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America's View of the Internet
Alien54 writes "It won't make you dinner or rub your feet, but nearly one in four Americans say that the Internet can serve as a substitute for a significant other for some period of time, according to a new poll released today by 463 Communications and Zogby International. The poll examined views of what role the Internet plays in people's lives and whether government should play a greater role in regulating it. The online survey was conducted Oct. 4-8, 2007, included 9,743 adult respondents nationwide, and carries a margin of error of +/- 1.0 percentage point. From the results blog post: 'More than half of Americans believe that Internet content such as video should be controlled in some way by the government. Only 33% of 18 to 24 year-olds supported government stepping in on content, while 72% of those over 70 years of age support government regulation and ratings. More than one in four Americans has a social networking profile such as MySpace or Facebook. Among 18-24 year-olds, it's almost mandatory - 78% of them report having a social networking profile. Americans may love the Internet, but most are not prepared to implant it into their brain, even if it was safe. Only 11% of respondents said they be willing to safely implant a device that enabled them to use their mind to access the Internet.'"
I'm still waiting for the fucking images to load.
Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
I don't like the idea of anyone sticking tubes in my head. Imagine if they overflowed!
Insert self-referential sig here.
Sure, you can keep in touch with lots of other people online, but when the (typical) user's entire social interaction is reduced to impassioned debates, downloading pr0n, FPS games, pissing off people on the other side of the planet with sophomoric trolling, and the whole time bullshitting about who you are and what you do in RL?
Gah - almost makes one fear for Humanity's future.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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Depends on what method of control they're talking about. If they mean online games (or pr0n), then a neural interface would be absolutely awesome.
Especially simulated reality hooked directly into the brain. We know from dreams that the brain can process things quicker where our sense of time passing is not "real time" (ie, a dream that seems to go on for 30 minutes might take place in a MUCH shorter ammount of real time).
How cool would it be to go on a simulated 2 week vacation to the Bahamas, but only really spend 1 hour running the simulation? Or perhaps it could even be reduced further in time. Why get upset over death when we could live an entire lifetime of extra activites in a single evening (think of that old Star Trek TNG episode where Picard lived an alt life where he was an old man with grandchildren and then upon death reawoke on the bridge, with only 2-3 minutes having passed). Of course, the addiction possibility here would be high. Imagine how much work place productivity would suffer if every time an employee came back to work each morning they've spent a virtual 6-months away in paradise.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I wonder if the brain has a usable life though?
Right now, our brains only last for about 80-100 years.....
I wonder if there would be any strange side effects from giving it 1000 years worth of experience?
If we really did accomplish this, imagine how much faster we could progress technologically......allow devs to drop into one of these things and we could have software that would normally take months to build developed in mere minutes!
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Lucid dreaming is to know that you dream while you dream. In dreams, the eye movements we make are also made with our real eyes. As such, they can be used as a way for dreamers to contact people doing experiments on them. What LaBerge did was to monitor the eye's movements, and instruct a lucid dreamer (lucidity can be trained) to count in his dream, and excecute a certain pattern of movement with his eyes whenever he counted to X (probably ten, can't remember).
It turns out that dream-time is just as fast as wake-time, and that the feeling of experiencing a year in a period of 30 minutes probably works like it does in movies. A man jumps into bed, the scene fades, you see the morning light come in and the man wakes up. In reality, a few seconds passed, but the movie gave you the illusion of a night passing. Now add to that that dreams affect all your senses (or at least have the ability of doing so).
Not so strange, eh? (Also, if you want to spend some time experiencing really surreal things, start doing lucid dreaming. It's awesome.)