Bad analogy, because it doesn't eliminate current human tech from the equation.
If our goal was leapfrogging them into the information age, we'd simply give them the knowhow and means to build the equipment that is our current standard, warts and all.
...with one important exception. We'd have to be mindful of the fact that they'd eventually realize the cruel joke we've played on them and return, looking for vengeance. That's why I think every piece of tech we give them should have a MacOS-compatible back door designed such that Jeff Goldblum and an Apple Powerbook would be all that is needed to render their entire battle-fleet helpless.
Jeez moron, it took me less time to go over to Altavista and do a search (found that the homepage is www.transhumanism.com... duh) that it's taking to flame your sorry ass for being lazy and stupid</I> <BR> Well, why did you bother asking then?:-) I said Transhumanists are busy people, didn't I?
Well, there isn't a platform per se. They're generally too busy to do things like run for office. However, here's a fairly representative smattering of sites, by no means complete:
Okay, we've just hit the Nazi threshhold. What was that old Usenet rule? Any thread that goes on long enough will eventually mention Nazis? Anyone remember the name and exact phrasing of that rule? <BR><BR> BTW, lay off the Libertarian baiting, will you? You don't see Libertarians ragging on the Idiot community, do you? Okay, maybe you do, but try to rise above them. <BR><BR> PS: No, I'm not a damn Libertarian. I am a Transhumanist, and have my own differences with the Libs, but not on this simplistic level.
It was goddamn inevitable that some asshead was going to build something on the Quake source and then turn Libertarian and refuse to abide by the GPL. If you drop a rock, it will fall. If you drop source code onto a gang of Windows programmers and Libertarians... Please don't turn this political. Calling opponents of GPL Libertarians is just as much of a fallacy and a disservice to GPL as calling its supporters Communists. Labels like that belong back in the 'brick-n-mortar' age. Anyway, I'm sure a lot of the Open Source community happens to be various shades of Libertarian and Anarchist. I agree with the point you were making, but it would be much stronger without the political baggage.
we either grow girls more like men(which I suspect men don't want, otherwise selective pressure would have already done this) As far as selective pressures are concerned, my heterosexuality appears to extend only as far as physical features. On the inside, the more 'macho' and 'logical' she is, the more I love her. Maybe I'm an exception, but I don't think so; I see the geeks around me flocking to women like that as well. It never gets talked about for some reason, though. In short, damn right this man wants 'girls' to be more like men! I would give my right arm to date someone with whom I can have a real conversation about my fields of interest.
1. The ultimate PDA understands what you're talking about, very intelligent, and aesthetically pleasing. Hell, why not cram those new plastic muscles from the other/. article plus some circuitry into a RealDoll (www.realdoll.com) body and have the perfect mate? The standard family unit becomes four adults. Human males and females become increasingly separatist but nobody really minds as much as they thought they would. Birth-rates go way down. Sex-drive has inspired yet another tech breakthrough... but of course, people want them to be more and more human, better and better conversationalists... so eventually they become human enough to start lobbying for equal rights.
2. Whatever the shape of PDAs to come, one thing I'm pretty sure of: the cubicle farm will be extinct. Why would workers want to go to a dreary beige office when they could instead telecommute from the beach, the golf course, or the coffee shop? Why would companies want to pay rent for office space that sits unused most of the time? So, tons of real estate gets abandoned by traditional companies and bought up by Starbucks et. al., made pleasant to work in, and rented back to the companies and/or free agents. The age of labortainment begins. Incidently, with such high mobility, it might be that almost everyone is a temp or contractor. Companies themselves start to be very temporary and abstract collections of stockholders, contract-managers, contract-labor, maybe some rented robofactory time, and glitzy web pages. They get together for a month or two to sell the latest-n-greatest product and service, then get bought by other temporary companies or spin off into several pieces that can more efficiently adapt themselves to whatever becomes the next money-making opportunity.
3. A brain interface doesn't have to be invasive, at least not the user-input part of it. Brain scanning technology already exists... maybe have something that passively scans electromagnetic waves emitted by the brain, so that wearers don't get cancer or whatever. Not sure if this is theoretically possible, though: I may be a bio geek but not specifically a neurology geek.
"If it's obviously designed for hairy apes to use to fend off the despair of loneliness, it's pornography."
I sense a pejorative tone here. Is it bad for hairy apes to fend of the despair of loneliness? Do we deserve to be lonely? Perhaps you'd care to maybe contribute to solving the problem instead of just taking cheap shots at it?
Just count your blessings that you aren't a guy and you don't need to get laid every couple of weeks in order to feel good about yourself (watch the especially desperate sensitive guys jump in with 'well, I don't need to, I can subsist indefinitely just on deep conversations').
Now then, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, the mobile thingies... Well, since they're going to be in every single traffic light, ATM, phone, doorknob, and toothpick, perhaps companies will spring up to offer people 'roaming accounts' so any nearby gizmo immediately queries their files/preferences and responds to them by name. That way, nobody will have to wear PDAs at all, which will fit in nicely with the 21st century's increasing acceptance of nudism that I'm also predicting.
As for the people raising screen-size issues, remember: they already have goggles that can mimic a 21" screen. It's not such a stretch to say that such goggles will become lighter, sleeker, and add opacity-control. If my nudism theory is wrong, I think the PDA of tomorrow will look like glasses or even contact lenses. People's perception of reality will literally be colored by their desktop settings. We'll be able to make people we don't like invisible (or funny looking) by adding them to our killfiles. Our language will become more terse, since part of the information content will be shifted to wireless chatter between our PDAs. Someone like the Scientologists might try to start a mind-control cult where they have control of the members' PDA-overlays and thus over their perception of reality... or perhaps it will be media and software conglomerates who try to pull this... but I doubt it will continue to be possible for really huge companies to exist toward the middle of the century.
Just two days ago I posted an off-topic flame about how Rob & Co. aren't living the same OpenEverything ethic they advocate. Now, I don't know whether to feel ashamed or vindicated.
(Sheesh. Somebody with the squishdot source want to open a new site?)
It's been tried. Guess what? For practical purposes, the current version of Slashdot is CLOSED SOURCE! That's right, the only source they made available last I checked was Slash 2 and pre-3, both of which were only marginally useable. I HOPE someone forks off Slash development and manages it responsibly, because Rob "Mr. OpenSource" Malda talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.
"Waitaminute", you'll say: "Rob doesn't get paid to do support his source". Not directly, no... but he makes his money off the OS community, and even among big soulless corporations, it's customary to throw us a bone now and then. So nevermind 'support'... you would think that the least he could do would be to practice what he preaches, and put a fsking tarball of the scripts in his/usr/local/slash directory onto his sources page. That's all we ask.
The untapped niche for Linux1 are projects that you want to fail. Really hate a manager? Convince them to buy the distro. Really hate your in-laws? Convince them to invest in LO.
You won't be able to short LNUX for a couple of months after their IPO, I believe. Federal regulations. Too bad, because I think shorting is the best way to make money off this "company", and by the time you're allowed to short it, the other investors will have gotten a clue and the price will already be down where it belongs... in the pink sheets!
Notice the vindictive, angry, tirades coming from some female readers. Again and again, I see this self-righteousness surface anytime a man dares to frankly discuss women with fellow men. It reminds me of the male insecurities that come to the surface when said males are confronted with feminist venting. Oh, and I do feel that women do have a lot of legitimate grievances by the way, but being pissed that we judge you just as mercilessly and arbitrarily as you judge us is not one of them.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @12:40PM EDT
> PETA women are always looking for partners, and > they vote just like you and donate to the same > causes.
Like hell they do! PETA, Greens, and other luddite bastards are the natural enemies of anyone who likes technology and/or believes in liberty. I'd rather be with a "right-wing" chiX0r whose political/religious views I'm indifferent to than some raging tree hugger whose politics are threatening the future of my species and my civilization. Of course, I don't have to settle for right-wing, because the sisters ain't dumb: more and more of them are wising up to what Libertarianism has to offer.
Admittedly small-time as yet, too small-time for Rob to even put it on his "sites that use Slash" page, but here it is: GerOL: Gerontology Online. It's a journal about life extension, both theoretical and practical. With most of the jargon linked to Slashdot's Everything site. I know there aren't many bio-geeks on this list, but check it out and see if you can make any sense of it, or suggest improvements. Oh, and it runs Slash, the best bunch of web-zine scripts around!
Biomed ethicists do for biology what Microsoft does for computers-- attempt to undermine progress, feed FUD to the public, and when they absolutely can't hold back a new development one second more, they take credit for it.
What ethical issues can this raise? It's not exactly a velociraptor we're talking about here. Yes, Dolly might be aging faster than normal, but that's a technical (and probably fixable) problem, not an ethical one. I'm glad they're going ahead with this, I hope they learn a lot of new stuff that will someday save/extend our lives, and I'm glad that the oversight of allowing ethicists into the discussion didn't kill the project. Be more careful next time, kids.
Word up, brother. Folks, this guy really know what he's talking about. He is like 40% of the support for Slash in the entire world (the other 40% being Temple Hoff and 20% being random people on Temple's list). Also, lilithfair.org is way cool. What do you mean, lame ripoff? It's running the same software, of course it's going to have some UI features in common. At least he did original artwork and color schemes for it. As for better Slashdot parodies, segfault.org actually bothered to mess around with the Slash code (AFAIK) and actually has funny stuff now and then.
To the poster who can tell "at a glance" whether something is spam or not: you might want to put special thought into what lexical clues allow you to differentiate between a legitimate dirty joke someone sent you and an XXX site advert. What other non-list messages are there that we get (and want to get) that resemble spam? I say non-list, because of course commercial lists that you've deliberately signed up for are trivial to make exceptions for in a filter.
So, in the future the Feds have killed crypto?
on
Review:Wing Commander
·
· Score: 1
Instead of checking the PGP sig on the "top secret message" against the Admiral's public key, they get into a big argument until the crazy french guy shows them some heirloom ring.
Keep it modular, and as automated as possible.
on
Open Source Funding
·
· Score: 1
In principle, I like this idea, but I also agree with the main criticism emerging: "beware of corruption and bureaucracy". So...
Modularity can resist bureaucracy. Any such project will have to be structured so that it's effective even if it's being done by just one person, but scaleable to accomodate unlimited numbers of additional volunteers. This spontaneous organization is one of the strengths of Open Source in the first place.
Automation can resist corruption. Making something technically impossible or difficult to accomplish goes a lot further than assuring people that you'll never let anyone do it. Someone should write a CGI program that accepts monetary or equipment pledges and keeps track of what goes where. The less human intervention, the better-- fewer financial irregularities and less administrative overhead.
Slashdot Mirror
Bad analogy, because it doesn't eliminate current human tech from the equation.
If our goal was leapfrogging them into the information age, we'd simply give them the knowhow and means to build the equipment that is our current standard, warts and all.
...with one important exception. We'd have to be mindful of the fact that they'd eventually realize the cruel joke we've played on them and return, looking for vengeance. That's why I think every piece of tech we give them should have a MacOS-compatible back door designed such that Jeff Goldblum and an Apple Powerbook would be all that is needed to render their entire battle-fleet helpless.
Jeez moron, it took me less time to go over to Altavista and do a search (found that the homepage is www.transhumanism.com ... duh) that it's taking to flame your sorry ass for being lazy and stupid</I> :-) I said Transhumanists are busy people, didn't I?
<BR>
Well, why did you bother asking then?
Okay, we've just hit the Nazi threshhold. What was that old Usenet rule? Any thread that goes on long enough will eventually mention Nazis? Anyone remember the name and exact phrasing of that rule?
<BR><BR>
BTW, lay off the Libertarian baiting, will you? You don't see Libertarians ragging on the Idiot community, do you? Okay, maybe you do, but try to rise above them.
<BR><BR>
PS: No, I'm not a damn Libertarian. I am a Transhumanist, and have my own differences with the Libs, but not on this simplistic level.
It was goddamn inevitable that some asshead was going to build something on the Quake source and then turn Libertarian and refuse to abide by the GPL. If you drop a rock, it will fall. If you drop source code onto a gang of Windows programmers and Libertarians...
Please don't turn this political. Calling opponents of GPL Libertarians is just as much of a fallacy and a disservice to GPL as calling its supporters Communists. Labels like that belong back in the 'brick-n-mortar' age. Anyway, I'm sure a lot of the Open Source community happens to be various shades of Libertarian and Anarchist. I agree with the point you were making, but it would be much stronger without the political baggage.
we either grow girls more like men(which I suspect men don't want, otherwise selective pressure would have already done this)
As far as selective pressures are concerned, my heterosexuality appears to extend only as far as physical features. On the inside, the more 'macho' and 'logical' she is, the more I love her. Maybe I'm an exception, but I don't think so; I see the geeks around me flocking to women like that as well. It never gets talked about for some reason, though. In short, damn right this man wants 'girls' to be more like men! I would give my right arm to date someone with whom I can have a real conversation about my fields of interest.
1. The ultimate PDA understands what you're talking about, very intelligent, and aesthetically pleasing. Hell, why not cram those new plastic muscles from the other /. article plus some circuitry into a RealDoll (www.realdoll.com) body and have the perfect mate? The standard family unit becomes four adults. Human males and females become increasingly separatist but nobody really minds as much as they thought they would. Birth-rates go way down. Sex-drive has inspired yet another tech breakthrough... but of course, people want them to be more and more human, better and better conversationalists... so eventually they become human enough to start lobbying for equal rights.
2. Whatever the shape of PDAs to come, one thing I'm pretty sure of: the cubicle farm will be extinct. Why would workers want to go to a dreary beige office when they could instead telecommute from the beach, the golf course, or the coffee shop? Why would companies want to pay rent for office space that sits unused most of the time? So, tons of real estate gets abandoned by traditional companies and bought up by Starbucks et. al., made pleasant to work in, and rented back to the companies and/or free agents. The age of labortainment begins. Incidently, with such high mobility, it might be that almost everyone is a temp or contractor. Companies themselves start to be very temporary and abstract collections of stockholders, contract-managers, contract-labor, maybe some rented robofactory time, and glitzy web pages. They get together for a month or two to sell the latest-n-greatest product and service, then get bought by other temporary companies or spin off into several pieces that can more efficiently adapt themselves to whatever becomes the next money-making opportunity.
3. A brain interface doesn't have to be invasive, at least not the user-input part of it. Brain scanning technology already exists... maybe have something that passively scans electromagnetic waves emitted by the brain, so that wearers don't get cancer or whatever. Not sure if this is theoretically possible, though: I may be a bio geek but not specifically a neurology geek.
"If it's obviously designed for hairy apes to use to fend off the despair of loneliness, it's pornography."
I sense a pejorative tone here. Is it bad for hairy apes to fend of the despair of loneliness? Do we deserve to be lonely? Perhaps you'd care to maybe contribute to solving the problem instead of just taking cheap shots at it?
Just count your blessings that you aren't a guy and you don't need to get laid every couple of weeks in order to feel good about yourself (watch the especially desperate sensitive guys jump in with 'well, I don't need to, I can subsist indefinitely just on deep conversations').
Now then, what were we talking about? Oh yeah, the mobile thingies... Well, since they're going to be in every single traffic light, ATM, phone, doorknob, and toothpick, perhaps companies will spring up to offer people 'roaming accounts' so any nearby gizmo immediately queries their files/preferences and responds to them by name. That way, nobody will have to wear PDAs at all, which will fit in nicely with the 21st century's increasing acceptance of nudism that I'm also predicting.
As for the people raising screen-size issues, remember: they already have goggles that can mimic a 21" screen. It's not such a stretch to say that such goggles will become lighter, sleeker, and add opacity-control. If my nudism theory is wrong, I think the PDA of tomorrow will look like glasses or even contact lenses. People's perception of reality will literally be colored by their desktop settings. We'll be able to make people we don't like invisible (or funny looking) by adding them to our killfiles. Our language will become more terse, since part of the information content will be shifted to wireless chatter between our PDAs. Someone like the Scientologists might try to start a mind-control cult where they have control of the members' PDA-overlays and thus over their perception of reality... or perhaps it will be media and software conglomerates who try to pull this... but I doubt it will continue to be possible for really huge companies to exist toward the middle of the century.
Just two days ago I posted an off-topic flame about how Rob & Co. aren't living the same OpenEverything ethic they advocate. Now, I don't know whether to feel ashamed or vindicated.
I guess I'll be less judgemental in the future.
(Sheesh. Somebody with the squishdot source want to open a new site?)
/usr/local/slash directory onto his sources page. That's all we ask.
It's been tried. Guess what? For practical purposes, the current version of Slashdot is CLOSED SOURCE! That's right, the only source they made available last I checked was Slash 2 and pre-3, both of which were only marginally useable. I HOPE someone forks off Slash development and manages it responsibly, because Rob "Mr. OpenSource" Malda talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk.
"Waitaminute", you'll say: "Rob doesn't get paid to do support his source". Not directly, no... but he makes his money off the OS community, and even among big soulless corporations, it's customary to throw us a bone now and then. So nevermind 'support'... you would think that the least he could do would be to practice what he preaches, and put a fsking tarball of the scripts in his
Then, the folks over at http://projects.is.asu.edu/mai lman/listinfo/slash-help will be able to fix all his broken code, document it, and redistribute it like they did version "pre-3".
Okay, so that strayed off topic, but it needed to be said. Rob, stop holding out on us please.
The untapped niche for Linux1 are projects that you want to fail. Really hate a manager? Convince them to buy the distro. Really hate your in-laws? Convince them to invest in LO.
You won't be able to short LNUX for a couple of months after their IPO, I believe. Federal regulations. Too bad, because I think shorting is the best way to make money off this "company", and by the time you're allowed to short it, the other investors will have gotten a clue and the price will already be down where it belongs... in the pink sheets!
Notice the vindictive, angry, tirades coming from some female readers. Again and again, I see this self-righteousness surface anytime a man dares to frankly discuss women with fellow men. It reminds me of the male insecurities that come to the surface when said males are confronted with feminist venting. Oh, and I do feel that women do have a lot of legitimate grievances by the way, but being pissed that we judge you just as mercilessly and arbitrarily as you judge us is not one of them.
by Anonymous Coward on Sunday October 24, @12:40PM EDT
> PETA women are always looking for partners, and
> they vote just like you and donate to the same
> causes.
Like hell they do! PETA, Greens, and other luddite bastards are the natural enemies of anyone who likes technology and/or believes in liberty. I'd rather be with a "right-wing" chiX0r whose political/religious views I'm indifferent to than some raging tree hugger whose politics are threatening the future of my species and my civilization. Of course, I don't have to settle for right-wing, because the sisters ain't dumb: more and more of them are wising up to what Libertarianism has to offer.
Admittedly small-time as yet, too small-time for Rob to even put it on his "sites that use Slash" page, but here it is: GerOL: Gerontology Online. It's a journal about life extension, both theoretical and practical. With most of the jargon linked to Slashdot's Everything site. I know there aren't many bio-geeks on this list, but check it out and see if you can make any sense of it, or suggest improvements. Oh, and it runs Slash, the best bunch of web-zine scripts around!
Biomed ethicists do for biology what Microsoft does for computers-- attempt to undermine progress, feed FUD to the public, and when they absolutely can't hold back a new development one second more, they take credit for it.
What ethical issues can this raise? It's not exactly a velociraptor we're talking about here. Yes, Dolly might be aging faster than normal, but that's a technical (and probably fixable) problem, not an ethical one. I'm glad they're going ahead with this, I hope they learn a lot of new stuff that will someday save/extend our lives, and I'm glad that the oversight of allowing ethicists into the discussion didn't kill the project. Be more careful next time, kids.
Word up, brother. Folks, this guy really know what he's talking about. He is like 40% of the support for Slash in the entire world (the other 40% being Temple Hoff and 20% being random people on Temple's list). Also, lilithfair.org is way cool. What do you mean, lame ripoff? It's running the same software, of course it's going to have some UI features in common. At least he did original artwork and color schemes for it. As for better Slashdot parodies, segfault.org actually bothered to mess around with the Slash code (AFAIK) and actually has funny stuff now and then.
To the poster who can tell "at a glance" whether something is spam or not: you might want to put special thought into what lexical clues allow you to differentiate between a legitimate dirty joke someone sent you and an XXX site advert. What other non-list messages are there that we get (and want to get) that resemble spam? I say non-list, because of course commercial lists that you've deliberately signed up for are trivial to make exceptions for in a filter.
Instead of checking the PGP sig on the "top secret message" against the Admiral's public key, they get into a big argument until the crazy french guy shows them some heirloom ring.
In principle, I like this idea, but I also agree with the main criticism emerging: "beware of corruption and bureaucracy". So...
Modularity can resist bureaucracy.
Any such project will have to be structured so that it's effective even if it's being done by just one person, but scaleable to accomodate unlimited numbers of additional volunteers. This spontaneous organization is one of the strengths of Open Source in the first place.
Automation can resist corruption.
Making something technically impossible or difficult to accomplish goes a lot further than assuring people that you'll never let anyone do it. Someone should write a CGI program that accepts monetary or equipment pledges and keeps track of what goes where. The less human intervention, the better-- fewer financial irregularities and less administrative overhead.