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Sign Language Out Loud
hcetSJ writes "CNN.com has an article about a glove that reads sign language and can translate to spoken English. Although it's only one-handed now, and can only handle about 200 words, the inventor has further plans for a second hand and wider vocabulary. I wonder if this could be linked with the Rosetta Stone idea, to quickly expand the vocabulary. Also mentioned in the article is the possibility of military use...gaming control can't be far off." grvsmth points to a more detailed article on GWU's website.
i see slashdot is not ready to talk about WHAT NEARLY THE WHOLE PLANET DOES ALL THE TIME.
will the mod who thinks this is a troll please stand up?
moral high ground
blah blah
mod me down whatever i have excellent karma
its not funny i got it in like 36 hours
hi
maybe i should just post nonsense until i get to positive again
at least there'll be a point in karma whoring
i dont know
btw
http://gold-exp.hp.infoseek.co.jp/collec0.htm - TEH FUNNEY
and now here i present THE HEDONISTIC IMPERATIVE
A B S T R A C T
This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Nanotechnology and genetic-engineering allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Post-humans will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.
The metabolic pathways of pain and malaise evolved only because they served the inclusive fitness of our genes in the ancestral environment. They can be replaced by a radically different sort of neural architecture. Life-long happiness of an intensity now physiologically unimaginable can become the genetically-preprogrammed norm of mental health. A sketch is offered of when, and why, this major evolutionary transition in the history of life is likely to occur. Possible objections, both practical and moral, are raised and then rebutted.
Today's images of opiate-addled junkies, and the lever-pressing frenzies of intra-cranially self-stimulating rats, are deceptive. Such stereotypes stigmatise, and falsely discredit, the only remedy for the world's horrors and everyday discontents that is biologically realistic. For it is misleading to contrast social and intellectual development with perpetual happiness. There need be no such trade-off. States of "dopamine-overdrive" can actually enhance exploratory and goal-directed activity. Hyper-dopaminergic states can also increase the range and diversity of actions an organism finds rewarding. So our descendants may live in a civilisation of well-motivated "high-achievers", animated by gradients of bliss. Their productivity may far eclipse our own.
Two hundred years ago, before the development of potent synthetic pain-killers or surgical anaesthetics, the notion that "physical" pain could be banished from most people's lives would have seemed no less bizarre. Most of us in the urban-industrial West now take its daily absence for granted. The prospect that what we describe as "mental" pain, too, could one day be superseded is equally counter-intuitive. The technical option of its abolition turns its deliberate retention into an issue of political policy and ethical choice. to you
TEH HEDONIST IMPERATIVE
"Happiness is an illusion; only suffering is real."
(Voltaire)
0.1 The Naturalisation of Heaven.
This manifesto combines far-fetched utopian advocacy with cold-headed social-scientific prediction. The Hedonistic Imperative outlines how nanotechnology and genetic engineering will eliminate aversive experience from the living world. Over the next thousand years or so, the biological substrates of suffering will be eradicated completely. "Physical" and "mental" pain alike are destined to disappear into evolutionary history. The biochemistry of everyday discontents will be genetically phased out too. Instead, matter and energy will be sculpted into perpetually life-loving super-beings. Their states of mind are likely to be incomprehensibly diverse by comparison with today. Yet all will share at least one common feature: a sublime and all-pervasive happiness.
This feeling of absolute well-being will surpass anything which human neurochemistry and imagination can presently access, let alone sustain. The story gets better. Post-human states of qui
not to mention they might forget to put their glove off while masturbating.
i can just hear it now
"fish. car. fish. car. fish. car. fish. car..fis..c.f..c..f.. biscutt"
god
deaf people masturbating
now thats a sick thought
if i were an editor i would just ban me for posting such crap on slashdot