Last week a friend and I went to Bletchley Park, where British codebreakers broke the German Enigma cipher during World War II. The site is run by (very) enthusiastic amateurs, and just about every conceivable kind of anorak was there displaying something.
A local computer society has a room at the site devoted entirely to old computer equipment. Among the nerdjunk were a number of old Pong machines. My friend and I played a game and a half, at which point we were bored stiff. But it was a nice nostalgia trip while it lasted.
So if you want to play a few games of Pong on vintage equipment (or you're into WWII, or crypto, or old toys, or you want to see the works of the Leighton Buzzard Model Boat Club, or...), Bletchley Park is the place to go.
The mental image I get on reading the abstract of this patent is something out of Dr. Suess:
A ground-contacting module, movably attached to the support, serves to suspend the subject in the support over the surface.
And this reference is attached to the patent:
Roy et al., "Five-Wheel Unicycle System", Medical & Biological Engineering & Computing, vol. 23, No. 6, United Kingdom (1985) pp. 539-596.
A five-wheel unicycle? Is that like a two-wheel tricycle? Obviously I'm missing something. A lot of the references on this patent deal with unicycles. I'm picturing executives in five years riding unicycles to work, looking just as silly as when they use razor scooters today.
This is a good point. The original poster talked about sending agriculture experts instead of technology experts. Ag experts are, of course, necessary, but not sufficient, and they use IT like everyone else.
Most people are at least familiar in passing with the famine cycle in the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia). One of the problems was that farmers would get a lousy harvest and be forced to eat the next year's seed crop just to stay alive. Then ag experts from donor countries gave them bags of new seeds -- not necessarily what the farmers had been planting, but whatever happened to be on hand.
Often, these failed the following year. Some farmers would get good results, others would not, and would be forced to eat the whole crop and it would start all over again.
After this happened a few times, the US Agency for International Development commissioned a GIS survey of the area, taking into account soil types, elevation, rainfall, etc. It turned out that the Horn of Africa is a crazy quilt of these factors, to a much greater degree than most other parts of the world. A crop that might grow well on one farm might grow very poorly on another just a few miles away. The new GIS was to be used in future seed distributions (though in truth I do not know what became of this and whether it was successful or not).
I'm an international development professional currently working in Egypt on a girls' education project. At other phases of my career I have worked on microcredit and small business development, all fairly "traditional" development interventions.
So do I think bringing IT to developing countries a waste of resources? Absolutely not. In fact, in my judgement, it is the single most important unmet need in international development today. Why? Because IT poses both a significant danger and a wonderful opportunity for the economies of these countries.
The developing world does not need an industrial revolution in the sense that we experienced it in the West. The world no longer works that way. Someone mentioned the automobile industry, and this is actually a great example of what I am talking about.
Go to a local new car dealer and pick a car -- any car, of any make or model. Take it apart and organize the parts by country of origin. You will have a great many piles of parts, and I will be very surprised if you find that more than 40% of them are from any one country. Certainly you will not find that most of the parts in that car came from the car's country of "manufacture." On top of that, many of the parts will be composed of raw materials from another country entirely.
Take apart the same make and model that came off the production line six months earlier, and I expect you will find many of the parts are from different countries than they were in the first car you took apart. You will also have a really pissed-off car lot owner.
This is basically just comparative advantage taken to extreme. We can take it to these extremes because we have transportation and communication technology that makes it feasible for a producer of a big ticket item like a car to get bids from all over the world for parts that meet its specifications and transport them quickly and reliably to the place of manufacture. This ability in turn creates pressure on the car manufacturer to do just that, because if it is not searching far and wide to save money on components, its competitors will.
As we've seen from the recent B2B boom on the Internet, the same resources are now becoming available and affordable to manufacturers of less complex, less expensive goods.
So does it make sense to start a Ghanaian car industry? Probably not. But it might make sense to produce particular components of cars, computers, and other goods that Ghanaian manufacturers are well-positioned to produce.
But without access to the kinds of technologies that would allow (in this example) Ghanaian producers to communicate directly with potential customers and competitors to determine specifications and market prices, and to make sales, such an industry is impossible. And Ghanaian producers could not hope to match the efficiencies of, say, Taiwanese producers, without access to IT.
On the other hand, with access to what are now relatively inexpensive information technologies, producers in developing countries have an unprecedented opportunity to compete with the big boys without having their huge capital investment. You've seen the IBM commercial where the Japanese company gets a bid from a small producer in Texas? Well, that producer could just as well be in Accra, or Cairo, or Almaty. If the technology is available in those places.
The same is true even for unprocessed agricultural commodities. These are traditionally exported through middlemen based in the developed world. But with modern communication technologies, developing-country producers can access those markets and make contacts directly, improving the prices it can get for those commodities. The flip side to this is that without those technologies, the need for middlemen either will price the commodity out of the market or will provide the producer with an even smaller return for its goods.
There are many other excellent arguments for promoting IT in developing countries, but for me this is the killer, and it is not specific to one class of countries. All countries have an interest in the forces that move export markets. Haiti exports. Burma exports. Ethiopia exports. With access to the modern tools that have transformed the Western economy over the last 5-10 years, they could have a chance at a better economic situation than ever before. Without access to those technologies, they're trapped.
Of course, they might turn it back on in case of a "strategic conflict", as they'd say.
The funny part about this is that during the Gulf War, the DOD apparently turned SA off, probably because a lot of the units deployed in the Gulf were using commercial-grade GPS receivers rather than the more expensive, less easily-available military-grade receivers. So when they were facing an actual enemy that theoretically might use GPS against them, they had to turn SA off anyway so they didn't get lost in the desert.
No, giving to different charities is not mutually exclusive, but if your goal really is to do the most people the most good, then I bet it would be best to give to the traditional feed-the-starving, house-the-homeless, cure-the-diseased type of charities.
I work for one of those traditional charities, so of course I believe them to be valuable. But there is a role for all of these organizations, and we shouldn't shut any of them out just because they don't deal in food and medicine. Civil society is a rich tapestry, and is not just about canned goods for the poor. Single-minded giving does not serve society well, and something people often forget is that the poor -- today's and tomorrow's -- are part of society, too.
My wife and I give to charities of the other's choosing for Christmas, and for the record, I'm having her give to EFF this year. I feel good about that choice. Not because I am not familiar with plenty of other worthy causes, or because I think poor Bangladeshi kids care about DeCSS, but because the EFF deals with important issues, issues that are important to wider society but that few of us are passionate about or equipped to really understand.
It's like historic preservation. I don't know anything about historic preservation, but when I go to a new place and explore its historic sites, I benefit from preservation. Not just because the sites are enjoyable, but because they present a learning experience and helps me think about my place in the vastness of history, and that has an effect on my life as a whole. So while I will probably never give a dime toward historic preservation, I am glad that others are passionate about it and give generously toward it, even though it may seem like a relatively frivolous and middle-class pursuit.
I'm not sure it's the most worthy recipient of your Christmas contributions, but the Long Now Foundation is an interesting organization that seeks to raise awareness of very long-term planning issues.
Their centerpiece project is the Clock of the Long Now, a clock with an extremely long period, made to last 10,000 years. The idea is to make it a destination that will inspire visitors to think about their place in time and their responsibility to the future.
A couple of people have mentioned Worldspace already. Worldspace is a satellite radio venture based out of Washington, DC, that aims to bring radio to developing countries, where many people live outside the range of conventional broadcast radio. In addition to the audio stream, there are data channels as well, opening some interesting possibilities for alternatives to traditional Internet access in the developing world.
Worldspace has two satellites in place and broadcasting, covering Africa and Asia. A third and final satellite, covering Latin America, either is about to launch or is about to begin broadcasting (I can't remember which).
The problem with Worldspace is getting a receiver. The low-end ones started at $350, which many people rightly pointed out was out of the reach of many of Worldspace's intended customers (though one often finds dirt-poor villages have at least one gigantic color television, so that was not necessarily an insurmountable barrier). The advertised prices recently came down to about $125-$175, which leads me to wonder if the company is in trouble.
I live in Cairo, which has been in the footprint of Worldspace broadcasts for over a year, but I can't get a receiver to save my life. I was willing to blow the $350, but the sets aren't sold here and the company is consistently unresponsive to queries about alternative sources. (I even ordered one online from their website, but can't get them to confim, deny, or fill the order).
The company claimed there were initial production problems, because the chipsets and everything had to be done custom. But the lingering distribution problems have not been adequately explained, and I can't imagine that bodes well for the venture.
Do one hand recount, at least of the undervoted punch-card ballots, preferably of the entire state to assuage the Bush camp's not unjustified concerns about selectivity.
That recount might well show Bush won. The margin of error would probably still be greater than the margin of victory, but at least we would have made a good-faith effort to determine the real result, rather than just saying "I won and I'm holding my hands over my ears so I can't hear anybody who says I didn't."
Bush won... They recounted... Bush still won... They recounted again... Bush STILL won.
This is a mantra we hear frequently, but which misses the point entirely.
It may very well be that more votes were cast in favor of Bush than Gore. The fact remains, though, that at no time has the margin of victory been more than 1,725 votes, or about.02% of the Florida votes cast.
In a single county, Miami-Dade, there are more than 10,000 ballots that punchcard readers registered as having made no vote for president. We know that in many counties votes have been undercounted because these "hanging chads" sometimes get pushed back into the hole when they are fed into the machine.
The current margin of victory is 537 votes, or about 1/20th of the number of undervotes registered in Miami-Dade alone.
So it is ridiculous to be saying "we counted the votes, and Bush won, and then we counted them again, and Bush won!" In point of fact there are thousands of votes that haven't been counted at all.
We're not talking about dimpled chads or butterfly ballots. We're talking about holes clearly punched in ballots and not counted by machines which, while neither Republican or Democrat, are also old and poorly designed. Is anybody on Slashdot really prepared to take the position that mechanical devices -- particularly 40 year-old mechanical devices -- can do everything automatically and never need human intervention?
So we counted some of the votes, and we didn't know who won, and then we counted some of them again, and didn't know who won, and then in two counties we counted all of the votes.
And apart from those two counties, we still don't know who won. And we won't until we count all the votes.
My memory on this is a little fuzzy, but I believe the genetic sequence the Israeli researchers were said to have sought and found was specific to certain communities of Iraqis.
IIRC they had gotten as far as identifying the sequences they would need to exploit to engineer an Iraqi-specific disease, but had not figured out how to exploit those sequences. A major sticking point was how to distinguish Iraqi Arabs from Sephardi Jews of Iraqi background; I don't recall whether this problem was resolved or not.
In fairness to the Israelis, it is worth noting that there was a tremendous uproar in the Knesset when this research was made public, and IIRC the plug was pulled at that time. But it is fairly shocking that the Israelis, of all people, would contemplate such a Mengele-esque project.
And I don't think anyone would be too surprised if research in this vein was still going on in secret.
I believe similar research was also done in Apartheid-era South Africa.
The link between sleeplessness and memory loss has always been intuitively known for eons. We've also known for quite some time that sleeplessness takes a toll on the workforce.
Various sculptures from different cultures that lived about 4.000 to 5.000 years ago in SOUTH AMERICA portray bearded people and black people. How did they get there? South Americans are genetically unable to have such beard-growth and arn't black either.
And therefore...
There used to be a civilsation we know nothing about that existed BEFORE continent-drift began.
Continent-drift started later then we think
So all the bearded and black people moved to certain designated areas so they wouldn't be on the wrong continent when continental drift came?
This is pushing the topic a little bit, but is there a map or other representation of the bandwidth that various countries/continents have coming into/going out of them?
You cannot establish a situation in which content must be labeled. It leads directly to censorship, period. Its ONLY purpose is censorship.
censorship is Baddddd, m'mkay?
When I pick up my TV Guide, it tells me whether a film is a comedy, drama, adult, etc. If I go to a bookstore, its contents are divided into fiction, non-fiction, history, geography, computers, etc. On the web, I can see whether the site I am viewing is commercial, non-commercial, educational, military, etc.
This is all useful information. Could it be used to censor? Yes, I suppose it could. Is censorship its "ONLY purpose?" Don't be ridiculous, m'mkay?
As to Cuba - the penalty isn't for trading with Cuba. It's for importing Cuban goods into the United States.
This is incorrect. It is also illegal to export to Cuba, with the exception of certain strictly regulated items such as pharmaceuticals. As another reader pointed out, the Helms-Burton Act even imposes penalties on non-US companies who do business with Cuba.
Well, there are non-capital costs with running these machines. Electricity for one, a physical place for the machine another, and keeping the thing running.
It's a bit of a stretch, sure, but it's conceivable that the cost-benefit could work out for somebody.
Steve Grand, a expert in artificial life with Cyberlife Research in Somerset, describes the work as "laudably perverse"
The article talks a little bit about transhumanist stuff like mapping a whole human brain to a robot body, but cautions:
More realistic... is connecting electronic devices such as mobile phones directly into our brains.
While I have long suspected that some of my colleagues have mobile phones connected directly to their brains, this does not strike me as an appealing idea.
"I have this horrible ringing in my ears."
"Of course you do. I've been trying to call you all day!"
Good thing stuff like this never gets taken out of context or misinterpreted or anything. Otherwise people might try to marginalize our points of view on issues like this by painting us as knee-jerk extremists with immature worldviews.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, but how would we know it's the real Bruce Perens speaking to us?
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Last week a friend and I went to Bletchley Park, where British codebreakers broke the German Enigma cipher during World War II. The site is run by (very) enthusiastic amateurs, and just about every conceivable kind of anorak was there displaying something.
A local computer society has a room at the site devoted entirely to old computer equipment. Among the nerdjunk were a number of old Pong machines. My friend and I played a game and a half, at which point we were bored stiff. But it was a nice nostalgia trip while it lasted.
So if you want to play a few games of Pong on vintage equipment (or you're into WWII, or crypto, or old toys, or you want to see the works of the Leighton Buzzard Model Boat Club, or...), Bletchley Park is the place to go.
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Isn't the whole point of Baywatch to corrupt the youth?
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Will the browser-neutral web soon become a thing of the past? Yes, by about 1996, I would say.
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The mental image I get on reading the abstract of this patent is something out of Dr. Suess:
And this reference is attached to the patent:
A five-wheel unicycle? Is that like a two-wheel tricycle? Obviously I'm missing something. A lot of the references on this patent deal with unicycles. I'm picturing executives in five years riding unicycles to work, looking just as silly as when they use razor scooters today.
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This is a good point. The original poster talked about sending agriculture experts instead of technology experts. Ag experts are, of course, necessary, but not sufficient, and they use IT like everyone else.
Most people are at least familiar in passing with the famine cycle in the Horn of Africa (Somalia, Ethiopia). One of the problems was that farmers would get a lousy harvest and be forced to eat the next year's seed crop just to stay alive. Then ag experts from donor countries gave them bags of new seeds -- not necessarily what the farmers had been planting, but whatever happened to be on hand.
Often, these failed the following year. Some farmers would get good results, others would not, and would be forced to eat the whole crop and it would start all over again.
After this happened a few times, the US Agency for International Development commissioned a GIS survey of the area, taking into account soil types, elevation, rainfall, etc. It turned out that the Horn of Africa is a crazy quilt of these factors, to a much greater degree than most other parts of the world. A crop that might grow well on one farm might grow very poorly on another just a few miles away. The new GIS was to be used in future seed distributions (though in truth I do not know what became of this and whether it was successful or not).
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I'm an international development professional currently working in Egypt on a girls' education project. At other phases of my career I have worked on microcredit and small business development, all fairly "traditional" development interventions.
So do I think bringing IT to developing countries a waste of resources? Absolutely not. In fact, in my judgement, it is the single most important unmet need in international development today. Why? Because IT poses both a significant danger and a wonderful opportunity for the economies of these countries.
The developing world does not need an industrial revolution in the sense that we experienced it in the West. The world no longer works that way. Someone mentioned the automobile industry, and this is actually a great example of what I am talking about.
Go to a local new car dealer and pick a car -- any car, of any make or model. Take it apart and organize the parts by country of origin. You will have a great many piles of parts, and I will be very surprised if you find that more than 40% of them are from any one country. Certainly you will not find that most of the parts in that car came from the car's country of "manufacture." On top of that, many of the parts will be composed of raw materials from another country entirely.
Take apart the same make and model that came off the production line six months earlier, and I expect you will find many of the parts are from different countries than they were in the first car you took apart. You will also have a really pissed-off car lot owner.
This is basically just comparative advantage taken to extreme. We can take it to these extremes because we have transportation and communication technology that makes it feasible for a producer of a big ticket item like a car to get bids from all over the world for parts that meet its specifications and transport them quickly and reliably to the place of manufacture. This ability in turn creates pressure on the car manufacturer to do just that, because if it is not searching far and wide to save money on components, its competitors will.
As we've seen from the recent B2B boom on the Internet, the same resources are now becoming available and affordable to manufacturers of less complex, less expensive goods.
So does it make sense to start a Ghanaian car industry? Probably not. But it might make sense to produce particular components of cars, computers, and other goods that Ghanaian manufacturers are well-positioned to produce.
But without access to the kinds of technologies that would allow (in this example) Ghanaian producers to communicate directly with potential customers and competitors to determine specifications and market prices, and to make sales, such an industry is impossible. And Ghanaian producers could not hope to match the efficiencies of, say, Taiwanese producers, without access to IT.
On the other hand, with access to what are now relatively inexpensive information technologies, producers in developing countries have an unprecedented opportunity to compete with the big boys without having their huge capital investment. You've seen the IBM commercial where the Japanese company gets a bid from a small producer in Texas? Well, that producer could just as well be in Accra, or Cairo, or Almaty. If the technology is available in those places.
The same is true even for unprocessed agricultural commodities. These are traditionally exported through middlemen based in the developed world. But with modern communication technologies, developing-country producers can access those markets and make contacts directly, improving the prices it can get for those commodities. The flip side to this is that without those technologies, the need for middlemen either will price the commodity out of the market or will provide the producer with an even smaller return for its goods.
There are many other excellent arguments for promoting IT in developing countries, but for me this is the killer, and it is not specific to one class of countries. All countries have an interest in the forces that move export markets. Haiti exports. Burma exports. Ethiopia exports. With access to the modern tools that have transformed the Western economy over the last 5-10 years, they could have a chance at a better economic situation than ever before. Without access to those technologies, they're trapped.
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The funny part about this is that during the Gulf War, the DOD apparently turned SA off, probably because a lot of the units deployed in the Gulf were using commercial-grade GPS receivers rather than the more expensive, less easily-available military-grade receivers. So when they were facing an actual enemy that theoretically might use GPS against them, they had to turn SA off anyway so they didn't get lost in the desert.
-
I work for one of those traditional charities, so of course I believe them to be valuable. But there is a role for all of these organizations, and we shouldn't shut any of them out just because they don't deal in food and medicine. Civil society is a rich tapestry, and is not just about canned goods for the poor. Single-minded giving does not serve society well, and something people often forget is that the poor -- today's and tomorrow's -- are part of society, too.
My wife and I give to charities of the other's choosing for Christmas, and for the record, I'm having her give to EFF this year. I feel good about that choice. Not because I am not familiar with plenty of other worthy causes, or because I think poor Bangladeshi kids care about DeCSS, but because the EFF deals with important issues, issues that are important to wider society but that few of us are passionate about or equipped to really understand.
It's like historic preservation. I don't know anything about historic preservation, but when I go to a new place and explore its historic sites, I benefit from preservation. Not just because the sites are enjoyable, but because they present a learning experience and helps me think about my place in the vastness of history, and that has an effect on my life as a whole. So while I will probably never give a dime toward historic preservation, I am glad that others are passionate about it and give generously toward it, even though it may seem like a relatively frivolous and middle-class pursuit.
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I'm not sure it's the most worthy recipient of your Christmas contributions, but the Long Now Foundation is an interesting organization that seeks to raise awareness of very long-term planning issues.
Their centerpiece project is the Clock of the Long Now, a clock with an extremely long period, made to last 10,000 years. The idea is to make it a destination that will inspire visitors to think about their place in time and their responsibility to the future.
Very interesting project.
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Except in this case, he's right: helping.org is an arm of the AOL Foundation.
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A couple of people have mentioned Worldspace already. Worldspace is a satellite radio venture based out of Washington, DC, that aims to bring radio to developing countries, where many people live outside the range of conventional broadcast radio. In addition to the audio stream, there are data channels as well, opening some interesting possibilities for alternatives to traditional Internet access in the developing world.
Worldspace has two satellites in place and broadcasting, covering Africa and Asia. A third and final satellite, covering Latin America, either is about to launch or is about to begin broadcasting (I can't remember which).
The problem with Worldspace is getting a receiver. The low-end ones started at $350, which many people rightly pointed out was out of the reach of many of Worldspace's intended customers (though one often finds dirt-poor villages have at least one gigantic color television, so that was not necessarily an insurmountable barrier). The advertised prices recently came down to about $125-$175, which leads me to wonder if the company is in trouble.
I live in Cairo, which has been in the footprint of Worldspace broadcasts for over a year, but I can't get a receiver to save my life. I was willing to blow the $350, but the sets aren't sold here and the company is consistently unresponsive to queries about alternative sources. (I even ordered one online from their website, but can't get them to confim, deny, or fill the order).
The company claimed there were initial production problems, because the chipsets and everything had to be done custom. But the lingering distribution problems have not been adequately explained, and I can't imagine that bodes well for the venture.
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Absolutely.
Do one hand recount, at least of the undervoted punch-card ballots, preferably of the entire state to assuage the Bush camp's not unjustified concerns about selectivity.
That recount might well show Bush won. The margin of error would probably still be greater than the margin of victory, but at least we would have made a good-faith effort to determine the real result, rather than just saying "I won and I'm holding my hands over my ears so I can't hear anybody who says I didn't."
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This is a mantra we hear frequently, but which misses the point entirely.
It may very well be that more votes were cast in favor of Bush than Gore. The fact remains, though, that at no time has the margin of victory been more than 1,725 votes, or about .02% of the Florida votes cast.
In a single county, Miami-Dade, there are more than 10,000 ballots that punchcard readers registered as having made no vote for president. We know that in many counties votes have been undercounted because these "hanging chads" sometimes get pushed back into the hole when they are fed into the machine.
The current margin of victory is 537 votes, or about 1/20th of the number of undervotes registered in Miami-Dade alone.
So it is ridiculous to be saying "we counted the votes, and Bush won, and then we counted them again, and Bush won!" In point of fact there are thousands of votes that haven't been counted at all.
We're not talking about dimpled chads or butterfly ballots. We're talking about holes clearly punched in ballots and not counted by machines which, while neither Republican or Democrat, are also old and poorly designed. Is anybody on Slashdot really prepared to take the position that mechanical devices -- particularly 40 year-old mechanical devices -- can do everything automatically and never need human intervention?
So we counted some of the votes, and we didn't know who won, and then we counted some of them again, and didn't know who won, and then in two counties we counted all of the votes.
And apart from those two counties, we still don't know who won. And we won't until we count all the votes.
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My memory on this is a little fuzzy, but I believe the genetic sequence the Israeli researchers were said to have sought and found was specific to certain communities of Iraqis.
IIRC they had gotten as far as identifying the sequences they would need to exploit to engineer an Iraqi-specific disease, but had not figured out how to exploit those sequences. A major sticking point was how to distinguish Iraqi Arabs from Sephardi Jews of Iraqi background; I don't recall whether this problem was resolved or not.
In fairness to the Israelis, it is worth noting that there was a tremendous uproar in the Knesset when this research was made public, and IIRC the plug was pulled at that time. But it is fairly shocking that the Israelis, of all people, would contemplate such a Mengele-esque project.
And I don't think anyone would be too surprised if research in this vein was still going on in secret.
I believe similar research was also done in Apartheid-era South Africa.
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Yeah, but we forgot.
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And therefore...
So all the bearded and black people moved to certain designated areas so they wouldn't be on the wrong continent when continental drift came?
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This is pushing the topic a little bit, but is there a map or other representation of the bandwidth that various countries/continents have coming into/going out of them?
-
When I pick up my TV Guide, it tells me whether a film is a comedy, drama, adult, etc. If I go to a bookstore, its contents are divided into fiction, non-fiction, history, geography, computers, etc. On the web, I can see whether the site I am viewing is commercial, non-commercial, educational, military, etc.
This is all useful information. Could it be used to censor? Yes, I suppose it could. Is censorship its "ONLY purpose?" Don't be ridiculous, m'mkay?
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Isn't this the genre that the Backstreet Boys belong to?
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This is incorrect. It is also illegal to export to Cuba, with the exception of certain strictly regulated items such as pharmaceuticals. As another reader pointed out, the Helms-Burton Act even imposes penalties on non-US companies who do business with Cuba.
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Just because they aren't signatories to the international conventions on IP doesn't mean they don't have IP laws.
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Well, there are non-capital costs with running these machines. Electricity for one, a physical place for the machine another, and keeping the thing running.
It's a bit of a stretch, sure, but it's conceivable that the cost-benefit could work out for somebody.
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This has to be the quote of the week:
The article talks a little bit about transhumanist stuff like mapping a whole human brain to a robot body, but cautions:
While I have long suspected that some of my colleagues have mobile phones connected directly to their brains, this does not strike me as an appealing idea.
"I have this horrible ringing in my ears."
"Of course you do. I've been trying to call you all day!"
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Good thing stuff like this never gets taken out of context or misinterpreted or anything. Otherwise people might try to marginalize our points of view on issues like this by painting us as knee-jerk extremists with immature worldviews.
That would be bad. Good thing it never happens.
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