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And no, handwaving won't solve it.

This might:
http://hplusmagazine.com/2009/...

When pilots start wearing clothes manufactured using BNNT, you know there is a solution.

Or perhaps airplanes should just store water in their upper skin. This would have the other benefit of making low speed crashes safer (less risk of fire).

I've been reading her PR. It looks like she did a small arts festival, and wants to do something else. She's tried being in a band, writing magazine articles, modeling, and organizing events. But no one is paying attention. There's little about her written by anyone else.

Sometimes she gets it right. Read her "John Galt is homeless", a brief reply to Ayn Rand. "We need to face the fact that Randian capitalism is no longer a way to advance oneself but a way to make oneself poor. The roles have now been reversed and it is no longer survival-of-the-fittest but survival-of-the-most-willing-to-please."

I've met so many people like that in the SF art scene. They're wild, crazy, fun, and can't quite make it. They tend to end up bitter by age 35.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Hundred Year Starship: An Apollo-like Push to the Stars? is a much better written article than the one linked to in the summary. Are you use chrome+/. on windows, I don't have problems in linux.

better link

Would curing a slow-growing cancer or rheumatoid arthritis morally wrong?
How about giving someone a pair of glasses, or contacts or perhaps laser-eye surgery?
How about restoring hearing to a deaf person (or simply the ability to hear about 20KHz again)?
How about vaccinating against rubella or meningitis to prevent deafness?
Or vaccinating people succeptible to polio or small pox?
Well one could argue that many of these are approximatly the same level of intervention as curing color blindness.

The article generally assert that if DNA is some magic new science to be wary of because someone else's "fix" can be another person's "enhancement" as if this is some sort of new issue. Sadly it is not. HGH is a recent example of something not-dna related. HGH is medically useful to accelerate the development of children that have development deficiencies and are used by some atheletes to gain an enhancement. Some people are taking ritalin and adderall to help with hyperactivity, but others to get better SAT scores. An older example might be taking antibiotics or steroids.

DNA retro-technology isn't moral or immoral, it's just a new technology like many others that spun out of scientific research. The people who apply the technology are either moral or immoral (or amoral) about it. Sadly there are some of each type that apply any technological advance. I guess the question at least keeps bioethicist employed.

The article summarized and quoted is not linked in the summary. The actual article here.

The difference being the Chinese are motivated by a sense of moral justice (at least on the surface) instead of a nihilistic quest for lulz. Frankly I like the 4chan way better, seems more honest.
It's also interesting that similar behavior has spontaneously developed in 2 parts of the world with a very different culture, it may indicate the way future internet-centric societies will further develop. Oh dear god IS "4chan the Future of Human Consciousness?"

I've frequently observed that AI researchers exaggerate their successes so grossly as to be outright lying. A little excess optimism is mild by comparison.

We actually have many parallel approaches towards producing super-human intelligences :

(1) education and psychology -- Any professional mathematician will tell you about people of unimaginable cleverness and productivity, but they only rarely tell you about all the extraordinarily clever normal mathematicians that will just never produce anything nearly so remarkable. Imagine if raise the percentage of the population with the focus, drive, work ethic, and good habits of say Terrance Tao. Just not scaring away the women helps too!

(2) implants and drugs -- We'll clearly have the ability to enhance the brian well before possessing the ability to build one, especially given this technology has medical applications. We know some academics are already using drugs to them focus or improve memory recall.

(3) parallelization -- We currently build the largest super computers by running parallel algorithms across numerous smaller systems, but the algorithms used by the human brain are already fairly parallel and adaptable. So we could develop implants and methodologies for parallelizing human mental functions such as memory or analyzing difficult problems, such technology could be developed by working on brian implants rodent or primate models.

I remembered that most of the new work on prosthetic arms these days focuses on using EMG to drive the arm behaviour (including Dean Kamen's new bionic arm), and there's a bunch of stuff done (and papers released) with driving the mouse for people with disabilities.

Surely this patent application has to be thrown out, and isn't Microsoft just wasting the Patent Office (and our) time with applications that are so easily shown to have been demonstrated before?

Look Ma, No Pen! Electrical Impulses Can Reproduce Handwriting
SmartHand: Merging Mind and Machine
Application of facial electromyography in computer mouse access for people with disabilities
Demonstrating the feasibility of using forearm electromyography for muscle-computer interfaces
Electromyography sensor based control for a hand exoskeleton

What's the original part here? The patent application does not specify any specific software application (just talks about interpreting the signals), so all the prior art should hold.

I, for one, welcome our new fusion-powered cephalords.

It's not going to just be cheaper to produce (eventually) it'll be healthier for you and the environment.. there is an interesting article over at h+ magazine about ways it'll change things forever (one can hope)
my own take

I'm all for ragging on crappy software, business practices, taxation, etc... coming out of Redmond, but honestly, pissing on the .Net framework because someone developed an application that was 2.3 milliseconds faster at a custom task is a bit asinine.

Um.... Trading times are very important:

http://www.hplusmagazine.com/articles/ai/singularity-already-happening-goldman-sachs

2.3 millisecond gaps are what are causing issues with the current stock exchanges and that the major financial organizations are being investigated for exploiting this:

This. Must I deduce that 'transhumanism' is like furry fandom except with robots instead of felines?

H+ magazine Summer Just go to page 16, exploring the possibilities of ESP through a brain chip.

h+: There has been a lot of discussion about the dangers of people doing this sort of research at home. Do you think this is over-exaggerated?

MP: I really do. The chances of someone accidentally creating a dangerous organism and the chances of it surviving in the environment outside a laboratory are vanishingly low.

Rudy Rucker has a great quote on that, "I have a mental image of germ-size MIT nerds putting on gangsta clothes and venturing into alleys to try some rough stuff. And then they meet up with the homies who've been keeping it real for a billion years or so." The bare facts of it are that there's nothing random about synthetic biology research. When we design a transgenic organism, we're deliberately adding one specific piece of new functionality, maybe a small pathway that leads to a new piece of functionality -- and the organism has to expend energy on producing the new proteins that those new genes code for. Because of this, the synthetic organism is necessarily less competitive than its wild-type relatives who are much better suited for the niche they already occupy in the environment.

So any accidental release is fated to die out within a few generations, because itâ(TM)s just not competitive enough.

That's right. When rabbits were introduced in Australia, they died off right away because they were less competitive than their wild-type relatives who were much better suited to the niche they already occupied.

The "YouTube videos of six military robots in action" are in a different article entirely. Thanks again, slashdot editors, for doing your job so well.

Obligatory futurism: H+ Magazine

Hey! My original submission just linked to this entirely different web site instead.

After reading that article, I went the extra mile to dig up the original research paper, because I thought it would make it more authoritative.