The question of whether an alien civilization might convert Earth to their religion, or become a religion unto themselves, is left unconsidered.
I heard about a religion a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The priests of this religion wore plain brown robes and carried sabers made out of light. They were (supposed to be) good and kind and helped fight evil.
I've never even met this alien civilization and I already want to convert to Jedi.:-)
But when I'm a few meters away from the person I'm chatting with, I discovered that opening my mouth to talk was much better.
Oh, I don't know. IM lets you use hyperlinks. If you know how to make audio, picture, and video content, or where to find it, you can augment your usual text-speech-text transmission pathways with sound and image. This is great for sharing experience without having to laborously describe in words. Want to give a family member directions to somewhere? Forget spelling it out in words talking to them in person. (They're good at tuning out your voice by now anyway.) Go AIM them a Yahoo Map to where you mean.
A lot of family communication is about relaying experience, but movies might be easier than text in this regard.. "Hey mom! My friends and I just got back from the skatepark- I learned how to do a 360 Stalefish today!" "Uh... uh that's nice dear, what is that?" "Well you catch some air off the lip and then grab the board behind your..."::mom's eyes glaze over:: "Here I'll send you a link to stalefish360.avi from www.tonyhawk.com..." "Oh, I see now dear. Also- never do that move again as long as you live in my house."
In the future communication will likely be even more multi-media. After all, the ability to send images and soudns along with speech has some of the magic of telepathy.
Lottery machines can keep a paper trail for hundreds of millions of "voters" during powerball crazes, and "all" that is at stake is hundreds of millions of dollars. Why can't election machines accomplish a similar task?
Interesting comparison between gambling machiens and voting machines.
Why does the bill allow such a long timeline? By requiring a paper trail in 2005 (not in time for the next presidentail election), the legislature is clearly saying there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Why does it not need to be addressed in time for the Presidentail election?
A year is plenty of time short of deliberate sandbagging.
Word on the street (no doubt obtained by violaing the DMCA) is that Wal-Mart is going to have a GameCube with Zelda:Wind Waker available for $74.95 from 6AM to Noon on Black Friday! I don't think I can pass that deal up!
So this article takes a look at different aspects of RPG games, such as Story, Strategy, and Puzzles. Then it goes on to say that movies and books are better for Story, RTS or turn-based Strategy games better for strategy, and Puzzle games better for puzzles.
The obvious counter is, isn't it sometimes fun to have a light mix of all of these elements? The amount of top-selling RPG games such as the Final Fantasy series suggests yes.
With only 1,000 limited sets, they could watermark each set with a specific number or pattern- then when the Bittorrent streams start popping up, they can see check the watermark on the P2Ped filesand find out which person leaked the data onto the net.
If the music companies hadn't done anything at all to try and stop file sharing, who knows what would have happened? Would they have lost money? Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, Money wouldn't have actively disappeared from their bank accounts.
But each dollar they give to their pet, the RIAA, is a dollar that disappears out of their bank accounts forever, something that even the P2Ps couldn't manage. And according to this article, all that money they flushed into the RIAA has gotten them.... next to nothing?
Of course, the RIAA will tell the music companies that the best way to make up for all the money lost to the RIAA is... to fund the RIAA some more! (RIAA Plan: 1.Give Millions (tens or hundreds of millions?) to RIAA. 2. Make Everyone Hate Us. 3. ???? 4. PROFIT!!) The RIAA will DIG them out of this P2P hole they're stuck in!
Makes sense though... if the RIAA found a magical way to make everything perfect, they'd be out of a job, wouldn't they?
4. Stuart - Atlanta 345 kV This line is part of the transmission pathway from southwestern Ohio into northern Ohio. It disconnected from the system due to a brush fire under a portion of the line. Hot gases from a fire can ionize the air above a transmission line, causing the air to conduct electricity and short-circuit the conductors.
So twenty guys with twenty gas cans could start 20 brush fires under 20 high-transmission lines and cause something like this to happen again? I wonder if Al Queda read this article?
Pirates sailed the ancient sees and profited by killing people and physically taking the gold away from them. A fundamentally destructive act and the selfish goal was personal profit. Taking gold from one person to another was also zero sum at best.
File sharers share files by allowing others to see the 1s and 0s on their hard drive and replicate that pattern on their own drive. In doing so they are setting those bits to a certain shape which is more interesting than random chaos. This is a fundamentally constructive act, and not zero sum. Granted it is very difficult to create that musical shape in the first place, but replicating it is so cheap it might as well be free. For the first time in human history we have something that has nearly broken the limits of entropy and scarcity.
Most filesharers I know believe in this naive yet idealistic view, even if they don't actually think about it cognitively. "This music is something good. By making a copy, there is more goodness in the world. Nothing was destroyed." File sharers don't gain anything of value by sharing the files they have. You don't get paypal-ed a dollar every time you give someone anything on Kazaa. Actually, you lose your available bandwidth and now expose yourself to unreasonable punishments. Most sharers feel it's worth the risks to make others happy, Do Unto Others etc...
It's the same naive desire of a little kid in a grocery store picking up an apple and going "Here mommy! I gave you an apple!" Except with filesharing the apple doesn't even disappear from the storeshelf. It's more like taking a picture of the apple for your own reference.
The main problem in the IP industries is they want to try and pretend that after the initial copy, entropy and scarcity still exist in the digital world so they can support old business models. They want to create artificial scarcity with encryption schemes and complete access control. In effect, adding artificial entropy back to the only system humanity ever managed to make that was free of it.
Once IP is paid for, it needs to be as free as possible. This isn't obvious in music, so let me make a short jump to medicine. It costs perhaps $.01 in bandwidth to transmit the "recipe" for a drug that cures AIDS, or heart disease, or any number of illnesses. For the first time in history we could easily replicate those recipes worldwide. And yet drug companies do not do this, on the pretense of "recouping costs" even after a drug is long profitable. Is it morally right to make easily-replicated information that can improve peoples' lives artificially scarce? On the other hand it takes a great deal of financial energy to create a viable drug or other work of intellectual property.
The best answer I can think of for Intellectual Property is communal pre-paid investment. A group of all interested investors (honor system I'm afraid) pay in advance to create IP. Once the costs of creating the IP are covered (paid in advance by people willing to acknowledge that they will benefit from its creation), everyone is ENCOURAGED to replicate the work as much as possible, and preventing replication of something that is good for humanity is made illegal. It's impossible to steal something that is freely copied.
Maybe individual people are too lazy to take that altruistic approach. Perhaps then governments could force people to take this moral approach.
It'll never happen you say? If humanity can't get over the urge to hoard IP instead of sharing it, forcing each other to reinvent solutions to solved problems, or find some way to solve fair IP use, maybe we deserve to go extinct.
If you can check for grammar, spelling, punctuation and other things, this would be a real help for e-mail. People who read a lot of e-mail could use this as a sort of chlorine in their mail pool. For example you could say someone needs at least a C+ to get read by me.
Mail written like "u r fukker I kil u" would never need to tarnish someone's consciousness again.
Cliff Bleszinksy (http://www.cliffyb.com/ , you know him from the likes of Unreal Tournament )explained this pretty well at the Game Developer's Conference (www.gdconf.com) two years ago. He says people who don't like games see it like this:
Non Gamer's Reasoning 1.Video games are toys. (Picture of colored blocks and squeaky balls.)
2. Only kids play with toys. (Picture of little three-year-olds having fun with blocks and balls.)
3. Adults who play with kid's toys are nerds. (Picture of taped glasses, pocket protector geek)
4. I don't want to be a nerd.
5. I don't play video games.
So that's like the core marketting trick to get around. And it can be done. Games like Solitaire do it by appearing to be Card Games instead of Video Games. And Card Games and casinos and the like have centuries of perceived legitimacy. EA markets NHL2K3 and NFL2K3 to a mass "non-gamer" audience because Hockey and Football are SPORTS, and you don't be MESSIN' with SPORTS. The Sims appeals to a large audience because it's like a crazy life simulator that tons of people can relate to, not a "Toy". Finally Warcraft3 and Age of Empires2 are STRATEGIC, you have to organize troops and cut lumber, and surely such simulated management effort trancends mere toy-ness.
As more people buy into these alternate paradigms, the numbers of people playing grow and pretty soon people find enough of their friends are doing it to justify them joining up too. I've seen the Sims spread across entire families and social circles this way.
Final Conclusion- Make Games Less Like Toys and You're Golden.
If you add one more phone to a network, millions more potential person-to-person calls can be made. The value grows exponentially and.
If I were a regular MSN user, this decision would affect many of my PERSONAL friends using Trillian who can't message me anymore. My buddy list shrinks. No MSN-only buddies to talk to? That sucks,I quit. That causes other peoples' MSN buddy lists to shrink. They quit. Pretty soon MSN Messenger has the rep "Well, no one uses it, so why should I?" Negative feedback loop.
Having everyone leave MSN Messenger should reduce their costs like they want anyway.
I've started a rule of thumb whenever I see a slashdot article on the upper limits of computing. This rule is activated even more rapidly if I see the phrase "Moore's Law". The game is I simply say to myself "How does this compare to the human brain?"
For example the poster for this article asked "Is the need to make do with the current fabrication technology enough to drive the move to multi-valued logic? Or will Moore's law continue without the need for doing more with less silica based real estate?"
So we're wondering about the upper limits of processing operations and the power expenditure. Is the sky the limit? Will we have to use something besides binary? I saw some posts saying ternary logic wasn't very practical because more interconnection requires even MORE power.
The human brain can peform on the order of perhaps trillions of operations per second. The human brain can do this with about 20 watts of electrical power provided chemically.
NOT BAD!! So what logical circuitry does the brain use for this?
Electrically, brain cells are either firing or not firing. 1 or 0. That sounds kind of like binary. But we also know that they connect with and are connected to 1000s of other neurons, which have a summing effect on whether they fire or not. That sounds more like a very large-base number system. So the brain sort of combines a manageble width with a large depth.
Anyway I just wanted to chime in that when it comes to pondering alternate calculation methods like ternary math, we would do well to at least think about reverse engineering the human brain's logical circuitry. And when it comes to thinking about the upper limits of computing, we should remind ourselves that we are competing with (and losing to, for now) a glob of salty fat that still outperforms our sillicon processor equivilants by orders of magnitude with less energy. If the brain can do it, so can we.
Gee, Antares Auto-Tune has been out now for what, 6 years? I have a demo of it on my old OS9 Mac, and you can get a hardware version.
Yeah I felt the same way. Usually Slashdot comes up with articles about stuff I never herad of. But as someone with intermediate audio knoweldge, THIS article just sounds a little funny. You guys are just finding about "Auto-Tune" now?
It's a little like hearing a buzz that authors have startd cheating by using a "new" technology called a "Spell-Checker" that automatically corrects spelling mistakes in a document. No really isn't that just WILD? The book industry is really lowering its standards with this one!
I guess this just goes to show that the standard slashdotters are really up-to-date on some issues, but not on ALL issues.
In the article he says that fewer than 8% of the copies in his business were unlicensed, accidentally leftover when they handed computers down with extraneous applications still on them. They're a guitar string company. They were not, on the whole, a piracy-based criminal organization by any stretch of the imagination but they were treated like one by the BSA. And now they are free from that ever happening again.
This week's Sexy Losers comic happens to be about that! But hard reality comes into play right away. These robots might not be as impressed with your endowments as you think. A little TOO perceptive?
Granted ADD is likely over-diagnosed, most of the books on ADD address that.
But maybe this book would help convince you. Basically, with the right hardware you can SEE pictures of the brain with places where activity isn't correct. Then there is a high correlation of these kinds of images to types of attention disorder behaviors.
"Using a nuclear medicine technique called 'single photon emission computed tomography' (SPECT)--a controversial step, according to some of his peers--Dr. Amen scans patients' brains to identify various abnormalities."
It's basically like those wireless dog "fences" that work with radio transmitters and shock collars. Except instead of shocking it engages the autopilot away from cities.
I hate Snood! It's totally a ripoff of Puzzle Bobble (later called Bust-a-Move), and PB has superior look and feel. No one has heard of Puzzle Bobble. Lots of people have heard of Snood. I know this point has been brought up on Slashdot before, but you asked if anyone else felt the same way and I do. Snood looks all blocky and stuff. All they did was rip off Puzzle Bobble and charge money.
{cynical} "Luckily" for the United States, ignoring the future World Nano-Polution Treaty should be no more difficulty than ignoring the Kyoto Protocol or the Ballsitic Missile treaty is today. Don't we use something like 50% of the world's resources while having 6% of its population? US Citizens will be able to afford nano filters. All other citizens should have thought about that before they were born in other countires, shouldn't they? {/cynical}
Maybe if everyone had a rating for their trustworthiness, and you could encrypt your Geocode data so that only people with a high enough trust rating could decrypt it. "Geocode available to those of trust 500+" One central database, each person with one core ID linked to their driver's license or social security number. Of course, the difficulty in creating such a trust system that could survive hacking, cheating, blackmailing etc is bordering on possible, it would take the wisest mathematical midns ever to work out something resilient yet fair. And then people woudl have to opt in to it.
Slashdot Mirror
The question of whether an alien civilization might convert Earth to their religion, or become a religion unto themselves, is left unconsidered.
:-)
I heard about a religion a long, long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. The priests of this religion wore plain brown robes and carried sabers made out of light. They were (supposed to be) good and kind and helped fight evil.
I've never even met this alien civilization and I already want to convert to Jedi.
But when I'm a few meters away from the person I'm chatting with, I discovered that opening my mouth to talk was much better.
Oh, I don't know. IM lets you use hyperlinks. If you know how to make audio, picture, and video content, or where to find it, you can augment your usual text-speech-text transmission pathways with sound and image. This is great for sharing experience without having to laborously describe in words. Want to give a family member directions to somewhere? Forget spelling it out in words talking to them in person. (They're good at tuning out your voice by now anyway.) Go AIM them a Yahoo Map to where you mean.
A lot of family communication is about relaying experience, but movies might be easier than text in this regard.. "Hey mom! My friends and I just got back from the skatepark- I learned how to do a 360 Stalefish today!" "Uh... uh that's nice dear, what is that?" "Well you catch some air off the lip and then grab the board behind your..."
In the future communication will likely be even more multi-media. After all, the ability to send images and soudns along with speech has some of the magic of telepathy.
Lottery machines can keep a paper trail for hundreds of millions of "voters" during powerball crazes, and "all" that is at stake is hundreds of millions of dollars. Why can't election machines accomplish a similar task?
Interesting comparison between gambling machiens and voting machines.
Why does the bill allow such a long timeline? By requiring a paper trail in 2005 (not in time for the next presidentail election), the legislature is clearly saying there is a problem that needs to be addressed. Why does it not need to be addressed in time for the Presidentail election?
A year is plenty of time short of deliberate sandbagging.
Word on the street (no doubt obtained by violaing the DMCA) is that Wal-Mart is going to have a GameCube with Zelda:Wind Waker available for $74.95 from 6AM to Noon on Black Friday! I don't think I can pass that deal up!
So this article takes a look at different aspects of RPG games, such as Story, Strategy, and Puzzles. Then it goes on to say that movies and books are better for Story, RTS or turn-based Strategy games better for strategy, and Puzzle games better for puzzles.
The obvious counter is, isn't it sometimes fun to have a light mix of all of these elements? The amount of top-selling RPG games such as the Final Fantasy series suggests yes.
If Kasparov can remember exactly how he built that "strong pawn structure", can he win in the exact same way again?
The image of a Chinese taikonaut planting a red chinese flag on Mars first might stir up some action in the US.
With only 1,000 limited sets, they could watermark each set with a specific number or pattern- then when the Bittorrent streams start popping up, they can see check the watermark on the P2Ped filesand find out which person leaked the data onto the net.
If the music companies hadn't done anything at all to try and stop file sharing, who knows what would have happened? Would they have lost money?
Maybe, maybe not. At the very least, Money wouldn't have actively disappeared from their bank accounts.
But each dollar they give to their pet, the RIAA, is a dollar that disappears out of their bank accounts forever, something that even the P2Ps couldn't manage. And according to this article, all that money they flushed into the RIAA has gotten them.... next to nothing?
Of course, the RIAA will tell the music companies that the best way to make up for all the money lost to the RIAA is... to fund the RIAA some more! (RIAA Plan: 1.Give Millions (tens or hundreds of millions?) to RIAA. 2. Make Everyone Hate Us. 3. ???? 4. PROFIT!!) The RIAA will DIG them out of this P2P hole they're stuck in!
Makes sense though... if the RIAA found a magical way to make everything perfect, they'd be out of a job, wouldn't they?
You just know some prankster would keep hitting all the buttons before getting out at their stop!
from the summary:
4. Stuart - Atlanta 345 kV
This line is part of the transmission pathway from southwestern Ohio into northern Ohio. It
disconnected from the system due to a brush fire under a portion of the line. Hot gases from a fire can ionize the air above a transmission line, causing the air to conduct electricity and short-circuit the conductors.
So twenty guys with twenty gas cans could start 20 brush fires under 20 high-transmission lines and cause something like this to happen again? I wonder if Al Queda read this article?
It is clear that their intent was piracy.
Pirates sailed the ancient sees and profited by killing people and physically taking the gold away from them. A fundamentally destructive act and the selfish goal was personal profit. Taking gold from one person to another was also zero sum at best.
File sharers share files by allowing others to see the 1s and 0s on their hard drive and replicate that pattern on their own drive. In doing so they are setting those bits to a certain shape which is more interesting than random chaos. This is a fundamentally constructive act, and not zero sum. Granted it is very difficult to create that musical shape in the first place, but replicating it is so cheap it might as well be free. For the first time in human history we have something that has nearly broken the limits of entropy and scarcity.
Most filesharers I know believe in this naive yet idealistic view, even if they don't actually think about it cognitively. "This music is something good. By making a copy, there is more goodness in the world. Nothing was destroyed." File sharers don't gain anything of value by sharing the files they have. You don't get paypal-ed a dollar every time you give someone anything on Kazaa. Actually, you lose your available bandwidth and now expose yourself to unreasonable punishments. Most sharers feel it's worth the risks to make others happy, Do Unto Others etc...
It's the same naive desire of a little kid in a grocery store picking up an apple and going "Here mommy! I gave you an apple!" Except with filesharing the apple doesn't even disappear from the storeshelf. It's more like taking a picture of the apple for your own reference.
The main problem in the IP industries is they want to try and pretend that after the initial copy, entropy and scarcity still exist in the digital world so they can support old business models. They want to create artificial scarcity with encryption schemes and complete access control. In effect, adding artificial entropy back to the only system humanity ever managed to make that was free of it.
Once IP is paid for, it needs to be as free as possible. This isn't obvious in music, so let me make a short jump to medicine. It costs perhaps $.01 in bandwidth to transmit the "recipe" for a drug that cures AIDS, or heart disease, or any number of illnesses. For the first time in history we could easily replicate those recipes worldwide. And yet drug companies do not do this, on the pretense of "recouping costs" even after a drug is long profitable. Is it morally right to make easily-replicated information that can improve peoples' lives artificially scarce? On the other hand it takes a great deal of financial energy to create a viable drug or other work of intellectual property.
The best answer I can think of for Intellectual Property is communal pre-paid investment. A group of all interested investors (honor system I'm afraid) pay in advance to create IP. Once the costs of creating the IP are covered (paid in advance by people willing to acknowledge that they will benefit from its creation), everyone is ENCOURAGED to replicate the work as much as possible, and preventing replication of something that is good for humanity is made illegal. It's impossible to steal something that is freely copied.
Maybe individual people are too lazy to take that altruistic approach. Perhaps then governments could force people to take this moral approach.
It'll never happen you say?
If humanity can't get over the urge to hoard IP instead of sharing it, forcing each other to reinvent solutions to solved problems, or find some way to solve fair IP use, maybe we deserve to go extinct.
If you can check for grammar, spelling, punctuation and other things, this would be a real help for e-mail. People who read a lot of e-mail could use this as a sort of chlorine in their mail pool. For example you could say someone needs at least a C+ to get read by me.
Mail written like "u r fukker I kil u" would never need to tarnish someone's consciousness again.
Cliff Bleszinksy (http://www.cliffyb.com/ , you know him from the likes of Unreal Tournament )explained this pretty well at the Game Developer's Conference (www.gdconf.com) two years ago. He says people who don't like games see it like this:
Non Gamer's Reasoning
1.Video games are toys. (Picture of colored blocks and squeaky balls.)
2. Only kids play with toys. (Picture of little three-year-olds having fun with blocks and balls.)
3. Adults who play with kid's toys are nerds. (Picture of taped glasses, pocket protector geek)
4. I don't want to be a nerd.
5. I don't play video games.
So that's like the core marketting trick to get around. And it can be done. Games like Solitaire do it by appearing to be Card Games instead of Video Games. And Card Games and casinos and the like have centuries of perceived legitimacy. EA markets NHL2K3 and NFL2K3 to a mass "non-gamer" audience because Hockey and Football are SPORTS, and you don't be MESSIN' with SPORTS. The Sims appeals to a large audience because it's like a crazy life simulator that tons of people can relate to, not a "Toy". Finally Warcraft3 and Age of Empires2 are STRATEGIC, you have to organize troops and cut lumber, and surely such simulated management effort trancends mere toy-ness.
As more people buy into these alternate paradigms, the numbers of people playing grow and pretty soon people find enough of their friends are doing it to justify them joining up too. I've seen the Sims spread across entire families and social circles this way.
Final Conclusion- Make Games Less Like Toys and You're Golden.
If you add one more phone to a network, millions more potential person-to-person calls can be made. The value grows exponentially and.
If I were a regular MSN user, this decision would affect many of my PERSONAL friends using Trillian who can't message me anymore. My buddy list shrinks. No MSN-only buddies to talk to? That sucks,I quit. That causes other peoples' MSN buddy lists to shrink. They quit. Pretty soon MSN Messenger has the rep "Well, no one uses it, so why should I?" Negative feedback loop.
Having everyone leave MSN Messenger should reduce their costs like they want anyway.
I've started a rule of thumb whenever I see a slashdot article on the upper limits of computing. This rule is activated even more rapidly if I see the phrase "Moore's Law". The game is I simply say to myself "How does this compare to the human brain?"
For example the poster for this article asked "Is the need to make do with the current fabrication technology enough to drive the move to multi-valued logic? Or will Moore's law continue without the need for doing more with less silica based real estate?"
So we're wondering about the upper limits of processing operations and the power expenditure. Is the sky the limit? Will we have to use something besides binary? I saw some posts saying ternary logic wasn't very practical because more interconnection requires even MORE power.
The human brain can peform on the order of perhaps trillions of operations per second.
The human brain can do this with about 20 watts of electrical power provided chemically.
NOT BAD!! So what logical circuitry does the brain use for this?
Electrically, brain cells are either firing or not firing. 1 or 0. That sounds kind of like binary. But we also know that they connect with and are connected to 1000s of other neurons, which have a summing effect on whether they fire or not. That sounds more like a very large-base number system. So the brain sort of combines a manageble width with a large depth.
Anyway I just wanted to chime in that when it comes to pondering alternate calculation methods like ternary math, we would do well to at least think about reverse engineering the human brain's logical circuitry. And when it comes to thinking about the upper limits of computing, we should remind ourselves that we are competing with (and losing to, for now) a glob of salty fat that still outperforms our sillicon processor equivilants by orders of magnitude with less energy. If the brain can do it, so can we.
Gee, Antares Auto-Tune has been out now for what, 6 years? I have a demo of it on my old OS9 Mac, and you can get a hardware version.
Yeah I felt the same way. Usually Slashdot comes up with articles about stuff I never herad of. But as someone with intermediate audio knoweldge, THIS article just sounds a little funny. You guys are just finding about "Auto-Tune" now?
It's a little like hearing a buzz that authors have startd cheating by using a "new" technology called a "Spell-Checker" that automatically corrects spelling mistakes in a document. No really isn't that just WILD? The book industry is really lowering its standards with this one!
I guess this just goes to show that the standard slashdotters are really up-to-date on some issues, but not on ALL issues.
In the article he says that fewer than 8% of the copies in his business were unlicensed, accidentally leftover when they handed computers down with extraneous applications still on them. They're a guitar string company. They were not, on the whole, a piracy-based criminal organization by any stretch of the imagination but they were treated like one by the BSA. And now they are free from that ever happening again.
http://sexylosers.keenspace.com/199.html
This week's Sexy Losers comic happens to be about that! But hard reality comes into play right away. These robots might not be as impressed with your endowments as you think. A little TOO perceptive?
Granted ADD is likely over-diagnosed, most of the books on ADD address that.
But maybe this book would help convince you. Basically, with the right hardware you can SEE pictures of the brain with places where activity isn't correct. Then there is a high correlation of these kinds of images to types of attention disorder behaviors.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/
"Using a nuclear medicine technique called 'single photon emission computed tomography' (SPECT)--a controversial step, according to some of his peers--Dr. Amen scans patients' brains to identify various abnormalities."
It's basically like those wireless dog "fences" that work with radio transmitters and shock collars. Except instead of shocking it engages the autopilot away from cities.
I hate Snood! It's totally a ripoff of Puzzle Bobble (later called Bust-a-Move), and PB has superior look and feel. No one has heard of Puzzle Bobble. Lots of people have heard of Snood. I know this point has been brought up on Slashdot before, but you asked if anyone else felt the same way and I do. Snood looks all blocky and stuff. All they did was rip off Puzzle Bobble and charge money.
{cynical}
"Luckily" for the United States, ignoring the future World Nano-Polution Treaty should be no more difficulty than ignoring the Kyoto Protocol or the Ballsitic Missile treaty is today. Don't we use something like 50% of the world's resources while having 6% of its population? US Citizens will be able to afford nano filters. All other citizens should have thought about that before they were born in other countires, shouldn't they?
{/cynical}
Maybe if everyone had a rating for their trustworthiness, and you could encrypt your Geocode data so that only people with a high enough trust rating could decrypt it. "Geocode available to those of trust 500+" One central database, each person with one core ID linked to their driver's license or social security number. Of course, the difficulty in creating such a trust system that could survive hacking, cheating, blackmailing etc is bordering on possible, it would take the wisest mathematical midns ever to work out something resilient yet fair. And then people woudl have to opt in to it.