Regarding your sig; That would explain the bloody fingerprints on my keyboard after installation and the strange buffalo headed apparition hovering over my printer... anybody got some sage???
It get's worse, is the single driver the President? Is the bus a U.N. bus full of kids from around the world on a field trip? What are the social risks/benefits given each choice, repercussion, on and on. So many variables, so many weighting factors. A machine could in fact make a logical choice, but there will still be hell to pay no matter the choice.
A completely robotic transportation service would include collision prevention and operate in some ways like electronic networks today. In fact, by that time, we might be able look seriously at maglev highways (using room temperature superconductors in the highways themselves serving dual purpose as the magnetic beds for maglev traffic and large scale near 0% loss conductors for electrical grids.) The advantage is that you can make vehicles that are physically incapable of collision. Under such a design, extremely low power consumption methods would still allow people to move at considerable speed (over 100 MPH, 160 KPH.)
That doesn't mean that other more important forces facing humanity won't demand the emergence of machine ethics at least as soon. With the growing advent of human beings abuse and nastiness to one another, it may in the end be up to the robots to help us get our abusive natures squared away. Ultimately all jobs will be done faster and better by robots... ALL JOBS. They will be smarter, fairer and more compassionate only if we choose to make them that way, and the price of not making them that way leads to a dystopian climax for humanity with almost absolute certainty. They will be ubiquitous, touching every aspect of our lives. They will either support us in becoming what we may become, or they'll take our warring idiocy to its final obvious conclusion.
We need to extrapolate the inevitable trends now. We need to think ahead. We need to plan for our retirement as a working species and begin to invent what we will do with unlimited labor and intelligence at our beck and call. Its time to get our primate instincts under strict control, and reengineer ourselves and our societies. It is pressingly important for this species to give birth to its own successors. Welcome Homo Resurectio, the Awakened Man.
You provide something to someone for nothing and they think they're entitled to even more for nothing. Welcome to monkeys... who grab everything that isn't nailed down and run off to the hills with it... you ever seen what happens to stores during a riot? You set the expectations at the beginning. So here's a bit of useful information. The nature of an upset is that there are several parts to it. Almost always there is the experience of a promise or expectation being broken (even when the promise is unspoken or even assumed on the part of the person who's is upset.) Next there is a goal, intent or desire which has been denied or caused to fail. Last there is a breakdown in communication, misunderstandings on both sides and a body of assumptions that are invalid almost certainly by both parties.
The solution is surprisingly simple. In plain no nonsense terms right on your webpage, explain your business model. Have it be fun, make a cartoon that walks people through the conversation.
A) We are awesome good guys who made this product for you to use for free so we can build a business around supporting it.
B) Though we're awesome guys, here to save you time and share a world class goodie with you, we're in the end business people, and we have to get paid some way. Imagine we're in the car business and we've given you a free car, we aren't going to charge you for the car, we will be charging you for servicing the car.
C) You might think that unfair, I mean we gave you the cool free car, why not service it for free too, well we could, and then we'd go out of business in a week and you'd be stuck with the car and nobody to service it. Bad for you, bad for us.
D) If you don't want our free car with paid for service, please feel free to go across the street to the guys who will only be too thrilled to sell you a car, sell you service, sell you options, sell you insurance, sell you undercoating and left winded bacon stretchers and gawd knows what else. I think you'll find we're an incredibly good deal, we just aren't 100% free for everything under the sun, and really if you think past the "I don't wanna pay nuthin!" mentality you need dedicated engineers who will be there to support you, which means you need us to get paid so we'll be here for you.
So here's our promise. Our product is free, our service is fair in price and excellent in quality, and our value is second to none. If that's not enough, please by all mean don't use us. We only want customers who are clear about the value we provide and willing to share our passion with our product and their success.
When your sales people (you have sales people?) talk with prospective clients, have them show the cartoon. Make it a point that your value proposition is spectacular, and that you are good businessmen too, you don't gouge your customers and they keep coming back for service. Explain to them. Nobody has a problem with razors. That brand new Trak 47 Shaving System you saw on the Superbowl halftime costs only $6 and then you have to come back at $15 a pop for the replacement blades. Or that printer from Lexmark that only cost $45, but the complete set of factory standard ink cartridges cost $65, and man when you use the factory ink the prints are freaking gorgeous. Its all about value and fair trade. We give you the free part so you'll come back for the pay part. That's not only fair, it's a great deal and you'd be a fool to pass it up./p>
For Customers who are currently upset. Have an honest no nonsense conversation. Do you like the product? Do you think it should be supported? How do you think we should pay for that support? Do the math. You can pay for the product, or pay for the support, or wait a hundred years and hope somebody will make a program and record a thousand hours of free support for downloading. Of course during that 100 years you'll miss out on a trillion dollars of business. That ain't us. With us you pay for support. Or you can just stop using the product and we'll be happy to suggest an alternative. Thank you for doing business with -Fill in the Blank-.
What you say is true, but what you fail to mention is that the dent we've made in these problems is in many cases superficial, and the distance we have yet to go is overwhelming. For Example: Still about half the landmass on the planet is some kind of war zone, and a bit less than 10% of the world's landmass is the scene of serious war and social conflict and its consequences. If you want to go here. The good news is that the actual number of people directly impacted by war and social conflict has dropped markedly, the bad news is that the number of people who have come under the influence of potentially warlike regimes has dramatically increased and the potential for war has actually risen (think Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East.)
As for poverty, though we've made marked strides in life threatening poverty and human suffering on the planet, chronic poverty remains a terrible problem for as much nearly a third of the planet. One in seven people in the world suffers chronic hunger and malnutrition. Here are a couple good sources of the state of the world's poor Poverty Stats and Facts and Hunger Facts and Stats and any suggestion that we've got the problem well in hand is just a bit premature.
And last there's ignorance. There is maybe a glimmer here with the advent of Humanitarian gifts of computers with satellite links for the third world and online education like the Khan Academy. However, the vast majority of the third world still has no infrastructure, no technology, little educational opportunity, and radical religious groups in many places that are dedicated to destroying secular education and particularly education for girls and women. So there's the inherent ignorance in places with out resources, the impact is literally on billions of people. Then there are the people who are being subjected to strict religious education and indoctrination, accounting for billions more. Finally there are the masses of the world who are the victims of government propaganda, poor public schooling, and a society that neither respects nor acknowledges intellectual performance or free thinking. Control the memes and control the culture. Here's a test. Sing the MacDonalds "Bic Mac" jiggle. Okay, now sing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" or perhaps "The Star Spangled Banner". Notice something? The fact that first world's head is full doesn't ensure the fact that the content isn't fecal in nature. We have a long way to go to eliminate ignorance, deceit, mysticism, prejudice and the purposeful misleading of large groups of people by their governments. Or perhaps you see something don't
Correction, Google has plenty, you turned up nothing, you need to look a little deeper. I had no problem Googling these by the way. Here are a couple facilities: Genspace and The DNA Learning Center. There have been articles about them in Wired, Discover Magazine and I'm not certain but I think right here on Slashdot. There is a strong movement to Open Source genetic technologies all over the country and make small very basic public laboratories available for student starting from Middle School. These kids are the future biohackers and they will be just as skilled with their tech as we computer nerds are with ours, only they'll be playing with the stuff life is made out of. Both very cool and terribly disconcerting. By the way, there are also a growing number of people experimenting at home with biotech. The hardest part is getting the basic reagents and buying the glassware without ending up on a DEA or Homeland Security Government Watchlist.
I can't believe you couldn't find information on the researchers in Australia. It was the source of huge controversy. The original researchers wanted to report about what they did in the hope of preventing other researchers from making the same mistake. Security experts however were deeply concerned that this would be the blue print for a bioweapon of unprecedented lethality. You can start reading here. The modification made to the mouse pox virus was easily translatable to human small pox, and subsequent research suggested it would be possible to engineer cold and flu virii with this mutation making them "Virtually Unstoppable Plagues". A bug with a 100% lethality is actually no threat as long as it has a short incubation period, because such a monster would burn through the local population so fast, it would leave no infection vectors only after a couple weeks. Still in that time, it could kill hundreds of thousands of people, more in dense populations like Tokyo or Manhattan. On the other hand, a virus with a long incubation period like, HIV, would be scary indeed, because each infected person could spread it to thousands of others before they even knew they were sick. Please don't call bullshit unless you're willing to do more than the most cursory of Slashdot searches. Besides throwing up FUD you only hurt your own credibility.
As for bunker living, I'd rather be with my friends if the end approached. The twits who think they can wait out a nuclear winter or radioactive contamination, or even massive social collapse in a hole in the ground have no idea whatsoever of what they're in for and those who perished early will almost certainly be the ones who got off easy. So I don't worry about things over which I have no control. I work on the things I can change and I stay informed just to know which way the wind it blowing. Avoid bad news if you can, and if you can't deal with it courageously. Sticking your head in the sand by the way, or watching FOX news (which is tantamount to sticking your head in a septic tank) is its own punishment.
Read "The Hot Zone" nonfiction story about USAMRID and how our government works with biohazards and addresses potential bioweapons. If you want an explicit description of the biosafe levels go here. There was even a case of a professor receiving samples of
Anthrax for research at his home address. That would now be a serious no, no.
I want a Roomba with a Taser and a water canon... "Halt, you're trespassing, if you do not lay down with your hands over your head and wait for the authorities to arrive, I will be forced to neutralize you!" Yeah like what can a vacuum cleaner do to meEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!. "Thank you for complying, the authorities will be here in 3 minutes." Of course if it had one of those RoboCop ED 209 errors... I'd just have to learn to live with it.
And what makes you think they won't connect the AI to everything? It'll start out Google's answer to Siri then boom, we're all buggered.
Oh yeah, we've done such a great job cleaning up war, poverty and ignorance...this global climate thing should be a snap.
Nobody is worried about countries nuking each other. We have every reason to be concerned however, that some knucklehead currently living in Saudi Arabia purchased black market plutonium from the former Soviet Union, to fashion a low yield thermonuclear device that they will FedEx to downtown Manhattan.
I'm sorry, perhaps you didn't read about the teenagers doing recombinant DNA in a public learning lab in Manhattan, or the Australians who ACCIDENNTALLY figured out away to turn the common cold into an unstoppable plague, or even perhaps the fact that up until recently, a number of biotech researchers had zone 3 biotoxins mailed to their homes for research.
There's a whole lot of stupid going on out there and the increasing price for even small mistakes is accelerating at a scary clip. Wait till kids can make gray goo in school... the world is getting very exciting. Are feeling the pucker?
Your right, the article is about a a larval snail and the fact that is seriously imperiled by the fact its shell is dissolving away. You could say "Gone With The Wind" was a story about the spoiled daughter of a plantation owner. However, I'd guess it would be a fair argument that without the larger context of slavery and the Civil War the story would have no point or significance. The Snail is endangered because the ocean is too acid and carbonate shells are being dissolved. By the way. this article spotlighted a single species. This is a problem with crab and lobster larva, reef larva, and the larval forms of shell fish. It even includes carbonate secreting algae, part of the phytoplankton. All secrete carbonate shells, all are suffering growing environmental stress from rising acid levels. It doesn't matter how this is received. Facts don't have an opinion about how people will accept them. Gravity doesn't care whether or not you believe in it... it works just the same either way.
There are a wealth of studies, including the study which indicates that the carbonate shell protect the plant or animal from UVa and UVb. That life with damages carbonate shells performs poorly compares to life with healthy carbonate shells. Here's the kicker, those phytoplankton are a critical part of the ocean ability to sink carbon through photosynthesis. So excessive carbon in the form of carbonic acid in the ocean actually drops the oceans carbon carrying capacity, and this is the largest carbon sink on he planet so we should be properly concerned.
Currently to date Eutrophication has a larger overall impact on ocean chemistry, but this is not a stable environment and we are playing with too many variables. We just need to cut back on the carbon.
Not flawed at all, Gaia is and has always been fine with or without the presence of human beings. It just seems a shame to spawn a sentient race only to have it snuff itself out because it couldn't get its own basist primate instincts under control. We have so much to offer, if we just be responsible for our monkey urges. You know, stop slinging shit, stop trying to take it all, and stop freaking out at those different then ourselves. These are all hardwired behaviors, and most people simply operate below the conscious threshold necessary to curb their instincts instead preferring to go off like serial time bombs crapping all over society and the scenery at large. Gaia might miss us, but the universe without us is poorer for the lack.
No, I know exactly what this article is talking about, what it means, and what it means in the context of several THOUSAND other fine works on the changing environment and its predicted impact to life on the planet. How many science articles do read a month, I'm in at around 500 (I'm a speed reader.) I'm conversant on topic as disparate as Cosmology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Biology (biochemistry, ecology, genetics, genomics, proteomics, epigenetics, taxonomy, botany, medicine...) Chemistry (Organic and Inorganic), Physics, Nanotechnology, Computer and Information Science (Robotics, Prosthetics, AI and Human Augmentation) Meteorology, Oceanography, Paleontology/Archeology/Anthropology, Sociology... I could go on if you think it would make a difference. You want to talk about the recently discovered rogue planet or the comet that will illuminate the skies a year from now or perhaps you want to have a conversation about the shape and structure of the protein which assembles in groups of four forming the calcium channel found in your cells, or maybe interesting new discoveries involving spites and goblins generated by lightenig. Perhaps you'd like to discuss the rise of slime, how Jelly Fish in the ocean have begun multiplying prodigiously, and experiments indicate its their way of preparing for imminent disaster so that no matter how bad things get some jellyfish will survive. Then again we could talk about changing seasonal temperatures and the global impact on spring arriving weeks earlier than it used to and how that is impacting global agriculture.
Irreducible complexity is a sham created by ideologues to avoid facing simple reality. I would argue the climate change denialists fall into the same camp. When the evidence becomes overwhelming, and my friend, it is now officially overwhelming, they have no sane response so they condemn the scientists. I am all for technological solutions, but this endless head in the sand is getting ludicrous. Here, let me help you. If you'd like to understand what this article means, I'd be happy to give you some reading assignments starting with a rather lengthy visit to Wikipedia, until you have some idea how the carbon cycle works, what a food chain is, what zooplankton are, to role that carbonaceous larvae play in the big picture of the ocean food chain, why the effects of CO3 in ocean water concentrates in the northern temperate latitudes, and what the long term impact of a population collapse results is for krill, smelt and sardines, herring and the larger predators that rely on these fish populations. We are already seeing mass die-off of sea birds all over the world, and we know they are dying of starvation. We are already seeing a collapse of numerous fisheries world wide (both for over fishing and destruction of habitat, but there may already be a significant impact to small fish.) If anything I'm saying is unclear to you, or is hard for you to understand, I have literally MOUNTAINS of articles to refer you to from top researcher and virtually unimpeachable sources, and please, anyone on the payroll of Exon-Mobil, or BP by definition is not an unimpeachable source (there's this weird thing called scientific objectivity... it involves going out with an open mind and coming up with the theories that fit the test results not the other way around.)
If there is something that I said that suggests to you that I don't understand this article, please feel free to enlighten me, be specific. I'm not infallible, just incredibly well informed. So rather than just pointing a finger and claiming something please tell me what you think I missed that you picked up on in this article. That would be a productive conversation.
And you're not getting it. This isn't a slow change. Natural changes occur over millions of years, This has precipitated in just a few human generations. It's looking more and more like an exponential change, because multiple feedbacks are beginning to tilt. Melting permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane and CO2, the continued slash and burn of the tropical forests around the world. All these sinks are breaking at the same time because we failed to address the problem and so now instead of a linear progress of the atmospheric carbon we planned for, we're beginning to see what may in fact be very nonlinear results. Unpredictable results which in a sentence mean results for which we will be unable to plan. The rate of change that "A Natural System" can happily accommodate is about 500 to 5,000 times slower than the rate we're inducing currently. You are perfectly correct that life will succeed and evolve its way out of any mess we make. But first virtually everything dies. Life will go on, it just won't be with anything resembling a human being in the neighborhood.
The only sudden changes we need to bring are the changes surrounding the use of our planet as a toilet for our industry. That should be sudden, and it should begin some time yesterday. Its becoming alarmingly clear that we've already missed the boat to get out of this without taking a beating. Now the outlooks grow increasingly dismal. However, it still doesn't have to be fatal. We are going to lose virtually all the iconic animals you're familiar with in this century. All the big animals of Africa (Elephants, Lions, Cheetahs, Giraffes, Hippo...) and Asia... gone. Virtually all of the higher primates, done. Whales, dolphins, fish, and crustaceans are currently a coin toss, but the prospects are pretty grim. Nothing has happened at this level in millions of years and we are busy cutting the floor out from beneath our own feet. There's an old saying. When you find yourself at the bottom of a deep hole, STOP DIGGING.
Conflating the fact that human beings are given to seeing faces everywhere (its part of our primate survival hard wiring and allows mothers and infants to bond at birth), with seeing and appreciating the fractal and inherently consistent nature of the universe is at once myopic, and at the same time deeply ignorant. From the birth of the Renaissance geniuses like Leonardo DaVinci saw the recurring patterns of nature. Noticing how the number Phi shows up again and again in physical systems from the budlets in the heart of a daisy to the swirl of a galaxy is not self delusion but the human mind extracting meaning from the vast cacophony of the universe. The fact that your body is self similar on many scales, as is our planet and the very universe itself, and that these self similarities transcend scales of space and time is illuminating, is awe inspiring. You are indeed a product of this universe, you bear the mark of its rhythms and harmonies. You have 5 fold symmetry, because one of your oldest ancestors was related to a starfish (echinoderm) you don't find it the least bit fascinating that the shape of you brain models the shape of the universe itself and is in fact the universe attempting to understand itself. Are you so apathetic that the shear mystery and magnificence of life in this place doesn't occasionally move you tears of joy or dumbstruck wonder?
If so, than I am so sorry for you. You've been born into the greatest show ever and can't seem to take your eyes off your own feet. By the way, nice shoes.
We are all connected. Our posts, Karma Whores and Trolls alike, give birth to Slashdot. Our insights and banal pontification ripple through time. From womb to tomb, some folks are addicted to spending all their waking hours brain farting here and the best you can hope for is to be up wind.
Yeah those goofy scientists... what will they say next. New York being stomped flat by a super storm? The hottest years in history all being in the last decade? The upper atmosphere colder than any time on record. The oceans turning into a carbonated beverage! What do they know? Let's use up all the coal and oil and gas. What could possible go wrong?
Because whats going extinct is at the bottom of the food chain. It means everything above it goes extinct... and no, this hasn't happened in hundreds of millions of years. The impact is profound, and sudden (on biological scales) and devastating to all life on the planet. You and your children will be impacted. The ocean covers 3/4 of the planets surface and people in Kansas are impacted by the ocean directly. Someone is telling you that you have cancer, and your response is "Tell me when I hit stage four, then I'll worry." Interesting, but loony. Perhaps a little chemo and surgery now are indicated, Hmmmm.
Okay, lets put the dots really close together for you. No, the oceans acidity doesn't change all the time. That last time it changed like this the planet changed from a snowball into a sauna bath and it followed perhaps the largest extinction indecent in the planet's history (read up on the snowball earth.) This is not a minor change. This isn't a "Okay so we lose the parrotfish.. who the 'F' cares about parrotfish?" This is a global change in ocean chemistry attacking one of the primary constituents of zooplankton.
I'm guessing you're not a biologist, so let me give you an example. If something came along and wiped out all the grass. You're immediate response would be big whoop, no more mowing. The problem is that all grains are grasses. So everything that eats grass or grain get's impacted immediately. No more bread, or rice, or oats or barely or corn or millet (you want to think about what proportion of the human diet is grain based, its the only thing keeping large parts of the third world alive.) So no more milk. No more beef. In fact Cows, Pigs, Chickens, Turkeys, Horses, Deer, basically every grass eating animal, mammals including rodents at the bottom of the food chain, birds, insects... all gone, see yah, then the predators that eat them... like you and me... gone, gone, gone. Can you see the implications now. No Grass BAD!!!
So, animals with shells all have a larval stages and are at the bottom of the oceans food chain. Anything that kills them is EQUALLY BAD for all the critters up the food chain (again that includes us human beings.) The sudden loss of zooplankton causes a subsequent super bloom in phytoplakton (also a potentially bad thing all by itself.) This is not some far off maybe someday event. Coral Reef are bleaching this very moment as I write (one of the largest and more diverse ecosystems on the planet responsible for more kinds of fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, you name it) is on the verge of catastrophic collapse. You can't geoengineer extinct. Gone is gone. You think the cost of cutting back on burning carbon is expensive, figure out how much it'll cost replace the services that nature provides for free with manmade alternatives. You can't unscramble an egg. You can't fix this once you're satisfied its broken, because you'll be in a moving train barreling down the tracks and the only thing you'll be able to do is gird yourself for the crash.
Its all tied together. Its all based on Carbon. There's too much where it doesn't belong and now its beginning to be a real problem. Soon it will be a problem for which human beings will be unable to address. Why would anybody with the vaguest hint of sanity let something get so bad. Sorry, its inconvenient. Expensive. Even hurtful to developing people, who always take the brunt of what fails in the world. Simply letting it get worse will ensure the impact on those same people will be nothing less than devastating. Playing Russian Roulette with the future of humanity is far more irresponsible than acting now to reduce carbon, improve efficiency, develop alternative energy sources, and come up with new technologies to better sequester the byproducts of our civilization. Wake up, the coffee is burning! Right Now.
I don't know what planet you live on, but the one I live on is tangled up in bureaucrats and a collapsing middle class. Think for a moment. We haven't been on the moon in nearly 45 years. You think we can put enough people on Mars to make a difference if we break our ecosystem? By when? The numbers are all in. The hottest years in history all this decade. The ocean is rising. The oceans chemistry it getting dangerously unbalanced. Please read about the rise of slim. Lakes dying and changing to Hydrogen Sulfide cycles below a 100 feet. The list is huge, but its all point at the inescapable certainty than man is toxic and poisoning his mater. I agree that a human diaspora to the stars is the answer, but destroying the ecosystem before you can leave is just stupid.
Right, because we all know its not like major mineral wealth producers like gold and oil companies have ever engages in shady practices. Let's just get it straight. Profit is the motive in a game called "All's Fair." Anything goes, no holds barred. Murder, you bet. Mercs by the batallion, whatever. Political assassination, What part of "no Holds Barred" is unclear? Shell oil has slaughtered thousands of Africans to get "Their" oil, and made certain through a masterwork of bribery, that the local get no value from their own mineral wealth, but do get stiffed with the environmental disaster.
That's because Bush was a figure head, and three days into his administration, Mr. Obama was informed that he needed to get with the program (we're over due for a Presidential assassination.) Why else would you have the agent of the shadows, er Joe Biden staring over your shoulder every day? No, elections are a farce, and presidents are figure heads. No real difference. Its a passion play friends, full of noise and fury signifying nothing. Its classical misdirection, make you look over on the right coast as the bankers pick your pockets and shave you like a rube. Go ahead. Hate the ugly dog toy. GGgggrrrrrr. Stop noticing the hand shaking the toy GGgggrrrrrr.. Good dog. Now shut up and fetch my slippers.
Why do you people keep fighting the party thing? Can't you see how easily you're being bought and sold? Just have someone put a tat on your head the reads "SUCKER!!!". So everyone knows who you are right off the bat. Get a good deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.
In 1980, we had a choice to take the country one way or another. One way required hard work, personal responsibility and integrity, perhaps even a little self sacrifice and brutally honest critical self appraisal, that and follow a man with the sex appeal of a Georgia peanut farmer. The other way was to follow the Candyman, and all we had to do wash flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet and take our new role as consumption units, it didn't hurt that this man reminded us of our Fathers, had rosy cheeks (at least the top ones from what I could see) and had been talking to us in long deep tones on the boxes in our living rooms since the 50s.
So here we are 30+ years. The Bill of Rights for all intents and purposes no longer exists. Huge tracts of the Constitution have been paved over, and we are now a corporate state where government of the business, for the business and by the business is the order of the day. So this is a moot conversation. Its a totally masturbatory exercise predicated on a the fantasy that we have some significant degree of freedom. To paraphrase "George Calrin" you live in the illusion of free choice, but in fact your choices have been diminished to paper or plastic, with or without cheese, diet or classic. Businesses have been give carte blanche to lay waste to your mind. If it was discovered that they could literally pump commercials up your ass, make no mistake, legally mandated daily commercial enemas would arrive with the governments blessing in about 72 hours.
So where do we begin. You want to return human rights to human beings, okay. You want to promote the freedom to have your entertainment/work devices respect your virtual personal space, wonderful. First you have to address bringing the nation to another turning point, because we're currently barreling down the tracks we're on with a full head of steam, and there simply isn't a stop on this track called your personal human dignity.
Just as an aside, I'm all for that new direction, you're just going to have to deal with a lot of repercussions and folks who have tremendous wealth and power who are perfectly warm and fuzzy the way things are right now.
Sorry, but raising a generation of children that agreeably comply to carry a tracking device, is a popcorn fart away from creating a society where our government requires each and every one of us to carry a tracking device. Imaging the up side. No Crime goes unpunished, almost instantly. Nobody ever get's lost. You can find almost anybody for a price. You can manage traffic, and human resource requirement to a person.
Of course the government always knows where you are, what you're doing, what you're saying. Hell, this is a future that would have chafed Big Brother's ass. You want to see what happens when you reduce people to sheep. Witless, mindless working units. I'm sorry but you are talking about planting the seeds for a dystopian future for which I want no part.
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Regarding your sig; That would explain the bloody fingerprints on my keyboard after installation and the strange buffalo headed apparition hovering over my printer... anybody got some sage???
It get's worse, is the single driver the President? Is the bus a U.N. bus full of kids from around the world on a field trip? What are the social risks/benefits given each choice, repercussion, on and on. So many variables, so many weighting factors. A machine could in fact make a logical choice, but there will still be hell to pay no matter the choice.
No, they'll throw in a case of Rice-O-Roni, the San Francisco treat to be divided by your heirs evenly.
A completely robotic transportation service would include collision prevention and operate in some ways like electronic networks today. In fact, by that time, we might be able look seriously at maglev highways (using room temperature superconductors in the highways themselves serving dual purpose as the magnetic beds for maglev traffic and large scale near 0% loss conductors for electrical grids.) The advantage is that you can make vehicles that are physically incapable of collision. Under such a design, extremely low power consumption methods would still allow people to move at considerable speed (over 100 MPH, 160 KPH.)
That doesn't mean that other more important forces facing humanity won't demand the emergence of machine ethics at least as soon. With the growing advent of human beings abuse and nastiness to one another, it may in the end be up to the robots to help us get our abusive natures squared away. Ultimately all jobs will be done faster and better by robots... ALL JOBS. They will be smarter, fairer and more compassionate only if we choose to make them that way, and the price of not making them that way leads to a dystopian climax for humanity with almost absolute certainty. They will be ubiquitous, touching every aspect of our lives. They will either support us in becoming what we may become, or they'll take our warring idiocy to its final obvious conclusion.
We need to extrapolate the inevitable trends now. We need to think ahead. We need to plan for our retirement as a working species and begin to invent what we will do with unlimited labor and intelligence at our beck and call. Its time to get our primate instincts under strict control, and reengineer ourselves and our societies. It is pressingly important for this species to give birth to its own successors. Welcome Homo Resurectio, the Awakened Man.
Only compared to an equal car that is free and requires paid for service... read in context please... silly rabbit.
You provide something to someone for nothing and they think they're entitled to even more for nothing. Welcome to monkeys... who grab everything that isn't nailed down and run off to the hills with it... you ever seen what happens to stores during a riot? You set the expectations at the beginning. So here's a bit of useful information. The nature of an upset is that there are several parts to it. Almost always there is the experience of a promise or expectation being broken (even when the promise is unspoken or even assumed on the part of the person who's is upset.) Next there is a goal, intent or desire which has been denied or caused to fail. Last there is a breakdown in communication, misunderstandings on both sides and a body of assumptions that are invalid almost certainly by both parties.
The solution is surprisingly simple. In plain no nonsense terms right on your webpage, explain your business model. Have it be fun, make a cartoon that walks people through the conversation.
A) We are awesome good guys who made this product for you to use for free so we can build a business around supporting it.
B) Though we're awesome guys, here to save you time and share a world class goodie with you, we're in the end business people, and we have to get paid some way. Imagine we're in the car business and we've given you a free car, we aren't going to charge you for the car, we will be charging you for servicing the car.
C) You might think that unfair, I mean we gave you the cool free car, why not service it for free too, well we could, and then we'd go out of business in a week and you'd be stuck with the car and nobody to service it. Bad for you, bad for us.
D) If you don't want our free car with paid for service, please feel free to go across the street to the guys who will only be too thrilled to sell you a car, sell you service, sell you options, sell you insurance, sell you undercoating and left winded bacon stretchers and gawd knows what else. I think you'll find we're an incredibly good deal, we just aren't 100% free for everything under the sun, and really if you think past the "I don't wanna pay nuthin!" mentality you need dedicated engineers who will be there to support you, which means you need us to get paid so we'll be here for you.
So here's our promise. Our product is free, our service is fair in price and excellent in quality, and our value is second to none. If that's not enough, please by all mean don't use us. We only want customers who are clear about the value we provide and willing to share our passion with our product and their success.
When your sales people (you have sales people?) talk with prospective clients, have them show the cartoon. Make it a point that your value proposition is spectacular, and that you are good businessmen too, you don't gouge your customers and they keep coming back for service. Explain to them. Nobody has a problem with razors. That brand new Trak 47 Shaving System you saw on the Superbowl halftime costs only $6 and then you have to come back at $15 a pop for the replacement blades. Or that printer from Lexmark that only cost $45, but the complete set of factory standard ink cartridges cost $65, and man when you use the factory ink the prints are freaking gorgeous. Its all about value and fair trade. We give you the free part so you'll come back for the pay part. That's not only fair, it's a great deal and you'd be a fool to pass it up./p>
For Customers who are currently upset. Have an honest no nonsense conversation. Do you like the product? Do you think it should be supported? How do you think we should pay for that support? Do the math. You can pay for the product, or pay for the support, or wait a hundred years and hope somebody will make a program and record a thousand hours of free support for downloading. Of course during that 100 years you'll miss out on a trillion dollars of business. That ain't us. With us you pay for support. Or you can just stop using the product and we'll be happy to suggest an alternative. Thank you for doing business with -Fill in the Blank-.
What you say is true, but what you fail to mention is that the dent we've made in these problems is in many cases superficial, and the distance we have yet to go is overwhelming. For Example: Still about half the landmass on the planet is some kind of war zone, and a bit less than 10% of the world's landmass is the scene of serious war and social conflict and its consequences. If you want to go here. The good news is that the actual number of people directly impacted by war and social conflict has dropped markedly, the bad news is that the number of people who have come under the influence of potentially warlike regimes has dramatically increased and the potential for war has actually risen (think Muslim Brotherhood throughout the Middle East.)
As for poverty, though we've made marked strides in life threatening poverty and human suffering on the planet, chronic poverty remains a terrible problem for as much nearly a third of the planet. One in seven people in the world suffers chronic hunger and malnutrition. Here are a couple good sources of the state of the world's poor Poverty Stats and Facts and Hunger Facts and Stats and any suggestion that we've got the problem well in hand is just a bit premature.
And last there's ignorance. There is maybe a glimmer here with the advent of Humanitarian gifts of computers with satellite links for the third world and online education like the Khan Academy. However, the vast majority of the third world still has no infrastructure, no technology, little educational opportunity, and radical religious groups in many places that are dedicated to destroying secular education and particularly education for girls and women. So there's the inherent ignorance in places with out resources, the impact is literally on billions of people. Then there are the people who are being subjected to strict religious education and indoctrination, accounting for billions more. Finally there are the masses of the world who are the victims of government propaganda, poor public schooling, and a society that neither respects nor acknowledges intellectual performance or free thinking. Control the memes and control the culture. Here's a test. Sing the MacDonalds "Bic Mac" jiggle. Okay, now sing the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" or perhaps "The Star Spangled Banner". Notice something? The fact that first world's head is full doesn't ensure the fact that the content isn't fecal in nature. We have a long way to go to eliminate ignorance, deceit, mysticism, prejudice and the purposeful misleading of large groups of people by their governments. Or perhaps you see something don't
Correction, Google has plenty, you turned up nothing, you need to look a little deeper. I had no problem Googling these by the way. Here are a couple facilities: Genspace and The DNA Learning Center. There have been articles about them in Wired, Discover Magazine and I'm not certain but I think right here on Slashdot. There is a strong movement to Open Source genetic technologies all over the country and make small very basic public laboratories available for student starting from Middle School. These kids are the future biohackers and they will be just as skilled with their tech as we computer nerds are with ours, only they'll be playing with the stuff life is made out of. Both very cool and terribly disconcerting. By the way, there are also a growing number of people experimenting at home with biotech. The hardest part is getting the basic reagents and buying the glassware without ending up on a DEA or Homeland Security Government Watchlist.
I can't believe you couldn't find information on the researchers in Australia. It was the source of huge controversy. The original researchers wanted to report about what they did in the hope of preventing other researchers from making the same mistake. Security experts however were deeply concerned that this would be the blue print for a bioweapon of unprecedented lethality. You can start reading here. The modification made to the mouse pox virus was easily translatable to human small pox, and subsequent research suggested it would be possible to engineer cold and flu virii with this mutation making them "Virtually Unstoppable Plagues". A bug with a 100% lethality is actually no threat as long as it has a short incubation period, because such a monster would burn through the local population so fast, it would leave no infection vectors only after a couple weeks. Still in that time, it could kill hundreds of thousands of people, more in dense populations like Tokyo or Manhattan. On the other hand, a virus with a long incubation period like, HIV, would be scary indeed, because each infected person could spread it to thousands of others before they even knew they were sick. Please don't call bullshit unless you're willing to do more than the most cursory of Slashdot searches. Besides throwing up FUD you only hurt your own credibility.
As for bunker living, I'd rather be with my friends if the end approached. The twits who think they can wait out a nuclear winter or radioactive contamination, or even massive social collapse in a hole in the ground have no idea whatsoever of what they're in for and those who perished early will almost certainly be the ones who got off easy. So I don't worry about things over which I have no control. I work on the things I can change and I stay informed just to know which way the wind it blowing. Avoid bad news if you can, and if you can't deal with it courageously. Sticking your head in the sand by the way, or watching FOX news (which is tantamount to sticking your head in a septic tank) is its own punishment.
Read "The Hot Zone" nonfiction story about USAMRID and how our government works with biohazards and addresses potential bioweapons. If you want an explicit description of the biosafe levels go here. There was even a case of a professor receiving samples of Anthrax for research at his home address. That would now be a serious no, no.
I'm sorry AI, but do you sound a little like this guy in person?
I want a Roomba with a Taser and a water canon... "Halt, you're trespassing, if you do not lay down with your hands over your head and wait for the authorities to arrive, I will be forced to neutralize you!" Yeah like what can a vacuum cleaner do to meEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!. "Thank you for complying, the authorities will be here in 3 minutes." Of course if it had one of those RoboCop ED 209 errors... I'd just have to learn to live with it.
And what makes you think they won't connect the AI to everything? It'll start out Google's answer to Siri then boom, we're all buggered.
Oh yeah, we've done such a great job cleaning up war, poverty and ignorance...this global climate thing should be a snap.
Nobody is worried about countries nuking each other. We have every reason to be concerned however, that some knucklehead currently living in Saudi Arabia purchased black market plutonium from the former Soviet Union, to fashion a low yield thermonuclear device that they will FedEx to downtown Manhattan.
I'm sorry, perhaps you didn't read about the teenagers doing recombinant DNA in a public learning lab in Manhattan, or the Australians who ACCIDENNTALLY figured out away to turn the common cold into an unstoppable plague, or even perhaps the fact that up until recently, a number of biotech researchers had zone 3 biotoxins mailed to their homes for research.
There's a whole lot of stupid going on out there and the increasing price for even small mistakes is accelerating at a scary clip. Wait till kids can make gray goo in school... the world is getting very exciting. Are feeling the pucker?
Your right, the article is about a a larval snail and the fact that is seriously imperiled by the fact its shell is dissolving away. You could say "Gone With The Wind" was a story about the spoiled daughter of a plantation owner. However, I'd guess it would be a fair argument that without the larger context of slavery and the Civil War the story would have no point or significance. The Snail is endangered because the ocean is too acid and carbonate shells are being dissolved. By the way. this article spotlighted a single species. This is a problem with crab and lobster larva, reef larva, and the larval forms of shell fish. It even includes carbonate secreting algae, part of the phytoplankton. All secrete carbonate shells, all are suffering growing environmental stress from rising acid levels. It doesn't matter how this is received. Facts don't have an opinion about how people will accept them. Gravity doesn't care whether or not you believe in it... it works just the same either way.
There are a wealth of studies, including the study which indicates that the carbonate shell protect the plant or animal from UVa and UVb. That life with damages carbonate shells performs poorly compares to life with healthy carbonate shells. Here's the kicker, those phytoplankton are a critical part of the ocean ability to sink carbon through photosynthesis. So excessive carbon in the form of carbonic acid in the ocean actually drops the oceans carbon carrying capacity, and this is the largest carbon sink on he planet so we should be properly concerned.
Currently to date Eutrophication has a larger overall impact on ocean chemistry, but this is not a stable environment and we are playing with too many variables. We just need to cut back on the carbon.
Not flawed at all, Gaia is and has always been fine with or without the presence of human beings. It just seems a shame to spawn a sentient race only to have it snuff itself out because it couldn't get its own basist primate instincts under control. We have so much to offer, if we just be responsible for our monkey urges. You know, stop slinging shit, stop trying to take it all, and stop freaking out at those different then ourselves. These are all hardwired behaviors, and most people simply operate below the conscious threshold necessary to curb their instincts instead preferring to go off like serial time bombs crapping all over society and the scenery at large. Gaia might miss us, but the universe without us is poorer for the lack.
No, I know exactly what this article is talking about, what it means, and what it means in the context of several THOUSAND other fine works on the changing environment and its predicted impact to life on the planet. How many science articles do read a month, I'm in at around 500 (I'm a speed reader.) I'm conversant on topic as disparate as Cosmology, Astronomy, Astrophysics, Biology (biochemistry, ecology, genetics, genomics, proteomics, epigenetics, taxonomy, botany, medicine...) Chemistry (Organic and Inorganic), Physics, Nanotechnology, Computer and Information Science (Robotics, Prosthetics, AI and Human Augmentation) Meteorology, Oceanography, Paleontology/Archeology/Anthropology, Sociology... I could go on if you think it would make a difference. You want to talk about the recently discovered rogue planet or the comet that will illuminate the skies a year from now or perhaps you want to have a conversation about the shape and structure of the protein which assembles in groups of four forming the calcium channel found in your cells, or maybe interesting new discoveries involving spites and goblins generated by lightenig. Perhaps you'd like to discuss the rise of slime, how Jelly Fish in the ocean have begun multiplying prodigiously, and experiments indicate its their way of preparing for imminent disaster so that no matter how bad things get some jellyfish will survive. Then again we could talk about changing seasonal temperatures and the global impact on spring arriving weeks earlier than it used to and how that is impacting global agriculture.
Irreducible complexity is a sham created by ideologues to avoid facing simple reality. I would argue the climate change denialists fall into the same camp. When the evidence becomes overwhelming, and my friend, it is now officially overwhelming, they have no sane response so they condemn the scientists. I am all for technological solutions, but this endless head in the sand is getting ludicrous. Here, let me help you. If you'd like to understand what this article means, I'd be happy to give you some reading assignments starting with a rather lengthy visit to Wikipedia, until you have some idea how the carbon cycle works, what a food chain is, what zooplankton are, to role that carbonaceous larvae play in the big picture of the ocean food chain, why the effects of CO3 in ocean water concentrates in the northern temperate latitudes, and what the long term impact of a population collapse results is for krill, smelt and sardines, herring and the larger predators that rely on these fish populations. We are already seeing mass die-off of sea birds all over the world, and we know they are dying of starvation. We are already seeing a collapse of numerous fisheries world wide (both for over fishing and destruction of habitat, but there may already be a significant impact to small fish.) If anything I'm saying is unclear to you, or is hard for you to understand, I have literally MOUNTAINS of articles to refer you to from top researcher and virtually unimpeachable sources, and please, anyone on the payroll of Exon-Mobil, or BP by definition is not an unimpeachable source (there's this weird thing called scientific objectivity... it involves going out with an open mind and coming up with the theories that fit the test results not the other way around.)
If there is something that I said that suggests to you that I don't understand this article, please feel free to enlighten me, be specific. I'm not infallible, just incredibly well informed. So rather than just pointing a finger and claiming something please tell me what you think I missed that you picked up on in this article. That would be a productive conversation.
And you're not getting it. This isn't a slow change. Natural changes occur over millions of years, This has precipitated in just a few human generations. It's looking more and more like an exponential change, because multiple feedbacks are beginning to tilt. Melting permafrost releasing huge amounts of methane and CO2, the continued slash and burn of the tropical forests around the world. All these sinks are breaking at the same time because we failed to address the problem and so now instead of a linear progress of the atmospheric carbon we planned for, we're beginning to see what may in fact be very nonlinear results. Unpredictable results which in a sentence mean results for which we will be unable to plan. The rate of change that "A Natural System" can happily accommodate is about 500 to 5,000 times slower than the rate we're inducing currently. You are perfectly correct that life will succeed and evolve its way out of any mess we make. But first virtually everything dies. Life will go on, it just won't be with anything resembling a human being in the neighborhood.
The only sudden changes we need to bring are the changes surrounding the use of our planet as a toilet for our industry. That should be sudden, and it should begin some time yesterday. Its becoming alarmingly clear that we've already missed the boat to get out of this without taking a beating. Now the outlooks grow increasingly dismal. However, it still doesn't have to be fatal. We are going to lose virtually all the iconic animals you're familiar with in this century. All the big animals of Africa (Elephants, Lions, Cheetahs, Giraffes, Hippo...) and Asia... gone. Virtually all of the higher primates, done. Whales, dolphins, fish, and crustaceans are currently a coin toss, but the prospects are pretty grim. Nothing has happened at this level in millions of years and we are busy cutting the floor out from beneath our own feet. There's an old saying. When you find yourself at the bottom of a deep hole, STOP DIGGING.
Conflating the fact that human beings are given to seeing faces everywhere (its part of our primate survival hard wiring and allows mothers and infants to bond at birth), with seeing and appreciating the fractal and inherently consistent nature of the universe is at once myopic, and at the same time deeply ignorant. From the birth of the Renaissance geniuses like Leonardo DaVinci saw the recurring patterns of nature. Noticing how the number Phi shows up again and again in physical systems from the budlets in the heart of a daisy to the swirl of a galaxy is not self delusion but the human mind extracting meaning from the vast cacophony of the universe. The fact that your body is self similar on many scales, as is our planet and the very universe itself, and that these self similarities transcend scales of space and time is illuminating, is awe inspiring. You are indeed a product of this universe, you bear the mark of its rhythms and harmonies. You have 5 fold symmetry, because one of your oldest ancestors was related to a starfish (echinoderm) you don't find it the least bit fascinating that the shape of you brain models the shape of the universe itself and is in fact the universe attempting to understand itself. Are you so apathetic that the shear mystery and magnificence of life in this place doesn't occasionally move you tears of joy or dumbstruck wonder?
If so, than I am so sorry for you. You've been born into the greatest show ever and can't seem to take your eyes off your own feet. By the way, nice shoes.
We are all connected. Our posts, Karma Whores and Trolls alike, give birth to Slashdot. Our insights and banal pontification ripple through time. From womb to tomb, some folks are addicted to spending all their waking hours brain farting here and the best you can hope for is to be up wind.
Yeah those goofy scientists... what will they say next. New York being stomped flat by a super storm? The hottest years in history all being in the last decade? The upper atmosphere colder than any time on record. The oceans turning into a carbonated beverage! What do they know? Let's use up all the coal and oil and gas. What could possible go wrong?
Because whats going extinct is at the bottom of the food chain. It means everything above it goes extinct... and no, this hasn't happened in hundreds of millions of years. The impact is profound, and sudden (on biological scales) and devastating to all life on the planet. You and your children will be impacted. The ocean covers 3/4 of the planets surface and people in Kansas are impacted by the ocean directly. Someone is telling you that you have cancer, and your response is "Tell me when I hit stage four, then I'll worry." Interesting, but loony. Perhaps a little chemo and surgery now are indicated, Hmmmm.
Okay, lets put the dots really close together for you. No, the oceans acidity doesn't change all the time. That last time it changed like this the planet changed from a snowball into a sauna bath and it followed perhaps the largest extinction indecent in the planet's history (read up on the snowball earth.) This is not a minor change. This isn't a "Okay so we lose the parrotfish.. who the 'F' cares about parrotfish?" This is a global change in ocean chemistry attacking one of the primary constituents of zooplankton.
I'm guessing you're not a biologist, so let me give you an example. If something came along and wiped out all the grass. You're immediate response would be big whoop, no more mowing. The problem is that all grains are grasses. So everything that eats grass or grain get's impacted immediately. No more bread, or rice, or oats or barely or corn or millet (you want to think about what proportion of the human diet is grain based, its the only thing keeping large parts of the third world alive.) So no more milk. No more beef. In fact Cows, Pigs, Chickens, Turkeys, Horses, Deer, basically every grass eating animal, mammals including rodents at the bottom of the food chain, birds, insects... all gone, see yah, then the predators that eat them... like you and me... gone, gone, gone. Can you see the implications now. No Grass BAD!!!
So, animals with shells all have a larval stages and are at the bottom of the oceans food chain. Anything that kills them is EQUALLY BAD for all the critters up the food chain (again that includes us human beings.) The sudden loss of zooplankton causes a subsequent super bloom in phytoplakton (also a potentially bad thing all by itself.) This is not some far off maybe someday event. Coral Reef are bleaching this very moment as I write (one of the largest and more diverse ecosystems on the planet responsible for more kinds of fish, crustaceans, cephalopods, you name it) is on the verge of catastrophic collapse. You can't geoengineer extinct. Gone is gone. You think the cost of cutting back on burning carbon is expensive, figure out how much it'll cost replace the services that nature provides for free with manmade alternatives. You can't unscramble an egg. You can't fix this once you're satisfied its broken, because you'll be in a moving train barreling down the tracks and the only thing you'll be able to do is gird yourself for the crash.
Its all tied together. Its all based on Carbon. There's too much where it doesn't belong and now its beginning to be a real problem. Soon it will be a problem for which human beings will be unable to address. Why would anybody with the vaguest hint of sanity let something get so bad. Sorry, its inconvenient. Expensive. Even hurtful to developing people, who always take the brunt of what fails in the world. Simply letting it get worse will ensure the impact on those same people will be nothing less than devastating. Playing Russian Roulette with the future of humanity is far more irresponsible than acting now to reduce carbon, improve efficiency, develop alternative energy sources, and come up with new technologies to better sequester the byproducts of our civilization. Wake up, the coffee is burning! Right Now.
I don't know what planet you live on, but the one I live on is tangled up in bureaucrats and a collapsing middle class. Think for a moment. We haven't been on the moon in nearly 45 years. You think we can put enough people on Mars to make a difference if we break our ecosystem? By when? The numbers are all in. The hottest years in history all this decade. The ocean is rising. The oceans chemistry it getting dangerously unbalanced. Please read about the rise of slim. Lakes dying and changing to Hydrogen Sulfide cycles below a 100 feet. The list is huge, but its all point at the inescapable certainty than man is toxic and poisoning his mater. I agree that a human diaspora to the stars is the answer, but destroying the ecosystem before you can leave is just stupid.
Right, because we all know its not like major mineral wealth producers like gold and oil companies have ever engages in shady practices. Let's just get it straight. Profit is the motive in a game called "All's Fair." Anything goes, no holds barred. Murder, you bet. Mercs by the batallion, whatever. Political assassination, What part of "no Holds Barred" is unclear? Shell oil has slaughtered thousands of Africans to get "Their" oil, and made certain through a masterwork of bribery, that the local get no value from their own mineral wealth, but do get stiffed with the environmental disaster.
That's because Bush was a figure head, and three days into his administration, Mr. Obama was informed that he needed to get with the program (we're over due for a Presidential assassination.) Why else would you have the agent of the shadows, er Joe Biden staring over your shoulder every day? No, elections are a farce, and presidents are figure heads. No real difference. Its a passion play friends, full of noise and fury signifying nothing. Its classical misdirection, make you look over on the right coast as the bankers pick your pockets and shave you like a rube. Go ahead. Hate the ugly dog toy. GGgggrrrrrr. Stop noticing the hand shaking the toy GGgggrrrrrr.. Good dog. Now shut up and fetch my slippers.
Why do you people keep fighting the party thing? Can't you see how easily you're being bought and sold? Just have someone put a tat on your head the reads "SUCKER!!!". So everyone knows who you are right off the bat. Get a good deal on the Brooklyn Bridge.
In 1980, we had a choice to take the country one way or another. One way required hard work, personal responsibility and integrity, perhaps even a little self sacrifice and brutally honest critical self appraisal, that and follow a man with the sex appeal of a Georgia peanut farmer. The other way was to follow the Candyman, and all we had to do wash flush the Bill of Rights down the toilet and take our new role as consumption units, it didn't hurt that this man reminded us of our Fathers, had rosy cheeks (at least the top ones from what I could see) and had been talking to us in long deep tones on the boxes in our living rooms since the 50s.
So here we are 30+ years. The Bill of Rights for all intents and purposes no longer exists. Huge tracts of the Constitution have been paved over, and we are now a corporate state where government of the business, for the business and by the business is the order of the day. So this is a moot conversation. Its a totally masturbatory exercise predicated on a the fantasy that we have some significant degree of freedom. To paraphrase "George Calrin" you live in the illusion of free choice, but in fact your choices have been diminished to paper or plastic, with or without cheese, diet or classic. Businesses have been give carte blanche to lay waste to your mind. If it was discovered that they could literally pump commercials up your ass, make no mistake, legally mandated daily commercial enemas would arrive with the governments blessing in about 72 hours.
So where do we begin. You want to return human rights to human beings, okay. You want to promote the freedom to have your entertainment/work devices respect your virtual personal space, wonderful. First you have to address bringing the nation to another turning point, because we're currently barreling down the tracks we're on with a full head of steam, and there simply isn't a stop on this track called your personal human dignity.
Just as an aside, I'm all for that new direction, you're just going to have to deal with a lot of repercussions and folks who have tremendous wealth and power who are perfectly warm and fuzzy the way things are right now.
Sorry, but raising a generation of children that agreeably comply to carry a tracking device, is a popcorn fart away from creating a society where our government requires each and every one of us to carry a tracking device. Imaging the up side. No Crime goes unpunished, almost instantly. Nobody ever get's lost. You can find almost anybody for a price. You can manage traffic, and human resource requirement to a person.
Of course the government always knows where you are, what you're doing, what you're saying. Hell, this is a future that would have chafed Big Brother's ass. You want to see what happens when you reduce people to sheep. Witless, mindless working units. I'm sorry but you are talking about planting the seeds for a dystopian future for which I want no part.