Every action being publicly known would cause you to think through everything you do. Every thought being public would cause you to fear thinking too much - about ideas that might be too controversial, sexual fantasies you might want to indulge in, feelings of hatred and hurt towards someone and so on. If your thoughts take you too far, perhaps you'll be an Enemy of the People(TM).
Pervasive telepathy will erase the concept of evil thoughts. Right now we have thoughts that embarass us. Many people have been taught to believe things that aren't true, for instance the idea that only bad girls like sex. For a person instilled with that belief, sexual desire is something to feel guilty about. With a brain that's hooked up to every other it becomes blatantly obvious that everyone shares these thoughts. If you can read minds you are immune to this kind of brainwashing and it is apparent to you that your brain works pretty much just like any others.
Likewise, feelings of hurt and hatred are felt by all people from time to time. In a pervasive telepathatic environment the object of your hatred can feel it as well. All people do mean things from time to time, but nobody wants to be hated. Telepathy is the ultimate behavioral feedback mechanism. No longer will people wonder why an associate is suddenly in a bad mood. No more guessing what you did to piss off your wife. With the silence of hurt out of the way, people can move on to healing with direct positive feedback to tell them if they have sucessfully made up.
I don't think it'll be a better world. I think peer pressure and desire of conformity would mold people into the same shape, strangling creativity, initiative and independent thought.
I disagree. Peer pressure is a very powerful factor already. Bland conformity is driven by a desire to belong and a fear of not being liked. Telepathy would provide confidence of belonging by creating much stronger rapport between individuals. Creative work has never happened in a vacuum, all creations are supported by many other people, directly or indirectly. Mind communion will strenghen the ability to colaborate, like SMP for creative acts.
The only way it would be a good idea is if you could directly point to an action it would cause, in order to prevent it from happening - much like Minority Report. But the film convieniently circumvents the issue since they see nothing but thoughts that do result in murder.
It is a mistake to think that there could only be one possible good outcome. This kind of change will have many unpredictible effects, good and bad. Crime would drop to practicaly nil as there would be no effective way to keep it secret. People will also develop a stronger sense of empathy and feel less isolated. Criminals generaly don't feel as if they belong in society and can't relate to the humanness of their victims. A mental connection would be a powerful tool to build empathy and inclusion.
All this depends on an internet-like pattern of connections between people rather than a big-brother-like system, but I think that's the direction we're already headed.
Dropping 'trodes into the heads of everyone at once and jacking them in together would probably be a bad idea, but that's not how things work. We didn't all get cellphones together at one instant in 1997, it's a gradual adoption process. It will probably take a generation for mind 'phones' to become ubiquitous.
I for one, welcome the end of privacy and the beginning of the new communication age, or should that be communion age? It's a brave new world indeed, and exciting thing we never imagined are bound to happen. Just try and imagine the dot-com bubble from the perspective of a 1950's file clerk.
I'd love to see an option on the google toolbar of "report link as googlespam", but I can imagine the manpower that'd be required to sift through submissions (you can't just do it automatically).
That's a great idea. I recall hearing about a NASA project using volunteers on the internet to classify craters on Mars from images. To combat innacurate submissions they had many different people classify the same image and filtered out the spurious results.
For Google, a statisticaly meaningful number of "googlespam" hits for a page could reduce its pagerank. Use the parallel processing power of millions of human brains to defeat spammers.
Some form of abuse prevention would be nessecary, of course, but Google already has a cookie on my machine and many talented software engineers.
I would cheerfully offer a half second of my lifetime to demote scumbag spammers in google's ranking. In fact, I expect it would elicit a gleeful cackle from me as I hit the button.
Draping your welding cable over your shoulder and behind your back so that it passes near your wallet while welding will eventually ruin your credit cards too.
Why throw it over your shoulder like a continental soldier? It's easier to weld a clean bead and less tiring when you're not holding up 5 feet of #2 AWG cable with the stinger.
You need to buy a Microsoft Windows licence (apparently any version will do) in order to use Microsoft's "free" reader. This is a requirement to purchase software, even if it is not Word.
My personal experience has been that you loose control as you become addicted. You can control your mood with drugs only up to the point that your need for drugs begins to control your mood.
When you need a hit to feel "normal" the drug has lost its performance enhancing effect and has become, by its absence, a performance limiting drug.
Uh, have you ever tried smoking "one or two" cigarettes a day? I've been off the tobacco for eight weeks as of this very morning and I know from prior relapses that I'm only one cigarette away from a pack a day habit.
We determine the difference between the atomic clock and the earth by watching the stars go by, and after spinning, spinning, spinning, we watch the atomic clock and the sky, and if it doesn't come out just right, we assume the clocks are right and the earth is wrong.
It seems to me that both the earth and the clocks are right. The earth gives the correct answer in days because the rotation of the planet defines night and day. The clocks also give the correct answer in seconds because a second has been defined as the time it takes a certain amount of cesium atoms to decay.
Thus, both the earth and the clock give a correct answer, just not the same answer. This is a problem, but only has been since 1972 when a second ceased to be a precise and consistent fraction of a day.
One of the advantages to organic fuels I haven't seen mentioned here is that it's way less damaging to spill them than mineral oil. The company I work for runs heavy machinery and we sometimes work near the ocean. In some cases we will replace the mineral based hydraulic oil in our equipment with canola because if we blow a line and spew gallons of canola into the water it's not as big a deal as it will break down naturaly.
On the other hand a mineral oil spill is a serious disaster and requires getting out the spill kit and a boat and trying to contain it with floating booms which never completely works and wastes hours of time.
Simple solution:
Pay for your own pipe.
Publish your own content.
Comercial content is just that: Comercial, The only comercial sites I regularly to visit are/. and my yahoo mail account. The reason for this is simple, comercial content sucks. Flash and banners take forever to load, News is spun to the advantage of the owner and real information is scarce. I have learned much more from sites put up by Universities and geeks with a personal interest in the subject then from comercial sites.
The formula is simple; If you know something share it. 100 Million webservers running in 100 Million closets will accurately represent the current state of culture and knowledge on the planet.
We just have to destroy the corporate monopoly on information.
If this theory can be demonstrated to be true, then we can use another evil organization to fight it: the WTO (World Trade Organization). If content protection is construed as a barrier to trade the WTO will happily bitchslap the US Gov and make them stop. Up here in Canada we just got bitchslapped ourselves over a law intended to keep a toxic fuel additive (MBE) out of our country. Not only were we forced to drop the legislation, we paid 12 million in damages to a corporation for 'damaging their reputation'. The WTO is far more powerfull and evil then the RIAA.
What's going to happen when the computer I purchased 3 years ago isn't powerful enough to run the latest greatest version of office, I'm perfectly happy with the version I have and M$ forces the new version down my throat?
I guess I will have no choice but upgrade my hardware.
'What your still using That old POS! no, no, no! Spend some more money if you still want to compute.'
Slashdot Mirror
Every action being publicly known would cause you to think through everything you do. Every thought being public would cause you to fear thinking too much - about ideas that might be too controversial, sexual fantasies you might want to indulge in, feelings of hatred and hurt towards someone and so on. If your thoughts take you too far, perhaps you'll be an Enemy of the People(TM).
Pervasive telepathy will erase the concept of evil thoughts. Right now we have thoughts that embarass us. Many people have been taught to believe things that aren't true, for instance the idea that only bad girls like sex. For a person instilled with that belief, sexual desire is something to feel guilty about. With a brain that's hooked up to every other it becomes blatantly obvious that everyone shares these thoughts. If you can read minds you are immune to this kind of brainwashing and it is apparent to you that your brain works pretty much just like any others.
Likewise, feelings of hurt and hatred are felt by all people from time to time. In a pervasive telepathatic environment the object of your hatred can feel it as well. All people do mean things from time to time, but nobody wants to be hated. Telepathy is the ultimate behavioral feedback mechanism. No longer will people wonder why an associate is suddenly in a bad mood. No more guessing what you did to piss off your wife. With the silence of hurt out of the way, people can move on to healing with direct positive feedback to tell them if they have sucessfully made up.
I don't think it'll be a better world. I think peer pressure and desire of conformity would mold people into the same shape, strangling creativity, initiative and independent thought.
I disagree. Peer pressure is a very powerful factor already. Bland conformity is driven by a desire to belong and a fear of not being liked. Telepathy would provide confidence of belonging by creating much stronger rapport between individuals. Creative work has never happened in a vacuum, all creations are supported by many other people, directly or indirectly. Mind communion will strenghen the ability to colaborate, like SMP for creative acts.
The only way it would be a good idea is if you could directly point to an action it would cause, in order to prevent it from happening - much like Minority Report. But the film convieniently circumvents the issue since they see nothing but thoughts that do result in murder.
It is a mistake to think that there could only be one possible good outcome. This kind of change will have many unpredictible effects, good and bad. Crime would drop to practicaly nil as there would be no effective way to keep it secret. People will also develop a stronger sense of empathy and feel less isolated. Criminals generaly don't feel as if they belong in society and can't relate to the humanness of their victims. A mental connection would be a powerful tool to build empathy and inclusion.
All this depends on an internet-like pattern of connections between people rather than a big-brother-like system, but I think that's the direction we're already headed.
Dropping 'trodes into the heads of everyone at once and jacking them in together would probably be a bad idea, but that's not how things work. We didn't all get cellphones together at one instant in 1997, it's a gradual adoption process. It will probably take a generation for mind 'phones' to become ubiquitous.
I for one, welcome the end of privacy and the beginning of the new communication age, or should that be communion age? It's a brave new world indeed, and exciting thing we never imagined are bound to happen. Just try and imagine the dot-com bubble from the perspective of a 1950's file clerk.
I'd love to see an option on the google toolbar of "report link as googlespam", but I can imagine the manpower that'd be required to sift through submissions (you can't just do it automatically).
That's a great idea. I recall hearing about a NASA project using volunteers on the internet to classify craters on Mars from images. To combat innacurate submissions they had many different people classify the same image and filtered out the spurious results.
For Google, a statisticaly meaningful number of "googlespam" hits for a page could reduce its pagerank. Use the parallel processing power of millions of human brains to defeat spammers. Some form of abuse prevention would be nessecary, of course, but Google already has a cookie on my machine and many talented software engineers.
I would cheerfully offer a half second of my lifetime to demote scumbag spammers in google's ranking. In fact, I expect it would elicit a gleeful cackle from me as I hit the button.
Take THAT evil spammer scumbag!
Also in the news in Vancouver: The city of Surrey, a suburb of Vancouver, has the highest rate of car theft in the english speaking world.
I'm all for the car alarm ban, but I don't own a car.
Draping your welding cable over your shoulder and behind your back so that it passes near your wallet while welding will eventually ruin your credit cards too.
Why throw it over your shoulder like a continental soldier? It's easier to weld a clean bead and less tiring when you're not holding up 5 feet of #2 AWG cable with the stinger.
Not in Canada, they didn't.
You need to buy a Microsoft Windows licence (apparently any version will do) in order to use Microsoft's "free" reader. This is a requirement to purchase software, even if it is not Word.
Come to think of it, I had a girlfriend who could either smoke or not with no apparent withdrawal.
It was pretty annoying (for me...)
I know one smoke would doom me. I think the same is probably true for most ex-smokers.
Heh, I drank 15 litres of water one day when I was planting trees in the northern Alberta sun.
I didn't piss out even as much as usual.
My personal experience has been that you loose control as you become addicted. You can control your mood with drugs only up to the point that your need for drugs begins to control your mood.
When you need a hit to feel "normal" the drug has lost its performance enhancing effect and has become, by its absence, a performance limiting drug.
Uh, have you ever tried smoking "one or two" cigarettes a day? I've been off the tobacco for eight weeks as of this very morning and I know from prior relapses that I'm only one cigarette away from a pack a day habit.
It seems to me that both the earth and the clocks are right. The earth gives the correct answer in days because the rotation of the planet defines night and day. The clocks also give the correct answer in seconds because a second has been defined as the time it takes a certain amount of cesium atoms to decay.
Thus, both the earth and the clock give a correct answer, just not the same answer. This is a problem, but only has been since 1972 when a second ceased to be a precise and consistent fraction of a day.
At least they're not calling it a new years tree...
My hammer cost more than $50 and it was on sale.
Who did you pay for the Perl interpreter?
There are very good reasons for some connectors to be male, some female, some hermaphrodite and some asexual.
Imagine how carefully you would have to pick up the end of an extension cable if your house had male jacks on the wall.
Chicago fittings on air lines are asexual but are designed to be impossible to disconnect while pressurised.
Wierdness in connectors might just be a feature protecting against some possible danger. On the other hand, it could just be crappy design.
I put up a mirror in case they get slashdotted:
http://puddle.dyndns.org/google.htm
I've got a roof
Broadway and Main, yep.
Hmm, this book was produced without TeX, groff, etc. Maybe that explains all of the COMPLETELY BLANK pages in the PDF.
One of the advantages to organic fuels I haven't seen mentioned here is that it's way less damaging to spill them than mineral oil. The company I work for runs heavy machinery and we sometimes work near the ocean. In some cases we will replace the mineral based hydraulic oil in our equipment with canola because if we blow a line and spew gallons of canola into the water it's not as big a deal as it will break down naturaly.
On the other hand a mineral oil spill is a serious disaster and requires getting out the spill kit and a boat and trying to contain it with floating booms which never completely works and wastes hours of time.
Simple solution:
Pay for your own pipe.
Publish your own content.
Comercial content is just that: Comercial, The only comercial sites I regularly to visit are /. and my yahoo mail account. The reason for this is simple, comercial content sucks. Flash and banners take forever to load, News is spun to the advantage of the owner and real information is scarce. I have learned much more from sites put up by Universities and geeks with a personal interest in the subject then from comercial sites.
The formula is simple; If you know something share it.
100 Million webservers running in 100 Million closets will accurately represent the current state of culture and knowledge on the planet.
We just have to destroy the corporate monopoly on information.
If this theory can be demonstrated to be true, then we can use another evil organization to fight it: the WTO (World Trade Organization). If content protection is construed as a barrier to trade the WTO will happily bitchslap the US Gov and make them stop. Up here in Canada we just got bitchslapped ourselves over a law intended to keep a toxic fuel additive (MBE) out of our country. Not only were we forced to drop the legislation, we paid 12 million in damages to a corporation for 'damaging their reputation'. The WTO is far more powerfull and evil then the RIAA.
What's going to happen when the computer I purchased 3 years ago isn't powerful enough to run the latest greatest version of office, I'm perfectly happy with the version I have and M$ forces the new version down my throat? I guess I will have no choice but upgrade my hardware.
'What your still using That old POS! no, no, no! Spend some more money if you still want to compute.'
Yeah, but who would want a (very) warm coke?
The Publisher's Rep complains loudly to representatives of the press. "Libraries are stealing from these poor defensless authors".
The authors happily munch cheese in the corner.