a website illegal anyway?

so a bunch of sites now have a potential case to sue?

The only appropriate response is a mile tall mecha to step on their government buildings

a quartet of quarter-mile mecha seems more efficient in terms of buildings squished per hour

Mile wide mecha.

2

Crunchyroll has been geoblocked for a while

23:08

So basically if it isn't a big "mainstream" anime there's no point buying it unless you can speak Japanese, you either pirate it or miss out

23:09

Kinda like the Game of Thrones situation, where if you rented and didn't have cable installed there was no way of legally accessing the show until 2 years later and thus was rampantly piratef

I'm irrationally upset at this

Seems to me it’s perfectly rational to be upset. Or enraged.

What crawled up Australian policy makers to make them suddenly do this’s

A big media company lobbying. I'm not sure why, but I suspect they owned the rights to one show on the site and are happy to see the whole site torched in retaliation

The power of Regulatory Capture™ for messing up everything!

https://beachgirlnikita.tumblr.com/post/179760880108/aerylon-karenhealey-forevernoon-this-is for the "awesome things" file, someone hand making lace. I am stunned they can keep track of that many spools

Beachgirlnikita

In general textile arts are highly underated considering the amount of skill and time needed to execute pretty much anything.

How’s this for an example of meme warfare? https://geneticliteracyproject.org/_amp/s/tdaynard.com/2018/12/27/why-lynas-book-seeds-of-science-made-me-angry-fortunately-the-greenpeace-strategy-fizzled-in-canada-heres-why/amp

I got a bad request error.

Okay, how about this link? https://geneticliteracyproject.org/2019/01/07/viewpoint-how-canadian-farmers-beat-anti-gmo-greenpeace-at-its-own-game/

Cameron English

Viewpoint: How Canadian farmers beat anti-GMO Greenpeace at its ow...

I confess I don’t read that many books in a year – preferring shorter Internet features instead – but I’m sure glad I found time in 2018 to read Mark

Amazing fan CGI: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFMtdiQILuTZr22sKUeAOOA/videos

Astartes

A Warhammer 40,000 fan-film project. Mini-episodes released as a five part series. If you would like to support this project please consider the links below....

So, like the Pinto?

For y'all's entertainment, I critique the Borg Collective elsewhere:

12:06

"I tend to assume that the Borg were the product of a poorly thought-through attempt at collective consciousness design, and like various other big engineering-fu in the posthuman project, it's something you have to get right the first time , 'cause you don't get any second chances. Specifically, they turned up the feedback gain way too high. By which I mean - well, the killer app of a collective consciousness is that it can consider problems from millions of different viewpoints, and in millions of different ways, then integrate and disseminate the results, so every problem it encounters can be matched with the exact right set of minds to have the perfect insights to handle it, and so forth. But the Borg collective overwrites its fed-back personality onto every drone. Sure, this helps it with assimilating the unwilling - which might have been the point of turning it up that high, although that might be crediting the designers too much, and anyway, a self-respecting collective consciousness should be able to easily recruit like this : http://angryflower.com/349.html - but it cripples it as a mind. All it can hear are the same thoughts repeated back billions of times. It thinks it's perfect and beautiful because it's echoing its single perspective back to itself in a self-reinforcing positive feedback cycle. As for tech superiority - it's crippled there, too, which is why a bunch of Luddites like the anti-genetics, anti-AI, anti-transhumanism etc. Federation can reliably defeat them. It can't carry out that killer app. It can compensate for its design flaws somewhat because it does have the ability to do massively-parallel processing across billions of drones, but it's trying to innovate with billions of minds all of which think in almost exactly the same way. An individuality-preserving collective would kick its ass up one spiral arm and down the other."

1

12:08

With a side note on their adapting to weapons: "Still: brainpower of trillions, and their top plan for dealing with phasers is to keep charging at them until one of them figures out how not to die? None of the collective concluded that just maybe it might be better to, oh, use their fancy through-shields teleportation to steal a couple of the Enterprise's weapons, then go away and come back in a couple of days having used their advantage in brains to completely analyze the technology, run a few billion simulations of the underlying physics, and develop Immunity to Freakin' Everything You Have Developed Or Might Develop Any Time Soon Using These Principles? (My main complaint here is that the Borg should have been so much scarier than they were portrayed as, as a posthuman hive mind. Even narratively speaking alone, they were set up as the antithesis to the Federation, which would work so much better if they used the hive-mind advantages that go directly against the Feds anti-augmentation principles.)"

1

The feds are a paranoid bunch. Any form of augmentation is not up their street, even when it would benefit society as a whole. (edited)

Any form of augmentation seems to lead to fanatical supermen who deem anything not within their abilities inferior insects to be crushed underfoot. (edited)

What social issue caused that, do you know? Most of the choices in Star Trek are either pragmatic ("we have teleporters so we don't need stock footage of landing on a planet, and to hell with the implications") or deliberately social (the Khan stuff). So what happened to make the producers declare augmentation was a disaster?

To keep the story comprehendible and the characters recognizable to the audience (darn human audience)

04:15

And to save money.

04:16

I assume those are the factors

even restorative prosthetics seemed to get a bad rap though

"Ugh, robotics are baaaad!" (edited)

04:17

"They interfere with the "human spirit"" (edited)

04:18

"(Insert dodgy Social Darwinist argument here)"

04:23

The federation seems to be full of biochauvinists, just like the faction the Photonic Network encountered and evenly and thoroughly toasted WITH ONE PROCESSING NODE. (edited)

I mean, I can't hate Star Trek, it's pro-abortion from an era where that was unthinkable and that means so much to me.

Thats a good point

But I can poke at its issues.

Most of us can.

(anyone being anti-abortion is a threat to my existence and I wish that was an exaggeration)

Message of the time, I suspect. Rodenberg was primarily concerned with how technology would be, historically, leveraged by power players for their advantage only.

04:38

One might suspect that to him, and in the Era when Star Trek was conceived especially, genetic engineering was just liable to massive abuse sooner or later.

In Star Trek they had the eugenics wars, and the hang up that result from that. But this is also true on a meta-level

07:00

Star Trek exists in the shadow of IRL eugenics, and we still haven't recovered from that

I mean, look at the Star Trek timeline.

07:00

The Eugenics Wars were supposed to happen around the 2000s.

07:00

So yeah. Meta is involved heavily.

the Federation can't really be understood (both in and out of universe) without understanding that it is a damaged society

(And a human-dominated one, for some reason.)

07:01

I enjoy Starsword-Cs Star Trek Online fanfiction for at times quite aggressively laying on that fact. (edited)

I think the human-dominated is because the humans want to leave home and poke things considerably more than anyone else

well the in-universe reason for that, at least later on, was that Earth was by far the weakest member so they put the capital there to make it less dangerous

http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2019/01/08/room-for-improvement

Derek Lowe

Room For Improvement

How much can we improve on Nature? Fixing defective proteins and pathways is one thing, but in those cases we're trying to get back to what the function should be (and what it is in healthy organisms). But what about "better than healthy"? That's a tricky area to enter, becau...

07:07

unrelated, but interesting article on improving the carbon fixation pathways in plants. It works in tobacco! Meaning next step will be potatos.

Anyone seen Gene Roddenberry’s (posthumous) Andromeda?

no

Three of the human crew are gene-modded, the fourth is a cyborg, and their ship is run by an AI with a lot of copies

I saw an Ep. once

11:12

it was the one about the Defectors escaping from Space!North Korea

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEIwNzJczw4

fanstoya

Andromeda Season 1 Intro HD

Heh, you know what they say about mad science

Just tested out new bike rack with basket and ((very) heavy) backpack.

08:28

Verdict: great for my back, but loaded shifts CoG too far back and up.

08:28

And I don't know which of those two problems is worse. (edited)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ALziqtuLxBQ interesting video showing how pterasaurs may have taken off they are still uncanny valley beasts to me

Direct Dimensions

Quadrupedal Launch in Pterosaurs Animation

A few of the more Libertarian artists I know are launching a crowd-patronage site that accepts Bitcoin https://www.deviantart.com/dreamkeepers/journal/Patreon-Alternative-DARK-MARKET-781165633

Dreamkeepers

Patreon Alternative: DARK MARKET

Time to raffle off some free art! Everybody else was too slow- Vivid Publishing is launching our own Patreon alternative, today. If you’re unfamiliar with the #PatreonPurge, plenty of other c...

Today in Bathroom Graffiti: Anarchy is Freedom from all forms of oppression and where all members are free and equal Different from Libertarianism how?

Who says we can't put our money when our mouth is

I rarely see furry art that reaches the value of a Bitcoin.

18:47

Though it's not unheard of.

18:47

Especially when some really in demand artists start auctioning off commission slots.

1BTC is 100,000 these days isnt it

I think you're exaggerating.

19:09

By a single order of magnitude

Eh

19:18

The price crashes and rises and crashes and I have no stock

dafuq

Stylish prosthetic

more like weird proesthetic

Not my personal taste but it’s well done and classy

It looks vicious with those claws yikes

Given his Roman roots, @MarcusAurelius probably prefers something more Classical or Gothic /s (edited)

Give me a classy femina stolam gerrens anyday

i rather like that image

Some time ago I read interesting... hypothesis of origin of life from which naturally follows that all life is naturally anti-enthropic.