The problem with nanotechnology is that we don't really understand why much of it works, and we don't have any idea how the special properties it has will affect our bodies.
There are actually two separate issues here. The troublesome complexity is rarely with a new technology, it is with the body's reaction to it. The human body is very complex, much more complex than most new technologies.
When you say we don't really understand why much of it works, that's usually not true. We usually have a pretty good idea why it does what we want it to do, the trouble is with why it does other things, that is, how it interacts with our very complex bodies.
The "fix" for that is to develop a really complete understanding of human biology. Right now the best initiative in that direction is the efforts to simulate cells. If you had a really accurate simulation involving several different kinds of cells, and some of the interactions between different tissues and organs (or in the really ideal case, a molecule-level simulation of an entire human body), then you could accurately predict which new technologies would be troublesome.
This would have two prerequisites. One is obviously a huge amount of computing power, but that increases every year anyway. The other thing is everything else: the scientific knowledge to get it started, the software engineering discipline to get it through years of QA cycles until it's debugged, the social and political work of making the idea palatable to whoever would need to buy in.
Good simulations are probably the closest thing one can get to commoditized insight. When we get good biosims, they'll revolutionize medical practice and vastly extend longevity. I hope I live long enough to take advantage of that.
I, unlinke our government, will continue to observe the law of the constitution over all others.
Now what did we learn over the last couple of years? Those things you learned about in school like the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions are GUIDELINES. Wealthy people shouldn't fret about having their style cramped by quaint old notions of what's legal or illegal. Go back and watch "Revenge of the Sith" again - legal systems are temporary band-aids to be used until somebody comes along with the brains and money to really get a handle on things.
it seems like a human is still needed for the final construction. I wouldn't consider this self replicating because it is not autonomous.
You're right, a human is needed and it's not autonomous in the strict sense. But it's not really an exercise in truly autonomous robotics, it's an exercise in helping the developing world. Another approach would be to set up machine shops in villages, and train the villagers, and transfer ownership to the villages when they had built all the tools for two more machine shops.
If this could be done with traditional machine shop tools, they wouldn't need to invent lots of new technology. I bet they're smart enough to see that, so it must not be possible to do it with traditional machine tools.
This is really a very cool idea. What needs to happen next is to build up some kind of Peace-Corps-like organization to support its deployment, and whatever training will be required. This should be a 501(c)3 so they can get tax-deductible donations. Actually they could set up the 501(c)3 before they're ready for deployment, to support their development effort.
There's nothing wrong with the education system, or what Johnny can or can't do at the moment, that won't resolve itself overnight if we can fix the real reasons America is slipping, which are outsourcing, outsourcing, and outsourcing. Because there's no demand for American programmers, there is no selection pressure to kill off crappy education. As soon as a selection pressure appears, the good and bad educational institutions will be sorted immediately.
We can't blame outsourcing on Indian or Chinese programmers. They're doing what's good for themselves and their families. We could blame corporations, but corporations never listen to criticism, even from shareholders, and certainly not from Slashdot comments.
What would work would be corporate tax breaks for creating American jobs. Bigger would be better, but they don't have to be huge. There may be many thousands of jobs where the difference in utility between hiring an American and outsourcing just isn't that large, and a small incentive would push it back to the American worker.
Another thing that might help would be a system of labelling that tells how many American jobs were involved in the manufacture of a product. How you guarantee the accuracy of such labels is a question; corporations will face incentives to lie about the numbers.
I would like to someday see "open" phones... Electronics companies, go on making the hardware.
That's a good idea. You can get a little close to that with the Treo, which has an SD card slot and for which you can get (or write your own) third-party apps.
It's not just "electronics" companies, however. A hardware manufacturer builds the physical phone (like Motorola or LGE), a carrier maintains towers and sells you a plan (like Verizon or Cingular). Something like this needs to be negotiated with both of them if you want an affordable cell phone that works in existing networks.
To satisfy them, the API will need to bury some things you might wish you could play with. With GPRS, you could provide a POSIX-like API for networking services (SMS looks a lot like email). Carriers like a lot of control over the UI, so when their marketing people decide that you should be able to press a single button to wirelessly put movie tickets on your Visa card, they can implement that, ideally reprogramming your phone's UI over the air.
If you want a really open phone, don't depend on existing cell networks. Build your own wifi/voip gadget. Move to one of those cities that's wifi-everywhere, if you're not already living in one. Open-source your gadget because it will be useless if you have the only one. Cost-reduce it as much as you can. Prototype it with PCs and laptops so everybody can get to participate in developing (and forking) the UI. Maintain clear divisions between protocols and apps/implementations so that people can roll their own as much as possible.
I'd want anyone to be free to do that in an unrestricted, royalty free fashion
As the patent holder you can certainly stipulate that, just as a copyright holder has a choice of license terms, and can even release a work under two contradictory licenses at the same time (e.g. GPL and proprietary).
Let me suggest a reverse-license-fee scheme. Decide how much money you're willing to spend on nut-kicking, and permit first N people to use your patented nut-kicking technique only if they accept a small payment. Subsequent nut-kickers could still be allowed royalty-free nut-kicking.
beat him senseless with a 1960s-vintage officially licensed STAR TREK (tm) PHASER.
HOLY FRIGGIN CHRIST, they HAVE those?? Where can I get one?
Too bad about whatshisname getting beat. Do they have tricorders too? Damn, I always thought the tricorder was so totally hot. Would we even have PDAs now if there hadn't been tricorders on the show?
While the actor that played Spock could really play the role as if he had not emotions, Blalock plays T'Pol as if T'Pol is always angry
There are two ways to think about Vulcan emotions. (1) Vulcans are totally incapable of having any emotions at all. The part of the brain responsible for emotions in Terran mammals is absent in the Vulcan brain. (2) Vulcans have emotions but train themselves to suppress them, considering them distasteful and/or dangerous.
You want theory number one. Nimoy often played Spock in the direction of theory number one in the original series. But whenever they dug a little deeper, they always came to theory number two. The history of ancient war-like Vulcans rendered peaceful by a philosophy of logic, the mental discipline that would be unnecessary if emotions were impossible for them, and the numerous times when Spock's composure fails and he laughs or cries, or whines about needing to suppress his emotions.
Blalock does a brilliant job with T'Pol. She doesn't waste a minute on theory number one. T'Pol has emotions, and like every Vulcan, maintains an effort to suppress them. Most of what she has felt toward humans, esp. early in the series, has been disdain (remember the episode in the Vulcan monastery where she complains about how they smell). Over time she realizes that she'll be spending a lot of time around humans, and loathing them is only going to burden her effort to suppress, so her disdain diminishes. Effortful suppression handles the effects of an emotion that has already arisen, but T'Pol's more effective strategy is to uproot the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to it, which she does by becoming completely familiar with humans, so that their bad smells and habits no longer arouse any response in her. (Hence the appropriateness that the Vulcan monastery was full of Theravadin statuary.)
Blalock has conveyed this entire process almost entirely non-verbally. She has a way with nuance and subtlety that the other actors on the show can't touch. I think Jolene Blalock may one day take a place among actresses like Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman and Emma Thompson. Terry Ferrell and Jeri Ryan won't be doing that.
Crichton should just admit he knows very little about real science
Go back a few decades when he was at the top of his game. Then his science was fairly believable. I suspect that he's now coasting on his memories of an education long past.
So we can decelerate outsourcing if we can make it easier to immigrate. Presumably these guys are smart enough to prefer immigration if they can get it. And as you say, corporations will fight against lowering the barriers to immigration.
An alternative (maybe more consistent with the long-term economic equilibrium) would be to raise living expenses in the developing world by making nicer houses there, making people there wealthier, and generally changing it from "developing" to "developed". The first rational incentive to give to charities I've heard that wasn't a tax deduction.
Interesting. Thanks for posting a response where I learned something new. I hadn't been keeping up with how H1B visas work (not being in the Bay Area, I'm relatively unaffected by it).
he has to pay them less because more will be willing to work for less.
If they stay in India/China/wherever, he can still hire them - that's called "outsourcing" - and he can pay them even less than when they're living here. Every time one of them comes to the U.S., it's one less opportunity for outsourcing. Outsourcing is much worse for you and me than if they just come here and take domestic jobs. The reason is that their living expenses here are similar to yours and mine, so they require salaries that are smaller (since they're frugal, and abused) but not as tiny as if the work is outsourced.
Bill Gates, richest man in the world (almost), who made his fortune with the help of American developers, now wants to bring a million Indians in to destroy the U.S. software industry as a job prospect for his own countrymen.
Suppose he leaves those million Indians in India, where they work for much cheaper because housing and other expenses are much lower. Since they have the Internet in India, it's easy for corporations to send programming work over to those million instead of giving it to to American workers. By leaving the million in India, we make life harder, not easier, for American programmers.
If those million come to America, they have to buy houses and cars at American prices, and get loans and mortgages at American rates. Now that their living expenses roughly match yours, they need a salary that roughly matches yours. They're habitually frugal, so it's lower, but not ridiculously mind-bogglingly lower, as it would be if they'd stayed home. Living here, they're a much smaller competitive threat than if they stay home.
Their actual nationality doesn't matter much - what matters most is where they are living, which determines their expenses. If you could go to India and work there (which you could, were it not for Indian labor laws regarding immigrants), you'd enjoy about the same competitive advantage they get by staying home.
You're OK on this. Gates is anti-Bush on this one. Bush would prefer to leave those engineers in other countries, where living expenses are cheap, so that corporations can cheaply outsource work to them. If we bring them over here, as Gates wants to do, they'll get salaries much closer to yours and mine, and represent much less of a competitive threat to you and me.
I don't know why Gates isn't lining up behind Bush on this; you'd think outsourcing lines Gates's pockets as much as anybody else's. But it's interesting to realize Bush is actually more evil than Gates.
It's unpopular to agree with Gates about anything, but he's right
about this. When a foreign-born engineer comes to the U.S., that
engineer must pay the same prices for a house or a car that I pay.
Therefore they will require a salary in the same ballpark as mine,
rather than the teeny salary they might live on back home. The
question of whether or not an engineer was born in the U.S. is
actually irrelevant to the economics of job competition. What matters
is where they live, because that dictates their living expenses, and
therefore their salary.
By maintaining caps on visas, we encourage outsourcing. Here's a
logical-extreme thought experiment: we remove all limits on
immigration, and every engineer in the world decides to move to the
U.S. As a result outsourcing ceases because there are no engineers
outside the U.S. to outsource work to.
TFA says "Congress capped the number of non-immigrant visas for
skilled professionals [to] ensure more jobs for home-grown tech
workers." But the economics don't work that way: by capping visas,
they move jobs overseas. I'm cynical enough to believe that was the
real intent, since the corporate owners of our politicians want to
preserve a healthy outsourcing market.
if the proof is too long to be checked, then it is flawed? WTF?
Presumably the idea that a proof can be independently verified by somebody else (and for that matter, understood by another human) is the mathematical version of peer review. If a proof is not human-understandable, then it's not really a contribution to human knowledge.
Remember the open-source argument that you wouldn't buy a car whose hood was welded shut. Even if you don't know squat about engines yourself, you can take it to a mechanic who does, and he can work on it. Given that the "open source" idea in software grew out of the "open inquiry" idea in academia, the parallel is more than accidental.
A conspiracy theorist would fret about the day when computers know things we humans don't. But computers already process lots of information that humans don't see; this concealment is tolerable because the information is uninteresting. The scary thing is that "interesting" (say, life-or-death) information might be withheld by a computer, if only because it's simply incomprehensible to you or me.
But the surgeon and the airline pilot are already in this position. We just have to trust their good intentions in using their many years of specialized training. We don't fear this situation because surgeons and pilots are human, and they work with human assistants. We expect that 99.9% of the time their motives will be comprehensible, and their work environment will be too info-porous to permit a big conspiracy. At the least, the number of successful conspiracies will be small.
So there's a kind of giant-brained Frankenstein phobia happening here. What might resolve it would be to develop tools allowing mathematicians to break these proofs into reasonable chunks (maybe 1000 "obvious" steps), verify those independently, and then verify that those fit together to form a correct proof.
What you're talking about is the very first experience anybody ever has with an oscilloscope. You're pretty much saying that a research team at a large Japanese electronics corporation has never been in an electronics lab in their lives, and yet said large corporation is ready to issue a press release about their work. I'm doubtful that's the case.
With a little filtering, you can pretty easily find a frequency band where the noise floor is adequately low. And if noise is still a problem, use code modulation (ala CDMA). For long enough codes, it give very good noise immunity and you can slap an error-correcting code on top of that. Then there's all that stuff in the TCP protocol. Noticing and fixing flipped bits is a pretty thoroughly studied problem.
I'm a fan of Niven and Doctorow. But there are lots of good SF authors out there, and it's not a huge mystery which ones they are. Why not just pick some of the best writing that exists, and do that show? And if the author wants a fat royalty, make sure he or she gets it. It will be worth it.
Look what happened with Earth Final Conflict. Roddenberry had a back-of-the-envelope idea that could deliver maybe two episodes, and from that point on, it was talentless hackery on autopilot. If somebody started with the Known Space stuff, or serialized Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for the first N weeks, it could be a long time before switching over to the talentless hacks, and they'd have a bunch of good writing to imitate. The stench might take quite a while to become noticeable.
What would it take to get a story like this onto the desk of every Gates-worshipping, MSFT-stock-owning, spyware-infested-Windows-machine-running, Gartner-Group-report-reading, pointy-haired boss?
He's not reading, he's just looking at the pictures. Oh wait, his lips are moving, so he's at least trying to read. Come back later and ask him questions about the contents to see how he did.
There's a big difference between mass-produced aluminum-layer CDs and CD-Rs that you burn on your PC. The mass-produced aluminum-layer CD really will be listenable by your great-great-grandkids; CD-Rs have much shorter lives.
If nobody bothers to mass-produce CDs any more, we lose that archive. We've been in that boat before with vinyl records, and it's not the end of the world, but it's easy for cool stuff to be lost unless somebody takes an interest and maintains it.
those of us who occasionally turn away from the various glass teats appreciate hearing about things that may have happened more than five minutes ago.
I am deeply offended and resent your implication that -- hey, look at that bird! Oh look, I must have been reading Slashdot. What the hell is this guy -- hey, I'm offended by that! What is this piece of string doing here?
I thought "holographic" meant that the movies would be stored on the disk in some VRML-like 3d format so that they could be projected like Princess Leia talking to R2D2, or the movie viewer could move the camera around the action. If there's going to be that much storage capacity on the disk anyway, wouldn't it be interesting to do something like this? In fact, don't machinima movies do something a little like this, where the network traffic is 3D model representations of the scene, and one machine positions the camera and renders the result for video recording? So the video bandwidth doesn't need to be any more than a typical LAN, 100 mbits per second. That should be pretty doable.
Slashdot Mirror
There are actually two separate issues here. The troublesome complexity is rarely with a new technology, it is with the body's reaction to it. The human body is very complex, much more complex than most new technologies.
When you say we don't really understand why much of it works, that's usually not true. We usually have a pretty good idea why it does what we want it to do, the trouble is with why it does other things, that is, how it interacts with our very complex bodies.
The "fix" for that is to develop a really complete understanding of human biology. Right now the best initiative in that direction is the efforts to simulate cells. If you had a really accurate simulation involving several different kinds of cells, and some of the interactions between different tissues and organs (or in the really ideal case, a molecule-level simulation of an entire human body), then you could accurately predict which new technologies would be troublesome.
This would have two prerequisites. One is obviously a huge amount of computing power, but that increases every year anyway. The other thing is everything else: the scientific knowledge to get it started, the software engineering discipline to get it through years of QA cycles until it's debugged, the social and political work of making the idea palatable to whoever would need to buy in.
Good simulations are probably the closest thing one can get to commoditized insight. When we get good biosims, they'll revolutionize medical practice and vastly extend longevity. I hope I live long enough to take advantage of that.
Now what did we learn over the last couple of years? Those things you learned about in school like the Constitution or the Geneva Conventions are GUIDELINES. Wealthy people shouldn't fret about having their style cramped by quaint old notions of what's legal or illegal. Go back and watch "Revenge of the Sith" again - legal systems are temporary band-aids to be used until somebody comes along with the brains and money to really get a handle on things.
You're right, a human is needed and it's not autonomous in the strict sense. But it's not really an exercise in truly autonomous robotics, it's an exercise in helping the developing world. Another approach would be to set up machine shops in villages, and train the villagers, and transfer ownership to the villages when they had built all the tools for two more machine shops.
If this could be done with traditional machine shop tools, they wouldn't need to invent lots of new technology. I bet they're smart enough to see that, so it must not be possible to do it with traditional machine tools.
This is really a very cool idea. What needs to happen next is to build up some kind of Peace-Corps-like organization to support its deployment, and whatever training will be required. This should be a 501(c)3 so they can get tax-deductible donations. Actually they could set up the 501(c)3 before they're ready for deployment, to support their development effort.
We can't blame outsourcing on Indian or Chinese programmers. They're doing what's good for themselves and their families. We could blame corporations, but corporations never listen to criticism, even from shareholders, and certainly not from Slashdot comments.
What would work would be corporate tax breaks for creating American jobs. Bigger would be better, but they don't have to be huge. There may be many thousands of jobs where the difference in utility between hiring an American and outsourcing just isn't that large, and a small incentive would push it back to the American worker.
Another thing that might help would be a system of labelling that tells how many American jobs were involved in the manufacture of a product. How you guarantee the accuracy of such labels is a question; corporations will face incentives to lie about the numbers.
- http://www.voip-news.com/1/voipwifi.htm
- http://www.zyxel.com/product/P2000W.php
- http://www.vonage.com/
- http://www.webopedia.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2005
/ voIP_WiFi.asp
- http://digital-lifestyles.info/display_page.asp?s
e ction=platforms&id=1761
- http://www.voipsupply.com/home.php
- http://www.voipuser.org/forum_topic_1072.html
- http://www.voip-info.org/tiki-index.php
What appears to be missing is the open-source version, but with all these open protocols, it should be feasible.That's a good idea. You can get a little close to that with the Treo, which has an SD card slot and for which you can get (or write your own) third-party apps.
It's not just "electronics" companies, however. A hardware manufacturer builds the physical phone (like Motorola or LGE), a carrier maintains towers and sells you a plan (like Verizon or Cingular). Something like this needs to be negotiated with both of them if you want an affordable cell phone that works in existing networks.
To satisfy them, the API will need to bury some things you might wish you could play with. With GPRS, you could provide a POSIX-like API for networking services (SMS looks a lot like email). Carriers like a lot of control over the UI, so when their marketing people decide that you should be able to press a single button to wirelessly put movie tickets on your Visa card, they can implement that, ideally reprogramming your phone's UI over the air.
If you want a really open phone, don't depend on existing cell networks. Build your own wifi/voip gadget. Move to one of those cities that's wifi-everywhere, if you're not already living in one. Open-source your gadget because it will be useless if you have the only one. Cost-reduce it as much as you can. Prototype it with PCs and laptops so everybody can get to participate in developing (and forking) the UI. Maintain clear divisions between protocols and apps/implementations so that people can roll their own as much as possible.
That's OK, as long as they have visible raster scan lines.
As the patent holder you can certainly stipulate that, just as a copyright holder has a choice of license terms, and can even release a work under two contradictory licenses at the same time (e.g. GPL and proprietary).
Let me suggest a reverse-license-fee scheme. Decide how much money you're willing to spend on nut-kicking, and permit first N people to use your patented nut-kicking technique only if they accept a small payment. Subsequent nut-kickers could still be allowed royalty-free nut-kicking.
This will a month long remembered. It has seen the end of Roddenberry, it will soon see the end of the Star Wars franchise.
HOLY FRIGGIN CHRIST, they HAVE those?? Where can I get one?
Too bad about whatshisname getting beat. Do they have tricorders too? Damn, I always thought the tricorder was so totally hot. Would we even have PDAs now if there hadn't been tricorders on the show?
There are two ways to think about Vulcan emotions. (1) Vulcans are totally incapable of having any emotions at all. The part of the brain responsible for emotions in Terran mammals is absent in the Vulcan brain. (2) Vulcans have emotions but train themselves to suppress them, considering them distasteful and/or dangerous.
You want theory number one. Nimoy often played Spock in the direction of theory number one in the original series. But whenever they dug a little deeper, they always came to theory number two. The history of ancient war-like Vulcans rendered peaceful by a philosophy of logic, the mental discipline that would be unnecessary if emotions were impossible for them, and the numerous times when Spock's composure fails and he laughs or cries, or whines about needing to suppress his emotions.
Blalock does a brilliant job with T'Pol. She doesn't waste a minute on theory number one. T'Pol has emotions, and like every Vulcan, maintains an effort to suppress them. Most of what she has felt toward humans, esp. early in the series, has been disdain (remember the episode in the Vulcan monastery where she complains about how they smell). Over time she realizes that she'll be spending a lot of time around humans, and loathing them is only going to burden her effort to suppress, so her disdain diminishes. Effortful suppression handles the effects of an emotion that has already arisen, but T'Pol's more effective strategy is to uproot the cognitive mechanisms that give rise to it, which she does by becoming completely familiar with humans, so that their bad smells and habits no longer arouse any response in her. (Hence the appropriateness that the Vulcan monastery was full of Theravadin statuary.)
Blalock has conveyed this entire process almost entirely non-verbally. She has a way with nuance and subtlety that the other actors on the show can't touch. I think Jolene Blalock may one day take a place among actresses like Meryl Streep and Nicole Kidman and Emma Thompson. Terry Ferrell and Jeri Ryan won't be doing that.
Go back a few decades when he was at the top of his game. Then his science was fairly believable. I suspect that he's now coasting on his memories of an education long past.
An alternative (maybe more consistent with the long-term economic equilibrium) would be to raise living expenses in the developing world by making nicer houses there, making people there wealthier, and generally changing it from "developing" to "developed". The first rational incentive to give to charities I've heard that wasn't a tax deduction.
Interesting. Thanks for posting a response where I learned something new. I hadn't been keeping up with how H1B visas work (not being in the Bay Area, I'm relatively unaffected by it).
If they stay in India/China/wherever, he can still hire them - that's called "outsourcing" - and he can pay them even less than when they're living here. Every time one of them comes to the U.S., it's one less opportunity for outsourcing. Outsourcing is much worse for you and me than if they just come here and take domestic jobs. The reason is that their living expenses here are similar to yours and mine, so they require salaries that are smaller (since they're frugal, and abused) but not as tiny as if the work is outsourced.
Suppose he leaves those million Indians in India, where they work for much cheaper because housing and other expenses are much lower. Since they have the Internet in India, it's easy for corporations to send programming work over to those million instead of giving it to to American workers. By leaving the million in India, we make life harder, not easier, for American programmers.
If those million come to America, they have to buy houses and cars at American prices, and get loans and mortgages at American rates. Now that their living expenses roughly match yours, they need a salary that roughly matches yours. They're habitually frugal, so it's lower, but not ridiculously mind-bogglingly lower, as it would be if they'd stayed home. Living here, they're a much smaller competitive threat than if they stay home.
Their actual nationality doesn't matter much - what matters most is where they are living, which determines their expenses. If you could go to India and work there (which you could, were it not for Indian labor laws regarding immigrants), you'd enjoy about the same competitive advantage they get by staying home.
You're OK on this. Gates is anti-Bush on this one. Bush would prefer to leave those engineers in other countries, where living expenses are cheap, so that corporations can cheaply outsource work to them. If we bring them over here, as Gates wants to do, they'll get salaries much closer to yours and mine, and represent much less of a competitive threat to you and me.
I don't know why Gates isn't lining up behind Bush on this; you'd think outsourcing lines Gates's pockets as much as anybody else's. But it's interesting to realize Bush is actually more evil than Gates.
By maintaining caps on visas, we encourage outsourcing. Here's a logical-extreme thought experiment: we remove all limits on immigration, and every engineer in the world decides to move to the U.S. As a result outsourcing ceases because there are no engineers outside the U.S. to outsource work to.
TFA says "Congress capped the number of non-immigrant visas for skilled professionals [to] ensure more jobs for home-grown tech workers." But the economics don't work that way: by capping visas, they move jobs overseas. I'm cynical enough to believe that was the real intent, since the corporate owners of our politicians want to preserve a healthy outsourcing market.
Presumably the idea that a proof can be independently verified by somebody else (and for that matter, understood by another human) is the mathematical version of peer review. If a proof is not human-understandable, then it's not really a contribution to human knowledge.
Remember the open-source argument that you wouldn't buy a car whose hood was welded shut. Even if you don't know squat about engines yourself, you can take it to a mechanic who does, and he can work on it. Given that the "open source" idea in software grew out of the "open inquiry" idea in academia, the parallel is more than accidental.
A conspiracy theorist would fret about the day when computers know things we humans don't. But computers already process lots of information that humans don't see; this concealment is tolerable because the information is uninteresting. The scary thing is that "interesting" (say, life-or-death) information might be withheld by a computer, if only because it's simply incomprehensible to you or me.
But the surgeon and the airline pilot are already in this position. We just have to trust their good intentions in using their many years of specialized training. We don't fear this situation because surgeons and pilots are human, and they work with human assistants. We expect that 99.9% of the time their motives will be comprehensible, and their work environment will be too info-porous to permit a big conspiracy. At the least, the number of successful conspiracies will be small.
So there's a kind of giant-brained Frankenstein phobia happening here. What might resolve it would be to develop tools allowing mathematicians to break these proofs into reasonable chunks (maybe 1000 "obvious" steps), verify those independently, and then verify that those fit together to form a correct proof.
With a little filtering, you can pretty easily find a frequency band where the noise floor is adequately low. And if noise is still a problem, use code modulation (ala CDMA). For long enough codes, it give very good noise immunity and you can slap an error-correcting code on top of that. Then there's all that stuff in the TCP protocol. Noticing and fixing flipped bits is a pretty thoroughly studied problem.
Look what happened with Earth Final Conflict. Roddenberry had a back-of-the-envelope idea that could deliver maybe two episodes, and from that point on, it was talentless hackery on autopilot. If somebody started with the Known Space stuff, or serialized Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for the first N weeks, it could be a long time before switching over to the talentless hacks, and they'd have a bunch of good writing to imitate. The stench might take quite a while to become noticeable.
He's not reading, he's just looking at the pictures. Oh wait, his lips are moving, so he's at least trying to read. Come back later and ask him questions about the contents to see how he did.
If nobody bothers to mass-produce CDs any more, we lose that archive. We've been in that boat before with vinyl records, and it's not the end of the world, but it's easy for cool stuff to be lost unless somebody takes an interest and maintains it.
I am deeply offended and resent your implication that -- hey, look at that bird! Oh look, I must have been reading Slashdot. What the hell is this guy -- hey, I'm offended by that! What is this piece of string doing here?
Don't you mean these Internet thingies? Do we even know how many of these Internets there are?
I thought "holographic" meant that the movies would be stored on the disk in some VRML-like 3d format so that they could be projected like Princess Leia talking to R2D2, or the movie viewer could move the camera around the action. If there's going to be that much storage capacity on the disk anyway, wouldn't it be interesting to do something like this? In fact, don't machinima movies do something a little like this, where the network traffic is 3D model representations of the scene, and one machine positions the camera and renders the result for video recording? So the video bandwidth doesn't need to be any more than a typical LAN, 100 mbits per second. That should be pretty doable.