jsveiga

I've never heard of it, but my thought when I read it was that it sounds like a bad respiratory tract condition. "The MRI revealed Jack had a 5cm Pleroma in his left lung. Stage 4. It was too late for Jack."

Agreed; I was going to comment something similar: I work with SAP (SAP's HANA database runs on SUSE). When I need a free swrver OS for anything else, I go debian (I used RH from 4.2 to 8.0 when they fooled us once, then went debian).

So being comfortable with a rpm based and a deb based system is good advice.

On the server side, when most administration is through ssh, distro differences are not as relevant as for GUI environments. Package handling is the most impacting difference (and I prefer deb), not that it's a showstopper, when you have yast and aptitude though.

My mother always voted center-left, I always voted center-right (this is not the US, we have some 40 parties), my sister voted left when young, then center-right after she started paying taxes.

We lived in the same home, we made healthy fun about each other's candidates.

We were all stubborn and we all knew it. We did not "respect" each other's opinions (we made fun of them), but we respected each other's right to have stupid (in each other's point of views) opinions. We knew the differences between criticizing opinions and making personal attacks, between disagreeing and death wish.

I guess before social media convinced everyone they're the bearer and defender of the only absolute truth, people were just easier to talk to.

Yes, that's what I meant.

About Venus, it's interesting to remember that not long ago, before the Oxygen Catastrophe some 3 Gigayears before Greta (BG), the atmosphere was basically Nitrogen and CO2 - and there was life. Their habitats were devastated and almost all existing life went mass extinct because those climate change deniers cyanobacteria went on with their irresponsible use of Earth resources, and filled the atmosphere with toxic, reactive O2. But life went on.

I believe we'd be down to a sustainable level of polluting population way before reaching pre-Oxygen Catastrophe levels of CO2 - and we were no Venus even then.

But back in those good ol'days the Sun apparently had only 70% of today's shininess, so maybe I'm wrong.

In any case, we as a whole are as clueless and reckless as those pesky cyanobacteria. We're just another catastrophic natural disaster in Earth's history.

But if we start spiraling down to Venus warm, we can quickly fill the skies with Sun blocking soot. No, wait, that's what that other AI did. hmmm...

(to be clear: I'm no climate change denier, I just think we're too stupid and attached to our way of living to change, until we're at the edge of the abyss. And "we" includes me: I don't do EVERYTHING possible to reduce my footprint, but it's calculated at 1.8, whereas the world average is 4.7, so yeah, I'll still have beef. If the rest of the world proved itself worthy and was around 2.0, I'd do more. I'm past school days when I did all the group work alone and the lazy ones got good grades for doing nothing)

Well thank you; we then exchanged good thought sandwiches.

I think what we are musing about with this impossible situation boils down to defining the nature of conscience (awareness of existence), which has been discussed for centuries with no absolute single definition. If we could prove with no doubt that any of us is right or wrong, we'd probably be the first to get a Philosophy Nobel prize.

Entertaining human written read.

But if I'm going to be that reckless, I'd rather feel the forbidden joy of riding my motorcycle sans helmet!

No issue, I'm not confronting you.

imo we're having an interesting philosophical chat about a completely hypotetical situation, and I don't think there's a right or wrong. That's why I spread some "imo" around.

I just pointed out that if you consider that "you" didn't die because you are still the person on the other side, then when copies are made (something possible in that reality), then "you" become more than one person (split you, or split personality).

It all boils down to what we consider "I", I guess. It seems I consider "I" as a continuum from birth to death, a set of continuous conscience and experiences - if I'm braindead then start from scratch today, I don't consider that individual is "me" anymore; it's just my body, now belonging to another person. The previous "I" died, and even if others see that body as "me", for "dead me" that's not the case.

You on the other hand seem to consider that "you" are what you are at this moment. So the copies (or the single rebuilt if the transporter doesn't glitch) are not "you" anyway, because as you said, you are not the same person as a second ago, sitting in your couch. So dying here and being rebuilt there makes no difference.

Just different takes on "self" conscience.

But if your personality was transported to to two bodies, that is literally splitting a personality, which will diverge from there. Not the same meaning used for the term in real life, but effectively a splitted personality. If you have one somehing and it becomes more than one, it was split.

PS: On the afterlife/soul issue, yes it'd be tricky - that's why I assumed you (like me) didn't follow that line of thought.

Assuming a soul inhabits the body would require either that the transporter technology had the hability to convert/rebuild souls - and in Riker's case to CREATE new souls, which would be the highest heresy - or that the souls would have to figure out where the transporter would materialize their body, and through supernatural powers, self-transport instantly there to reposses it. And in Riker's case, one of the bodies would be souless, and having no soul to get ethernal damnation or salvation, this copy would be free from God's blackmailing. I bet the writers didn't think of the consequences of that episode, if conservatives had understood that...

In one episode of startrek ng a glitch ends up creating two copies of Riker (transport is apparently aborted, he's recovered back to the ship, but the transporter on the other side materializes "him" too - bad handshaking in comms do that kind of thing in real life transactions too).

Both believed they were the original (and one believes he was abandoned on the planet).

Same goes for using it as a replicator (if the information can be sent as data, it can also be copied, stored and rematerialized multiple times). The aforementioned episode makes that canon.

Then if you're not dead, who are you after multiple copies are created? If your conscience was effectively transported to the copies, do you now have split personalities? Because each copy will live a different life from this moment on.

Assuming the original ceased to exist, and the other - or others - are copies is more consistent imo, because assuming you "are" the produced being on the other side doesn't work for multiple copies.

You're right, instant painless death, then no regrets (I'm assuming you - like me - don't believe im afterlife, or souls, as startrek style teleporters are incompatible with those).

But I don't want to cease to exist just yet.

If it opens a spacetime tunnel and I cross it with all my original atoms, yes.

If it disintegrates me to 3d print a copy on the other side, no.