I've said it before, and I'll say it again: civil war, for starters. If things get too out of hand, world war. Governments (well, 1st world country governments, at least) see these things and will take steps to prevent a crisis on the level that produces conflict on that level. The rest of the world? Places like China, that don't particularly value human rights? Maybe not so much. People will not sit quietly and starve to death. If it got bad enough, they'd turn to crime to feed themselves and their families. Gets worse, there starts being armed conflicts, first on small scales, then more organized. You let it go far enough, you have civil war.
Oh yeah it's positively terrible out there for humans! This morning I had to dodge around all the robots doing road construction on my street, the robot neighbor walking his robot dogs, the robot making my espresso when I got to work, all the robots in the hallways, the lab full of robots working on validatiing other robots, and just now I got an email from my robot boss who sent me a list of all the robots that he wants me to be sure have access to our fileserver so they can share information with other robots about the robot projects they're all working on for the robot CEO. Just remembered I'll need to go down to the cafeteria later to ask the robot cashiers to give me a refund for the vending machine that ripped me off. I am looking forward to when I'm off work, there are robot shows I want to sit down and watch with my robot wife and robot kids, and it's always relaxing to make the robot cat chase the laser pointer.
'Religion' is not a brain hack so much as it is evidence that our brains are still more-or-less the same as when we lived in caves and were hunter-gatherers. Human brains can't accept abstract concepts like infinity, and the Universe and so many things in it are too big and too old to comprehend.. and our brains want answers as to the nature of these things. So rather than go insane, it makes things up (like 'gods' and other imaginary, supernatural, magical things) to 'explain' it. That in and of itself isn't so bad, but then some people who have also realized the nature (and vulnerability) of our brains, leverage that into a system of control. There are 'systems of control' of this nature all over the planet. It's the biggest evolutionary hurdle the human race will have to overcome in order to become truly civilized.
There is no 'healthy integration' of these 'ideas'. There is only enduring them as a major flaw in us, until such time as our poor brains grow up and don't need it anymore. With some luck we won't extinct ourselves before that happens.
Posting this as an AC because I really don't feel like dealing with the 10,000 flame posts I'll get otherwise for daring to point out the elephant in the room.
Here's a trivial but functional example of what you're talking about: https://img.ifcdn.com/images/4...
If your brain can't be hacked via sensory inputs, then why does this do anything at all?
Okay.. you're missing the point. Which is better: Having a brain that doesn't need a electronic crutch installed in it or Having a brain that's as good (if not better) than a computer all by itself?
I don't assume all technology makes us better. I'm seeing some of it as making us weaker, lazier, and dumber, and that's not going to be good for us in the long run. Also,
be always connected to a portable micro computer implanted in our heads
..would more or less create the situation I outlined above: 3rd parties being able to hack our brains directly. Nope, no, and hell, no, in that order.
We (as a species) need to do things that encourage improvements in our genome, not the opposite. Installing electronics in our skulls, having computers connected to our brains all the time, these things will not encourage positive evolutionary changes, they'll make us lazier and dumber.
Connecting a computer to your brain is not 'evolution' in any sense of the word. It's just more toys that we may or may not need.
You want real evolution of man? How about our brains evolve to not need computers at all anymore? Maybe computers are just a crutch.
There probably needs to be money (real money, not nickel and dime) in that equation to make it work, and that means something like a commercial version aimed specifically at average consumers. It would also mean WINE would have to get the same treatment, because if Joe Average can't run his Windows software and games on his shiny new Linux OS, he's going to throw up his hands and go back to Windows. You essentially need a Playskool version of Linux with all the hand-holding that implies, real tech support on-demand, etc..
We can't even secure our non-brain-connected computers, devices, vehicles, etc, from outside intrusion, why in the world would I want to open the door for someone to hack my brain through a computer? Thanks, but no thanks. I'll leave my brain standalone and air-gapped from computers and the internet. The last thing anyone needs is some script-kiddie deciding to brick someone's head for the lulz. Also this would potentially redefine what a 'botnet' is. Nope, nope, nope.
Because if you're not in control of your computer, then ultimately someone else will be. The alternative, I guess, is to have your garden-variety consumer computer to be an appliance, like a toaster or microwave oven, that does a set number of things, and that's all it does -- but as I recall that's been tried before, and it didn't go over well except with people whose VCRs would flash 12:00 forever and ever.
I'll second the motion on Linux Mint. That being said, lately sudo stopped accepting my root credentials (and I don't know why), and I still have no idea where in the filesystem the subdirectory is that represents the GUI desktop, and I haven't figured out how to get Java installed under WINE yet (for one piece of Windows software I need to use that needs Java). There's going to be a learning curve no matter what you pick.
I say we go back to the way things were pre-Internet, and actually talk to people, face-to-face, in private places, with no cellphones or computers around. Then the bloody bastards will be forced to get off their fat asses and actually work for their surveillance data, rather than just sit in an office and poke at a keyboard for it. Before too long we'd find them being a whole lot less nosy, when it actually costs them orders of magnitude more in dollars and man-hours.
Okay. We go back to the way things were in the 1970's and 1980's, then. I'm actually OK with that. The Internet, which once showed such great potential and promise for elevating Humanity, has been subverted, perverted, and turned into just another sewer. We're probably better off without it.
But if this gets joe-six-pack-of-beer to sit up and pay attention then it may be worth it.
Sadly, it likely won't. Not unless something gets put right in Joes' face that he can't ignore, like something related to his searching online for erectile dysfunction drugs, or something equally embarassing -- or something shows up in his email that Joes' wife sees that pisses her off enough to start a knock-down-drag-out fight. Otherwise, 'Joe' is rather clueless, has been so thoroughly indoctrinated by Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general, to believe that 'sharing' is normal, and that nothing about his life could possibly be of any value or import to anyone, anywhere, and besides which, 'he's not doing anything wrong, so he has nothing to fear', so why should Joe even care? That's just the, say, 18 to 35 demographic. The 35+ demographic probably doesn't even use the internet for much of anything other than paying bills and email, and unless they make a connection between spam they receive and the content of the emails they've been sending and receiving (because ISPs will be sifting everyone's email, too) they won't notice anything either.
What Neuroelectronic said; this will mean more revenue for VPN providers, at least from people who have the technical expertise to set up VPN use.. or that actually understand that 'privacy' is not a sign of mental illness or criminal activity, but a basic human right.
You and another commentor in this thread are ignorning the point: Banks SHOULD have someone auditing their ATM machines, daily, if not several times daily, to ensure there are no unauthorized devices attached to their ATM machines. There is no excuse for not doing it. If Brinks or some other company is who is serving the machines then THEY need to be trained to do this, plain and simple. Laziness is not an excuse, it's part of the problem.
I've been to Reddit 2 or 3 times total. I found it to be a total confusing mess and didn't hang around. It's got a horrible reputation all over the internet so far as I can tell, and they're going to play the 'social media' card? LOL, you're right, this'll kill Reddit, and that's probably a good thing. Of course so far as I'm concerned, ALL 'social media' should go the way of the dinosaurs, too..
That's the only valid response to this whole subject. I buy something, it's MINE. Unless I'm reverse-engineering it to copy it and sell the copies, the manufacturer should stay the hell out of it. This applies to everyone across the board, including software (I'm looking at YOU, Miscreant-o-soft; get your dirty little fingers out of our computers, NOT YOURS!). How many of you are aware that farmers who own John Deere equipment are not allowed to service and repair them themselves, for instance? Auto manufacturers would love legal precedent like this, essentially putting a lock on the hood of your car or truck, and suing you if you so much as changed the oil without taking it to an 'authorzied service center' (extreme example, yes, but don't think they wouldn't welcome it). So far as selling something of mine to someone else: also nobodys' damned business. Do any of you really think the police want to have their time and limited resources wasted because they have to have a 'Craigslist Squad' to track down people selling used electronics? Bah. All of this is just another symptom of 'capitalism gone bad'. Just like an otherwise benign micro-organism in your gut, you feed it the wrong things or too much of the right things, it grows out of control and becomes a health problem. Things like in TFA are exactly like that: corporate America has been fed an improper diet for too long and is now becoming malignant. Time for for some legal and/or legislative antifungal.
Two ways they could solve the 'card skimmer' problem:
1. Train bank employees that service the ATM to look for and recognize card skimmers. I'm surprised if they don't already do this. ATMs have to be reloaded with money, have jams cleared, etc, on a regular basis. If bank employees aren't routinely looking for these, then there's something seriously wrong with their procedures.
2. Install software on the ATM itself that scans Bluetooth for card skimmers, and SHUT DOWN if it detects one. I can't see it being too difficult to create software that would do this. Law Enforcement must have boxes full of the things, determine what devices they show up as, what protocol they use for transfer of captured data, and write a program that looks for the device and verifies it's a card skimmer. It finds one, it tells the ATM to shut itself down until a bank employee and police can come by to remove the thing.
I'm sorry, but you're either living in a fantasy world or you're trolling, that's never going to happen, for more reasons than I can easily ennumerate. Of course this will never even be an issue for serious discussion, since the country would have to be geographically split down the middle, and there'd have to be a Civil War in progress, before any such so-called 'division' would happen. Otherwise, do you really think Congress is going to approve it? The office of the President (not the SITTING President, but ANY President)? LOL, no, not happening. There'd have to be an entire block of states who agree to secede, can raise an army, establish a border between their nascent State and the U.S., and they'd have to be willing to fight and kill their former countrymen over it. Pretty much like before, and it'd end pretty much like before, except the order of magnitude of how it affects the rest of the world would be much, much higher. Meanwhile all the enemies the United States has accumulated over the decades would see their opportunity to take pot-shots at both sides, while they're otherwise occupied and weakened. Former U.S. allies wouldn't be of much help since they wouldn't know which side they should be backing, if any side at all. It would be a complete and total disaster.
Yeah. I think 'make America great again' might just translate to 'sweep all the stuff we don't want to deal with under the rug, like we used to do, so we can live in the ILLUSION of greatness again'.
Slashdot Mirror
I've said it before, and I'll say it again: civil war, for starters. If things get too out of hand, world war. Governments (well, 1st world country governments, at least) see these things and will take steps to prevent a crisis on the level that produces conflict on that level. The rest of the world? Places like China, that don't particularly value human rights? Maybe not so much. People will not sit quietly and starve to death. If it got bad enough, they'd turn to crime to feed themselves and their families. Gets worse, there starts being armed conflicts, first on small scales, then more organized. You let it go far enough, you have civil war.
Oh yeah it's positively terrible out there for humans! This morning I had to dodge around all the robots doing road construction on my street, the robot neighbor walking his robot dogs, the robot making my espresso when I got to work, all the robots in the hallways, the lab full of robots working on validatiing other robots, and just now I got an email from my robot boss who sent me a list of all the robots that he wants me to be sure have access to our fileserver so they can share information with other robots about the robot projects they're all working on for the robot CEO. Just remembered I'll need to go down to the cafeteria later to ask the robot cashiers to give me a refund for the vending machine that ripped me off. I am looking forward to when I'm off work, there are robot shows I want to sit down and watch with my robot wife and robot kids, and it's always relaxing to make the robot cat chase the laser pointer.
LOL, or, forgetting to click the check-box, and probably getting flamed anyway. xD
'Religion' is not a brain hack so much as it is evidence that our brains are still more-or-less the same as when we lived in caves and were hunter-gatherers. Human brains can't accept abstract concepts like infinity, and the Universe and so many things in it are too big and too old to comprehend.. and our brains want answers as to the nature of these things. So rather than go insane, it makes things up (like 'gods' and other imaginary, supernatural, magical things) to 'explain' it. That in and of itself isn't so bad, but then some people who have also realized the nature (and vulnerability) of our brains, leverage that into a system of control. There are 'systems of control' of this nature all over the planet. It's the biggest evolutionary hurdle the human race will have to overcome in order to become truly civilized.
There is no 'healthy integration' of these 'ideas'. There is only enduring them as a major flaw in us, until such time as our poor brains grow up and don't need it anymore. With some luck we won't extinct ourselves before that happens.
Posting this as an AC because I really don't feel like dealing with the 10,000 flame posts I'll get otherwise for daring to point out the elephant in the room.
Here's a trivial but functional example of what you're talking about: https://img.ifcdn.com/images/4...
If your brain can't be hacked via sensory inputs, then why does this do anything at all?
Which is better: Having a brain that doesn't need a electronic crutch installed in it
or
Having a brain that's as good (if not better) than a computer all by itself?
I don't assume all technology makes us better. I'm seeing some of it as making us weaker, lazier, and dumber, and that's not going to be good for us in the long run.
Also,
be always connected to a portable micro computer implanted in our heads
..would more or less create the situation I outlined above: 3rd parties being able to hack our brains directly. Nope, no, and hell, no, in that order.
We (as a species) need to do things that encourage improvements in our genome, not the opposite. Installing electronics in our skulls, having computers connected to our brains all the time, these things will not encourage positive evolutionary changes, they'll make us lazier and dumber.
Sure, in this iteration of the idea. What about the next?
Connecting a computer to your brain is not 'evolution' in any sense of the word. It's just more toys that we may or may not need.
You want real evolution of man? How about our brains evolve to not need computers at all anymore? Maybe computers are just a crutch.
There probably needs to be money (real money, not nickel and dime) in that equation to make it work, and that means something like a commercial version aimed specifically at average consumers. It would also mean WINE would have to get the same treatment, because if Joe Average can't run his Windows software and games on his shiny new Linux OS, he's going to throw up his hands and go back to Windows. You essentially need a Playskool version of Linux with all the hand-holding that implies, real tech support on-demand, etc..
We can't even secure our non-brain-connected computers, devices, vehicles, etc, from outside intrusion, why in the world would I want to open the door for someone to hack my brain through a computer? Thanks, but no thanks. I'll leave my brain standalone and air-gapped from computers and the internet. The last thing anyone needs is some script-kiddie deciding to brick someone's head for the lulz. Also this would potentially redefine what a 'botnet' is. Nope, nope, nope.
Because if you're not in control of your computer, then ultimately someone else will be. The alternative, I guess, is to have your garden-variety consumer computer to be an appliance, like a toaster or microwave oven, that does a set number of things, and that's all it does -- but as I recall that's been tried before, and it didn't go over well except with people whose VCRs would flash 12:00 forever and ever.
I'll second the motion on Linux Mint.
That being said, lately sudo stopped accepting my root credentials (and I don't know why), and I still have no idea where in the filesystem the subdirectory is that represents the GUI desktop, and I haven't figured out how to get Java installed under WINE yet (for one piece of Windows software I need to use that needs Java). There's going to be a learning curve no matter what you pick.
I say we go back to the way things were pre-Internet, and actually talk to people, face-to-face, in private places, with no cellphones or computers around. Then the bloody bastards will be forced to get off their fat asses and actually work for their surveillance data, rather than just sit in an office and poke at a keyboard for it. Before too long we'd find them being a whole lot less nosy, when it actually costs them orders of magnitude more in dollars and man-hours.
Okay. We go back to the way things were in the 1970's and 1980's, then. I'm actually OK with that. The Internet, which once showed such great potential and promise for elevating Humanity, has been subverted, perverted, and turned into just another sewer. We're probably better off without it.
But if this gets joe-six-pack-of-beer to sit up and pay attention then it may be worth it.
Sadly, it likely won't. Not unless something gets put right in Joes' face that he can't ignore, like something related to his searching online for erectile dysfunction drugs, or something equally embarassing -- or something shows up in his email that Joes' wife sees that pisses her off enough to start a knock-down-drag-out fight. Otherwise, 'Joe' is rather clueless, has been so thoroughly indoctrinated by Facebook, Twitter, and social media in general, to believe that 'sharing' is normal, and that nothing about his life could possibly be of any value or import to anyone, anywhere, and besides which, 'he's not doing anything wrong, so he has nothing to fear', so why should Joe even care? That's just the, say, 18 to 35 demographic. The 35+ demographic probably doesn't even use the internet for much of anything other than paying bills and email, and unless they make a connection between spam they receive and the content of the emails they've been sending and receiving (because ISPs will be sifting everyone's email, too) they won't notice anything either.
What Neuroelectronic said; this will mean more revenue for VPN providers, at least from people who have the technical expertise to set up VPN use.. or that actually understand that 'privacy' is not a sign of mental illness or criminal activity, but a basic human right.
"Your taxpayer dollars at work! Busting criminals who sell used video games!" Utterly rediculous.
You and another commentor in this thread are ignorning the point: Banks SHOULD have someone auditing their ATM machines, daily, if not several times daily, to ensure there are no unauthorized devices attached to their ATM machines. There is no excuse for not doing it. If Brinks or some other company is who is serving the machines then THEY need to be trained to do this, plain and simple. Laziness is not an excuse, it's part of the problem.
I've been to Reddit 2 or 3 times total. I found it to be a total confusing mess and didn't hang around. It's got a horrible reputation all over the internet so far as I can tell, and they're going to play the 'social media' card? LOL, you're right, this'll kill Reddit, and that's probably a good thing. Of course so far as I'm concerned, ALL 'social media' should go the way of the dinosaurs, too..
That's the only valid response to this whole subject. I buy something, it's MINE. Unless I'm reverse-engineering it to copy it and sell the copies, the manufacturer should stay the hell out of it. This applies to everyone across the board, including software (I'm looking at YOU, Miscreant-o-soft; get your dirty little fingers out of our computers, NOT YOURS!). How many of you are aware that farmers who own John Deere equipment are not allowed to service and repair them themselves, for instance? Auto manufacturers would love legal precedent like this, essentially putting a lock on the hood of your car or truck, and suing you if you so much as changed the oil without taking it to an 'authorzied service center' (extreme example, yes, but don't think they wouldn't welcome it). So far as selling something of mine to someone else: also nobodys' damned business. Do any of you really think the police want to have their time and limited resources wasted because they have to have a 'Craigslist Squad' to track down people selling used electronics? Bah. All of this is just another symptom of 'capitalism gone bad'. Just like an otherwise benign micro-organism in your gut, you feed it the wrong things or too much of the right things, it grows out of control and becomes a health problem. Things like in TFA are exactly like that: corporate America has been fed an improper diet for too long and is now becoming malignant. Time for for some legal and/or legislative antifungal.
Two ways they could solve the 'card skimmer' problem:
1. Train bank employees that service the ATM to look for and recognize card skimmers. I'm surprised if they don't already do this. ATMs have to be reloaded with money, have jams cleared, etc, on a regular basis. If bank employees aren't routinely looking for these, then there's something seriously wrong with their procedures.
2. Install software on the ATM itself that scans Bluetooth for card skimmers, and SHUT DOWN if it detects one. I can't see it being too difficult to create software that would do this. Law Enforcement must have boxes full of the things, determine what devices they show up as, what protocol they use for transfer of captured data, and write a program that looks for the device and verifies it's a card skimmer. It finds one, it tells the ATM to shut itself down until a bank employee and police can come by to remove the thing.
I have the same exact things to say to you that I said to the other guy: https://slashdot.org/comments....
I'm sorry, but you're either living in a fantasy world or you're trolling, that's never going to happen, for more reasons than I can easily ennumerate.
Of course this will never even be an issue for serious discussion, since the country would have to be geographically split down the middle, and there'd have to be a Civil War in progress, before any such so-called 'division' would happen. Otherwise, do you really think Congress is going to approve it? The office of the President (not the SITTING President, but ANY President)? LOL, no, not happening. There'd have to be an entire block of states who agree to secede, can raise an army, establish a border between their nascent State and the U.S., and they'd have to be willing to fight and kill their former countrymen over it. Pretty much like before, and it'd end pretty much like before, except the order of magnitude of how it affects the rest of the world would be much, much higher. Meanwhile all the enemies the United States has accumulated over the decades would see their opportunity to take pot-shots at both sides, while they're otherwise occupied and weakened. Former U.S. allies wouldn't be of much help since they wouldn't know which side they should be backing, if any side at all. It would be a complete and total disaster.
Perhaps it's time to split the USA rather than waste resources and anger on gridlock and seesaw politics.
Let me sum that statement up in two words for you: Civil War.
Yeah. I think 'make America great again' might just translate to 'sweep all the stuff we don't want to deal with under the rug, like we used to do, so we can live in the ILLUSION of greatness again'.