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http://technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News.asp?NewsNum=1319

Sarcos is way cool! We could have a tethered mecha in real life with their technology.

Moving an asteroid is MUCH easier than solving poverty, crime or homelessness. If you have enough lead time it takes a relatively small rocket attached to the asteroid to steer it clear of the earth. A paper on moving asteroid, with 10N of force! Another simple proposal.

On the other hand, there is already enough food for everyone on the whole planet, but human greed, for both wealth and power, prevents a huge number of people from enjoying peace and prosperity. And no amount of technical or political knowledge is going to help.

In short, it is a very low chance event with very bad results that we CAN do something about.

That would be quite the bar trick if your liver started glowing when it processed alcohol, all ET style.

You mean like this?

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News .asp?NewsNum=939

From the article...

These devices could also be used to identify and track people. For example, suppose you participated in some sort of protest or other organized activity. If police agencies sprinkled these tags around, every individual could be tracked and later identified at leisure, with powerful enough tag scanners.

but could they send up a satellite to look for some debris and zap it with a laser to vaporize it?

What happens if we set of a nuke in the upper atmosphere?

Excuse me? An arcology would be a very bad place to put a vertical farm. The structure of the arcology would cut the farm off from wind and sun, its two main sources of energy.

Anyway, the point of an arcology is to minimize the "footprint" of urban zones, not to create totally self-sufficient entities.

I prefer to think that New York is considering vertical farms because they're getting ready to install a spindizzy.

Will you look at that thing! Stilgar whispered. Paul lay beside him in a slit of rock high on the shield wall rim, eye fixed to the collector of a Fremen telescope. The oil lens was focused on a starship lighter exposed by dawn in the basin below them. The tall eastern face of the ship glistened in the flat light of the sun, but the shadow side still showed yellow portholes from glowglobes of the night.

Yup. Some further details for anyone who doesn't know:

Ursula K. Le Guin coined the term "ansible"; it first appeared in her novel Rocannon's World in 1966.

James Blish used a similar (but not identical) device, called the Dirac transmitter; that term first appeared in his 1957 story "Beep."

E. E. "Doc" Smith had a faster-than-light communications device called the "ultraphone" in his Skylark of Valeron in 1934. I'm pretty sure there were a variety of FTL communications devices in pulp science fiction.

But yeah, Le Guin was the originator of the term "ansible." Card and others got the term from her.

I was pretty much convinced the space elevator was never going to happen with our current understanding of material technology anyway. There was a study in Nature a while back by Nicola Pugno who pointed out that defects in carbon nanoribbon would pretty much make it impossible. You need 62 gigapascals of tension strength for a space elevator. Carbon nanoribbon gives you 100 gigapascals. First, note how slim that margin is, and that's with PERFECT nanoribbon. But perfection is difficult to achieve in the real world, and inevitable atomic defects reduce the strength of the ribbon dramatically. Just a single atom defect in a single strand reduces strength by 30%. Bulk material consisting of many strands reduces that even further.

I can't find the original article, but here's a typical write-up at the time.

Who knows, maybe somebody will invent something better than carbon nanotubes, but even a perfect ribbon has a mighty slim margin.

... are doomed to live it. See Larry Niven's story "Cloak of Anarchy".

Maybe someone else knows of offensive weapons that don't need a human to pull the trigger

Robotic Sentry Gun

Whipped up by amateurs.

Um I can't imagine how much success I will have with girls waking up with that T-Shirt, going to shower with that soap driving this car ...

Yes they kept files on threats and non threats, who wants to have each team investigate the same harmless nuts?

Indeed: for too long has it ben assumed that the police only need to keep files on people who constitute threats. There's no harm in their compiling and disseminating dossiers on the innocent as well -- after all, those of us who aren't doing anything wrong have nothing to hide.

when the convention hit they knew which ones were the small hardcore fringe most likely to commit crimes and they culled em out of the herd while allowing several hundred thousand (misguided fools

It sounds like a very sensible efficiency measure to me: arrest people before they have committed a crime and save time all round. I for one applaud the work of the NYPD's new Precrime Analytical Wing!

"Now, they have been held up as a symbol of both Russia's deep and rich scientific traditions and the country's inability to convert that talent into useful--and commercial--merchandise outside of the weapons business." if u follow the link to: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Science-Fiction-News .asp?NewsNum=740 there is a youtube video if translated. talks about today. they boots are used as attraction and rented like roller skates. additional talks about how 50 exported to japan/australia. these is how my russian speaking friend translated^^ also they joke about how military can use for the military post man to speed him up in delivery as they are known for being slow.

There's no reason you can't make a nice case and then upgrade the insides when needed. I recall a similar concept in William Gibson's "Idoru", where the most valued and permanent part of one character's computer was the "Sandbenders" case.

This came up the last time they discussed wooden cases on Slashdot.

Here it is.

Enjoy.

Frank Herbert has prior art with Dune's windtraps.

This must run on the 1st generation Maas-Neotek biochips. One can only hope...

Slow glass

"Two prototypes," Rowan continued. "Three, four billion years ago. Two competing models. One of them cornered the market, set the standard for everything from viruses up to giant sequoias. But the thing is, Yves, the winner wasn't necessarily the best product. It just got lucky somehow, got some early momentum. Like software, you know? The best programs never end up as industry standards."

(Watts also has made his 2006 stand-alone novel Blindsight available under CC. The reviews are right- this is one of the best hard SF books to come out this decade. "[he] has taken the core myths of the First Contact story and shaken them to pieces. The result is a shocking and mesmerizing performance, a tour-de-force of provocative and often alarming ideas. It is a rare novel that has the potential to set science fiction on an entirely new course." Makes a great gift for anyone who reads hard science fiction. (disclaimers- none, I don't know the guy, but I do want him able to afford to write much more like this.)

Kurt Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, 1963. Ice 9 is the simplest of molecules which will out-crystallize / out-compete anything that life today uses.

Goldstein's worries are just Watts' B-life (or a slightly more complex Ice-9) plus the belief Goldstein can build it.

I wrote a short paper concerning RFID technology about a year ago, it mostly concerned the hardware and systems architecture. There was no shortage of reports and studies of RFID keys being cracked like the mobile speedpass http://www.jhu.edu/news_info/news/home05/jan05/rfi d.html.

http://www.ti.com/rfid/shtml/news-releases-rel02-1 0-05.shtml. Some of these passive rfid tags have no access control whatsoever. Meaning one take a small RFID programmer into their favorite store and start changing prices, or worse, write a virus to the RFID tag so the next time it's polled it'll get injected into their SQL DB. Possibly compromising their entire POS system. Ironically, this sort of stunt if done well enough could result in a jackpot of creditcard numbers so it wouldn't matter if you used an RFID enabled card or not at that point :).

Some random RFID links.
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/03/rfid _security_a.html
http://www.rfidgazette.org/2004/06/rfid_101.html
http://www.rfidjournal.com/article/articleview/133 9/2/129/
http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/Technology-Article.a sp?ArtNum=20
http://www.enigmatic-consulting.com/Communications _articles/RFID/Link_budgets.html

A nice article on RFID virus attack
http://www.cbronline.com/article_news.asp?guid=B96 0208D-9ECF-4F0B-B964-4DD779BFF905

http://www.computerworld.com/securitytopics/securi ty/story/0,10801,100459p2,00.html

From which comes a nice quote, this is from 2005.
"The TI technology is vulnerable to attack because it uses a decade-old, 40-bit cryptographic key to encrypt communications between the RFID DST tags and readers, the researchers found. TI also used an unknown and proprietary encryption algorithm on its DST devices. But Rubin's team reverse-engineered the secret algorithm by observing how DST tags responded to specially crafted challenges. Once they guessed the algorithm, researchers created a software program that could be used in so-called brute-force attacks on DST devices to recover the secret cryptographic keys, Rubin said."

The site, http://rfidanalysis.org/ that hosted these findings no longer exists but you could probably find it cached on the net somewhere, wayback machine maybe.

Remember that RFID represents a system and not one piece of technology. The implementation of the system is dependent on the deployment plan. I could make an "RFID system" with 2 933Mhz radios and a pair of 8-bit microcontrollers from digikey for around $150. Sure, you could pull my data out of the air, but technically speaking I'm using RFID. I could also build my own RFID key system with 2048-bit encryption to act as the keys to my car. It's not that difficult to develop, really just assembling existing technologies. RFID can be done "right" and it is a promising technology. I wouldn't shun it for alot of commercial applications but for personal applications, well ask yourself the question. Is this thing a necessary part of your life?

Peter

This page describes:

Amateur roboticists (and gunmakers) Aaron and Eric Rasmussen built an autonomous sentry gun as a summer project. Aaron wrote custom software to acquire and track human targets using images recieved from an attached USB webcam. The brothers have incorporated as USMechatronics to begin building sentry guns based on the technology.

More information here on the brothers official sentry gun website.

This sounds rather like Larry Niven's "copseye" ( http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=309 ):

    Someone at police headquarters had expected that. Twice the
    usual number of copseyes floated overhead, waiting. Gold dots
    ageist blue, basketball-sized, twelve feet up. Each a television
    eye and a sonic stunner, each a hookup to police headquarters,
    they were there to enforce the law of the Park.

    No violence.

From Cloak of Anarchy, by Larry Niven.
Published by Analog in 1972

Jules Vernes pegged the basic idea or our Space Program (From the Earth to the Moon -- 1865). He predicted submarines as well (20,000 Leagues under the Sea -- 1869). Paris in the 20th Century (1863)sounds to me like a fairly accurate discription of life in any modern city (gas powered automobiles, glass skyscrapers, high speed trains, global communication, and calculators).

Going forward to the twentith century, I can't think of an invention we have today that wasn't at least partially forshadowed by at least one scifi writer.http://www.technovelgy.com/

The secret of predicting anything is to write a lot of predictions.

Next: a joint project with Scalar Composites to develop the laminated mouse brain computer.

The psychedelic equivalent of identity-obscuring shadows/pixellation and voice distortion for whistleblowers on television news magazines, the scramble suit was introduced by Philip K. Dick in his novel "A Scanner Darkly". Give it a few years before somebody does this for Halloween, now...

Skum-skimming wasn't hard to learn. You got up at dawn. You gulped a breakfast sliced not long ago from Chicken Little and washed it down with Coffiest. You put on your coveralls and took the cargo net up to your tier. In blazing noon from sunrise to sunset you walked your acres of shallow tanks crusted with algae. If you walked slowly, every thirty seconds or so you spotted a patch at maturity, bursting with yummy carbohydrates. You skimmed the patch with your skimmer and slung it down the well, where it would be baled, or processed into glucose to feed Chicken Little, who would be sliced and packed to feed people from Baffinland to Little America.

Yum!

See this entry on Chicken Little.
The Space Merchants is still available here. The equally entertaining sequel, The Merchant's War appears to be out of print.

And maybe they are fans of what Larry Niven did with the idea.

Also, don't forget the Master of Orion video game - which has a fitting theme.

Oh, to be able to live on Mars....

This sounds awfully like the Blish prediction in his 'Cities in Flight' series (some of the best SF ever written, though too intellectual to be in fashion now!).

There he proposes an anti-gravity drive based on the rapid controlled rotation of electrons, which can be made to selectively reject the rest of the universe and thus propel objects at trans-photic speeds without running into relativistic problems.

The cool thing about the drive is that it creates its own shield, so does not need to be attached to a vehicle. Whole cities, and even planets are driven by the system.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=136 or the Wiki refer. Read his books for the maths behind the idea (the only time, AFAIK, when the workings of a warp drive were explained in detail), or find a copy of his 'Doctor Mirabilis' (long out of print) for a description of Roger Bacon inventing Science, in the original latin!

older than that even, John Brunner predicted the rise of the prediction biz several decades ago, in his now sadly neglected novel Shockwave Rider: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=661

Stephenson came up with the hip description, but Niven came up with the idea of a variable-stiffness suit:

        Snow Crash (by Neal Stephenson): published 1992
        The Soft Weapon (by Larry Niven): published 1967

For further reference:
        http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=942
        http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=927

-klode

Stephenson came up with the hip description, but Niven came up with the idea of a variable-stiffness suit:

        Snow Crash (by Neal Stephenson): published 1992
        The Soft Weapon (by Larry Niven): published 1967

For further reference:
        http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=942
        http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=927

-klode

Much as I love Neal, Larry Niven was way ahead of him on this idea. Check out: http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=942

I loved the idea in the Ringworld books. Very clever technology that subtly changed the rules of combat. Larry Niven is the man.

Try http://www.technovelgy.com/

Try this: http://www.technovelgy.com/ The site lists sci-fi stuff and real world instances of that tech.

I also suggest Orion's Arm. It's a "reference" for a pretty in depth sci-fi universe and has a nice encyclopedia of tech and social ideas.
http://www.orionsarm.com/main.html
http://www.orionsarm.com/eg/index.html

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Reminds me of a pre-technology leading to Larry Niven's Variable Swords from Ringworld. It "just" involves a statis field for stability and a little ball afixed on the tip so you know where the end of the sword is. Too bad the former's probably a show stopper -- for a while anyway.

Look at this door," said Marvin, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure. "All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done."

You mean kinda like one of these?

No heat!

Straight from the book!
I remember reading this as a kid, too.

http://www.technovelgy.com/ct/content.asp?Bnum=68

... from H. G. Wells.

Link from the article
Says that these are not autonomous and are controlled by humans. Is this really any different than the Global Hawk?

As I pointed out in the article (and the comments), these devices are not autonomous. For some, this would disqualify them from being true robots. However, the military and the manufacturer both refer to the SWORDS device as a robot, and it certainly fits common usage. The word "robot" comes from the Czech robota (from Capek's play R.U.R.) meaning "forced labor" or "drudgery." This device surely does an unpleasant task usually done by a person. Also, consider that, strictly speaking, an autonomous cruise missile is a self-guided machine, and is therefore a "robot" although most people wouldn't think of it that way.

Could be worse.

Maybe soon it will be.

I hope this isn't the first step on the way to creating Ice-Nine!

It's basically a micro-sandwich; a high-efficiency filter and heat-exchange system. the skin-contact layer is porous. Perspiration passes through it, having cooled the body. Motions of the body, especially breathing, and some osmotic action provide the pumping force. With a Fremen suit in good working order, you won't lose more than a thimbleful of moisture a day - even if you're caught in the Great Erg.