The activation of cell phones microphones by the underlying network is actually possible with a lot of mobile phones (maybe all of them). The finnish government has had a guideline for classified meetings in place since the early nineties that strictly mandates all cell phones to have their batteries removed during the meeting because of exactly this possibility.
"...If any of our code is found to infringe someone else's patents, we will try to find prior technology to invalidate the patents, rework the code to design around the infringement, or as a last resort remove the functionality..."
This is a nice admission of Novell to the fact that they will never pay anyone licensing fees for a patent. This is of course true for most large corporations, but they hardly ever go on record stating it this clearly.
The reason you don't want to do this is that with a system like this, buying and selling votes becomes possible. up till now this practise is rendered useless as the person buying votes can never be sure of what his money actually gets him (this is not to sat that some people wont try it anyway).
The comparison with Finland is invalid since the sentence was given for filesharing and not for downloading files. Untill recently the legislation in finland was as clear about downloads (i.e. they were legal). Now we have the new european version of the DMCA and there haven't been any cases to test whether that status has changed. Since the legislation is essentially (supposed to be) the same throughout europe, I would guess that simply downloading stuff is still legal.
Supposing one intercepted the signal underwater it could still be decrypted. Admittedly this would require formidable computing power since one would have to simulate the geometry of sender and reciever in a continuous medium.
In communications across the net this kind of playing around with different routings and time delays would not be as effective since once intercepted the decoding would be assuming a descreet medium (only so many different pathways). It isn't clear whether the effort put in this kind of scheme would be worth it, ie. it could bne much more effective to refine the encryption algorithm.
One should note that in descreet systems, like electronic locks that open when a transmitting key is waved in front of it, the principle of asynchronous signaling is already in use. These systems use clockless processors to make the recording and decoding of the transmitted signals near impossible.
Now they can get at organised crime via the DMCA when they catch dealers paying with forged money.
"You're under arrest buster, cracking the encrypted verification on $100 bills violates the gorevnments copyright, you're looking at 15 - 20 out in 10 if your lucky."
An extremely good FAQ about mobile phones and radiation go here. This is the page that the World Health Organization links to so I for one trust it, as an international non-profit organization, to be objective.
The FAQ has some interesting information about how the writers of most of those "cellphones cause cancer" papers, which get picked up by the media in no time, have actually no tenure at any universtity and how their papers haven't undergone peer-review.
I work at a research institute of the University of Helsinki and ever so often we get long letters and research "papers" by people certain of having found ways to explain quantum gravity / the universe / theory of everything. These papers are nothing more than comic entertainment for us and a freetime hobby for whoever is sending them. As long as it's theoretical physics no-one cares. However, write a paper about cancer and cellphones and you may actually get some attention and perhaps even money. As long as your name has a PhD. in front of it the media wont bother to mention that you're actually unemployed or that your paper hasn't actually been published.
Oh please tell me where the other companies beside NOKIA are:). But seriously, texting has become extremely popular here in Finland lately. Especially young people (ie teenagers) use them in incredible amounts.
The possible reasons for this is, besides the veritable plethora of mobile phones around here, the fact that we have lots and lots of services available via texting. Services ranging from weather forecasts to reserving your movie tickets, searching the whitepages or checking stockprices, even chat-rooms and uploadable modifications to your phone (like ringing tunes and operator logos). Shortly put, we have it all.
Personally I don't use any of those services (well ok, I did load a neat logo for my phone), but these services are definetly attracting a lot of revenue for the teleoperators, since the average user of those services doesn't pay his or her own phonebill but lets daddy or mommy take care of it.
Lets start a price comparison thread. I for one would be interested in how expensive mobile calls are elswhere. I'll start be entering the prices for Finland:
Monthly: $2.92 - $4.62 (no data conection) $4.62 - $18 (data connection) Calls: $0.09 - $0.15 (to same operator) $0.09 - $0.37 (to hard line) $0.15 - $0.37 (to other operator)
These are the prices for the oprator that I use, Radiolinja, the prices of other operators are pretty much the same since there is fierce competition over customers here in Finland where the law prohibits long term binding contracts to operators and thus switching between them is easy.
The price ranges indicated give the prices depending on time of day and type of contract. not listed are special contracts like "family line" where the call costs between three individual phones and a hard line can be as low as $0.04 per minute.
For reference, a hard line costs about $10 a month with calls at $0.07 per ten minutes. So lets hear what ather countries have to offer.
This is something that is already happening a lot and not so much in the western industrialized countries but more so in the third world countries where there is no telephone network to begin with. Governments in Asia and Africa find it cheaper to build a mobile network instead of upgrading, or in some cases actually starting from scratch, a conventional cable based network. Although the cost of an individual cell phone is astronomical in relative economic terms it is cheaper for an village in Africa to buy one cell phone than to to get a puplic phone booth for example.
On the other hand in industrialized countries the reasons for switching entirely to mobile phones are different but mostly also cost related. Countries where the mobile coverage reaches an acceptable range, and I personally can only talk about Finland where ist is darn close to 100%, there is really no drawback to having a cell phone regardless of where you live (plus the obvious advantages of the cell phones mobility).
Here in Finland the amount of housholds with only a cell phone and no hard line is rising steadily as well as in other European countries. The main reason being cheap phone calls. Whith the infrastructure of the mobile network in place, operators can start lowering the call prices as the investments that were needed to build the network are being paid back and the interest on them get less and less. The price difference in the monthly fee of a hard line and a mobile is enough to let you talk for about one hour on your mobile, admittedly not much, but with additional plans for eg. interoperator calls that can go up to three hours and then your only at the amount you'd have to pay for having the hard line to your home. I reacon the States still have some way to go before a significant price drop in the call charges happens since your operators are still building the network and that takes a lot of money.
One other big question which comes up in deciding whether to get rid of the hard line is the computer. Connecting to the net over a cell phone is... well it sucks. Here again students have the advantage since universities offer unlimited net access in some cases even in the campus living quarters. Other non-phoneline related solutions like cable modems are slowly making progress and in turn accelerate the rate at which people give up their hard lines (with a cable modem and a mobile phone you really don't need a hard line anymore).
A year later it was Eidos Interactive's turn to recognise that the model from Rotherham in Yorkshire had the requisite attitude, looks and - let's face it - physical dimensions to fill the star of the Tomb Raider series' famous boobs.
You got it right almost untill the end, the bit with claude in the middle didn't go quite right. your writing is almost a perfect copy of an article that came out in Scientific American a while ago. the article explains why claude is actually no problem: bob can simply choose some bits (not the whole transmitted key but only part of it) and send tham back over an unsecure line, alice can then check whether they match the ones she sent. if claude is listening then a substantial part of this "control key" is wrong because he messed it up. also i think the current status of test results is a bit longer than the ones you mention (though no satellite capabilities yet).
I belive the scientology reference meant was more in the line of "Travolta is a scientologist as is the author and thats the only reason this book was turned into a movie". I really doubt that a two hour movie can do this work justice, there are some books that should never be turned into movies, and this is just a case of "buddy favouring" which goes on all the time in hollywood only this time it has a religious nature.
The entire DeCSS affair and the other cases around the DMCA have generated a lot of fuss and made people re-think copyright issues, fair use definitions, the legality of region coding on old movies etc. etc. In all of this there is one development which hasn't gotten enough attention in my opinion, especially since its impact is truly gigantic in comparison to the DVD dilemma. The sentence pointed out in this/. story entails the seed of enormous profits for the MPAA and various other corporations in the film/tv-media industry. combine the statement that "digital copyright protection may not be circumvented by code/technology even if fair use would allow the use of said material" with two words: "digital television". DTV will be a reality in the near future (here in finland they are starting broadcasts real soon), now imagine that broadcasting companies start embedding a copyprotection into the bit stream of their broadcasts, as with CSS it needn't be perfect it could even be blantanly easy to crack but thanks to the DMCA, videotaping these kind of transmissions would be illegal. (well at least in the states, not here though) be afraid, (no kidding) be very afraid...
the US seems like an endless source of curious and macabre entertainment, all one really can do is sit back and enjoy (and hope that the punch line doen't hit your own nose). I have always liked being on an entirely different continent than the USA although I'd prefer a different planet or solar system.
I wonder whether one can trap oxygen inside these buckyballs. If one can get enough stuffed inside and mass produce them, they'd be the perfect lighterfluid for BBQs, even better, one could mix them with normal charcoal to make "super"-charchoal - burns fast and is easy to light - no more lighterfluid aftertaste on them ribs...
Obviously the PSX2 isn't just a game console. It has at least DVD capability and I bet Sony also implemented the possibility to present other media via the PSX2. Now if Sony plans to sell their own content for viewing on the PSX2 then it'd just make sense that they make sure you can't get at it.
Also one should note that the restriction comes from the Japanese end and have thus nothing to do with the US crypto laws. I doubt that Sony will have problems getting the required permissions before long.
What remains to be seen is how long it will take for eg. distributed.net to crak the encryption once the PSX2 falls into their hands;).
Take the New Sciantist with a grain of salt. They are more of a popular than a science magazine and I usually read their stories only if there is really nothing else to do around work. The reason for my caevat is that about half a year ago they published a "revolutionary theory" that explains the universe as a quantized entity without the dimension of time, which pops up simply as a result of calculating most propable trajectories for particles. As a physics major, and to anyone who has taken at least one course of it at university level, it was, however, quite obvious that nothing else than an elaborate coordonate transformation was performed which effectively "hid" the time dimension. Not only was this article just one gigantic slight of hand but also the coordinate transformation itself was done badly with a huge amount of unneccessary variables. Beware of the New Scientist, go instead to www.SciAm.com and check out their feature articles on the possibility of a trip to mars (I wonder why this hasn't been on/.) with a price tag that B.G. could spit up anytime...
The article has a valid point about baing able to attend stockholders meetings and having your say. Doing that may even persuade others to vote the same as you. But aside from the problem mentioned already in some other post, mainly that most stock doesn't allow you to vote, one has to appreciate the Largeness of some of these companies. I did the math on our favourite orge Micro$oft around the time when there where speculations about what the court could do if they are found guilty of abusing their monoopoly. One of the coices was splitting and selling off some parts of M$ and i thought it would be extremely nifty if the community of free code, linux etc users got together and rounded up enough money to buy the M$-spinoff. The problem is that every person on this planet would have to cough up $1000 to buy micro$oft... let that sink in. Now admittedly most of the companies we are talking about are not as big as M$ and instead of buying the whole our aim would only be a significant vote, say 1%-5%. However we are also very few compared to the entire population of the earth so that it's up to several thousands of dollars per capita again. The idea of the community influencing BB by becoming stockholders is super nifty but even if we all pulled together and got millions of dollars (perhaps even tens of millions) that would only byu us 0.1% of any given Big Corp. That we'd like to influence. The reasonable alternative would be to start an investment fund with long term objectives. Maybe in 20 years time we'd have enough money to fullfill our dreams.
Speech: everyday communication between human beings. Code: instructions for machine operated systems to perform certain tasks.
Although code can be understood by many people it is hardly common enough to qualify for anything with the meaning of speech. Also in speech you may cite other people, yet I hardly think that citing the win2k sourcecode would be a very successfull idea.
Art too is not speech, it is cencored regularly (eg Southpark the Movie).
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics in it's most simple form (without supersymmetry or strings) was formulated in the early sixties. The model alone was a substantial Hack unifying several ideas and theories that were around at the time and it has stood undisputed for decades.
For those who haven't studied particle physics let me explain a bit. A theory in particle physics means that you define three things: The particles that are fundamental, the way they interact and the symmetries under which everything stays unchanged. The SM does all this very simply but it has a problem: none of the particles you define can have masses if you want to preserve the symmetries. This is (was) a big problem since it was known that certain symmetries existed and the existence of mass was even more evident (just drop an apple on someones head).
The way the masses are given to the particles is to introcuce a new particle, the Higgs, which when it interacts with a particle gives it mass. This is dirty patchwork at it's best. Most particle physicists will agree that the Higgs is a pain in the a..e, it introduces a totally new _type_ of particles to the theory, it's mass is not predictable and it hasn't been found yet and perhaps will never be found. But it makes the whole theory work like an angel.
The Theory of Sub-millimeter Extra Dimensions is a neat way of explaining what is called the "hierachy problem", mainly why the Plank scale 2*10E18GeV is so high. We have found most of the elementary particles with the number and properties of the Higgs particle(s) and possible supersymmetric partners the most reasonable "undiscovered" particles left. All these particles even the undiscovered ones stay with their mass below a few 1000GeV. So why is there a "Desert" that spans 1000000000000000GeV of the energy scale befor something happens to the particle content again? Small Extra Dimensions are an elegant way of solving this problem without introducing lots of new particles and interactions. I really like the idea because it is so simple, I distrust it partly because it can be used to give almost any kind of physics i.e. it always works and it is difficult to experimentaly test it. On the other hand this idea has been around for a couple of years now so it can't be totally crappy. I hope you remember some high school physics. You may remember that the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force both grow weaker with the inverse square of the distance ~G*r^-2 with G the constant of the relevant force. If you know Math or have done universtiy physics you know that this law is because the space is three-dimensional and this is just the way a wave dissipates in three dimensions. Now imagine that as you go to smaller and smaller distances, say between two particles, the space suddenly has more dimensions so the wave gets to dissipate at a faster rate. Since the interaction remains the same the coupling constant G must change in response. The coupling constant of gravity relates to the Plank scale so you end up changing that and voila by adding some extra dimensions the "Desert" dissapears and everybody is happy. Exept for the experimantalists since you can't verify this theory yet...
In addition to putting back the oil and other minerals into the environment in the distant future we'll also start to dismantle all the great superstructures built by humans throughout the millenia. Our extended lifespan will allow us to start our colonisation of the universe but the timescale of such a project makes it unneccessary to leave any form of high tech behind on earth. Human kind will be divided into those adventurers who will go explore the stars in huge comfortable spaceships ala "Culture" and those who decide to go "native" on a planet rendered to the state it was 50000 years ago. We'll be the seeds of a new population on and off earth, returning in a more distant future as aliens to a sociological experiment called earth.
Slashdot Mirror
Dissapoint!
I like the simple layout though, might make me actually read the site once in a while instead of just subscribing to the RSS feed.
The activation of cell phones microphones by the underlying network is actually possible with a lot of mobile phones (maybe all of them). The finnish government has had a guideline for classified meetings in place since the early nineties that strictly mandates all cell phones to have their batteries removed during the meeting because of exactly this possibility.
From that same page Novel states the following,
"...If any of our code is found to infringe someone else's patents, we will try to find prior technology to invalidate the patents, rework the code to design around the infringement, or as a last resort remove the functionality..."
This is a nice admission of Novell to the fact that they will never pay anyone licensing fees for a patent. This is of course true for most large corporations, but they hardly ever go on record stating it this clearly.
The reason you don't want to do this is that with a system like this, buying and selling votes becomes possible. up till now this practise is rendered useless as the person buying votes can never be sure of what his money actually gets him (this is not to sat that some people wont try it anyway).
The comparison with Finland is invalid since the sentence was given for filesharing and not for downloading files. Untill recently the legislation in finland was as clear about downloads (i.e. they were legal). Now we have the new european version of the DMCA and there haven't been any cases to test whether that status has changed. Since the legislation is essentially (supposed to be) the same throughout europe, I would guess that simply downloading stuff is still legal.
Supposing one intercepted the signal underwater it could still be decrypted. Admittedly this would require formidable computing power since one would have to simulate the geometry of sender and reciever in a continuous medium.
In communications across the net this kind of playing around with different routings and time delays would not be as effective since once intercepted the decoding would be assuming a descreet medium (only so many different pathways). It isn't clear whether the effort put in this kind of scheme would be worth it, ie. it could bne much more effective to refine the encryption algorithm.
One should note that in descreet systems, like electronic locks that open when a transmitting key is waved in front of it, the principle of asynchronous signaling is already in use. These systems use clockless processors to make the recording and decoding of the transmitted signals near impossible.
Now they can get at organised crime via the DMCA when they catch dealers paying with forged money.
"You're under arrest buster, cracking the encrypted verification on $100 bills violates the gorevnments copyright, you're looking at 15 - 20 out in 10 if your lucky."
The FAQ has some interesting information about how the writers of most of those "cellphones cause cancer" papers, which get picked up by the media in no time, have actually no tenure at any universtity and how their papers haven't undergone peer-review.
I work at a research institute of the University of Helsinki and ever so often we get long letters and research "papers" by people certain of having found ways to explain quantum gravity / the universe / theory of everything. These papers are nothing more than comic entertainment for us and a freetime hobby for whoever is sending them. As long as it's theoretical physics no-one cares. However, write a paper about cancer and cellphones and you may actually get some attention and perhaps even money. As long as your name has a PhD. in front of it the media wont bother to mention that you're actually unemployed or that your paper hasn't actually been published.
Oh please tell me where the other companies beside NOKIA are:). But seriously, texting has become extremely popular here in Finland lately. Especially young people (ie teenagers) use them in incredible amounts.
The possible reasons for this is, besides the veritable plethora of mobile phones around here, the fact that we have lots and lots of services available via texting. Services ranging from weather forecasts to reserving your movie tickets, searching the whitepages or checking stockprices, even chat-rooms and uploadable modifications to your phone (like ringing tunes and operator logos). Shortly put, we have it all.
Personally I don't use any of those services (well ok, I did load a neat logo for my phone), but these services are definetly attracting a lot of revenue for the teleoperators, since the average user of those services doesn't pay his or her own phonebill but lets daddy or mommy take care of it.
Monthly: $2.92 - $4.62 (no data conection) $4.62 - $18 (data connection) Calls: $0.09 - $0.15 (to same operator) $0.09 - $0.37 (to hard line) $0.15 - $0.37 (to other operator)
These are the prices for the oprator that I use, Radiolinja, the prices of other operators are pretty much the same since there is fierce competition over customers here in Finland where the law prohibits long term binding contracts to operators and thus switching between them is easy.
The price ranges indicated give the prices depending on time of day and type of contract. not listed are special contracts like "family line" where the call costs between three individual phones and a hard line can be as low as $0.04 per minute.
For reference, a hard line costs about $10 a month with calls at $0.07 per ten minutes. So lets hear what ather countries have to offer.
On the other hand in industrialized countries the reasons for switching entirely to mobile phones are different but mostly also cost related. Countries where the mobile coverage reaches an acceptable range, and I personally can only talk about Finland where ist is darn close to 100%, there is really no drawback to having a cell phone regardless of where you live (plus the obvious advantages of the cell phones mobility).
Here in Finland the amount of housholds with only a cell phone and no hard line is rising steadily as well as in other European countries. The main reason being cheap phone calls. Whith the infrastructure of the mobile network in place, operators can start lowering the call prices as the investments that were needed to build the network are being paid back and the interest on them get less and less. The price difference in the monthly fee of a hard line and a mobile is enough to let you talk for about one hour on your mobile, admittedly not much, but with additional plans for eg. interoperator calls that can go up to three hours and then your only at the amount you'd have to pay for having the hard line to your home. I reacon the States still have some way to go before a significant price drop in the call charges happens since your operators are still building the network and that takes a lot of money.
One other big question which comes up in deciding whether to get rid of the hard line is the computer. Connecting to the net over a cell phone is... well it sucks. Here again students have the advantage since universities offer unlimited net access in some cases even in the campus living quarters. Other non-phoneline related solutions like cable modems are slowly making progress and in turn accelerate the rate at which people give up their hard lines (with a cable modem and a mobile phone you really don't need a hard line anymore).
Nice freudian slip:)
the lyrics to the song mentioned in the crest can be found here . Now if only someone could translate them for us:)
You got it right almost untill the end, the bit with claude in the middle didn't go quite right. your writing is almost a perfect copy of an article that came out in Scientific American a while ago. the article explains why claude is actually no problem: bob can simply choose some bits (not the whole transmitted key but only part of it) and send tham back over an unsecure line, alice can then check whether they match the ones she sent. if claude is listening then a substantial part of this "control key" is wrong because he messed it up. also i think the current status of test results is a bit longer than the ones you mention (though no satellite capabilities yet).
I belive the scientology reference meant was more in the line of "Travolta is a scientologist as is the author and thats the only reason this book was turned into a movie". I really doubt that a two hour movie can do this work justice, there are some books that should never be turned into movies, and this is just a case of "buddy favouring" which goes on all the time in hollywood only this time it has a religious nature.
The entire DeCSS affair and the other cases around the DMCA have generated a lot of fuss and made people re-think copyright issues, fair use definitions, the legality of region coding on old movies etc. etc. In all of this there is one development which hasn't gotten enough attention in my opinion, especially since its impact is truly gigantic in comparison to the DVD dilemma. The sentence pointed out in this /. story entails the seed of enormous profits for the MPAA and various other corporations in the film/tv-media industry. combine the statement that "digital copyright protection may not be circumvented by code/technology even if fair use would allow the use of said material" with two words: "digital television". DTV will be a reality in the near future (here in finland they are starting broadcasts real soon), now imagine that broadcasting companies start embedding a copyprotection into the bit stream of their broadcasts, as with CSS it needn't be perfect it could even be blantanly easy to crack but thanks to the DMCA, videotaping these kind of transmissions would be illegal. (well at least in the states, not here though) be afraid, (no kidding) be very afraid...
the US seems like an endless source of curious and macabre entertainment, all one really can do is sit back and enjoy (and hope that the punch line doen't hit your own nose). I have always liked being on an entirely different continent than the USA although I'd prefer a different planet or solar system.
I wonder whether one can trap oxygen inside these buckyballs. If one can get enough stuffed inside and mass produce them, they'd be the perfect lighterfluid for BBQs, even better, one could mix them with normal charcoal to make "super"-charchoal - burns fast and is easy to light - no more lighterfluid aftertaste on them ribs...
Obviously the PSX2 isn't just a game console. It has at least DVD capability and I bet Sony also implemented the possibility to present other media via the PSX2. Now if Sony plans to sell their own content for viewing on the PSX2 then it'd just make sense that they make sure you can't get at it.
Also one should note that the restriction comes from the Japanese end and have thus nothing to do with the US crypto laws. I doubt that Sony will have problems getting the required permissions before long.
What remains to be seen is how long it will take for eg. distributed.net to crak the encryption once the PSX2 falls into their hands;).
Take the New Sciantist with a grain of salt. They are more of a popular than a science magazine and I usually read their stories only if there is really nothing else to do around work. The reason for my caevat is that about half a year ago they published a "revolutionary theory" that explains the universe as a quantized entity without the dimension of time, which pops up simply as a result of calculating most propable trajectories for particles. As a physics major, and to anyone who has taken at least one course of it at university level, it was, however, quite obvious that nothing else than an elaborate coordonate transformation was performed which effectively "hid" the time dimension. Not only was this article just one gigantic slight of hand but also the coordinate transformation itself was done badly with a huge amount of unneccessary variables. Beware of the New Scientist, go instead to www.SciAm.com and check out their feature articles on the possibility of a trip to mars (I wonder why this hasn't been on /.) with a price tag that B.G. could spit up anytime...
The article has a valid point about baing able to attend stockholders meetings and having your say. Doing that may even persuade others to vote the same as you. But aside from the problem mentioned already in some other post, mainly that most stock doesn't allow you to vote, one has to appreciate the Largeness of some of these companies. I did the math on our favourite orge Micro$oft around the time when there where speculations about what the court could do if they are found guilty of abusing their monoopoly. One of the coices was splitting and selling off some parts of M$ and i thought it would be extremely nifty if the community of free code, linux etc users got together and rounded up enough money to buy the M$-spinoff. The problem is that every person on this planet would have to cough up $1000 to buy micro$oft... let that sink in. Now admittedly most of the companies we are talking about are not as big as M$ and instead of buying the whole our aim would only be a significant vote, say 1%-5%. However we are also very few compared to the entire population of the earth so that it's up to several thousands of dollars per capita again. The idea of the community influencing BB by becoming stockholders is super nifty but even if we all pulled together and got millions of dollars (perhaps even tens of millions) that would only byu us 0.1% of any given Big Corp. That we'd like to influence. The reasonable alternative would be to start an investment fund with long term objectives. Maybe in 20 years time we'd have enough money to fullfill our dreams.
Speech: everyday communication between human beings.
Code: instructions for machine operated systems to perform certain tasks.
Although code can be understood by many people it is hardly common enough to qualify for anything with the meaning of speech. Also in speech you may cite other people, yet I hardly think that citing the win2k sourcecode would be a very successfull idea.
Art too is not speech, it is cencored regularly (eg Southpark the Movie).
The Standard Model (SM) of particle physics in it's most simple form (without supersymmetry or strings) was formulated in the early sixties. The model alone was a substantial Hack unifying several ideas and theories that were around at the time and it has stood undisputed for decades.
For those who haven't studied particle physics let me explain a bit. A theory in particle physics means that you define three things: The particles that are fundamental, the way they interact and the symmetries under which everything stays unchanged. The SM does all this very simply but it has a problem: none of the particles you define can have masses if you want to preserve the symmetries. This is (was) a big problem since it was known that certain symmetries existed and the existence of mass was even more evident (just drop an apple on someones head).
The way the masses are given to the particles is to introcuce a new particle, the Higgs, which when it interacts with a particle gives it mass. This is dirty patchwork at it's best. Most particle physicists will agree that the Higgs is a pain in the a..e, it introduces a totally new _type_ of particles to the theory, it's mass is not predictable and it hasn't been found yet and perhaps will never be found. But it makes the whole theory work like an angel.
The Theory of Sub-millimeter Extra Dimensions is a neat way of explaining what is called the "hierachy problem", mainly why the Plank scale 2*10E18GeV is so high. We have found most of the elementary particles with the number and properties of the Higgs particle(s) and possible supersymmetric partners the most reasonable "undiscovered" particles left. All these particles even the undiscovered ones stay with their mass below a few 1000GeV. So why is there a "Desert" that spans 1000000000000000GeV of the energy scale befor something happens to the particle content again? Small Extra Dimensions are an elegant way of solving this problem without introducing lots of new particles and interactions. I really like the idea because it is so simple, I distrust it partly because it can be used to give almost any kind of physics i.e. it always works and it is difficult to experimentaly test it. On the other hand this idea has been around for a couple of years now so it can't be totally crappy. I hope you remember some high school physics. You may remember that the gravitational force and the electromagnetic force both grow weaker with the inverse square of the distance ~G*r^-2 with G the constant of the relevant force. If you know Math or have done universtiy physics you know that this law is because the space is three-dimensional and this is just the way a wave dissipates in three dimensions. Now imagine that as you go to smaller and smaller distances, say between two particles, the space suddenly has more dimensions so the wave gets to dissipate at a faster rate. Since the interaction remains the same the coupling constant G must change in response. The coupling constant of gravity relates to the Plank scale so you end up changing that and voila by adding some extra dimensions the "Desert" dissapears and everybody is happy. Exept for the experimantalists since you can't verify this theory yet...
In addition to putting back the oil and other minerals into the environment in the distant future we'll also start to dismantle all the great superstructures built by humans throughout the millenia. Our extended lifespan will allow us to start our colonisation of the universe but the timescale of such a project makes it unneccessary to leave any form of high tech behind on earth. Human kind will be divided into those adventurers who will go explore the stars in huge comfortable spaceships ala "Culture" and those who decide to go "native" on a planet rendered to the state it was 50000 years ago. We'll be the seeds of a new population on and off earth, returning in a more distant future as aliens to a sociological experiment called earth.