How do you expect that the 'chemical/hormonal environment' affects the progeny in a heritable manner?
It is quite possible that under certain environments certain sections of the DNA can be activated - and that these activations (in memory or elsewhere) can be heritable.
This is not necessarily what is going on in the article, but it is an interesting and tested if unknown means by which non-genetic heritability can take place.
We're just learning that Histone/DNA modifications can be inherited.
Histones (the spools around which DNA is stored) tell when the DNA source code should be 'active' vs 'inactive'. And these histones have a huge data space in the form of possible modifications (methylation, acetylation, etc.).
When DNA is replicated, these histones too are replicated at the same time. And they seem to be replicated in a semiconserved manner similar to DNA (half go to 'old' strand, half go to 'new' strand). And that there is a whole series of touring-like proteins that can 'read' 'write' or 'erase' these modifications.
If these modifications are made during an organism's life, they can be inherited by offspring.
Not only is the code being copied, but the 'marks' that tell which/when/where to read the code at any given time/condition too can be passed down. And that these marks can be written in real time rather than waiting for mutations in the code itself.
There was a recent study that XO females who inherited the X from their father had markedly different dispositions than those who inherited the X from their mother. DNA modification that is unique to how the male or female deal with their own X chromosome could be being passed down to offspring.
I think reality has it's part. I think in a game of conquest, to lack the ability to commit genocide is unrealistic. In the same way that a game set in post-apocalyptic-wherever where everyone is a marine probably involves some blood. As do war simulations.
But again, those are more choices of genre. However, the concept of detail/control do not traverse genres very well currently.
One must be careful, when talking about such issues, to not confuse the genre of the game, and appeal for the genre, with the mechanisms used by designers to make things fun. True, they overlap, but a detailed/control-oriented game doesn't always need to involve exploding body parts. (conversely, a war game does).
However, I've always been intrigued by the freedom of GTA. I personally have little desire to engage in the plot - but the intricacy of play is appealing. Though I agree, that makes those games, mightn't it be possible to make a game where such freedom is allowed (even to kill) but the direction or tone was not so obviously violent?
I would really like to play GTA, but I honestly am turned off by the missions I must willfully accept. I have great fun with the feeling of control - the ability to get in cars, travel around a huge map, and explore.
The control and competence is what makes that game appealing to me, not the gore or plot. And I think that is what is interesting - that a game can be fundamentally appealing for something outside of it's plot, theme or story.
Nature is indeed a difficult concept to describe. But there is a relevant and practical distinction between humans and their creations and other animals'.
The most relevant definition I've come up with is rate of change. That which changes at order of magnitudes different than others is unnatural to its environment.
In this way, most of what humans do i unnatural. As are most virii, many catalytic processes and others. In being 'unnatural' they change their surroundings (environment) in drastic and often extreme ways.
I think it's unfair to a logically sound, if not-well resolved distinction to feel that much of what humans are doing to the planet today is unnatural. It is not self-hatred, rather an acknowledgement that a bever must live within strict confines of his environment and can only build what his surrounding will let him. We have escaped those bounds allowing us to build dams every 10 feet along every river on the glob if we had the inclination.
I too am a H. sapien, and with that unique distinction I and all of my products are indeed one and the same as that around me - but I am capable of great affect on those surroundings. There are very different limits on the rates of change I can affect than those placed on other entities around me.
All satellite providers are very low on the horizon in an older neighborhood with beautiful towering trees - so almost no one in the area can receive satellite signals from any of the GeoSynch sats up there.
ATT - the other monopoly - has been running FTTN but has somehow forgotten that people live more than 2000ft from busy intersections. The signal strength was abominable and they wouldn't install any service at our home.
There is no other choice - and no other competition.
exactly my point. There are perspectives, some of which require these people to need laptops over their current happiness - while others do not.
In some respects a lack of medical, sanitation, agricultural education IS needed - but with it comes the cost of brining the rest of the wide world into their homes.
*need* is a context dependent word. I cannot absolve myself of all contexts, though honestly in many more respects than I believe most entrepreneurial americans would admit, I think we should just let people be. They don't need anything else.
Food is good and all, but the fact is that in most of the countries this laptop is aimed at, people eat well. They're frankly some of the oldest cultures around (Arabic, Thai, Nigerian) and have survived because they know how to make and produce and eat food. That's not the issue. I spent a month working in the villages of rural Thailand. These people eat well but they have nothing to do. They just sit around during the summer and talk, as there is no extra water for farming, no economy to support, and no need to do anything other than talk. Everyone is doing just fine.
What is needed is education, access to the world beyond their village and the "city" miles away. These laptops will possibly (though again, efficacy has yet to be proven) encourage such interaction, learning and initialization into the modern world. Furthermore, the people are not stupid. The one computer that was in the government office was used regularly by middle and high-schoolers downloading music, reading up on the latest news from Bangkok, the weather, or various other games. But creation of original content, for access within the village, is another issue altogether.
As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had. By connecting them to the capitalistic global society with these laptops we take away their status quo. They will be hungry, not for food, but for education, for money, for placement within the larger world. And it will destroy the villages as they know it. For better or worse.
This article is not about how we should all just get up and die to make the Earth better. It is to inform us of our own impact on this small island upon which we live.
And we do have an impact. We are the ecological 'winners' and we are not outside the system, true. But we have the ability to think, to ponder, to plan, to use our knowledge.
And yes, in the end, it's all for naught, the sun will blow up, our galaxy will crash into another one, time will slowly fizzle out towards a great crunch (and yeah, it would be pretty neat if humanity or its derivative could survive that long). But at the same time, if we could do it while brining along the least 'fortunate' of our kind as well, I think it would be a lot more interesting ride. We bring homeless, sick, and other unfortunate humans along with our welfare. Are you to say it's worth destroying 99% of all the species of 'unfortunate' life which coexists on this earth in order to have a bit more profitable of a day? We destroy in ignorance and in arrogance. We have the ability to live alongside the poor little insect we smash underfoot for fun. We are fortunate enough to have this ability of foresight and compassion. We have the ability to spend our lives in moderation (and still be kings).
Maybe as a species we are no better than the rabid carnivores of our past. Maybe as a species we have not learned the ability of foresight and we are just reactive, primitive, egotistical, deterministic 'lifeforms.'
And for those of you who are so bent on building the fastest, cheapest artificial intelligence, artificial reality, or computer of any sort. I will quickly point you to the millions of animals that are erased by our wanton arrogance.
we have enough. we (should) have the ability of foresight. we can live alongside our planet. But that would require choice, moderation and discipline. But those qualities are exactly what make us human - interesting.
This is an easily demarkated event occuring to an historic institution which illustrates the current and future cultural and intellectual climate. What Guttenberg did, in itself didn't create anything extraordinary, but it changed the order of magnitude of use of an existing technology. It allowed an order of magnitude of more readers to read what used to be expensive books (one of the more popular, and duly important is in fact the Encyclopedia Brittanica). What Wikipedia allows is an order of magnitude of more editors and commentaries to provide information (and for free). The system is not perfect, but with the help of a tuned submission and editorial procedures, Wikiepedia's abilities far outweigh the Brittanica's venerable, though glorified, trustworthiness.
This seems to be happening on many fronts, and in many places with the advent of viral communication. But as this debate involves clear, historically relevant, as well as practically useful opponents it seems it will be pretty memorable. If you read the rebuttles to each others' works from a technologically historical perspective the arguments are interesting and can be applied to so much. And coming from two institutions which pride themselves on their intellectual merrits, such documents might be interesting to keep and look at in a few years when more and more of these same arguments pop up in less public and less known situations.
On the other hand it seems to retain the vigor and mundanity of a nerd fight.
Why must there only be buttons on a remote? What about a scroll wheel like on the iPod? The 'superluous' padlock on the iPod is an easy way to squeeze numeric buttons into one scroll wheel...
The folder browsing view where folders appear in a new pane on the right every time a new folder is selected, one after another. What's that called? Can I reproduce the same effect in linux?
It's called Column Browsing. Beautiful design it is...
Fish is cheaper today than ever because we have more boats on the sea than ever. More fisherman = more boats = cheaper prices. However, because there are more fisherman, AND the number of fish in the ocean is limited, the population of certain very common varieties of fish has peaked. We take out more and more fish a year, but all of a sudden the fish population can't keep up. Fish prices will become very cheap as more boats are put out. And then, all of a sudden, we will fish the 95% of the fish of a particular species in one season. And at that moment the price of fish will skyrocket.
That's what the explosion, implosion is all about. We are smart enough to see it, why are we not smart enough to act on it with self-determination.
Oil, Water (esp in places like China), arable land, etc. And those are things we really are dependent on. An immediate bust for any of those things will not result in the death of humanity, but it WILL result in war, famine, strife and a loss of population.
That is the point. The population will go down, it's too high. It's just a matter of how it does it. We have the foresight to do it gradually before the hand of natural equilibrium does it for us. But in reality it seems we really do not...
Freeman Dyson had the great example of self-replicating robots in his book 'Disturbing the Universe.'
Imagine sending a quarter-pound payload of a well-programed robot of such construction to something like one of Jupiter's icy moons. It is as small as needed to do the following tasks: replicating twice, grab a small piece of the ice on the moon as cargo, and then launching itself with some element in the ice as fuel towards mars. That's all it is programmed to do.
In x amount of time you have a mars with oceans. Astroid mining could also work on similar principles.
Regardless of how plausible or crazy the above ideas are, the concept is gorgeous for people... The investment in one such machine can yield payoffs of millions/billions of man-hours of labor, in places man can exist etc.
There is always the observation of slavery/exploitation if such a machine can replicate. Or even fears of Matrix/virus-like behavior which continues uncontrollably. But it is an interesting idea to think about. Rarely can a human investment of time provide such a staggering turnaround in product.
Interesting concept, even if it does still resemble science-fiction.
The point of running on a G4 is ease of physical use, not really software.
The G4 can be opened and closed in under a second - a small latch on the side. Drives can be plugged in in as long a time it takes you to align the cable. And you "could" do this while its running (not advisable). It also can have a few PCI cards in it for any kinda drive you got.
The G4 idea is a great one. I used it a lot this summer working for a school for checking for bad/good HDs we had in storage because it was just so easy to access.
Apple not only makes OSX, but also a wonderfully engineered computer, its internals can be accessed so quickly and easily.
One must compare the war and science. It is not possible not to. Both use very real money, and though not 1:1, if the money goes to one cause, it cannot be spent on the other. Some would like to spend the money one way, some another, and it's the governments job to placate as many as possible. If more choose one or the other, that will get more funding.
Because everything in this society can be broken down to a common denominator (guess... money), everything can be rewritten in terms of it, space, wars, time, life, and everything else.
That's how capitalistic societies work. And if you live in any of the countries where you are likely to be reading slashdot, you live in a capitalistic society...
Did anyone else get physically dizzy - as in a vertigo-like effect - when zooming in too fast? It feels like I'm falling at breakneck speed onto the paper. It was very strange, and it happened repeatedly, not just upon initial viewing...
interesting how well your brain can be fooled, even when it's being treated Humanely
conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in a device that circumvents technological protection measures
Circumvents technology? Isn't that what technology is for - to circumvent some path of more resistance? I realize that this might be harmful to those make the technology, but isn't that a risk we're willing to take?
I personally don't want to be run by corporate owned copyrights etc....
Ever heard of red-shift or blue-shift? Frequency of light is not a constant across those distances, especially within the fiber. Though I'm sure you could compensate for it, that might take more data-space than the information itself.
Using color to differentiate streams sounds good until you do the physics.
Though I would like to hear from someone who knows better than I if somthing like that is possible.... encode the routing data in some property of the light, the way electricity cannot, and then a router to take advantage of it.
How isn't the internet alive already? It has these cell things which go around in hoards and repair it when it gets broken, and they coordinate with each other and autonomously - without their own knowledge - make the whole being work.
The internet is alive by almost all standards of definitions, except that it is on such a different scale, that it cannot communicate with us the way an animal can.
Massive computing power can just "create" such entities, and coupled with the massive amounts of energy in terms of software and use at the miniature scale (PCs), one can create a very complicated set of living ideas.
Ever look at the "maps" of the internet? Ask anyone who knows anything about biology and they will tell you it looks a darn lot like neuron "maps" of the brain. The internet is self-correcting, self-propagating, self-sustaining. And if you say that it couldn't do it without us, the sentient people, well then I'd like to see you be so conscious without your red blood cells, or your carbon atoms...
Slashdot Mirror
How do you expect that the 'chemical/hormonal environment' affects the progeny in a heritable manner?
It is quite possible that under certain environments certain sections of the DNA can be activated - and that these activations (in memory or elsewhere) can be heritable.
This is not necessarily what is going on in the article, but it is an interesting and tested if unknown means by which non-genetic heritability can take place.
We're just learning that Histone/DNA modifications can be inherited.
Histones (the spools around which DNA is stored) tell when the DNA source code should be 'active' vs 'inactive'. And these histones have a huge data space in the form of possible modifications (methylation, acetylation, etc.).
When DNA is replicated, these histones too are replicated at the same time. And they seem to be replicated in a semiconserved manner similar to DNA (half go to 'old' strand, half go to 'new' strand). And that there is a whole series of touring-like proteins that can 'read' 'write' or 'erase' these modifications.
If these modifications are made during an organism's life, they can be inherited by offspring.
Not only is the code being copied, but the 'marks' that tell which/when/where to read the code at any given time/condition too can be passed down. And that these marks can be written in real time rather than waiting for mutations in the code itself.
There was a recent study that XO females who inherited the X from their father had markedly different dispositions than those who inherited the X from their mother. DNA modification that is unique to how the male or female deal with their own X chromosome could be being passed down to offspring.
I think reality has it's part. I think in a game of conquest, to lack the ability to commit genocide is unrealistic. In the same way that a game set in post-apocalyptic-wherever where everyone is a marine probably involves some blood. As do war simulations.
But again, those are more choices of genre. However, the concept of detail/control do not traverse genres very well currently.
One must be careful, when talking about such issues, to not confuse the genre of the game, and appeal for the genre, with the mechanisms used by designers to make things fun. True, they overlap, but a detailed/control-oriented game doesn't always need to involve exploding body parts. (conversely, a war game does).
However, I've always been intrigued by the freedom of GTA. I personally have little desire to engage in the plot - but the intricacy of play is appealing. Though I agree, that makes those games, mightn't it be possible to make a game where such freedom is allowed (even to kill) but the direction or tone was not so obviously violent?
I would really like to play GTA, but I honestly am turned off by the missions I must willfully accept. I have great fun with the feeling of control - the ability to get in cars, travel around a huge map, and explore.
The control and competence is what makes that game appealing to me, not the gore or plot. And I think that is what is interesting - that a game can be fundamentally appealing for something outside of it's plot, theme or story.
Nature is indeed a difficult concept to describe. But there is a relevant and practical distinction between humans and their creations and other animals'.
The most relevant definition I've come up with is rate of change. That which changes at order of magnitudes different than others is unnatural to its environment.
In this way, most of what humans do i unnatural. As are most virii, many catalytic processes and others. In being 'unnatural' they change their surroundings (environment) in drastic and often extreme ways.
I think it's unfair to a logically sound, if not-well resolved distinction to feel that much of what humans are doing to the planet today is unnatural. It is not self-hatred, rather an acknowledgement that a bever must live within strict confines of his environment and can only build what his surrounding will let him. We have escaped those bounds allowing us to build dams every 10 feet along every river on the glob if we had the inclination.
I too am a H. sapien, and with that unique distinction I and all of my products are indeed one and the same as that around me - but I am capable of great affect on those surroundings. There are very different limits on the rates of change I can affect than those placed on other entities around me.
Perchlorate does three things:
-Treats thyroid gland disorders
-Used as rocket fuel
-Used in generating oxygen (O2) chemically
Seems like good happenstance to land on a planet with frozen water on tracts of rocket fuel and solid oxygen-generating salts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemical_oxygen_generator
Comcast is the defacto monopoly in my area.
All satellite providers are very low on the horizon in an older neighborhood with beautiful towering trees - so almost no one in the area can receive satellite signals from any of the GeoSynch sats up there.
ATT - the other monopoly - has been running FTTN but has somehow forgotten that people live more than 2000ft from busy intersections. The signal strength was abominable and they wouldn't install any service at our home.
There is no other choice - and no other competition.
exactly my point. There are perspectives, some of which require these people to need laptops over their current happiness - while others do not.
In some respects a lack of medical, sanitation, agricultural education IS needed - but with it comes the cost of brining the rest of the wide world into their homes.
*need* is a context dependent word. I cannot absolve myself of all contexts, though honestly in many more respects than I believe most entrepreneurial americans would admit, I think we should just let people be. They don't need anything else.
Food is good and all, but the fact is that in most of the countries this laptop is aimed at, people eat well. They're frankly some of the oldest cultures around (Arabic, Thai, Nigerian) and have survived because they know how to make and produce and eat food. That's not the issue. I spent a month working in the villages of rural Thailand. These people eat well but they have nothing to do. They just sit around during the summer and talk, as there is no extra water for farming, no economy to support, and no need to do anything other than talk. Everyone is doing just fine.
What is needed is education, access to the world beyond their village and the "city" miles away. These laptops will possibly (though again, efficacy has yet to be proven) encourage such interaction, learning and initialization into the modern world. Furthermore, the people are not stupid. The one computer that was in the government office was used regularly by middle and high-schoolers downloading music, reading up on the latest news from Bangkok, the weather, or various other games. But creation of original content, for access within the village, is another issue altogether.
As a side - those people were some of the happiest people I have ever met. They were not hungry, were not in a hurry, never spent much time indoors, never needed anything more than what they had. By connecting them to the capitalistic global society with these laptops we take away their status quo. They will be hungry, not for food, but for education, for money, for placement within the larger world. And it will destroy the villages as they know it. For better or worse.
Something to think about.
This article is not about how we should all just get up and die to make the Earth better. It is to inform us of our own impact on this small island upon which we live.
And we do have an impact. We are the ecological 'winners' and we are not outside the system, true. But we have the ability to think, to ponder, to plan, to use our knowledge.
And yes, in the end, it's all for naught, the sun will blow up, our galaxy will crash into another one, time will slowly fizzle out towards a great crunch (and yeah, it would be pretty neat if humanity or its derivative could survive that long). But at the same time, if we could do it while brining along the least 'fortunate' of our kind as well, I think it would be a lot more interesting ride. We bring homeless, sick, and other unfortunate humans along with our welfare. Are you to say it's worth destroying 99% of all the species of 'unfortunate' life which coexists on this earth in order to have a bit more profitable of a day? We destroy in ignorance and in arrogance. We have the ability to live alongside the poor little insect we smash underfoot for fun. We are fortunate enough to have this ability of foresight and compassion. We have the ability to spend our lives in moderation (and still be kings).
Maybe as a species we are no better than the rabid carnivores of our past. Maybe as a species we have not learned the ability of foresight and we are just reactive, primitive, egotistical, deterministic 'lifeforms.'
And for those of you who are so bent on building the fastest, cheapest artificial intelligence, artificial reality, or computer of any sort. I will quickly point you to the millions of animals that are erased by our wanton arrogance.
we have enough. we (should) have the ability of foresight. we can live alongside our planet. But that would require choice, moderation and discipline. But those qualities are exactly what make us human - interesting.
exactly, the Greek root giga- it's pronounced like the English 'gig' - as in 'gigabyte', and as in the English 'gigantic'.
I don't hear too many people saying ''wow, you sure have a 'guygantic...'" usually it's "jygantic."
This is an easily demarkated event occuring to an historic institution which illustrates the current and future cultural and intellectual climate. What Guttenberg did, in itself didn't create anything extraordinary, but it changed the order of magnitude of use of an existing technology. It allowed an order of magnitude of more readers to read what used to be expensive books (one of the more popular, and duly important is in fact the Encyclopedia Brittanica). What Wikipedia allows is an order of magnitude of more editors and commentaries to provide information (and for free). The system is not perfect, but with the help of a tuned submission and editorial procedures, Wikiepedia's abilities far outweigh the Brittanica's venerable, though glorified, trustworthiness.
This seems to be happening on many fronts, and in many places with the advent of viral communication. But as this debate involves clear, historically relevant, as well as practically useful opponents it seems it will be pretty memorable. If you read the rebuttles to each others' works from a technologically historical perspective the arguments are interesting and can be applied to so much. And coming from two institutions which pride themselves on their intellectual merrits, such documents might be interesting to keep and look at in a few years when more and more of these same arguments pop up in less public and less known situations.
On the other hand it seems to retain the vigor and mundanity of a nerd fight.
Why must there only be buttons on a remote? What about a scroll wheel like on the iPod? The 'superluous' padlock on the iPod is an easy way to squeeze numeric buttons into one scroll wheel...
It's called Column Browsing. Beautiful design it is...
example:
http://www.ucs.ed.ac.uk/usd/cts/ol/os/mac_osx/Pan
example: Fish
Fish is cheaper today than ever because we have more boats on the sea than ever. More fisherman = more boats = cheaper prices. However, because there are more fisherman, AND the number of fish in the ocean is limited, the population of certain very common varieties of fish has peaked. We take out more and more fish a year, but all of a sudden the fish population can't keep up. Fish prices will become very cheap as more boats are put out. And then, all of a sudden, we will fish the 95% of the fish of a particular species in one season. And at that moment the price of fish will skyrocket.
That's what the explosion, implosion is all about. We are smart enough to see it, why are we not smart enough to act on it with self-determination.
Oil, Water (esp in places like China), arable land, etc. And those are things we really are dependent on. An immediate bust for any of those things will not result in the death of humanity, but it WILL result in war, famine, strife and a loss of population.
That is the point. The population will go down, it's too high. It's just a matter of how it does it. We have the foresight to do it gradually before the hand of natural equilibrium does it for us. But in reality it seems we really do not...
Freeman Dyson had the great example of self-replicating robots in his book 'Disturbing the Universe.'
Imagine sending a quarter-pound payload of a well-programed robot of such construction to something like one of Jupiter's icy moons. It is as small as needed to do the following tasks: replicating twice, grab a small piece of the ice on the moon as cargo, and then launching itself with some element in the ice as fuel towards mars. That's all it is programmed to do.
In x amount of time you have a mars with oceans. Astroid mining could also work on similar principles.
Regardless of how plausible or crazy the above ideas are, the concept is gorgeous for people... The investment in one such machine can yield payoffs of millions/billions of man-hours of labor, in places man can exist etc.
There is always the observation of slavery/exploitation if such a machine can replicate. Or even fears of Matrix/virus-like behavior which continues uncontrollably. But it is an interesting idea to think about. Rarely can a human investment of time provide such a staggering turnaround in product.
Interesting concept, even if it does still resemble science-fiction.
The point of running on a G4 is ease of physical use, not really software.
The G4 can be opened and closed in under a second - a small latch on the side. Drives can be plugged in in as long a time it takes you to align the cable. And you "could" do this while its running (not advisable). It also can have a few PCI cards in it for any kinda drive you got.
The G4 idea is a great one. I used it a lot this summer working for a school for checking for bad/good HDs we had in storage because it was just so easy to access.
Apple not only makes OSX, but also a wonderfully engineered computer, its internals can be accessed so quickly and easily.
If GPS is safe enough for guided missiles, then it's safe enough for me...
Is GPS accuracy supposed to be measured in lives saved, or lives lost per error in calculation?
One must compare the war and science. It is not possible not to. Both use very real money, and though not 1:1, if the money goes to one cause, it cannot be spent on the other. Some would like to spend the money one way, some another, and it's the governments job to placate as many as possible. If more choose one or the other, that will get more funding.
Because everything in this society can be broken down to a common denominator (guess... money), everything can be rewritten in terms of it, space, wars, time, life, and everything else.
That's how capitalistic societies work. And if you live in any of the countries where you are likely to be reading slashdot, you live in a capitalistic society...
Did anyone else get physically dizzy - as in a vertigo-like effect - when zooming in too fast? It feels like I'm falling at breakneck speed onto the paper. It was very strange, and it happened repeatedly, not just upon initial viewing...
interesting how well your brain can be fooled, even when it's being treated Humanely
Pictures of the new Headless iHome...
h**p://dms.tecknohost.com/macrumors/i/ihome/
When I read this it seemed to scary to be true:
conspiracy to commit copyright infringement and conspiracy to traffic in a device that circumvents technological protection measures
Circumvents technology? Isn't that what technology is for - to circumvent some path of more resistance? I realize that this might be harmful to those make the technology, but isn't that a risk we're willing to take?
I personally don't want to be run by corporate owned copyrights etc....
kinda scary to me
Seriously, When can I get one?
I really would like to get one - this would be aweseme. I'd pay too...
Ever heard of red-shift or blue-shift? Frequency of light is not a constant across those distances, especially within the fiber. Though I'm sure you could compensate for it, that might take more data-space than the information itself.
Using color to differentiate streams sounds good until you do the physics.
Though I would like to hear from someone who knows better than I if somthing like that is possible.... encode the routing data in some property of the light, the way electricity cannot, and then a router to take advantage of it.
How isn't the internet alive already? It has these cell things which go around in hoards and repair it when it gets broken, and they coordinate with each other and autonomously - without their own knowledge - make the whole being work.
The internet is alive by almost all standards of definitions, except that it is on such a different scale, that it cannot communicate with us the way an animal can.
Massive computing power can just "create" such entities, and coupled with the massive amounts of energy in terms of software and use at the miniature scale (PCs), one can create a very complicated set of living ideas.
Ever look at the "maps" of the internet? Ask anyone who knows anything about biology and they will tell you it looks a darn lot like neuron "maps" of the brain. The internet is self-correcting, self-propagating, self-sustaining. And if you say that it couldn't do it without us, the sentient people, well then I'd like to see you be so conscious without your red blood cells, or your carbon atoms...