The real goal here is to be able to genetically analyze people, and not what the article claims, to help them. Like any tool, it can be used for good and for bad. Like any new technology, such as aviation, or nuclear, it will probably be first tested out by the military or at least tested out in all its negative connotations before it is put to work for public good. Such people-analyzing technology will allow a new form of racism, or at least some form of historical revenge-taking. How would you like to know that your genetic makeup is 26% of a genetic class #AA5FE most prevalent in lower Poland, Checz Republic, Northern Ireland and Southern Iran, then 32% is class #BY98Z most prevalent in southern Sweden, 5% class #CCXFE most prevalent in ancient Greece(from archeological bone-marrow extracts) but practically extinct (therefore you'll be heavily studied and bread with similar people containing this ancient Greek recessive gene to study the ancient Greeks better, especially by people who have an axe to grind with the ancient greeks), 2% class #FE3X2 of a gene most prevalent in North Korea and South America, etc. Imagine if you possessed a gene that's most prevalent in North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya (wait, Libya no longer belongs to this axis of evil group), imagine if such a gene was found that's most prevalent in the countries that happen to fall into the current axis-of-evil vogue category. Aha! We found the evil gene, now let's go find people that have it in the USA, and send them to camps like the japanese were in WW2. There'll be people looking for the callousness gene, the atheist gene, the deist gene, the child-molester gene, the communist-gene, the capitalist-gene, and try to put people to death based on it, in the name of the good of society, just like witches were burned alive at the stake for being found guilty of mingling with the devil. For fire has a purifying power, it cleanses your soul of your sins, and being burned alive is like passing through a purgatory on this earth, therefore your soul has a higher chance of entering Heaven instead of Hell in the afterworld, so people who execute you at the town square like this do it out of brotherly love, in the name of saving your soul from eternal damnation, while the crowd cheers on.
Sometimes I just don't wanna know "who" exactly I am, or where I come from, or where the other guy next to me comes from. It's enough of a divide that he looks different, such as he's black, but now we're gonna fine tune the difference seeking amongst people, and turn man against man not because one looks black the other white, or because even if they look the same, one is serbian the other croatian, now we'll be able to turn people against each other and have them exterminate each other even when they look the same, speak the same language, hold the same culture, but hey!, they are genetically different! So go fight, compete, push your "kind" higher, push other "kinds" lower, as opposed to the old your nation higher, other nations lower, now you'll be able to do it even within nations better! There are native americans on reservations studying in schools, and here and there there is a blonde kid amongst them, even though his parents are both indian-looking, but carry some blonde recessive gene from all the past intermarriages. This blonde kid may think himself as indian, even though he might have a hard time dealing with his looks standing out in a crowd. But even indian looking people are told today they are not indian. They are told, look, here's your bloodline, your great great great gramma married a black guy, so that made your bloodline 1/2 native american, then 3 generations later your great great granpa married an italian, so that made it 1/4, and so on, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, 1/128th. The treaties signed by Abe Licoln giving this land to native americans do not apply to you, because the government has a policy to stop considering you indian once your genetic makeup falls below 1/64th native american, and 63/64th other. So it doesn't matter that you love nativ
Given sufficient effort anybody can be framed properly, and even a dead body can be faked. Of course most of the 99.99% of real world cases are just that, real world cases, but then again, reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. You still go ahead, with the run of the mill prosecution and convictions, deal with the real world assuming that's all you're dealing with, but in all that, you have to keep the other side too in the back of your mind, that you can never be certain about anything in this world.
I was about to post this comment, good thing I searched if someone else posted it first. Especially when reading "deny such freedom of action to adversaries." We catch anybody else in outer space, and we'll treat them like a tresspasser on our property. I wonder how UFO's will react when we catch them out there, when we start shooting at anything that looks like a spaceship and can't ID itself as one of ours as a default stance. Maybe UFO's will just do shape shifting and cloack/ID themselves for us just fine while they pass by, as an easy way to bypass the nuissance of aggressive primitive Eartians attacking anything that moves out there.
"Microsleep" is so old fashioned. These days there is new technology called "nanosleep" that imparts a finer granularity to the experience of being awake. It is a subbranch of nanotechnology.
The reason is the "cost of delivery" line item you see in your bill, whatever that means. Basically, we still don't have a good means of storing large amounts of energy, other than pumping water backwards up hydroelectric dams, where they may evaporate if they sit too long, plus there is relatively limited capacity. To take your wind electricity, have it cross miles of copper and high voltage transformers with core losses, you're looking at quite a bit of resisitive drop, then the pumped storage part is only 60%-80% DC to DC efficient, then the current has to come back to you, crossing miles of lines again. Those wires and equipment represent quite a bit of cost, as far as capital goes that could generate interest if it sat in a bank account as money, plus there are maintenance/replacement costs, all the electric company workers have to be paid too, etc. So the "cost of delivery" is a pretty big line item. If you can cut yourself from the electric company and store your electricity locally, then you'd be independent, but there is still something good about having an electric grid in the world, because even if home owners could generate all the power they need from wind+solar, most industrial sites just don't have the room or even desire to mess with the whole thing. Inasmuch residential customers drop out of the electric grid, there is less of an "economy of scale" and the grid becomes more costly per consumer. However if your generated power was sold directly to your neighbour, and it had to cross very little wiring, then the cost of delivery shouldn't be such a big factor. You could have local neighbourhoods trade power amongst each other, and maintain their own electric wiring, then have a meter at the local transformer station to see how much actually crosses over to the "natural monopoly's" grid, then you could sell/trade at lower prices, but good luck hiring debt collectors when one of your neighbour's doesn't pay. If you had locally elected oversears with a central switchboard where the "village" can vote to disconnect someone, that'd be one thing, but that's like getting up too much in your neighbours finances and private life, he can't jog with his dog down the street, unlike in case of the electricity company disconnecting him and nobody on the street knowing about it. To make things fair, if there is a need for electricity when it is generated, in your neighbourhood, the electric company should charge less "cost of delivery" fees, at least as far as ohmic-pumpedstorage-ohmic efficiency drops are concerned, the worker's salaries and the maintenance/sunk capital cost is still there. They would need locally installed power flow monitors with accurate accounting to tell how far your power went up the chain each time, say 60% of it was sold 3 houses down, 40 % left the neighbourhood, but 20% of that was sold in a neighbouring city, and say only 5% ended up in a pump storage reserve. This would require an accurate timelog of how much electricity was generated when, say with a 30 second update interval, that talks to a local transformer site power meter about the current price factor, as in how much electricity is flowing in/out, how much is locally consumed(when all the meters talk back on the wire reporting their own status), and that local master transformer meter can talk up to it's masters and so on up the chain, and obtain the current factor of how far electricity travels. There'd be need for a communication network over the electric wire, being able to bear enough subjects per transformer station. Right now we have reliable analog summing powermeters, this whole new "instant update technology" over where the electricity is getting consumed and generated would have to be created, and just imagine the bugs when your electric grid goes down not because there isn't enough electricity or there is a storm that broke the lines, but because some idiot hacked into the system, or there is a bug somewhere, or one of your neighbour's meters is buggy and keeps sending wrong info, messing up the whole accounting scheme. But it's still something interesting to think about.
Well, I guess you're right, in a sense. It's nice to know that there are no warheads pointed at us that only take a button push to launch, but the technological barrier is so small, that any subverted and perverted political system can get to the point of the ready to push the button situation in no time. The technology is just so cheap and easy these days, the problem is that it takes less than a year to fully build up an arsenal and aim it at something. Compare the changes in the world from 1900, to 1915, to 1925 to 1943. Japan was on one side in 1915, on the other side in 1943, and airplanes were just invented yet everybody had them in 1943. If a country such as Japan who has no such weapons today, but polarized heavily politically in say 5 years, they could build up an arsenal in a mere 2 months any time, from seawater. How can you predict that we will have world peace and harmony, and countries won't fly off the handle like they did only 100 years ago, especially when they get resource starved with the end of the cheap fossil fuel age? I still fear people turning into idiots, that fear is never gone.
Note sarcasm, please: - How long is too long to wait? Well, as long as there is oil in Iraq and fusion power isn't successfully developed, it's not too long. How about 2015 or more like 2020? If things go well, maybe even 2030, but after all the oil is pumped, there ain't much reason to stay. - How many lives are too many to lose? Come on, Da Man doesn't even have a line item on his balance sheet for such petty things. He only sees $ signs. The only problem is that it's hard to get people to volunteer to go get butchered in the name of some holy almighty cause, and if a draft was instituted, which might have to be by say 2010, there is a severe danger that dads and moms will flock to the states chanting "leave my little boy and little girl alone, I won't let you take them to the butcher shop." People only act when their lives are personally affected, and you need a critical mass before those who protests are really protesters taken seriously, not just a handful of vagabonds and trouble makers that nobody really pays attention to or cares about. - How much money is too much to spend? Well, the whole economy eats, sleeps and breaths oil. If there is no oil, the show stops. How much money is too much money to keep the show going? There aint such thing as too much money to keep the show going, the show must go on by any means necessary. If we come up with fusion, then forget oil, the new energy cash will be fusion power, and then countries no longer have to fight each other because everyone has rainwater or seawater to extract the fuel from. The problem is that it takes a few trillion dollars to research, develop and buildup a fusion based energy economy, and it's not a sure bet that it will work, while punching a hole in the ground for oil that's a sure bet and sure profit today is just so much simpler and cheaper, even when you count the lives, as far as the man's balance sheet goes. Forget people in Iraq suffering when they got what we want, we depict them as evil enemies that we're trying to help liberate, from their oppressors and we pay ourselves with their resources for having done such a good job. Do unto others as thou would have them do unto thee? Love thy neighbor? How about screw your neighbor over as much as you can get away with, who's gonna stop you?
Keeping the population in fear is the only effective means of mass control. Now that the cold war is over, and Da Man who's always tryna keep a brother down, who ran both the totalitarian commie systems and the western imperialist capitalist free democracies, and could keep both sides in fear by pitting them against each other, so Da Man is searching for a new ultimate fear object - terrorism, WMD's, etc, whatever works man, just come up with something that works, because we all gotta fear something in order to conform and stay motivated, otherwise people have rights such as "even the King of England may not enter", so we need those comfortable exceptions where "even the King of England may not enter except when.." Fortunately or unfortunately the population has it too good to pay attention or give a crap and start living in fear, at least compared to how going to hell was feared back in the Dark Middle Ages, we're nowhere near that kind of fear. Talk about total mind control. These days people got used to being callous, or at least they learned to stay out of Da Man's Game, unless their life is personally affected.
The constant impeding doom is still here. However, it's nice to know that it's hard to get people to carry out such world-destruction - that's why the 1983 movie mentioned above was about robots and machines, because most normal people won't follow such commands - , unless, of course, they believe that there is afterlife where they'll live on along with everybody else, and be judged based on their behavior in this life.
One very important reason to fear the India - Pakistan conflict is that it's small scale, and suddenly appearing from out of nowhere, compared the following reasoning, all hypothetical of course: You could say that during the cold war the whole world population was bedazzled into believing there was a global conflict, they were given something to fear when in fact it was the same world power hegemony controlling both the US and USSR political systems, and this whole Stanislav Petrov event was just an experiment by these powers that be to test just how far Earth is from a catastrophy. I believe, or secretly hope, that if Petrov had acted as expected of him in carrying out his duties, it would have escalated very high, and at the last minute the hegemony would stop the experiment and say ok, we see what happens, enough now, let's stop this experiment. (Running such experiments is extremely high risk, and very many bases need to be covered to make it all failsafe.) The nice thing is that they were in for a marvelous surprise of humanity and caring in action, and basically life on Earth defending itself. Such instincts are very deep rooted. I don't think most "reasonable" people will go along with the "mutually assured destruction doctrine", as in "here we go, we're assuredly destructed, we can see that on the screen, so now it's our turn, let's destruct our attacker too completely, to live up to the contract and to show that nobody messes with us - if I'm going down, then everybody go down with me, if me and my folks ain't surviving then I'm making sure nobody else will" -this would be a very adolescent and childish stance, though it's present in every human being in the form of revenge instincts. In a sense, if I'm going down, at least somebody else lives on, even if it's the misguided enemy, is the survival instinct of life as a whole defending itself, though you need very mature souls to act like this, and in world history you do end up with crazy leaders such as it often happened in the Roman empire, with rulers such as Caligula, Commodus and Nero, basically mentally ill people without a properly reigned in ego, without a religion that provides ego-control and self-control. So back to the original topic, as long as there is a single hegemony controlling the actions of the US gov't, USSR gov't, the EU, the World Bank, etc, the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophy is nil, and the makebelieve smoke and mirror conflicts can be stopped in time without getting too much out of hand. True conflicts where there are two independent contesting powers not being under the control of the same group can lead the catastrophies. Unfortunately humans by nature love being free beings, and do not easily bear shackles and total control. No matter how long you explain someone that you were born to be a slave, and these are your commanders and superiors, people don't like the idea of being unequals - in a sense I won't take the you're better than me statement, even though I don't mind striving to prove that I'm better than you, but that's hipocrisy and illogical and unsustainable, so the only stable equilibrium here is that of neither of us is better than the other, as far as intrinsic value as a human being goes, even if some of us are better at singing, at basketball, etc. In this sense the existence of a single global hegemony that assures that mutually assured destruction is never activated, the existence of such an entity is undermined by the desire of people trying to be free and equal to each other in essence, as far as the worth as a human being goes. So how can you have a global single entity overseeing everything that happens, without the feeling of oppression by that entity? Makebelieve democracy is a great thing, it makes you believe you elected the leader, so you're not oppressed, you're in charge, while the actual powers that be acting in the background assure world peace at least as long as they have a hand in local appearing out of nowhere situations, which, by the way do take some effort to subdue in a sense and make be und
That argument would fly the same if WIndows was still stuck on the Windows 3.1 interface, but who would want that? I don't think the world had a problem adapting to Windows 95, which was like finally a breath of fresh air, and I don't think the confusion was that great for newcomers from Win31. However there is such a thing as something becoming a mature technology, and you can only innovate so much. The latin alphabet superceded the greek and the egyptian hieroglyphs, which were all great inventions in their time, or even equivalent to the latin alphabet just different, but not much has changed for like 2 millenia now. Will that be the same with the 2d computer interfaces, in 2 millenia will we still have a Start button? Yeah, ok, you still have cyrillic alphabets, arabic, chinese, etc, but I don't think they represent such a tremenduous technological improvement over the latin one. If they'd be an improvement, we'd be using them, just like around the 1500's people switched from roman numerals to "arabic" numerals developed by the indians, because they were better, but we've been stuck with the same symbols for 500 years now.
Or they can say we did this so somebody else can't do it then sue us for their patents - is one argument used a lot, we do "defensive patenting." I think the term "defensive patenting" is boloni, if that's all you want, to defend yourself all you need to do is publish to the world without applying for a patent, and then it's prior art public domain for anyone else, and nobody can have a patent on it and sue you. You just have to be the first to publish it to the world before someone beats you to it and publishes it as a patent. That's all.
It's like telling a dog, that doesn't want a collar and chain around it's neck, "Here doggie, doggie, let's put this chain on your neck, and we promise we ain't gonna yank it! Good dog!" What's wrong with dogchains if there is a promise they will never be used and abused? They are just like not having a collar around your neck, after all, the covenant is legally binding unless - unless, aha, I knew there was a catch! - unless you inspect the small print, which is subject to interpretation by lawyers in a courtroom at some later time. But baby steps first, let's get the collar on your neck, today, let's get over that step first, then we deliberate over whether we have the right to yank it or not. OK? Com'ere doggie! Good daaawg!
And your nanoancestors used nanoparticulate charcoal sticks to paint their nanocave paintings, while inhaling nanoparticulate nanosmoke from their nanocampfire. Same with crocodiles, who 200 million years ago inhaled the invisible nanodust that floats around in the atmosphere and makes the sky red when the sun sets. So what? Did the romans have sufficient resolution microscopy to actually tell they were dealing with nanocrap?
If someone looks wrong at the other sex, stares wrong, and has a large porn collection, that's sufficient grounds to say that he's sexually addicted and a danger to society. We will only tolerate people who are not addicted in sex, who have been able to eradicate any lust and desire, one of the cardinal mortal sins. Then wait a hundred years, and there will be only cheaters of the law left, those who gave in to their addiction and reproduced anyway, ehh? Sex is the touchiest of topics, because it requires two people, one fucking the other and vice versa, during which personal freedoms are deliberately trampled upon by request - such as please invade my privacy - by mutual agreement, and such mutual agreements are later questionable because there is no a priori written and signed contract. I suggest they enact a law where you can only have sex where both(or all) of the participant sign a detailed, preplanned contract, spelling out how they intend to proceed during the act, and to really be safe, have a public notary or a government official participate as an overseer, observing the details of the contract and warning you about any missteps. Anyway, there is such a thing called reproductive rights, but Da Man always tryna keep a brother down is always messing with that, and talks you into being a nun, priest, Shaker, tells you it's a cardinal sin, etc. Yeah, it's a cardinal sin to enter into contracts with minors, but otherwise what counts is the mutual agreement, which is hard to tell whether it is there when your mate wants you to be impulsive and surprise him/her, and says ahhh, that hurts, but it hurts so goood! Your honor, he/she hurt me!!! You can always chastize pretty much anyone alive with a healthy reproductive instinct over being guilty, but what's new, we're told we're born in sin, we're guilty for simply being alive, unless we do as told. But if you look at places where such brainwashing is in effect, you can note the smaller overpopulation problems, so who's to say what's best, maybe you need some dose of sexual instinct opression just to have a stable and working society, because the drive to reproduce is just so damn strong, and man no longer has predators or enemies to keep its population in check, so it has to come from somewhere, and where better than the governement erecting laws, or religion teaching self control, because whoever expects people not to cheat on the first cardinal sin? We tell you it's a sin but come on, we don't really mean it, we just want to moderate you, we still need new people and a next generation, just not too many!
As far as oil goes Hungary is not in the Top 50 (guess which countries most terrorist hide in), but it does have some coal, nowhere neas are much as the US does though. Back in the days the US used to top the oil reserves chart too, and even as recently as 2003 it held the 2nd spot for largest oil producer even from dwindling reserves, but now it has "fallen" to the 3rd spot. Note how Iraq has a lot of oil, but it's been producing relatively little, holding on to its reserves to the end. Such things are unsustainable, it's like wobbling a piece of sausage before the nose of a hungry dog, or leaving a hungry goat and a head of cabbage together in the same room, how long can you expect the situation to stand? There is actually a proverb/saying in Hungarian, about a desirable solution, where the "kecske is jóllakik, a káposzta is megmarad", meaning a solution where both the goat is sated, but the cabbage has remained too, but can you think of such a solution for the oil case?
Bullshit.. I remember that mystical feeling of the early days of surfing the net, in a library, way back in 1994, with Nescape 1.0. Yahoo was a neat place, had a lot of categories, while it was young, run by two hillbillies as a startup, there was Webcrawler as a search engine, then Altavista later a little better (nothing as good as google though that showed up in 1999, or ICQ in 97), and even Ebay was around. Back in 94 forget looking at the library catalog index to find a book, walk to the shelf, when you could just sit down at the same computer and just have the answers right at your fingertips. And you could have all that from home, via a SLIP dialup, with Trumpet Winsock/Win3.1, manual logins! Yay! And all this came alive because of Netscape - gopher, news, ftp, telnet and such have fallen mostly by the wayside, and http became the major dominant force of the internet, all because of netscape making it so accessible. Microsoft had no clue, was just simply left in the dust, they thought of the internet and www as you think of gopher or ftp these days - insignificant user experience, clumsy and frustrating to use, and who needs it anyway? Netscape, riding on NCSA's Mosaic's back, proved it differently. Netscape 2.0 had neat javascript (plus bundled news and especially email) - who would have thought an C-like syntax is masterable by the masses, when average joe needs either cobol or basic? Then holy cow, Netscape 3.0 with java! Yahoo games, chess, card games, pool, it all rocked! Secure sandbox too! Good old days when the web used to be secure, unlike the activex junk today, plus all the downloadable instant messenger backdoors and spyware 'innovations' that happened since then. Or blogging, you no longer have to go to the confession booth to repent your sins, you can put it all in writing online! Be honest please, and personal! Gee, what progress since then to please you the customer! Back then Netscape 3.0 was miles ahead of IE 3.0, even though by 4.0 you could feel the pressure lowering on the company to stop doing what it was doing, including sabotagelike deliberate crappy work - 4.0 was pretty much crap compared to the revolution 3.0 was, dhtml was a mess compared to the perfection that secure java applets were. If netscape were allowed to flourish, I believe the whole computing experience would be different today - I can't tell what they would have invented, but I'm sure it would have been more nice stuff - for instance you could be having an online desktop, with wordprocessors and all your needs, from any-isp service provider at a low cost, all you need is hardware, boot via some free bios program, log on from anywhere in the world to your service provider, and there you go, at 10bux a month everything included, connection, software, everyting, if there is enough competition, because netscape didn't try to hog the market, they didn't try to be yet another AOL and "everything goes through me" service provider, but they let local isp's live too. Today even if you had such an webmail service type of world, it would be only 3 players - yahoo, gmail and hotmail. Barrier of entry humongous. What about local ISP's, mom and pop shops? Talk about an information economy where there are only 2 players and the rest of the population is excluded, can only be p4wns. Unfortunately there were powerful forces vested in the current monopolistic desktop model. After Netscape was exterminated, what has happened? Nothing! We're just milking the same old cash cows from way back 1993, Win31 + MS Office + some database on the network somewhere, all with a new face slapped on it, and ok, some stability improvements, but with all those trillions invested, you better get some stability, and even so I dont' think the customer is getting a fair return. Why innovate if the money is flowing in, why be stupid and undercut yourself, why lower the cost of computing, and have everyone better off when that means making yourself worse off? Of course you won't. And most importantly, don't let the market turn into a competitive place where there a
You forget that the USA has some of the richest farmland in the world, with relatively low population density. It's in one of the best positions against surviving any kind of catastrophic collapse in global world order. Now Japan, with huge population density, stuck on a barren rock, is walking in a different set of shoes. Technically you could mass produce ammonia, proteins, sugar, etc. in chemical factories to feed the population if you had plenty of energy, such as fusion, no wonder they fought so desperately to host ITER. The sea just doesn't produce enough food for all of Japan to feed on, because it's colored blue, not green, and biological and photosynthetic activity is relatively low. As far as the USA goes, there isn't too much to worry about, we got everything here, we just aren't used to living within our means.
I beg to disagree. I've personally teased a kitty with a laser pointer, in a carpeted corridor, in low light. Kitties have a natural chase instinct to chase the laser pointer that moves along the carpet. Mind you it has no smell or anything other than appearance, and cats trust their eyes more than their sense of touch, for instance. Now the fun part was always when the laser dot walked along the edge of the wall, very slowly, it practically drove the kitty nuts, but the kitty lay low, stalking, ready to pounce anytime. Then as the laser light went around a slight corner of about 12 inches deep to the next wall, that looked like this ___|TTTT the kitty being somewhere above the T's, guess what? The kitty "knew" where the light was, that it existed, even though it couldn't see it. It would get up from the previous low lying stalk position, and walk right up to the corner, to the very nearby T, but not as far as the tip of her nose to be seen. She had her ears tensed to the limit listening, of couse the laser dot made no sound. I'd make the dot walk away from the corner along the other wall, til it came to an angle where the kitty could see it, and boy, you could see the electric jolt run down the kitty as soon as the dot was visible, but she held steady, and then I made it walk back to the corner, and not move for minutes. After a while the kitty got fed up with waiting, and attacked the unseen dot, - whammmm! it was scary - dashing out from behind the corner, then looking intensly and pawing toward it as soon as she saw it. In fact it would attack the corner even if I made the dot disappear, which was very disappointing to the kitty, the dot must have escaped somehow, but as soon as the dot reapearred somewhere else, aha, there you are, time to stalk and pounce you again! Tell me the kitty had no 2d map of the corner in her mind, or concept of the dot held in her mind, even while it wasn't visible to her senses. I think kitties model the world too, and model it very geometrically too, often a lot better than you do. Try getting chased by a tiger, and lets see who solves the geometric problems of shortest running distances, or jumping paths through rocks on a river quicker, you or the tiger?
E-Ink? Hold on for an e-second while I look for an e-tissue to wipe my e-glasses, and scratch my e-i-e-o-ass. Old McDonald had a farm, and an e-pencil too, with an e-tip!
Manned missions are necessary so that we get practical everyday means of and experience in sustaining life in a self-contained-bubble, if you will, so that we can send up a few such rainforest-glass-bubbles to outer space, that function in a closed system, as an insurance policy against humans going nuts down here, and exterminating themselves in a final nuclear apocalypse. At least some of these bubble-ships could hide out in the asteroid fields, or even land back on a devastated Terra, or even Terra would have a few thousand of these huge spaceships on hand serving as bunkers that are ready to jump in case the stuff hits the fan, ready to either stay down here, or make a run to the other side of the Moon if a next Hitler is chasing you with a stick. Yes there is a danger of different evolutions in different self-contained spheres, and some isolated bubbles may mutate/evolve some super-beings that are stronger/smarter/more radiation/cancer/HIV/black plague/bird flu resistant than you or me, or some bubbles may even go nuts and decide to destroy everyone else because they think their bubble would be safe, the mutually assured destruction wouldn't apply to them, but still, I don't really like the mutually assured destruction argument keeping us safe, do you? Manned missions and everyday practical technology for self-contained radiation resistant bubbles down here on Earth is an important insurance policy for life - including plant, animal, aquatic etc. life - to survive in face of the danger we pose ourselves and to other living things on this planet. We owe it to the monkeys and the polar bears to do some manned missions, how else you gonna explain it to them to trust us?
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The real goal here is to be able to genetically analyze people, and not what the article claims, to help them. Like any tool, it can be used for good and for bad. Like any new technology, such as aviation, or nuclear, it will probably be first tested out by the military or at least tested out in all its negative connotations before it is put to work for public good. Such people-analyzing technology will allow a new form of racism, or at least some form of historical revenge-taking. How would you like to know that your genetic makeup is 26% of a genetic class #AA5FE most prevalent in lower Poland, Checz Republic, Northern Ireland and Southern Iran, then 32% is class #BY98Z most prevalent in southern Sweden, 5% class #CCXFE most prevalent in ancient Greece(from archeological bone-marrow extracts) but practically extinct (therefore you'll be heavily studied and bread with similar people containing this ancient Greek recessive gene to study the ancient Greeks better, especially by people who have an axe to grind with the ancient greeks), 2% class #FE3X2 of a gene most prevalent in North Korea and South America, etc. Imagine if you possessed a gene that's most prevalent in North Korea, Iran, Iraq, Libya (wait, Libya no longer belongs to this axis of evil group), imagine if such a gene was found that's most prevalent in the countries that happen to fall into the current axis-of-evil vogue category. Aha! We found the evil gene, now let's go find people that have it in the USA, and send them to camps like the japanese were in WW2. There'll be people looking for the callousness gene, the atheist gene, the deist gene, the child-molester gene, the communist-gene, the capitalist-gene, and try to put people to death based on it, in the name of the good of society, just like witches were burned alive at the stake for being found guilty of mingling with the devil. For fire has a purifying power, it cleanses your soul of your sins, and being burned alive is like passing through a purgatory on this earth, therefore your soul has a higher chance of entering Heaven instead of Hell in the afterworld, so people who execute you at the town square like this do it out of brotherly love, in the name of saving your soul from eternal damnation, while the crowd cheers on.
Sometimes I just don't wanna know "who" exactly I am, or where I come from, or where the other guy next to me comes from. It's enough of a divide that he looks different, such as he's black, but now we're gonna fine tune the difference seeking amongst people, and turn man against man not because one looks black the other white, or because even if they look the same, one is serbian the other croatian, now we'll be able to turn people against each other and have them exterminate each other even when they look the same, speak the same language, hold the same culture, but hey!, they are genetically different! So go fight, compete, push your "kind" higher, push other "kinds" lower, as opposed to the old your nation higher, other nations lower, now you'll be able to do it even within nations better! There are native americans on reservations studying in schools, and here and there there is a blonde kid amongst them, even though his parents are both indian-looking, but carry some blonde recessive gene from all the past intermarriages. This blonde kid may think himself as indian, even though he might have a hard time dealing with his looks standing out in a crowd. But even indian looking people are told today they are not indian. They are told, look, here's your bloodline, your great great great gramma married a black guy, so that made your bloodline 1/2 native american, then 3 generations later your great great granpa married an italian, so that made it 1/4, and so on, 1/8, 1/16, 1/32, 1/64, 1/128th. The treaties signed by Abe Licoln giving this land to native americans do not apply to you, because the government has a policy to stop considering you indian once your genetic makeup falls below 1/64th native american, and 63/64th other. So it doesn't matter that you love nativ
Given sufficient effort anybody can be framed properly, and even a dead body can be faked. Of course most of the 99.99% of real world cases are just that, real world cases, but then again, reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. You still go ahead, with the run of the mill prosecution and convictions, deal with the real world assuming that's all you're dealing with, but in all that, you have to keep the other side too in the back of your mind, that you can never be certain about anything in this world.
Escargot, madammes et monsigneurs?
I was about to post this comment, good thing I searched if someone else posted it first. Especially when reading "deny such freedom of action to adversaries." We catch anybody else in outer space, and we'll treat them like a tresspasser on our property. I wonder how UFO's will react when we catch them out there, when we start shooting at anything that looks like a spaceship and can't ID itself as one of ours as a default stance. Maybe UFO's will just do shape shifting and cloack/ID themselves for us just fine while they pass by, as an easy way to bypass the nuissance of aggressive primitive Eartians attacking anything that moves out there.
"Microsleep" is so old fashioned. These days there is new technology called "nanosleep" that imparts a finer granularity to the experience of being awake. It is a subbranch of nanotechnology.
The reason is the "cost of delivery" line item you see in your bill, whatever that means. Basically, we still don't have a good means of storing large amounts of energy, other than pumping water backwards up hydroelectric dams, where they may evaporate if they sit too long, plus there is relatively limited capacity. To take your wind electricity, have it cross miles of copper and high voltage transformers with core losses, you're looking at quite a bit of resisitive drop, then the pumped storage part is only 60%-80% DC to DC efficient, then the current has to come back to you, crossing miles of lines again. Those wires and equipment represent quite a bit of cost, as far as capital goes that could generate interest if it sat in a bank account as money, plus there are maintenance/replacement costs, all the electric company workers have to be paid too, etc. So the "cost of delivery" is a pretty big line item. If you can cut yourself from the electric company and store your electricity locally, then you'd be independent, but there is still something good about having an electric grid in the world, because even if home owners could generate all the power they need from wind+solar, most industrial sites just don't have the room or even desire to mess with the whole thing. Inasmuch residential customers drop out of the electric grid, there is less of an "economy of scale" and the grid becomes more costly per consumer. However if your generated power was sold directly to your neighbour, and it had to cross very little wiring, then the cost of delivery shouldn't be such a big factor. You could have local neighbourhoods trade power amongst each other, and maintain their own electric wiring, then have a meter at the local transformer station to see how much actually crosses over to the "natural monopoly's" grid, then you could sell/trade at lower prices, but good luck hiring debt collectors when one of your neighbour's doesn't pay. If you had locally elected oversears with a central switchboard where the "village" can vote to disconnect someone, that'd be one thing, but that's like getting up too much in your neighbours finances and private life, he can't jog with his dog down the street, unlike in case of the electricity company disconnecting him and nobody on the street knowing about it. To make things fair, if there is a need for electricity when it is generated, in your neighbourhood, the electric company should charge less "cost of delivery" fees, at least as far as ohmic-pumpedstorage-ohmic efficiency drops are concerned, the worker's salaries and the maintenance/sunk capital cost is still there. They would need locally installed power flow monitors with accurate accounting to tell how far your power went up the chain each time, say 60% of it was sold 3 houses down, 40 % left the neighbourhood, but 20% of that was sold in a neighbouring city, and say only 5% ended up in a pump storage reserve. This would require an accurate timelog of how much electricity was generated when, say with a 30 second update interval, that talks to a local transformer site power meter about the current price factor, as in how much electricity is flowing in/out, how much is locally consumed(when all the meters talk back on the wire reporting their own status), and that local master transformer meter can talk up to it's masters and so on up the chain, and obtain the current factor of how far electricity travels. There'd be need for a communication network over the electric wire, being able to bear enough subjects per transformer station. Right now we have reliable analog summing powermeters, this whole new "instant update technology" over where the electricity is getting consumed and generated would have to be created, and just imagine the bugs when your electric grid goes down not because there isn't enough electricity or there is a storm that broke the lines, but because some idiot hacked into the system, or there is a bug somewhere, or one of your neighbour's meters is buggy and keeps sending wrong info, messing up the whole accounting scheme. But it's still something interesting to think about.
How about flaming coyote instead of firefox?
Well, I guess you're right, in a sense. It's nice to know that there are no warheads pointed at us that only take a button push to launch, but the technological barrier is so small, that any subverted and perverted political system can get to the point of the ready to push the button situation in no time. The technology is just so cheap and easy these days, the problem is that it takes less than a year to fully build up an arsenal and aim it at something. Compare the changes in the world from 1900, to 1915, to 1925 to 1943. Japan was on one side in 1915, on the other side in 1943, and airplanes were just invented yet everybody had them in 1943. If a country such as Japan who has no such weapons today, but polarized heavily politically in say 5 years, they could build up an arsenal in a mere 2 months any time, from seawater. How can you predict that we will have world peace and harmony, and countries won't fly off the handle like they did only 100 years ago, especially when they get resource starved with the end of the cheap fossil fuel age? I still fear people turning into idiots, that fear is never gone.
Note sarcasm, please:
- How long is too long to wait? Well, as long as there is oil in Iraq and fusion power isn't successfully developed, it's not too long. How about 2015 or more like 2020? If things go well, maybe even 2030, but after all the oil is pumped, there ain't much reason to stay.
- How many lives are too many to lose? Come on, Da Man doesn't even have a line item on his balance sheet for such petty things. He only sees $ signs. The only problem is that it's hard to get people to volunteer to go get butchered in the name of some holy almighty cause, and if a draft was instituted, which might have to be by say 2010, there is a severe danger that dads and moms will flock to the states chanting "leave my little boy and little girl alone, I won't let you take them to the butcher shop." People only act when their lives are personally affected, and you need a critical mass before those who protests are really protesters taken seriously, not just a handful of vagabonds and trouble makers that nobody really pays attention to or cares about.
- How much money is too much to spend? Well, the whole economy eats, sleeps and breaths oil. If there is no oil, the show stops. How much money is too much money to keep the show going? There aint such thing as too much money to keep the show going, the show must go on by any means necessary. If we come up with fusion, then forget oil, the new energy cash will be fusion power, and then countries no longer have to fight each other because everyone has rainwater or seawater to extract the fuel from. The problem is that it takes a few trillion dollars to research, develop and buildup a fusion based energy economy, and it's not a sure bet that it will work, while punching a hole in the ground for oil that's a sure bet and sure profit today is just so much simpler and cheaper, even when you count the lives, as far as the man's balance sheet goes. Forget people in Iraq suffering when they got what we want, we depict them as evil enemies that we're trying to help liberate, from their oppressors and we pay ourselves with their resources for having done such a good job. Do unto others as thou would have them do unto thee? Love thy neighbor? How about screw your neighbor over as much as you can get away with, who's gonna stop you?
Keeping the population in fear is the only effective means of mass control. Now that the cold war is over, and Da Man who's always tryna keep a brother down, who ran both the totalitarian commie systems and the western imperialist capitalist free democracies, and could keep both sides in fear by pitting them against each other, so Da Man is searching for a new ultimate fear object - terrorism, WMD's, etc, whatever works man, just come up with something that works, because we all gotta fear something in order to conform and stay motivated, otherwise people have rights such as "even the King of England may not enter", so we need those comfortable exceptions where "even the King of England may not enter except when.." Fortunately or unfortunately the population has it too good to pay attention or give a crap and start living in fear, at least compared to how going to hell was feared back in the Dark Middle Ages, we're nowhere near that kind of fear. Talk about total mind control. These days people got used to being callous, or at least they learned to stay out of Da Man's Game, unless their life is personally affected.
The constant impeding doom is still here. However, it's nice to know that it's hard to get people to carry out such world-destruction - that's why the 1983 movie mentioned above was about robots and machines, because most normal people won't follow such commands - , unless, of course, they believe that there is afterlife where they'll live on along with everybody else, and be judged based on their behavior in this life.
One very important reason to fear the India - Pakistan conflict is that it's small scale, and suddenly appearing from out of nowhere, compared the following reasoning, all hypothetical of course: You could say that during the cold war the whole world population was bedazzled into believing there was a global conflict, they were given something to fear when in fact it was the same world power hegemony controlling both the US and USSR political systems, and this whole Stanislav Petrov event was just an experiment by these powers that be to test just how far Earth is from a catastrophy. I believe, or secretly hope, that if Petrov had acted as expected of him in carrying out his duties, it would have escalated very high, and at the last minute the hegemony would stop the experiment and say ok, we see what happens, enough now, let's stop this experiment. (Running such experiments is extremely high risk, and very many bases need to be covered to make it all failsafe.) The nice thing is that they were in for a marvelous surprise of humanity and caring in action, and basically life on Earth defending itself. Such instincts are very deep rooted. I don't think most "reasonable" people will go along with the "mutually assured destruction doctrine", as in "here we go, we're assuredly destructed, we can see that on the screen, so now it's our turn, let's destruct our attacker too completely, to live up to the contract and to show that nobody messes with us - if I'm going down, then everybody go down with me, if me and my folks ain't surviving then I'm making sure nobody else will" -this would be a very adolescent and childish stance, though it's present in every human being in the form of revenge instincts. In a sense, if I'm going down, at least somebody else lives on, even if it's the misguided enemy, is the survival instinct of life as a whole defending itself, though you need very mature souls to act like this, and in world history you do end up with crazy leaders such as it often happened in the Roman empire, with rulers such as Caligula, Commodus and Nero, basically mentally ill people without a properly reigned in ego, without a religion that provides ego-control and self-control.
So back to the original topic, as long as there is a single hegemony controlling the actions of the US gov't, USSR gov't, the EU, the World Bank, etc, the likelihood of a nuclear catastrophy is nil, and the makebelieve smoke and mirror conflicts can be stopped in time without getting too much out of hand. True conflicts where there are two independent contesting powers not being under the control of the same group can lead the catastrophies. Unfortunately humans by nature love being free beings, and do not easily bear shackles and total control. No matter how long you explain someone that you were born to be a slave, and these are your commanders and superiors, people don't like the idea of being unequals - in a sense I won't take the you're better than me statement, even though I don't mind striving to prove that I'm better than you, but that's hipocrisy and illogical and unsustainable, so the only stable equilibrium here is that of neither of us is better than the other, as far as intrinsic value as a human being goes, even if some of us are better at singing, at basketball, etc. In this sense the existence of a single global hegemony that assures that mutually assured destruction is never activated, the existence of such an entity is undermined by the desire of people trying to be free and equal to each other in essence, as far as the worth as a human being goes. So how can you have a global single entity overseeing everything that happens, without the feeling of oppression by that entity? Makebelieve democracy is a great thing, it makes you believe you elected the leader, so you're not oppressed, you're in charge, while the actual powers that be acting in the background assure world peace at least as long as they have a hand in local appearing out of nowhere situations, which, by the way do take some effort to subdue in a sense and make be und
That argument would fly the same if WIndows was still stuck on the Windows 3.1 interface, but who would want that? I don't think the world had a problem adapting to Windows 95, which was like finally a breath of fresh air, and I don't think the confusion was that great for newcomers from Win31. However there is such a thing as something becoming a mature technology, and you can only innovate so much. The latin alphabet superceded the greek and the egyptian hieroglyphs, which were all great inventions in their time, or even equivalent to the latin alphabet just different, but not much has changed for like 2 millenia now. Will that be the same with the 2d computer interfaces, in 2 millenia will we still have a Start button? Yeah, ok, you still have cyrillic alphabets, arabic, chinese, etc, but I don't think they represent such a tremenduous technological improvement over the latin one. If they'd be an improvement, we'd be using them, just like around the 1500's people switched from roman numerals to "arabic" numerals developed by the indians, because they were better, but we've been stuck with the same symbols for 500 years now.
Or they can say we did this so somebody else can't do it then sue us for their patents - is one argument used a lot, we do "defensive patenting." I think the term "defensive patenting" is boloni, if that's all you want, to defend yourself all you need to do is publish to the world without applying for a patent, and then it's prior art public domain for anyone else, and nobody can have a patent on it and sue you. You just have to be the first to publish it to the world before someone beats you to it and publishes it as a patent. That's all.
It's like telling a dog, that doesn't want a collar and chain around it's neck, "Here doggie, doggie, let's put this chain on your neck, and we promise we ain't gonna yank it! Good dog!" What's wrong with dogchains if there is a promise they will never be used and abused? They are just like not having a collar around your neck, after all, the covenant is legally binding unless - unless, aha, I knew there was a catch! - unless you inspect the small print, which is subject to interpretation by lawyers in a courtroom at some later time. But baby steps first, let's get the collar on your neck, today, let's get over that step first, then we deliberate over whether we have the right to yank it or not. OK? Com'ere doggie! Good daaawg!
And your nanoancestors used nanoparticulate charcoal sticks to paint their nanocave paintings, while inhaling nanoparticulate nanosmoke from their nanocampfire. Same with crocodiles, who 200 million years ago inhaled the invisible nanodust that floats around in the atmosphere and makes the sky red when the sun sets. So what? Did the romans have sufficient resolution microscopy to actually tell they were dealing with nanocrap?
If someone looks wrong at the other sex, stares wrong, and has a large porn collection, that's sufficient grounds to say that he's sexually addicted and a danger to society. We will only tolerate people who are not addicted in sex, who have been able to eradicate any lust and desire, one of the cardinal mortal sins. Then wait a hundred years, and there will be only cheaters of the law left, those who gave in to their addiction and reproduced anyway, ehh? Sex is the touchiest of topics, because it requires two people, one fucking the other and vice versa, during which personal freedoms are deliberately trampled upon by request - such as please invade my privacy - by mutual agreement, and such mutual agreements are later questionable because there is no a priori written and signed contract. I suggest they enact a law where you can only have sex where both(or all) of the participant sign a detailed, preplanned contract, spelling out how they intend to proceed during the act, and to really be safe, have a public notary or a government official participate as an overseer, observing the details of the contract and warning you about any missteps. Anyway, there is such a thing called reproductive rights, but Da Man always tryna keep a brother down is always messing with that, and talks you into being a nun, priest, Shaker, tells you it's a cardinal sin, etc. Yeah, it's a cardinal sin to enter into contracts with minors, but otherwise what counts is the mutual agreement, which is hard to tell whether it is there when your mate wants you to be impulsive and surprise him/her, and says ahhh, that hurts, but it hurts so goood! Your honor, he/she hurt me!!! You can always chastize pretty much anyone alive with a healthy reproductive instinct over being guilty, but what's new, we're told we're born in sin, we're guilty for simply being alive, unless we do as told. But if you look at places where such brainwashing is in effect, you can note the smaller overpopulation problems, so who's to say what's best, maybe you need some dose of sexual instinct opression just to have a stable and working society, because the drive to reproduce is just so damn strong, and man no longer has predators or enemies to keep its population in check, so it has to come from somewhere, and where better than the governement erecting laws, or religion teaching self control, because whoever expects people not to cheat on the first cardinal sin? We tell you it's a sin but come on, we don't really mean it, we just want to moderate you, we still need new people and a next generation, just not too many!
As far as oil goes Hungary is not in the Top 50 (guess which countries most terrorist hide in), but it does have some coal, nowhere neas are much as the US does though. Back in the days the US used to top the oil reserves chart too, and even as recently as 2003 it held the 2nd spot for largest oil producer even from dwindling reserves, but now it has "fallen" to the 3rd spot. Note how Iraq has a lot of oil, but it's been producing relatively little, holding on to its reserves to the end. Such things are unsustainable, it's like wobbling a piece of sausage before the nose of a hungry dog, or leaving a hungry goat and a head of cabbage together in the same room, how long can you expect the situation to stand? There is actually a proverb/saying in Hungarian, about a desirable solution, where the "kecske is jóllakik, a káposzta is megmarad", meaning a solution where both the goat is sated, but the cabbage has remained too, but can you think of such a solution for the oil case?
Cable is also a monopoly, but dialup isps didn't use to be.
Bullshit.. I remember that mystical feeling of the early days of surfing the net, in a library, way back in 1994, with Nescape 1.0. Yahoo was a neat place, had a lot of categories, while it was young, run by two hillbillies as a startup, there was Webcrawler as a search engine, then Altavista later a little better (nothing as good as google though that showed up in 1999, or ICQ in 97), and even Ebay was around. Back in 94 forget looking at the library catalog index to find a book, walk to the shelf, when you could just sit down at the same computer and just have the answers right at your fingertips. And you could have all that from home, via a SLIP dialup, with Trumpet Winsock/Win3.1, manual logins! Yay! And all this came alive because of Netscape - gopher, news, ftp, telnet and such have fallen mostly by the wayside, and http became the major dominant force of the internet, all because of netscape making it so accessible. Microsoft had no clue, was just simply left in the dust, they thought of the internet and www as you think of gopher or ftp these days - insignificant user experience, clumsy and frustrating to use, and who needs it anyway? Netscape, riding on NCSA's Mosaic's back, proved it differently. Netscape 2.0 had neat javascript (plus bundled news and especially email) - who would have thought an C-like syntax is masterable by the masses, when average joe needs either cobol or basic? Then holy cow, Netscape 3.0 with java! Yahoo games, chess, card games, pool, it all rocked! Secure sandbox too! Good old days when the web used to be secure, unlike the activex junk today, plus all the downloadable instant messenger backdoors and spyware 'innovations' that happened since then. Or blogging, you no longer have to go to the confession booth to repent your sins, you can put it all in writing online! Be honest please, and personal! Gee, what progress since then to please you the customer! Back then Netscape 3.0 was miles ahead of IE 3.0, even though by 4.0 you could feel the pressure lowering on the company to stop doing what it was doing, including sabotagelike deliberate crappy work - 4.0 was pretty much crap compared to the revolution 3.0 was, dhtml was a mess compared to the perfection that secure java applets were. If netscape were allowed to flourish, I believe the whole computing experience would be different today - I can't tell what they would have invented, but I'm sure it would have been more nice stuff - for instance you could be having an online desktop, with wordprocessors and all your needs, from any-isp service provider at a low cost, all you need is hardware, boot via some free bios program, log on from anywhere in the world to your service provider, and there you go, at 10bux a month everything included, connection, software, everyting, if there is enough competition, because netscape didn't try to hog the market, they didn't try to be yet another AOL and "everything goes through me" service provider, but they let local isp's live too. Today even if you had such an webmail service type of world, it would be only 3 players - yahoo, gmail and hotmail. Barrier of entry humongous. What about local ISP's, mom and pop shops? Talk about an information economy where there are only 2 players and the rest of the population is excluded, can only be p4wns. Unfortunately there were powerful forces vested in the current monopolistic desktop model. After Netscape was exterminated, what has happened? Nothing! We're just milking the same old cash cows from way back 1993, Win31 + MS Office + some database on the network somewhere, all with a new face slapped on it, and ok, some stability improvements, but with all those trillions invested, you better get some stability, and even so I dont' think the customer is getting a fair return. Why innovate if the money is flowing in, why be stupid and undercut yourself, why lower the cost of computing, and have everyone better off when that means making yourself worse off? Of course you won't. And most importantly, don't let the market turn into a competitive place where there a
You forget that the USA has some of the richest farmland in the world, with relatively low population density. It's in one of the best positions against surviving any kind of catastrophic collapse in global world order. Now Japan, with huge population density, stuck on a barren rock, is walking in a different set of shoes. Technically you could mass produce ammonia, proteins, sugar, etc. in chemical factories to feed the population if you had plenty of energy, such as fusion, no wonder they fought so desperately to host ITER. The sea just doesn't produce enough food for all of Japan to feed on, because it's colored blue, not green, and biological and photosynthetic activity is relatively low. As far as the USA goes, there isn't too much to worry about, we got everything here, we just aren't used to living within our means.
Gimme your kidney! What kidney?
I beg to disagree. I've personally teased a kitty with a laser pointer, in a carpeted corridor, in low light. Kitties have a natural chase instinct to chase the laser pointer that moves along the carpet. Mind you it has no smell or anything other than appearance, and cats trust their eyes more than their sense of touch, for instance. Now the fun part was always when the laser dot walked along the edge of the wall, very slowly, it practically drove the kitty nuts, but the kitty lay low, stalking, ready to pounce anytime. Then as the laser light went around a slight corner of about 12 inches deep to the next wall, that looked like this ___|TTTT the kitty being somewhere above the T's, guess what? The kitty "knew" where the light was, that it existed, even though it couldn't see it. It would get up from the previous low lying stalk position, and walk right up to the corner, to the very nearby T, but not as far as the tip of her nose to be seen. She had her ears tensed to the limit listening, of couse the laser dot made no sound. I'd make the dot walk away from the corner along the other wall, til it came to an angle where the kitty could see it, and boy, you could see the electric jolt run down the kitty as soon as the dot was visible, but she held steady, and then I made it walk back to the corner, and not move for minutes. After a while the kitty got fed up with waiting, and attacked the unseen dot, - whammmm! it was scary - dashing out from behind the corner, then looking intensly and pawing toward it as soon as she saw it. In fact it would attack the corner even if I made the dot disappear, which was very disappointing to the kitty, the dot must have escaped somehow, but as soon as the dot reapearred somewhere else, aha, there you are, time to stalk and pounce you again! Tell me the kitty had no 2d map of the corner in her mind, or concept of the dot held in her mind, even while it wasn't visible to her senses. I think kitties model the world too, and model it very geometrically too, often a lot better than you do. Try getting chased by a tiger, and lets see who solves the geometric problems of shortest running distances, or jumping paths through rocks on a river quicker, you or the tiger?
E-Ink? Hold on for an e-second while I look for an e-tissue to wipe my e-glasses, and scratch my e-i-e-o-ass. Old McDonald had a farm, and an e-pencil too, with an e-tip!
Manned missions are necessary so that we get practical everyday means of and experience in sustaining life in a self-contained-bubble, if you will, so that we can send up a few such rainforest-glass-bubbles to outer space, that function in a closed system, as an insurance policy against humans going nuts down here, and exterminating themselves in a final nuclear apocalypse. At least some of these bubble-ships could hide out in the asteroid fields, or even land back on a devastated Terra, or even Terra would have a few thousand of these huge spaceships on hand serving as bunkers that are ready to jump in case the stuff hits the fan, ready to either stay down here, or make a run to the other side of the Moon if a next Hitler is chasing you with a stick. Yes there is a danger of different evolutions in different self-contained spheres, and some isolated bubbles may mutate/evolve some super-beings that are stronger/smarter/more radiation/cancer/HIV/black plague/bird flu resistant than you or me, or some bubbles may even go nuts and decide to destroy everyone else because they think their bubble would be safe, the mutually assured destruction wouldn't apply to them, but still, I don't really like the mutually assured destruction argument keeping us safe, do you? Manned missions and everyday practical technology for self-contained radiation resistant bubbles down here on Earth is an important insurance policy for life - including plant, animal, aquatic etc. life - to survive in face of the danger we pose ourselves and to other living things on this planet. We owe it to the monkeys and the polar bears to do some manned missions, how else you gonna explain it to them to trust us?