Ah, yes. The heady days after the fall of the original Napster. A service sprung up in its wake, called Napigator, whose function was to locate "Nap servers," which were decentralized mini-versions of the original. You had to hop from server to server and most of them held sh1t and many of them viruses, and it kind of died out. A brief dark age ensued until the rise of peer-to-peer. I remember BearShare well. You could snoop on people's hard drives and it was always fun when people shared their whole c: drive. But it became less reliable and numerous spoofs of popular songs were released. Around 2005 I gave up and started playing around with paid services, e.g. Rhapsody. But anyone with half a brain could just go analog-to-digital on those, and of course the same can be done now with YouTube. Shoot, there's even legit software that'll digitally convert your .flv temp. files to mp3's, iPhone video, etc. (I know, shhh!) If YouTube (with the collusion of RealNetworks) is allowing this, who he devil is minding the store? I myself uploaded a video with copyrighted track to YouTube. They sent me a tut-tut and told me it wouldn't play in Germany, but other than that, they kept it up--till I got either paranoid or remorseful, and took it down!
How do you know any human being, or any being commonly considered sentient, has a consciousness, other than yourself? How do you know that the rest of the "people" you see aren't just meat robots, acting "as if" they see and feel and understand me? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE WHETHER IT IS MEAT OR METAL?
Or do you consider it a fact, a priori, that consciousness cannot be engineered into existence, ever?
Are you, sir, a closet vitalist?
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I remember the early post-Napster days
Ah, yes. The heady days after the fall of the original Napster. A service sprung up in its wake, called Napigator, whose function was to locate "Nap servers," which were decentralized mini-versions of the original. You had to hop from server to server and most of them held sh1t and many of them viruses, and it kind of died out. A brief dark age ensued until the rise of peer-to-peer. I remember BearShare well. You could snoop on people's hard drives and it was always fun when people shared their whole c: drive. But it became less reliable and numerous spoofs of popular songs were released. Around 2005 I gave up and started playing around with paid services, e.g. Rhapsody. But anyone with half a brain could just go analog-to-digital on those, and of course the same can be done now with YouTube. Shoot, there's even legit software that'll digitally convert your .flv temp. files to mp3's, iPhone video, etc. (I know, shhh!) If YouTube (with the collusion of RealNetworks) is allowing this, who he devil is minding the store? I myself uploaded a video with copyrighted track to YouTube. They sent me a tut-tut and told me it wouldn't play in Germany, but other than that, they kept it up--till I got either paranoid or remorseful, and took it down!
Re: Interesting question to ponder
How do you know any human being, or any being commonly considered sentient, has a consciousness, other than yourself? How do you know that the rest of the "people" you see aren't just meat robots, acting "as if" they see and feel and understand me? WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE WHETHER IT IS MEAT OR METAL?
Or do you consider it a fact, a priori, that consciousness cannot be engineered into existence, ever?
Are you, sir, a closet vitalist?