At what point do you become unemployed?

technically at 5.30 I guess?

Unless you've got holiday to take. In that case you're employed until its over

Techradar really need someone to read the copy before putting it online

Sleep's good but i really need a break from work. The last time I had a couple of weeks off, my nan died and we had to fly out for the funeral. That was at the start of April. It's been chaos at work and there's a new system starting midweek next week. Being the only IT-savvy person means I need to stick around until end of Sept so that's when I'll take my annual leave. Still have around 3 weeks left so maybe two then and one in Dec.

In Star Trek I've often thought that instead of a transporting device capable of beaming people to other places, they had actually invented a cloning device where you kill the version in the place you don't want to be and create a clone in the place you do want them to be.

The thing is, how would anyone ever know this is what was happening? What would be the difference? The original human doesn't know they are being killed and feels no pain.

The clone has all the memories the original had, and feels that he has been transported, so will report that "it works, I'm fine".

Interesting then to note that in the first season (I'm re-watching TNG) Picard gets transported as energy into space and they revert to an earlier version of him to get him back because his data is still stored in the computer. It seems I'm not alone in thinking it's not a transporter at all, is this an established theory then?

I was having this exact conversation with someone last night.

Good, well I'm glad I'm not alone.

I have been known to take it one step further and ask: If it is a killing, then cloning device.... does it matter? If "we" get recreated and everyone INCLUDING US doesn''t realise?

Perhaps going to sleep every night kills yesterday's version of you?


Sweet dreams

I saw a cartoon about this a few years ago. A child was asking the same questions of the professor that invented it. She got him to postpone the squishing of the original, and the two professors played chess and talked until it was time for one of them to die.

The girls then uses the device. The new her feels elated, free from any regrets of the past because she knows that was not her.

Also, Thomas Riker...

Re. sleeping, I hate general anaesthetic for that reason. I feel like I died, and the me that wakes up isn't a whole person. Like I lost a part of my soul.

And then there is Riker's clone in a later series, after a transporter accident...

Edit: ah, jjw beat me to it.

Also remember Scotty kept himself hidden in a transporter buffer for a long time.

Watch a film called The Prestige. It's the one with David Bowie as Nikolai Tesla.

[SPOILERS: It's about an illusion where the magician is transported from one point to another. The trick starts off as a trick, but eventually becomes a real transporter. The clone is the transported person; the original is drowned. The thing is, the magician never knows if he will "live" or "die" before performing the trick, despite both copies being identical. It's where your consciousness goes - the other copy is another person.]

I am also reminded of the second series of the radio play Hutch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy where there is an infinite number of Lintilla clones because the cloning machine broke down and started producing a new clone before finishing the last, switching it off was regarded as murder.

As far as Trek goes, just about everything is a "clone" of some form or another. Anything out of a replicator is a copy of an originally sampled item - whether it's food, drink, an object, or the constituent materials assembled to make a new , original item. So it's I grained in society, and no one bats an eyelid. Clearly the legal, moral and philosophical matters surrounding the destruction and reassembly of a person have been overcome. There is certainly no mention of them in Enterprise, where the transporter is a new bit of kit and no one really likes the idea of using it. It would have been interesting for that series to have explored these issues, but I expect that no one in the writing team had the calibre to do so. Where's DC Fontana when you need her?

Not exactly, on Star Trek, they would program the replication with recipes as well.

Luckily, Pickard never asked the computer why his Earl Grey tasted almost, but not entirely unlike tea just before they went into battle.

When I'm getting off this rig. It's either going to be two and a half weeks or three and a half weeks here.
I'm tempted by three and a half as it's easy money at the moment. The office will make the final decision though.

I have seen the film, I don't think consciousness in that sense really exists. In this context it is being used to describe a soul, your stream of conciousness would go into both new versions of you, they both think they're you, or maybe it's better to say you both think you're you - there's no mechanism present in The Prestige that necessitates chance just "assigning" your "soul" to one of them on a 50/50 basis.

I avoided using such terms as "soul". My thoughts are that "you" - that is the entity that looks out of your eye sockets and has thoughts and internal conversations has a 50/50 chance of ending up in the water tank.



But this recipes would use "cloned" ingredients. Ask for a pork pie, and the replicator would generate the pie using replicated pork, replicated lard and the other constituents of the pastry. It expect it would mathematically simulate the cooking process and generate the final item, no doubt introducing some randomness to ensure each pie is slightly different to the last.