Here's an article on Jay Leno who owns one and drives it around hollywood.
NICE looking vehicle. Slow, but hey - it beats the fuck out of shlepping some gus guzzling death monster three blocks to pick ip a six pack and a pack of smokes... I'd drive what Leno's got. It looks like it could deal with some dodgey street conditions as well - and that'll be important because peak oil == peak asphalt. Sure: take your hydrogen powered Ferrari - it's not going to get very far when streets are dusty scrub-board horse tracks. Cars in 50 years will be lightweight with a high clearance, relatively narrow large wheels (think seriously heavy duty bike tires), and slow. And THAT'S if you actually own a car.
Most people won't - too expensive and not enough of a need.
Oh, I know I know. I have many many friends sweating it out in the Empire. I get daily reports on the misery, and they are NOT knuckledragging retards. Except for Aaron. He's a fucking idiot. But I digress...
You are correct. Please note: I'm not in the UK. I find what is happening there very sad, and just as sad as the USA, my former homeland.
And it's just really really sad to watch. The USA did away with habeus corpus, and the gutless democrats haven't found the FUCKING BALLS to reinstate it. But it was the Brits who invented it BECAUSE of a Really Craptastic King they had forcing them to develop the Magna Carta. So many thousands of people struggled and died for the freedoms we all take for granted, and it seems people are just too stupid or cowed to bother demanding their privacy and freedom.
No shit. What the fuck is up with the UK these days? The USA is a pit of right wing idiocy, but I always blame it on the fact they're morons from the gitgo. I mean really - that George Bush could be considered a viable candidate indicates that way too many knuckledragging retards live there. So you sort of have to spot the yanks a few right off.
But one would think that the UK, with THOUSANDS of years of experience, and having had their nation bombed and burned by fascists would be a good bit more on top of this kind of thing. But. no. It's like they're saying "Roights? Who needs roights? Cor Blimey - just gimme a pint there guvnah!" sheeesh. Between the jillions of cameras in London, which HAVEN'T really made the city safer, and the constant erosion of human rights and common sense, argh. It's a sad thing to watch.
It's all crap. It's $5 now, and after a year or two they'll say "Waaaa! We're not making enough money for our 'rights holders' so we gotsa run the price! Now it's $10" and so on and so on until, like Cable TV, it's $100 a month.
And sans net neutrality, they could tier your music access - $5 a month gets you classical music and show tunes. $10 a month gets you Jazz and Indie Rock. $20 a month gets you top 40. $30 a month gets you...
Are you sure? Human conversational domain might be finite, albeit quite a bit larger than the chess domain. At some point it becomes very difficult to tell the difference between "infinite" and just "very very very large"...
Wrong. Human conversation can loop and converse about the loopage. That is infinite.
Any system of tuning, be it standard Western 12 tones per octave, or more detailed Indian scales that include quarter tones, only uses a few of the infinite number of audible frequencies. Human ears can actually be trained to identify differences between a standard A at 440 Hz and an A at 441 Hz. If you represent those frequencies as 440.000 and 441.000, you may see my point.
Ah, but: that's at 440. Octaves double frequences, so the octave below, that same relative difference is 2 Hz, etc. Humans ARE able to hear things when they pay attention, but most of the time they don't, and a huge number of people are "tone deaf" which is kind of like musical nearsightedness. If they get up close and really focus, they might be able to distinguish the differences. But usually they can't. The opposite, perfect natural pitch, is very rare. Most of us are somewhere in between. Besides: I'm not interested in modeling, I'm interested in GETTING RICH ON THE BACKS OF OTHERS!!!!
:-)
All I'm interested in is what can be expressed by standard notation. That's what stands up in court, and that's how I will be collecting money from the RIAA!!!
All this does is move the goal post. It's crap. Insurance companies will dump millions into it only to find that surprises still happen. Hurricanes plow into cities. Cities drown. The govt is too incompetent to help, so it farms it all out to their buddies in related industries. Naomi Wolf can tell you how such Modeling surprise ideas would work for Certain People.
Probabilistic Chips
This is not revolutionary or even interesting, as we teeter on the brink of optical computing.
NanoRadio
Great. Now head lice can listen to Coldplay. I'm so happy I could just plotz.
Wireless Power
Great. Plug in the cellphone, go to bed and the thing will zap bugs all night. And your cat.
Atomic Magnetometers
Fine - piss all this money into that, but defund free clinics, let people die from treatable diseases, etc. jusst because they're uninsured. Frankly, I could do with a little more focus on basic preventive health and health maintenance work, and a little less medical techno heroics. the tech stuff is easy because you don't have to care. dealing with some pregnant 14 year old from the ghetto, now that takes some attention...
Offline Web Applications
Oh lordy bullshit. It's just Adobe trying to find ways to keep people from stealing photoshop.
Graphene Transistors
But will it make my porn look better?
Connectomics
Wanna get rid of autism? Don't let a kid watch TV or use a video game until he's 10. That would clear up a good 20% of the autism AND ADHD cases would disappear. The rest of the autistics? They're tards. It's why we invented factories and WalMart. They need to work somewhere.
Reality Mining
Ummm yeah - and considering the govt is reviving the Big Brother Machine it'll be so much easier to monitor your every thought, and you can change your name to THX1138, or LUH1734 if you're a girl...
Cellulolytic Enzymes
Sure - until some tiny bacteria crittur finds it tasty and infects the vats. Biofuels = genocide.
So that about raps it up for this years techno wankfest. Thanks for tuning in! Come back next year for yet another pile of misguided wishful thinking posing as science. Til then, buh bye!
The TV industry only recently acquired a commodity model like the music industry (little pieces of plastic), and most of its history, has been one of broadcast. If any website can route around using the a youtube API, and TiVo is in on it, then one should be able completely skirt the broadcast model completely. Instead of a "tube" going from broadcaster to audient, the tube is removed and then anyone can talk to the audient.
The only thing that remains are issues of "quality" that one gets from expensive productions (crane shots, long tracking shots, fancy lighting tricks, quality make up, good direction and acting). So, the funding would have to come from somewhere - the economic model would have to work - but if it is settled either through fees for DL or subscriptions or whatever, then basically two things happen: the broadcaster business model is mortally wounded and the advertisers that support it will have a harder time keeping eyeballs...
This youtube / tivo thing is a harbinger of the future of TV, and is a BIG step in the right direction.
You don't need "higher dimensions" to do this at all. In fact, it's insanely simple, and is governed by numbers. Like Boards of Canada said, Music is Math.
It works like this: you use an algorithm that puts together in a very orderly fashion every possible note combination. Think of this as Serialism gone buttfuck crazy. If your system has only one note, and only one duration, then it can be represented in binary: 1 = note, 0 = silence. You can arbitrarily limit the duration (set definition) in question. So, let's say it's 8 measures.
So, every possible combination of 1 and zero becomes a number in this system, and so every melody can be identified.
Now, just multiply pitches, give it a number, and you get melody - 1,6,21,4,55, etc. Then you establish a simple number as your base "speed" (say, 120) and you can calculate the fastest possible repetition of a sound before it buzzes into a sound itself (something over 20 beats per second, so let's say 64th notes) and you then establish that as your "Planck" note duration. You then establish the number of possible pitches (the MIDI 128 will do for now) and then it's on to harmony.
Harmony (harmonies, triads, and chords, clusters, etc.) is simply melody stacked on top of itself. So, you then put some upper limit on the number of "voices" you wish to consider. An orchestra has 80+ voices, so let's make it a nice number like 100. So, you then take one melody.
So, now we have to calculate all the possible (128) pitches and silences for 8 measures for one melody. That gives you a number. Then you calculate it for each voice in sequence, and that gives you another number. Keep calculating. You will end up with a VERY large number of numbers, but you will be able to calculate EVERY POSSIBLE melody, harmony, triad and chord, in EVERY POSSIBLE rhythm within the parameters of your system (which, at 64th notes at 120bpm with a range of 128 notes, is REALLY FREAKIN' HUGE).
Except for primes, all numbers are the products of two smaller numbers greater than 1, so, one could then arrive at an equation of simple numbers arranged in additions and multiplications that would provide the given number to express a given piece of music. In fact, it would, in essence, express ALL music, as a given song would consist of a number expressing 8 measures, which is then followed by another number expressing 8 measures, etc. It's completely linear.
So, the first 8 bars might be [(a+b+c)(df)+g] which is then followed by [h(ij)+(kl)] which describes the next 8 measures, etc.
The computer would do the calculations themselves on demand. And this is where the EVIL FUN begins:
What you do is with this system, ANY piece of notated music could be fed into the computer, and it would then "find" that music inside the system, and ALL SONGWRITERS would have to PAY royalties on the music the computer has generated.
"Buh buh buh I'm an artist and I wrote this song. It goes Gm / Gm7 / A / D / G for eight bars and then..."
Buh buh bullshit buddy: you song is located RIGHT HERE in my MASTER MUSIC PLAN. It's number consists of 10^42 digits and starts with "234895230498000345600045345" and ends with "3489000234502340523065023045604004506340" See? Right there.... Now PAY UP MOTHERFUCKER...
"buh buh buh..."
"ALL YOUR SONGS ARE BELONG TO ME!!!! now PAY UP!!!! I make the RIAA look like a bunch of GIRL SCOUTS!!! PAY UP!!! NOW!!!!"
See? We don't need "multidimensional systems" to describe music - it can be done linearly. And it can make the guy who builds this damn thing filthy fucking rich.
Your stupid arrogant little piddly-ass dumb-fuck laws in KENTUCKY have no bearing on me in Canada. Or my sister in the UK. Or the best man at my wedding in Australia. Or even my ex-girlfriend in Oregon. Or even my assistant's parents in fucking OHIO. Or anywhere else on this planet outside of the benighted state of Kentucky.
Good gawd, when are these fools going to get a clue that there's a whole big wide world out there that doesn't give a flying fuck about them or their piddly little problems, and that making laws in your state that regulates an international system of data transmission is little more than arm-waving flautus? Somebody, PLEASE make these idiots either shut up or go away. PLEASE.
From 1997 - 2004 I spent most of my working time doing QA testing (at first blackbox, of course, then went into greybox, and some whitebox, but found black and grey more fun) and I never wanted to get into serious management as it was too boring for words. The most I ever directed was 4 or 5 testers under me, usually contractors.
I left ICT because I finally got sick and tired of 50 hour work weeks, crappy vacation time, the endless stress, the petty competitions, and basically having no life, and retirement consisted of whatever I could squirrel away in a 401k, which isn't much when you live in San Francisco, and then have a baby and then have a mortgage, etc...
So, I got some degrees and now I'm in academia and have a much more active art practice. I get most of the summer off, and life is pretty good. I left the USA, and instantly doubled my vacation time. during the school year I work 50 - 60 hours a week, like I did before, but now I get summers off, and 2 weeks at Xmas and 5 weeks vacation. There is stress, but it's not like a certain micromanaging CEO of a certain Huge Company is standing on my desk screaming at me and my colleagues for blowing a deadline.
So, if there is a problem with retention of quality people in ICT, from my experience, it likely has to do more with the crap working conditions and dismal futures of so much of the average ICT employee. Note: AVERAGE employee. The stars will always excel, but if you're not a high flying Type A aneurysm waiting to happen, and you just want a job at something that doesn't hurt, being an average ICT worker isn't always such a great deal.
However, the deficits have bloomed out of control due to inadequate taxation on the rich, which began during the Reagan Administration. Presently, the highest incomes actually pay less (percentage wise) than middle income earners. Bush's tax reductions on the rich only exacerbated the problem, and that is why the USA is staring at 1/3 to 1/2 trillion dollar deficits forever.
What we have seen over the past 100 years is the development of the American Empire. Empires are expensive to maintain and inevitably collapse under their own weight of corruption and mismanagement. That's what we are seeing now, is the dismantling of the American Empire - the abandonment of the unipolar for the multipolar geopolitic. It will take at least a few decades. The USA will be forced to retire as a global hegemon and take on a role as a regional hegemon (dominating North and South America) while China dominates East Asia, India South Asia, and Russia does a peculiar dance with a EU. Africa becomes a free-for-all exploitation zone.
We're about to start skidding down the back end of the energy curve, and that will make global empires obsolete, if not impossible. The USA was the last of that genre.
I think the USA is beset by a number of problems. Corruption is certainly one of them, but a lazy and wilfully ignorant populace I would rank as an even greater problem. If people were more engaged and better educated in critical thinking skills, I don't think the USA would be quite the slow motion train wreck it has become.
I do not see this as cheating at all. This is a pedagogical issue: HOW was the class's content and practice managed? What were the stated expectations of the professor for the students in the class as described by the syllabus?
Example: let's say that in one of my classes I go rambling on about some stupid nonsense, and it's full of holes, but I'm dealing with second years who are easily confused by a forceful presentation. So, in the classroom itself, they're all "Wow - that's really (x) and I think (y)" so, some of them get together and informally discuss over a few beers, "Yeah - Prof. Spoilsport's full of shit. Look - right here - everything he said yesterday was crap. Obviously, we're not getting what we think we're getting - let's form a study group."
Now, the verity of my lecture is of no consequence - I could have been barking mad, or stone cold sober mumbling truisms of such obviousness Jack Handey would consider it an eminent truth of the universe. That's not the point. The point is association of participants in an educational context that is additional and secondary to the classroom experience. If they go over homework questions all together in some filthy dorm room or in the digital space of facebook, I don't see the difference, except one is public and done in the glare of the internet, and the other is done in the dim light of bong hits and dingy carpet.
I also think this speaks to the differences in spatial perception by students who have grown up with digital materials and their professors and educational institutions. For failing to respect this difference is to fail to perceive the difference between boundary postulation and boundary location. These are social facts of enormous power, and it shows the power of the stranglehold of the cultural industries on the imaginations of the young, at the same time it shows the young taking advantage of cultural techne in order to advance themselves within the social order and confines of social institutions, such as Ryerson University.
To put it all more simply, these kids saw a way to share data, and did it. This is very much like a P2P system, only with knowledge as the commodity being traded, and it shows an essential fact missed by the Prussian system's axia and assumptions of and in education, especially education in the 21st century: that it is a social act committed by groups, that students are not blank slates, and that the traditional classroom system needs to be re-thought as the petroleum age comes to a shuddering skid into the brick wall of resource depletion. After the wreck, some few will survive the crash, and it is imperative that education be one of them. Otherwise, as Jane Jacobs described: we rush headlong into a Dark Age.
This kind of thing happening at Ryerson is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what is to follow all over the world, assuming the likes of China's so-called "Communist" party and the idiocy of American Fascism (like Bush/Cheney et al) don't shut the whole thing down before we get there. This expansion of education into ICT should be embraced and managed, co-opted and accounted for, not persecuted and fought with threats of expulsion. I think the kid at Ryerson (like Sean Fanning) should get a freakin' medal for his efforts.
flying Cars won't happen because people are idiots and can barely pilot automobiles. Add another dimension to their travels, and it blows their mental buffer in a big way. It's why we pay pilots large sums of money to get us home in one piece.
The post says:
Translating this concept to the 21st century would be something like introducing email for things: you could order something on the Internet and pick it up through a trapdoor in your cellar the next morning."
Suuuure... Let's dig up the ENTIRE NATIONS SIDEWALKS and install delivery tubes to all the houses. I want to live in a city / suburb / town / village where thousands of people are digging vast pits and ditches that will deliver Consumer Goods from China (tm) to my door. Brilliant. Imagine the noise. As if it's not going to simply fill up with water and become just another sewer. As if the planet has enough energy to build such a pointless network much less constantly propel all these Consumer Goods 24/7.
Fuck, when will people get a clue that the world is better off with fewer but BETTER technologies, than more crappier technologies? and how will we tell you might ask... energy costs will certainly be a defining currency.
Yes I did. It was one of the best classes I had that semester, too. Normally getting 150 narcissistic second years to peel their eyes off of facebook and pay attention to ANYTHING is hard enough, so I really have to dazzle them and make each class an event. Being a perfessah is hard work, being a good one takes extra work, and being a good public speaker comes in handy.
and lord knows, Ralph Spoilsport can sell anything - a bag of Yucatan blue or a double blast of Communication Theory served up as a classroom performance...
The lecture went "hahaha - we all know know about surveillance, right??? So, let's pretend I'm tired of living here and I want to move back home. let's look at realtor.com - I'll need a place to live. Oh look - a nice house in the neighbourhood I want. Cool. click on that, and oh - look - the interior of the place is photographed. Nice kitchen - big bathroom. Ugly carpet, but I can change that. And that credenza? Urp - that'll have to go. But that's OK. Now - let's see what the neighbourhood is like. Excellent. Google Street goes right by the place. so we'll enter the address and look wher ewe are. Oh - we're right in front of the building. nice - and look! The PEOPLE ARE MOVING OUT OF THE HOUSE. There's the moving van parked right in front. Excellent! And there's the neighbour - I recognise him because I used to live around the block from here back in the late 90s. Cool..."
At this point the class (a mass lecture of 150) got quiet...
"Oh, and look in his window! See that lamp? The guy who lived upstairs from me used to own that, and he gave to the guy who lives there. I remember that - it's a nice lamp and it was a great day. We all sat around drinking beer. Oh - just like the guy down on the corner over there."
We zoom down the street to the corner.
"Yeah - I recognise him - lousy stupid drunk. Really bad attitude. Never liked him."
"So that was fun, wasn't it kids? Dropping in on their lives, looking into their homes? Nice. so, now let's open up a new tab and I'll type in http://www.opentopia.com/hiddencam.php and look here - links to CCTs we can look through. Excellent. Click on this one, and look - we get CONTROLS- we can move and zoom the camera. Looks like we're in some university, similar to this one, but it looks like a very different time zone. Hhhhm... Let's zoom in on those kids over there. Look - one of them is picking his nose. Pig..."
The class got REALLY QUIET...
"And now, let's type in a some search criteria, like "inurl: view/index.shtml?videos=one" and look - an entire list of open cameras. Let's look at this one. Cool. People working in a call centre in Argentina. WORK YOU LOSERS! WORK!!! WORK HARDER!!! MAKE ME RICH!!! Hahaha! funny isn't it?"
No one laughed. People were squirming as we went from one private scene to another.
"OK - so today we're going to watch portions of some hollywood entertainment fodder. It's called "The Truman Show"."
They watched it with new eyes. They were guilty. They had sinned. We had gone from "isn't this interesting" to the "global panopticon" with a visceral sense of what surveillance really is as we watched people work, scratch themselves, goof off, pick their noses, BE HUMAN BEINGS.
RESIST THE SURVEILLANCE STATE. TAKE YOUR SPACE BACK FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND PRIVATE INDUSTRY.
It's not that Google Street is evil, it's not that a CCT in an airport is evil. It's not that a CCT in a parking lot is evil. But in aggregate, it is evil, and Google is not helping.
Why would you want to militarise the internet? Nothing better do? Isn't this sort of thing best left to Intelligence Agencies like the CIA and NSA who have a long-standing mandate on managing and analysing ICT data? Why do you feel the need to militarise data? Isn't this just another aspect of the Bush Administration's misguided militarisation of civilian functions?
Using car analogies makes the eeePC more like the Tata Nano. I think the eeePC is wonderful, but it doesn't have enough RAM or "drive space" for my needs. The Apple AIR is insanely overpriced, so I'll just wait... my MacBook Pro does just fine...
all you need to do to prevent this kind of thing is shift the military stance of the USA from one of "invading countries that have resources necessary to keep the planet eating death machine going" to "selectively murder spammers".
The freeing up of bandwidth from the deaths of these leeches would lead to such massive leaps in bandwidth we could actually have something like a global information economy that might survive the loss of fossil fuels. So, when a bunch of islamic extremists scream "DEATH TO AMERICA" america can scream "DEATH TO SPAMMERS" which is something even the islamic extremists can dig. In fact, the USA could hire them to hunt down and slaughter spammers. They would be doing "God's Work" no matter what imaginary friend you consider the Ruler of the Universe. They could form teams of Jihadists and Green Berets busting into suburban homes, guns a-blazing:
"DIE!!! SPAMMER INFIDEL!!!"
"EAT LEAD SPAMMER FUCKWAD!!!"
And with the bullet riddled corpse still twitching, the American and the Jihadi could shake hands and embrace over a job well done.
"Even if you are a disgusting pig eating infidel, you are a good fighter for a noble cause, Imshallah!"
"Yep, my little friend - you might smell like the goats you sleep with, but you can sniff out a spammer better than anyone on the planet! you ROCK little dude!"
And they would grab the cable and get lifted back out through the hole in the roof to the waiting helicopter. Next Mission? Another Spammer - this time in NIGERIA!!!
You'd have to pay an infinite amount of money in tax (any percentage of infinity is infinite), but then you'd write off that expense, resulting in an infinite tax write off, bankrupting the gov't.
Science doesn't give them the "Truth" they want, i.e., eternal forever truth. It's not "nice" to talk about, but intelligence follows a bell curve, and half the population, by definition, is below average, that's why average is "average". Yes, there is a huge flat part of the curve, which is where most of the population resides. But there's a good solid percentage that is stupid and clueless. Proof? Bush's popularity is at 19%. That means about 1 out of 5 people think he's OK, even after ALL the obvious horseshit that idiot has done, almost 1 out of 5 think he's OK.
There are other examples that are not political - a lot of the "safety reminders" on products come to mind. For an amusing view on this, I'd recommend 2 the Ranting Gryphon's rant on America. He's a knucklehead, but he's not an idiot and he's funny.
I read somewhere recently that a recent study determined that 25% of the American public sincerely doesn't want to think. They sincerely want to be told what to do and what to think. That they tend to be religious only makes sense. The problem is these people don't want SCIENTIFIC truth, which is always tentative and only true until proven otherwise. This is especially so with the larger questions - where did life start, how did the universe come to be, etc. Sure, we have scientific ideas, but they tend to change over time, and that is something these dunderheads can't cope with. They need UNCHANGING ABSOLUTE TRUTH (tm), and if it comes from some nonsensical piece of crap written by obscure semiliterate Israeli goatherders 3000 years ago, all the better.
Seriously - people don't want science. They want TRUTH, and scientific truth just doesn't cut it - it requires a sense of doubt, and that is something their 1/2 watt brains can't seem to muster. Things are VERY VERY bad, and they are not getting better, and odly, science isn't doing it for them.
Why? Because for every bible thumping retard, there's a dozen who go along with it because it works. How?
1. day care
2. community
3. elder care
4. entertainment
5. The Club
thee are more than that - many more - but churches provide things in the USA that secular society doesn't, and it's the "glue" type things that are not only valuable, but REQUIRED to keep a society together. Example: if you don't have much family in the area (and given the mobile nature of the USA, who does...) you need a baby sitter. Well, so and so from church has a teenager... You need to get some food to granny, but aren't goign to be able to do it. Call so and so from church who lives near her. They owe you a favour anyway... And ten there are the church picnics where people get together and the kids play and it's a nice way to blow a sunday afternoon. And then there's the church youth groups where the kids learn abstinence and practice giving blow jobs. It goes on and on. Yes, it is horrible, yes it is stupid, but in its own stumpy retarded way, it WORKS as long as people don't think too much or often about what the fuck it's all really about or for. THAT requires DOUBT, and that leads to SCIENCE.
So, I don't think tarting up science is going to amount to a hill of beans as long as American society spends half its wealth on the military industrial complex, a quarter on the infrastructure, and some tiny amount on culture and the things that make culture work. Other societies don't have this problem. The USA does, and as long as secular society refuses to step up to the plate and provide the REQUIRED social services for a functioning society, religion will be there to fill in the gap and own the minds and hearts of the retarded half of America.
Slashdot Mirror
NICE looking vehicle. Slow, but hey - it beats the fuck out of shlepping some gus guzzling death monster three blocks to pick ip a six pack and a pack of smokes... I'd drive what Leno's got. It looks like it could deal with some dodgey street conditions as well - and that'll be important because peak oil == peak asphalt. Sure: take your hydrogen powered Ferrari - it's not going to get very far when streets are dusty scrub-board horse tracks. Cars in 50 years will be lightweight with a high clearance, relatively narrow large wheels (think seriously heavy duty bike tires), and slow. And THAT'S if you actually own a car.
Most people won't - too expensive and not enough of a need.
RS
You are correct. Please note: I'm not in the UK. I find what is happening there very sad, and just as sad as the USA, my former homeland.
This song sums up my feelings about the USA:
Going to a Town
And this sums up my opinion of WAY too many of its inhabitants:
America
And with the way the UK govt is going, it's going straight here:
SexCrime
And it's just really really sad to watch. The USA did away with habeus corpus, and the gutless democrats haven't found the FUCKING BALLS to reinstate it. But it was the Brits who invented it BECAUSE of a Really Craptastic King they had forcing them to develop the Magna Carta. So many thousands of people struggled and died for the freedoms we all take for granted, and it seems people are just too stupid or cowed to bother demanding their privacy and freedom.
RS
But one would think that the UK, with THOUSANDS of years of experience, and having had their nation bombed and burned by fascists would be a good bit more on top of this kind of thing. But. no. It's like they're saying "Roights? Who needs roights? Cor Blimey - just gimme a pint there guvnah!" sheeesh. Between the jillions of cameras in London, which HAVEN'T really made the city safer, and the constant erosion of human rights and common sense, argh. It's a sad thing to watch.
RS
And sans net neutrality, they could tier your music access - $5 a month gets you classical music and show tunes. $10 a month gets you Jazz and Indie Rock. $20 a month gets you top 40. $30 a month gets you...
etcetera blah.
It's not just a bad idea, it's a trap!
RS
Wrong. Human conversation can loop and converse about the loopage. That is infinite.
RS
Ah, but: that's at 440. Octaves double frequences, so the octave below, that same relative difference is 2 Hz, etc. Humans ARE able to hear things when they pay attention, but most of the time they don't, and a huge number of people are "tone deaf" which is kind of like musical nearsightedness. If they get up close and really focus, they might be able to distinguish the differences. But usually they can't. The opposite, perfect natural pitch, is very rare. Most of us are somewhere in between. Besides: I'm not interested in modeling, I'm interested in GETTING RICH ON THE BACKS OF OTHERS!!!!
All I'm interested in is what can be expressed by standard notation. That's what stands up in court, and that's how I will be collecting money from the RIAA!!!
No? Well fuck - a fella can dream can't he?
RS
All this does is move the goal post. It's crap. Insurance companies will dump millions into it only to find that surprises still happen. Hurricanes plow into cities. Cities drown. The govt is too incompetent to help, so it farms it all out to their buddies in related industries. Naomi Wolf can tell you how such Modeling surprise ideas would work for Certain People.
Probabilistic Chips
This is not revolutionary or even interesting, as we teeter on the brink of optical computing.
NanoRadio
Great. Now head lice can listen to Coldplay. I'm so happy I could just plotz.
Wireless Power
Great. Plug in the cellphone, go to bed and the thing will zap bugs all night. And your cat.
Atomic Magnetometers
Fine - piss all this money into that, but defund free clinics, let people die from treatable diseases, etc. jusst because they're uninsured. Frankly, I could do with a little more focus on basic preventive health and health maintenance work, and a little less medical techno heroics. the tech stuff is easy because you don't have to care. dealing with some pregnant 14 year old from the ghetto, now that takes some attention...
Offline Web Applications
Oh lordy bullshit. It's just Adobe trying to find ways to keep people from stealing photoshop.
Graphene Transistors
But will it make my porn look better?
Connectomics Wanna get rid of autism? Don't let a kid watch TV or use a video game until he's 10. That would clear up a good 20% of the autism AND ADHD cases would disappear. The rest of the autistics? They're tards. It's why we invented factories and WalMart. They need to work somewhere.
Reality Mining
Ummm yeah - and considering the govt is reviving the Big Brother Machine it'll be so much easier to monitor your every thought, and you can change your name to THX1138, or LUH1734 if you're a girl...
Cellulolytic Enzymes
Sure - until some tiny bacteria crittur finds it tasty and infects the vats. Biofuels = genocide.
So that about raps it up for this years techno wankfest. Thanks for tuning in! Come back next year for yet another pile of misguided wishful thinking posing as science. Til then, buh bye!
RS
The only thing that remains are issues of "quality" that one gets from expensive productions (crane shots, long tracking shots, fancy lighting tricks, quality make up, good direction and acting). So, the funding would have to come from somewhere - the economic model would have to work - but if it is settled either through fees for DL or subscriptions or whatever, then basically two things happen: the broadcaster business model is mortally wounded and the advertisers that support it will have a harder time keeping eyeballs...
This youtube / tivo thing is a harbinger of the future of TV, and is a BIG step in the right direction.
RS
It works like this: you use an algorithm that puts together in a very orderly fashion every possible note combination. Think of this as Serialism gone buttfuck crazy. If your system has only one note, and only one duration, then it can be represented in binary: 1 = note, 0 = silence. You can arbitrarily limit the duration (set definition) in question. So, let's say it's 8 measures.
So, every possible combination of 1 and zero becomes a number in this system, and so every melody can be identified.
Now, just multiply pitches, give it a number, and you get melody - 1,6,21,4,55, etc. Then you establish a simple number as your base "speed" (say, 120) and you can calculate the fastest possible repetition of a sound before it buzzes into a sound itself (something over 20 beats per second, so let's say 64th notes) and you then establish that as your "Planck" note duration. You then establish the number of possible pitches (the MIDI 128 will do for now) and then it's on to harmony.
Harmony (harmonies, triads, and chords, clusters, etc.) is simply melody stacked on top of itself. So, you then put some upper limit on the number of "voices" you wish to consider. An orchestra has 80+ voices, so let's make it a nice number like 100. So, you then take one melody.
So, now we have to calculate all the possible (128) pitches and silences for 8 measures for one melody. That gives you a number. Then you calculate it for each voice in sequence, and that gives you another number. Keep calculating. You will end up with a VERY large number of numbers, but you will be able to calculate EVERY POSSIBLE melody, harmony, triad and chord, in EVERY POSSIBLE rhythm within the parameters of your system (which, at 64th notes at 120bpm with a range of 128 notes, is REALLY FREAKIN' HUGE).
Except for primes, all numbers are the products of two smaller numbers greater than 1, so, one could then arrive at an equation of simple numbers arranged in additions and multiplications that would provide the given number to express a given piece of music. In fact, it would, in essence, express ALL music, as a given song would consist of a number expressing 8 measures, which is then followed by another number expressing 8 measures, etc. It's completely linear.
So, the first 8 bars might be [(a+b+c)(df)+g] which is then followed by [h(ij)+(kl)] which describes the next 8 measures, etc.
The computer would do the calculations themselves on demand. And this is where the EVIL FUN begins:
What you do is with this system, ANY piece of notated music could be fed into the computer, and it would then "find" that music inside the system, and ALL SONGWRITERS would have to PAY royalties on the music the computer has generated.
"Buh buh buh I'm an artist and I wrote this song. It goes Gm / Gm7 / A / D / G for eight bars and then..." Buh buh bullshit buddy: you song is located RIGHT HERE in my MASTER MUSIC PLAN. It's number consists of 10^42 digits and starts with "234895230498000345600045345" and ends with "3489000234502340523065023045604004506340" See? Right there.... Now PAY UP MOTHERFUCKER...
"buh buh buh..."
"ALL YOUR SONGS ARE BELONG TO ME!!!! now PAY UP!!!! I make the RIAA look like a bunch of GIRL SCOUTS!!! PAY UP!!! NOW!!!!"
See? We don't need "multidimensional systems" to describe music - it can be done linearly. And it can make the guy who builds this damn thing filthy fucking rich.
RS
Your stupid arrogant little piddly-ass dumb-fuck laws in KENTUCKY have no bearing on me in Canada. Or my sister in the UK. Or the best man at my wedding in Australia. Or even my ex-girlfriend in Oregon. Or even my assistant's parents in fucking OHIO. Or anywhere else on this planet outside of the benighted state of Kentucky.
Good gawd, when are these fools going to get a clue that there's a whole big wide world out there that doesn't give a flying fuck about them or their piddly little problems, and that making laws in your state that regulates an international system of data transmission is little more than arm-waving flautus? Somebody, PLEASE make these idiots either shut up or go away. PLEASE.
RS
I left ICT because I finally got sick and tired of 50 hour work weeks, crappy vacation time, the endless stress, the petty competitions, and basically having no life, and retirement consisted of whatever I could squirrel away in a 401k, which isn't much when you live in San Francisco, and then have a baby and then have a mortgage, etc...
So, I got some degrees and now I'm in academia and have a much more active art practice. I get most of the summer off, and life is pretty good. I left the USA, and instantly doubled my vacation time. during the school year I work 50 - 60 hours a week, like I did before, but now I get summers off, and 2 weeks at Xmas and 5 weeks vacation. There is stress, but it's not like a certain micromanaging CEO of a certain Huge Company is standing on my desk screaming at me and my colleagues for blowing a deadline.
So, if there is a problem with retention of quality people in ICT, from my experience, it likely has to do more with the crap working conditions and dismal futures of so much of the average ICT employee. Note: AVERAGE employee. The stars will always excel, but if you're not a high flying Type A aneurysm waiting to happen, and you just want a job at something that doesn't hurt, being an average ICT worker isn't always such a great deal.
RS
Scorpio: Beware of people who limp!
RS
Yes, the US govt has grown immensely since WW2.
However, the deficits have bloomed out of control due to inadequate taxation on the rich, which began during the Reagan Administration. Presently, the highest incomes actually pay less (percentage wise) than middle income earners. Bush's tax reductions on the rich only exacerbated the problem, and that is why the USA is staring at 1/3 to 1/2 trillion dollar deficits forever.
What we have seen over the past 100 years is the development of the American Empire. Empires are expensive to maintain and inevitably collapse under their own weight of corruption and mismanagement. That's what we are seeing now, is the dismantling of the American Empire - the abandonment of the unipolar for the multipolar geopolitic. It will take at least a few decades. The USA will be forced to retire as a global hegemon and take on a role as a regional hegemon (dominating North and South America) while China dominates East Asia, India South Asia, and Russia does a peculiar dance with a EU. Africa becomes a free-for-all exploitation zone.
We're about to start skidding down the back end of the energy curve, and that will make global empires obsolete, if not impossible. The USA was the last of that genre.
I think the USA is beset by a number of problems. Corruption is certainly one of them, but a lazy and wilfully ignorant populace I would rank as an even greater problem. If people were more engaged and better educated in critical thinking skills, I don't think the USA would be quite the slow motion train wreck it has become.
RS
Example: let's say that in one of my classes I go rambling on about some stupid nonsense, and it's full of holes, but I'm dealing with second years who are easily confused by a forceful presentation. So, in the classroom itself, they're all "Wow - that's really (x) and I think (y)" so, some of them get together and informally discuss over a few beers, "Yeah - Prof. Spoilsport's full of shit. Look - right here - everything he said yesterday was crap. Obviously, we're not getting what we think we're getting - let's form a study group."
Now, the verity of my lecture is of no consequence - I could have been barking mad, or stone cold sober mumbling truisms of such obviousness Jack Handey would consider it an eminent truth of the universe. That's not the point. The point is association of participants in an educational context that is additional and secondary to the classroom experience. If they go over homework questions all together in some filthy dorm room or in the digital space of facebook, I don't see the difference, except one is public and done in the glare of the internet, and the other is done in the dim light of bong hits and dingy carpet.
I also think this speaks to the differences in spatial perception by students who have grown up with digital materials and their professors and educational institutions. For failing to respect this difference is to fail to perceive the difference between boundary postulation and boundary location. These are social facts of enormous power, and it shows the power of the stranglehold of the cultural industries on the imaginations of the young, at the same time it shows the young taking advantage of cultural techne in order to advance themselves within the social order and confines of social institutions, such as Ryerson University.
To put it all more simply, these kids saw a way to share data, and did it. This is very much like a P2P system, only with knowledge as the commodity being traded, and it shows an essential fact missed by the Prussian system's axia and assumptions of and in education, especially education in the 21st century: that it is a social act committed by groups, that students are not blank slates, and that the traditional classroom system needs to be re-thought as the petroleum age comes to a shuddering skid into the brick wall of resource depletion. After the wreck, some few will survive the crash, and it is imperative that education be one of them. Otherwise, as Jane Jacobs described: we rush headlong into a Dark Age.
This kind of thing happening at Ryerson is just the tiniest tip of the iceberg of what is to follow all over the world, assuming the likes of China's so-called "Communist" party and the idiocy of American Fascism (like Bush/Cheney et al) don't shut the whole thing down before we get there. This expansion of education into ICT should be embraced and managed, co-opted and accounted for, not persecuted and fought with threats of expulsion. I think the kid at Ryerson (like Sean Fanning) should get a freakin' medal for his efforts.
RS
The post says:
Translating this concept to the 21st century would be something like introducing email for things: you could order something on the Internet and pick it up through a trapdoor in your cellar the next morning."
Suuuure... Let's dig up the ENTIRE NATIONS SIDEWALKS and install delivery tubes to all the houses. I want to live in a city / suburb / town / village where thousands of people are digging vast pits and ditches that will deliver Consumer Goods from China (tm) to my door. Brilliant. Imagine the noise. As if it's not going to simply fill up with water and become just another sewer. As if the planet has enough energy to build such a pointless network much less constantly propel all these Consumer Goods 24/7.
Fuck, when will people get a clue that the world is better off with fewer but BETTER technologies, than more crappier technologies? and how will we tell you might ask... energy costs will certainly be a defining currency.
RS
and lord knows, Ralph Spoilsport can sell anything - a bag of Yucatan blue or a double blast of Communication Theory served up as a classroom performance...
RS
RS
At this point the class (a mass lecture of 150) got quiet...
"Oh, and look in his window! See that lamp? The guy who lived upstairs from me used to own that, and he gave to the guy who lives there. I remember that - it's a nice lamp and it was a great day. We all sat around drinking beer. Oh - just like the guy down on the corner over there."
We zoom down the street to the corner.
"Yeah - I recognise him - lousy stupid drunk. Really bad attitude. Never liked him."
"So that was fun, wasn't it kids? Dropping in on their lives, looking into their homes? Nice. so, now let's open up a new tab and I'll type in http://www.opentopia.com/hiddencam.php and look here - links to CCTs we can look through. Excellent. Click on this one, and look - we get CONTROLS- we can move and zoom the camera. Looks like we're in some university, similar to this one, but it looks like a very different time zone. Hhhhm... Let's zoom in on those kids over there. Look - one of them is picking his nose. Pig..."
The class got REALLY QUIET...
"And now, let's type in a some search criteria, like "inurl: view/index.shtml?videos=one" and look - an entire list of open cameras. Let's look at this one. Cool. People working in a call centre in Argentina. WORK YOU LOSERS! WORK!!! WORK HARDER!!! MAKE ME RICH!!! Hahaha! funny isn't it?"
No one laughed. People were squirming as we went from one private scene to another.
"OK - so today we're going to watch portions of some hollywood entertainment fodder. It's called "The Truman Show"."
They watched it with new eyes. They were guilty. They had sinned. We had gone from "isn't this interesting" to the "global panopticon" with a visceral sense of what surveillance really is as we watched people work, scratch themselves, goof off, pick their noses, BE HUMAN BEINGS.
RESIST THE SURVEILLANCE STATE. TAKE YOUR SPACE BACK FROM THE GOVERNMENT AND PRIVATE INDUSTRY.
It's not that Google Street is evil, it's not that a CCT in an airport is evil. It's not that a CCT in a parking lot is evil. But in aggregate, it is evil, and Google is not helping.
RS
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The freeing up of bandwidth from the deaths of these leeches would lead to such massive leaps in bandwidth we could actually have something like a global information economy that might survive the loss of fossil fuels. So, when a bunch of islamic extremists scream "DEATH TO AMERICA" america can scream "DEATH TO SPAMMERS" which is something even the islamic extremists can dig. In fact, the USA could hire them to hunt down and slaughter spammers. They would be doing "God's Work" no matter what imaginary friend you consider the Ruler of the Universe. They could form teams of Jihadists and Green Berets busting into suburban homes, guns a-blazing:
"DIE!!! SPAMMER INFIDEL!!!"
"EAT LEAD SPAMMER FUCKWAD!!!"
And with the bullet riddled corpse still twitching, the American and the Jihadi could shake hands and embrace over a job well done.
"Even if you are a disgusting pig eating infidel, you are a good fighter for a noble cause, Imshallah!"
"Yep, my little friend - you might smell like the goats you sleep with, but you can sniff out a spammer better than anyone on the planet! you ROCK little dude!"
And they would grab the cable and get lifted back out through the hole in the roof to the waiting helicopter. Next Mission? Another Spammer - this time in NIGERIA!!!
RS
You'd have to pay an infinite amount of money in tax (any percentage of infinity is infinite), but then you'd write off that expense, resulting in an infinite tax write off, bankrupting the gov't.
Works for me!
RS
wonderful. nothing like standing up for what's right in this world.
There are other examples that are not political - a lot of the "safety reminders" on products come to mind. For an amusing view on this, I'd recommend 2 the Ranting Gryphon's rant on America. He's a knucklehead, but he's not an idiot and he's funny.
I read somewhere recently that a recent study determined that 25% of the American public sincerely doesn't want to think. They sincerely want to be told what to do and what to think. That they tend to be religious only makes sense. The problem is these people don't want SCIENTIFIC truth, which is always tentative and only true until proven otherwise. This is especially so with the larger questions - where did life start, how did the universe come to be, etc. Sure, we have scientific ideas, but they tend to change over time, and that is something these dunderheads can't cope with. They need UNCHANGING ABSOLUTE TRUTH (tm), and if it comes from some nonsensical piece of crap written by obscure semiliterate Israeli goatherders 3000 years ago, all the better.
Seriously - people don't want science. They want TRUTH, and scientific truth just doesn't cut it - it requires a sense of doubt, and that is something their 1/2 watt brains can't seem to muster. Things are VERY VERY bad, and they are not getting better, and odly, science isn't doing it for them.
Why? Because for every bible thumping retard, there's a dozen who go along with it because it works. How?
1. day care
2. community
3. elder care
4. entertainment
5. The Club
thee are more than that - many more - but churches provide things in the USA that secular society doesn't, and it's the "glue" type things that are not only valuable, but REQUIRED to keep a society together. Example: if you don't have much family in the area (and given the mobile nature of the USA, who does...) you need a baby sitter. Well, so and so from church has a teenager... You need to get some food to granny, but aren't goign to be able to do it. Call so and so from church who lives near her. They owe you a favour anyway... And ten there are the church picnics where people get together and the kids play and it's a nice way to blow a sunday afternoon. And then there's the church youth groups where the kids learn abstinence and practice giving blow jobs. It goes on and on. Yes, it is horrible, yes it is stupid, but in its own stumpy retarded way, it WORKS as long as people don't think too much or often about what the fuck it's all really about or for. THAT requires DOUBT, and that leads to SCIENCE.
So, I don't think tarting up science is going to amount to a hill of beans as long as American society spends half its wealth on the military industrial complex, a quarter on the infrastructure, and some tiny amount on culture and the things that make culture work. Other societies don't have this problem. The USA does, and as long as secular society refuses to step up to the plate and provide the REQUIRED social services for a functioning society, religion will be there to fill in the gap and own the minds and hearts of the retarded half of America.
RS