1) It could make a difficult-to-remove tracking device 2) It could make a difficult-to-defeat-or-even-know-about recording device
But, if you had one of these in you, at the given time you would already know if you were part of the program or not. You're more concerned with whether these would be used on unawares citizens, which kind of combined all of your points (more addressed, below) into one single point of concern.
a) Handy if you want to record somebody else, like a cop who stopped you b) Not so handy if it could record you without your consent and/or knowledge 3) It might be something whose records could be subpoenaed, both civilly and criminally
Frankly, there's not a lot of progress being made in how to translate a few (three to four) brainwave patterns into meaningful human experience. The few brainwaves (somewhat academically arguable in their existence) that can be sensed can be sensed well outside of the human cranium, for one thing, so I'd expect a humanitarian such as yourself to be more concerned with why this thing needs to be a brain-implant to begin with.
But also, what is up to be recorded from these brain waves is akin to keeping a record of things like your emotional response at a given time, or your decision (scientifically questionable) to send a signal to make part of your body react voluntarily. This last part, signals that are sent just prior to a decision to start some physical motion, are not well defined as of yet even though they are being explored and even utilized with primates, other animals, and even humans. It's sort of like the scientists exploring this capability are going forward with what they do know and applying it to practical usages and products, without fully knowing what the hell they're relying on. And even with the more academically accepted patterns, such as those indicating angry or meditative states, aren't consistent across all individuals. It's a very rough field.
Which means it's not at all admissible in court, presently.
4) It could be used to control weapons without objects in the hands or movement of the body
If you fit the profile. But again, that's not an "issue" since that's sort of the intended use.
a) You could launch an attack on cops remotely while seemingly standing passively b) Cops might shoot you just for looking like you might be about to launch an attack at them remotely while seemingly standing passively
The first part there, (a) is just wild imagination. The second part, (b) is more considerate. If "cops" or any other potential aggressor could get the information from your implant, they might be able to tell things like:
* whether you've registered their locations visually or are under the influence of hallucinogens * whether you're planning a method of attack, or perhaps you're just daydreaming * whether you've given up and are fleeing or are just passing out from blood loss * whether you're about to (in the next few milliseconds) move a limb or finger, or if you're just thinking about eating a sandwich
There's not a lot of progress being made in taking these brain wave patterns and differentiating them at a practical level.
5) If it's capable of communicating with the outside world, it would presumably be two-way. That might make it possible for a hacker to do bad things to your brain, even it it's only cause the device to overheat or discharge electricity into your head
I doubt it would be two-way, there's nothing in the description of the device or its intended usage to suggest that it would benefit from feedback. Also, there is no scientist in the world who has any idea how to send and use such feedback in a predictable manner, whether in terms of the amplitude and focus of electromagnetic signals or in terms of how to make something that small emit that large of a signal.
I take a different tack, from a perspective that the NSA should always seek to be more transparent. This has proven to be a pretty successful basis of advice, so far.
Whatever backdoors the NSA is using, they should reveal to the American public. This in turn makes the information available to enemies of the U.S., but it also gives the U.S. public all the tools they need implement measures to safeguard against the threat. Let's leave it to the CIA to secretly use backdoors against the U.S.'s enemies, and let the NSA be more focused on getting the American populace up to speed on being more secure.
McAfee isn't unaware of all this. One of his campaign keys is that he will provide a more security-hardened communications platform to U.S. government personnel.
In another comment, I came to the same conclusion: getting it out again is the most weighty concern.
An EEG helmet could be thrown away; a scalp implant could be dug out with a knife, a folding can-opener, the butt of a gun, or a rock, etc.
A brain implant represents an impossible to remove barrier against decision-making.
I have to conclude that the idea behind the implant is to limit the available tactical decisions of the group so that they can be forced to continue HQ's strategically defined operations.
Kind of sad if you think about it. The resulting impact in terms of human suffering is somewhat worse than both sending a person into a suicide mission and also putting a soldier on an addictive regimen of enhancement drugs.
I wholeheartedly agree: there's nothing that such an "implant" could do that a little scalp implant or thin, removable helmet could not. People seem to not have a grasp on the measurable electromagnetic power of the brain's output.
The only reason I can see to implant something like this directly into the brain is so that its removal becomes either impossible or an undesirable decision. Even an EEG trode under the scalp can be dug out in extenuating circumstances; a bluetooth-enabled (or whatever) helmet is even easier to do away with. But removing something lodged in your brain tissue at a moment's notice given a combat knife and some tampons is not a valid response.
Also, the article does nothing to explain how the injected implant will pass the blood-brain barrier. So I must assume the thing will be injected directly into the brain's mass. Is that not crude or what? And how is that even a feasible scientific experiment, given how much damage is done to the brain in the process of introducing discontinuities into the tissues with a hypo?
Watching television, one thing that comes up on a constant basis are advertisements for viewers to join class action lawsuits against stent manufacturers. It's endemic. But let us not let that stop us from graduating the stent straight to the brain!
"Straight to the brain!" -- bro chugging a beercan
I also ask whether this is even a "modem". What does it modulate and demodulate? The article doesn't make that clear. If we're looking for specific brain wave patterns, their existence is either on or off; you wouldn't even need so much as an analog to digital conversion to set a flip-flop circuit high based on the output of a differentiator and a few more flip-flops.
hey, maybe the roid-raging, drugged-up super-soldiers they're injecting this into are so large that on a relative scale, their capillaries are the size of caterpillars. the hypo would be the size of a chihuahua and so the injected paperclip would be within the realms of "tiny" in comparison!
(people, my point was that if the universe is contracting or expanding, something as co-involved as Planck's constant could easily change and we wouldn't be able to measure it as all of our measuring devices and things they're measuring would be contracting or expanding simultaneously. sheesh. how i got downvoted to 0 on a subject that sprang so much discussion is typical slashdot and yet completely beyond me.)
hey, that's cool. the planck constant can not and will not ever, ever possibly change. right, literally everyone alive now and in the foreseeable future?
when we have such a close tie in such an important situation, whatever happened to using high technology, supposedly one of the hallmarks of our advanced civilization?
why are we tossing a coin when a whole slew of models of handheld calculators come with a rand() function?
it's pretty simple. somebody is picked to be the caller and they call high or low.
then you get a group of people (does 10 work?) to write a single digit from 0-9 on a piece of paper and stuff it in a box (UNfolded). somebody shakes the box and then the 10 people get in line to reach in and take a piece of paper out of the box without looking at it. as each piece of paper is drawn, a string of numbers is built up. you seed the randomizer with that string of digits, throw out x number of results and produce the next result.
if it's higher than 0.49, then the result is "high", otherwise it's "low".
not that damn hard to figure out. but these are the people who get into politics rather than something that takes intelligence.
any succession of coin tosses is arguably equally likely.
but hey, let's go your direction and do it one more:
the odds of a coin landing on a specific side are 1:2.
but then somebody has to have called the correct side to win. so, let's "compound" those events. the caller has two choices to choose from, so the odds of them calling the correct side are also 1:2.
wow, now winning a coin-toss is 1:4.
oh, hey, what are the odds that the person chosen to be the caller wins? well you have two sides vying for a win, and so two people to choose from. once again, the odds of the person being called also winning the coin toss are 1:2.
wow, winning a coin toss just got to 1:8.
ad infinitum.
also doesn't change the fact that if you practice it for long enough, if you're in control of both the toss and the catch, you can force the outcome. if you manage to master this art, consider the fact that the call is usually made while the coin is in air, giving the master of hand eye coordination, reflexes, or whatever ample time to adjust the height of the catch.
When I would wait (upwards of an hour) the for bus after work, I'd sit on the concrete and flip a quarter to see if I could get down an art of forcing the outcome. I once managed to tally up 25 heads in a row.
Given that this is a proven unfortunate fact of coin flipping, I'd say that there's probably no way to make a coin toss fair without enforcing a lot of distance between the tosser and the landing surface, and enforcing a lot of spin during the coin's flight.
It doesn't matter what you, as the designing Engineer, plan for.
Ultimately, your plans get handed up and up until they reach a holder, and then down and down until they reach a buyer.
And that buyer, ultimately, decides how those plans are executed -- whether in full or in part, with or without modifications.
And when "in part" and "with modifications" means selling *more quickly* for a *good enough* price to any buyer whatsoever, then that course you took in Ethics In Engineering (I hope!) waves good-bye because the end-producer is the one who determines what the actual product is and the politics that producer works under decides how accountable they are to their consumers.
a: wishing in one hand and shitting in the other. it's a joke -- don't actually do it!
fact of the matter is, you can look at the history of PC's and see *FOUR* prevailing and concurrent trends:
1. "this gets easier to sell as it gets smaller"
2. "this gets harder to break into and work on as it gets smaller"
3. "making things smaller takes more investment and research, it's more expensive and fewer companies can compete -- which means i can't just run out and get replacement parts for a smaller device"
4. "things getting smaller, harder to work on and more desireable all at the same time is a real fucking hard on for me, i'm going to go with manufacturig the miniaturized model AND the proprietary model AND the unserviceable model, all because nobody can fucking touch me! i'm king! KING!"
................. the point was that if you bought all your consumer goods (which those undoubtably are) all at the same time, and if they all had a planned obsolescence of the same time period (these days it's two years -- look it up!) and if enough people were in the same boat as you, then all of a sudden, wow wow, all at once, gee whiz, a whole population would be stroking their dicks in the dirt in a big fucking circle around a bonfire of their worthless fucking gadgets.
yo drop the pinochle, boise this senior citizen's about to get noisy i'm not crazy, just senile but i can pick up rhymes like mahjongg tiles my grand-daughter is a hacker, not a slacker windows 10 since july 29th, cracker taught this granny everything she knows like how to search amazon for dildos now i'm surfin' on over to the slash-dot point my webcrawler from my aol push the firehose button and blow it all to hell tony bennett, drop the bass you crackhead
a) that treating slashdot as a money maker seemed to be a step in the wrong direction as far as "news for nerds" and yet here we go again
b) that "nerd" has become so hyper-realized since the 1990's, that basically everybody and their grandmother is a "nerd", now, completely eliminating any point in targeting anything at "nerds"
They wouldn't have *had* to build to handle power coming back if the entire system had been allowed to naturally turn into a power circuit instead of an out and back again distribution network. So, they kind of brought that expense down on themselves.
if you want to treat the home producer as a wholesaler of electric power,
No, that's not it. The parent is trying to treat power distribution as a chain of delivery of something like goods. This is the mentality that has been allowed to creep in on power regulation like a toothless hollar-dwellar getting people worked up in a meeting of the galactic federation: "hey it's just as expensive to put your solar generated power on the back of a track, fill it with gas, and ship it all willy nilly up and down da countryside as it is for the energy company ta have ta do it!"
Parent obviously doesn't realize the obvious (as you pointed out), that the generated power reduces load and that that reduction will disseminate back up the grid.
Until we get to the point in time where the power company has to start building at the plant to handle back surge from all the millions of solar panel using consumers, it's not any kind of cost for the power company.
"Probably" was a pretty bad term to rely on in an argument you're making that someone else's argument doesn't "hold water".
"Probably" to whom, when? You're talking about the middle of the day, when most power companies have determined is the best time to charge the most for power, because that's when the most is actually being used--
wait a minute, have you ever even paid your own power bill? You're not... 14, are you?
Slashdot Mirror
1) It could make a difficult-to-remove tracking device
2) It could make a difficult-to-defeat-or-even-know-about recording device
But, if you had one of these in you, at the given time you would already know if you were part of the program or not. You're more concerned with whether these would be used on unawares citizens, which kind of combined all of your points (more addressed, below) into one single point of concern.
a) Handy if you want to record somebody else, like a cop who stopped you
b) Not so handy if it could record you without your consent and/or knowledge
3) It might be something whose records could be subpoenaed, both civilly and criminally
Frankly, there's not a lot of progress being made in how to translate a few (three to four) brainwave patterns into meaningful human experience. The few brainwaves (somewhat academically arguable in their existence) that can be sensed can be sensed well outside of the human cranium, for one thing, so I'd expect a humanitarian such as yourself to be more concerned with why this thing needs to be a brain-implant to begin with.
But also, what is up to be recorded from these brain waves is akin to keeping a record of things like your emotional response at a given time, or your decision (scientifically questionable) to send a signal to make part of your body react voluntarily. This last part, signals that are sent just prior to a decision to start some physical motion, are not well defined as of yet even though they are being explored and even utilized with primates, other animals, and even humans. It's sort of like the scientists exploring this capability are going forward with what they do know and applying it to practical usages and products, without fully knowing what the hell they're relying on. And even with the more academically accepted patterns, such as those indicating angry or meditative states, aren't consistent across all individuals. It's a very rough field.
Which means it's not at all admissible in court, presently.
4) It could be used to control weapons without objects in the hands or movement of the body
If you fit the profile. But again, that's not an "issue" since that's sort of the intended use.
a) You could launch an attack on cops remotely while seemingly standing passively
b) Cops might shoot you just for looking like you might be about to launch an attack at them remotely while seemingly standing passively
The first part there, (a) is just wild imagination. The second part, (b) is more considerate. If "cops" or any other potential aggressor could get the information from your implant, they might be able to tell things like:
* whether you've registered their locations visually or are under the influence of hallucinogens
* whether you're planning a method of attack, or perhaps you're just daydreaming
* whether you've given up and are fleeing or are just passing out from blood loss
* whether you're about to (in the next few milliseconds) move a limb or finger, or if you're just thinking about eating a sandwich
There's not a lot of progress being made in taking these brain wave patterns and differentiating them at a practical level.
5) If it's capable of communicating with the outside world, it would presumably be two-way. That might make it possible for a hacker to do bad things to your brain, even it it's only cause the device to overheat or discharge electricity into your head
I doubt it would be two-way, there's nothing in the description of the device or its intended usage to suggest that it would benefit from feedback. Also, there is no scientist in the world who has any idea how to send and use such feedback in a predictable manner, whether in terms of the amplitude and focus of electromagnetic signals or in terms of how to make something that small emit that large of a signal.
I take a different tack, from a perspective that the NSA should always seek to be more transparent. This has proven to be a pretty successful basis of advice, so far.
Whatever backdoors the NSA is using, they should reveal to the American public. This in turn makes the information available to enemies of the U.S., but it also gives the U.S. public all the tools they need implement measures to safeguard against the threat. Let's leave it to the CIA to secretly use backdoors against the U.S.'s enemies, and let the NSA be more focused on getting the American populace up to speed on being more secure.
McAfee isn't unaware of all this. One of his campaign keys is that he will provide a more security-hardened communications platform to U.S. government personnel.
In another comment, I came to the same conclusion: getting it out again is the most weighty concern.
An EEG helmet could be thrown away; a scalp implant could be dug out with a knife, a folding can-opener, the butt of a gun, or a rock, etc.
A brain implant represents an impossible to remove barrier against decision-making.
I have to conclude that the idea behind the implant is to limit the available tactical decisions of the group so that they can be forced to continue HQ's strategically defined operations.
Kind of sad if you think about it. The resulting impact in terms of human suffering is somewhat worse than both sending a person into a suicide mission and also putting a soldier on an addictive regimen of enhancement drugs.
I wholeheartedly agree: there's nothing that such an "implant" could do that a little scalp implant or thin, removable helmet could not. People seem to not have a grasp on the measurable electromagnetic power of the brain's output.
The only reason I can see to implant something like this directly into the brain is so that its removal becomes either impossible or an undesirable decision. Even an EEG trode under the scalp can be dug out in extenuating circumstances; a bluetooth-enabled (or whatever) helmet is even easier to do away with. But removing something lodged in your brain tissue at a moment's notice given a combat knife and some tampons is not a valid response.
Also, the article does nothing to explain how the injected implant will pass the blood-brain barrier. So I must assume the thing will be injected directly into the brain's mass. Is that not crude or what? And how is that even a feasible scientific experiment, given how much damage is done to the brain in the process of introducing discontinuities into the tissues with a hypo?
Watching television, one thing that comes up on a constant basis are advertisements for viewers to join class action lawsuits against stent manufacturers. It's endemic. But let us not let that stop us from graduating the stent straight to the brain!
"Straight to the brain!" -- bro chugging a beercan
I also ask whether this is even a "modem". What does it modulate and demodulate? The article doesn't make that clear. If we're looking for specific brain wave patterns, their existence is either on or off; you wouldn't even need so much as an analog to digital conversion to set a flip-flop circuit high based on the output of a differentiator and a few more flip-flops.
hey, maybe the roid-raging, drugged-up super-soldiers they're injecting this into are so large that on a relative scale, their capillaries are the size of caterpillars. the hypo would be the size of a chihuahua and so the injected paperclip would be within the realms of "tiny" in comparison!
voila!
(people, my point was that if the universe is contracting or expanding, something as co-involved as Planck's constant could easily change and we wouldn't be able to measure it as all of our measuring devices and things they're measuring would be contracting or expanding simultaneously. sheesh. how i got downvoted to 0 on a subject that sprang so much discussion is typical slashdot and yet completely beyond me.)
So, is it "tiny" or is it "the size of a paperclip"? Totally weird contradiction in the write-up.
hey, that's cool. the planck constant can not and will not ever, ever possibly change. right, literally everyone alive now and in the foreseeable future?
*hell freezes over*
hello?
when we have such a close tie in such an important situation, whatever happened to using high technology, supposedly one of the hallmarks of our advanced civilization?
why are we tossing a coin when a whole slew of models of handheld calculators come with a rand() function?
it's pretty simple. somebody is picked to be the caller and they call high or low.
then you get a group of people (does 10 work?) to write a single digit from 0-9 on a piece of paper and stuff it in a box (UNfolded). somebody shakes the box and then the 10 people get in line to reach in and take a piece of paper out of the box without looking at it. as each piece of paper is drawn, a string of numbers is built up. you seed the randomizer with that string of digits, throw out x number of results and produce the next result.
if it's higher than 0.49, then the result is "high", otherwise it's "low".
not that damn hard to figure out. but these are the people who get into politics rather than something that takes intelligence.
any succession of coin tosses is arguably equally likely.
but hey, let's go your direction and do it one more:
the odds of a coin landing on a specific side are 1:2.
but then somebody has to have called the correct side to win. so, let's "compound" those events. the caller has two choices to choose from, so the odds of them calling the correct side are also 1:2.
wow, now winning a coin-toss is 1:4.
oh, hey, what are the odds that the person chosen to be the caller wins? well you have two sides vying for a win, and so two people to choose from. once again, the odds of the person being called also winning the coin toss are 1:2.
wow, winning a coin toss just got to 1:8.
ad infinitum.
also doesn't change the fact that if you practice it for long enough, if you're in control of both the toss and the catch, you can force the outcome. if you manage to master this art, consider the fact that the call is usually made while the coin is in air, giving the master of hand eye coordination, reflexes, or whatever ample time to adjust the height of the catch.
I've done this and can vouch for it.
When I would wait (upwards of an hour) the for bus after work, I'd sit on the concrete and flip a quarter to see if I could get down an art of forcing the outcome. I once managed to tally up 25 heads in a row.
Given that this is a proven unfortunate fact of coin flipping, I'd say that there's probably no way to make a coin toss fair without enforcing a lot of distance between the tosser and the landing surface, and enforcing a lot of spin during the coin's flight.
It doesn't matter what you, as the designing Engineer, plan for.
Ultimately, your plans get handed up and up until they reach a holder, and then down and down until they reach a buyer.
And that buyer, ultimately, decides how those plans are executed -- whether in full or in part, with or without modifications.
And when "in part" and "with modifications" means selling *more quickly* for a *good enough* price to any buyer whatsoever, then that course you took in Ethics In Engineering (I hope!) waves good-bye because the end-producer is the one who determines what the actual product is and the politics that producer works under decides how accountable they are to their consumers.
Say "hi" to China for me.
q: what's stupid?
a: wishing in one hand and shitting in the other. it's a joke -- don't actually do it!
fact of the matter is, you can look at the history of PC's and see *FOUR* prevailing and concurrent trends:
1. "this gets easier to sell as it gets smaller"
2. "this gets harder to break into and work on as it gets smaller"
3. "making things smaller takes more investment and research, it's more expensive and fewer companies can compete -- which means i can't just run out and get replacement parts for a smaller device"
4. "things getting smaller, harder to work on and more desireable all at the same time is a real fucking hard on for me, i'm going to go with manufacturig the miniaturized model AND the proprietary model AND the unserviceable model, all because nobody can fucking touch me! i'm king! KING!"
which is exactly where we are, today!
................. the point was that if you bought all your consumer goods (which those undoubtably are) all at the same time, and if they all had a planned obsolescence of the same time period (these days it's two years -- look it up!) and if enough people were in the same boat as you, then all of a sudden, wow wow, all at once, gee whiz, a whole population would be stroking their dicks in the dirt in a big fucking circle around a bonfire of their worthless fucking gadgets.
not that hard to figure out!!
... don't try to sell me on planned obsolescence!
When I was proofing goods for the sales floor at a charity second hand shop, here's the prevailing theme I noticed:
* Made before 1970: Pretty good
* Made during WW2: Awesome
* Made during WW1: How are we so blessed
Everything else is unserviceable fucking garbage, might as well throw it in the trash.
*animated old lady in a flower dress and shades*
yo
drop the pinochle, boise
this senior citizen's about to get noisy
i'm not crazy, just senile
but i can pick up rhymes like mahjongg tiles
my grand-daughter is a hacker, not a slacker
windows 10 since july 29th, cracker
taught this granny everything she knows
like how to search amazon for dildos
now i'm surfin' on over to the slash-dot
point my webcrawler from my aol
push the firehose button and blow it all to hell
tony bennett, drop the bass you crackhead
a) that treating slashdot as a money maker seemed to be a step in the wrong direction as far as "news for nerds" and yet here we go again
b) that "nerd" has become so hyper-realized since the 1990's, that basically everybody and their grandmother is a "nerd", now, completely eliminating any point in targeting anything at "nerds"
get dat granny nerd rap $$$, g's
top comment
They wouldn't have *had* to build to handle power coming back if the entire system had been allowed to naturally turn into a power circuit instead of an out and back again distribution network. So, they kind of brought that expense down on themselves.
if you want to treat the home producer as a wholesaler of electric power,
No, that's not it. The parent is trying to treat power distribution as a chain of delivery of something like goods. This is the mentality that has been allowed to creep in on power regulation like a toothless hollar-dwellar getting people worked up in a meeting of the galactic federation: "hey it's just as expensive to put your solar generated power on the back of a track, fill it with gas, and ship it all willy nilly up and down da countryside as it is for the energy company ta have ta do it!"
Parent obviously doesn't realize the obvious (as you pointed out), that the generated power reduces load and that that reduction will disseminate back up the grid.
Until we get to the point in time where the power company has to start building at the plant to handle back surge from all the millions of solar panel using consumers, it's not any kind of cost for the power company.
Um... by generating power on your side of some transformer, you are reducing the load on that side, plain and simple.
"Probably" was a pretty bad term to rely on in an argument you're making that someone else's argument doesn't "hold water".
"Probably" to whom, when? You're talking about the middle of the day, when most power companies have determined is the best time to charge the most for power, because that's when the most is actually being used--
wait a minute, have you ever even paid your own power bill? You're not ... 14, are you?