The next worldwide industrial boom will be Bioengineering.
And it will be one of the last vain human-centric booms too.
In about 25 years $1000 will buy you (and especially cost-cutting corporations, who are increasingly autonomous themselves) a "computer" capable of human-level thought which will replace more intellectual jobs than the efficient agriculture "boom" displaced farmers' labor jobs. No amount of grey-matter enhancement would do your kids much good, since even if they were born today with a "+100 IQ boost", they'd be obsolete by the time real AI sped past them in adulthood.
Also in about 25 years, robotics will have finally come into its own (as will have serious spacedev & nanotech); the current bipedal Honda bots are model-T's in comparison. These bots will be superior in most ways to any physical genetic modification you could make to your body. Flesh is simply too weak and too vulnerablem especially longterm.
Anyway... I guess my longwinded point is that the bioengineering boom, already in its infancy, will be pretty short-lived when compared to others. Ultimately, it's only really useful outcome will be as playing a part in the engineering of the wetware mind->machine bridge. Without that bridge we could only look on as our "Mind Children" (as Hans Moravec calls them) replaced us. With the bridge, we can join 'em... sort of.
(references intentionally left blank because this post turned out to be mostly mental masturbation):-)
And we're left in a state of perpetual police state surveilence and eroding liberties. It's analagous to the "war on drugs" -- people willingly bend over and allow their cars to be searched for "drugs" and their property to be seized on flimsy drug charges, and their lives to be turned upside down.
With the "war on terrorism" I wonder how long it will be before people bend over again and allow the storm troopers access to search their homes for plutonium/anthrax/etc in order to "prove their innonence." Hey, they don't even need a search warrant first anymore... almost there.
10 grand/mo eh? That buys something around 5,000 Gigs/mo on the cheap side; what a waste.
You'd think that just maybe that would be an incentive to USE the distributed network itself to distribute your digitally signed app in order to cut costs.
Anyway, I recall that BearShare eventually got around to forcing various kinds of "adware" (spyware) down your throat, but after the bitching got to be too much, Vinnie grew half a conscience and instead begged you to Opt-In to the scheme.
Of course, there's a big difference between LimeWire (open but SLOW as snot), and BearShare (closed but the fastest).
You mean everyone could be an animated walking billboard, right?:-) "Advertising supported apparel" would be about as appealing as the animated GIF banner, and ten times more annoying.
I think I'd go insane if that fad lasted more than a microsecond. The only way to filter out the visual noise would be in the form of a retinal scanner that "blocks ads" in the real world by superimposing generic images. Hopefully this arrives first.
But yeah, active surfaces would be nice for most other applications. I recall reading about some very cool applications of "pie-in-the-sky" nanotech derived "Programmable Paint"...
1) Login as Anonymous Terrorist.
2) Login as Registered Patriot (same as above, only more inconvenient)
3) Login as Port80 Leech-Only.
4) Login as Power-Tripping Network Admin.
5) Exit and try down the street.
Oh yeah? Well, an American company (Microvision) has been working on something even more impressive than standard LCD VR goggles: retinal displays.
I expect these babies to be a must-have when they're ready for the mass market in a few years; especially since the #1 "augmented reality" app is likely to be naked 3D babes "on" your real bed.:)
But they haven't announced that they're planning to strip search people... yet.
Well, you know... if they were Customs Officers, they could check your rectum for fingernail clippers if you looked at them the wrong way; and if you happened to have any outgoing international snailmail on you, they could read that too -- and these searches will be completely constitutional IF it becomes law.
...but it's just not very professional, and if we want Linux to have a clean image (I do), than we gotta have a clean fight - not a cat fight.
That's where you're wrong. Most people -- real people -- can't stand the sneaky, sterile, euphemized corporate-speak; it comes off like a press release devoid of all emotion.
IMO, Linus has struck the right balance between zealot and Spock.:)
(Oh, and a quick aside on the subject of euphemisms: DON'T let them "renice" the word "recession" into "economic downturn"! -- Sick'em Carlin!)
Back in college, Oct '94, I pulled a prank on my roommate that's probably more common today (I would think.)
I set up my 486/66 tower to blast the movie theme song from Halloween at full volume, and flash my 14" monitor between black and orange at like 3Hz, when the mouse detected movement. I coded this hack in x86 assembler (when it was cool to waste your time with DOS, DMA, mode-x, etc., at low-level).
I unscrewed the lightbulb to keep it dark in the room, and placed the mouse trap (pun!)gently on top of the answering machine that I knew my roommate would check when he got back.
I waited in the dark like a poser for about an hour, then left for a party because he didn't show ontime.
The next day he said something like, "yeah, you got me bad. I had to turn your computer off."
Back when Northpoint went belly up (Mar-Apr '01) I had a choice between switching my 1.5Mbps SDSL to Rhythms (also a floater now), going with RoadRunner Cable (2M/384kbps in NYC), or reverting back to my dual 56K mux modem (11KB/s... Wow!).
Of course, survival probability and bang/buck was on Cable's side, so I picked up the self install kit from a Time Warner office down the street (I remember the sales girl wistfully mentioning to me that she didn't have cable herself; that she didn't even own a TV; that she reads mostly. I still haven't figured out what kind of signal she was sending me...but I smelled geek! And not a bad looking one either.)
I was multibooting Win98/Linux at the time, but pretended that I was running Linux only in order to impress her and get some raw network info so I didn't have to install Time Warner's lame win32 client software in the case of network weirdness.
Well, she wasn't impressed by linux (she's from the book-geek-only tribe I guess) and couldn't give me any additional info, so I went home (to my other woman:), killed my static DSL IP, and let DHCP do the rest without having to install any craptacular, bloated, windows-only, hand-holding gatekeeper-ware.
What does this lame short story have to do XP? Not much, other than the fact that an ISP "supporting and OS" should be as easy as DHCP (1, 2, 3. Get it?); which it was for me, and which it should be for most others.
I guess the only remaining issues are things like mail and news servers that don't usually auto-configure themselves... and client hijack-ware that isn't ready to rewire WinXP configs.
IMO, ISP's shouldn't have to _actively_ support any OS. ISP's should only be there to bitch at when your connection dies for ~5 minutes every ~30...like mine is now!!
I pity all the folks who wake up tomorrow and have to watch them at about two frames per second. Bandwidth suck. Whee!:)
I pity all the folks who are unaware of the wonders that 2000 edonkey's can provide when it comes to large media files.:)
All four vids have been available in standard mpeg, and DivX, for quite a while... and I see that only the first three vids are available on Toonami's site, and in Crap-Quality.
The Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger vid was interesting: The band members are manufactured "Ghost-in-the-shell-style", then get their memory scanned in. The End.
--A-Distributed-Search-That-Doesn't-Suck-- is next on the list, but unlike the others, it won't die, because the network is the computer.
A traditional search engine is a mostly centralized and controllable client-server beast -- something that business naturally gravitates to because it needs this point of CONTROL in order to have a chance to profit. It's also a small part of the reason why we don't have a useful distributed search engine yet; there's not much money in it, so we have to wait for clever "hobbyists" to evolve it.
Eventually, we WILL rest upon on an as-yet-unrealized distributed search engine; one a thousand times "smarter" and more sophisticated than that gnutella hack can ever hope to be.
Most of the people freaked out about flying, anthrax, and "arabs in public," are the same ones who play they lottery every week; i.e. they let their emotions cloud the actual odds of winning and/or dying. I realize this is human nature, but the media isn't helping, in fact they're rubbing salt in the wound.
As for this "hypermedia" -- well, I hate to be cynical (not really), but being factual and rational aren't conducive to RATINGS. Our "respected news organizations" are more like the tabloids than they (or their viewers) would like to admit, and as long as this profitable, they're not going to stop exploiting paranoia.
Personally, I fear anthrax about as much as I fear Michael Jackson, and I fear a rogue briefcase nuke about as much as I fear Bill Gates...which is saying that Gates is only a TINY bit more frightful than MJ, but they're both still mostly harmless.:)
(Oh, and how to make up for that first week of good reporting without ads? How better than by running spots that exploit patriotism...you've bought YOUR genuine U.S. Flag Pin and Medallion Set haven't you!? No? You must be a terrorist sympathizer then!)
MS plans to charge devs who want to integrate MS's own centralized brew of ".NET My Services" into their apps. (and I hope those plans backfire -- I don't want a Passport status quo forced on me.)
The core SDK has always been free (except for some juicy core stuff that MS keeps to themselves, and their "shared source partners.")
Right on. And at its base, advertising is mental engineering; boobies are just one of the best means to that end (for guys anyway).
Anyway, my problem with 99% of all advertising isn't that it's evil propaganda, it's that the market is getting so crowded that those who succeed in screaming the loudest to get my attention, usually don't deserve it, because most of their money is necessarily spent on marketing vs. the actual product/service; and you end up paying more for less (even after economy of scale takes effect).
So, even if TheProduct(tm) is worthwhile to you, it makes more sense to skip the middleman reseller, and go to the source -- or failing that, buying the word-of-mouth best alternative.
Google is about the only advertising I'm receptive to -- everything else I scorn. At the extreme would be car commercials (selling nothing but emotion), and the recent "U.S. Flag & Cipro" email spam (paranoia leeches) -- makes my blood boil!
Of course, you're right -- and this distinction has long since been summed up by Thomas Jefferson with his "receives light without darkening me" copyright quote. It's a shame that more people don't 'get it'.
Information really wants to be free, but unfortunately, as long as FOOD, and other resources, are tangibly scarce, people will want to make information artificially scarce in order to give it an inflated value that can PAY for FOOD.
Hmm. I should really condense the above paragraph for my sig; it's really at the heart of the matter of why people want to "control intellectual property."
A few decades down the road, people won't need to justify their copyright selfishness when nanotech eventually enables the molecular reassembly of trash into any desired object, and machine intelligence solves problems of increasing complexity, etc... (and living in boundless space habitats alleviates the problem of an overcrouded Earth and greedy landlords.:)
In 1907, however, when the company first used the metal in its name, it was "The Aluminum Company of America," with the new American spelling. This coincided with the emergence of the Americanized name in public usage.
Slashdot Mirror
And it will be one of the last vain human-centric booms too.
In about 25 years $1000 will buy you (and especially cost-cutting corporations, who are increasingly autonomous themselves) a "computer" capable of human-level thought which will replace more intellectual jobs than the efficient agriculture "boom" displaced farmers' labor jobs. No amount of grey-matter enhancement would do your kids much good, since even if they were born today with a "+100 IQ boost", they'd be obsolete by the time real AI sped past them in adulthood.
Also in about 25 years, robotics will have finally come into its own (as will have serious spacedev & nanotech); the current bipedal Honda bots are model-T's in comparison. These bots will be superior in most ways to any physical genetic modification you could make to your body. Flesh is simply too weak and too vulnerablem especially longterm.
Anyway... I guess my longwinded point is that the bioengineering boom, already in its infancy, will be pretty short-lived when compared to others. Ultimately, it's only really useful outcome will be as playing a part in the engineering of the wetware mind->machine bridge. Without that bridge we could only look on as our "Mind Children" (as Hans Moravec calls them) replaced us. With the bridge, we can join 'em... sort of.
(references intentionally left blank because this post turned out to be mostly mental masturbation) :-)
Except in times of national emergency...
With G.Bush's declaration (paraphrased):
"...this war on terrorism has no endgame..."
And we're left in a state of perpetual police state surveilence and eroding liberties. It's analagous to the "war on drugs" -- people willingly bend over and allow their cars to be searched for "drugs" and their property to be seized on flimsy drug charges, and their lives to be turned upside down.
With the "war on terrorism" I wonder how long it will be before people bend over again and allow the storm troopers access to search their homes for plutonium/anthrax/etc in order to "prove their innonence." Hey, they don't even need a search warrant first anymore... almost there.
You'd think that just maybe that would be an incentive to USE the distributed network itself to distribute your digitally signed app in order to cut costs.
Anyway, I recall that BearShare eventually got around to forcing various kinds of "adware" (spyware) down your throat, but after the bitching got to be too much, Vinnie grew half a conscience and instead begged you to Opt-In to the scheme.
Of course, there's a big difference between LimeWire (open but SLOW as snot), and BearShare (closed but the fastest).
You mean everyone could be an animated walking billboard, right? :-) "Advertising supported apparel" would be about as appealing as the animated GIF banner, and ten times more annoying.
I think I'd go insane if that fad lasted more than a microsecond. The only way to filter out the visual noise would be in the form of a retinal scanner that "blocks ads" in the real world by superimposing generic images. Hopefully this arrives first.
But yeah, active surfaces would be nice for most other applications. I recall reading about some very cool applications of "pie-in-the-sky" nanotech derived "Programmable Paint" ...
Welcome to my Cable[2Mbps] WAP kind neighbor!
1) Login as Anonymous Terrorist.
2) Login as Registered Patriot (same as above, only more inconvenient)
3) Login as Port80 Leech-Only.
4) Login as Power-Tripping Network Admin.
5) Exit and try down the street.
I expect these babies to be a must-have when they're ready for the mass market in a few years; especially since the #1 "augmented reality" app is likely to be naked 3D babes "on" your real bed. :)
I mean... as long as we're being realistic. :-)
Well, you know ... if they were Customs Officers, they could check your rectum for fingernail clippers if you looked at them the wrong way; and if you happened to have any outgoing international snailmail on you, they could read that too -- and these searches will be completely constitutional IF it becomes law.
I feel safer already.
That's where you're wrong. Most people -- real people -- can't stand the sneaky, sterile, euphemized corporate-speak; it comes off like a press release devoid of all emotion.
IMO, Linus has struck the right balance between zealot and Spock. :)
(Oh, and a quick aside on the subject of euphemisms: DON'T let them "renice" the word "recession" into "economic downturn"! -- Sick'em Carlin!)
I set up my 486/66 tower to blast the movie theme song from Halloween at full volume, and flash my 14" monitor between black and orange at like 3Hz, when the mouse detected movement. I coded this hack in x86 assembler (when it was cool to waste your time with DOS, DMA, mode-x, etc., at low-level).
I unscrewed the lightbulb to keep it dark in the room, and placed the mouse trap (pun!)gently on top of the answering machine that I knew my roommate would check when he got back.
I waited in the dark like a poser for about an hour, then left for a party because he didn't show ontime.
The next day he said something like, "yeah, you got me bad. I had to turn your computer off."
Okay... not the best story. :)
Of course, survival probability and bang/buck was on Cable's side, so I picked up the self install kit from a Time Warner office down the street (I remember the sales girl wistfully mentioning to me that she didn't have cable herself; that she didn't even own a TV; that she reads mostly. I still haven't figured out what kind of signal she was sending me...but I smelled geek! And not a bad looking one either.)
I was multibooting Win98/Linux at the time, but pretended that I was running Linux only in order to impress her and get some raw network info so I didn't have to install Time Warner's lame win32 client software in the case of network weirdness.
Well, she wasn't impressed by linux (she's from the book-geek-only tribe I guess) and couldn't give me any additional info, so I went home (to my other woman :), killed my static DSL IP, and let DHCP do the rest without having to install any craptacular, bloated, windows-only, hand-holding gatekeeper-ware.
What does this lame short story have to do XP? Not much, other than the fact that an ISP "supporting and OS" should be as easy as DHCP (1, 2, 3. Get it?); which it was for me, and which it should be for most others.
I guess the only remaining issues are things like mail and news servers that don't usually auto-configure themselves... and client hijack-ware that isn't ready to rewire WinXP configs.
IMO, ISP's shouldn't have to _actively_ support any OS. ISP's should only be there to bitch at when your connection dies for ~5 minutes every ~30...like mine is now!!
2. Give the software, sell the hardware...
3. Give the software away, and eat FREE food from your vegetable garden, and live rent-FREE in your van down by the river...
The video's all of 3 minutes long.
er... is that supply line or a supply chain? :)
I pity all the folks who are unaware of the wonders that 2000 edonkey's can provide when it comes to large media files. :)
All four vids have been available in standard mpeg, and DivX, for quite a while... and I see that only the first three vids are available on Toonami's site, and in Crap-Quality.
The Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger vid was interesting: The band members are manufactured "Ghost-in-the-shell-style", then get their memory scanned in. The End.
I cached a local copy for reference; a rare thing.
Oh, and be sure to thank your friend for adding you to another spamlist.
"Send this to a friend!" is AKA "supply us with a live email address!" .. marketing scam.
--A-Distributed-Search-That-Doesn't-Suck-- is next on the list, but unlike the others, it won't die, because the network is the computer.
A traditional search engine is a mostly centralized and controllable client-server beast -- something that business naturally gravitates to because it needs this point of CONTROL in order to have a chance to profit. It's also a small part of the reason why we don't have a useful distributed search engine yet; there's not much money in it, so we have to wait for clever "hobbyists" to evolve it.
Eventually, we WILL rest upon on an as-yet-unrealized distributed search engine; one a thousand times "smarter" and more sophisticated than that gnutella hack can ever hope to be.
You would trade one gravity well for another?
Mars is interesting, but space habitats are the future my man. :)
As for this "hypermedia" -- well, I hate to be cynical (not really), but being factual and rational aren't conducive to RATINGS. Our "respected news organizations" are more like the tabloids than they (or their viewers) would like to admit, and as long as this profitable, they're not going to stop exploiting paranoia.
Personally, I fear anthrax about as much as I fear Michael Jackson, and I fear a rogue briefcase nuke about as much as I fear Bill Gates...which is saying that Gates is only a TINY bit more frightful than MJ, but they're both still mostly harmless. :)
(Oh, and how to make up for that first week of good reporting without ads? How better than by running spots that exploit patriotism...you've bought YOUR genuine U.S. Flag Pin and Medallion Set haven't you!? No? You must be a terrorist sympathizer then!)
The core SDK has always been free (except for some juicy core stuff that MS keeps to themselves, and their "shared source partners.")
Right on. And at its base, advertising is mental engineering; boobies are just one of the best means to that end (for guys anyway).
Anyway, my problem with 99% of all advertising isn't that it's evil propaganda, it's that the market is getting so crowded that those who succeed in screaming the loudest to get my attention, usually don't deserve it, because most of their money is necessarily spent on marketing vs. the actual product/service; and you end up paying more for less (even after economy of scale takes effect).
So, even if TheProduct(tm) is worthwhile to you, it makes more sense to skip the middleman reseller, and go to the source -- or failing that, buying the word-of-mouth best alternative.
Google is about the only advertising I'm receptive to -- everything else I scorn. At the extreme would be car commercials (selling nothing but emotion), and the recent "U.S. Flag & Cipro" email spam (paranoia leeches) -- makes my blood boil!
Information really wants to be free, but unfortunately, as long as FOOD, and other resources, are tangibly scarce, people will want to make information artificially scarce in order to give it an inflated value that can PAY for FOOD.
Hmm. I should really condense the above paragraph for my sig; it's really at the heart of the matter of why people want to "control intellectual property."
A few decades down the road, people won't need to justify their copyright selfishness when nanotech eventually enables the molecular reassembly of trash into any desired object, and machine intelligence solves problems of increasing complexity, etc... (and living in boundless space habitats alleviates the problem of an overcrouded Earth and greedy landlords. :)
I suppose I should have read this comment before posting. :-)
From Alcoa's own site is this bit of history: