Slashdot Mirror

Already done in 1999 with an Apple Message Pad and a cell modem.

http://www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/7.03/street cred.html?pg=10

Some rural areas, like middle-of-nowhere, Oregon, haven't relied on corporate munificence: http://www.wirednews.com/news/wireless/0,1382,6923 4,00.html

Doesn't matter that the plaintiff didn't have a case to start with - what matters is whether the plaintiff got a fair hearing.

The grandparent is right - the judge is jeopardizing the case by screwing around like this. The plaintiff now has the point that the judge may not have been impartial.

It's not the first time where a judge's impartiality was called into question. See http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,4207 1,00.html Of course, if the judge had kept his mouth shut, he'd be taking the blame for Vista not shipping.

Hm... I tried submitting this story a couple times in the past week, with no luck. I've pasted my submission below, which has a little more info on why the Rocket Racing League could be significant, and a video of former Shuttle Commander Rick Searfoss test-piloting the rocket-plane prototype:

X Prize founder Peter Diamandis's Rocket Racing League has announced its first rocketplane team, headed by two F-16 pilots. The team's expected annual operating cost is up to $1 million, compared to $18 million for a NASCAR vehicle. A video is also available of former Shuttle Commander Rick Searfoss test-piloting a prototype racer at the 2005 X Prize Cup. It's hoped that the competition will help foster the development of more robust, economical, and reliable rocket technology.

I'm still not sure on whether or not this League will be successful. It's a neat idea, but it'll be tricky to do this well, without making it boring or too tacky.

Link for those too young to remember.

They have to pick the biggest browsers and target their software for them.

You don't write web pages for browsers, you write web pages to standards.

It's not too hard, for inspiration, Wired News recently switched to full xhtml compliance with css. Their stuff works fine in any compliant browser.

People who complain about "I try to write to standards but all the browsers are broken", or "you can only do $feature on a certain browser" are lazy. That was a valid excuse 5 years ago, but not today. It is easier to write the stuff compliant to begin with than play around with stupid browser detection and NS4.x workarounds.

If FMDs ever come out we could store much more data, and possibly even emulate DVD, since FMDs have several layers to DVD's two.

Every day it gets worse. I mean scientists not being able to express their research. Independent sources of media facing intimidation. I know this is may not be completely relevant bto the story above but it relates to all of our rights concerning freedom of speech . Basically a gag order has been placed on Indymedia by some law enforcement agency. The EFF has taken an interest in the case. It's basically like the NYT getting investigated by the government and not being able to publish anything about about it. The story about it is at Wired. It looks like our right to publish and speak freely are getting more and more limited by the day. I am getting very tired of corporate consortiums and the government consistantly working to limit our ability to express ideas.

This point in history is very important if you believe in freedom. I encourage everyone to do whatever is in their power to fight censorship and the limitation of the expression of ideas no matter what form the ideas take.

• Thanks to new software applications hitting the market, content providers are now able to track users that share music, movie and other media files across file-trading networks like Napster. Even Freenet -- the fiercely protective network -- appears to be vulnerable to the new programs.

• One service, Copyright Agent, allows content owners to provide ISPs with lists of files to remove and, in many cases, to have Internet access to certain users cut off completely.

  "Our software all developed around the DMCA. We've Web-enabled the DMCA."

And in one of their officially attributed press releases:

• Copyright.net goes live today with CopyrightAgent, its groundbreaking software tool that legitimizes Napster and other peer-to-peer networks while at the same time protecting the rights of copyright owners.

Poof, this lone company suddenly solves the whole P2P problem.

Yeah, that's it.
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Id software has filed a defamation of character suit against CNN claiming they were "totally misrepresented" in a story linking them to a regional shake-up in China.

In a related story China is now promoting a defensive strategy in order to curtail further attacks.

The truth is that security cameras and other surveillance technology is ubiquitous and the technology behind them is only going to improve and get as cheap as dirt. The question is, as a society are we going to do about it? Judging from how the discussion has gone so far, i can only shake my head. Lets move the discussion passed, the police surveillance is "good vs evil" stage.

For those who believe that having the police check every ones face as they enter the gate at the Super Bowl is a good thing, are you naive? How do you know that your not? I'm sure they kept the camera's secret because It would creep people out to know that they were being scanned against known criminals, yet they did it anyway. How do you know that they are just looking out for your interests, what did they do they deserve this level of trust from you? This is a very powerful tool in the hands of the police that can be used for both good or ill. What's to prevent them from betraying this trust in the future?

For those who are apposed to this kind of Technology, lets get past the 1984 analogies. Let me remind you that, You don't need technology to create a very chilling authoritarian state, and technology only played a minor role in the book. For better or worse the technology exists and fortunately the picture of the future for most of us is not a "boot stomping on a human face". In fact surveillance can act in reverse, making the police much less likely to beat someone if they believe that they themselves are being
watched. Watching the watchers watch may one key to preventing the abuse of this technology.

Someone who has put a great deal of thought on the matter is David Brin, and I'm quite surprised that is lucid thoughts on this matter has not yet come up in this thread. This short piece in Wired and this Discussion are a good place places start. From what I can tell, many of you have not been exposed to these ideas yet. I put these in the "must read" category.

Enjoy.

Linus began to experiment with his own hacks, using Minix as scaffolding to develop a new program. "I made two processes and made them write to the screen and had a timer that switched tasks," he recalls. "One process wrote A, the other wrote B, so I saw AAAA, BBBB, and so on."

I believe this means he wrote a really simple multitasking kernel that switched between two processes, compiling it on Minix but not using Minix code. Then he wanted to turn that simple 2-process kernel into a terminal emulator, which raised the question of drivers, and it was on its way to being a real kernel. (If you look at the Linux-activists archive (warning: 600K archive), early Linux seems much cruder than Minix, something which wouldn't have been the case if Linux == Minix being rewritten piece-by-piece.

• HomeRF (Intel)
• HyperLAN II (Ericsson and Nokia)

2) The privacy intrusions aren't equitable. In other words, they get to see 10% more of what we do, but we don't get to see 10% more of what they do. This is one proposed standard that I've seen for deciding if a privacy intrusion is acceptable, and it scales nicely to the Transparent Society. But in the monetary sense, it might be equitable, in that the site gets money for violating your privacy, and in turn, you get more costly services for free. *shrug*

3) They've tried to make the information personally identifiable before, so why should we trust them with our data? I expect that soon, a company will emerge that will properly anonymize such information and still target ads, and will eventually be accepted by the public as a good thing (in that companies can respond to desires more quickly, so consumers get what they want faster). Such a company will have to do everything possible to make sure that its end users trust that company, because the collected data is more easily abused than most. Doubleclick has done just the opposite.
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• WAP Vs i-Mode: The Big Fight
• Canvas Dreams Article: WAP vs. i-Mode
• WAP or I-Mode: Which is Better?

On the other hand, there's a whole lot we don't know about life. We have made great strides in advancing life expectancy, but the quality of those extra years may not be all that great. If this technology could let people live to be 100 without nursing homes and hospitals it could have huge benefits for society.

• Wired News article, Nov 1998
• NASA Discovery Program: Deep Impact page
• UMD.edu Deep Impact page
• Spacecraft Trajectory

The copper cylinder will weigh 500kg / 1,100 pounds, and will carry a camera and an infrared spectrometer. The targetted comet is Comet 9P/Tempel 1.
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If I understand correctly, the authority to set the voting policy in USA resides with the county officials. They decide what kind of voting machines should be used/not used and the money to implement such comes from the county. I don't think the story implies the Feds have commissioned MS/Dell/Unisys to build the voting machines. They are building these on their own and unless some county authorities decide to buy these they cannot be implemented.

The best way to go about the voting machines is for the Feds to publish the specifications of the ideal voting machines and an agency to certify whether a particular brand of machines satisfy the specifications. These specs should be open and without any patents. Any company small or big would be able to build machines according to the specs and market it. Counties can buy the machines from whichever company they prefer. This may not guarantee fair play, but atleast there will be some competition, and the government can buy the machines in their own terms, not some big corporation's EULA.

He woke up in Cleveland before dawn, then flew to visit Bose Corporation, near Boston, to show off the Ibot and talk with Amar Bose about marketing Deka's top-secret consumer device.

When Kamen wanted to erect a wind turbine on North Dumpling and the state of New York objected, he seceded from the US. Though the secession has never been officially recognized, he signed a nonaggression pact with his friend, then-President George Bush, and enlisted Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield of Ben & Jerry's as "joint chiefs of ice cream." North Dumpling has its own flag, its own anthem, a one-ship navy, and its own currency. One bill, which Kamen carries in his wallet, is the value of pi. "You can't make change for it," he says with a grin. "It's a transcendental function."

For those too lazy to see the above link: Page two says:

He might run into problems with the Stirling engine, too. The development of a marketable Stirling device has eluded the brightest engineering minds since Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, patented the first version in 1816. The basic principle of Stirling's external combustion engine is simple: A chamber is filled with a gas that expands as it is heated by a small heat source, such as a propane flame, and contracts when cooled. The process operates a piston and drives the engine. The advantage? Cheap, local fuels can be used to run the engines, and Kamen has adapted his model to produce electricity instead of mechanical power.

But producing the thing is a more complex matter. While many have tried to use Stirlings to power drive shafts for vehicles, they have proved too expensive to manufacture on a mass scale, and they're not always efficient enough. One low tech problem is designing seals that guard against waste as the heat is transferred into a form that does useful work.

Deka's version heats a chamber containing helium, under pressure, and Kamen says it can run on gasoline, propane, fuel oil, diesel, alcohol, or even solar power - with one-fifth the emissions of a gas stove. Deka's engineers think they'll succeed where others have failed because they've ironed out all the kinks. "We looked at the history of the Stirling - all the money and time and expertise poured into it - and identified a half-dozen key goofs that previous teams had made," says project leader Chris Langenfeld. "Seventy percent of it was a materials challenge. We had to track down the right composites to use as seals."

Kamen hopes that his family of Stirlings, five years in development, will soon bring portable electricity to nations without a reliable power grid - or any grid at all. He envisions briefcase-sized Stirlings powering cell phones and cell towers, as well as purifying water. He aims to have them on the market in the next two years, and is currently working on the marketing issues - like how developing nations will be able to afford bulk purchases of the engines, which are projected to cost $1,500 apiece.


I think our friend Ross C. Bracket may have what IT is... a stirling engine powered scooter(?)?

For those too lazy to see the above link: Page two says:

He might run into problems with the Stirling engine, too. The development of a marketable Stirling device has eluded the brightest engineering minds since Robert Stirling, a Scottish minister, patented the first version in 1816. The basic principle of Stirling's external combustion engine is simple: A chamber is filled with a gas that expands as it is heated by a small heat source, such as a propane flame, and contracts when cooled. The process operates a piston and drives the engine. The advantage? Cheap, local fuels can be used to run the engines, and Kamen has adapted his model to produce electricity instead of mechanical power.

But producing the thing is a more complex matter. While many have tried to use Stirlings to power drive shafts for vehicles, they have proved too expensive to manufacture on a mass scale, and they're not always efficient enough. One low tech problem is designing seals that guard against waste as the heat is transferred into a form that does useful work.

Deka's version heats a chamber containing helium, under pressure, and Kamen says it can run on gasoline, propane, fuel oil, diesel, alcohol, or even solar power - with one-fifth the emissions of a gas stove. Deka's engineers think they'll succeed where others have failed because they've ironed out all the kinks. "We looked at the history of the Stirling - all the money and time and expertise poured into it - and identified a half-dozen key goofs that previous teams had made," says project leader Chris Langenfeld. "Seventy percent of it was a materials challenge. We had to track down the right composites to use as seals."

Kamen hopes that his family of Stirlings, five years in development, will soon bring portable electricity to nations without a reliable power grid - or any grid at all. He envisions briefcase-sized Stirlings powering cell phones and cell towers, as well as purifying water. He aims to have them on the market in the next two years, and is currently working on the marketing issues - like how developing nations will be able to afford bulk purchases of the engines, which are projected to cost $1,500 apiece.


I think our friend Ross C. Bracket may have what IT is... a stirling engine powered scooter(?)?

Dang. I submitted this question Ask Slashdot style under science, hoping it would get serious attention, seeing as how Dean Kamen has brought a lot of good to this world through scientific advances.

My personal hope is that the Stirling engine discussed on page 2 of this Wired article is approaching commercial viability. Cheap portable power generation using virtually any kind of fuel? Sounds awesome and of great potential beneifet to humanity. Anyone close to the project have any inside info? Anyone familiar with this technology want to further explain its coolness?

For example, it talks about absolute equality and freedom of religion, but a former colleague of mine had to resign and move back to England, after being subjected to racial and religious abuse (he's a Black Muslim).

Even worse, there isn't just a law against abortion, it's the Eighth Constitutional Amendment, so it's not surprising that abortion clinics near airports and ferry ports (e.g. Holyhead in Wales) enjoy the benefits (as allowed by the Fourteenth Amendment!).

Ireland actively promotes high-tech industry, which is why I'm here, and even passed a Digital Commerce bill that formally legalised Digital Signatures and the use of encryption without key escrow or legal requirements to hand over keys (Wired article here.

Part of my work for a certain Canadian government agency was to compare tax rates in the US and Canada. It's a REALLY hard thing to calculate! We concluded that the tax rates (calculating for utility / dollar spent) were approximately equal (with a 1-3% margin).

This story on Wired (06/08/00) talkes about the difference in tax rates for companies, and reasons techies might want to move 'up north'. (a counter arguement can be found in the Canadian Bankers Report).

The Canadian government is trying to make Canada a more attractive place for high and medium-earners though, as seen in the recent series of income-tax cuts.

Pete
Econ/CS
University of New Brunswick

• It's not actually an official law until President Clinton signs it.
• The very same day that the president signed COPA into law, the ACLU filed a suit against it (and they've been winning so far).
• CIPA is different from COPA and CDA though, in many ways. One of the main differences is that COPA and CDA were criminal statutes, bound by stricter due-process considerations. CIPA is just an incentive-based "suggestion", similar to the 55mph thing, and so it's not bound by constitutional considerations as much.
• This law has been introduced 9 times over the past two years, all by Republicans.
• The American Library Association strongly opposes such a law.

• A general perception exists that Internet filtering is seriously flawed and in many situations unusable. It is also perceived that schools and libraries don't want filtering. These notions are naive and based largely on problems associated with earlier versions of client-based software that are admittedly crude and ineffective. Though some poor filtering products still exist, filtering has gone through an extensive evolution and is not only good at protecting children but also well-received and in high demand.

Sounds like you're misinformed.

Can I quote you when I next talk to the folks planning this? ;)

Some quick, publicly-available mentions of the plans (note the recurrent references to Lake Vostok, the Antarctic lake with miles-thick ice cover, which is our present best model for the Europa ocean):

From Wired ; search for "Engelhardt", near the end. He's the CalTech glaciologist who invented the "hot water drill."

BBC's Online talks about this, too: the article is about the parallels between Antarctia's Lake Vostok and Europa. Search for "melt," it's the third occurance of the word. Frank Carsey, who's talking, is with the Polar Oceanography Group at JPL (and is mentioned in the Wired link, too).

A website on Europa's oceans, which mentions the "melting" plan. Papers are cited, and the bibliography's here.

JPL's website also mentions it; search for "hydrobots". Also check the Europa Orbiter Fact Sheet link (to a PDF) on that same page.

And finally, a Michigan State University honors course page which talks about the proposed Odysseus Mission, which is looking at an ice-melting "drill".

I'm not misinformed -- I think you haven't thought it through. Yeah, drilling that deep on Earth is incredibly hard, if not impossible. But Europa (and Lake Vostok, for that matter) are covered with miles of ice, not rock... a very different problem, with a very different solution.

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join the Young Microsofts

www.everything2.com/index.pl?node=karma%20whore

www.cybernothing.org/~holychao/karmaho.html

www.wirednews.com/wired/archive/8.07/mustread.html ?pg=9

http://slashdot.org/users.pl?op=userinfo&nick=sign al%2011

This place should give a lot of resources too:
http://goatse.cx

Why should the WHO have a monopoly on the .health TLD? Should we give the WTO .trade? Should we give the WorldBank .finance? APEC .asia? The UN Council for Human Rights .family?

This is not a debate against modern medicine v. new age quackery, or science v. superstition. It's about giving UN regulatory power over what would be a good portion of the internet. The UN has never been a friend of either the internet or a free flow of information.

• It was the UN that proposed a global tax on email. http://www.wirednews .co m/news/politics/0,1283,20705,00.html
• It was the UN that called for censorship on the internet. http://news.cnet.com/n ews /0-1005-200-323675.html?sas.mail
• It was the UN that cried out for a tax on international travel. http://www.globalpolicy.o rg/ socecon/glotax/baumert.htm

It is not a good idea to give the United Nations/The World Health Organization this control. If they wish to run their own site, say health.un.org, health.who.org, I have no problem with that. But it is foolish to believe that giving the WHO autority of a TLD is a good idea. They will either punish groups that use a .health domain for a purpose that the WHO don't like (what if southafricamedicalassociation.health publishes a paper denying HIV causes AIDS), or, much worse, prior restrait.

I also fear that the WHO won't stop there. The UN (of which the WHO is a part) has already tried to tax and censor the internet because of political reasons. With that mindset, it's only logical to do the same thing for medical reasons. You want to operate a web site that advocates smoking, or drinking, or steak eating, or having sex without protection? Pay a cent tax per hit.

The UN has already seen fit to run over individual beliefs when the issue's important. It's hard to feel sorry for hate groups when the United Nations advocates their banning. But what of a Roman Catholic site that decries birth control? What of a vegan site that implores the visitor not to consume animal products?

Giving an organization that's adamently against free-information (in both meanings) is a bad idea. I hope you will reconsider.

Attackers won't get in by defeating smartcard antitamper mechanisms any more than they get in by brute-forcing DES today. Even when the cards are perfect, there will be gaping holes in the system.

Consider for example a smartcard reader connected to a Windoze box and used to authenticate network connections. Why bother breaking the card when you could just take over the machine once authentication is complete?

That, and DECSSS-style stupidity inside the cards should mean that hackers of all varieties will continue unimpeded.

Privacy however... now there's a problem.
--
Martin

For what its worth, check out this Wired News story for some of Bush's blather. A quote:

"This is analog thinking in a digital age, 28K thinking in a broadband era, an eight-track ideology in an MP3 world," Bush added.

Harshbarger's Mona Lisa was commissioned by Dave Michelson, a programmer who's bought several of Eric's other works. And it's really wonderful to see the ancient practice of artistic patronage by the wealthy paying off in this 21st century.

But, sadly, not all artists are so lucky, and the current political climate in the US isn't so forgiving. Back in 1997, NEA funding was severely cut, and private giving hasn't increased to make up for the deficit. And with current debates about eliminating the estate tax failing to see how the estate tax actually increases patronage of museums and public art institutions by wealthy people eager to divest themselves of inheritted works, we're little assured of a brighter future.

How many other lego scuplters would our nation produce if we were more liberal with funding for the arts? How many nascent artists, how many little Erics, are picking through their lego tubs, searching for that flat 3x1 piece, but more importantly, searching for a nation who would see their promise and help them deliver? And if they ever receive the funding they so desperately need, will they be saddled with draconian political restrictions on what sort of art they may create? Sure, no one's offended by a lego Mona Lisa, but will the same be true when someone finally builds a lego Piss Christ?

I urge all of you, write your congresspersons and support funding for the arts. Especially our international friends over in the Netherlands, since you seem to have something extra to do with legos and all. It's imperative that the promise of tomorrow doesn't get squashed today like so many little pieces of plastic under the foot of an angry parent walk barefoot to the bathroom in the middle of the night.

Wired's list of global-filesharing applications: http://www.wiredne ws. com/wired/archive/8.10/p2p_pages_pr.html

David Brin. The Transparent Society.

Slashdot keeps mangling my html. Specifically the closing "/a" tags. Let's try again.

Slashdot didn't "rip" that story. It published a link to that story. You're making the same indistinction that the MPAA and the Hon. Lewis A. Kaplan is guilty of.

And by no means does New Scientist own a copyright on the UNC researchers' results ...

And by no means does New Scientist own a copyright on the UNC researchers' results ...

I learned in my introductory college physics course about EMF, and we determined (based on decade-old, proven scientific formulas) that power lines could not possibly cause genetic mutation or reformation of any kind. Therefore, I do not understand why people keep getting caught up in the whole cell phone cancer scare.

The only possible danger of using cell phones is memory loss, as noted in this Wired article. The article describes how scientists have found that radio frequencies have been proven to cause long-term memory loss in rats, and thus may be equally harmful to humans.
______________________________
Eric Krout

In the current installment, Reed Hundt makes a thinly veiled argument for the BS that a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush.

Bullshit. A vote for Nader is a vote for Nader.

However, he doesn't note the business model that successful FPS games have used to overcome that problem: They open up the level-design specs, and make it possible for anybody to design their own level. That, plus the recent phenomena of near-universal Internet access, means that you can find people out there willing to give their work away for free as long as they get one e-mail's worth of praise for it. Egoboo is a powerful thing.

This puts a pretty radical paradigm shift into the gaming world: Your users determine the game's level design and play pattern. The most obvious example is that they can control the spacing and variety of obstacles (puzzles, enemies, etc.). But there are also people who have used the basic 3D engine at the heart of an FPS and applied them to uses that most people would have never predicted, including:

• Real-time virtual wedding ceremonies
• Animated short films set in the Quake world
• A virtual sysadmin tool that simulates kill -9 with a shotgun

Francis Hwang

IANAA, (I Am Not An American) but hail from thier neigbour to the North. Since much of what goes on below the 49th eventually happens up here, I'll comment anyway.

Isn't it amazing. Here we are, 224 years after the American Revolution, and we're back to square one. If this follows through, the Citizens of the Good Ol' US of A will be paying sales tax to a coproration. Heh. Something like that hasn't happened since, ohhhhh... the British Crown decided to tax tea. Read the link, kids - that was to save a faltering coporation, namely the East India Company, too.

So, we have taxes on audio capable blanks to make sure the RIAA and it's kin get thier fair share, absurd patents and copyrights whose sole purpose is to guarantee profits for already successful companies, and now this. Makes you sick, especially when this and this stare you in the face each night on the news

Welcome to the Free World, fellow serfs, look what the American Free Market eventually brings you - The Copristocracy. It works just like an Aristocracy, but instead of being appointed by a King, the people in it founded a successful company, are paying off our "elected" officials to pass laws so they keep thier fabulous wealth, so they can pass it on to thier progeny - just like a Duke, Prince or Barron. So much for the Revolution, eh?

Think about flywheels. There's a good Wired article here and another interessting page (artemis project) here.

Added to solar panels, they would provide a pretty good alternative to batteries for energy storage.

/max

In this article, Wired, points out that Dick Armey got filtered! Armey is one of the leading Congressional proponents of filtering.

The previous one APEX 600-AD can play DVD / CD / VCD & mp3 . This one has 3 disc changer in addition.

I have the single disc version and I have nothing but good things to say about this geek's toy. My friends went and bought name brands (Panasonic / Sony) for twice/thirce the price (I got mine for $150 in Circuit City ). But still some of theirs don't play VCDs and don't have the zoom / sound / play functions of APEX. But what is kinky is it can play MP3 CDs (even CD-RWs without closing the CD - I haven't tried this, but I know others who do this successfully). Here is circuit city link

Forget this vaporware crap and buy one that works and affordable. And this is your good chance to upset MPAA :=))

MP3 player (with remote control), radio and TV, videoconferencing, multiplayer games, and emergency beacons.

We shouldn't be too surprised; Web Pages are already like this.

I remember the surprise that a friend of mine showed when I showed her "Apache Logs".

Her first reply was, "HOW CAN I MAKE IT NOT DO THAT?!?"

(This is a particularly paranoid friend of mine.)

General rule of thumb: If you're doing something on the Internet, you're being logged.

Do something useful: read "Transparent Society" and/or work on making yourself a more tolerant person, rather than fretting about your "privacy" (unaccountability).

Reuters
CBC
Wired News
MSNBC
CNN
--

Wired News offers a little more detail. The expressed difference is that it is a digital/analog hybrid. Apparently, the chip consists of standard transistors in a ring of artifical neurons and synapses. When impulses hit the neurons, they fire, but they can be regulated by a central inhibitor, blocking an ugly chain effect. The central inhibiting neuron allows control, including filtering of weaker signals to allow stronger ones to come through -- Sarpeshkar compares it to ignoring background noise at a party. It's an interesting concept, at any rate.
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Wired News offers a little more detail. The expressed difference is that it is a digital/analog hybrid. Apparently, the chip consists of standard transistors in a ring of artifical neurons and synapses. When impulses hit the neurons, they fire, but they can be regulated by a central inhibitor, blocking an ugly chain effect. The central inhibiting neuron allows control, including filtering of weaker signals to allow stronger ones to come through -- Sarpeshkar compares it to ignoring background noise at a party. It's an interesting concept, at any rate.
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So you get a smart gene "installed" in your child- Who owns it? I was just reading this scary story at Wired News about the Monsanto/Farmer sue-sounter-sue situation. Supposedly some Monsanto-patented genes made it into his field- They accuse him of stealing, and he counter-sues because the genes made it into his crop without his knowledge or consent. -Freaky stuff. Will you have to pay a yearly licensing fee for some of you're childrens genes? What if you didn't want those genes there in the first place? How do you compartmentalize genetic material?