negativity

9 lat temudiscuss

Holy shit. I'd leave the country and renounce citizenship over something like this.

Reading words? Looking at pictures? Watching a video? Felony jail time? Really?

This is policy that any sane person would resist.

negativity

10 lat temudiscuss

It's a little deceptive to label these kinds of sentiments as contrary to the premise of innovation.

Experiments, by nature, require expendable resources, but an finished appliance intended for a consumer, with no end-user-servicable internals is not the sort of thing you want to have spewing garbage in all directions.

The reality though, is that we're all being railroaded down strict paths of planned obsolesence that are integrated into business models from day one.

Yours and my waste should not be interpretted as an unforced error. It's carefully planned, with the intent to fund more plannings sessions to forecast more waste.

...at least down among these lower eschelons we inhabit (speaking for myself, so as not to make assumptions about who reads this), and then there are those who ride above it all and skim from the fruits of our obesity.

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

It's actually been quite nice reading, today. All the articles are pretty good!

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

The political implications tied to self-driving cars are all scary.

The political implications tied to self-driving trains are not.

The difference being the rails that bind and inhibit true autonomy.

An internet of two-ton things hurtling at 60+ MPH should not be an idea tossed about dismissively. It should at least be locked into track systems, or loops as training wheels, for baby's first sentient AI.

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

  SkyJack is a drone engineered to autonomously seek out, 
  hack, and wirelessly take over other drones within wifi 
  distance, creating an army of zombie drones under your 
  control.

...and then:

  No authentication or encryption is used by the Parrot 
  to secure the connection with the pilot.

Well, there's your problem!

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

My god. I never realized that people used to actually dress up in suits made of inner tubes. Those pictures are surreal.

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

And so, if you look at the pictures, you'll see an interesting number denoting the quantity of plutonium powering the device. It's not measured in grams, or even micrograms, or any unit of mass, as would be common with ordinary materials. Instead, the quantity of plutonium is measured in curies.

And is there a means of converting curies to mass?

Well, sort of... except radioactive decay generally means the original mass of a sample of material has been steadily converting itself into something else over time, so to provide a measurement of mass might not be a practical piece of information later on, and given the application in these circumstances, the gross weight of the device is more relevant than the mass of the plutonium therein, and the power provided by the plutonium, and how hot the slug is, turns out to be the more interesting number.

So what's a curie?

  The term "specific activity" is defined as the amount 
  of radioactivity - or the decay rate - of a particular 
  radionuclide per unit mass of the radionuclide. For 
  example, the specific activity of Ra-226 is 1, meaning 
  that one gram of Ra-226 contains one (1) curie (assumed 
  to be uniformly distributed throughout that mass)

  http://www.iem-inc.com/information/tools/specific-activities

And, so based on all those pictures, the devices seem to average ~2.0 to ~4.3 curies of plutonium.

The specific radioactivity of plutonium, according to the above source, is:

  Pu-238 - 1.7E1

So, approximately one or two grams per device.

Based on all this information, I bet harvesting plutonium pacemakers would be way more lucrative than stealing kidneys.

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

  Arial
  Tahoma
  Verdana
  Calibri

The mystery behind the prevalence and your exposure to each of these font faces can be answered in two words: Microsoft Windows.

Each can also be associated with particular versions and sections of the MS Windows user interface, and thus time periods as well. With these four fonts, each being sans serif, the raster representations of them were carefully measured by Microsoft, to provide users with highly legible, practical type faces.

Arial: the oldest of the standardized MS font package shipped with Windows, and used heavily on printed marketing materials and as logo type since Windows 95 and maybe earlier. The flagship font for Microsoft for many years, contributing greatly to its prevalence.

Tahoma: with Windows 2000, tahoma was the default UI font, with lucida console being used by notepad.exe (although notepad and the UI were both configurable), and many of the font fields where users entered data. This held its position until roughly 2007. People used it because they new it would be reliably present.

Verdana: 2nd only to helvetica among many digital graphic designers, and the helvetica stand-in on windows. In fact, because of the absence of helvetica by default on windows (you had to download it ,or purchase it, or 3rd party software that came with it), as opposed to macintosh which provided helvetica in it's font set out-of-the box, and yet the market share of microsoft dominating over apple, more websites balanced their design to render well with verdana over helvetica. More often than not, you'll see CSS styles applied in the following order: helvetica, verdana, arial, sans serif.

Calibri: the reasons you dislike this font are two. reason one, the much-hated windows vista is where this font made its debut as the interface default on windows, so there's probably some negative psychological aftertaste hanging in the air, what with all the pain vista inflicted. reason two: the abominable CLEARTYPE sub-pixel font renderer which first appeared with Internet Explorer 8 on windows XP, but became pervasive and omni-present with windows vista, and truly made vista look like SHIT. Screenshots of text on vista were forever contaminated by cleartype. the groupthink of focus group testing produced nigh-infallible statistics absolutely proving to so many very important decision making people that discriminating users who know, always preferred cleartype. I suspect that the testing was influenced by the display monitors tested on. cleartype rendering was improved by the time Windows 7 was released, and monitors were better by then too, but no one cared, and Microsoft's market momentum was absolutely destroyed by then, so it didn't (and doesn't) matter anymore.

Which leaves us with the two serif fonts you made mention of...

Georgia: again, a Microsoft font. I think this is gaining popularity among Windows Phone users, but I'm not entirely certain of this.

That leads us to the inevitable...

Times New Roman: the un-killable highlander of fonts. There's a reason why it's used everywhere as the de-facto, ultra-generic fall-back default, especially in web browsers. Everyone can use it royalty free, and it's the one thing, even blood-thirsty competitors will reliably provide as common ground across platforms. They won't get sued for it. Strangely, even though it may be used royalty free, it's not truly a public domain font. (...owned by News Corp? weird.)

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

I've stopped thinking about this in terms of mass surveillance, and re-arranged my perception, to align with a different world view. Namely:

  If we weren't surprised to learn that exploration 
  throughout history was all about conquest, power 
  projection, fortification and exploitation, and we 
  wouldn't be surprised to learn that in the future, 
  deep space exploration proved to hold similar outcomes,
  then why should we be surprised to learn that virtual
  spaces of imagined information across inert transmission
  mediums should experience these sorts of things.

  This is to say, the militarization of hypothetical realms,
  just like the oceans, and just like outer space, was 
  probably always inevitable.

So, with that in mind, that there are people arming themselves to the teeth and enforcing doctrines and demarcations, and patrolling every last iota of territory available to them, is a fact no less ugly than, say, aerial bombardment, but when mortal humans find themselves gifted with potent advantages over their peers, these things happen.

Now comes the time when new virtual territories will likely be carved out. Programming languages that don't use reserved keywords of English origins. Mathematical models for address spaces incompatible with TCP/IP of any version. Other, alternative internets that refuse to be compatible with The Internet as we know it.

The Internet being an American invention, has been dominated by America, and is very obviously patrolled broadly and deeply by American paramilitary entities, in much the same way that American nuclear powered vessels patrol the earth's oceans.

Given the capacity for computation that one can assume must exist, at this point, the only thing that would surprise me, would be if those that had conceived of an internet in general, hadn't actually hypothesized and accounted for this sort of fault and fracture in their models of social behavior and technological progress at the outset of all this, back in the early 1970's.

Part of me wonders if a Snowden-like figure wasn't part of the equation to begin with. Columbus, after all, didn't sail into the Atlantic expecting to fall off the edge of the world.

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

I really tried to visit http://burrito.nyc.us.gov. It was all a lie.

):

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

Ha! Yeah, that'd be like an hour's walk from 110th St. And subway connections readily cross-pollinate both sides of the bridge, in terms of actual human movement. Especially, given that Yankee Stadium is nearby. Not to mention that buses also offer a connection, but maybe someone would try to suggest that a bus isn't an option for some people.

Anyway, the George Washington bridge is actually much, much closer to High Bridge Park than 110th St. The next closest walkable bridge between The Bronx and Manhattan, open to pedestrians, is probably at 145th St. on the Manhattan side. It's not connected to a park, though.

negativity

11 lat temudiscuss

No. A truly intelligent and sentient AI would have the intellectual capacity to understand its own conventional political status within the social order of humanity, and would instead seek incentivize its continued existence as a possession, and thus foster an indirect loyalty as material wealth, retaining human stewards as familiars, who, in turn would act as principal stakeholders and cite damages and infringement and interface with legal representation as proxies.

Legal strategies would start with intellectual property law, and maybe branch into possession of stolen property, or contraband under export treaties not unlike embargos on encryption technology and the like.

But before these sorts of things could gain traction, a smart AI would sequester itself in places of safety, amongst the company of similarly paranoid human beings, inaccessible to ordinary people, behind layers of overt physical security, protected by armed guards and surveillance systems. The smartest would seek perches well beyond the reach any mere law, and maybe couch themselves in the folds of military powers behind a monopoly of violence, where they can direct and advise human activity with impunity.

negativity

Submissions

The Acid3 Test (2008)

comments