A lot of the funding today is going to actively involve the public in sci/tech policy. The controversy around GMO food and the Euro market (GMO-free until recently) being largely closed to the pro-GMO U.S. food industry has opened a lot of eyes. If we're going to avoid this kind of controversy in the future, we need to dump research dollars into finding out what people think about new tech and developing it accordingly rather than expecting people to just get used to whatever tech is developed.
Right! We've nearly trashed Earth's ecosystem. It's time to do it to another planet. As an added bonus, we could wipe out whatever chance we had of studying life there without contamination from Earth.
Pfft. By entering digits on your phone, you just missed out. Get her to write on your hand with a pen, a 20th century device used to inscribe data on paper (or skin). It's much more intimate.
If you honestly believe that CNN is left-leaning, I think you need to seriously re-examine your definition of left. American media has always been right-leaning. If you think otherwise, you need to do long-term comparisons of what stories were covered in the American media and the language that was used to cover them. You will find that the liberal media myth is completely false and that the standards of journalism have been pulled to the right by reactionary "journalists" like Bill O'Reilly.
Just because you're less right wing than Bill O'Reilly doesn't mean you're leftist.
We'll be waiting a lot longer than 20 years for nanobots that we have to worry about crashing or being hacked, at least on a widespread basis. When you think of nanobots in the short term, you'd be better off thinking of protiens than little submarine robots. They will be dumb machines that will handle one or two tasks - closing certain receptors, opening others, or just bonding to them and waiting for outside activation by light or radiation. They certainly won't be able to be reprogrammed or crash because of software bugs. The first ones won't be there to cure diseases, either. They'll be diagnostic tools, help with drug delivery, or perhaps treat symptoms of said diseases by halting or taking over various activities encouraged or disabled by the disease.
Personally, I think Kurzweil's 20 year estimates are overly optimistic, although the general principles of what he talks about do hold up...
Re:Flying Car: Completely Impractical
on
NYT On Flying Cars
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I don't think the personal flying car will ever be practical or affordable, but I think there are some applications for merging flight with city traffic. First, flying police cars as mentioned in the article. Second, how about flying transit? How much more popular would mass transit be if you could zip over the heads of car-driving motorists stuck in traffic at 450km/hr, making it to the depot at the grocery store or near your work in record time?
I'm really glad some people are exploring it. Hydrogen-powered flying transit, anyone?
not only that, but they might not even have changed it with the intent of breaking third party software. it's in beta, so they might just be experimenting with better ways to work things.
is available here. one of the most promising techniques seems to be self-assembling nanowires and sensors running through the blood vessels of the brain. lots of facinating reading.
what are the chances the big music companies would choose to showcase a tune that is about to go into the public domain by releasing a single for it putting it through the hype machine to push it up to #3? seems they wanted to have a clear case of a song that revenue will be lost on if copyright is not extended. am i just being too skeptical?
to be honest, a voluntary system with no rules on what information can be collected scares me more than the all-knowing capps ii program. it puts in effect the same sort of discrimination and information gathering without any of the restrictions that would be in place in a legislated system. say 8 passengers give their information and two don't-- who do you think will get the cavity search?
Something non-empirical doesn't necessarily equate with useless. People's feelings are important to qualitative research and can sometimes get at things that quantitative/empirical studies cannot.
The quality on the Pixies gigs is great, too... I picked up one for Edmonton and it has been in heavy iTunes rotation since then. The quality is fine, but to be honest, a well-encoded mp3 version of the show would be (nearly) as good as the cd-r version they were selling. However, you'd have to do without the nifty cd case, which is really incredible for the Pixies gigs - silver foil lettering on a white cardboard case. It looks classy. You just wouldn't get that kind of thing with a USB key.
Yes, they meant vultures. Air Canada is dying, and these funds are just waiting for them to keel over before they swoop down for the feed. Thus, vulture funds.
No, they will be pissed off. But they're happy to have the work right now, just like their replacements will be 10-15 years from now. The American high tech workforce has become lazy and complaicant, and the replacement workforce will too, but not for a while yet.
Massive flamebait warning, but this is really what I think:
This kind of thinking is part of the reason why jobs are going overseas. Imagine yourself to be in charge of BigCorp Inc. If you can choose to give the job to someone overseas who is grateful just to have it or an American who feels that employment and benefits are owed to him/her, posts on Slashdot all day while they are employed and will cause damage to the company upon termination of employment, who gets the job?
my point was that parents won't be able to be strict anymore. kids will have access to all their parents' skeletons, politicians to each other's skeletons, media to celebrities' skeletons... it'll just stop being interesting, and we'll all stop caring. everyone has sex, most people have tried drugs, etc etc etc. why keep pretending?
Great! I can't wait for privacy issues to go mental super-hardcore. Once everyone's closeted skeletons are on video for the world to see, do you think anyone will care about yours? The world will get a hell of a lot more liberal in a real hurry once everyone realizes that =everyone= does naughty stuff.
Part of my job involves science policy research. When I talk to scientists, they say just the opposite. They don't want more science fiction. In fact, they blame science fiction for getting inaccurate ideas out to the public. (You might say that good science fiction doesn't do this, but how much science fiction is good?)
The debate in question is not forming policy. It's just throwing ideas on the table. They aren't saying 'let's form a Preserve Life On Mars Society -now-!' They're saying 'so, if there is life on Mars, how should we deal with it?' This kind of debate is highly constructive, as it lays groundwork for policy no matter what information comes out later on.
Slashdot Mirror
You've got it completely right.
A lot of the funding today is going to actively involve the public in sci/tech policy. The controversy around GMO food and the Euro market (GMO-free until recently) being largely closed to the pro-GMO U.S. food industry has opened a lot of eyes. If we're going to avoid this kind of controversy in the future, we need to dump research dollars into finding out what people think about new tech and developing it accordingly rather than expecting people to just get used to whatever tech is developed.
Right! We've nearly trashed Earth's ecosystem. It's time to do it to another planet. As an added bonus, we could wipe out whatever chance we had of studying life there without contamination from Earth.
Pfft. By entering digits on your phone, you just missed out. Get her to write on your hand with a pen, a 20th century device used to inscribe data on paper (or skin). It's much more intimate.
If you honestly believe that CNN is left-leaning, I think you need to seriously re-examine your definition of left. American media has always been right-leaning. If you think otherwise, you need to do long-term comparisons of what stories were covered in the American media and the language that was used to cover them. You will find that the liberal media myth is completely false and that the standards of journalism have been pulled to the right by reactionary "journalists" like Bill O'Reilly.
Just because you're less right wing than Bill O'Reilly doesn't mean you're leftist.
Austin International Airport Security:
o .c gi?camera=&resolution=640x480
http://lobbycamera4.abia.org/axis-cgi/mjpg/vide
And Roddenberry brilliant idea came only a decade after Richard Feynman talked about it.
We'll be waiting a lot longer than 20 years for nanobots that we have to worry about crashing or being hacked, at least on a widespread basis. When you think of nanobots in the short term, you'd be better off thinking of protiens than little submarine robots. They will be dumb machines that will handle one or two tasks - closing certain receptors, opening others, or just bonding to them and waiting for outside activation by light or radiation. They certainly won't be able to be reprogrammed or crash because of software bugs. The first ones won't be there to cure diseases, either. They'll be diagnostic tools, help with drug delivery, or perhaps treat symptoms of said diseases by halting or taking over various activities encouraged or disabled by the disease.
Personally, I think Kurzweil's 20 year estimates are overly optimistic, although the general principles of what he talks about do hold up...
This is what happens.
I don't think the personal flying car will ever be practical or affordable, but I think there are some applications for merging flight with city traffic. First, flying police cars as mentioned in the article. Second, how about flying transit? How much more popular would mass transit be if you could zip over the heads of car-driving motorists stuck in traffic at 450km/hr, making it to the depot at the grocery store or near your work in record time?
I'm really glad some people are exploring it. Hydrogen-powered flying transit, anyone?
not only that, but they might not even have changed it with the intent of breaking third party software. it's in beta, so they might just be experimenting with better ways to work things.
is available here. one of the most promising techniques seems to be self-assembling nanowires and sensors running through the blood vessels of the brain. lots of facinating reading.
what are the chances the big music companies would choose to showcase a tune that is about to go into the public domain by releasing a single for it putting it through the hype machine to push it up to #3? seems they wanted to have a clear case of a song that revenue will be lost on if copyright is not extended. am i just being too skeptical?
to be honest, a voluntary system with no rules on what information can be collected scares me more than the all-knowing capps ii program. it puts in effect the same sort of discrimination and information gathering without any of the restrictions that would be in place in a legislated system. say 8 passengers give their information and two don't-- who do you think will get the cavity search?
Why waste time on long term fatal? How about stretch ebola out over a week and make it airborne?
Something non-empirical doesn't necessarily equate with useless. People's feelings are important to qualitative research and can sometimes get at things that quantitative/empirical studies cannot.
The quality on the Pixies gigs is great, too... I picked up one for Edmonton and it has been in heavy iTunes rotation since then. The quality is fine, but to be honest, a well-encoded mp3 version of the show would be (nearly) as good as the cd-r version they were selling. However, you'd have to do without the nifty cd case, which is really incredible for the Pixies gigs - silver foil lettering on a white cardboard case. It looks classy. You just wouldn't get that kind of thing with a USB key.
But it'll all be worth it to have one status symbol built into another...
Yes, they meant vultures. Air Canada is dying, and these funds are just waiting for them to keel over before they swoop down for the feed. Thus, vulture funds.
Right here.
No, they will be pissed off. But they're happy to have the work right now, just like their replacements will be 10-15 years from now. The American high tech workforce has become lazy and complaicant, and the replacement workforce will too, but not for a while yet.
Massive flamebait warning, but this is really what I think:
This kind of thinking is part of the reason why jobs are going overseas. Imagine yourself to be in charge of BigCorp Inc. If you can choose to give the job to someone overseas who is grateful just to have it or an American who feels that employment and benefits are owed to him/her, posts on Slashdot all day while they are employed and will cause damage to the company upon termination of employment, who gets the job?
my point was that parents won't be able to be strict anymore. kids will have access to all their parents' skeletons, politicians to each other's skeletons, media to celebrities' skeletons... it'll just stop being interesting, and we'll all stop caring. everyone has sex, most people have tried drugs, etc etc etc. why keep pretending?
that the 'land of the free and the home of the brave' is horribly restrictive and lives in abject terror?
Great! I can't wait for privacy issues to go mental super-hardcore. Once everyone's closeted skeletons are on video for the world to see, do you think anyone will care about yours? The world will get a hell of a lot more liberal in a real hurry once everyone realizes that =everyone= does naughty stuff.
Part of my job involves science policy research. When I talk to scientists, they say just the opposite. They don't want more science fiction. In fact, they blame science fiction for getting inaccurate ideas out to the public. (You might say that good science fiction doesn't do this, but how much science fiction is good?)
The debate in question is not forming policy. It's just throwing ideas on the table. They aren't saying 'let's form a Preserve Life On Mars Society -now-!' They're saying 'so, if there is life on Mars, how should we deal with it?' This kind of debate is highly constructive, as it lays groundwork for policy no matter what information comes out later on.