Two words: Biofeedback Therapy. Allopathic Medicine has been the hard rule in the states for a long time, but the gap has been closing in the recent decades.
The kind of biofeedback therapy i'm thinking of is the kind where a computer accepts input from a crown of electrodes that measure the electromagnetic fields in the brain, interpereting the data in such a way as to allow it to use the input as the inputs for game-like tasks that train you to actually correct problems like bipolar disorder and ADHD not by adding chemicals to the stews in our brains, but rather approaching it from a cognative angle, perhaps analogous to exersizing a muscle.
These same tools were developed to study the effect of yogic meditation on the brain, and studies that used this technology in conjunction with yoga training found that similar mindstates could be acheived in a fraction of the time with the neural feedback provided by a computer (that is, giving you visual and auditory feedback of yoru current brain state, allowing you to consciously change it).
This may sound very blue-sky, but my younger sister has been undergoing biofeedback therapy administered by a holistic doctor for a condition that hasn't even been completely diagnosed by several traditional psychologists, ideas ranging from bipolar disorder, manic depressive, ADHD, they haven't really decided yet. Since she started the therapy, however, she's much improved.
To help further clarify what i'm talking about and perhaps provide further information for the interested, one computer program that she used in therapy displayed three rocket ships on the screen. She was told that the left-hand rocket represented something like being bored and daydreamy, and the right-hand rocket represented something like hyperactivity and excitement, with the middle rocket ship representing Focus. The computer program is calibrated much like a lie-detector test, and the computer will reward a shift in her brain state towards Focused Attention with the graphical representation of the middle rocket ship rising, with similar reactions in the other two ships when slips into the other two brain states are detected by the electrodes on her head.
She can play pacman without touching a physical controller, after calibrating the software correctly. Her current exersizes with the gear, i beleive, are simply transcendental meditation rouines aided by the biofeedback software. I'm pretty sure i saw a getup like this pilot a flight sim (without a controller) back in college. This is a legitimate field of study, folks.
The hardware and software (i dont know if its exactly what my sister uses, but its damn close) can be found at www.brainfingers.com, and even includes a midi-mapper interface for the brainwave interpreter (as well as some games and i think a development kit)!
Before I get any replies of this nature, I'm not entirely in the loop with what my sister's current scholastic/health situation is, but I -do- know that my mother isn't disregarding or ignoring the help of traditional psychologists or allopathic doctors, but from what i can tell, has just sought out options for treatment that don't involve drugging her up (not that i'm opposed to recreational drugging, just habitual drugging).
I, for one, equate the modern condition of psychopharmacy to be in the same state as surgery in the dark ages. I have several examples of how this is so and why, but i think this post has gone on quite long enough anyway.
At that price point, why not just get an LCD projecter? Many of them have excellent contrast ratios, and can accept input from everything the samsung display can. Additionally, the ability to see an image clearly at about 51' diagonal is pretty neat (especially if you spend a lot of time lurking around your local theatrespace).
nothing to fear except an invasion of your privacy, perhaps, and getting some bandwidth wasted by large companies trolling your hardware for supposedly illegal files.
i think a better role-model than a mafia boss would be the main character of Office Space. When you're trapped in a repetative and mundane experience, the players i look up to are ones that find creative solutions to the boredom wraught by blind farming of capital and experience.
any good art leads you to more. How many people never heard of the cave allegory or gnosticism before seeing the matrix? I mean, for me, it was P.K.Dick that introduced me to the idea, and i never got around to reading -him- until Linklater mentions him in the movie "Waking Life" (yeah, ive had a lot of Dick to catch up on).
There are probably better ways of judging the movie than scoring how much time it spends regurgitating what everyone's said about the cave allegory already, but all of these methods are by and large predicated on waiting for the actual story to finish. You know..see where they're going with it.
i doubt humanity will be recognizable to itself in 10k years, if its still around at all.
They said it would take 100 years to each the moon, and it was done (all conspiracy theories aside) within that decade. The same was said about flight earlier in the century (many said it would be impossible).
How are extropian ideas like direct neural interfacing and immortality any different?
I don't see why this technology would be employed to re-live the past instead of reshaping reality, except maybe for the scenario of an involuntary human-machine symbiosis like the one portrayed in The Matrix.
if, in fact, we are living in a computer simulation, and if, in fact, the computer is designed to prevent us from realizing that, it would seem likely that it would allow the idea to be contextualized and dismissed, similarly to how many governments dismiss, sanitize, and damage-control its misdeeds; by hiding them out in the open.
at the risk of straying offtopic somewhat, I thought the question was "what do you get when you multiply six by nine?", when he pulled the scrabble tiles out of the bag in the third book.
i interpereted this as a kind of "indirect proof", whereby if you can actually prove that 6x9=42, you can prove literally anything.
i would imagine the growth of the singularity would be exponential, and planetary destruction would occur within minutes, if not seconds. If it happens at all, of course.
Ive seen a rehash in this thread of several sensible (and not so sensible) ideas regarding reducing spam, and making life tougher for spammers. One idea this article gave me, however, that i havent seen discussed much, involves these message boards that were alluded to in the article.
A digital social network (in the form of bullitain boards, etc) through which people can trade information about addresses, software, and spamming methods should be a trivial thing for a large digitally sophisticated crowd (ie slashdot) to find and then attack, either by trolling/flooding, or more outright destructive means.
This dosent address the actual hardware involved in sending and receiving spam, but rather constitutes a multi-front assault against a subculture. Maybe it wont stop all spam, but it would make it harder for people to get into the spam business, by either exposing this social infrastructure and diluting it, or disabling it violently by disrupting the virtual real-estate it resides in.
what i think a lot of people misread in Snowcrash and Diamond age (and sometimes gibson novels too) is that...let's see...the musical analogy works best, i think. The end of a peice isn't the entire raison d'etre of the composition, otherwise you'd have people who compose nothing but finales, and the best songs would be rushed through to get to the ending faster.
I think we all may be a little too used to fiction that reads like an essay, with a logical conclusion that neatly summs everything up that happened prior. Things rarely ever seem to really work out that way, no beginnings or endings, just a continuous process that we all catch glimpses of the middle of.
i'd also like to see what happens with the Data Haven that waterhouse helps construct in the present-day timeline of cryptonomicon, but that's heading in the wrong direction on the timeline, from what ive seen of quicksilver so far.
NS's books that ive read so far (zodiac, snow crash, the diamond age, cryptonomicon) all either take place in the past/present or the not-far-but-not-near future (ok, diamond age is pretty far future), seeing what effect the data haven from cryptonomicon would have on the hypothetical present day would be an interesting story of the present progressing into the future.
i loved things like that as well, i guess some people prefer their fiction terse and to the point, but compare the targeted meandering in cryptonomicon with a lot of the "useless" things you can do in the game Deus Ex (reading people's emails, datacubes, etc), that give you the feeling that you're immersed in a world instead of consuming a media product.
although this may be a messy solution, those emails cross onto a US server at -some point- in between them and you, so why not filter out from there unless a tax has been paid to the gateway? i dunno if this is technically feasible or not, but the internet is a web, not a cloud, and there are a finite number of wires through which spam can travel into this country from another one.
have one of these connect to a HUD embedded into your glasses. type on a projected infra-red keyboard. no more pda!
Re:These sorts of questions apply to all devices..
on
Looking at Longhorn
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· Score: 1
what super-important process was your graphics card doing in your desktop environment to begin with?
i think this is mostly just picking up the slack left by steadily increasing hardware performance. Like, for example, a thousand dollars of computer hardware is massive overkill for what most people use a computer for. Now, its still overkill, just less blatantly and massively.
i haven't had any problems with my 1.33, all im using is one of those Volcano II's, a couple of case fans, and a topside blowhole. Nothing fancy, just the stock fans that came with my Lian-Li.
relying on sound pressure waves has its limitations, especially in noisy or crowded areas. The number of microphones to reliably process everyone's conversations would have to grow exponentially with the amount of noise in the area. Relying on a visual information source might be trickier given the current state of computational power, but from a pure signal standpoint, it isn't effected by the ambient noise level or interferance from other conversations. it basically lets you sidestep the problem of sorting out who is saying what. In the process, of course, other problems are created, but hey, that's what happens.
I'm not too worried about the whole thing, the more resources they dump into this kind of foolishness, the more shit people will get away with as The Powers That Be get complacent in their technological superiority. Biometrics, for example, is silly and dosen't work. Once we waste enough money on this sort of thing, itll be abandoned for surveillance purposes and integrated into consumer electronics in flashy ways.
laser microphones have been widely used in james-bondesque espionage situations for years (those of us who've played Splinter Cell were forced to use one more than once), basically a laser microphone measures the vibrations on a plate of glass and tunes into conversations by measuring the vibrations.
Sound pressure waves cause the density of air to fluctuate, which would bend the path of a beam of light travelling through it.
basically, you'd need more than one laser in this situation, i think, you'd need like a 3d array of them.
actually, forget lasers. Focused radio waves (which are just like light but with a slower frequency) would react to sound pressure waves too.
yeah, a lot of asian languages rely on internal vowel sounds that make lip-reading nearly impossible. Maybe if they used lasers to measure the sound pressure waves, or vibrations of the voicebox in conjunction with the lipreading.
size and weather-resistance would be reason enough to utilize it. I beleive i've mentioned these above. Speakers take up space, and they let dust and moisture in.
Slashdot Mirror
why bother with that when you can just blow up buildings and shoot people? Jeebus, man, Dr. Evil is just a movie character.
Two words: Biofeedback Therapy. Allopathic Medicine has been the hard rule in the states for a long time, but the gap has been closing in the recent decades.
The kind of biofeedback therapy i'm thinking of is the kind where a computer accepts input from a crown of electrodes that measure the electromagnetic fields in the brain, interpereting the data in such a way as to allow it to use the input as the inputs for game-like tasks that train you to actually correct problems like bipolar disorder and ADHD not by adding chemicals to the stews in our brains, but rather approaching it from a cognative angle, perhaps analogous to exersizing a muscle.
These same tools were developed to study the effect of yogic meditation on the brain, and studies that used this technology in conjunction with yoga training found that similar mindstates could be acheived in a fraction of the time with the neural feedback provided by a computer (that is, giving you visual and auditory feedback of yoru current brain state, allowing you to consciously change it).
This may sound very blue-sky, but my younger sister has been undergoing biofeedback therapy administered by a holistic doctor for a condition that hasn't even been completely diagnosed by several traditional psychologists, ideas ranging from bipolar disorder, manic depressive, ADHD, they haven't really decided yet. Since she started the therapy, however, she's much improved.
To help further clarify what i'm talking about and perhaps provide further information for the interested, one computer program that she used in therapy displayed three rocket ships on the screen. She was told that the left-hand rocket represented something like being bored and daydreamy, and the right-hand rocket represented something like hyperactivity and excitement, with the middle rocket ship representing Focus. The computer program is calibrated much like a lie-detector test, and the computer will reward a shift in her brain state towards Focused Attention with the graphical representation of the middle rocket ship rising, with similar reactions in the other two ships when slips into the other two brain states are detected by the electrodes on her head.
She can play pacman without touching a physical controller, after calibrating the software correctly. Her current exersizes with the gear, i beleive, are simply transcendental meditation rouines aided by the biofeedback software. I'm pretty sure i saw a getup like this pilot a flight sim (without a controller) back in college. This is a legitimate field of study, folks.
The hardware and software (i dont know if its exactly what my sister uses, but its damn close) can be found at www.brainfingers.com, and even includes a midi-mapper interface for the brainwave interpreter (as well as some games and i think a development kit)!
Before I get any replies of this nature, I'm not entirely in the loop with what my sister's current scholastic/health situation is, but I -do- know that my mother isn't disregarding or ignoring the help of traditional psychologists or allopathic doctors, but from what i can tell, has just sought out options for treatment that don't involve drugging her up (not that i'm opposed to recreational drugging, just habitual drugging).
I, for one, equate the modern condition of psychopharmacy to be in the same state as surgery in the dark ages. I have several examples of how this is so and why, but i think this post has gone on quite long enough anyway.
At that price point, why not just get an LCD projecter? Many of them have excellent contrast ratios, and can accept input from everything the samsung display can. Additionally, the ability to see an image clearly at about 51' diagonal is pretty neat (especially if you spend a lot of time lurking around your local theatrespace).
nothing to fear except an invasion of your privacy, perhaps, and getting some bandwidth wasted by large companies trolling your hardware for supposedly illegal files.
i think a better role-model than a mafia boss would be the main character of Office Space. When you're trapped in a repetative and mundane experience, the players i look up to are ones that find creative solutions to the boredom wraught by blind farming of capital and experience.
any good art leads you to more. How many people never heard of the cave allegory or gnosticism before seeing the matrix? I mean, for me, it was P.K.Dick that introduced me to the idea, and i never got around to reading -him- until Linklater mentions him in the movie "Waking Life" (yeah, ive had a lot of Dick to catch up on).
There are probably better ways of judging the movie than scoring how much time it spends regurgitating what everyone's said about the cave allegory already, but all of these methods are by and large predicated on waiting for the actual story to finish. You know..see where they're going with it.
i doubt humanity will be recognizable to itself in 10k years, if its still around at all.
They said it would take 100 years to each the moon, and it was done (all conspiracy theories aside) within that decade. The same was said about flight earlier in the century (many said it would be impossible).
How are extropian ideas like direct neural interfacing and immortality any different?
I don't see why this technology would be employed to re-live the past instead of reshaping reality, except maybe for the scenario of an involuntary human-machine symbiosis like the one portrayed in The Matrix.
if, in fact, we are living in a computer simulation, and if, in fact, the computer is designed to prevent us from realizing that, it would seem likely that it would allow the idea to be contextualized and dismissed, similarly to how many governments dismiss, sanitize, and damage-control its misdeeds; by hiding them out in the open.
at the risk of straying offtopic somewhat, I thought the question was "what do you get when you multiply six by nine?", when he pulled the scrabble tiles out of the bag in the third book.
i interpereted this as a kind of "indirect proof", whereby if you can actually prove that 6x9=42, you can prove literally anything.
i would imagine the growth of the singularity would be exponential, and planetary destruction would occur within minutes, if not seconds. If it happens at all, of course.
message boards are hosted on open relays or proxies?
This message board has a physical residence somewhere, and as such, its vulnerable to attack, and certainly deserving.
they dont require payment to ddos, screw with the site's domain name, deface, etc.
Ive seen a rehash in this thread of several sensible (and not so sensible) ideas regarding reducing spam, and making life tougher for spammers. One idea this article gave me, however, that i havent seen discussed much, involves these message boards that were alluded to in the article.
A digital social network (in the form of bullitain boards, etc) through which people can trade information about addresses, software, and spamming methods should be a trivial thing for a large digitally sophisticated crowd (ie slashdot) to find and then attack, either by trolling/flooding, or more outright destructive means.
This dosent address the actual hardware involved in sending and receiving spam, but rather constitutes a multi-front assault against a subculture. Maybe it wont stop all spam, but it would make it harder for people to get into the spam business, by either exposing this social infrastructure and diluting it, or disabling it violently by disrupting the virtual real-estate it resides in.
what i think a lot of people misread in Snowcrash and Diamond age (and sometimes gibson novels too) is that...let's see...the musical analogy works best, i think. The end of a peice isn't the entire raison d'etre of the composition, otherwise you'd have people who compose nothing but finales, and the best songs would be rushed through to get to the ending faster.
I think we all may be a little too used to fiction that reads like an essay, with a logical conclusion that neatly summs everything up that happened prior. Things rarely ever seem to really work out that way, no beginnings or endings, just a continuous process that we all catch glimpses of the middle of.
i'd also like to see what happens with the Data Haven that waterhouse helps construct in the present-day timeline of cryptonomicon, but that's heading in the wrong direction on the timeline, from what ive seen of quicksilver so far.
NS's books that ive read so far (zodiac, snow crash, the diamond age, cryptonomicon) all either take place in the past/present or the not-far-but-not-near future (ok, diamond age is pretty far future), seeing what effect the data haven from cryptonomicon would have on the hypothetical present day would be an interesting story of the present progressing into the future.
i loved things like that as well, i guess some people prefer their fiction terse and to the point, but compare the targeted meandering in cryptonomicon with a lot of the "useless" things you can do in the game Deus Ex (reading people's emails, datacubes, etc), that give you the feeling that you're immersed in a world instead of consuming a media product.
although this may be a messy solution, those emails cross onto a US server at -some point- in between them and you, so why not filter out from there unless a tax has been paid to the gateway? i dunno if this is technically feasible or not, but the internet is a web, not a cloud, and there are a finite number of wires through which spam can travel into this country from another one.
it should be fairly simple to add an exception for "non commercial", with heavy fines attached for an excempted user sending the wrong kinds of email.
have one of these connect to a HUD embedded into your glasses. type on a projected infra-red keyboard. no more pda!
what super-important process was your graphics card doing in your desktop environment to begin with?
i think this is mostly just picking up the slack left by steadily increasing hardware performance. Like, for example, a thousand dollars of computer hardware is massive overkill for what most people use a computer for. Now, its still overkill, just less blatantly and massively.
i haven't had any problems with my 1.33, all im using is one of those Volcano II's, a couple of case fans, and a topside blowhole. Nothing fancy, just the stock fans that came with my Lian-Li.
relying on sound pressure waves has its limitations, especially in noisy or crowded areas. The number of microphones to reliably process everyone's conversations would have to grow exponentially with the amount of noise in the area. Relying on a visual information source might be trickier given the current state of computational power, but from a pure signal standpoint, it isn't effected by the ambient noise level or interferance from other conversations. it basically lets you sidestep the problem of sorting out who is saying what. In the process, of course, other problems are created, but hey, that's what happens.
I'm not too worried about the whole thing, the more resources they dump into this kind of foolishness, the more shit people will get away with as The Powers That Be get complacent in their technological superiority. Biometrics, for example, is silly and dosen't work. Once we waste enough money on this sort of thing, itll be abandoned for surveillance purposes and integrated into consumer electronics in flashy ways.
laser microphones have been widely used in james-bondesque espionage situations for years (those of us who've played Splinter Cell were forced to use one more than once), basically a laser microphone measures the vibrations on a plate of glass and tunes into conversations by measuring the vibrations.
Sound pressure waves cause the density of air to fluctuate, which would bend the path of a beam of light travelling through it.
basically, you'd need more than one laser in this situation, i think, you'd need like a 3d array of them.
actually, forget lasers. Focused radio waves (which are just like light but with a slower frequency) would react to sound pressure waves too.
yeah, a lot of asian languages rely on internal vowel sounds that make lip-reading nearly impossible. Maybe if they used lasers to measure the sound pressure waves, or vibrations of the voicebox in conjunction with the lipreading.
size and weather-resistance would be reason enough to utilize it. I beleive i've mentioned these above. Speakers take up space, and they let dust and moisture in.