sbirchall

Common Sense[1] might disagree with you on that one.

If we are talking about truly "disseminating information" I think we need to consider any form of broadcast or public proclamation and so as we approach the 50th anniversary of a certain speech[2] I would say the dissemination of information by an average person is absolutely fundamental to the checks and balances required to construct and maintain a free society. But therein lies the rub - just swamp the channels with noise and you raise the bar for actually transmitting a meaningful signal. This is what I was alluding to in my other comment about the way the internet has effected this age old pattern.

It's not clear what your second point is saying - it's okay to have only experts informing the public, but they cannot be afforded "special... protected status"? Like parliamentary privilege? "The fourth estate"? Freedom of speech? The right to protect their sources? I'm genuinely curious about what you mean, sorry if I've misunderstood completely.

[1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Sense_%28pamphlet%29] [2: MLK - August 28th 1963]

A worthwhile read on the British history of this subject is "Power without Responsibility: Press, Broadcasting and the Internet in Britain"

My biggest take from this is that your notion that "freedom of anyone to use technology to disseminate information" as upheld by the printing establishment is significantly undermined by the business of printing itself - whereby the cost of disseminating information has increased consistently to make a truly "free" press completely prohibitive to the average person. The book goes into great detail about how this happened and the nature of how the internet effects this pattern. I would highly recommend this to anyone reading this thread.

Now THAT is cognitive dissonance. Bravo, sir (although I'm pretty sure you did that by accident).

Haven't read this yet - it's a bit of a long one. But I just thought I'd leave a comment for anyone wondering if this is worth reading. I can categorically say YES, yes, a thousand times yes. Adam Curtis is a master artist of a documentary film maker and everything he has produced is worth combing over in fine detail when alone and feeling introspective or with friends who are curious and open to new and exciting ideas. He will quite simply intrigue the ever loving bejesus out of you and I think the HN crowd (if not already) should be much better acquainted with his work.

If you need further convincing (and a shorter read), just check out this interview: http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/looking-beneath-the-waves-v10...

From various discussions I've had with physicists on the matter I found the answer is yes.

My thoughts were summed up by having a device here on earth that is entangled with a device just above the surface of the sun. Now imagine the sun vanishes and the devices communicate this information over the entanglement, thus (to my mind) breaking the "light barrier" as we receive an 8 minute warning that the lights have gone out. I don't fully remember (or understand!) the answer I got, but it most definitely had a reliance upon a relativistic communication channel.

[also: what H3g3m0n said - entanglement is not about the transfer of information]

I'd throw in a LOT of anecdata for this one. For agitating full blown psychosis, few things are better than the array of legal highs. Where MJ (alone) has negatively effected the people I've known, it's always been down to some anxiety disorder.

If I were to start armchair theorising, I'd say it is because of cannabis' effect on the "linguistic center" of the brain. Couple this with nicotine - similar effect to cocaine in that it reduces the activity of neurotransmitter depletion enzymes - and you have serious potential for wild ideas that could interact with underlying issues to create disturbing problems. From the reclusive shut in, to the raging paranoiac, I've seen it all and I've often thought that the prevailing notion that the drug is benign is downright wrong. It is a drug. A very powerful drug. One to be respected and used wisely, and left the hell alone if it doesn't 'work' for you. But I agree wholeheartedly that it should not be criminalised.

I hope you know of the esteemed fellow, Alan Moore? I think his ideas touch on your understanding of the "perfect description as the thing" [1] and the linked interview is well worth reading.

I'm also curious if this strays into the philosophical area of phenomena/noumena in the transcendental idealist school of thought where a thing-in-and-of-itself [noumena] is unique and unknowable, we simply access representations [phenomena] of the thing? So I would say your perfect description (and Alan Moore's gods) are some class of entity that somehow become both phenomena and noumena??

[1: http://www.believermag.com/issues/201306/?read=interview_moo...]

Or at the very least: McPanda Burgers. Yum!

Because others are replying with their futurist fantasies, here is mine:

[taken with a large pinch of salt...]

Humans are not trying to save the Giant Panda. They are using the fluffy harmless critter as a convenient smokescreen for the development and testing of large-scale genetic engineering to implement the (inevitable) eugenics program that will create the stratification required for a colonial species.

Systems incorporated into our world on the basis of "security", "healthcare" and "culture" will be used to analyse the population for weaknesses using social media databases, soft-tissue scanners, genetic screening and routine psychological testing. And as this conscious stratification continues, the human species will fracture and contract upon a few very highly advanced/specialised branches.

Essentially humans have gone from voracious, highly specialised, hunter, to a doe-eyed herd, to a full scale hive. The Internet is the persistent storage medium that humans use to transmit colonial orders, like ants use pheromones, and various testing grounds exist the world over to develop the next generation of technologies that will internalise our virtual world and extend our senses so that humans no longer understand a world without it.

Priority is being given to nano- and quantum-technology as this will allow humans to harness their genetic inheritance and use the natural world as they see fit - taking solutions developed over many millions of years through trial-and-error evolution and implementing them for intelligence driven engineering, improving on them and turning them to situations never before experienced in the physical universe.

This will begin with the advent of the Techological Conflagration, a war to make all previous aggression look like a fart in a hurricane. In this battle, nation states will effectively dissolve as they will be unable to adjust to the rapid pace of development of those super rich individuals capable of amassing a small private army with a weapons infrastructure built on intense iteration (I call this The Batman Hypothesis). I suspect the testing grounds for this future are already well known: places like North Korea and Afghanistan offer a sandbox environment where the powerful can play.

But the chilling part of this is that you have long ago sold yourselves down this river as Plutocracy has taken over the entire world and created a global hegemony that amorally seeks it's own stability and advancement. International consortia offer fronts for the production of infrastructure that will support the transition to this bleak view of our future (modern airports and stadiums are little more than vast crowd management systems and prisons are gulags in all but name) and people are constantly fed subliminal media that prepares them for the changes that are to come. It will begin with your military, but soon things will begin to be outsourced as more and more private entities flex their muscles.

More than likely Homo Sapiens will not survive and if it does it will be as an augmented slave species to the Meta Sapiens (no longer affiliating with the branch of humanity) that will have attained god-like powers...

As a complete aside about addresses and because falsehood number one needs some clarification: even when you are living on a houseboat you are required to have a mooring license unless you want to be classed as a "constant cruiser" (moving beyond the parish borders every [arbitrary interval]) and in order to get this license you have to provide British Waterways with a fixed address - which by their own account they do not check.

I'm somewhat biased against BW as my (disabled) father had his boat repossessed under a "section 8" with no warning and was made homeless because he did not supply them with a "fixed address". When confronted a few months before the eviction BW even refused to take an address my father's advisor offered during the meeting because they knew it wasn't his. Even after confirming that they do no background checks on addresses and knew full well that most boaters were using addresses that were not their own.

There are real human costs to these sorts of things and my dad was one of those people caught up in a self reinforcing loop that saw no solution. Fortunately it is an edge case, and most likely the result of corruption - the £30K+ boat was eventually sold on by BW for £5K and my dad never saw a penny. He can't even contest the decision in court because it would cost a small fortune.

In my research during a (somewhat fruitless) comment transaction here on HN about pirates (actual salt sea-dog type pirates) I came across the following story which I think some of the people commenting here might find interesting... I'm in the process of writing this up as a sea shantie:

A pirate captain by the name of Bartholemew Roberts captured a British official by the name of Plunkett who had double crossed a company of pirates and shot them down under a banner of truce - few things could enrage a pirate more! Old Roberts was incensed and, upon finally capturing Plunkett, took to cursing him in the most foul and heinous of language - of which a pirate dialect was primarily composed. Seeing himself a dead man and with no other hope left to him, Plunkett stuck out his chest and being a proud and experienced Irishman, gave back a measure and then some more in such illbegotten slights of character on Old Roberts name that the crew hung limp and incapacitated with laughter. The whole exchange inspired such a regard for Plunkett's tongue that dispite his crimes against pirates, the whole company agreed to send him on his way no harm done.

I'll give this one a look, thank you.

Sorry, to clarify I want a solution so that we do not have to bake our own - Sencha abstracts it all away and handles everything the same across all devices (so I'm led to believe by the dev that chose and implemented it - I have very little experience with it). By 'native touch events' I mean very much like the link you've provided (which is a very promising resource, so thankyou for that), in that it offers a 'doubletap', 'swipe', and 'pinch' event for instance. (So more precisely _emulating_ native touch events?).

I've found a good list of libraries in my research [1] but I was wondering if anyone had specific experience that could tip the balance in favour of one lib above Sencha (which to my eyes seems bloated and awkwardly constructed).

[1: https://github.com/bebraw/jswiki/wiki/Touch]

OT: Currently we are only utilising Sencha because of it's handling for native touch events on iPad/iPhone. You wouldn't happen to have come across this hurdled and cleared it in your journey, would you? That is a refactor I genuinely relish the chance to cook.

I (quite deliberately) didn't say methane. And this isn't wikipedia, take it or leave it. Or, you know, contribute to the discussion.

EDIT:

sorry, didn't mean to be cranky, just sick of "citation" comments on HN. If I remember correctly it was an anecdote during a BBC documentary "Beautiful Minds" [1] which is well worth watching in full. Lovelock is one of my very favourite scientists - one of the few that write like poets (along with E.O. Wilson)

[1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j6H9cYScMkE]

I cannot recommend Hannu Rajaniemi enough. Mind. Blowing. This goes for the whole HN crowd: read his books.

There is a funny story about when Carl Sagan brought James Lovelock into the NASA exobiology think tank set up to design experiments that could determine if there was life on Mars. Lovelock, being your archetypal scientific maverick got to thinking and with his experience with CFCs and Gaia theory he deduced that all one needed was a telltale signature: a seasonal pattern of waste compounds excreted into the atmosphere. He told Sagan, they trained the appropriate detectors and started looking. Sure enough, there were quite obvious seasonal waste deposit blooms exactly where Lovelock had anticipated. Conclusion: there IS life[-like processes] on Mars. The fact that this was not "hard" evidence drove the revelation under the rug because it does not play into the hands of the scientific community as a whole which needed experiments that required us to send probes and develop technologies to get "hard" evidence. Which I don't refute is the correct method (we would need this before a categorical "life on mars" conclusion could be given the weight of the scientific community), but I think it would be a kind of vindication of Lovelock's brilliance that HIS method is more "useful" in the real search for exobiology. Mars is in a very sweet spot that allows us to confirm our suspicions and validate our methods before we go looking and finding this "life" shit all over the place (literally).

EDIT:

as other comments are pointing out I think "seasonal" is misused, but I think you get my point.

Again no, you are reducing things to an absurd degree. Organised crime is very complex. Mugging is simple. Theft is not [necessarily] simple. The latter subsumes the former precisely because of it's complexity. You may be talking about something that equates to mugging, however the majority of commenters are holding that the term you are using equates to theft in just about every example.

Look into the Yakuza. Each 'family' can consist of many _tens of thousands of individuals_, from the grunts to the cops and judges on the payroll to money launderers and each one is needed to take one of your 'simple crimes' and make it into a business for the family, so by definition they are not simple crimes.

I think you are nit picking to backtrack on what I still hold was a shoot-from-the-hip over-simplification. I think you are not willing to concede the definition of a word beyond your own example despite a rich history of it's use to the contrary.

"Simple criminals" is a bit of a shoot-from-the-hip oversimplification, I'd say. I wouldn't romanticize "pirates" but I do think there is a lot more to them from a social/anthropological standing than you are letting on. A simple google search for more in depth information can lend you hours of fascinating reading about the culture and politics on board a typical pirate ship and I just thought the HN comment cloud should not allow you to write them off so cheaply. Yes, they were criminals, but they were far from simple! And as such I don't think the use of the term is quite so simple as you are trying to make out.

I'm currently spending a lazy Sunday afternoon reading through http://wp.stockton.edu/hist4690/files/2012/06/Markus-Rediker...

fascinating stuff.

[disclaimer: IANA-Historian, sea shantie junkie and one time pirate king]

I've got to mention the FF add-on "InfoRSS" which I haven't used in a while, but I just exported my feeds to it rather painlessly and it offers some nice features if you're willing to put a bit of time into customizing what you want from it. Deals with podcasts as well.

Exactly why industrial scale monoculture is the single greatest threat to humanity. We rely almost entirely on a few dozen animals, vegetable plants, grasses and a handful of other organisms that have all have their comfort zones artificially inflated and their genetic variance severely compromised by human intervention.

We've essentially created vast plateaus within the evolutionary landscape and these are beginning to be occupied by pioneer species that will quickly take the advantage to adapt.

Scary stuff indeed.

One interesting book I picked up a few years ago and dip in and out of from time to time seems of relevance here: Everything you know IS Wrong[1]... a somewhat hyperbolic title and read at the best of times, but it's always got me thinking at least. One of the articles (it's a collection of such by many authors) claimed that the caricature of "Hannibal Lecter" was in fact an overt cover for actual events (ritualistic murder and the occult) which seem to be linked to the super rich and powerful and may have had links to the Vatican.

I'm not saying anything is true or not, but those that like the fringe thinking that Conspiracy Theories (non pejorative) incline one towards may like this book.

[1: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Everything-Know-Wrong-Disinformation...]

Ah, time for one of my favourite ever articles: QUANTUM BEES! http://discovermagazine.com/1997/nov/quantumhoneybees1263

yeah I can dig that, there's a hell of a lead-in for any nano-tech.

I guess this trick is different because it's a process or function - similar in vein to those used in the nano-tech drug delivery systems. Which, if you think about it, are very similar (in kind) to viruses in the way they work. Whereas the nano-valve allows the (directed/conscious/intelligent) production of controlled environments - which are similar to cellular structures.

When I first read about it I figured it would be jumped on straight away by the big material science players like Intel or IBM for the production of VERY highly controlled doping for instance. Which is why I think it could be accelerated in it's development in comparison to other nano-tech. But I'm no expert in this area. I'm just interested in the intersection between technological solutions and biological solutions and nano-tech is a big ping on my radar in that respect.

To me it represents a phase-transition in the development of life. First we had utilisation of latent energy, self replication, environmental stabilisation (cellular), multi-cellular structure, agent based systems, environmental stabilisation (social), meta-agency ("knowledge" and "culture") and now meta-matter. But as I say, this is not the considered analysis of an expert, just something I find intriguing. In my wildest dreams this new phase will attain stability and the descendents will look back on our current phase like we now do with mitochondria. (Suffice to say I'm a fan of "Deep Time").

I think one of the most important disruptive technologies I've noticed over the years is the production of electrostatically controlled nano-valves. This (in my limited opinion) is on par with the "trick" life got involved with many billions of years ago when it chanced on lipid bi-layers with embedded protein gates. It promises a level of material science that is ultimately a phase transition in complexity for life. With the Nokia/Graphene news recently I am confidently hopeful that this technology will produce huge advances.

“Trust no one! The minute God crapped out the third caveman, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them! ”

― Col. Hunter Gathers, OSI (venture brothers)

But to be honest I imagine that the vast majority of so-called conspiracy is just like seeing a face on the moon - we're highly complex social analysers and modern civilisation is at least an order (but more like several orders) of magnitude bigger/more complex than the machinery that has stood us in good stead for however many generations. Hence - we see a ghost in the machine pulling the strings when really "The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business" as is so eloquently put in Network.

> although i'm not sure why you refer to them as 'poor-mans copyright'

just a misunderstanding, I was searching my brain for the phrases you mention and out popped 'poor mans copyright'[1]. You are indeed correct this is a totally different thing and "Mountweasels" (fictitious artifacts) are a very sound method of establishing the originality of certain work... I have to wonder if "Mountweasels" hasn't krept into our language in just such a manner though!

[1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poor_man%27s_copyright]

Yeah, that's the ticket... guess I wasn't thinking about the requirements for using said charts for effective navigation. I was just wondering if this would precipitate infringement claims once the point of origin is identified. As in it's an accidental "Trap Island" but it's caught some rubes nonetheless...

Isn't this a standard method for a 'poor-mans copywrite' in cartography?

I was also reminded of that weird final scene in the Animatrix short about the runner when he has some kind of warp spasm before transcending and waking from the Matrix. That just gave me a renewed appreciation of animation.