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jmsmistral

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I came across the Bigelow contest that had a sizeable prize for to people submit articles / essays arguing beyond a reasonable doubt that consciousness survives physical bodily death - here is a link to the top 3 winners: https://www.bigelowinstitute.org/index.php/bics-afterlife-pr...

There's some good material in there.

I don't know what a proof would look like, but often the experiences involve being disembodied, so a reproduced and reproducible experiment where someone having a near death experience can accurately describe something they couldn't have had prior knowledge of, or guessed, or sensed (heard) in a coma, or found out after waking but before describing, that would be proof. Anecdote is not enough.

There are indeed multiple cases that follow that pattern that have been recorded and in papers (see an example below) - I think they're called "Peak in Darien" cases. The pattern is:

- Person has a near-death experience whilst unconscious - Something happens whilst they are unconscious that they would have no natural means of knowing - Same person comes back and has knowledge of what happened

Here's a paper from Bruce Greyson - https://med.virginia.edu/perceptual-studies/wp-content/uploa...

Agree about applying the scientific method. I do think it’s a range of phenomena that does not lend itself to the running of experiments.

That said - in the area of shared death experiences, you have multiple independent accounts of people experiencing the same phenomena, which is harder (or impossible) to brush off as “subjective” experience.

Interesting read - thanks for sharing. I have recently been reading-up on near-death experiences, shared-death experiences, and tangential subjects and highly recommend books like:

- Proof of Life After Life - https://tinyurl.com/proof-of-life-after-life-moody

- After - https://tinyurl.com/after-bruce-greyson

On the one side I am happy to see more scientifically-minded people attracted to these topics. At the same time, I am also dismayed at the block a lot of people have at any phenomena that doesn't seem to be physically-based.

[dead] 5 years ago

+1. Glad to see praise for rms. I'm thankful for everything he's done, and continues to do through the Free Software Movement.

I wholeheartedly agree with this comment... and find the way it's articulated refreshing. God forbid we say we hate something without someone being outraged. +1 to 98% hating Microsoft... but also kudos for VSCode and TypeScript.

These types of articles are a great reminder of how prevalent censorship is on mainstream services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc.

Question - what other tech/services exists out there that supports freedom? Would that be in the form of distributed tech like mastodon, for example? Could these be leveraged to trigger tech giants to revert censorship?

Meh... It's demotivating to see that everyday services that everyone uses essentially limit perspectives on how life happens.

Agree. A great code management feature like CTEs is limited to less data-intensive operations because of this :(

You can innovate around the issue, like some of the comments mention.

You should focus on growing sustainably, instead of selling yourselves to advertisers for quick cash. God knows there are a plethora of other places we can get our content from. There's enough information pollution in our daily lives - I won't accept you polluting my reading of your 'well-written' articles.

So, in summary... good riddance.

I think ">128TB" is stretching the upper-limit for single-node database. When you're dealing with > 10TB in a single node, it's probably wise to 'shard' or partition the data over more than one node (think backups/archiving, query performance,...).

To answer the initial question - take a look at CitusDB that runs over PostgreSQL. They seem to be doing some cool work in real-time analytics/scalability: https://www.citusdata.com/

WTF?! - "When Apple add or remove a port or protocol such as a floppy drive, a disk drive or Adobe Flash support from its mainstream tech output, worlds change" ... chill out.

Moving our usage totally to the cloud is not a great idea, it seems. Yes, we get convenience, but at the same time lose autonomy, control, and freedom over our computing.

RMS has a good (albeit slightly extreme) view on this: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

This view has people discussing the issues e.g. http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2008/09/why-st...

All in all, if we as users demand web apps that respect our freedom, and employ non-proprietary file formats, then this would be a non-issue. There are a number of ways this could be implemented... one would be to provide a software package (with source code), available to be downloaded and run locally on one's machine, if the product changes or gets trashed. Of course, complete access to your online data is necessary (i.e. ability to download your data as when you please).