Does it seem to anybody else that fewer and fewer people are actually doing actual useful work these days (yay productivity-gain hoarding! not), and thus if you're not unemployed you're increasingly likely to be producing new kinds of bullshit for newly created bullshit markets?
Instead of trying to create yet another kind of BS "intellectual property" in the form of taste & smell patents, we should be reevaluating our fucked up socio-economics. Everybody wants to feel useful and justify their existence I guess... whether you're a bogus patent peddler, a dead-weight manager, a yoga instructor, or a herbal supplement phony.
Q: why do I now have to pay for features that were free a month ago, and which appear to be enabled until you attempt to use them.
A: Because we're sellouts. What can we say? We were hoping that most people wouldn't noticed. Evil pays. Now move along... nothing to see here. Vote with your uninformed wallet. yadayada.
Launching into space via chemical rockets will always be expensive, so don't pin your hopes on it; it just can't get much cheaper. Even after you've subtracted the bureaucracy bloat, the huge chemical energy costs required to get to LEO will remain (and probably increase).
There's pretty much only two ways that the majority of the population will enter space:
The Space Elevator - which is slow, "unromantic" compared to blazing phallic rockets, and is still 10 to 15 years off.
Mind "Uploading" - that is, instead of physically moving our heavy meat-bags of the gravity well, we "scan" our brain and transmit the transcendant bits that make up our unique pattern of mind. This information that makes us US is then embodied (or virtualizied) by an offworld body manufactured bottom-up by a nano-factory seed we sent ahead to some asteroid. (30 years away).
That's right: help the village idiot build up his immune system!
I'm no germ-freak idiot, and have no problem, say, eating a slice of pizza that fell topdown on the floor. Wipe the big crunchy dirt off and it's as good as new... unless your shit don't stink.
There's no longer a credible excuse to prefer superstition.
Sure there is: if you decide to turn on your brain and reject age-old stuperstition, you'll be kicked out of the cozy culture club and lose your non-thinking socio-economic networking benfits.
I've always had this unrealistic fantasy about giving a keynote speech at an important science conference where I unveil to the world some huge "independent" breakthrough (in molecular manufacturing, teleportation, etc.-it doesnt matter what). After an overview, an unbelievable demonstration, and a talk about the implications, I inform the audience that I'll conclude my presentation on the following day with full details on reproducing the results.
Of course, among all the scientists in the audience are a few industry bigwigs who represent the powerful, monied status quo. They are obviously VERY upset with this disruptive technology, so they decide to silence me before I can spill the beans the next day.
Well, they succeed in murdering me, but unbeknownst to them I had set a 24hour deadman switch that didn't get reset so it automatically emailed all my notes to thousands of people in places high and low. The evil is exposed, the world is made a better place, and I get to be the martyred hero in this fantasy.
The big hole in this story (in hindsight) is that most presentations wouldn't span more than one day, and even if it did it'd make more sense to let loose all the details upfront so there's no way of putting the genie back in the bottle. Burn some DVDs and be done with it.
Yes - you are the only one who hates being insulted with tiny pages of content surrounded by scores of blinky ads. Everyone else just loves it, and in turn hates the unobtrusive Google-style advertising and their idealistic "dont be evil" motto.
Running an adblocker or even clicking on the "printable version of this page" option takes food off their childrens' table! </sarcasm>
Hah. I have the same problem with my IMAP mail - I want to keep the email text, but not the honking 10MB.PSD attachment, or whatever. What I end up doing is moving the entire message from the server to a local folder (in ThunderBird), but now I have my mail in two places and the thread is broken.
I suppose I should look into a utility to strip attachements from my inbox on the serverside...
It is high time that we start accepting the idea that we MUST limit the "rights" of consumers if intellectual property is to retain any value at all.
Never.
Economics is about how we distribute scarce resources among unlimited needs and wants. However, information is *NOT* scarce, but you know what is? The time and effort of the creator required to forge a GOOD first instance; THAT is the naturally scarce SERVICE that we should be modeling our new payment systems around in the face of the reality of free-flowing bits.
Since artificial scarcity isn't enforcable (except in a global police state with DRM up the wazoo), the "next best" thing is getting paid upfront in escrow by distributed patrons who've seen your other stuff and want to trade their money to have more unique creations instantiated into the public domain.
There's only one thing worse than being assaulted with ads BEFORE the movie starts, and that's being insulted with obvious product placement IN the movie.
I swear, if it gets much worse I'm going to seriously start thinking about an EDL-type solution that can remove the ads by overlaying something generic. e.g. In Castaway, all the annoying 'FedEx' branding would become 'ACME', or in BladeRunner (*oh no! not that sacred cow!*) the giant Coke sign would become some generic japanese symbol.
Of course, it would take some effort to make these overlays, but it'd only take *ONE* pissed off person to do it and make it easily available (for the people with a player able to use it.)
What we really need to do is figgure out how to make it so that spam isn't profitable. Ever.
What if almost nothing was worth *buying* from someone else because you could "replicate" it yourself locally? The end of (most) material scarcity is just one of the economic implications of molecular manufacturing; it will remove a lot of the incentive behind being an asshole trying to get ahead by any means necessary. Which reminds me of a quote:
For at least another hundred years we must pretend to ourselves and to every one that fair is foul and foul is fair; for foul is useful and fair is not. Avarice and usury and precaution must be our gods for a little longer still. -- John Maynard Keynes
Hey, great! I've been wanting to increase the size of the tiny google searchbar for quite a few months. I always assumed that by version 1.0 of firefox it would be easy to do this by resizing it dynamically (guess not), but until then 300px fixed works for me.
The PearPC folks state that performance is roughly 1/40th that of native.
Sounds about right. It took over 8 hours to do a minimal MacOSX 10.3 install on my 1.2Ghz athlon system (running SuSE9.1), and it takes about 5 minutes just to boot it up. Still, it's great for testing Safari compat even at a snails pace.
It is surely the envious, the lustful, the smug and the spoiled, who would demand the right to the fruits of another's creation without payment or consent.
You want your precious "intellectual property" to remain unique and artificially scarce? Then keep it a secret! Information, once unleashed, naturally spreads from mind to mind like a virus; the vast majority of people are OK with this natural state of ideas because at a gut level it just FEELS RIGHT and it promotes progress.
You want to get paid for the fruits of your labor in the face of the new reality of millions of 'dirty, envious, spoiled pirates'? Then get paid UPFRONT for the scarce (and often not-so-scarce) act of original creation, just as a plumber gets paid for a job well-done, rather than getting royalty payments for an artful and propietary pipe fitting his grandfather did in 1930 that no other plumber could dare build on...
Nanotech will surely be the great equalizer of the material world, as the computer and internet was for the digitalinfo world, but as the previous poster mentioned, there will still be a power hierarchy to contend with.
Evolutionary psyche is such that there are some power-hungry mutants who given the choice would rather live as a god among peasants, than a king among kings. At a basic level this is because this relative advantage secures their gene survival above others. Of course, this doesn't matter in an world of intelligently managed abundance, but our brains evolved in environments of scarcity and are still operating as such.
Anyway, I too smile when I think about how disruptive nanotech will be to the giants of the old economy (goodbye Walmart, CocaCola, ADM, Monsanto, Citibank, etc.), and how liberating it will be to live almost entirely self-sufficiently with molecular reassembly of local resources, but always in the back of my mind is the image of a primitive monkey-human hitting me over the head and not knowing why.
(btw... your nickname isn't from a certain comment made by certain band on MTV Unplugged once upon a time, is it?)
If "peak oil" is truth, then the people who've built these shelters will be sitting pretty assuming they've also got a couple-years supply of freeze-dried food, potable water, and an energy source.
Seriously, my #1 fear is the economic collapse that will happen once the free ride of cheap oil is over, but I don't have a survival plan. My plan is essentially starvation suicide (I'll let the assholes and paranoids in the bunkers continue the human race while I sleep the long sleep.)
And I first got broadband in the form of SDSL from Northpoint, in 1999. IIRC, it cost $180/mo for 784kbps/784kbps (and I got a northpoint friend give me a "free upgrade" to 1.5mbps/1.5mbps). When Northpoint went belly up about a year or so later, I switched to RoadRunner cable's 2mbps/256kbps for $40/mo. Another year later and Time warner increased the speed to 3mbps/384kbps at no extra cost to me.
Overall, I'm getting more bang for my buck. Oh, and I download and upload multiple Gigs like a mofo, and not a peep from Timewarner in over 4 years. (NYC area.)
They lived in an age of exponential progress, and it was exciting.... Then things just stopped.
Exponential progress has by no means stopped! Sure, we don't have craft traveling at the speed of light, but just because outward 1950's expectations haven't been met doesn't mean that the overall trend isn't still exponential- it is. Most of the progress has simply been focused inward, on communication, chips, biotech, and the all important nanotech.
The future we have isn't so exciting, and certainly isn't worth writing much about.
I never had a thing for the "near term" future. The closer it is to reality, the less I care for it.
Then why are you reading Vinge? He's well known, among a few others, for writing about the Technological Singularity, which is our "near term" future given exponential tech evolution.
The buildings where the ordinary folks live are mostly empty from the population drain and decaying.
What kind of spacelaunch system was used that could transport people offworld faster than they were being born on Earth? (Oh, that's right- they had fantasy hovercar tech.)
Trees for pencils and paper are usually grown on farms or their replacements planted immediately
Indeed. And the dirty little secret is that paper recycling is actually WORSE for the environment than harvesting newgrowth, but nobody wants to believe that in the face of the facts (which I haven't linked to here). In fact, about the only thing worth recycling, in terms of saving both energy and environment, is aluminum. Once oil gets too expensive to extract, plastic can join that list too.
So, if you want to *be* "earth friendly", instead of *feeling* earth-friendly, throw away everything except your cans (at least until we can recycle 100% of everything with molecular reassembly).
Slashdot Mirror
Instead of trying to create yet another kind of BS "intellectual property" in the form of taste & smell patents, we should be reevaluating our fucked up socio-economics. Everybody wants to feel useful and justify their existence I guess... whether you're a bogus patent peddler, a dead-weight manager, a yoga instructor, or a herbal supplement phony.
--
A: Because we're sellouts. What can we say? We were hoping that most people wouldn't noticed. Evil pays. Now move along... nothing to see here. Vote with your uninformed wallet. yadayada.
--
Was that self-censorship really necessary, Mr. Classy?
If you're going to use colorful language, at least have the decency to use it fucking correctly.
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Quick public email accounts for email validation are free and unaccountable (even moreso if you went through a non-logging proxy first).
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There's pretty much only two ways that the majority of the population will enter space:
I'm no germ-freak idiot, and have no problem, say, eating a slice of pizza that fell topdown on the floor. Wipe the big crunchy dirt off and it's as good as new... unless your shit don't stink.
I with Carlin and Kramer. :)
--
Sure there is: if you decide to turn on your brain and reject age-old stuperstition, you'll be kicked out of the cozy culture club and lose your non-thinking socio-economic networking benfits.
--
Of course, among all the scientists in the audience are a few industry bigwigs who represent the powerful, monied status quo. They are obviously VERY upset with this disruptive technology, so they decide to silence me before I can spill the beans the next day.
Well, they succeed in murdering me, but unbeknownst to them I had set a 24hour deadman switch that didn't get reset so it automatically emailed all my notes to thousands of people in places high and low. The evil is exposed, the world is made a better place, and I get to be the martyred hero in this fantasy.
The big hole in this story (in hindsight) is that most presentations wouldn't span more than one day, and even if it did it'd make more sense to let loose all the details upfront so there's no way of putting the genie back in the bottle. Burn some DVDs and be done with it.
--
Running an adblocker or even clicking on the "printable version of this page" option takes food off their childrens' table! </sarcasm>
--
I suppose I should look into a utility to strip attachements from my inbox on the serverside...
--
Yet another distro to testdrive (in VMWare).
--
--
Never.
Economics is about how we distribute scarce resources among unlimited needs and wants. However, information is *NOT* scarce, but you know what is? The time and effort of the creator required to forge a GOOD first instance; THAT is the naturally scarce SERVICE that we should be modeling our new payment systems around in the face of the reality of free-flowing bits.
Since artificial scarcity isn't enforcable (except in a global police state with DRM up the wazoo), the "next best" thing is getting paid upfront in escrow by distributed patrons who've seen your other stuff and want to trade their money to have more unique creations instantiated into the public domain.
--
I swear, if it gets much worse I'm going to seriously start thinking about an EDL-type solution that can remove the ads by overlaying something generic. e.g. In Castaway, all the annoying 'FedEx' branding would become 'ACME', or in BladeRunner (*oh no! not that sacred cow!*) the giant Coke sign would become some generic japanese symbol.
Of course, it would take some effort to make these overlays, but it'd only take *ONE* pissed off person to do it and make it easily available (for the people with a player able to use it.)
--
What if almost nothing was worth *buying* from someone else because you could "replicate" it yourself locally? The end of (most) material scarcity is just one of the economic implications of molecular manufacturing; it will remove a lot of the incentive behind being an asshole trying to get ahead by any means necessary. Which reminds me of a quote:
--
--
Sounds about right. It took over 8 hours to do a minimal MacOSX 10.3 install on my 1.2Ghz athlon system (running SuSE9.1), and it takes about 5 minutes just to boot it up. Still, it's great for testing Safari compat even at a snails pace.
--
You want your precious "intellectual property" to remain unique and artificially scarce? Then keep it a secret! Information, once unleashed, naturally spreads from mind to mind like a virus; the vast majority of people are OK with this natural state of ideas because at a gut level it just FEELS RIGHT and it promotes progress.
You want to get paid for the fruits of your labor in the face of the new reality of millions of 'dirty, envious, spoiled pirates'? Then get paid UPFRONT for the scarce (and often not-so-scarce) act of original creation, just as a plumber gets paid for a job well-done, rather than getting royalty payments for an artful and propietary pipe fitting his grandfather did in 1930 that no other plumber could dare build on...
--
Evolutionary psyche is such that there are some power-hungry mutants who given the choice would rather live as a god among peasants, than a king among kings. At a basic level this is because this relative advantage secures their gene survival above others. Of course, this doesn't matter in an world of intelligently managed abundance, but our brains evolved in environments of scarcity and are still operating as such.
Anyway, I too smile when I think about how disruptive nanotech will be to the giants of the old economy (goodbye Walmart, CocaCola, ADM, Monsanto, Citibank, etc.), and how liberating it will be to live almost entirely self-sufficiently with molecular reassembly of local resources, but always in the back of my mind is the image of a primitive monkey-human hitting me over the head and not knowing why.
(btw... your nickname isn't from a certain comment made by certain band on MTV Unplugged once upon a time, is it?)
--
Seriously, my #1 fear is the economic collapse that will happen once the free ride of cheap oil is over, but I don't have a survival plan. My plan is essentially starvation suicide (I'll let the assholes and paranoids in the bunkers continue the human race while I sleep the long sleep.)
--
Overall, I'm getting more bang for my buck. Oh, and I download and upload multiple Gigs like a mofo, and not a peep from Timewarner in over 4 years. (NYC area.)
--
Exponential progress has by no means stopped! Sure, we don't have craft traveling at the speed of light, but just because outward 1950's expectations haven't been met doesn't mean that the overall trend isn't still exponential- it is. Most of the progress has simply been focused inward, on communication, chips, biotech, and the all important nanotech.
The future's not exciting? It's terrifying! :)
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Then why are you reading Vinge? He's well known, among a few others, for writing about the Technological Singularity, which is our "near term" future given exponential tech evolution.
--
What kind of spacelaunch system was used that could transport people offworld faster than they were being born on Earth? (Oh, that's right- they had fantasy hovercar tech.)
--
Indeed. And the dirty little secret is that paper recycling is actually WORSE for the environment than harvesting newgrowth, but nobody wants to believe that in the face of the facts (which I haven't linked to here). In fact, about the only thing worth recycling, in terms of saving both energy and environment, is aluminum. Once oil gets too expensive to extract, plastic can join that list too.
So, if you want to *be* "earth friendly", instead of *feeling* earth-friendly, throw away everything except your cans (at least until we can recycle 100% of everything with molecular reassembly).
--