Wikileaks founder arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, United States and many other countries partake in secret, scandalous dealings outside of the public view, the DOJ cracks down on piracy sites thus paving the way for internet censorship, the space shuttle launch delays another month, slashdotters begin to buy tinfoil hats by the case as human society faces major upheavals....
"And the universe does not even notice...."
You might want to ground that tinfoil hat in the event of a CME impacting the earths magnetosphere... because tinfoil will become an antenna and you an earthed conductor.
Once you have a phone which is fast enough to play video and has a battery that lasts all day, the biggest improvements are going to come as software update and you won't care about the hardware any more than you currently care whether you have a 2.6GHz CPU vs. a 3GHz CPU -- both are fast enough to do whatever so nobody cares anymore.
Except that wireless providers are historically terrible at providing software updates. Apple bucked this trend a bit, and some Android phones have gotten one or two updates. Carriers are still the gatekeepers for the vast majority of phones, though. They want to sell new hardware, not provide new software.
All hope is not lost. If you have an Android phone it's only a matter of time before you root your handset go for a aftermarket ROM - probably when your warranty runs out in 12 months. Ironically the community builds of Android are often highly stable and usable sometimes less buggy than carrier software, and you get the latest and greatest features and performance. I have a HTC Magic running Android 2.2, this is hardware that was abandonded by HTC in late 2009 with no further than version 1.6, and it runs sweetly.
You tend to get a stable release every month, or you could update to nightly builds if you like self-torture. That's per ROM, there's a huge range of aftermarket OS builds. Admittedly it's a minefield, and it's not for the novice tech user, but anyone who's installed Windows or changed a hard drive is probably the right technical level.
Point is, where the carriers let Android users down, the OSS community has done a fucking awesome job of keeping old handsets upgraded.
Apple has very deliberately ensured that the iPad is highly dependant on a computer for syncing. They are still in the business of notebooks and desktops to some extent. If the iPad could do something as simple as host USB, it would make a desktop redundant.
The end of the existing paradigm does not bode well for the competition to that paradigm. Linux has taken decades to try conquer the desktop, it has missed it's chance.
One battle lost. However, Linux has is winning the smartphone market, having taken down iOS with the explosive growth of Android, and will inevitably do the same with tablets.
I've never found Apple products terribly visually appealing, a little too "pretty" in a feminine way. I prefer harder edge more badass looking gadgets, and I guess that's just what TFA is on about - alot of the Android handsets are coming from manufacturers who produce more masculine designs generally.
Have one guy (and a few relatives) build it himself using 2000 BC technology, pack it with animals, and then see if it floats.
You mean pack it with at least one breeding pair of every land dwelling species, along with birds, insects, and tropical fish that have specific temperature and salinity requirements... various corals etc. Then keep these critters alive for a couple of years. You'd also need to travel the world to lands not known in 2000 BC to make sure you've got countless thousands of then undiscovered species...
The bacterium GFAJ-1 is a strain of the Halomonadaceae family which is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteobacteria. It's just somehow adapted to the use Arsenic in place of phosphorous on it's DNA.
No ET. No shadow biosphere. But it pushes the envelope of where life can possibly exist and demonstrates that life could function, possibly evolve in an aresnic-rich phosphorous-poor environment. Importantly it shows there isn't some exact balance of elements necessary to support life, you can swap out elements and still have functioning life.
Still, even if it were easier to murder Assange than to make charges stick, it would very much add to Wikileaks' credibility, moral high ground and popularity. Assange is already a popular hero; making him a martyr as well would be a stupid move.
You're assuming governments will not do something because it is a stupid move. In what world does that happen exactly? Assange must be expecting an attempt on his life as an inevitability.
By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.
Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. We have all of that pretty much, what is John Rennie on about?
2) Full immersion virtual reality has been around since the 1990s, headsets are commercially available but motion sickness is the problem keeping it from mass market. In the mean time augmented reality is available from your smartphone app store (Layar et al).
3) Wearable computing. This is old also, I have a thinkgeek t-shirt with a wi-fi detector, feasible but other than nerd toys it didn't really take off... but RFID tags are in bloody everything, increasingly so he was right about that, even credit cards have microchips now.
4) Interacting with virtual personalities? This is a little different, and not quite a hit, but we are so close: I can't think how many virtual pet games there are (which almost meets Kurzweil's prediction), WoWee robot toys, and of course Kinect - which has some virtual pet style games already, with some impressive interaction, with more advancements to come.
Kurzweil has pretty much nailed everything in that quote. Difference is in the details and how these things came to market.
Kurzweil is wrong, but what matters is he's the least wrong out of many futurists. Criticisms of these kind of predictions usually come from people who make no predictions themselves, or do not offer a better prediction. So Kurzweils not getting it right very often... but who's getting it right all?
I want to hear about what if any predictions IEEE spectrum has published? Did they predict the internet? Very few saw that coming, not even Kurzweil correctly saw it. Again he was the least wrong I can think of.
What do Triclosan being an potential alergen and Bisphenol-A which is not a sanitation product have to do with "Being Too Clean Can Make People Sick" which is reference to the hygiene-hypothesis?
And then we're not being too clean, we're just cleaning the wrong way, the wrong things, the wrong time.
My understanding of the hygiene-hypothesis and modern auto-immune disorders is that its nothing to do with the over use of sanitation products, and more to do with we don't spend enough time outdoors in the natural environment which our immune system seems to need to be calibrated by. Instead of contact with environmental bacterial, dust, spores, we're exposed to artifical chemicals in our indoor environments and food/water and our immune system gets the wrong idea about what to fight.
I'm disturbed by the lack of handwashing in the general population. Almost nobody remembers to wash their hands before they eat, barely do it after visiting the bathroom, and it certainly never happens when your eating out. Blame fast food which is "finger food" to some extent. Some kids these days don't know how to use a knife and fork let alone name vegetables and fruit. Some are genuinely perplexed by the need to wash hands before handling food - and don't really grasp the reasons why - from experience managing a food kitchen.
Previous generations were much more fastidious about washing and scrubbing themselves and everything, perhaps because before antibiotics it was the only defence against the spread of pathogetns. Perhaps because these people had deadly global flu pandemics in living memory.
It's ironic that we are both over using antiseptic compounds where they aren't needed, poisoning ourselves, and not cleaning when it actually is needed to prevent the spread of potentiall deadly pathogenics (salmonella, campolybacter, hepatitis A, influenza and many more). Virtually all human to human or human to food transmission of this stuff is due to some dim wit not washing his hands after taking a dump. Influenza is weakly spread airbone, but strongly spread by touch.
Doubling lifespan in a century has lead to declining population and crashing birthrates in developed nations. Radical life extension would further reduce the need for people to children to support them in old age.
From about age 5 I spent a lot of time outdoors, somtimes on my own even. I'd wander with groups of kids unsupervised out in nature. Building forts in trees and daming streams. No police showed up took the kids home and laid child abuse charges.
I was better off for it. Locking our children up and wrapping them in cotton wool is exactly whats causing them harm, they are actually missing out on life lessons. No wonder so many kids are immature brats these days.
Human life span has doubled in a century. Most developed nations are actually experiencing a population crash and as developed nations play catch up in their standard of living they will follow suit. This over population thing you speak of is isolated to the developing (and un-developed) world. In practice as people can expect to live longer and to not need children as a means of support in old age, the birth rate is crashing.
In fact many nations will have an explosion of retirees very soon, and a ever smaller tax-paying workforce to support them. Infact we really need to do something about age-related disease otherwise we're going to economic hell in a handbasket.
So yeah without DIY suicide kits, we need another solution.
I actually think radical life extension is one of the things that will save this planet. For this very reason. It is indirectly a population control method. Crashing birthrate has in practice mitigated the results of doubling life span in a century and now populations are receding.
I have to concede here there is a link between the standard of living and the number of children people have to - it's not all about lifespan.
If you knew you would live for 80, 90 or 100 years and remain mobile and lucid right up to the end. Perhaps you'd plan longer term? Perhaps our politicians would be able to see past the next election. Perhaps we'd care about climate change more?
Cats seem to read my expression and gestures. The result is they seem to just know if I actually intend to put food in their bowl, or let them outside. Where I've tried to teach them "Food?" or "Outside?" they don't actually fully react until I actually make a move to do it, and then aren't necessarily fooled by pretending to do it.
I think an easier test of intelligence is to point at something. A dog will look where you're pointing. A cat just looks at your finger...
Not true, at least for some cats, both my cats have learned how to interpret pointing. A classic trick is to pretend to throw something (ie a treat) both dogs and cats will skillfully anticipate the trajectory of object from the motion of your hand and pursue, with excitement. A test of intellegence may be if the cat or dog figures out it's been scammed quicker than the other does. From experience cats are sharp and natural skeptics once they've been tricked a couple of times. Dogs will fall for the same trick over and over, all day.
If I do throw the kitty treat, but it bounces away and the cat missed it, my cats will look around then look at me to try and get an impression of where it might have gone. Cats and dogs both make eye contact and can easily learn to understand pointing.
Slashdot Mirror
Wikileaks founder arrested on suspicion of sexual assault, United States and many other countries partake in secret, scandalous dealings outside of the public view, the DOJ cracks down on piracy sites thus paving the way for internet censorship, the space shuttle launch delays another month, slashdotters begin to buy tinfoil hats by the case as human society faces major upheavals.... "And the universe does not even notice...."
You might want to ground that tinfoil hat in the event of a CME impacting the earths magnetosphere... because tinfoil will become an antenna and you an earthed conductor.
No, we'd probably have enough warning to get some looting and pillaging in, even if the event was cataclysmic.
Now that is the good news I was after.
Once you have a phone which is fast enough to play video and has a battery that lasts all day, the biggest improvements are going to come as software update and you won't care about the hardware any more than you currently care whether you have a 2.6GHz CPU vs. a 3GHz CPU -- both are fast enough to do whatever so nobody cares anymore.
Except that wireless providers are historically terrible at providing software updates. Apple bucked this trend a bit, and some Android phones have gotten one or two updates. Carriers are still the gatekeepers for the vast majority of phones, though. They want to sell new hardware, not provide new software.
All hope is not lost. If you have an Android phone it's only a matter of time before you root your handset go for a aftermarket ROM - probably when your warranty runs out in 12 months. Ironically the community builds of Android are often highly stable and usable sometimes less buggy than carrier software, and you get the latest and greatest features and performance. I have a HTC Magic running Android 2.2, this is hardware that was abandonded by HTC in late 2009 with no further than version 1.6, and it runs sweetly.
You tend to get a stable release every month, or you could update to nightly builds if you like self-torture. That's per ROM, there's a huge range of aftermarket OS builds. Admittedly it's a minefield, and it's not for the novice tech user, but anyone who's installed Windows or changed a hard drive is probably the right technical level.
Point is, where the carriers let Android users down, the OSS community has done a fucking awesome job of keeping old handsets upgraded.
Apple has very deliberately ensured that the iPad is highly dependant on a computer for syncing. They are still in the business of notebooks and desktops to some extent. If the iPad could do something as simple as host USB, it would make a desktop redundant.
The end of the existing paradigm does not bode well for the competition to that paradigm. Linux has taken decades to try conquer the desktop, it has missed it's chance.
One battle lost. However, Linux has is winning the smartphone market, having taken down iOS with the explosive growth of Android, and will inevitably do the same with tablets.
I've never found Apple products terribly visually appealing, a little too "pretty" in a feminine way. I prefer harder edge more badass looking gadgets, and I guess that's just what TFA is on about - alot of the Android handsets are coming from manufacturers who produce more masculine designs generally.
Because well, you know, I like to look badass...
TFTFY Timothy
Have one guy (and a few relatives) build it himself using 2000 BC technology, pack it with animals, and then see if it floats.
You mean pack it with at least one breeding pair of every land dwelling species, along with birds, insects, and tropical fish that have specific temperature and salinity requirements... various corals etc. Then keep these critters alive for a couple of years. You'd also need to travel the world to lands not known in 2000 BC to make sure you've got countless thousands of then undiscovered species...
Flash is available for linux works just fine.
The bacterium GFAJ-1 is a strain of the Halomonadaceae family which is a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proteobacteria. It's just somehow adapted to the use Arsenic in place of phosphorous on it's DNA.
No ET. No shadow biosphere. But it pushes the envelope of where life can possibly exist and demonstrates that life could function, possibly evolve in an aresnic-rich phosphorous-poor environment. Importantly it shows there isn't some exact balance of elements necessary to support life, you can swap out elements and still have functioning life.
When they discovered Darwin they were suprised. Chipped him out of a sedimentary layer.
So playing make-believe with action figures, would a Julian Assange's transparency field trump Steve Jobs's reality distortion field?
Still, even if it were easier to murder Assange than to make charges stick, it would very much add to Wikileaks' credibility, moral high ground and popularity. Assange is already a popular hero; making him a martyr as well would be a stupid move.
You're assuming governments will not do something because it is a stupid move. In what world does that happen exactly? Assange must be expecting an attempt on his life as an inevitability.
The Banks have deeper pockets than most governments, and all governments do their banking with The Banks.
Assange is the man The Man is affraid of.
By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities.
Whisky. Tango. Foxtrot. We have all of that pretty much, what is John Rennie on about?
So It's 2010:
1) Direct to retina display http://www.engadget.com/2010/09/17/brothers-airscouter-floats-a-16-inch-display-onto-your-eye-bisc/
2) Full immersion virtual reality has been around since the 1990s, headsets are commercially available but motion sickness is the problem keeping it from mass market. In the mean time augmented reality is available from your smartphone app store (Layar et al).
3) Wearable computing. This is old also, I have a thinkgeek t-shirt with a wi-fi detector, feasible but other than nerd toys it didn't really take off... but RFID tags are in bloody everything, increasingly so he was right about that, even credit cards have microchips now.
4) Interacting with virtual personalities? This is a little different, and not quite a hit, but we are so close: I can't think how many virtual pet games there are (which almost meets Kurzweil's prediction), WoWee robot toys, and of course Kinect - which has some virtual pet style games already, with some impressive interaction, with more advancements to come.
Kurzweil has pretty much nailed everything in that quote. Difference is in the details and how these things came to market.
Kurzweil is wrong, but what matters is he's the least wrong out of many futurists. Criticisms of these kind of predictions usually come from people who make no predictions themselves, or do not offer a better prediction. So Kurzweils not getting it right very often ... but who's getting it right all?
I want to hear about what if any predictions IEEE spectrum has published? Did they predict the internet? Very few saw that coming, not even Kurzweil correctly saw it. Again he was the least wrong I can think of.
What do Triclosan being an potential alergen and Bisphenol-A which is not a sanitation product have to do with "Being Too Clean Can Make People Sick" which is reference to the hygiene-hypothesis?
And then we're not being too clean, we're just cleaning the wrong way, the wrong things, the wrong time.
My understanding of the hygiene-hypothesis and modern auto-immune disorders is that its nothing to do with the over use of sanitation products, and more to do with we don't spend enough time outdoors in the natural environment which our immune system seems to need to be calibrated by. Instead of contact with environmental bacterial, dust, spores, we're exposed to artifical chemicals in our indoor environments and food/water and our immune system gets the wrong idea about what to fight.
I'm disturbed by the lack of handwashing in the general population. Almost nobody remembers to wash their hands before they eat, barely do it after visiting the bathroom, and it certainly never happens when your eating out. Blame fast food which is "finger food" to some extent. Some kids these days don't know how to use a knife and fork let alone name vegetables and fruit. Some are genuinely perplexed by the need to wash hands before handling food - and don't really grasp the reasons why - from experience managing a food kitchen.
Previous generations were much more fastidious about washing and scrubbing themselves and everything, perhaps because before antibiotics it was the only defence against the spread of pathogetns. Perhaps because these people had deadly global flu pandemics in living memory.
It's ironic that we are both over using antiseptic compounds where they aren't needed, poisoning ourselves, and not cleaning when it actually is needed to prevent the spread of potentiall deadly pathogenics (salmonella, campolybacter, hepatitis A, influenza and many more). Virtually all human to human or human to food transmission of this stuff is due to some dim wit not washing his hands after taking a dump. Influenza is weakly spread airbone, but strongly spread by touch.
Doubling lifespan in a century has lead to declining population and crashing birthrates in developed nations. Radical life extension would further reduce the need for people to children to support them in old age.
From about age 5 I spent a lot of time outdoors, somtimes on my own even. I'd wander with groups of kids unsupervised out in nature. Building forts in trees and daming streams. No police showed up took the kids home and laid child abuse charges.
I was better off for it. Locking our children up and wrapping them in cotton wool is exactly whats causing them harm, they are actually missing out on life lessons. No wonder so many kids are immature brats these days.
Human life span has doubled in a century. Most developed nations are actually experiencing a population crash and as developed nations play catch up in their standard of living they will follow suit. This over population thing you speak of is isolated to the developing (and un-developed) world. In practice as people can expect to live longer and to not need children as a means of support in old age, the birth rate is crashing.
In fact many nations will have an explosion of retirees very soon, and a ever smaller tax-paying workforce to support them. Infact we really need to do something about age-related disease otherwise we're going to economic hell in a handbasket.
So yeah without DIY suicide kits, we need another solution.
I actually think radical life extension is one of the things that will save this planet. For this very reason. It is indirectly a population control method. Crashing birthrate has in practice mitigated the results of doubling life span in a century and now populations are receding.
I have to concede here there is a link between the standard of living and the number of children people have to - it's not all about lifespan.
If you knew you would live for 80, 90 or 100 years and remain mobile and lucid right up to the end. Perhaps you'd plan longer term? Perhaps our politicians would be able to see past the next election. Perhaps we'd care about climate change more?
Now, I want to see what happens when a flight sim buff gets in the cockpit of a real fighter jet.
Will they take off and do acrobatics easily?
I drove a shifter kart for 15 minutes and had to come off the track with neck pain.
Cats seem to read my expression and gestures. The result is they seem to just know if I actually intend to put food in their bowl, or let them outside. Where I've tried to teach them "Food?" or "Outside?" they don't actually fully react until I actually make a move to do it, and then aren't necessarily fooled by pretending to do it.
I think an easier test of intelligence is to point at something. A dog will look where you're pointing. A cat just looks at your finger...
Not true, at least for some cats, both my cats have learned how to interpret pointing. A classic trick is to pretend to throw something (ie a treat) both dogs and cats will skillfully anticipate the trajectory of object from the motion of your hand and pursue, with excitement. A test of intellegence may be if the cat or dog figures out it's been scammed quicker than the other does. From experience cats are sharp and natural skeptics once they've been tricked a couple of times. Dogs will fall for the same trick over and over, all day.
If I do throw the kitty treat, but it bounces away and the cat missed it, my cats will look around then look at me to try and get an impression of where it might have gone. Cats and dogs both make eye contact and can easily learn to understand pointing.