I'd have to agree... at 1.4 Gigapixels, you're gonna see skin mites, bacteria, fungus, folds and crinkles, and hairs that would shock lumberjacks... way, way, way, too much information...
You're absolutely right... it's obvious that the founding fathers intended that American Citizens have the right to build and occupy stone fortresses and posses the arms of bears. How could we have gotten it so wrong!!!
There is a tremendous genetic variance in all the senses among diverse populations. Just as some people have virtually no taste and others are "Super Tasters" and have orders of magnitude more taste buds, there are people with super dense retinas. These people have exceptional "Visual Acuity". This is completely independent of being near or farsighted (though serious astigmatism precludes high visual acuity without vision correction.) I for one am terribly near-sighted, but have exceptionally high visual acuity. In my teens, I could focus my eye on a spot less than an inch from my eye, and could clearly make out a wide variety of single celled protozoans in a drop of pond water illuminated by a strong light source (eg. sunlight.)
With visual correction, I would would make out pixels.
The cornea is a simple lens and you'd almost certainly have to replace the lens in the eye with a more complex set of optical elements to get telescopic vision. A simpler answer would be to place nano-scale laser arrays on the inner surface of the lens, such that it could paint images directly onto the retina. Having an ultra high performance video imaging system inside your eye would be wicked cool. Now if you want telescopic vision, just get a really good small scope with an imaging device and a transmitter to your eye and let the good times roll.
This is an interesting time... I'm in my mid 50s, and I remember a time when TV was black and white, and a computer filled rooms (a bunch of rooms.) Technology is accelerating at itself and accelerating pace (the first derivative of position is velocity, the next is acceleration, and after that jerk. We are now at the point of a positive jerk in technological advance. Augmentation will soon be the norm, and the distance between haves and have-nots will soon be greater than astronauts and cave-dwellers. Even children without augmentation will be unable to keep up with the growing delta. God help us when machines can design and build machines without human intervention. The point is, the advances coming will come fast and furious and the future is quickly approaching chaotic unpredictability.
What you grand-kids experience is almost a pure crap shoot.
Actually, what makes the Roman concrete unique is that their formulation produced a concrete with amazingly small pores. The stuff is virtually impervious to weather. In fact there are a number of ancient harbors (2000 year and more) lined with the stuff, and it's still around and hard as ever.
Saw his business film called "Who Sold You That?" about customer service... I almost wet myself laughing... it should be required viewing in any service training program.
Hhhmmm, I don't know, but I think this would have been a really simple thing to prevent... no need for any new technology whatsoever
First replace the entire bozo squad passing for government regulators, in fact jail the lot of them, for receiving bribes, and causing billions of dollars of damage to the country.
Next when an oil company installs emergency shut off valves at the well head, make certain they work, BP knew for a fact theirs didn't work and ignored it.
Additionally, when your high tech well has special high pressure seals, design expressly for potential disasters, and you know you've damaged or destroyed them, stop drilling, and fix the seals, BP knew they had a problem when they brought huge chunks of rubber and again ignored it to continue drilling.
Finally, when some idiot from an oil company tells the folks on the rig to remove tons of drilling mud from the well, now, to shave a few days off of opening the well to pumping later, knowing full well that leaving that mud in the well is a critical safety feature for preventing disasters like... this one, they should be politely shot in the head. Twice.
There was absolutely no need for this mess. BP played loose and fast with the lives of millions of people. Hell, they virtually murdered the drilling crew. They knew they were engaged in risky behavior, they cut dozens of corners, shaved the rules, lied about their problems, and did anything at all to cut their expense and increase their profit. At some point, when a company creates, literally manufactures a disaster of this proportion, and the only significant cause is a blatant and callous disregard for human life, and environmental safety, I think it's only fair to invite them to leave the country permanently. They've demonstrated they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in being responsible, decent, or even vaguely accountable. We're still the largest consumer of petroleum products in the world. They must serve us, and not the other way.
If we can simply survive another decade the bullshit will reach critical mass, and gravitationally collapse! Then all we have to do is feed lawyers, politicians, and banker into it with sufficient angular momentum, and we should have a nearly infinite source of energy.
So there are two completely separate issues to be addresses here. In this specific case if you read the article, these scientists went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that their work wouldn't lead to potential negative impact. Bioethicists were involved from the get go, and that is distinctly different than the unsupervised genetic twiddling that happens naturally.
As for genetic experimentation as a whole, there are things happening in labs that are seriously more dangerous to humanity and life as we know it, than the genetic experimentation naturally occurring. You don't normally find monkey, octopuss, and corn DNA in the same cell naturally because these thing can't mate! There are genetic mutations that never occur in nature, that can produce viral or bacterial monstrosities. A weakened mousepox virus was manipulated in Australia, in an experiment to understand immunity in mouse populations. The virus which should have been relatively harmless was viciously lethal. The change that was made to it's genome is a change that would never occur in nature, but was easy to do in the lab, and could be done to human pathogens. In other words, it was relatively easy to make a human pathogen with a virtually 100% kill capability. Nature does this very infrequently because such a pathogen burns itself out of existence very quickly. There's a lot for bioethicists to deal with in the work of scientists rolling genetic dice.
They've given us the very tool with which to solve the problem. Put the face of Mohammed on every single useful, item in our society from canned food to computer chips. The religious zealots will in knee-jerk fashion declare all those useful things as blasphemous, and that all good Muslims must abstain from antibiotics, plane travel, food, cars, and clothing from outside their country. Those people with an IQ greater than 3 will immediately decide that maybe the stone age sucks and leave, while the rest slowly sink into cannibalism and wearing mud. We'll have instantly allowed Darwin to take the shallow end of the gene pool. Problem solved in one generation or less.
Figure out a way to build a device the releases the hormones and enzymes needed to trigger lipolysis into the blood stream and then burn the free fatty acids to make energy. The benefits would be immediate.
1. For starters fat has more calories than sugar i.e. more energy per unit mass.
2. Keeping LDLs and Triglycerides in the blood stream low, by burning them up would prevent hundreds of thousands of heart attacks.
3. Life expectancies would skyrocket.
4. You could get to your target weight by simply generating power for you home and office appliances.
5. You would save tremendous amounts of energy being generated by power plants, reducing the environmental load on society.
6. Fast food and it's promise to power the modern world, would become a gift to the society instead of a curse.
Of course I'm not certain I could deal with a world full of lean and mean techno-geeks:-)
Tell you what. Build a netbook/ipad killer with linux environment, a touch-screen, full media acceleration, ipad form factor, and a dedicated wireless keyboard and pointing device for more traditional apps and uses (and just for grins and giggles put 100-300 GB of solid state storage and peripherals interfaces in the keyboard), and I'm betting you'd pretty much have the convergence platform everybody's been waiting for!!!/p
A jury by one's peers is a misnomer. In any case, there's a wealth of evidence that juries do a poor job over-all of finding guilt or innocence, suggesting that we are near a time in our history where it would be most advisable to use technologies that are free us all from; prejudice, emotional influence, social proclivity, and (as the parent comment remarks) "Dumbasses". With the advent of brain-scans, the P800 brain signal, and a growing ability to read brain activity directly, we're on the verge of a breakthrough in the ability to determine guilt or innocence (your brainwaves can't lie.) When the tech get's good enough, let people choose jury or brain-scan. It should become clear that the folks using the brain-scan get a fairer trial (i.e. the guilty are found guilty, and the innocent are set free), and ultimately we can do away with the jury circus altogether.
On a related note. we have got to stop letting prosecutors put people in jail for life or on death row for purely circumstantial cases (i.e. no dna, no witnesses, no single scrap of viable evidence whatsoever.) The number of people who've been put on death row, who have been found innocent is suggesting the entire system is horribly broken, and that in fact greater than 10% of those found guilty of capital crimes are innocent. Our government is killing innocent people, and our juries are putting them on death row. As much as some acts are so heinous that the cry for justice becomes overwhelming, answering that cry with weak (or nonexistent) evidence, self serving prosecutors, moronic juries, and innocent defendants should be a crime in of itself.
Why yes the Pope is a Dope... but at least he uses his "Pope Soap on a Rope"... for that cleanliness is next to godliness, holier than thou, deep down clean
It didn't help that with the growth of rich content, and growing sophistication (i.e. software bloat), that typical files sizes have reached or exceeded 1.44 MB. Figure Fry's today had a 32 GB thumb-drive on sale for $59.95. That's 22,756 "1.44 MB floppy disks", in a form factor that's less than 1/10th the size of the floppy. I recently found a cache of old disks, and I'm wondering what would be an environmentally friendly way to dispose of the little space wasters???
In fact one can't codify the derivative sham. One holds a bucket under a male bovines rectum, until one has a large enough sample of said business process, for direct analysis.
Perhaps they could figure a way to display the actual and implied lies and deceits involved in these contracts... of course that would probably end investment as we know it anyway...
So as usual, this is blowing one aspect out of proportion to make headlines and virtually ignoring other issues. Working in groups to answer homework questions is at best a yawner... especially when these very same kids pass their exams gloriously. Who gives a feathery, how you do your homework as long as you grasp the material, and can demonstrate mastery of the subject. At this particular level, as long as you are actually doing the homework and can so demonstrate by passing tests both written and oral, then who cares if they working in a 20 person study group.
In point of fact, the real concern is ethics and instilling a rich and lasting sense of personal integrity. This is so important (and from the article, it's clear the problem is just as bad or even worse in other disciplines), that a significant ground-work of ethics and personal integrity should be a required part of every discipline taught in our colleges today. Rather than teaching kids that cheating is bad for some vague ideological reason (or equally impotent for some religious reason), it should be made abundantly clear that integrity immediately equates to workability. That the lack of honesty, communication, discipline, forthrightness, compassion, and integrity, is directly responsible for the greatest and least problems facing humanity today, and that bringing ethical rigor to one's day to day practices (scholastic or professional), provides a foundation upon which one can build a future worth celebrating. Teach students not to cheat. Have them confront the schools' presumptions and regulations based in false presumptions, but have them aware that the world demands a high level of performance and that performance is ultimately built on integrity. A breach in integrity may provide short-term gain, but it invariably costs more in the long run.
This should be especially important to this crowd. These are the future professionals who will either honor Open Source Licenses or in the name of short term expedience, claim copyrighted code as their own, and try to stonewall legal IP holders through courtroom maneuvering. Big business has been ripping off inventors for a very long time (Flash of Genius) and we need only look at our current economic woes to see the depth and breadth of the ethical crisis facing our nation. We either do a better job teaching our children, or we face a dark and frightening future indeed.
Far more recently (the 60s and 70s), government doctors sterilized approximately 25% of all Native American women frequently without consent or though coercion and deception. For further reading: Native women sterilized.
I believe the best use of this technology is as a means for monitoring our government officials and representatives (starting with the folks thinking about using it here.) It is arguable that the harm done by the average juvenile delinquent pales in comparison to the social and economic harm done by politicians and lawless officials. We should be using predictive technology keep them in check, and ensure that liberty is being preserved for future generations...
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I'd have to agree... at 1.4 Gigapixels, you're gonna see skin mites, bacteria, fungus, folds and crinkles, and hairs that would shock lumberjacks... way, way, way, too much information...
This is how Google will insert the HYPNOTOAD onto your android phone... ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!...
You're absolutely right... it's obvious that the founding fathers intended that American Citizens have the right to build and occupy stone fortresses and posses the arms of bears. How could we have gotten it so wrong!!!
There is a tremendous genetic variance in all the senses among diverse populations. Just as some people have virtually no taste and others are "Super Tasters" and have orders of magnitude more taste buds, there are people with super dense retinas. These people have exceptional "Visual Acuity". This is completely independent of being near or farsighted (though serious astigmatism precludes high visual acuity without vision correction.) I for one am terribly near-sighted, but have exceptionally high visual acuity. In my teens, I could focus my eye on a spot less than an inch from my eye, and could clearly make out a wide variety of single celled protozoans in a drop of pond water illuminated by a strong light source (eg. sunlight.)
With visual correction, I would would make out pixels.
The cornea is a simple lens and you'd almost certainly have to replace the lens in the eye with a more complex set of optical elements to get telescopic vision. A simpler answer would be to place nano-scale laser arrays on the inner surface of the lens, such that it could paint images directly onto the retina. Having an ultra high performance video imaging system inside your eye would be wicked cool. Now if you want telescopic vision, just get a really good small scope with an imaging device and a transmitter to your eye and let the good times roll.
This is an interesting time... I'm in my mid 50s, and I remember a time when TV was black and white, and a computer filled rooms (a bunch of rooms.) Technology is accelerating at itself and accelerating pace (the first derivative of position is velocity, the next is acceleration, and after that jerk. We are now at the point of a positive jerk in technological advance. Augmentation will soon be the norm, and the distance between haves and have-nots will soon be greater than astronauts and cave-dwellers. Even children without augmentation will be unable to keep up with the growing delta. God help us when machines can design and build machines without human intervention. The point is, the advances coming will come fast and furious and the future is quickly approaching chaotic unpredictability.
What you grand-kids experience is almost a pure crap shoot.
Actually, what makes the Roman concrete unique is that their formulation produced a concrete with amazingly small pores. The stuff is virtually impervious to weather. In fact there are a number of ancient harbors (2000 year and more) lined with the stuff, and it's still around and hard as ever.
Saw his business film called "Who Sold You That?" about customer service... I almost wet myself laughing... it should be required viewing in any service training program.
Hhhmmm, I don't know, but I think this would have been a really simple thing to prevent... no need for any new technology whatsoever
There was absolutely no need for this mess. BP played loose and fast with the lives of millions of people. Hell, they virtually murdered the drilling crew. They knew they were engaged in risky behavior, they cut dozens of corners, shaved the rules, lied about their problems, and did anything at all to cut their expense and increase their profit. At some point, when a company creates, literally manufactures a disaster of this proportion, and the only significant cause is a blatant and callous disregard for human life, and environmental safety, I think it's only fair to invite them to leave the country permanently. They've demonstrated they have absolutely no interest whatsoever in being responsible, decent, or even vaguely accountable. We're still the largest consumer of petroleum products in the world. They must serve us, and not the other way.
If we can simply survive another decade the bullshit will reach critical mass, and gravitationally collapse! Then all we have to do is feed lawyers, politicians, and banker into it with sufficient angular momentum, and we should have a nearly infinite source of energy.
So there are two completely separate issues to be addresses here. In this specific case if you read the article, these scientists went to extraordinary lengths to ensure that their work wouldn't lead to potential negative impact. Bioethicists were involved from the get go, and that is distinctly different than the unsupervised genetic twiddling that happens naturally.
As for genetic experimentation as a whole, there are things happening in labs that are seriously more dangerous to humanity and life as we know it, than the genetic experimentation naturally occurring. You don't normally find monkey, octopuss, and corn DNA in the same cell naturally because these thing can't mate! There are genetic mutations that never occur in nature, that can produce viral or bacterial monstrosities. A weakened mousepox virus was manipulated in Australia, in an experiment to understand immunity in mouse populations. The virus which should have been relatively harmless was viciously lethal. The change that was made to it's genome is a change that would never occur in nature, but was easy to do in the lab, and could be done to human pathogens. In other words, it was relatively easy to make a human pathogen with a virtually 100% kill capability. Nature does this very infrequently because such a pathogen burns itself out of existence very quickly. There's a lot for bioethicists to deal with in the work of scientists rolling genetic dice.
They've given us the very tool with which to solve the problem. Put the face of Mohammed on every single useful, item in our society from canned food to computer chips. The religious zealots will in knee-jerk fashion declare all those useful things as blasphemous, and that all good Muslims must abstain from antibiotics, plane travel, food, cars, and clothing from outside their country. Those people with an IQ greater than 3 will immediately decide that maybe the stone age sucks and leave, while the rest slowly sink into cannibalism and wearing mud. We'll have instantly allowed Darwin to take the shallow end of the gene pool. Problem solved in one generation or less.
Figure out a way to build a device the releases the hormones and enzymes needed to trigger lipolysis into the blood stream and then burn the free fatty acids to make energy. The benefits would be immediate.
Of course I'm not certain I could deal with a world full of lean and mean techno-geeks :-)
Tell you what. Build a netbook/ipad killer with linux environment, a touch-screen, full media acceleration, ipad form factor, and a dedicated wireless keyboard and pointing device for more traditional apps and uses (and just for grins and giggles put 100-300 GB of solid state storage and peripherals interfaces in the keyboard), and I'm betting you'd pretty much have the convergence platform everybody's been waiting for!!!/p
A jury by one's peers is a misnomer. In any case, there's a wealth of evidence that juries do a poor job over-all of finding guilt or innocence, suggesting that we are near a time in our history where it would be most advisable to use technologies that are free us all from; prejudice, emotional influence, social proclivity, and (as the parent comment remarks) "Dumbasses". With the advent of brain-scans, the P800 brain signal, and a growing ability to read brain activity directly, we're on the verge of a breakthrough in the ability to determine guilt or innocence (your brainwaves can't lie.) When the tech get's good enough, let people choose jury or brain-scan. It should become clear that the folks using the brain-scan get a fairer trial (i.e. the guilty are found guilty, and the innocent are set free), and ultimately we can do away with the jury circus altogether.
On a related note. we have got to stop letting prosecutors put people in jail for life or on death row for purely circumstantial cases (i.e. no dna, no witnesses, no single scrap of viable evidence whatsoever.) The number of people who've been put on death row, who have been found innocent is suggesting the entire system is horribly broken, and that in fact greater than 10% of those found guilty of capital crimes are innocent. Our government is killing innocent people, and our juries are putting them on death row. As much as some acts are so heinous that the cry for justice becomes overwhelming, answering that cry with weak (or nonexistent) evidence, self serving prosecutors, moronic juries, and innocent defendants should be a crime in of itself.
Why yes the Pope is a Dope... but at least he uses his "Pope Soap on a Rope"... for that cleanliness is next to godliness, holier than thou, deep down clean
POPE!!!??? RAILS!!!??? Place Ruby joke here... (eg. How many Nazis does it take to write a web app???)
It didn't help that with the growth of rich content, and growing sophistication (i.e. software bloat), that typical files sizes have reached or exceeded 1.44 MB. Figure Fry's today had a 32 GB thumb-drive on sale for $59.95. That's 22,756 "1.44 MB floppy disks", in a form factor that's less than 1/10th the size of the floppy. I recently found a cache of old disks, and I'm wondering what would be an environmentally friendly way to dispose of the little space wasters???
Tough tofu Gweilo...
In fact one can't codify the derivative sham. One holds a bucket under a male bovines rectum, until one has a large enough sample of said business process, for direct analysis.
Perhaps they could figure a way to display the actual and implied lies and deceits involved in these contracts... of course that would probably end investment as we know it anyway...
So as usual, this is blowing one aspect out of proportion to make headlines and virtually ignoring other issues. Working in groups to answer homework questions is at best a yawner... especially when these very same kids pass their exams gloriously. Who gives a feathery, how you do your homework as long as you grasp the material, and can demonstrate mastery of the subject. At this particular level, as long as you are actually doing the homework and can so demonstrate by passing tests both written and oral, then who cares if they working in a 20 person study group.
In point of fact, the real concern is ethics and instilling a rich and lasting sense of personal integrity. This is so important (and from the article, it's clear the problem is just as bad or even worse in other disciplines), that a significant ground-work of ethics and personal integrity should be a required part of every discipline taught in our colleges today. Rather than teaching kids that cheating is bad for some vague ideological reason (or equally impotent for some religious reason), it should be made abundantly clear that integrity immediately equates to workability. That the lack of honesty, communication, discipline, forthrightness, compassion, and integrity, is directly responsible for the greatest and least problems facing humanity today, and that bringing ethical rigor to one's day to day practices (scholastic or professional), provides a foundation upon which one can build a future worth celebrating. Teach students not to cheat. Have them confront the schools' presumptions and regulations based in false presumptions, but have them aware that the world demands a high level of performance and that performance is ultimately built on integrity. A breach in integrity may provide short-term gain, but it invariably costs more in the long run.
This should be especially important to this crowd. These are the future professionals who will either honor Open Source Licenses or in the name of short term expedience, claim copyrighted code as their own, and try to stonewall legal IP holders through courtroom maneuvering. Big business has been ripping off inventors for a very long time (Flash of Genius) and we need only look at our current economic woes to see the depth and breadth of the ethical crisis facing our nation. We either do a better job teaching our children, or we face a dark and frightening future indeed.
Far more recently (the 60s and 70s), government doctors sterilized approximately 25% of all Native American women frequently without consent or though coercion and deception. For further reading: Native women sterilized.
Our history is ripe with examples of genocide.
Only if you're incapable of saying "The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain..." -- Dr. Arry Iggins
SSssssshhhhh... ix-nay!!!! You start telling people about the Hentai that get's people executed and they'll all wann see it!!!
I believe the best use of this technology is as a means for monitoring our government officials and representatives (starting with the folks thinking about using it here.) It is arguable that the harm done by the average juvenile delinquent pales in comparison to the social and economic harm done by politicians and lawless officials. We should be using predictive technology keep them in check, and ensure that liberty is being preserved for future generations...