There is nothing special about a file system storage technology. It reads bytes, it writes bytes. That is all it has to do. The developers catering to the FAT or extended-FAT paradigm are examples of suck-ups who do not believe that "information should be free". If one had cajones one would propose an open source file system storage system.
And I am making this statement, clearly and open to the public, to the developers of exFAT file system and anyone who deals with it. You are EVIL, Wikipedia clearly states "Extended File Allocation Table, aka FAT64) is a proprietary file system". Why are you working on such evil plans?
Now, if we were moral people we would name the perpetrators. We might gain the advantage that if you think you are shrouded in secrecy -- that secrecy is hidden -- for now. And you need to ask how long is it before we catch up with you?
It takes me only several hours (over DSL) to download a CD. A genome for the megabat is 3.2 GB, a genome for the several versions of the elephant genome is 11 GB. I constrain my downloading so as to not adversely affect other family members (something you with your meager speed obsessed mind might not be able to comprehend -- and I do mean that as an insult.)
Go ahead, take me on, you may not understand who you are dealing with and I would suggest that you tread carefully.
While I am all for organ donation and digging into defective brains.
I am completely against medical therapies which prematurely terminate the life of an individual While I am completely aware that there is a medical case for declaring an individual as "dead".
So long as the individual's brain is intact and can be preserved, using technologies known to Alcor and/or other preservation organizations -- one is not "dead" -- i.e. the physicians pronouncement in the ER is WRONG. I realize that I am promising potential future technologies. But you have to realize that the past can be broken. And more importantly that is the course that humanity has chosen.
How hard is it to write a file system driver? You write a generic form, you make it open source and adapt it to Windows and Linux (maybe Mac) drivers). It is a couple of hackers in a room for a weekend maybe. The only tricky part might be if the interface allows you to schedule multiple read/write threads to the drive. I still can't believe this is more than a week's worth of effort for people who know what they are doing.
And 2 TB cards. What have they been smoking? I've been downloading genomes for the last month (DSL line speeds) (I have most of the known mammalian and many bacterial genome sequences) and I *still* have room left over on my 500 MB drive). There is simply *not* that much useful information in the world yet.
Now, you could argue that this is Panasonic and so their currency is in "non-useful information" and so we have reached the point where we are recording the lives of individuals that will never be watched and certainly is not useful. Do you have 2 TB of "poignant moments" that you wish to record for some subset of humanity to view? If we all have 2 TB cards we are going to have to *pay* people to watch them. (Oh, please come watch my video).
And so I view this advance of information storage technology as an evil thing. In that it will allow the recording of minutes of ones life which are on balance unimportant (at least for the progress of humanity).
Needless to say the disk access speeds are insufficient to support moving 2 TB of data around. One would have to totally restructure the PC data interface to be able to deal with those data loads.
Any rational person would throw such suggestions into the dust bin until we have "real" molecular nanotechnology and space development becomes significantly less expensive.
I have run the numbers, and to supply the complete energy needs of everyone living in the U.S. requires a small fraction of the solar energy falling on the SW U.S. One does not need to go into space, one simply needs to harvest the energy available efficiently. Then there are transportation issues, but we have superconducting transmission lines *now*.
One needs to realize that the energy efficiency of existing systems sucks. Plants operate at 4%. Cheap solar cells (which we do not have the manufacturing capacity to make them *really* cheap) are at 15-18%. Multilayer (expensive) solar cells can get up to 30%+, cells in the lab are operating at 50%+. I have yet to see a single study which explores where the U,S. could be if it applied the same "we can do it" perspetcive to the production of clean energy technologies (largely, wind, solar, tidal (and biotechnology -- proper engineering of bacteria or algae can probably push that 4% to 8-12%.)
We do not need to go into space (now). We need to invest and develop those technologies which can be used here and now without the expense of lifting those technologies out of the gravity well in which we live. Any rational examination of the numbers will show a far better payoff for investing in either biotechnology based energy development or ground based energy development.
Ok, I need a bit of education here. There are "anonymous" ways of browsing the internet. I am thinking that that in the back of my mind that one only need to enhance bitorrent protocols with the typical "anonymous" methods (yes I know this means software for detection and participation in an "enhanced btorrent protocol") but these packets could then be routed to/from random machines (which the receiving machine having an encrypted list of "who" to accept connections from).
What would be "true justice" is if we could compromise one or more of the huge "botnets" to become P2P redistribution networks... The hackers hacked...
Could someone explain precisely *what* it is in the P2P protocol that makes it vulnerable to filtering? Is it some unique port (I can setup randomly migrating ports at specific time points distributed though encrypted communications)? Is it some specific address list of machines hosting BT traffic? (Then increase the number of machines the source packets are coming from -- part of the anonymizing strategy).
Until a government disallows (a) encrypting any data (which I think in the U.S. would violate the 5th amendment, in the U.K. may violate the Magna Carta (or one would presume whatever the operating basis for UK law is today); or (b) connecting peer-to-peer systems at will (which if you randomize it enough should allow any data to be distributed to anyone). (There are all kinds of "government" prohibiting "life, liberty and the pursuit" of happiness" arguments that can come up here.)
In short it sounds to me like the BT authors should go back to the drawing boards and develop a "fault-tolerant", "randomized distribution", "non-filterable" strategy. Since we have seen this coming, my question would be why have they not done this?
Hoping that someone who understands these things better than I will take the time to respond.
There are at least 3 ways to search for Matrioshka Brains.
1. Mid-to-Far IR surveys. But they require liquid He cooling and don't last very long. The last good survey that was done was with the IRAS satellite in 1983. I first started to look at that data about 7 years ago but had to set it aside for more pressing priorities. Richard Carrigan, is a Physicist at Fermilab and has recently done the work of going through the data and has some interesting candidates [1]. But he is searching for Dyson Shells (improperly named "Dyson Spheres") and is using somewhat different parameters for his search (Matrioshka Brains do not have "liquid water" and Earth like temperatures that the habitats envisioned by Dyson need.) A very mature Matrioshka Brain can be very large and have a temperature approaching the ambient environment (in most of the universe ~3-20K). The IRAS data was obviously not intended for reconstructing black body curves of objects. To improve this physicists could put more effort into the development of massive IR detector arrays (bolometers or similar) with millions of "pixels" and launch a "permanent" IR survey satellite (or plan a "permanent" IR observatory, perhaps on the back side of the moon).
2. Convince the gravitational microlensing astromers that some of the microlensing events they are observing could be caused by Matrioshka Brains (or Dyson Shells). I went to 2 international microlensing conferences in an attempt to do this and the microlensing physicists would hear none of it. (Whatever is causing the events must be "natural" and it must be something we have encountered before (K or M class stars for example) it *certainly* can't be the result of intelligent life forms from civilizations much older than ours.)
3. Start using the data from any of the surveys being done to do "occultation astronomy". This will kind of fall out of the searches for exoplanets as well as searches for near earth asteroids. But nobody to my knowledge is pooling information from multiple surveys over time to either track MBrains through a galaxy or determine the rate at which stars go dark (which sets limits on the abundance of civilizations making the transition from our (water phase based on "natural" evolution) state of development to a post-nanotechnology, largely machine/AI/uploaded phase where the civilization has a whole different set of constraints from what we typically consider. If my current efforts to produce pristine stem cells are as successful as I hope, then I may retire again and work on this part of the problem (by then open access to the astronomy databases and computers fast enough to deal all of the data may be available to make this work).
Another useful activity would be to get the "old school" SETI proponents together and convince them that the primary basis for most of their ideas (radio or optical signals) are completely out-of-date with the technologies that we know advanced civilizations will have (molecular nanotechnology and a huge amount of computational capacity at their disposal). Until one gets more people thinking along those lines then much of the efforts of SETI researchers and many astrobiologists may be misdirected. Milan Cirkovic is a physicist/astronomer from Yugoslavia who has published several papers over the last couple of years (one with me) attempting to promote re-thinking the "old" SETI perspective but its like trying to paddle against the current of a rather fast river.
Does that provide enough meat to allow me to keep the modded up status?:-)
Also, of interest for people might be Damien Broderick's collection of provocative papers "Year Million" loosely organized around what life might be like in the year 1,000,000. Several of the chapters, including one by myself, deal with the topic of Matrioshka Brains. I did not write the Wikipedia page on Matrioshka Brains, but have offered a few "steering" comments. That page has a link to my site which has the original ideas as well as a number of related sites.
The points here are valid. Robert Freitas wrote a book (Xenology) nearly 30 years ago which explored how other life forms might develop and evolve. I am sure that an even more expansive discussion on the topic could be written now. The "water" phase period for intelligent life forms may well vary, but it is not a requirement for non-water based start-ups (covered in Xenology) or post-water based existences, e.g. Dyson shells or their more sophisticated derivatives (Matrioshka Brains).
It is a shame that current physicists are using valuable resources to search for "life" within such a limited framework. When we have available concepts of non-water-staged life and post-water-staged life upon which we can draw. It can even be argued that the "water-state" basis of life is a minimal state in the Universe. (Given that Matrioshka Brains have lifetimes that may exceed even those of stars.)
My bad (that number didn't look right but I didn't double check it). It looks like my Pentium 4 Prescott at 2.8 GHz is ~840 times faster than the PDP-11 though once one starts dealing with parallel instruction execution or multiple cores or overclocked CPUs the difference gets even greater.
> "One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac > through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
Hmpfh... Circa 1978-79, Forrest Howard and I wrote a PDP-10 simulator that ran on a PDP-11/70 (a 36 bit machine on a 16 bit machine for those not educated in DEC hardware). It was used to recompile the DEC Fortran compiler which was written in Bliss-11. And the Bliss-11 compiler could only be run on a PDP-10. Lacking a PDP-10 (expensive pseudo-mainframe computers in those days) we simply wrote a simulator. It didn't run fast, as I recall the DEC Fortran compiler recompile took several weeks, but it did run.
Reproducing a PDP-11 sumulator on modern hardware would be relatively trivial, though it would have been much easier on older Macs because it could be argued that the 680X0 architecture was a knockoff of the PDP-11 architecture. Though one could suppose that current era (non-680X0 or non-PowerPC) machines are fast enough that it is a noop. I think the PDP-11 had a 300 ns cycle time and current machines are ~10x faster. Any current machines could easily simulate a '70s era minicomputer (or even most mainframes).
I am not going to argue with your claims for the "current" facts. The primary point being they are the *current* situation which in turn is dictated by the *current* environment. Several paths can break that perspective. A medical education requires the investment of a number of years of ones life (8+) so one expects a payback. One can either make the cost of a medical education lower (low cost or free loans in return for X years of community service) or one can make the number of people with medical educations greater (driving down the cost through an abundance of suppliers). If one can live 400+ years, then a medical education and perhaps its subsequent practice is but one small stop on the journey through life. If every individual had the education of an MD then why would you bother to pay to go to see one?
You also completely ignore the potential for competition. I have self-diagnosed several medical problems, not going through an MD but simply by consulting the internet. When AIs (or equivalent expert systems) reach the human level (which they have already done with chess and almost with real world road driving capabilities) then the costs drop significantly. Finally, your premises are based on a mentality of "scarcity" thinking (i.e. that certain physical elements are in short supply). In a world where nanorobots are programmed to be the providers that concept is completely invalid. I would urge you to read the extensive works by Drexler, Merkle & Freitas and compare where we are now with where we could be. And then one must ask oneself "Why are we not 'there' yet?". By and large IMO, it is because we have not chosen to "be there" (as we once did with going to the moon). An environment of abundance turns a system of an environment of scarcity on its head and therefore upsets a lot of apple carts. But if you really want progress then make an effort to understand what is possible and what it may take to get there (and indirectly why we are not "there" now).
The problems is that this is not really a universal mechanism of aging. While Sinclair and associates are clearly doing good work they are not answering a fundamental question -- "Why do all complex organisms age and die?" The fact that their work shows an extension of mean lifespans but not maximal lifespan is critical. Similar results were demonstrated a year or more ago with completely different work involving telomere extension in mice with increased tumor suppressor gene capability. One can extend mean lifespan in a group of individuals but one does not extend maximal lifespan -- thus one is not dealing with the "universal" mechanisms of aging. If one *is* dealing with universal mechanisms then one would have a mouse that lives anywhere from 120 years (= ~maximal human lifespan) to 220 years (= ~maximal Bowhead whale lifespan) and *longer*. If you are not addressing why a Bowhead whale (a mammal) can live ~220+ years vs. a mouse (another mammal) living ~3 years then one is *not* dealing with a universal mechanism of aging.
The problem may be that they are dealing with how double strand DNA breaks are dealt with (involving the quantity and relocation of sirtuins) rather than why the occur in the first place (i.e. what are the causes of genomic decay?) and how they are dealt with (the non-homologous DNA double-strand break repair processes). If the DNA double strand break repair processes inherently corrupt the genome (my current opinion) then *that* is a universal mechanism of aging -- not whether one has enough sirtuins (which are involved in decloaking the DNA for such repairs). The only organism I am currently aware of which uses a different process for double strand break repair is members of the Deinococcus bacterial group. All other species utilize enzymes which inherently corrupt the genome during the repair process. The sirtuins are "side actors" in this process and they play only a minor role in the grand scheme.
The author (girlintraining) unfortunately, IMO, does not know what they are talking about. With respect to medical costs, one can make and argument that they are only available to the wealthy, but that only lasts so far as there is not an abundance of knowledge, information and resources that would force them to be less expensive.
I would cite the fact that it would appear that the cost of sequencing a complete human genome (which allows you to determine disease predispositions) appears to be dropping from a cost of $1+ billion dollars (~2003) to perhaps $1000 dollars (~2013). There is an incentive to make medical care costs cheaper -- the number of people who can spend $1 billion is less than 100. The number of people who can spend $1000 is millions.
I also object to the premise that the wealthy do not contribute. The company that I was president of, Aeiveos Sciences Group, was the first to attempt to determine genes that contribute to the longevity of centenarians and much of its funding came from one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. I myself when I was somewhat wealthy contributed a significant resources to understanding and hopefully solving the aging problem. I did so with the understanding that once one has wealth, more "la-de-da" is pointless, what counts is the difference one is making. When one is dealing with the wealthy the classical "rules" (often the view posed by those who are not or who have never been "wealthy") are not applicable -- what counts is how you setup the game.
Finally, the poster has no understanding of robust molecular nanotechnology and/or AI. Both of those technologies have the potential to make the classical concepts of "wealth" irrelevant. Wealth has historically used to determine things like power, status, survival potential, etc. With the development of molecular nanotechnology, measures such as "what you have", and with robust AI, "what you are capable of" start to become irrelevant. So "classical" perspectives of wealth, medical technologies, who has and does not have them, etc. begin to become non-starting premises in this type of discussion.
No. We use elephants for woolly mammoths. We use human mothers for Neanderthals. Now what we use for the various ice age tigers I'm unsure of. Real tigers perhaps but they aren't exactly so abundant that one might use them to help resurrect extinct cousins.
Now of course there are potential problems with compatibility between fetal and maternal protein signals. This may require some "fudging" of the genomes being resurrected to prove more biocompatible with their modern counterparts. These problems presumably go away once artificial wombs are developed. (I believe the Japanese are working on the development of such technologies, presumably in part due to their own declining population).
So it seems you are arguing that creating an "individual" which could never fit into society is cruel and therefore immoral.
This precludes a host of interesting genetic evolutionary pathways that I consider quite desirable, e.g. hyperintelligent or non-aging transhumans. Perhaps even more importantly is the simple solution to eliminate the objection that the individual "might feel alone" can be resolved simply by creating a Neanderthal "family".
I would suggest that you go learn some molecular biology before you make comments like this.
Here is how you would do it. 1) Sequence the ancient DNA and assemble it until you feel you have a "complete" genome sequence. 2) Either mutate an existing human genome using the technology Sangamo as or assemble a complete synthetic genome using technology such as that Synthetic Genomics is developing. 3) Replace the genome in an existing human cell with the Neanderthal artificial genome or create a artificial cell using the artificial genome (this is the part which hasn't really been demonstrated yet). Alternatively if one can create an artificial nucleus you could presumably transfer it into an enucleated human cell using the standard nuclear transfer techniques used in cloning. 4) Take the neanderthal cell and subject it to current iPS procedures to generate a neanderthal stem cell. 5) Transfer the nucleus of this cell into a human egg (standard cloning procedures again). 6) Implant said egg (now functioning as a fertilized neanderthal zygote) into a human host (or if synthetic wombs are available one of those). 7) Wait ~7-9 months for either C-section birth or natural birth.
Of course there are a lot of things that can go wrong in this process so one is probably going to have to do it multiple times. But its the same basic methods that will probably be used to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
There is no need to undertake gene therapy on any human child or adult. I cannot see any "unethical" argument because one never has to work with a human embryo. I would also point out that we will be doing human embryo modifications relatively soon to correct genetic defects. Watch and see how the debate develops once the genes for intelligence become more clearly known. Argue the morality of knowingly giving birth to a child of below average intelligence!
Faster CPUs are lees important than "intelligent programming". I am sitting here with an old Prescott P4 CPU which is essentialy doing nothing and yet 13+% of the CPU time is being consumed by galeon and 30+% of the CPU time is being consumed by X.
Dedicate some of the design and engineering expertise to the software, rather than the hardware.
It would be useful for people to remember that Joy was the author of "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." which was an interesting examination of why some technologies might be best left untouched.
Now, you want to appoint a luddite as the CTO of the United States? Please explain the rationale behind this.
What you need is the solution which was popular back in the old days (circa 1974-1980). The minicomputer (DEC PDP-11/45) at the undergraduate science center at Harvard used a DH-11 (16-RS232-lines) to allow a dozen or so terminals and even a few extremely low bandwidth teletypes to connect to the computer running Unix. A similar solution was adopted at Time Inc. in the early 1980's to allow a PDP-11/34 to communicate with all of the far-flung correspondents allowing them to submit stories every week (also running Unix). These types of solutions were quite popular at that time frame.
But PCs which commonly have only 2 serial ports (if that in the USB age), with Windows (which was essentially designed as a "personal" workstation and assumed high bandwidth connections) -- you have me ROTFL.
Better to run Linux, get the hardware which will support the low bandwidth connections, and then use Xen (or equivalents) to provide VM support for windows if that is absolutely necessary. Then, also do the world a favor, take the people providing the windows only software out in the backyard, beat them a little bit, then bury them alive.
Orion is the best solution for *what*? Sending humans to the moon? Sending humans to Mars? Both of these are silly ideas. Humans did not evolve to tolerate the nasties of interplanetary or interstellar space. Yes, having a space station with the Earth's protective magnetic shield is fine, but when you start considering long term (months to years) occupation of space outside of that field you should think again.
Until such a time as humans are completely reengineered to be radiation resistant, e.g. have DNA repair systems as good or better than Deinococcus bacteria, can tolerate being frozen solid and thawed out, etc. E.g. probably desginer synthetic genomes for humans, they have no business being sent on space missions. The same amount of money spent of heavy lift vehicles, radiation shielding, or worse yet a new Project Orion, could be spent instead on the development of semi-intelligent exploratory robots (look at the Mars Rovers!) without putting human lives at risk.
The idea of man colonizing the moon or Mars is a romantic fantasy (and I grew up in the Apollo era and have fond memories of what it inspired). Computers (and what they are capable of) are on a Moore's Law advancement curve. Rocket science & engineering is not. Witness the fact that you are bringing a 50 year old concept to the discussion.
It is my understanding that the primary advantages of FF 3.1 are speedups to Javascript and adoption of new HTML tags.
For me (and for much of the web browsing community, such as my cousin, aunt & father, e.g. the 50-84 y.o community) these are USELESS.
1) I am slowly converting my family entirely over to using Firefox with NoScript -- because *anyone* who allows random internet sites to run software on their machine is *nuts* [1].
2) A significant majority of "common" sites will not be using enhanced HTML tags because they have to continue to work with the installed browser base.
This is another example of Mozilla developers getting side-tracked with respect to what is important to *them* rather than what might be important to the community [2].
1. The *real* advantage of Firefox is the selected enabling of Javascript for a few "trusted" relatively non-commercial sites (e.g. gmail, ones bank, ones broker) using NoScript. I will assume the display of pages from such sites is relatively unimpacted by Javascript speedups (since they tend to be network bandwidth or user input consrained). [Though it is worth noting that the gmail javascript appears to be becoming a bit of a pig.]
2. It is worth noting that my cousin, my aunt and my father continue to survive on the internet quite well using dial-up connections (in large part because they live in regions where DSL (or fiber) is unavailable and Cable is too expensive). I presume that G3 service will fall into the $$$ category even when reasonably priced modems that can connect their computers to the net become available.
My reading of the abstract [1] indicates that they have found 5 SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) on chromosome 20p11 that show a linkage to baldness. There is NO mention of a *gene* or genes in that region (though one could presumably look up candidates in one of the human genome browsers). If the genes are of unknown function (or worse yet are gene regulatory regions, or siRNAs or still something else which is not a classical gene) then it will still take a fair amount of work (years unless we get very lucky) linking that chromosome region to the biochemistry involved.
If you are "approving" topics for science.slashdot.org you at should at least know enough about the topic (genomics, gene defects, etc.) to tell when a submission has folded, spindled or mutilated the actual science involved.
I agree. But work by Lineweaver's group suggests that ~70% of the Earth-like planets in nearby galaxies are older than the Earth. In nearby galaxies there are sufficient heavy metals to enable an Earth-like biolological system.
I would put decreasing probabilities on the development of any intelligent/technolological life on systems older than say 9 billion years. But we only have an example of 1 to base any assumptions on. We have no idea whether our experience is a lucky shot at the start of the curve, a late comer that got shot down again and again, or a typical "average" developmental path for intelligence and technology. And intelligence may not be the critical aspect. Dolphins, whales, elephants and parrots may be "intelligent". What appears to be critical is whether you have the means, skills and need to develop tools and eventually advanced technologies.
I agree that one should not violate known physical laws. And Matrioshka Brains don't really bend any laws of physics, they simply stretch technology, primarily molecular nanotechnology, to its proposed limits. There are serious scientists, such as Smalley and Church who find such stretching implausible. But there are others such as Drexler, Merkle, Hall, Freitas (and myself) who simply believe it is a matter of development.
But technology is on a roll. Look at the decline in costs of sequencing an entire mammalian genome (the latest number I've seen is $60K) and the predicted decline in costs (to a few thousand $) over the last decade. And now we have several efforts to put together synthetic genomes and even synthetic life. Molecular nanotechnology largely suffers from not enough people really understanding it (and failing to understand its implications). Once you get over those hurdles then the big questions revolve around how many "good" planets are there (and we will likely have start getting hard answers for that in the next decade) and is "intelligence" (and potentially technology) particularly common?
Largely due to claims of a sudden appearance and the fact that astronomers don't have another explanation. I've been to 2 gravitational microlensing conferences attempting to convince astrophysicists that they should consider that the microlensing objects (large invisible masses) could be Matrioshka Brains. They don't simply reject the idea. The reject it with extreme prejudice. That is in spite of the fact that the eventual development of molecular nanotechnology makes the development of Matrioshka Brains a very short project (100-1,000,000 years) on astronomical time scales.
To assume that there are not Matrioshka Brains out there you are forced to assume that *we* are the only intelligent technological species in the universe (within say 5 billion light years) and I don't notice astrophysicists writing a lot of papers which make that assertion!
Slashdot Mirror
There is nothing special about a file system storage technology. It reads bytes, it writes bytes. That is all it has to do. The developers catering to the FAT or extended-FAT paradigm are examples of suck-ups who do not believe that "information should be free". If one had cajones one would propose an open source file system storage system.
And I am making this statement, clearly and open to the public, to the developers of exFAT file system and anyone who deals with it. You are EVIL, Wikipedia clearly states "Extended File Allocation Table, aka FAT64) is a proprietary file system". Why are you working on such evil plans?
Now, if we were moral people we would name the perpetrators. We might gain the advantage that if you think you are shrouded in secrecy -- that secrecy is hidden -- for now. And you need to ask how long is it before we catch up with you?
It takes me only several hours (over DSL) to download a CD. A genome for the megabat is 3.2 GB, a genome for the several versions of the elephant genome is 11 GB. I constrain my downloading so as to not adversely affect other family members (something you with your meager speed obsessed mind might not be able to comprehend -- and I do mean that as an insult.)
Go ahead, take me on, you may not understand who you are dealing with and I would suggest that you tread carefully.
While I am all for organ donation and digging into defective brains.
I am completely against medical therapies which prematurely terminate the life of an individual
While I am completely aware that there is a medical case for declaring an individual as "dead".
So long as the individual's brain is intact and can be preserved, using technologies known to Alcor and/or other preservation organizations -- one is not "dead" -- i.e. the physicians pronouncement in the ER is WRONG.
I realize that I am promising potential future technologies. But you have to realize that the past can be broken. And more importantly that is the course that humanity has chosen.
How hard is it to write a file system driver? You write a generic form, you make it open source and adapt it to Windows and Linux (maybe Mac) drivers). It is a couple of hackers in a room for a weekend maybe. The only tricky part might be if the interface allows you to schedule multiple read/write threads to the drive. I still can't believe this is more than a week's worth of effort for people who know what they are doing.
And 2 TB cards. What have they been smoking? I've been downloading genomes for the last month (DSL line speeds) (I have most of the known mammalian and many bacterial genome sequences) and I *still* have room left over on my 500 MB drive). There is simply *not* that much useful information in the world yet.
Now, you could argue that this is Panasonic and so their currency is in "non-useful information" and so we have reached the point where we are recording the lives of individuals that will never be watched and certainly is not useful. Do you have 2 TB of "poignant moments" that you wish to record for some subset of humanity to view? If we all have 2 TB cards we are going to have to *pay* people to watch them. (Oh, please come watch my video).
And so I view this advance of information storage technology as an evil thing. In that it will allow the recording of minutes of ones life which are on balance unimportant (at least for the progress of humanity).
Needless to say the disk access speeds are insufficient to support moving 2 TB of data around. One would have to totally restructure the PC data interface to be able to deal with those data loads.
Any rational person would throw such suggestions into the dust bin until we have "real" molecular nanotechnology and space development becomes significantly less expensive.
I have run the numbers, and to supply the complete energy needs of everyone living in the U.S. requires a small fraction of the solar energy falling on the SW U.S. One does not need to go into space, one simply needs to harvest the energy available efficiently. Then there are transportation issues, but we have superconducting transmission lines *now*.
One needs to realize that the energy efficiency of existing systems sucks. Plants operate at 4%. Cheap solar cells (which we do not have the manufacturing capacity to make them *really* cheap) are at 15-18%. Multilayer (expensive) solar cells can get up to 30%+, cells in the lab are operating at 50%+. I have yet to see a single study which explores where the U,S. could be if it applied the same "we can do it" perspetcive to the production of clean energy technologies (largely, wind, solar, tidal (and biotechnology -- proper engineering of bacteria or algae can probably push that 4% to 8-12%.)
We do not need to go into space (now). We need to invest and develop those technologies which can be used here and now without the expense of lifting those technologies out of the gravity well in which we live. Any rational examination of the numbers will show a far better payoff for investing in either biotechnology based energy development or ground based energy development.
Ok, I need a bit of education here. There are "anonymous" ways of browsing the internet. I am thinking that that in the back of my mind that one only need to enhance bitorrent protocols with the typical "anonymous" methods (yes I know this means software for detection and participation in an "enhanced btorrent protocol") but these packets could then be routed to/from random machines (which the receiving machine having an encrypted list of "who" to accept connections from).
What would be "true justice" is if we could compromise one or more of the huge "botnets" to become P2P redistribution networks... The hackers hacked...
Could someone explain precisely *what* it is in the P2P protocol that makes it vulnerable to filtering? Is it some unique port (I can setup randomly migrating ports at specific time points distributed though encrypted communications)? Is it some specific address list of machines hosting BT traffic? (Then increase the number of machines the source packets are coming from -- part of the anonymizing strategy).
Until a government disallows (a) encrypting any data (which I think in the U.S. would violate the 5th amendment, in the U.K. may violate the Magna Carta (or one would presume whatever the operating basis for UK law is today); or (b) connecting peer-to-peer systems at will (which if you randomize it enough should allow any data to be distributed to anyone). (There are all kinds of "government" prohibiting "life, liberty and the pursuit" of happiness" arguments that can come up here.)
In short it sounds to me like the BT authors should go back to the drawing boards and develop a "fault-tolerant", "randomized distribution", "non-filterable" strategy. Since we have seen this coming, my question would be why have they not done this?
Hoping that someone who understands these things better than I will take the time to respond.
There are at least 3 ways to search for Matrioshka Brains.
1. Mid-to-Far IR surveys. But they require liquid He cooling and don't last very long. The last good survey that was done was with the IRAS satellite in 1983. I first started to look at that data about 7 years ago but had to set it aside for more pressing priorities. Richard Carrigan, is a Physicist at Fermilab and has recently done the work of going through the data and has some interesting candidates [1]. But he is searching for Dyson Shells (improperly named "Dyson Spheres") and is using somewhat different parameters for his search (Matrioshka Brains do not have "liquid water" and Earth like temperatures that the habitats envisioned by Dyson need.) A very mature Matrioshka Brain can be very large and have a temperature approaching the ambient environment (in most of the universe ~3-20K). The IRAS data was obviously not intended for reconstructing black body curves of objects. To improve this physicists could put more effort into the development of massive IR detector arrays (bolometers or similar) with millions of "pixels" and launch a "permanent" IR survey satellite (or plan a "permanent" IR observatory, perhaps on the back side of the moon).
2. Convince the gravitational microlensing astromers that some of the microlensing events they are observing could be caused by Matrioshka Brains (or Dyson Shells). I went to 2 international microlensing conferences in an attempt to do this and the microlensing physicists would hear none of it. (Whatever is causing the events must be "natural" and it must be something we have encountered before (K or M class stars for example) it *certainly* can't be the result of intelligent life forms from civilizations much older than ours.)
3. Start using the data from any of the surveys being done to do "occultation astronomy". This will kind of fall out of the searches for exoplanets as well as searches for near earth asteroids. But nobody to my knowledge is pooling information from multiple surveys over time to either track MBrains through a galaxy or determine the rate at which stars go dark (which sets limits on the abundance of civilizations making the transition from our (water phase based on "natural" evolution) state of development to a post-nanotechnology, largely machine/AI/uploaded phase where the civilization has a whole different set of constraints from what we typically consider. If my current efforts to produce pristine stem cells are as successful as I hope, then I may retire again and work on this part of the problem (by then open access to the astronomy databases and computers fast enough to deal all of the data may be available to make this work).
Another useful activity would be to get the "old school" SETI proponents together and convince them that the primary basis for most of their ideas (radio or optical signals) are completely out-of-date with the technologies that we know advanced civilizations will have (molecular nanotechnology and a huge amount of computational capacity at their disposal). Until one gets more people thinking along those lines then much of the efforts of SETI researchers and many astrobiologists may be misdirected. Milan Cirkovic is a physicist/astronomer from Yugoslavia who has published several papers over the last couple of years (one with me) attempting to promote re-thinking the "old" SETI perspective but its like trying to paddle against the current of a rather fast river.
Does that provide enough meat to allow me to keep the modded up status? :-)
Also, of interest for people might be Damien Broderick's collection of provocative papers "Year Million" loosely organized around what life might be like in the year 1,000,000. Several of the chapters, including one by myself, deal with the topic of Matrioshka Brains. I did not write the Wikipedia page on Matrioshka Brains, but have offered a few "steering" comments. That page has a link to my site which has the original ideas as well as a number of related sites.
References:
1. http://arxiv.org/abs/0811.2376
The points here are valid. Robert Freitas wrote a book (Xenology) nearly 30 years ago which explored how other life forms might develop and evolve. I am sure that an even more expansive discussion on the topic could be written now. The "water" phase period for intelligent life forms may well vary, but it is not a requirement for non-water based start-ups (covered in Xenology) or post-water based existences, e.g. Dyson shells or their more sophisticated derivatives (Matrioshka Brains).
It is a shame that current physicists are using valuable resources to search for "life" within such a limited framework. When we have available concepts of non-water-staged life and post-water-staged life upon which we can draw. It can even be argued that the "water-state" basis of life is a minimal state in the Universe. (Given that Matrioshka Brains have lifetimes that may exceed even those of stars.)
My bad (that number didn't look right but I didn't double check it). It looks like my Pentium 4 Prescott at 2.8 GHz is ~840 times faster than the PDP-11 though once one starts dealing with parallel instruction execution or multiple cores or overclocked CPUs the difference gets even greater.
> "One of their demos even has the old UNIX kernel compiled directly on the Mac
> through the original PDP C compiler by somehow executing the PDP binaries on OS X!"
Hmpfh... Circa 1978-79, Forrest Howard and I wrote a PDP-10 simulator that ran on a PDP-11/70 (a 36 bit machine on a 16 bit machine for those not educated in DEC hardware). It was used to recompile the DEC Fortran compiler which was written in Bliss-11. And the Bliss-11 compiler could only be run on a PDP-10. Lacking a PDP-10 (expensive pseudo-mainframe computers in those days) we simply wrote a simulator. It didn't run fast, as I recall the DEC Fortran compiler recompile took several weeks, but it did run.
Reproducing a PDP-11 sumulator on modern hardware would be relatively trivial, though it would have been much easier on older Macs because it could be argued that the 680X0 architecture was a knockoff of the PDP-11 architecture. Though one could suppose that current era (non-680X0 or non-PowerPC) machines are fast enough that it is a noop. I think the PDP-11 had a 300 ns cycle time and current machines are ~10x faster. Any current machines could easily simulate a '70s era minicomputer (or even most mainframes).
I am not going to argue with your claims for the "current" facts. The primary point being they are the *current* situation which in turn is dictated by the *current* environment. Several paths can break that perspective. A medical education requires the investment of a number of years of ones life (8+) so one expects a payback. One can either make the cost of a medical education lower (low cost or free loans in return for X years of community service) or one can make the number of people with medical educations greater (driving down the cost through an abundance of suppliers). If one can live 400+ years, then a medical education and perhaps its subsequent practice is but one small stop on the journey through life. If every individual had the education of an MD then why would you bother to pay to go to see one?
You also completely ignore the potential for competition. I have self-diagnosed several medical problems, not going through an MD but simply by consulting the internet. When AIs (or equivalent expert systems) reach the human level (which they have already done with chess and almost with real world road driving capabilities) then the costs drop significantly. Finally, your premises are based on a mentality of "scarcity" thinking (i.e. that certain physical elements are in short supply). In a world where nanorobots are programmed to be the providers that concept is completely invalid. I would urge you to read the extensive works by Drexler, Merkle & Freitas and compare where we are now with where we could be. And then one must ask oneself "Why are we not 'there' yet?". By and large IMO, it is because we have not chosen to "be there" (as we once did with going to the moon). An environment of abundance turns a system of an environment of scarcity on its head and therefore upsets a lot of apple carts. But if you really want progress then make an effort to understand what is possible and what it may take to get there (and indirectly why we are not "there" now).
The problems is that this is not really a universal mechanism of aging. While Sinclair and associates are clearly doing good work they are not answering a fundamental question -- "Why do all complex organisms age and die?" The fact that their work shows an extension of mean lifespans but not maximal lifespan is critical. Similar results were demonstrated a year or more ago with completely different work involving telomere extension in mice with increased tumor suppressor gene capability. One can extend mean lifespan in a group of individuals but one does not extend maximal lifespan -- thus one is not dealing with the "universal" mechanisms of aging. If one *is* dealing with universal mechanisms then one would have a mouse that lives anywhere from 120 years (= ~maximal human lifespan) to 220 years (= ~maximal Bowhead whale lifespan) and *longer*. If you are not addressing why a Bowhead whale (a mammal) can live ~220+ years vs. a mouse (another mammal) living ~3 years then one is *not* dealing with a universal mechanism of aging.
The problem may be that they are dealing with how double strand DNA breaks are dealt with (involving the quantity and relocation of sirtuins) rather than why the occur in the first place (i.e. what are the causes of genomic decay?) and how they are dealt with (the non-homologous DNA double-strand break repair processes). If the DNA double strand break repair processes inherently corrupt the genome (my current opinion) then *that* is a universal mechanism of aging -- not whether one has enough sirtuins (which are involved in decloaking the DNA for such repairs). The only organism I am currently aware of which uses a different process for double strand break repair is members of the Deinococcus bacterial group. All other species utilize enzymes which inherently corrupt the genome during the repair process. The sirtuins are "side actors" in this process and they play only a minor role in the grand scheme.
The author (girlintraining) unfortunately, IMO, does not know what they are talking about. With respect to medical costs, one can make and argument that they are only available to the wealthy, but that only lasts so far as there is not an abundance of knowledge, information and resources that would force them to be less expensive.
I would cite the fact that it would appear that the cost of sequencing a complete human genome (which allows you to determine disease predispositions) appears to be dropping from a cost of $1+ billion dollars (~2003) to perhaps $1000 dollars (~2013). There is an incentive to make medical care costs cheaper -- the number of people who can spend $1 billion is less than 100. The number of people who can spend $1000 is millions.
I also object to the premise that the wealthy do not contribute. The company that I was president of, Aeiveos Sciences Group, was the first to attempt to determine genes that contribute to the longevity of centenarians and much of its funding came from one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. I myself when I was somewhat wealthy contributed a significant resources to understanding and hopefully solving the aging problem. I did so with the understanding that once one has wealth, more "la-de-da" is pointless, what counts is the difference one is making. When one is dealing with the wealthy the classical "rules" (often the view posed by those who are not or who have never been "wealthy") are not applicable -- what counts is how you setup the game.
Finally, the poster has no understanding of robust molecular nanotechnology and/or AI. Both of those technologies have the potential to make the classical concepts of "wealth" irrelevant. Wealth has historically used to determine things like power, status, survival potential, etc. With the development of molecular nanotechnology, measures such as "what you have", and with robust AI, "what you are capable of" start to become irrelevant. So "classical" perspectives of wealth, medical technologies, who has and does not have them, etc. begin to become non-starting premises in this type of discussion.
No. We use elephants for woolly mammoths. We use human mothers for Neanderthals. Now what we use for the various ice age tigers I'm unsure of. Real tigers perhaps but they aren't exactly so abundant that one might use them to help resurrect extinct cousins.
Now of course there are potential problems with compatibility between fetal and maternal protein signals. This may require some "fudging" of the genomes being resurrected to prove more biocompatible with their modern counterparts. These problems presumably go away once artificial wombs are developed. (I believe the Japanese are working on the development of such technologies, presumably in part due to their own declining population).
So it seems you are arguing that creating an "individual" which could never fit into society is cruel and therefore immoral.
This precludes a host of interesting genetic evolutionary pathways that I consider quite desirable, e.g. hyperintelligent or non-aging transhumans. Perhaps even more importantly is the simple solution to eliminate the objection that the individual "might feel alone" can be resolved simply by creating a Neanderthal "family".
I would suggest that you go learn some molecular biology before you make comments like this.
Here is how you would do it.
1) Sequence the ancient DNA and assemble it until you feel you have a "complete" genome sequence.
2) Either mutate an existing human genome using the technology Sangamo as or assemble a complete synthetic genome using technology such as that Synthetic Genomics is developing.
3) Replace the genome in an existing human cell with the Neanderthal artificial genome or create a artificial cell using the artificial genome (this is the part which hasn't really been demonstrated yet). Alternatively if one can create an artificial nucleus you could presumably transfer it into an enucleated human cell using the standard nuclear transfer techniques used in cloning.
4) Take the neanderthal cell and subject it to current iPS procedures to generate a neanderthal stem cell.
5) Transfer the nucleus of this cell into a human egg (standard cloning procedures again).
6) Implant said egg (now functioning as a fertilized neanderthal zygote) into a human host (or if synthetic wombs are available one of those).
7) Wait ~7-9 months for either C-section birth or natural birth.
Of course there are a lot of things that can go wrong in this process so one is probably going to have to do it multiple times. But its the same basic methods that will probably be used to resurrect the woolly mammoth.
There is no need to undertake gene therapy on any human child or adult. I cannot see any "unethical" argument because one never has to work with a human embryo. I would also point out that we will be doing human embryo modifications relatively soon to correct genetic defects. Watch and see how the debate develops once the genes for intelligence become more clearly known. Argue the morality of knowingly giving birth to a child of below average intelligence!
Faster CPUs are lees important than "intelligent programming". I am sitting here with an old Prescott P4 CPU which is essentialy doing nothing and yet 13+% of the CPU time is being consumed by galeon and 30+% of the CPU time is being consumed by X.
Dedicate some of the design and engineering expertise to the software, rather than the hardware.
It would be useful for people to remember that Joy was the author of "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us." which was an interesting examination of why some technologies might be best left untouched.
Now, you want to appoint a luddite as the CTO of the United States? Please explain the rationale behind this.
What you need is the solution which was popular back in the old days (circa 1974-1980). The minicomputer (DEC PDP-11/45) at the undergraduate science center at Harvard used a DH-11 (16-RS232-lines) to allow a dozen or so terminals and even a few extremely low bandwidth teletypes to connect to the computer running Unix. A similar solution was adopted at Time Inc. in the early 1980's to allow a PDP-11/34 to communicate with all of the far-flung correspondents allowing them to submit stories every week (also running Unix). These types of solutions were quite popular at that time frame.
But PCs which commonly have only 2 serial ports (if that in the USB age), with Windows (which was essentially designed as a "personal" workstation and assumed high bandwidth connections) -- you have me ROTFL.
Better to run Linux, get the hardware which will support the low bandwidth connections, and then use Xen (or equivalents) to provide VM support for windows if that is absolutely necessary. Then, also do the world a favor, take the people providing the windows only software out in the backyard, beat them a little bit, then bury them alive.
Orion is the best solution for *what*? Sending humans to the moon? Sending humans to Mars? Both of these are silly ideas. Humans did not evolve to tolerate the nasties of interplanetary or interstellar space. Yes, having a space station with the Earth's protective magnetic shield is fine, but when you start considering long term (months to years) occupation of space outside of that field you should think again.
Until such a time as humans are completely reengineered to be radiation resistant, e.g. have DNA repair systems as good or better than Deinococcus bacteria, can tolerate being frozen solid and thawed out, etc. E.g. probably desginer synthetic genomes for humans, they have no business being sent on space missions. The same amount of money spent of heavy lift vehicles, radiation shielding, or worse yet a new Project Orion, could be spent instead on the development of semi-intelligent exploratory robots (look at the Mars Rovers!) without putting human lives at risk.
The idea of man colonizing the moon or Mars is a romantic fantasy (and I grew up in the Apollo era and have fond memories of what it inspired). Computers (and what they are capable of) are on a Moore's Law advancement curve. Rocket science & engineering is not. Witness the fact that you are bringing a 50 year old concept to the discussion.
It is my understanding that the primary advantages of FF 3.1 are speedups to Javascript and adoption of new HTML tags.
For me (and for much of the web browsing community, such as my cousin, aunt & father, e.g. the 50-84 y.o community) these are USELESS.
1) I am slowly converting my family entirely over to using Firefox with NoScript -- because *anyone* who allows random internet sites to run software on their machine is *nuts* [1].
2) A significant majority of "common" sites will not be using enhanced HTML tags because they have to continue to work with the installed browser base.
This is another example of Mozilla developers getting side-tracked with respect to what is important to *them* rather than what might be important to the community [2].
1. The *real* advantage of Firefox is the selected enabling of Javascript for a few "trusted" relatively non-commercial sites (e.g. gmail, ones bank, ones broker) using NoScript. I will assume the display of pages from such sites is relatively unimpacted by Javascript speedups (since they tend to be network bandwidth or user input consrained). [Though it is worth noting that the gmail javascript appears to be becoming a bit of a pig.]
2. It is worth noting that my cousin, my aunt and my father continue to survive on the internet quite well using dial-up connections (in large part because they live in regions where DSL (or fiber) is unavailable and Cable is too expensive). I presume that G3 service will fall into the $$$ category even when reasonably priced modems that can connect their computers to the net become available.
My reading of the abstract [1] indicates that they have found 5 SNPs (Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms) on chromosome 20p11 that show a linkage to baldness. There is NO mention of a *gene* or genes in that region (though one could presumably look up candidates in one of the human genome browsers). If the genes are of unknown function (or worse yet are gene regulatory regions, or siRNAs or still something else which is not a classical gene) then it will still take a fair amount of work (years unless we get very lucky) linking that chromosome region to the biochemistry involved.
If you are "approving" topics for science.slashdot.org you at should at least know enough about the topic (genomics, gene defects, etc.) to tell when a submission has folded, spindled or mutilated the actual science involved.
[1] http://www.nature.com/ng/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/ng.228.html
I agree. But work by Lineweaver's group suggests that ~70% of the Earth-like planets in nearby galaxies are older than the Earth. In nearby galaxies there are sufficient heavy metals to enable an Earth-like biolological system.
I would put decreasing probabilities on the development of any intelligent/technolological life on systems older than say 9 billion years. But we only have an example of 1 to base any assumptions on. We have no idea whether our experience is a lucky shot at the start of the curve, a late comer that got shot down again and again, or a typical "average" developmental path for intelligence and technology. And intelligence may not be the critical aspect. Dolphins, whales, elephants and parrots may be "intelligent". What appears to be critical is whether you have the means, skills and need to develop tools and eventually advanced technologies.
I agree that one should not violate known physical laws. And Matrioshka Brains don't really bend any laws of physics, they simply stretch technology, primarily molecular nanotechnology, to its proposed limits. There are serious scientists, such as Smalley and Church who find such stretching implausible. But there are others such as Drexler, Merkle, Hall, Freitas (and myself) who simply believe it is a matter of development.
But technology is on a roll. Look at the decline in costs of sequencing an entire mammalian genome (the latest number I've seen is $60K) and the predicted decline in costs (to a few thousand $) over the last decade. And now we have several efforts to put together synthetic genomes and even synthetic life. Molecular nanotechnology largely suffers from not enough people really understanding it (and failing to understand its implications). Once you get over those hurdles then the big questions revolve around how many "good" planets are there (and we will likely have start getting hard answers for that in the next decade) and is "intelligence" (and potentially technology) particularly common?
Largely due to claims of a sudden appearance and the fact that astronomers don't have another explanation. I've been to 2 gravitational microlensing conferences attempting to convince astrophysicists that they should consider that the microlensing objects (large invisible masses) could be Matrioshka Brains. They don't simply reject the idea. The reject it with extreme prejudice. That is in spite of the fact that the eventual development of molecular nanotechnology makes the development of Matrioshka Brains a very short project (100-1,000,000 years) on astronomical time scales.
To assume that there are not Matrioshka Brains out there you are forced to assume that *we* are the only intelligent technological species in the universe (within say 5 billion light years) and I don't notice astrophysicists writing a lot of papers which make that assertion!