Here's a site promoting General Aviation with a map of public and private airports (click on the link near the bottom to see the map). According to the map, there are 5,400 public-use airports in the U.S. compared to 12,945 private airports. (And only 30 airports handle 70% of airline traffic.) Pretty interesting site for information about light planes.
The Risks digest reported in 1991 that the email newsletter from the International Association for Cryptographic Research was being blocked by spam filters. One of the IACR board members was a crypto expert with the unfortunate name of Don Beaver. And there were some references to "hardcore bits" and LaTex. It was all too much for the filters.
It's been something like 200 million years since the last "extinction level event". If they happen statistically at random this suggests that the chances of one happening in the next 200 years is only one in a million. Not one in a million per year, or per rock, or per observation - one in a million total over the next 200 years. And that's assuming that we can't or don't do anything to improve the odds.
On the list of doomsday threats I'd say that asteroid impacts come pretty far down. Man made disasters are overwhelmingly more threatening.
Palladium technology (or possibly TCPA) could fix this, without any new laws or arguing over copyright terms.
With Palladium, the server site could verify that the client (that's you) is running an approved (by the site) web browser and not a screen scraper. In order to access the site you would have to run a Palladium OS and run one of the web browsers the site owner accepted.
Your freedom would be complete. You could choose not to view the site, or you could choose to view it under conditions which are mutually acceptable between you and the site owner. That's the same basic bargain being offered in every voluntary transaction in the world.
GPG is freeware, as is the old PGP 2.X. Zimmermann's new product and the NAI version are commercial software. When you pay the big bucks for these programs what you are really buying is support and hand-holding. Many companies still prefer to pay for the privilege of having another company they can go to when things go wrong, rather than relying on the user community.
One reason for this is psychological; Republicans like to pal around with Republicans, Democrats like to hang with Democrats, and companies like to do business with companies.
The "potato clocks" and such are misleading. You're not getting the power from the potato. The power comes from the electric differential between the two electrodes of dissimilar metals. The potato just supplies an electrolyte. You can get exactly the same effect by sticking the electrodes into salt water. The metals gradually dissolve away, and when they're gone the system can't generate any more power.
I've never really understood the title of Joy's essay, "Why the future doesn't need us", and likewise for Dyson's rejoinder. Joy mostly wrote about how we could wipe ourselves out through technology. Of course this has been a concern for decades. But nobody before expressed it as whether or not the future "needed" us. It was rather a question of whether we would be around!
Why did Joy adopt this curious phraseology? What does it mean for the future to need us? How can the future have needs at all? It's like saying that Left needs us, or Up doesn't need us. I've never understood it.
A palladium certified system contains a master encryption/trust relationship chip called the nexus, a encrypted video card, encrypted sound card, encrypted hard drive, encrypted network card, encrypted memory, and maybe an encrypted cpu like the one in the xbox but I am not to sure on this.
Come on, Billy, where do you get all this? the Microsoft document you linked to explains that Palladium contains 3 hardware components and 2 software. The hardware:
Trusted space
Sealed storage
Attestation
The software:
Nexus
Trusted agents
This doesn't say anything about encrypted video cards, encrypted sound cards, encrypted network card or hard drive. The "trusted space" is some kind of memory area, but I don't know if it is encrypted or not. And you're wrong about the "nexus", that is a software component, part of the operating system, not a "relationship chip".
Okay, you don't want to believe everything Microsoft says. Fine, I don't necessarily believe it either. But what about your facts? Where did you get them? Why should we believe your claims about what Palladium is?
The hardware refuses to
execute a boot sector that has not been digitally signed.
Many people have posted to explain that you are all wrong about this. The bigger question is, where did you get your misinformation? Was it perhaps from the TCPA/Palladium FAQ? That FAQ is full of misinformation! You can't trust a word in it.
Someone yesterday posted that TCPA had good uses. They were accused of spreading FUD! And yet people post all kinds of totally incorrect information about Palladium and TCPA and nobody objects. People don't seem to mind when they are lied to, as long as the people doing the lying are on the same side. But lies which promote your goals are just as bad as lies which oppose them! In the long run, lying hurts you because eventually the truth will come out.
More and more, people are learning the truth behind Palladium (excuse me, the Windows next generation secure computing platform - boy, that just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) and TCPA. It's not great news, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the doomsayers were claiming. Let us rededicate ourselves to dealing with reality, to getting the full facts about these technologies and not believing every net.rumor that someone is mongering.
A lot of you are missing the point. $10 million isn't that much. They could build 100 such machines for a billion dollars, not an unreasonable sum for the NSA, especially if it is spread out over a few years.
Furthermore, technology continues to improve. Moore's law will speed up the chips, and this design is probably not the last word. There could be significant improvements ahead.
I agree that the premise was implausible in terms of people mistreating the dittos. In fact, I found it quite offensive, as Brin dusted off all of the worst abuses of the slavery era and presented them unapologetically as part of this new society. Dittos must step aside when the humans come along, they must sit in the back of the bus, they must bow and scrape in an offensive Steppin Fetchit fashion. And yet these are people who, from their perspective, were human only a few hours before! It's absurd to believe that people would accept such mistreatment from their fellow man just because they happen to be made of clay. It's like racism brought to the highest degree.
I also thought it was crazy that dittos would go to work in the factories every morning knowing that they would *die* at the end of the day! And it doesn't bother them! Either they are the most elevated philosphers ever, or there's something in the ditto brain which keeps it from worrying. But that just pushes the problem back to the human who gets into the machine to copy himself - would you do it, knowing there was a 50-50 chance you would wake up as a clay person whose lot in life was to work hard for a day and then die? It's crazy.
The idea of the dittos is fascinating, but Brin's extrapolations don't make sense, and his insensitivity to the horrors of ditto slavery is quite disturbing.
a) Isn't the goal of "trusted computing" to allow entities other than the owner of the computer to control what the owner does with his/her hardware?
No, it's not. Trusted computing allows you to prove to remote users that you are running some particular software. It lets you provide a hash of the running software and possibly some other properties of your computer, all signed using the internal TPM key which never leaves the chip.
This is a general technological capability that could support many goals. It would let some P2P applications run more efficiently, for example, by letting each peer authenticate that others in the network are running the same software. It could help with online games by letting users prove that they are running non-cheating clients. It could improve the security of VPNs by making sure that remote users are running up-to-date versions of system software.
And yes, it could serve the purposes of DRM, by allowing servers to refuse to download content unless the client is running a program which will honor the DRM requirements.
But none of this involves anyone controlling the owner or his computer! At most it allows the owner to convincingly claim that he is running software which will work in a particular way. The owner may choose to use that capability in order to persuade a remote system to do him a service - like letting him join in an online game, or a P2P network, or to download a movie. But that's the owner's choice. Nobody is forcing him to do anything. Nobody is controlling him.
If someone offers to give me information only in exchange for me signing a non-disclosure agreement, and I choose to take that bargain, he is not controlling me. It's my own choice. In the past, a similar exchange was not possible on computers, because I couldn't convincingly claim to be running any particular software. Trusted computing intends to make that kind of claim be possible. That's all. It doesn't give anyone control over any systems, it just lets people make new kinds of bargains.
Right, the problem is that the "speed of gravity" really means the speed of changes to gravity. But when you have something like Jupiter, it moves along at a very steady pace, so there are very few changes.
Even if gravity moved very slowly, like at a walking pace, the gravitational field around planets would not be much different than it is today. For complicated reasons which my margin is too damn small to hold (luckily), the gravitational field doesn't "lag behind" the planet. It stays centered on the planet even if gravity were to move slowly.
When Jupiter moves in front of the distant galaxy, its gravitational field extends spherically around the planet, moving along with the planet. That's true regardless of the speed of gravity. It would only be slight irregularities in Jupiter's motion, perhaps due to tugs from other planets or its moons (but they are tiny tiny tiny next to Jupiter!) that could produce the irreglarities that would allow you to measure the speed of gravity. Maybe that's what was done here, but I doubt it.
The RCA PVR is $599 according to the article, and you can already get a TiVo or a Replay box with a lifetime-of-the-unit pre-paid program guide subscription for that kind of money. The RCA box only provides 40 hours of recording time, which isn't all that great either. You can get a 60 hour TiVo with lifetime guide subscription for $550.
The new feature is that the RCA box is also a DVD recorder, which may justify the extra cost for some buyers. But making a 40 hr PVR for $600 up front with no per-month free is nothing new.
Jane Black wrote an article making a similar analysis in BusinessWeek Online a few weeks ago. She discussed commercial WiFi companies like Cometa and brought up the example of FedEx's ZapMail to illustrate that commercial WiFi could face the same failure. Some quotes:
When fax machines were first introduced in the 1980s, several big
companies planned new fax-delivery services. In 1984, visionary FedEx
CEO Frederick Smith introduced a service called ZapMail that he hoped
would replace jet fuel with ink toner. The plan: FedEx would buy the
then-pricey fax machines and place them in every FedEx office. Customers
who wanted to send a fax would have FedEx pick up their documents and
bring them to a local office. Within the hour, the documents would then
be faxed to the FedEx office closest to the recipient. FedEx would put
the fax in an envelope and hand-deliver the service.
At the time, it made sense. ZapMail began as a value-added service
that leveraged FedEx's core strength--reliably delivering information
overnight. It also saved customers the trouble of installing and
maintaining expensive equipment. But ZapMail ultimately failed as the
price of fax machines plummeted. Rather than pay someone else to send a
fax, businesses just bought their own machines. FedEx shuttered ZapMail
only 12 months after the launch--and $190 million in losses.
ZapMail may prove a cautionary tale for Cometa. Right now, Wi-Fi seems
like a new, whiz-bang technology that requires corporate oversight. But
in time, business users and individuals may not see the need to pay
someone for Wi-Fi service. After all, bandwidth is sold at a flat monthly
rate. That means there's no cost difference to a hotel, restaurant,
or public park if 1,000 or 100,000 people log on to their network.
"This is a corporate land grab. Ultimately, though, users may realize
they can make this work on their own," predicts Dewayne Hendricks, CEO of
the California-based Dandin Group, which promotes wireless technology in
remote areas. That would be good news for Wi-Fi. But bad news for Cometa.
Let's give Ms. Black credit for coming up with the ZapMail analogy first. Shirky may have thought of it on his own, or he may have borrowed consciously or unconsciously from this earlier article.
Don't you think it would be possible to write a program that could handle one of these captcha tests? Has anyone tried this, to validate their claims? Otherwise it's like roll-your-own crypto, worthless if you don't know if it can be defeated.
Why should the OS let an unhandled exception in a userland app crash the entire box? Bad design decision.
Many of these crashes are because the games rely on device drivers for graphics speed. Because Windows uses a monolithic kernel, every driver has the ability to crash the system.
Linux has the same architecture. If it ever got to be a huge gaming platform you'd see the same problems there.
I can go buy a gun, with little or no background checking, and have the potential to kill dozens of children, and it isn't illegal. Or, I could make a program that could theoretically be used to pirate some stupid ebooks, and that's illegal.
The difference is that the gun is not primarily intended to kill dozens of children. Software that is illegal under the DMCA must be primarily intended to circumvent copyright protection technology.
So there's not really an inconsistency here. Guns which are primarily intended to commit acts that would be illegal for civilians, like certain military weapons, are in fact illegal. And software which only has the incidental potential for circumventing copyright protection, for example binary editors, is legal. In each case the question is whether the primary purpose of the product is for breaking the law.
The physical world is so 20th century. The future is virtual.
A few interesting facts about Crichton
on
Prey
·
· Score: 2
He's extremely tall - six feet nine inches.
He's extremely rich - from movies like Jurassic Park, and especially the TV show he created, ER, one of the most successful shows in history. He's got hundreds of millions of dollars.
He was going through a nasty divorce with his wife while writing Prey, a fact which perhaps influences the good-dad-bad-mom dynamic in the early part of the book.
The interesting part about attitudes towards SETI is what they say about our own future. What is happening with our civilization? Where will we be in 100 years? In 1000?
Many people are pessimistic. They think we're bad and getting worse. They expect that we will destroy ourselves soon, or sink into a dark age, or otherwise lose the ability to communicate with the stars. So they can imagine a galaxy full of life but not much of it communicating at any given time.
But let's suppose that things continue on as they have. Look at the grand sweep of human history. We see a continual growth of capability and power. Even a poor person today in the West has technology which would have been unavailable to the richest person in the world 100 years ago.
Imagine that this continues to happen. Technology not only advances, it speeds up. The next 100 years bring more changes than the last 1000 years. Nanotechnology, biotech, AI, physics advances; we could be living like gods in 100 years.
And let's assume that social trends continue. Racism and sexism was ubiquitous 100 years ago. Now they are recognized as great evils. As our power grows and our moral sensitivity increases, we will want to help those less fortunate than ourselves. We will end poverty and suffering among humans, because it will be easy compared to the power we have. We will turn to the higher animals, and do what we can to improve their lives as well.
And we will turn outwards. We will reach out into the galaxy with communications and explorations. It will take centuries, millennia, but as our capabilities grow we will eventually find even the great interstellar distances easy to cross. We will search the galaxy for life, ready to cherish and protect anything that we find. And if we could meet a culture less advanced than our own, we would do what we could to ease their suffering while still respecting their chosen path.
This may seem like an absurdly optimistic vision, but it's nothing different from what has happened in the past! Anyone who looks with clear eyes at the record of human history and who extrapolates it forward should see this as a very plausible and likely future path. The reason that it's not explored much in literature is because there aren't that many dramatic possibilities in a world which is as much improved over the present as our own world is over the past.
The point is that if this is the likely path for a civilization, it would suggest that other cultures in the galaxy would also be spreading outward and would probably be here by now. The fact that we don't see them, that we stumble along and still suffer great and preventable catastrophes, suggests that really life is not so prevalant in the galaxy after all.
So ironically, both the optimistic and the pessimistic view of humanity's future suggest that SETI won't work. The pessimists believe that any advanced culture will wipe itself out; and the optimists believe that such a civilization will spread through the galaxy and render aid to less developed worlds. Either way we won't find intelligent signals on our expensive radio telescopes.
The GPL license puts restrictions on what you can do. They are well-intentioned restrictions, like the license mentioned recently here which didn't let you use the software to harm human rights. Or you could imagine a license that required you to donate money to charity. These are good goals but they are not free software.
Free software should mean software that can be used freely, without restriction. That means something like the MIT license. That is a true "free software" license. The GPL is a restrictive license that advances certain social goals.
My ideal world is one where there is a wide mix of software and sofware licenses in use. Some are free, like MIT. Some promote social goals, like GPL. Some are commercial. And some are facist. That way people can decide which licenses and which software they want to use and support. Let a thousand licenses bloom!
A correction, Mojo Nation's URL was always mojonation.net. Someone else is there now but it's a related company, another effort by MN founder Jim McCoy.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a site promoting General Aviation with a map of public and private airports (click on the link near the bottom to see the map). According to the map, there are 5,400 public-use airports in the U.S. compared to 12,945 private airports. (And only 30 airports handle 70% of airline traffic.) Pretty interesting site for information about light planes.
The Risks digest reported in 1991 that the email newsletter from the International Association for Cryptographic Research was being blocked by spam filters. One of the IACR board members was a crypto expert with the unfortunate name of Don Beaver. And there were some references to "hardcore bits" and LaTex. It was all too much for the filters.
It's been something like 200 million years since the last "extinction level event". If they happen statistically at random this suggests that the chances of one happening in the next 200 years is only one in a million. Not one in a million per year, or per rock, or per observation - one in a million total over the next 200 years. And that's assuming that we can't or don't do anything to improve the odds.
On the list of doomsday threats I'd say that asteroid impacts come pretty far down. Man made disasters are overwhelmingly more threatening.
Palladium technology (or possibly TCPA) could fix this, without any new laws or arguing over copyright terms.
With Palladium, the server site could verify that the client (that's you) is running an approved (by the site) web browser and not a screen scraper. In order to access the site you would have to run a Palladium OS and run one of the web browsers the site owner accepted.
Your freedom would be complete. You could choose not to view the site, or you could choose to view it under conditions which are mutually acceptable between you and the site owner. That's the same basic bargain being offered in every voluntary transaction in the world.
GPG is freeware, as is the old PGP 2.X. Zimmermann's new product and the NAI version are commercial software. When you pay the big bucks for these programs what you are really buying is support and hand-holding. Many companies still prefer to pay for the privilege of having another company they can go to when things go wrong, rather than relying on the user community.
One reason for this is psychological; Republicans like to pal around with Republicans, Democrats like to hang with Democrats, and companies like to do business with companies.
I wasn't opposed to the VCR.
So I guess he wasn't opposed to the Boston Strangler either?
The "potato clocks" and such are misleading. You're not getting the power from the potato. The power comes from the electric differential between the two electrodes of dissimilar metals. The potato just supplies an electrolyte. You can get exactly the same effect by sticking the electrodes into salt water. The metals gradually dissolve away, and when they're gone the system can't generate any more power.
I've never really understood the title of Joy's essay, "Why the future doesn't need us", and likewise for Dyson's rejoinder. Joy mostly wrote about how we could wipe ourselves out through technology. Of course this has been a concern for decades. But nobody before expressed it as whether or not the future "needed" us. It was rather a question of whether we would be around!
Why did Joy adopt this curious phraseology? What does it mean for the future to need us? How can the future have needs at all? It's like saying that Left needs us, or Up doesn't need us. I've never understood it.
Come on, Billy, where do you get all this? the Microsoft document you linked to explains that Palladium contains 3 hardware components and 2 software. The hardware:
- Trusted space
- Sealed storage
- Attestation
The software:This doesn't say anything about encrypted video cards, encrypted sound cards, encrypted network card or hard drive. The "trusted space" is some kind of memory area, but I don't know if it is encrypted or not. And you're wrong about the "nexus", that is a software component, part of the operating system, not a "relationship chip".
Okay, you don't want to believe everything Microsoft says. Fine, I don't necessarily believe it either. But what about your facts? Where did you get them? Why should we believe your claims about what Palladium is?
Many people have posted to explain that you are all wrong about this. The bigger question is, where did you get your misinformation? Was it perhaps from the TCPA/Palladium FAQ? That FAQ is full of misinformation! You can't trust a word in it.
Someone yesterday posted that TCPA had good uses. They were accused of spreading FUD! And yet people post all kinds of totally incorrect information about Palladium and TCPA and nobody objects. People don't seem to mind when they are lied to, as long as the people doing the lying are on the same side. But lies which promote your goals are just as bad as lies which oppose them! In the long run, lying hurts you because eventually the truth will come out.
More and more, people are learning the truth behind Palladium (excuse me, the Windows next generation secure computing platform - boy, that just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?) and TCPA. It's not great news, but it's not nearly as bad as some of the doomsayers were claiming. Let us rededicate ourselves to dealing with reality, to getting the full facts about these technologies and not believing every net.rumor that someone is mongering.
A lot of you are missing the point. $10 million isn't that much. They could build 100 such machines for a billion dollars, not an unreasonable sum for the NSA, especially if it is spread out over a few years.
Furthermore, technology continues to improve. Moore's law will speed up the chips, and this design is probably not the last word. There could be significant improvements ahead.
I agree that the premise was implausible in terms of people mistreating the dittos. In fact, I found it quite offensive, as Brin dusted off all of the worst abuses of the slavery era and presented them unapologetically as part of this new society. Dittos must step aside when the humans come along, they must sit in the back of the bus, they must bow and scrape in an offensive Steppin Fetchit fashion. And yet these are people who, from their perspective, were human only a few hours before! It's absurd to believe that people would accept such mistreatment from their fellow man just because they happen to be made of clay. It's like racism brought to the highest degree.
I also thought it was crazy that dittos would go to work in the factories every morning knowing that they would *die* at the end of the day! And it doesn't bother them! Either they are the most elevated philosphers ever, or there's something in the ditto brain which keeps it from worrying. But that just pushes the problem back to the human who gets into the machine to copy himself - would you do it, knowing there was a 50-50 chance you would wake up as a clay person whose lot in life was to work hard for a day and then die? It's crazy.
The idea of the dittos is fascinating, but Brin's extrapolations don't make sense, and his insensitivity to the horrors of ditto slavery is quite disturbing.
a) Isn't the goal of "trusted computing" to allow entities other than the owner of the computer to control what the owner does with his/her hardware?
No, it's not. Trusted computing allows you to prove to remote users that you are running some particular software. It lets you provide a hash of the running software and possibly some other properties of your computer, all signed using the internal TPM key which never leaves the chip.
This is a general technological capability that could support many goals. It would let some P2P applications run more efficiently, for example, by letting each peer authenticate that others in the network are running the same software. It could help with online games by letting users prove that they are running non-cheating clients. It could improve the security of VPNs by making sure that remote users are running up-to-date versions of system software.
And yes, it could serve the purposes of DRM, by allowing servers to refuse to download content unless the client is running a program which will honor the DRM requirements.
But none of this involves anyone controlling the owner or his computer! At most it allows the owner to convincingly claim that he is running software which will work in a particular way. The owner may choose to use that capability in order to persuade a remote system to do him a service - like letting him join in an online game, or a P2P network, or to download a movie. But that's the owner's choice. Nobody is forcing him to do anything. Nobody is controlling him.
If someone offers to give me information only in exchange for me signing a non-disclosure agreement, and I choose to take that bargain, he is not controlling me. It's my own choice. In the past, a similar exchange was not possible on computers, because I couldn't convincingly claim to be running any particular software. Trusted computing intends to make that kind of claim be possible. That's all. It doesn't give anyone control over any systems, it just lets people make new kinds of bargains.
Right, the problem is that the "speed of gravity" really means the speed of changes to gravity. But when you have something like Jupiter, it moves along at a very steady pace, so there are very few changes.
Even if gravity moved very slowly, like at a walking pace, the gravitational field around planets would not be much different than it is today. For complicated reasons which my margin is too damn small to hold (luckily), the gravitational field doesn't "lag behind" the planet. It stays centered on the planet even if gravity were to move slowly.
When Jupiter moves in front of the distant galaxy, its gravitational field extends spherically around the planet, moving along with the planet. That's true regardless of the speed of gravity. It would only be slight irregularities in Jupiter's motion, perhaps due to tugs from other planets or its moons (but they are tiny tiny tiny next to Jupiter!) that could produce the irreglarities that would allow you to measure the speed of gravity. Maybe that's what was done here, but I doubt it.
The RCA PVR is $599 according to the article, and you can already get a TiVo or a Replay box with a lifetime-of-the-unit pre-paid program guide subscription for that kind of money. The RCA box only provides 40 hours of recording time, which isn't all that great either. You can get a 60 hour TiVo with lifetime guide subscription for $550.
The new feature is that the RCA box is also a DVD recorder, which may justify the extra cost for some buyers. But making a 40 hr PVR for $600 up front with no per-month free is nothing new.
Let's give Ms. Black credit for coming up with the ZapMail analogy first. Shirky may have thought of it on his own, or he may have borrowed consciously or unconsciously from this earlier article.
Don't you think it would be possible to write a program that could handle one of these captcha tests? Has anyone tried this, to validate their claims? Otherwise it's like roll-your-own crypto, worthless if you don't know if it can be defeated.
Why should the OS let an unhandled exception in a userland app crash the entire box? Bad design decision.
Many of these crashes are because the games rely on device drivers for graphics speed. Because Windows uses a monolithic kernel, every driver has the ability to crash the system.
Linux has the same architecture. If it ever got to be a huge gaming platform you'd see the same problems there.
I can go buy a gun, with little or no background checking, and have the potential to kill dozens of children, and it isn't illegal. Or, I could make a program that could theoretically be used to pirate some stupid ebooks, and that's illegal.
The difference is that the gun is not primarily intended to kill dozens of children. Software that is illegal under the DMCA must be primarily intended to circumvent copyright protection technology.
So there's not really an inconsistency here. Guns which are primarily intended to commit acts that would be illegal for civilians, like certain military weapons, are in fact illegal. And software which only has the incidental potential for circumventing copyright protection, for example binary editors, is legal. In each case the question is whether the primary purpose of the product is for breaking the law.
The physical world is so 20th century. The future is virtual.
He's extremely tall - six feet nine inches.
He's extremely rich - from movies like Jurassic Park, and especially the TV show he created, ER, one of the most successful shows in history. He's got hundreds of millions of dollars.
He was going through a nasty divorce with his wife while writing Prey, a fact which perhaps influences the good-dad-bad-mom dynamic in the early part of the book.
The interesting part about attitudes towards SETI is what they say about our own future. What is happening with our civilization? Where will we be in 100 years? In 1000?
Many people are pessimistic. They think we're bad and getting worse. They expect that we will destroy ourselves soon, or sink into a dark age, or otherwise lose the ability to communicate with the stars. So they can imagine a galaxy full of life but not much of it communicating at any given time.
But let's suppose that things continue on as they have. Look at the grand sweep of human history. We see a continual growth of capability and power. Even a poor person today in the West has technology which would have been unavailable to the richest person in the world 100 years ago.
Imagine that this continues to happen. Technology not only advances, it speeds up. The next 100 years bring more changes than the last 1000 years. Nanotechnology, biotech, AI, physics advances; we could be living like gods in 100 years.
And let's assume that social trends continue. Racism and sexism was ubiquitous 100 years ago. Now they are recognized as great evils. As our power grows and our moral sensitivity increases, we will want to help those less fortunate than ourselves. We will end poverty and suffering among humans, because it will be easy compared to the power we have. We will turn to the higher animals, and do what we can to improve their lives as well.
And we will turn outwards. We will reach out into the galaxy with communications and explorations. It will take centuries, millennia, but as our capabilities grow we will eventually find even the great interstellar distances easy to cross. We will search the galaxy for life, ready to cherish and protect anything that we find. And if we could meet a culture less advanced than our own, we would do what we could to ease their suffering while still respecting their chosen path.
This may seem like an absurdly optimistic vision, but it's nothing different from what has happened in the past! Anyone who looks with clear eyes at the record of human history and who extrapolates it forward should see this as a very plausible and likely future path. The reason that it's not explored much in literature is because there aren't that many dramatic possibilities in a world which is as much improved over the present as our own world is over the past.
The point is that if this is the likely path for a civilization, it would suggest that other cultures in the galaxy would also be spreading outward and would probably be here by now. The fact that we don't see them, that we stumble along and still suffer great and preventable catastrophes, suggests that really life is not so prevalant in the galaxy after all.
So ironically, both the optimistic and the pessimistic view of humanity's future suggest that SETI won't work. The pessimists believe that any advanced culture will wipe itself out; and the optimists believe that such a civilization will spread through the galaxy and render aid to less developed worlds. Either way we won't find intelligent signals on our expensive radio telescopes.
The GPL license puts restrictions on what you can do. They are well-intentioned restrictions, like the license mentioned recently here which didn't let you use the software to harm human rights. Or you could imagine a license that required you to donate money to charity. These are good goals but they are not free software.
Free software should mean software that can be used freely, without restriction. That means something like the MIT license. That is a true "free software" license. The GPL is a restrictive license that advances certain social goals.
My ideal world is one where there is a wide mix of software and sofware licenses in use. Some are free, like MIT. Some promote social goals, like GPL. Some are commercial. And some are facist. That way people can decide which licenses and which software they want to use and support. Let a thousand licenses bloom!
Michael Crichton's new novel Prey involves what could be described as a reconfigurable high-res network camera.
It learns to eat people.
A correction, Mojo Nation's URL was always mojonation.net. Someone else is there now but it's a related company, another effort by MN founder Jim McCoy.