Robert Freitas, a research scientist at Zyvex, has done a very detailed analysis of the "gray goo" threat. He had previously posted preliminary analyses on sci.nanotech, but DejaNews appears to have dropped them (that was around 1997). After analyzing likely chemistries for omnivorous replicators, and the physical limits on replication rates, he reaches these conclusions.
9.0 Conclusions and Public Policy Recommendations
The smallest plausible biovorous nanoreplicator has a molecular weight of ~1 gigadalton and a minimum replication time of perhaps ~100 seconds, in theory permitting global ecophagy to be completed in as few as ~10^4 seconds. However, such rapid replication creates an immediately detectable thermal signature enabling effective defensive policing instrumentalities to be promptly deployed before significant damage to the ecology can occur. Such defensive instrumentalities will generate their own thermal pollution during defensive operations. This should not significantly limit the defense strategy because knapsacking, disabling or destroying a working nanoreplicator should consume far less energy than is consumed by a nanoreplicator during a single replication cycle, hence such defensive operations are effectively endothermic.
Ecophagy that proceeds near the current threshold for immediate climatological detection, adding perhaps ~4C to global warming, may require ~20 months to run to completion, which is plenty of advance warning to mount an effective defense.
Ecophagy that progresses slowly enough to evade easy detection by thermal monitoring alone would require many years to run to completion, could still be detected by direct in situ surveillance, and may be at least partially offset by increased biomass growth rates due to natural homeostatic compensation mechanisms inherent in the terrestrial ecology.
Ecophagy accomplished indirectly by a replibot population pre-grown on nonbiological substrate may be avoided by diligent thermal monitoring and direct census sampling of relevant terrestrial niches to search for growing, possibly dangerous, pre-ecophagous nanorobot populations.
Specific public policy recommendations suggested by the results of the present analysis include:
an immediate international moratorium on all artificial life experiments implemented as nonbiological hardware. In this context, "artificial life" is defined as autonomous foraging replicators, excluding purely biological implementations (already covered by NIH guidelines tacitly accepted worldwide) and also excluding software simulations which are essential preparatory work and should continue. Alternative "inherently safe" replication strategies such as the broadcast architecture are already well-known.
continuous comprehensive infrared surveillance of Earth's surface by geostationary satellites, both to monitor the current biomass inventory and to detect (and then investigate) any rapidly-developing artificial hotspots. This could be an extension of current or proposed Earth-monitoring systems (e.g., NASA's Earth Observing System and disease remote-sensing programs) originally intended to understand and predict global warming, changes in land use, and so forth -- initially using non-nanoscale technologies. Other methods of detection are feasible and further research is required to identify and properly evaluate the full range of alternatives.
initiating a long-term research program designed to acquire the knowledge and capability needed to counteract ecophagic replicators, including scenario-building and threat analysis with numerical simulations, measure/countermeasure analysis, theory and design of global monitoring systems capable of fast detection and response, IFF (Identification Friend or Foe) discrimination protocols, and eventually the design of relevant nanorobotic systemic defensive capabilities and infrastructure. A related long-term recommendation is to initiate a global system of comprehensive in situ ecosphere surveillance, potentially including possible nanorobot activity signatures (e.g. changes in greenhouse gas concentrations), multispectral surface imaging to detect disguised signatures, and direct local nanorobot census sampling on land, sea, and air, as warranted by the pace of development of new MNT capabilities.
Sympathy is also seen in other mammal species upon death, for example elephants will sometimes pick up the ivory or bones of a dead herd member, hold pieces in their trunks, and pass them around. Some return for many years to the spot where a relative died, touching the relics. It makes us ask whether they remember. Elephants are the only mammals with brains larger than humans, actually three times the mass.
Erratum: whales are mammals, and have larger brains than elephants.
Elephants don't presently do much we regard as intelligent, and the absence of hands with opposable thumbs obviously doesn't help. Our understanding of their vocalizations is pretty minimal. Like whales, they may be conveying a lot of information that we are missing. There might be a good distributed.net project in there somewhere.
If somebody invented guns and radios that could be carried and operated by elephants, it would be interesting to see what armed, coordinated elephants would do to poachers. If there were elephant-operable construction machinery, they might build dwellings for themselves. Or maybe they'd have philosophical reasons for not doing these things. It would be interesting to know.
We need new computing models (i.e. Quantum Computing) not just smaller/faster version of what we have.
You can have new models of computation without busting your noggin against exotic new physics. One easy way to do that is with new algorithms. Public-key cryptography opened up all kinds of interesting opportunities, running on tedious conventional hardware.
A couple years ago, I heard a talk at MIT about amorphous computing. It is basically a way of thinking about algorithms and communication so that we can successfully program low-reliability hardware (ordinary lithography/silicon stuff) to get reliably high performance. It's approximately the art of coordinating behavior in the presence of noise and unpredictability.
As a side benefit, this work is applicable to a lot of different scenarios for nanocomputing. They assume systems where processors or the communication pathways between them may be unreliable, or where there isn't a regular geometry, so this is the kind of thinking you'd need to program plaque-cleaning bots wandering around your arteries.
what I really need to simulate are emergent behavior algorithms
There is some interesting work along these lines at MIT's Amorphous Computing web site. What these people are doing will be of very great importance when nanocomputing hardware starts to exist. Luckily, they will be able to apply it long before then, since their assumptions also apply to very-inexpensively-manufactured silicon.
Mathematics is a great cooperative venture. It wouldn't be easy to identify one mathematician who did the largest share of the work
Probably the money would go to the person who completed the proof, that is, did the last few steps, essentially dismissing any work done previously by others. As you point out, this isn't a terribly fair method of compensation. The uniqueness of the winner's status would be a disincentive to anybody who had a lot to contribute, but was reasonably unsure he'd accomplish the last few steps of the proof.
An interesting counter-proposal to address this dilemma is proposed by a New Zealand economist named Ronnie Horesh, at http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/9856/, albeit in a different context. Horesh's idea is a social policy bond issued by a government or somebody else with deep pockets and a social agenda. The bond is redeemable for a large fixed sum when the goal is achieved. Until then, the bond is a good that can be bought and sold like a share of stock. Like a share of stock, its price will rise as the goal moves closer to being accomplished. The purpose of inventing these bonds is to delegate the implementation of social goals to free market forces.
If a mathematician felt confident that he had made an important contribution, but didn't feel confident that he'd complete the proof himself, he could buy bonds cheaply as soon as they were issued, and hold onto them until the proof was complete. When the proof was made public, each bond would become redeemable for a large fixed sum, and the guy who bought early would make big bucks.
It's good to see interest in the areas they are talking about. Frequently some institution announces their interest in "nanotech" but really they are pursuing some very near-term, such as marginal improvements in lithography. The inclusion here of "molecular self-assembly, with particular emphasis on organized structures and machines" is important. Most of the nanotech "economy of plenty" scenarios depend on the idea of self-replicating assemblers. It's the reason vegetables are so affordable, despite the fact they're more complex than 99.9% of human artifacts.
It's also good to see interest in "molecular-scale biomedical engineering", though this far along in the human genome project it's a bit of a no-brainer. Nevertheless, it's one of the areas where nanotech offers the greatest long-term promise, and it represents another point for long-term thinking on the part of the ACS.
Yahoo has a story about Red Hat's involvement with embedded Linux applications. This appears to be a rehash of the Cygnusacquisition a few months ago, but still interesting reading. Apparently what makes this news is that Red Hat is putting together some new tools for developers, aimed at x86 and PowerPC targets.
until a real technological babelfish is made (no, altavista's babelfish doesn't count)
Are there any open-source machine translation projects? The prodigious bug-fixing rate for open source software would mean that even a poor translator could lead eventually to an excellent one, if bad assumptions were not built into it at some fundamental level. And if they were, somebody would notice them and start a second project.
I don't work in the field of machine translation, but I'm guessing that an important first step is to invent a sufficiently rich interlingua so that you can do something like EnglishinterlinguaHindi or EnglishinterlinguaTamil. One benefit of an interlingua would be that adding a new language would be an O(1) operation rather than O(N), where you already have N languages. Another is that it centralizes many assumptions in one place, where they can be better subjected to scrutiny and peer review.
An open-source translator would be an excellent thing. It would be a boon for Internet access to many people throughout the world who would otherwise miss out.
BTW, I got 2/3 of the way thru your post before I learned that you weren't a native English speaker, and that only because you specifically mentioned it.
People often complain about competitions (ala Software Carpentry) that they pit OSS developers against one another, creating incentives not to share tools and techniques. The reason for this is that in a competition, only one person wins.
Ronnie Horesh, an economist in New Zealand, proposed an idea called social policy bonds to bring free-market forces to bear on social problems. The idea in a nutshell is this:
The government selects a social goal with an objective measure (e.g. infant mortality rate going below 50 per 1000). The government issues bonds, redeemable for a fixed large sum of money when the condition is met. People buy and sell the bonds, essentially speculating on the probability and timing of the condition being met. Bond holders are incentivized to take actions that bring about the condition.
In this scheme, bond holders have no incentive to compete with one another. When one wins, all win.
To move this to OSS development, it must be privatized. I must be able to issue a bond as an individual. So I place my chunk of money in escrow, possibly with one of the e-cash outfits, and in return I get an unforgeable certificate, which I sell on eBay or elsewhere.
The escrow agency which holds my money must be trusted by everybody, and it needs to be able to create an unforgeable transferrable certificate. A sufficiently large e-cash outfit should meet both criteria.
To this and similar proposals, the complaint has been made that it undermines the cooperative nature that should properly inhere in the world of free software. If I compete, and in order to do so I write some incredibly cool tool, I'll probably keep the tool a "trade secret" in preparation for the next competition. This is a completely valid complaint; people are put in competition with one another when they ought not to be.
The free market is a wonderful thing, and you don't want to discard the parts of it that work well. It's not unreasonable to offer compensation to somebody to write a useful piece of software.
I recently came across a proposal by an economist (in the UK, I think) called "social policy bonds", which is applicable here. His proposal was that the government would create a financial instrument (a piece of paper) which could be redeemed for a fixed amount of money when some measurable social goal was fulfilled. Once the bonds were created, they would be auctioned to the highest bidder. A further free-market tweak could be put on the idea: bonds are issued by individuals rather than the government. Rather than collected tax dollars, an individual puts a chunk of cash in escrow with a private financial institute, which gives the individual a certificate serving the same function. If the condition is met, anybody can redeem the certificate and take the money out of escrow. (Until that time, the escrow agency can invest the money, or collect interest on it.)
I've discussed this idea with a couple of banks in my area and they aren't interested in acting as escrow agents. The idea is too wierd and new for them. Maybe I'll try insurance companies. The viability of a certificate is contingent upon the reputation of the escrow agent.
A similar instrument could be used in place of Software Carpentry's competition. It would remove the stipulation that only one person could prosper for each goal. People would be able to profit by contributing to the efforts of others. As with shares of stock, all the owners have an incentive to cooperate to cause the price of the shares to rise.
The economist who originated this idea is named Ronnie Horesh. His proposal goes into much greater detail than I have done here. It's a cool idea, probably useful for many different goals.
There is a precedent for positive feedback in games, particularly drinking games. Many drinking games require the player to do something tricky, like reciting a tongue twister, and take a drink if he fails. More drinks make it harder to do the tricky thing, hence positive feedback.
Just because it's grown in a tank doesn't make it any less of an animal. You're still killing it.
in response to:
I hope that... we'd put an end to slaughtering sentient creatures...
I think the important distinction from a moral standpoint is sentient. Animals suffer because they have brains and nervous systems. If we learn to grow bovine muscles in a tank with no nerves connected, can they really be said to suffer? I can't see how, unless you're willing to consider the "suffering" of individual cells.
Robert Freitas has written the (afaik) world's first technical book on Nanomedicine, described here and purchasable at Amazon or the publisher. This book is a big advance in the art, comparable to Drexler's Nanosystems. Freitas is an extremely diligent author, treating every imaginable detail of the designs he proposes.
A gentler intro to nanomedicine is available here, in an earlier book.
One of the interesting ideas from Freitas's book is the respirocyte, an artificial red blood cell with a much higher oxygen-carrying capacity than the biological version. A person with respirocytes in his bloodstream could sit on the bottom of a swimming pool for nearly four hours.
I'm another ham radio operator (albeit inactive for many years now) and Ramsey Electronics is well known among hams as making some of the most fun, excellent radio kits in the hobby. It's particularly irksome that this is happening to folks who have done so much to educate and entertain so many. They're a wonderful little company.
Why didn't these agents bust Radio Shack, which sells walkie-talkies that could also be used for surveillance? Oh right, the bully rule: only bully people much weaker so that there will be no chance of their effectively fighting back. It's good to see that the government has the keen grasp of bullying that was available to some of the seven-year-olds I remember growing up with. Gee, I hope the IRS operates at or above this level of maturity.
Besides, isn't this the same government that promotes surveillance at every possible opportunity, and erodes the privacy of private citizens whenver possible? Aren't these the same guys who read 1984 and drool? When the heck would they have decided that surveillance ought to be a crime?
From a business standpoint, this is no different than any of the currently existing cheap PCs with included internet service. The choice of Linux means nothing to the consumer, except that it won't crash very often. Why does Intel regard this as a desirable market segment? Is there that much market share left there? Aren't the existing cheap PC companies doing pretty poorly? What the heck is Intel thinking?
It's of course great to see Linux making yet another advance into the mainstream and I applaud that, and expect it to benefit both the OS and humanity in general. I just don't see where this is a good business decision for Intel.
Sterling talks about gizmos using the same language that people use when discussing RAD languages or scripting languages. That seems (aside from his small amount of OS and posthuman rhetoric) to be his main idea here. Consumers are supposed to cobble together their own widgets in Lego-&-duct-tape fashion, and swap recipes on the Internet, like birdhouse builders publishing blueprints in hobbyist magazines. Sounds like a cool idea to me, the trick will be designing or marketing the construction toy that makes it possible.
Not Quite C, a subset of C for the Mindstorm system
l egOS, an RTOS to replace the normal OS in the Mindstorm control brick. This uses friendly familiar Linux-ish development tools like the egcs compiler.
One possible purpose for non-coding DNA would be to adjust how the chromosomes fold in the cell nucleus. The folding process for DNA is actually pretty complex, similar to the way proteins fold. IIRC, protein folding is viewed at three levels. Primary structure is just the sequence of amino acids (roughly analogous to DNA's base pairs, more closely analogous to triplets of base pairs). Secondary structure involves twisting into alpha- and beta-helices, or just staying in straight runs. Tertiary structure is how the secondary pieces arrange themselves to give the overall shape of the molecule. IANABiologist and my memory may be faulty in spots, but that's the rough idea with proteins.
Proteins need to fold up in characteristic ways because they do so many different jobs in the cell, both as builders and as structural materials themselves.
DNA needs to be able to fit nicely into chromosomes that don't have sharp edges that might puncture the nuclear wall. Maybe the DNA would give before the wall did, but then you'd have chromosome damage which isn't a wonderful thing. There may be other constraints on how DNA decides to fold, I don't know what they are.
I'm not aware of a specific criterion that distinguishes a DSP from a normal processor. DSP as an intellectual field preceded DSP chips. People noticed that there were a few mathematical operations that were very useful in signal processing: discrete-time filters, fast fourier transforms, discrete-time convolutions, etc. It seemed logical to start designing chips that were carefully optimized to do these things as fast as possible, as opposed to more general processors that would be optimized for, say, running an operating system (e.g. the 68000).
To the best of my knowledge, the business of DSP chips started with Texas Instruments' TMS320C10, a quirky little 16-bit processor with a 4-deep hardware return stack, built around a multiply-accumulator (MAC). The MAC meant that the chip could be very efficient for performing vector dot products, which are the inner loop in all the DSP operations. There were many (fairly ugly) hardware hacks embedded in the 320C10 to make sure that dot products were as fast as possible, at the expense of anything like elegance or comprehensibility. When my boss handed me the 320C10 data sheet in 1983 and asked if I wanted to work with the thing, I cringed.
Since then, Texas Instruments is still quite prominent in the DSP chip business, but they've been joined by others like Analog Devices, National Semiconductor, and Motorola. DSPs now come in a range of prices and capabilities, and you can get both fixed-point and floating-point DSPs. As with the rest of the semiconductor industry, DSPs have been steadily increasing in speed and complexity.
Almost any program with a lot of arithmetic, in reasonably regular patterns, can benefit from DSPs. This includes graphics, audio, compression and decompression, rendering movies, medical imaging, cryptographic key cracking, radar and sonar, various other things, and the traditional supercomputer problems like weather prediction and nuclear weapon simulation.
The MMX extensions to the Pentium processor was a move in the direction of on-chip DSP. The G4 processor is a PowerPC core with an on-chip VLIW DSP. You could stretch the analogy and say that off-chip math coprocessors like the 80387 and the 68881/2 are a similar idea.
DSPs are useful in modems because of the kind of math used for picking signals out of noise, and for decoding bits from the extracted signal. I took a course on detection and estimation once, and the math is fascinating, but it's definitely not the only thing DSPs can do.
industrial labor is qualitatively different from agrarian/craft labor, because (1) the laboror is no longer in control of the "means of production", so he is working for somebody else, not himself, and (2) industrial labor treats the worker as an automaton, not as a real human.... both [Karl Marx and Adam Smith] stand for the concentration of working capital and the means of production in the hands of a few
I caught a few minutes of something on PBS the other night that touched on this issue. It was some financial talking heads discussing the trend for everybody to start investing. The individual investor is becoming vastly less dependent on brokers to mediate his or her trading activities. And we are now at a point where something like 50% of working Americans use stocks as a major component of their retirement portfolio. Stock option programs are starting to be used outside the high tech world. Apparently, all this is fairly shocking to the old-guard financial community.
So you have this old assumption that the rich exclusively own the means of production and the workers and the poor are entirely out of the loop, but the validity of that assumption is starting to crumble, and it is taking the distinction between workers and owners with it. The process is only in its very early stages, and it is still true that the overwhelming majority of capital is held by the small minority of the wealthy. Still, it's a good and interesting thing.
The disparity between rich and poor does no favors to capitalism or the free market. People fret over class divisions, and plan acts of violence, instead of engaging in fruitful voluntary trade.
If the ownership of capital were more or less evenly distributed throughout society (and we appear to be moving in that direction), I think we might find ourselves in the paradise Marx hoped for. But maybe we can get there by free market mechanisms rather than violent revolutions and central control.
Slashdot Mirror
Why does nobody talk about uplifting elephants? At http://www.biol.tsukuba.ac.jp/~macer/bll/bll6.html :
Erratum: whales are mammals, and have larger brains than elephants.Elephants don't presently do much we regard as intelligent, and the absence of hands with opposable thumbs obviously doesn't help. Our understanding of their vocalizations is pretty minimal. Like whales, they may be conveying a lot of information that we are missing. There might be a good distributed.net project in there somewhere.
If somebody invented guns and radios that could be carried and operated by elephants, it would be interesting to see what armed, coordinated elephants would do to poachers. If there were elephant-operable construction machinery, they might build dwellings for themselves. Or maybe they'd have philosophical reasons for not doing these things. It would be interesting to know.
You can have new models of computation without busting your noggin against exotic new physics. One easy way to do that is with new algorithms. Public-key cryptography opened up all kinds of interesting opportunities, running on tedious conventional hardware.
A couple years ago, I heard a talk at MIT about amorphous computing. It is basically a way of thinking about algorithms and communication so that we can successfully program low-reliability hardware (ordinary lithography/silicon stuff) to get reliably high performance. It's approximately the art of coordinating behavior in the presence of noise and unpredictability.
As a side benefit, this work is applicable to a lot of different scenarios for nanocomputing. They assume systems where processors or the communication pathways between them may be unreliable, or where there isn't a regular geometry, so this is the kind of thinking you'd need to program plaque-cleaning bots wandering around your arteries.
There is some interesting work along these lines at MIT's Amorphous Computing web site. What these people are doing will be of very great importance when nanocomputing hardware starts to exist. Luckily, they will be able to apply it long before then, since their assumptions also apply to very-inexpensively-manufactured silicon.
An interesting counter-proposal to address this dilemma is proposed by a New Zealand economist named Ronnie Horesh, at http://www.geocities.com/WallStreet/9856/, albeit in a different context. Horesh's idea is a social policy bond issued by a government or somebody else with deep pockets and a social agenda. The bond is redeemable for a large fixed sum when the goal is achieved. Until then, the bond is a good that can be bought and sold like a share of stock. Like a share of stock, its price will rise as the goal moves closer to being accomplished. The purpose of inventing these bonds is to delegate the implementation of social goals to free market forces.
If a mathematician felt confident that he had made an important contribution, but didn't feel confident that he'd complete the proof himself, he could buy bonds cheaply as soon as they were issued, and hold onto them until the proof was complete. When the proof was made public, each bond would become redeemable for a large fixed sum, and the guy who bought early would make big bucks.
www.grameen.org, Grameen Bank
wlink.com.np, an affordable ISP in Nepal
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l, a Wired article by John Perry Barlow
www.grameen.org, Grameen Bank, a microlending bank in Bangladesh
wlink.com.np, an affordable ISP in Nepal
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/6.01/barlow.htm l, a Wired article by John Perry Barlow about his travels in Africa and Internet access availability there
It's also good to see interest in "molecular-scale biomedical engineering", though this far along in the human genome project it's a bit of a no-brainer. Nevertheless, it's one of the areas where nanotech offers the greatest long-term promise, and it represents another point for long-term thinking on the part of the ACS.
Yahoo has a story about Red Hat's involvement with embedded Linux applications. This appears to be a rehash of the Cygnus acquisition a few months ago, but still interesting reading. Apparently what makes this news is that Red Hat is putting together some new tools for developers, aimed at x86 and PowerPC targets.
I don't work in the field of machine translation, but I'm guessing that an important first step is to invent a sufficiently rich interlingua so that you can do something like EnglishinterlinguaHindi or EnglishinterlinguaTamil. One benefit of an interlingua would be that adding a new language would be an O(1) operation rather than O(N), where you already have N languages. Another is that it centralizes many assumptions in one place, where they can be better subjected to scrutiny and peer review.
An open-source translator would be an excellent thing. It would be a boon for Internet access to many people throughout the world who would otherwise miss out.
BTW, I got 2/3 of the way thru your post before I learned that you weren't a native English speaker, and that only because you specifically mentioned it.
Ronnie Horesh, an economist in New Zealand, proposed an idea called social policy bonds to bring free-market forces to bear on social problems. The idea in a nutshell is this:
In this scheme, bond holders have no incentive to compete with one another. When one wins, all win.To move this to OSS development, it must be privatized. I must be able to issue a bond as an individual. So I place my chunk of money in escrow, possibly with one of the e-cash outfits, and in return I get an unforgeable certificate, which I sell on eBay or elsewhere.
The escrow agency which holds my money must be trusted by everybody, and it needs to be able to create an unforgeable transferrable certificate. A sufficiently large e-cash outfit should meet both criteria.
The free market is a wonderful thing, and you don't want to discard the parts of it that work well. It's not unreasonable to offer compensation to somebody to write a useful piece of software.
I recently came across a proposal by an economist (in the UK, I think) called "social policy bonds", which is applicable here. His proposal was that the government would create a financial instrument (a piece of paper) which could be redeemed for a fixed amount of money when some measurable social goal was fulfilled. Once the bonds were created, they would be auctioned to the highest bidder. A further free-market tweak could be put on the idea: bonds are issued by individuals rather than the government. Rather than collected tax dollars, an individual puts a chunk of cash in escrow with a private financial institute, which gives the individual a certificate serving the same function. If the condition is met, anybody can redeem the certificate and take the money out of escrow. (Until that time, the escrow agency can invest the money, or collect interest on it.)
I've discussed this idea with a couple of banks in my area and they aren't interested in acting as escrow agents. The idea is too wierd and new for them. Maybe I'll try insurance companies. The viability of a certificate is contingent upon the reputation of the escrow agent.
A similar instrument could be used in place of Software Carpentry's competition. It would remove the stipulation that only one person could prosper for each goal. People would be able to profit by contributing to the efforts of others. As with shares of stock, all the owners have an incentive to cooperate to cause the price of the shares to rise.
The economist who originated this idea is named Ronnie Horesh. His proposal goes into much greater detail than I have done here. It's a cool idea, probably useful for many different goals.
There is a precedent for positive feedback in games, particularly drinking games. Many drinking games require the player to do something tricky, like reciting a tongue twister, and take a drink if he fails. More drinks make it harder to do the tricky thing, hence positive feedback.
in response to:
I hope that... we'd put an end to slaughtering sentient creatures...
I think the important distinction from a moral standpoint is sentient. Animals suffer because they have brains and nervous systems. If we learn to grow bovine muscles in a tank with no nerves connected, can they really be said to suffer? I can't see how, unless you're willing to consider the "suffering" of individual cells.
A gentler intro to nanomedicine is available here, in an earlier book.
One of the interesting ideas from Freitas's book is the respirocyte, an artificial red blood cell with a much higher oxygen-carrying capacity than the biological version. A person with respirocytes in his bloodstream could sit on the bottom of a swimming pool for nearly four hours.
Why didn't these agents bust Radio Shack, which sells walkie-talkies that could also be used for surveillance? Oh right, the bully rule: only bully people much weaker so that there will be no chance of their effectively fighting back. It's good to see that the government has the keen grasp of bullying that was available to some of the seven-year-olds I remember growing up with. Gee, I hope the IRS operates at or above this level of maturity.
Besides, isn't this the same government that promotes surveillance at every possible opportunity, and erodes the privacy of private citizens whenver possible? Aren't these the same guys who read 1984 and drool? When the heck would they have decided that surveillance ought to be a crime?
It's of course great to see Linux making yet another advance into the mainstream and I applaud that, and expect it to benefit both the OS and humanity in general. I just don't see where this is a good business decision for Intel.
Sterling talks about gizmos using the same language that people use when discussing RAD languages or scripting languages. That seems (aside from his small amount of OS and posthuman rhetoric) to be his main idea here. Consumers are supposed to cobble together their own widgets in Lego-&-duct-tape fashion, and swap recipes on the Internet, like birdhouse builders publishing blueprints in hobbyist magazines. Sounds like a cool idea to me, the trick will be designing or marketing the construction toy that makes it possible.
Proteins need to fold up in characteristic ways because they do so many different jobs in the cell, both as builders and as structural materials themselves.
DNA needs to be able to fit nicely into chromosomes that don't have sharp edges that might puncture the nuclear wall. Maybe the DNA would give before the wall did, but then you'd have chromosome damage which isn't a wonderful thing. There may be other constraints on how DNA decides to fold, I don't know what they are.
To the best of my knowledge, the business of DSP chips started with Texas Instruments' TMS320C10, a quirky little 16-bit processor with a 4-deep hardware return stack, built around a multiply-accumulator (MAC). The MAC meant that the chip could be very efficient for performing vector dot products, which are the inner loop in all the DSP operations. There were many (fairly ugly) hardware hacks embedded in the 320C10 to make sure that dot products were as fast as possible, at the expense of anything like elegance or comprehensibility. When my boss handed me the 320C10 data sheet in 1983 and asked if I wanted to work with the thing, I cringed.
Since then, Texas Instruments is still quite prominent in the DSP chip business, but they've been joined by others like Analog Devices, National Semiconductor, and Motorola. DSPs now come in a range of prices and capabilities, and you can get both fixed-point and floating-point DSPs. As with the rest of the semiconductor industry, DSPs have been steadily increasing in speed and complexity.
The MMX extensions to the Pentium processor was a move in the direction of on-chip DSP. The G4 processor is a PowerPC core with an on-chip VLIW DSP. You could stretch the analogy and say that off-chip math coprocessors like the 80387 and the 68881/2 are a similar idea.
DSPs are useful in modems because of the kind of math used for picking signals out of noise, and for decoding bits from the extracted signal. I took a course on detection and estimation once, and the math is fascinating, but it's definitely not the only thing DSPs can do.
So you have this old assumption that the rich exclusively own the means of production and the workers and the poor are entirely out of the loop, but the validity of that assumption is starting to crumble, and it is taking the distinction between workers and owners with it. The process is only in its very early stages, and it is still true that the overwhelming majority of capital is held by the small minority of the wealthy. Still, it's a good and interesting thing.
The disparity between rich and poor does no favors to capitalism or the free market. People fret over class divisions, and plan acts of violence, instead of engaging in fruitful voluntary trade.
If the ownership of capital were more or less evenly distributed throughout society (and we appear to be moving in that direction), I think we might find ourselves in the paradise Marx hoped for. But maybe we can get there by free market mechanisms rather than violent revolutions and central control.