Then you would never achieve tenure. Scientists have as much, and perhaps even more, political pressure than corporate serfs. Dissenting opinions are hardly tolerated, and the likes of Isaac Newton would never make it nowadays.
In the book "The Diamond Age", a nanoengineer steals a program from his employer by inserting code to create hackleburr-like seeds on the cover of the product (a book). When he handled the book, the burrs stuck to his palm, enabling him to carry it out of the laboratory on his person. While trying to carry eighteen pounds of plutonium out of a secure nuclear weapons factory is ludicrous at best, to carry out a plague spore is not at all unrealistic, since it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the microscopic garbage we normally carry on our skin. To further evade detection, the spore could infect our malicious engineer (remember, the disease is very selective, and will not kill anyone unless he tells it to) and allow him to pass the most thorough of skin examinations. The spore could then interface with his retinal HUD implants for further instructions, use the considerable resources of his body to replicate and generate more spores. He could then select the criteria for detonation. Our Palestinian engineer could, for instance, use the plague's GPS capability to restrict the fatalities to the borders of Israel. Then, all he has to do is set the detonation time, which he could easily do by encoding it into the plague itself, which is capable of accurate timekeeping. Then, one fine morning, everyone in Israel will die within the same five minutes. No accountability. No warning. No trace. No culprits. No more Israel.
> Well, you could have a disgruntled engineer construct a rogue > nuclear weapon and use it to destroy a city.
Fission materials are not that easy to obtain. Sure, some eccentric billionnaire could probably purchase them for a few million dollars, but for most people it is simply not possible. Most engineers would have no idea how to go about purchasing enriched uranium, nor would they have enough money to pull it off. Even Osama Bin Laden, with all his money and all his connections, has evidently not been able to procure any nuclear materials. And if he can not do it, how can your average disgruntled Joe Engineer?
Furthermore, the threat is much lower. A nuclear explosion in a major city might cause millions to die, if he is lucky. The death toll for Hiroshima was much lower. A nanoplague could wipe out entire nations! Quite a difference in scale, don't you agree?
> A case could be made that by the time a person > gains the education to be able to construct such > a device (nuclear weapon/rogue nanomachine), > that the people with the means and the mental > issues to cause such destruction/death will be weeded out.
Really, now. Were there really no scientists working on biological weapons in Iraq? The Unabomber was an educated man too, you know. Furthermore, it only takes ONE, so I wouldn't put too much faith in this argument.
> And if you read Drexler's book Engines of > Creation, there are proposed systems that could > be constructed to keep check of nanomachines.
And how would such a system detect an inert spore sitting on a doorknob in the neighbourhood with a few million dust grains from which it is externally indistinguishable? Will you decompile every dust particle to see if there is anything interesting in it? Will you decompile every grain of sand under your feet, every skin flake, every dust mite? If Saddam Hussein has no difficulty hiding tanks in the open desert, do you really think it would be difficult to hide something trillions of times smaller amid similar items?
Perhaps you meant to install such inspectors inside the body? How will they be able to tell an plague body apart from an erithrocyte, if it were disguised as one? Will it even be able to detect a millimeter thin graphite antenna within solid bone? Will it be able to stop the poison factories in time when that antenna receives a signal to blow, if it may take only nanograms of a strong poison to kill you?
> The key is to focus on developing the defensive > systems as quickly as possible, to minimize the > time period that nanomachines could exist > unchecked in the wild.
But they are not "in the wild". You are thinking of the "grey goo" threat of runaway replication, not about an intentionally disguised, hostile, nanoscopic entity, which can compile any shell it chooses, like a perfect chameleon. Think about a threat that comes from a hostile mind, not from negligence.
> Pehaps the number one method of preventing such > occurences is to try and find the way to > minimize the number of people with such strong > hatred of other people as to be willing to do that.
Very funny. That such people exist and always will, may be illustrated by a random post at nanodot. Check out the first comment at http://nanodot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/24/0521230 And in the meantime the Israelites keep killing the Palestinians and vice versa. The Chechens keep killing the Russians. The Serbians keep killing the Bosnians. The arabs keep hating the europeans. The African nations all hate each other are in constant war. And, of course, these days everybody abroad hates the United States too. And, since I am living there, perhaps you can understand my concern?
To contract AIDS (or rather HIV, as I have not yet seen the connection proved to my satisfaction), you have to exchange bodily fluids with the infected person. That means a blood trasfusion, or sexual intercourse. Since most of us only have sex with a very limited number of people (and those who are on Slashdot probably don't have sex with anybody:), the rate of infection is quite slow and limited. Nevertheless, it is currently the rage in Africa, where apparently the people are more promiscuous than in our prudish western societies.
Consider the nanoplague now, which is not limited to this form of infection. Viruses and bacteria have great difficulty surviving outside the host for a long time. Excepting anthrax spores, most biological diseases die off in a day or less when deposited on any dry surface. A nanoplague can manufacture spores that would survive indefinitely and can be spread by touch alone if generated on the fingertips. Such spores will lie dormant on every doorknob the infected person has touched and will infect EVERYONE who touches it afterwards with nearly 100% efficiency. The entire world could be infected in a few months in this manner without anybody noticing.
> Nobody would ever have to work a day in their lives for food.
We already have this. It is called "welfare". People on welfare tend to stay at home, do nothing, and have lots of children (to raise benefits). Those children will inevitably grow up and also be on welfare. Thus the system perpetuates, but nobody says it is a good thing.
> How is this risk any different than the risk of mass ebola infection by bio-terrorists today?
With a biological infection you generally can quarantine the sick and thus contain the spread if you catch it early enough. This is because ebola and all other diseases start killing the host as soon as they can. A nanoplague can spread with no symptoms whatsoever, since it only needs to create a small spore synthesis plant inside the body, and can be triggered at a predetermined time, so that there is no way to "stop" its spread - everyone dies at exactly the same time. There is also no possible treatment, since the death is instantaneous. Biological diseases, including ebola, never have a 100% fatality rate because they usually can be treated, if not cured, like anthrax. Detectability is also a problem since, unlike biological infections, there would be no symptoms in carriers or those about to die. A nightmare, isn't it?
Everyone seems to ignore the fact the with nanotechnology any disgruntled employee can manufacture a nanoplague that will kill off the whole world's population. Imagine something like a miniature time bomb that spreads like a cold virus. At a predetermined time it explodes (Diamond Age's cookie cutters), produces a poison, or compiles a toaster in your brain. With a GPS antenna (graphite is an pretty good conductor) this could be very location specific. With the capability to map the bloodstream, it could selectively kill fat people (body mass index), stupid people (small brains), blacks (thick lips), various asian races (epicanthic fold variances), ugly people (by scanning the face). And all this is no more difficult than compiling a toaster. You can't even enforce assembler containment; read about how Hackworth stole the primer (Diamond Age): any engineer working with assemblers could do exactly the same thing to get himself one. And this ONE MAN can kill off everyone in the world. Now tell me, which benefit of nanotech will offset this not-too-negligible danger?
A matter compiler, as described in "The Diamond Age" is simply a eutactic chamber containing a feed interface, which brings molecular building blocks into it, and some assemblers, which follow a specific program to build something out of those blocks. The MC is to assemblers is what a construction site is to bricklayers.
Although Feynman proposed the idea first, it was Drexler who actually developed practical ideas about how it could be done. It was Drexler who fully explored the implications of the new invention, benefits and dangers. It was Drexler who designed molecular machinery (in Nanosystems) and calculated their physical parameters.
Maybe he just did not know who Kevin Railsback was, or that one had to contact him to get this particular piece of software working. Where do you get an idea like that? How is "Spam Assassin" suddenly supposed to be associated with "Kevin Railsback"? And don't you even dare to say "google it". There are so many pages mentioning every popular product, nobody has time to read them all.
> I don't understand why he's so critical of a free product.
Why is there this attitude that if your project is free, then it does not matter if it is garbage. Furthermore, you are not allowed to say it is garbage, because, after all, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps that is why Linux is still not on the desktop. There are plenty of people who spend days configuring theirs and then post "it works for me" comments, while the rest of us silently wonder why anyone would want to spend so much time on such garbage.
Submarines are detected mostly because of cavitation noise on the propellers and the engine sounds. Since the undersea glider has neither engine nor propellers, they would be indistinguishable from the background. The operators would have to maintain silence, of course, and the buoyancy pumps would have to be quiet, but those are simple problems to solve compared with designing your own stealth sub in the first place.
> Technology has shot so far ahead that what already > surrounds is far more impressive than anything we > can quickly whip up from readily available materials.
Then the next step in science should be to find out how to quickly whip up all the modern technology from readily available materials. Or else, what is it good for?
"Am I intruding on your Schwartzchild radius?" "I'll show you some redshift..." "You are so slow, you couldn't orbit a rock." "Kiss your simply-connected days goodbye!"
For thousands of years there were many many people who believed that as long as for thousands of years there have been many many people who believed in an idea, that must necessarily constitute a historical proof of its veracity. The fact that such people continue to exist is an unfortunate illustration of humanity aversion to scientific progress, which has succeeded (I think) only because for thousands of years there still are (few few) people who happen to think that knowledge and reason are good and worthwhile.
For thousands of years there were many many people who believed that you shouldn't have to pay for things that you want. The fact that such people continue to exist, must necessarily constitute a historical proof that such beliefs are indeed worthy and rational. (Note that free as in "speech" is usually accompanied by free as in "beer", blurring the distinction by the simple observation that neither product makes any money for its developer. Look at RedHat, for example, which makes no money at all from its software, but nevertheless is able to keep itself from bankrupcy by holding hands of those few who are not able to install it themselves.)
> The really scary part is the 17. Basically you are > setting up anyone you don't know to overwrite your > diary with some script that says how lame a haxor > you are
What kind of a lame haxor are you if you don't know that 217 does NOT give write permissions to anyone but you? (217 = -w---xr-x) Are you running FreeBSD or something?:)
Slashdot Mirror
> Maybe I should have been a scientist!
Then you would never achieve tenure. Scientists have as much, and perhaps even more, political pressure than corporate serfs. Dissenting opinions are hardly tolerated, and the likes of Isaac Newton would never make it nowadays.
In the book "The Diamond Age", a nanoengineer steals a program from his employer by inserting code to create hackleburr-like seeds on the cover of the product (a book). When he handled the book, the burrs stuck to his palm, enabling him to carry it out of the laboratory on his person. While trying to carry eighteen pounds of plutonium out of a secure nuclear weapons factory is ludicrous at best, to carry out a plague spore is not at all unrealistic, since it would be indistinguishable from the rest of the microscopic garbage we normally carry on our skin. To further evade detection, the spore could infect our malicious engineer (remember, the disease is very selective, and will not kill anyone unless he tells it to) and allow him to pass the most thorough of skin examinations. The spore could then interface with his retinal HUD implants for further instructions, use the considerable resources of his body to replicate and generate more spores. He could then select the criteria for detonation. Our Palestinian engineer could, for instance, use the plague's GPS capability to restrict the fatalities to the borders of Israel. Then, all he has to do is set the detonation time, which he could easily do by encoding it into the plague itself, which is capable of accurate timekeeping. Then, one fine morning, everyone in Israel will die within the same five minutes. No accountability. No warning. No trace. No culprits. No more Israel.
> Well, you could have a disgruntled engineer construct a rogue
0
> nuclear weapon and use it to destroy a city.
Fission materials are not that easy to obtain. Sure, some eccentric billionnaire could probably purchase them for a few million dollars, but for most people it is simply not possible. Most engineers would have no idea how to go about purchasing enriched uranium, nor would they have enough money to pull it off. Even Osama Bin Laden, with all his money and all his connections, has evidently not been able to procure any nuclear materials. And if he can not do it, how can your average disgruntled Joe Engineer?
Furthermore, the threat is much lower. A nuclear explosion in a major city might cause millions to die, if he is lucky. The death toll for Hiroshima was much lower. A nanoplague could wipe out entire nations! Quite a difference in scale, don't you agree?
> A case could be made that by the time a person
> gains the education to be able to construct such
> a device (nuclear weapon/rogue nanomachine),
> that the people with the means and the mental
> issues to cause such destruction/death will be weeded out.
Really, now. Were there really no scientists working on biological weapons in Iraq? The Unabomber was an educated man too, you know. Furthermore, it only takes ONE, so I wouldn't put too much faith in this argument.
> And if you read Drexler's book Engines of
> Creation, there are proposed systems that could
> be constructed to keep check of nanomachines.
And how would such a system detect an inert spore sitting on a doorknob in the neighbourhood with a few million dust grains from which it is externally indistinguishable? Will you decompile every dust particle to see if there is anything interesting in it? Will you decompile every grain of sand under your feet, every skin flake, every dust mite? If Saddam Hussein has no difficulty hiding tanks in the open desert, do you really think it would be difficult to hide something trillions of times smaller amid similar items?
Perhaps you meant to install such inspectors inside the body? How will they be able to tell an plague body apart from an erithrocyte, if it were disguised as one? Will it even be able to detect a millimeter thin graphite antenna within solid bone? Will it be able to stop the poison factories in time when that antenna receives a signal to blow, if it may take only nanograms of a strong poison to kill you?
> The key is to focus on developing the defensive
> systems as quickly as possible, to minimize the
> time period that nanomachines could exist
> unchecked in the wild.
But they are not "in the wild". You are thinking of the "grey goo" threat of runaway replication, not about an intentionally disguised, hostile, nanoscopic entity, which can compile any shell it chooses, like a perfect chameleon. Think about a threat that comes from a hostile mind, not from negligence.
> Pehaps the number one method of preventing such
> occurences is to try and find the way to
> minimize the number of people with such strong
> hatred of other people as to be willing to do that.
Very funny. That such people exist and always will, may be illustrated by a random post at nanodot. Check out the first comment at http://nanodot.org/article.pl?sid=03/11/24/052123
And in the meantime the Israelites keep killing the Palestinians and vice versa. The Chechens keep killing the Russians. The Serbians keep killing the Bosnians. The arabs keep hating the europeans. The African nations all hate each other are in constant war. And, of course, these days everybody abroad hates the United States too. And, since I am living there, perhaps you can understand my concern?
To contract AIDS (or rather HIV, as I have not yet seen the connection proved to my satisfaction), you have to exchange bodily fluids with the infected person. That means a blood trasfusion, or sexual intercourse. Since most of us only have sex with a very limited number of people (and those who are on Slashdot probably don't have sex with anybody :), the rate of infection is quite slow and limited. Nevertheless, it is currently the rage in Africa, where apparently the people are more promiscuous than in our prudish western societies.
Consider the nanoplague now, which is not limited to this form of infection. Viruses and bacteria have great difficulty surviving outside the host for a long time. Excepting anthrax spores, most biological diseases die off in a day or less when deposited on any dry surface. A nanoplague can manufacture spores that would survive indefinitely and can be spread by touch alone if generated on the fingertips. Such spores will lie dormant on every doorknob the infected person has touched and will infect EVERYONE who touches it afterwards with nearly 100% efficiency. The entire world could be infected in a few months in this manner without anybody noticing.
> Nobody would ever have to work a day in their lives for food.
We already have this. It is called "welfare". People on welfare tend to stay at home, do nothing, and have lots of children (to raise benefits). Those children will inevitably grow up and also be on welfare. Thus the system perpetuates, but nobody says it is a good thing.
> How is this risk any different than the risk of mass ebola infection by bio-terrorists today?
With a biological infection you generally can quarantine the sick and thus contain the spread if you catch it early enough. This is because ebola and all other diseases start killing the host as soon as they can. A nanoplague can spread with no symptoms whatsoever, since it only needs to create a small spore synthesis plant inside the body, and can be triggered at a predetermined time, so that there is no way to "stop" its spread - everyone dies at exactly the same time. There is also no possible treatment, since the death is instantaneous. Biological diseases, including ebola, never have a 100% fatality rate because they usually can be treated, if not cured, like anthrax. Detectability is also a problem since, unlike biological infections, there would be no symptoms in carriers or those about to die. A nightmare, isn't it?
Everyone seems to ignore the fact the with nanotechnology any disgruntled employee can manufacture a nanoplague that will kill off the whole world's population. Imagine something like a miniature time bomb that spreads like a cold virus. At a predetermined time it explodes (Diamond Age's cookie cutters), produces a poison, or compiles a toaster in your brain. With a GPS antenna (graphite is an pretty good conductor) this could be very location specific. With the capability to map the bloodstream, it could selectively kill fat people (body mass index), stupid people (small brains), blacks (thick lips), various asian races (epicanthic fold variances), ugly people (by scanning the face). And all this is no more difficult than compiling a toaster. You can't even enforce assembler containment; read about how Hackworth stole the primer (Diamond Age): any engineer working with assemblers could do exactly the same thing to get himself one. And this ONE MAN can kill off everyone in the world. Now tell me, which benefit of nanotech will offset this not-too-negligible danger?
A matter compiler, as described in "The Diamond Age" is simply a eutactic chamber containing a feed interface, which brings molecular building blocks into it, and some assemblers, which follow a specific program to build something out of those blocks. The MC is to assemblers is what a construction site is to bricklayers.
Do you think Smalley is a word to describe his inclinations or the size of his intellect?
Although Feynman proposed the idea first, it was Drexler who actually developed practical ideas about how it could be done. It was Drexler who fully explored the implications of the new invention, benefits and dangers. It was Drexler who designed molecular machinery (in Nanosystems) and calculated their physical parameters.
Well, actually, toilet paper makes great gaskets for your homemade CPU coolant pump, if smeared liberally with lithium grease...
If you own a Commodore 64-powered particle accelerator, the odds are not too much in your favor to begin with.
Maybe he just did not know who Kevin Railsback was, or that one had to contact him to get this particular piece of software working. Where do you get an idea like that? How is "Spam Assassin" suddenly supposed to be associated with "Kevin Railsback"? And don't you even dare to say "google it". There are so many pages mentioning every popular product, nobody has time to read them all.
> I don't understand why he's so critical of a free product.
Why is there this attitude that if your project is free, then it does not matter if it is garbage. Furthermore, you are not allowed to say it is garbage, because, after all, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. Perhaps that is why Linux is still not on the desktop. There are plenty of people who spend days configuring theirs and then post "it works for me" comments, while the rest of us silently wonder why anyone would want to spend so much time on such garbage.
Submarines are detected mostly because of cavitation noise on the propellers and the engine sounds. Since the undersea glider has neither engine nor propellers, they would be indistinguishable from the background. The operators would have to maintain silence, of course, and the buoyancy pumps would have to be quiet, but those are simple problems to solve compared with designing your own stealth sub in the first place.
> Do you supose they could be women as well?
Oh, we all so wish this could be true!!!
> Technology has shot so far ahead that what already
> surrounds is far more impressive than anything we
> can quickly whip up from readily available materials.
Then the next step in science should be to find out how to quickly whip up all the modern technology from readily available materials. Or else, what is it good for?
"Am I intruding on your Schwartzchild radius?"
"I'll show you some redshift..."
"You are so slow, you couldn't orbit a rock."
"Kiss your simply-connected days goodbye!"
Her name is Liserle and she is there to observe the photino birds which are destroying our universe. (Stephen Baxter's The Ring)
For thousands of years there were many many people who believed that as long as for thousands of years there have been many many people who believed in an idea, that must necessarily constitute a historical proof of its veracity. The fact that such people continue to exist is an unfortunate illustration of humanity aversion to scientific progress, which has succeeded (I think) only because for thousands of years there still are (few few) people who happen to think that knowledge and reason are good and worthwhile.
For thousands of years there were many many people who believed that you shouldn't have to pay for things that you want. The fact that such people continue to exist, must necessarily constitute a historical proof that such beliefs are indeed worthy and rational. (Note that free as in "speech" is usually accompanied by free as in "beer", blurring the distinction by the simple observation that neither product makes any money for its developer. Look at RedHat, for example, which makes no money at all from its software, but nevertheless is able to keep itself from bankrupcy by holding hands of those few who are not able to install it themselves.)
Of course. The best way to outcompete those who work for next to nothing is to work for nothing.
> The really scary part is the 17. Basically you are
:)
> setting up anyone you don't know to overwrite your
> diary with some script that says how lame a haxor
> you are
What kind of a lame haxor are you if you don't know that 217 does NOT give write permissions to anyone but you? (217 = -w---xr-x) Are you running FreeBSD or something?
And they say Don Quixote was crazy for attacking a few much more fearsome looking windmills...
The same logic applies to viruses, worms, and spyware.