Why does everything have to be high - tech? High tech things, as we all know, are the most disastrous weapons once someone figures out how to coopt them for his purpose.
I fly back and forth between the US and Israel often, and the Israelis have been dealing with this sort of thing for years. All the American airlines needed to do to prevent this is take 3 steps which Israel has been taking for a long time.
1) Give all commercial pilots and some flight attendants a week of light arms training and a handgun.
2) Lock all cockpits with metal bolts.
3) Give all passengers the third degree. I have seen people getting on planes to Israel get asked to take out a map and show their trip itinerary, then to verify by calling the places where they said they will stay and see if they have reservations, I have seen a needle stuck through a lipstick to check if it is plastique, etc.
It's inconvenient, but it makes it safe.
Israel takes more steps, such as constantly reshuffling how you proceed through the airport, 1 way glass watching you when you wait in line for check in, and an amount of airport security staff, all with military training. I have personally seen the same garbage can be looked inside of 2 times in a span of 15 minutes to confirm that it had no bomb in it - that's just routine patrol.
Reporters in Palestinian areas have been threatened that their lives may be in danger if they publicize pictures of palestinians celebrating the WTC and Pentagon disasters. This is similar to threats which Italian reporters received when they documented the lyniching of Israelis in ramalla by a palestinian mob a few months ago.
Here's a report about it from AP (you can find more on this at The Jerusalem Post.
Arafat horrified; Palestinians celebrating
By Mohammed Daraghmeh, The Associated Press
NABLUS, West Bank (AP) - Thousands of Palestinians celebrated toiday's terror attacks in the United States, chanting "God is Great" and distributing candy to passers-by, even as their leader, Yasser Arafat, said he was horrified.
The US government has become increasingly unpopular in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past year of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, with many Palestinians accusing Washington of siding with Israel.
In the West Bank town of Nablus, about 3,000 people poured into the street shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and government targets in Washington.
Demonstrators distributed candy in a traditional gesture of celebration. Several Palestinian gunmen shot in the air, while other marchers carried Palestinian flags.
Nawal Abdel Fatah, 48, wearing a long black dress, threw sweets in the air, saying she was happy because "America is the head of the snake, America always stands by Israel in its war against us."
Her daughter Maysoon, 22, said she hoped the next attack would be launched against Tel Aviv.
In traditionally Arab eastern Jerusalem, there was a smaller gathering of about two dozen people, many of them young children led in chants by adults. Some drivers passing the scene honked their horns and flashed victory signs from their windows.
1) I'm an American expatriate living in Israel, and here we also have many American fast food chains here - Sbarro's, McDonalds, KFC, Wendy's, Burger King, Nathan's Franks, etc. I actually never ate in these places in the states because there they are not kosher, but that is another story. Anyway, they have a completely different character than in America - they are an exotic foreign food, something people pay a lot of money for relative to local fast-food like falafel or whatever. Tourist pay for the "like home" quality of the food, locals pay for the "foreign" quality.
2) Fast Food and MS definitely have a common success factor. Most people would rather get something which does *most* of what they want *more or less* the way they like it, as long as someone else will do everything for them and endorse the food/software as "valid". A few people (hackers/home cooks) realize that it is more worthwhile to take the time and learn how to hack/cook because that way you can get EVERYTHING you want EXACTLY the way you like it. They also have enough confidence in their own skills and judgement to assess whether what they are making is as good as the "store-bought" product.
3) The distinction between home cooked food and fast food is always changing. Again, I live in Israel, where standards are a little different. You don't carve the NY strip steak, do you? If you bought a side of beef and cut it up yourself, you could save even more $$$, and cut the steak as thick as you want. I happen to buy large hunks of beef and cut them up into steaks for these very reasons. So "fast food" is relative, although I can't see how we could make it much faster except burger vending machines.
Three ideas -
1) Take up a hobby you can learn over the web, such as cooking, video editing, writing, etc.
2) Meet people from other countries where it is not the middle of the night. I'm sure you can meet all kinds of interesting people.
3) Get a part time job in some country where it is not the middle of the night, and you can make a little $ on the side.
The free software which came with my logitech quickcam (~$50 street) allows "video radar" - it will detect changes in the video data. You can adjust the sensitivity, and set the computer to either sound an audible alarm, record video, or both when motion is detected. You can also upload a still to a website at fixed increments if you have an internet connection.
It would probably not be so difficult to have a little program on the web server which compares the current still and the previous still pixel by pixel, then sends an email or SMS message if there are more than x pixels different.
Good Luck.
This script will encrypt a song title in a person-readable yet machine-meaningless form. You could use something like this in a "pirate" napster client.
Better yet, someone should write a napster client which renames all of your files with a real encryption, and then the client is needed to decrypt them.
What we are really talking about here is changing every kind of property into intellectual property. Once this can be done at the molecular or atomic level, then you can make gold, heroin, a ferrari, or any other desirable item out of your garbage, mud, sewage, etc. It would render things like recycling completely obsolete. It would also render the ownership, buying and selling of material goods completely obsolete. Every electron, proton, and neutron would be worth the same amount because all would have the same utility.
I think you are also missing the biological implications. Today, when we want to fix a problem with your body, we have to first understand the problem, then coax your body into healing it with its immune system or with chemical help. But if we could just move your molecules around, we could just take a "snapshot" of you when you were a healthy 18 year old, and then, years later, rearrange your decrepit 85 year old body, except the brain, to the original configuration. This would be much more dramatic than cloning. You could duplicate or modify yourself with great flexibility, and would not have to wait for the product to "grow up" - while we don't understand certain mysteries of life, I bet a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons configured just like me would be, well, just like me. PEOPLE might ultimately be transformed into intellectual property.
There's also the military angle. Those who read Ender's Game may remember the "Molecular Detachment Device", which could undo molecular bonds. Just like you could turn a pile of garbage into a person or a tank, you could turn a tank or a person (or a country) into a pile of garbage. Perhaps the analogy is really Calvin & Hobbes's transmogrifyer. Of course, "they" could just turn their pile of garbage right back into a tank, and this time also turn YOU into extra missiles for them to use, so this would quickly spin completely out of control.
Of course, the ability to do this at the atomic level is very far from the fabbers we are talking about. I doubt it will come any time soon.
I really agree with the importance of using a wireless LAN. I have one in my home and it certainly is a lifestyle change - the laptop goes from the home office to the kitchen to the bedroom and occasionally the bathroom, all the while connected to the internet and my desktop. My main original reason for getting it was that in my rented apartment, drilling or tearing up floors to lay cable was not an option. I am really happy with it, and would not go back to wires for anything.
If you like to lie in bed and read, you can basically go over to doing so full time with a wireless LAN. I have an intel anypoint wireless, which is only for win 98/ME:(, crashes occasionally, and is only 1.6 mbps, but it is still great. It makes it much more feasible to go "paperless" - there's no need to print something out when you can take the laptop with you (I would recommend getting a light laptop). I keep everything on my desktop with a big hard drive (music, recipes, technical documentation, data files), and the laptop with its faster processor and smaller hard drive has access to all this stuff from anywhere. I also connected my desktop to real stereo speakers in the living room, and got a remote control on the laptop which can control winamp on the desktop. So I can, theoretically, surf the net and control the stereo from the bathroom, just to give a real-life example.
I am encouraging people I work with to get the same network, so we can meet for lunch and just "be connected", whether at either of our houses or a remote location (no hub required).
Another major unintended benefit is that I need less computers. Rather than put a computer in each place I want one, and running all the cable, I just take the one computer wherever it is needed.
Also, as for security, I think the whole thing is overblown. I live in an apt. building, and my whole apt. is covered, but I don't think coverage extends too far beyond (on the box it says about 150' range, but I suspect less). I think that none of my neighbors have the same hardware as me, so hackers are much more likely to find me through my wired connection ot the internet. It's not like I have a sign in the front yard saying "Intel Anypoint Here", so why would anybody even think about trying to sniff? I can see where this would not apply in the business sector, but for the home user wireless is the way to go.
What I would really like to do is replace the laptop with a slightly different device. It would have everything the laptop does, but the screen would be able to fold all the way around, like the way people open a magazine and refold it backwards. This would make it possible to read the laptop much more comfortably. Also, I would like a utility to rotate the display 90 degrees so that I could get the aspect ratio of a piece of paper. A touch sensitive screen would make it sheer heaven. If anyone knows how to do that, tell me.
"If I want to have a child and can't find a man I consider suitable to be a father, why should I have to trust that sperm donors are going to be any better?"
Is this really so obvious? To my mind you have hit on the real crux of the issue - "if I want a child". The ethical question is whether a child is an entitlement or a responsibility. I really do think that probably the sperm donor scenario is just as bad as the clone, a conclusion which you apparently recoil at.
Nature built us so children have 2 parents, and the child benefits from this in obvious ways. Furthermore, nature selects against people who can't find any other perso they can get along with. In thwarting this, we give a child a single, misanthropic parent, rather than the loving couple which nature would have provided him with.
I think that, at a minimum, the laptop would need a PDA-like monochrome LCD; could someone possibly make one of reasonable laptop size for this cheap price? And I assume this thing would also have to have some kind of disk drive.
This price seems much further out there than the phone price
There is a great deal being done in the world of educational technology - some schools really don't know how to get with the times and could probably use paid time of high-powered private consultants like big business uses.
There are also many educational websites which you could check out. I work at one, and would be glad to tell you more about it, but won't plug it here. The US government has a commission of some sort on educational technology, though I don't recall their url.
I actually had the choice which you are talking about a year ago. I had 2 offers, one from a non-profit educational site and the other from an intensely competitive startup which offered $, stock options, etc. I went with the non-profit, for the following decisive factors:
1) In the non-profit I had more input into shaping the product, despite my relatively limited experience
2) The people in the non-profit were much more laid back. I felt they would let me have time with my family, be flexible about vacations and holidays, and in general would not want to work me till I dropped.
3) The non-profit people took genuine interest in me on a personal level, not just on a professional one. I trusted them more to consider my welfare down the road.
4) The non-profit would let me work from home (or the mall, the beach, the moon, etc.) This also diverted more free high-tech toys to my house.
5) The non-profit's product was much more innovative and engaging.
6) The non-profit matched the salary of the start-up, minus options and perks.
The for-profit startup has since run through most of its' venture capital. The non-profit has another person with only a couple years experience working here, plus some after hours volunteers from big accounting places. Our senior management consists of idealistic people who already made their money in the for-profit internet and want to do something worthwhile now.
I think what you really have to realize is that ultimately, at least for some people, once you clear a certain threshold and are offering a salary they can live on and save some of, piling on more $$$ may not help them as much as being nice to them, letting them do something interesting, and giving them gadgets.
I have also been thinking along these lines. What would need to be explored to make it effective is: 1) Bandwidth and range - I think you were talking about IR, but radio has more potential in both these areas, I think. 2) The possibility of hacking diverse devices (smart phones, alphanumeric pagers, etc) to participate in such a network. 3) The applications of such a network during its interim phases - wireless LANS and the like before full internet connectivity is possible. I think there is alot of potential here. Unfortunately, my background is software, and I have no clue how the bandwidth works or how to get inside the guts of cellphones. I do, however, have a whole bunch of clever uses for such a network while in its infancy. For example, a non-virtual ICQ. You can see and chat with anyone currently accessible to you. I say non-virtual because at first you would only see people within a mile or two. This would be neat for situations where you want to meet someone in a big city, etc. I like this idea because it flies in the face of the current business models of wireless companies, who plan on making big bucks on services, which this would totally circumvent.
Slashdot Mirror
People generally have brain surgery because their mind is malfunctioning.
Why does everything have to be high - tech? High tech things, as we all know, are the most disastrous weapons once someone figures out how to coopt them for his purpose.
I fly back and forth between the US and Israel often, and the Israelis have been dealing with this sort of thing for years. All the American airlines needed to do to prevent this is take 3 steps which Israel has been taking for a long time.
1) Give all commercial pilots and some flight attendants a week of light arms training and a handgun.
2) Lock all cockpits with metal bolts.
3) Give all passengers the third degree. I have seen people getting on planes to Israel get asked to take out a map and show their trip itinerary, then to verify by calling the places where they said they will stay and see if they have reservations, I have seen a needle stuck through a lipstick to check if it is plastique, etc.
It's inconvenient, but it makes it safe.
Israel takes more steps, such as constantly reshuffling how you proceed through the airport, 1 way glass watching you when you wait in line for check in, and an amount of airport security staff, all with military training. I have personally seen the same garbage can be looked inside of 2 times in a span of 15 minutes to confirm that it had no bomb in it - that's just routine patrol.
Reporters in Palestinian areas have been threatened that their lives may be in danger if they publicize pictures of palestinians celebrating the WTC and Pentagon disasters. This is similar to threats which Italian reporters received when they documented the lyniching of Israelis in ramalla by a palestinian mob a few months ago.
Here's a report about it from AP (you can find more on this at The Jerusalem Post.
You can see a picture of this at my page
Arafat horrified; Palestinians celebrating
By Mohammed Daraghmeh, The Associated Press
NABLUS, West Bank (AP) - Thousands of Palestinians celebrated toiday's terror attacks in the United States, chanting "God is Great" and distributing candy to passers-by, even as their leader, Yasser Arafat, said he was horrified.
The US government has become increasingly unpopular in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the past year of Israeli-Palestinian fighting, with many Palestinians accusing Washington of siding with Israel.
In the West Bank town of Nablus, about 3,000 people poured into the street shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and government targets in Washington.
Demonstrators distributed candy in a traditional gesture of celebration. Several Palestinian gunmen shot in the air, while other marchers carried Palestinian flags.
Nawal Abdel Fatah, 48, wearing a long black dress, threw sweets in the air, saying she was happy because "America is the head of the snake, America always stands by Israel in its war against us."
Her daughter Maysoon, 22, said she hoped the next attack would be launched against Tel Aviv.
In traditionally Arab eastern Jerusalem, there was a smaller gathering of about two dozen people, many of them young children led in chants by adults. Some drivers passing the scene honked their horns and flashed victory signs from their windows.
1) I'm an American expatriate living in Israel, and here we also have many American fast food chains here - Sbarro's, McDonalds, KFC, Wendy's, Burger King, Nathan's Franks, etc. I actually never ate in these places in the states because there they are not kosher, but that is another story. Anyway, they have a completely different character than in America - they are an exotic foreign food, something people pay a lot of money for relative to local fast-food like falafel or whatever. Tourist pay for the "like home" quality of the food, locals pay for the "foreign" quality.
2) Fast Food and MS definitely have a common success factor. Most people would rather get something which does *most* of what they want *more or less* the way they like it, as long as someone else will do everything for them and endorse the food/software as "valid". A few people (hackers/home cooks) realize that it is more worthwhile to take the time and learn how to hack/cook because that way you can get EVERYTHING you want EXACTLY the way you like it. They also have enough confidence in their own skills and judgement to assess whether what they are making is as good as the "store-bought" product.
3) The distinction between home cooked food and fast food is always changing. Again, I live in Israel, where standards are a little different. You don't carve the NY strip steak, do you? If you bought a side of beef and cut it up yourself, you could save even more $$$, and cut the steak as thick as you want. I happen to buy large hunks of beef and cut them up into steaks for these very reasons. So "fast food" is relative, although I can't see how we could make it much faster except burger vending machines.
Three ideas - 1) Take up a hobby you can learn over the web, such as cooking, video editing, writing, etc. 2) Meet people from other countries where it is not the middle of the night. I'm sure you can meet all kinds of interesting people. 3) Get a part time job in some country where it is not the middle of the night, and you can make a little $ on the side.
The free software which came with my logitech quickcam (~$50 street) allows "video radar" - it will detect changes in the video data. You can adjust the sensitivity, and set the computer to either sound an audible alarm, record video, or both when motion is detected. You can also upload a still to a website at fixed increments if you have an internet connection. It would probably not be so difficult to have a little program on the web server which compares the current still and the previous still pixel by pixel, then sends an email or SMS message if there are more than x pixels different. Good Luck.
This script will encrypt a song title in a person-readable yet machine-meaningless form. You could use something like this in a "pirate" napster client. Better yet, someone should write a napster client which renames all of your files with a real encryption, and then the client is needed to decrypt them.
What we are really talking about here is changing every kind of property into intellectual property. Once this can be done at the molecular or atomic level, then you can make gold, heroin, a ferrari, or any other desirable item out of your garbage, mud, sewage, etc. It would render things like recycling completely obsolete. It would also render the ownership, buying and selling of material goods completely obsolete. Every electron, proton, and neutron would be worth the same amount because all would have the same utility.
I think you are also missing the biological implications. Today, when we want to fix a problem with your body, we have to first understand the problem, then coax your body into healing it with its immune system or with chemical help. But if we could just move your molecules around, we could just take a "snapshot" of you when you were a healthy 18 year old, and then, years later, rearrange your decrepit 85 year old body, except the brain, to the original configuration. This would be much more dramatic than cloning. You could duplicate or modify yourself with great flexibility, and would not have to wait for the product to "grow up" - while we don't understand certain mysteries of life, I bet a bunch of electrons, protons, and neutrons configured just like me would be, well, just like me. PEOPLE might ultimately be transformed into intellectual property.
There's also the military angle. Those who read Ender's Game may remember the "Molecular Detachment Device", which could undo molecular bonds. Just like you could turn a pile of garbage into a person or a tank, you could turn a tank or a person (or a country) into a pile of garbage. Perhaps the analogy is really Calvin & Hobbes's transmogrifyer. Of course, "they" could just turn their pile of garbage right back into a tank, and this time also turn YOU into extra missiles for them to use, so this would quickly spin completely out of control.
Of course, the ability to do this at the atomic level is very far from the fabbers we are talking about. I doubt it will come any time soon.
I really agree with the importance of using a wireless LAN. I have one in my home and it certainly is a lifestyle change - the laptop goes from the home office to the kitchen to the bedroom and occasionally the bathroom, all the while connected to the internet and my desktop. My main original reason for getting it was that in my rented apartment, drilling or tearing up floors to lay cable was not an option. I am really happy with it, and would not go back to wires for anything.
If you like to lie in bed and read, you can basically go over to doing so full time with a wireless LAN. I have an intel anypoint wireless, which is only for win 98/ME :(, crashes occasionally, and is only 1.6 mbps, but it is still great. It makes it much more feasible to go "paperless" - there's no need to print something out when you can take the laptop with you (I would recommend getting a light laptop). I keep everything on my desktop with a big hard drive (music, recipes, technical documentation, data files), and the laptop with its faster processor and smaller hard drive has access to all this stuff from anywhere. I also connected my desktop to real stereo speakers in the living room, and got a remote control on the laptop which can control winamp on the desktop. So I can, theoretically, surf the net and control the stereo from the bathroom, just to give a real-life example.
I am encouraging people I work with to get the same network, so we can meet for lunch and just "be connected", whether at either of our houses or a remote location (no hub required).
Another major unintended benefit is that I need less computers. Rather than put a computer in each place I want one, and running all the cable, I just take the one computer wherever it is needed.
Also, as for security, I think the whole thing is overblown. I live in an apt. building, and my whole apt. is covered, but I don't think coverage extends too far beyond (on the box it says about 150' range, but I suspect less). I think that none of my neighbors have the same hardware as me, so hackers are much more likely to find me through my wired connection ot the internet. It's not like I have a sign in the front yard saying "Intel Anypoint Here", so why would anybody even think about trying to sniff? I can see where this would not apply in the business sector, but for the home user wireless is the way to go.
What I would really like to do is replace the laptop with a slightly different device. It would have everything the laptop does, but the screen would be able to fold all the way around, like the way people open a magazine and refold it backwards. This would make it possible to read the laptop much more comfortably. Also, I would like a utility to rotate the display 90 degrees so that I could get the aspect ratio of a piece of paper. A touch sensitive screen would make it sheer heaven. If anyone knows how to do that, tell me.
"If I want to have a child and can't find a man I consider suitable to be a father, why should I have to trust that sperm donors are going to be any better?"
Is this really so obvious? To my mind you have hit on the real crux of the issue - "if I want a child". The ethical question is whether a child is an entitlement or a responsibility. I really do think that probably the sperm donor scenario is just as bad as the clone, a conclusion which you apparently recoil at.
Nature built us so children have 2 parents, and the child benefits from this in obvious ways. Furthermore, nature selects against people who can't find any other perso they can get along with. In thwarting this, we give a child a single, misanthropic parent, rather than the loving couple which nature would have provided him with.
A child is not a puppy.
This price seems much further out there than the phone price
There is a great deal being done in the world of educational technology - some schools really don't know how to get with the times and could probably use paid time of high-powered private consultants like big business uses. There are also many educational websites which you could check out. I work at one, and would be glad to tell you more about it, but won't plug it here. The US government has a commission of some sort on educational technology, though I don't recall their url.
1) In the non-profit I had more input into shaping the product, despite my relatively limited experience
2) The people in the non-profit were much more laid back. I felt they would let me have time with my family, be flexible about vacations and holidays, and in general would not want to work me till I dropped.
3) The non-profit people took genuine interest in me on a personal level, not just on a professional one. I trusted them more to consider my welfare down the road.
4) The non-profit would let me work from home (or the mall, the beach, the moon, etc.) This also diverted more free high-tech toys to my house.
5) The non-profit's product was much more innovative and engaging.
6) The non-profit matched the salary of the start-up, minus options and perks.
The for-profit startup has since run through most of its' venture capital. The non-profit has another person with only a couple years experience working here, plus some after hours volunteers from big accounting places. Our senior management consists of idealistic people who already made their money in the for-profit internet and want to do something worthwhile now.
I think what you really have to realize is that ultimately, at least for some people, once you clear a certain threshold and are offering a salary they can live on and save some of, piling on more $$$ may not help them as much as being nice to them, letting them do something interesting, and giving them gadgets.
Good luck.
MP3 is pretty big here, and I think probably more teenagers know about it than legislators.
I have also been thinking along these lines. What would need to be explored to make it effective is: 1) Bandwidth and range - I think you were talking about IR, but radio has more potential in both these areas, I think. 2) The possibility of hacking diverse devices (smart phones, alphanumeric pagers, etc) to participate in such a network. 3) The applications of such a network during its interim phases - wireless LANS and the like before full internet connectivity is possible. I think there is alot of potential here. Unfortunately, my background is software, and I have no clue how the bandwidth works or how to get inside the guts of cellphones. I do, however, have a whole bunch of clever uses for such a network while in its infancy. For example, a non-virtual ICQ. You can see and chat with anyone currently accessible to you. I say non-virtual because at first you would only see people within a mile or two. This would be neat for situations where you want to meet someone in a big city, etc. I like this idea because it flies in the face of the current business models of wireless companies, who plan on making big bucks on services, which this would totally circumvent.