Someday, I want to have a little digital appliance, that fits in my pocket. I want it to do a lot of things, and I want to take it with me everywhere:
cellphone/satellite phone
digital camera
audio player/recorder
gps
mapquest style maps and directions for all of Earth, including topo maps of remote regions for backpacking etc.
I want to be able to load books into it, especially field guides (plants animals)
it should use wireless communication, and encrypt it all
of course it should do addressbook/schedule/calendar/notebook stuff, and I should be able to allow other trusted parties to enter things (remotely over the network) to the database of things inside my applicance, when they change their address or phone number for instance.
It will use a reflective media for display, and run on rechargeable batteries, or a tiny fuelcell. I want something that I can take into the field with me for months at a time, so I need to be able to recharge it with solar cells, or carry a bottle of fuel for the fuel cell.
I should be able to use it to open my garage door, or control my stereo, or do any other radio/IR transmission I need
Alternatively, for display, it should be able to communicate to a wireless HUD invisibly concealed in my glasses (or my head eventually), similarly, there should be a wireless headset.
Ideally, it would all be waterproof and shock resistant too, with upgreadeable software and hardware
Things need to get smaller, faster, and more power efficient. I kind of suspect we'll see things like this in our lifetimes though. And I'll be willing to shell out a couple of thousand dollars for it when it comes.
I remember seeing a show on these things on the Discovery Channel at some point. There were several parts. The tiny implant that they actually put inside, and microphone which you wear on your ear, and then the processing unit that you wear on your belt. The processor communicated with the implant using a radio transmitter... In this application, of course, it was a very low power radio transmitter. But I don't see any reason you couldn't hook a similar thing into, say, the cell phone network... or your stereo system. Then you'd really have "voices in your head".
Additionally, they've found that people reading to themselves make "subvocalizations" - the muscles in your throat that control your voice fire, just not very strongly. Imagine if you could somehow translate those impulses into the words that you were subvocalizing, and transmit them via radio to these implants... It would almost be like telepathy.
Just imagine the fight to keep *that* traffic encrypted with keys outside the government's hands, and the price for advertizing space in your mind...
I thought it was interesting that the Discovery Channel chose not to explore any of these possibilities in their show, and instead focused on the (in my opinion strange) backlash within the deaf community against the assumption that these implants were good for deaf kids. They held that being deaf wasn't a "defect" that needed to be fixed.
Personally, I'd jump at the chance to extend my senses, either up to normal (glasses?) or beyond!
Seriously, these are words to terrify governments. What you describe, is the act of sedition. As per WordNet:
SeditionSe*di"tion, n. OE. sedicioun, OF. sedition, F. s'edition, fr. L. seditio, originally, a going aside;
hence, an insurrectionary separation; pref. se-, sed-, aside + itio a going, fr. ire, itum, to go. Cf. Issue.
1. The raising of commotion in a state, not amounting to insurrection; conduct tending to treason, but without an overt act; excitement of discontent against the government, or of resistance to lawful authority.
In soothing them, we nourish 'gainst our senate The cockle of rebellion, insolence, sedition.
--Shakespeare
Noisy demagogues who had been accused of sedition.
--Macaulay.
Of course, founding a government on the idea that sedition is okay, and in some cases even necessary, is, well, a little iffy to say the least. But that's not to say I don't agree!
I wonder, if you had asked the framers of the Constitution to predict how long it would be until the government they were instituting would be toppled by revolution from within, what would they have said?
We, apparently alone among all species on Earth, have the potential to consciously direct our own evolution. This opens up places to us in evolutionary space that would never be open to a "naturally" evolved organism. Whereas natural evolution can only ever go uphill monotonically - each generation has to be better than the last for its genes to survive, with never a drop in fitness - we will have the ability to make leaps upward, across local minima. We will be able to look at a survival problem that might be insurmountable in a million years of darwinian evolution, and solve it in one generation. To turn our backs on this gift and let our species languish would, in my opinion, be the unethical behaviour.
Are we there yet? No. Not even close. This is only the beginning. Will things be wierd? Yes. Horribly, wonderfully wierd. But hopefully not catastrophically wierd.
As H.G. Wells said in "Things to Come" (1936). Our choices are "All the Universe, or nothing. Which shall it be?"
That's right. It's as easy to get as candy, and even goes by the street name "skittles". And there's no nasty underground or illegal connotations to go along with it. For $1 to $5, you get the tablet, crush it up, and snort away.
In addition, it is interesting to note that Ciba Geigy (now part of Novartis), which manufactures the stuff, has done a wonderfully covert job of marketing this stuff at parents across the country, by funnelling about a million dollars through the supposedly "grass roots" organization CHADD, which aims to "educate" the public about ADD. In much the same way that the manufacturers of Listerine "educated" the populus about a "disease" called halcytosis. AKA bad breath, about a hundred years ago.
So pop a few tablets in your kids, cure them of their impulsivity, and creativity. Drop them in front of the nearest Cathode Ray Tube, and voila! Parenting can be done even by idiots. And so it is (not that they were prevented from doing it before mind you...)
It's soma. Pure and simple. Brave new world, here we come...
You are correct that the perception of crime in the US is much higher than in other countries. However, if you actually look at the statistics, I think you will be suprised:
563/100,000 people were the victims of violent crime in the US in 1999 (see: the FBI's Statistics)
570/100,000 people were victims of violent crime in the Netherlands in 1999, just about the same as the US! (see: the Netherlands Ministry of Justice)
From an economic point of view, even the
DEA's own statistics clearly state (if you wade around for a while) that the Drug war is just about an economic null-op. i.e. the money we "save" by having these "criminals" off the streets is about the same as the amount of money we spend to put them in prison. So, what the hell? Why are we doing this again?
There is a lot of good that can potentially come from genetic testing, especially when you're testing for conditions that can be avoided through lifestyle changes. But if we opt to use it for good reasons, can we avoid having the same information used for bad reasons? Corporations clearly have a very strong financial incentive to avoid paying worker's comp. If the information is out there, can it really be kept private?
Beyond that, is this even the kind of change that people want in their lives? Do people really want to know what all their genetic weaknesses are? How does that affect the way you think of yourself? The way you live your life?
Of course, we could always work on systematically eradicating the offending genes from our pool. (but that's called eugenics, and it has a bad name for some reason)
Once your genetic profile gets leaked to Freenet, how can you really prove that the company you're interviewing with isn't using it to evaluate you?
Personally, I doubt that our genes will really be very private once detailed genetic profiling becomes cheap and fast(legal or not). And because there are benefits to knowing what your genetic makeup, profiling will eventually become cheap and fast. I don't think people (or the genomics companies) are really investigating the possible downsides. Really, there only needs to be a small set of people willing to pursue this, and it will get done. Wierd world our kids will grow up in.
The doppler shift in the star's spectrum (which
indicates a "wobble" because it's being pulled on
by its companion planet) isn't the only way to detect a planet around a distant star. Recently there have been detections from measuring the change in the brightness of the star as well. When a planet crosses the disk of the star (from our point of view) it gets dimmed just a little, but enough to detect. This site has a list of other methods (current and future) for doing detection of extrasolar planets as well. Coronographs (making a false eclipse by blocking out the star physically, or with adaptive digital techniques) seems like the most promising for the near term.
The possibility of P2P networks has been around for ages, at least at Universities and other persistently connected places. Having been introduced to the Net really for the first time upon entering college (in 1993), it didn't occur to be that my computer was really any different from anyone elses. But I think that's really the way a lot of people do think about it. Here's my little desktop machine, I use to to browse the web, send e-mail, write paperes, play games. I turn it off at night, and that's that. People (not-tech people) drop their jaw in wonder when I tell them I run a webserver from under my desk. Or when I connect to my home computer from work. I am similarly in shock when they "forget to bring a file from home". But none of this is cool enough or inconvenient enough to make people change the way they use the machines.
Enter Napster. Suddenly, everyone has a reason to think of their computer as no different from all the other computers (even if they are going through a centralized server). It becomes clear that there is great utility in being connected, and having access to other machines, both upstream and downstream. Now that the populus has gotten a taste of this, I doubt they'll go back. Napster will be re-implemented as Espra over Freenet, and given the much more generalized architecture, Peer to Peer networks will branch out into all kinds of new spheres of influence. I can't wait to watch it happen!
This isn't as elegant as it seems. Right now, you own a copyright as soon as the work is "fixed", i.e. written down, recorded, or saved in any material way. You don't have to register it (unlike patents). Also, what really constitutes a "work", or unit of copyright for which you would owe $1? Is it one song off an album, or the whole album? One chapter from your book, or the whole book? I post lots of material on my web pages, that is technically copyrighted now, but which, unless I was very diligent, would become public domain very quickly. What if I want to publish it someday? I think this would be a great solution for patents (and other registered IP) though!
I work for the Planetary Science department at Caltech, for a group that wants to do holistic modelling of planetary atmospheres (including the influences of geology and biology, and what kind of star you're orbiting) - so that when we start getting spectra from the atmospheres of extrasolar terrestrial planets some time in the next decade, we'll have a hope of interpreting what these spectra mean - whether they might imply (or at least suggest) life out there.
The current atmospheric model the group uses is about 20,000 lines of FORTRAN that has been hacked on and augmented willy nilly since 1978. And runs primarily on a DEC Alpha running OpenVMS There are no comments in it whatsoever. I'm trying to convince them that it should be re-written from scratch (maybe in a more modern language, for a more widely supported OS, with some comments...) But they (a couple of older professors) seem terrified of letting the code out of their hands, and are having trouble absorbing the idea of version control, among other things.
I'm very frustrated. They're about to get a herd of academics (none of whom has a CS background) working on code with no forethought, and I think I'll go nuts if I have to sit there and implement horrible things for them. Can anyone give me some eloquent ammunition to convince them this needs to be treated like a software engineering project - not atmospheric science?
See www.avlsi.com
for the Asynchronous Digital Design page. (They
are one of the start-ups mentioned in the article) ---------------------------------------- --------
I like to think about human society as a kind of N dimensional bell curve like distribution (gaussian, poisson, etc). For any given characteristic (dimension) there are those people who are near the peak (the vast majority) and those people who are out in the tails (us wierdos). I think that throughout history, as human culture has developed, the tails have been getting wider - i.e. there are more choices out in the periphery, more opportunity to be different. Recently, with the advent of mass media and the global distribution of American "culture";) I think that in addition to this, the peak in the middle has been getting sharper. - there are more people who cling to a very well prescribed set of desires, lifestyles, fashions, motivations. The new Britney Spears CD, the latest shoes made by Nike, Pokemon, the profit motive, consumerism, etc. But at the same time, we out in the tails (the strange ones) are able to communicate with each other, and know that we are not the lone freaks. There are others like us. But because it is impractical to be autonomous - if you find a bunch of other people who are like you, it'd be nice to go off and form your own island nation - we cannot completely develop the other directions we would like to push our society.
In the future, I hope that we will be able to have that autonomy, either through expansion in space, or Libretarian style government (ha!), or some other way to avoid bothering (and being bothered by) those others with whom we disagree. I see it as a more thurough method of exploration of the space of possible cultures. Our society can better evolve then. Once free of strong central social normitive forces, we may be free to direct our society anywhere, especially if we are able to engineer different hardwired behavior into the human brain. What if we had the "mate for life" gene that many birds have? What if we were programmed to behave as more selfless individuals in a collective? What if we were all female? How would expanding the human senses expand the human society? Telepathy (via radio transmitters)? The ability to truly see through other people's eyes? Sonar? Radar? All the knowledge of the world instantly accessible in your head, updated once a day? Some people don't want us to become more than human. We need not fight them to have autonomy, we can leave them alone. Bifurcate society. All this assuming, of course, that we manage to preserve ourselves for the next couple of decades/centuries, until we aren't all in the same place anymore. ---------------------------------------- --------
Slashdot Mirror
Soros is quite an interesting character/organization... we need more of these people.
- cellphone/satellite phone
- digital camera
- audio player/recorder
- gps
- mapquest style maps and directions for all of Earth, including topo maps of remote regions for backpacking etc.
- I want to be able to load books into it, especially field guides (plants animals)
- it should use wireless communication, and encrypt it all
- of course it should do addressbook/schedule/calendar/notebook stuff, and I should be able to allow other trusted parties to enter things (remotely over the network) to the database of things inside my applicance, when they change their address or phone number for instance.
- It will use a reflective media for display, and run on rechargeable batteries, or a tiny fuelcell. I want something that I can take into the field with me for months at a time, so I need to be able to recharge it with solar cells, or carry a bottle of fuel for the fuel cell.
- I should be able to use it to open my garage door, or control my stereo, or do any other radio/IR transmission I need
- Alternatively, for display, it should be able to communicate to a wireless HUD invisibly concealed in my glasses (or my head eventually), similarly, there should be a wireless headset.
- Ideally, it would all be waterproof and shock resistant too, with upgreadeable software and hardware
Things need to get smaller, faster, and more power efficient. I kind of suspect we'll see things like this in our lifetimes though. And I'll be willing to shell out a couple of thousand dollars for it when it comes.--
Additionally, they've found that people reading to themselves make "subvocalizations" - the muscles in your throat that control your voice fire, just not very strongly. Imagine if you could somehow translate those impulses into the words that you were subvocalizing, and transmit them via radio to these implants... It would almost be like telepathy.
Just imagine the fight to keep *that* traffic encrypted with keys outside the government's hands, and the price for advertizing space in your mind...
I thought it was interesting that the Discovery Channel chose not to explore any of these possibilities in their show, and instead focused on the (in my opinion strange) backlash within the deaf community against the assumption that these implants were good for deaf kids. They held that being deaf wasn't a "defect" that needed to be fixed.
Personally, I'd jump at the chance to extend my senses, either up to normal (glasses?) or beyond!
--
I wonder, if you had asked the framers of the Constitution to predict how long it would be until the government they were instituting would be toppled by revolution from within, what would they have said?
---
Are we there yet? No. Not even close. This is only the beginning. Will things be wierd? Yes. Horribly, wonderfully wierd. But hopefully not catastrophically wierd.
As H.G. Wells said in "Things to Come" (1936). Our choices are "All the Universe, or nothing. Which shall it be?"
---
That's right. It's as easy to get as candy, and even goes by the street name "skittles". And there's no nasty underground or illegal connotations to go along with it. For $1 to $5, you get the tablet, crush it up, and snort away.
School Nurses across the country trot from class to class, handing this stuff out like an afternoon snack. It's closely related to Methamphetamines, and has an almost identical list of side effects and warnings.
In addition, it is interesting to note that Ciba Geigy (now part of Novartis), which manufactures the stuff, has done a wonderfully covert job of marketing this stuff at parents across the country, by funnelling about a million dollars through the supposedly "grass roots" organization CHADD, which aims to "educate" the public about ADD. In much the same way that the manufacturers of Listerine "educated" the populus about a "disease" called halcytosis. AKA bad breath, about a hundred years ago.
So pop a few tablets in your kids, cure them of their impulsivity, and creativity. Drop them in front of the nearest Cathode Ray Tube, and voila! Parenting can be done even by idiots. And so it is (not that they were prevented from doing it before mind you...)
It's soma. Pure and simple. Brave new world, here we come...
---
563/100,000 people were the victims of violent crime in the US in 1999 (see: the FBI's Statistics)
570/100,000 people were victims of violent crime in the Netherlands in 1999, just about the same as the US! (see: the Netherlands Ministry of Justice)
From an economic point of view, even the DEA's own statistics clearly state (if you wade around for a while) that the Drug war is just about an economic null-op. i.e. the money we "save" by having these "criminals" off the streets is about the same as the amount of money we spend to put them in prison. So, what the hell? Why are we doing this again?
---
Beyond that, is this even the kind of change that people want in their lives? Do people really want to know what all their genetic weaknesses are? How does that affect the way you think of yourself? The way you live your life?
Of course, we could always work on systematically eradicating the offending genes from our pool. (but that's called eugenics, and it has a bad name for some reason)
Once your genetic profile gets leaked to Freenet, how can you really prove that the company you're interviewing with isn't using it to evaluate you?
Personally, I doubt that our genes will really be very private once detailed genetic profiling becomes cheap and fast(legal or not). And because there are benefits to knowing what your genetic makeup, profiling will eventually become cheap and fast. I don't think people (or the genomics companies) are really investigating the possible downsides. Really, there only needs to be a small set of people willing to pursue this, and it will get done. Wierd world our kids will grow up in.
---
---
Enter Napster. Suddenly, everyone has a reason to think of their computer as no different from all the other computers (even if they are going through a centralized server). It becomes clear that there is great utility in being connected, and having access to other machines, both upstream and downstream. Now that the populus has gotten a taste of this, I doubt they'll go back. Napster will be re-implemented as Espra over Freenet, and given the much more generalized architecture, Peer to Peer networks will branch out into all kinds of new spheres of influence. I can't wait to watch it happen!
---
---
The current atmospheric model the group uses is about 20,000 lines of FORTRAN that has been hacked on and augmented willy nilly since 1978. And runs primarily on a DEC Alpha running OpenVMS There are no comments in it whatsoever. I'm trying to convince them that it should be re-written from scratch (maybe in a more modern language, for a more widely supported OS, with some comments...) But they (a couple of older professors) seem terrified of letting the code out of their hands, and are having trouble absorbing the idea of version control, among other things.
I'm very frustrated. They're about to get a herd of academics (none of whom has a CS background) working on code with no forethought, and I think I'll go nuts if I have to sit there and implement horrible things for them. Can anyone give me some eloquent ammunition to convince them this needs to be treated like a software engineering project - not atmospheric science?
---
See www.avlsi.com for the Asynchronous Digital Design page. (They are one of the start-ups mentioned in the article)- --------
---------------------------------------
In the future, I hope that we will be able to have that autonomy, either through expansion in space, or Libretarian style government (ha!), or some other way to avoid bothering (and being bothered by) those others with whom we disagree. I see it as a more thurough method of exploration of the space of possible cultures. Our society can better evolve then. Once free of strong central social normitive forces, we may be free to direct our society anywhere, especially if we are able to engineer different hardwired behavior into the human brain. What if we had the "mate for life" gene that many birds have? What if we were programmed to behave as more selfless individuals in a collective? What if we were all female? How would expanding the human senses expand the human society? Telepathy (via radio transmitters)? The ability to truly see through other people's eyes? Sonar? Radar? All the knowledge of the world instantly accessible in your head, updated once a day? Some people don't want us to become more than human. We need not fight them to have autonomy, we can leave them alone. Bifurcate society. All this assuming, of course, that we manage to preserve ourselves for the next couple of decades/centuries, until we aren't all in the same place anymore.- --------
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