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Or it would be if they made tin-foil anymore. Hmm... I bet the reptoids, who control the Illuminati via the Council of Five, stopped world-wide production when it was discovered how efficacious tin was at stopping the brain beams...
But I digress.
One science report claims that thought-reading machines may not be too far off.
A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act.
The research breaks controversial new ground in scientists' ability to probe people's minds and eavesdrop on their thoughts, and raises serious ethical issues over how brain-reading technology may be used in the future.
My first thought? Puh-leaze.
I'm sure this is either case of wild optimism from the scientists, shoddy reporting from the Guardian (not the Guardian!), or a combination of both. In this case I'm going with a reporter that doesn't quite understand what he was told. If you really read the article, most of the fine grained "reading" seems to be with machines that have been specifically tuned to a specific brain. I doubt they can ever tune a machine with general rules and still be able to pull any meaningful information out a random population.
There is more application as a diagnostic tool. Or as a device to facilitate mind-machine interfaces such as those being developed for artificial limbs. And, as with any new tool, there will be ethical concerns to be dealt with. The sheer invasiveness of such a device would be one such concern. But the subtext of the article appears to be some kind of general thought reading machine that can predict crime is just over the horizon. And I'm at a loss as to how the reporter could reach this conclusion.
Well, not really. I'm sure that part of it he understood, part of it he didn't, and some of it he extrapolated using movie-science (i.e. nonsense).
A study that is able to predict a subject's choice of adding or subtracting two numbers is a far cry from being able to read intentions in general. What this study says is that they can read the intentions of someone in a rigidly defined situation with only two possible outcomes, and I'm guessing only after extensively tuning the machine to each individual's particular brain.
This is way too specific a technique for any kind of general crime-prevention tool. Not only does it need to be tuned, they have to know what exactly they are looking for. And I'm betting while it may never be impossible, it seems it would be so highly improbable that it may as well be considered impossible.
There is no "alphabet of the synapses" where they can observe a person's synaptic activity and look up what it means in some lexicon. Because no one person's brain works exactly like another's. A large part of this is because there's a mini-evolutionary war that occurs when your nervous system is developing. Proto nerves are in competition to become either synapses or glial cells. Due to the trillions of cells involved, no one brain develops in quite the same way as any other.
Just as it is in our macro level ecosystems, so it is in your brain. Nature does not use the ideal model for a situation. It uses the first model that survives. The one that is "good enough". Take the human eye. It most definitely is not the ideal model for an organ that processes the visual spectrum of electromagnetic radiation. Hell, there's a blind spot right in the center of our vision where the optic nerve enters the orb. But it's good enough (and the binocular aspect of our visual field helps compensate). It has contributed to our survival and perpetuation as a species, therefore there is no longer environmental pressure to find a better ocular organ. But you can bet your ass if that little spot caused problems, it would have been bred out of existence long before we developed these big brains of ours.
Now, due to our DNA, every brain has the same essential starting blueprint and overall structure. But there are pressures at work as well and the brain is, essentially, a closed environment. Think of the brain as a ecosystem with trillions of little denizens. It is constantly searching for ways to accomplish tasks "well enough". If a certain pattern of firings or cell configurations produces a desired result that pattern will be used again. And again. Until is becomes more-or-less "hard wired". There is no optimization involved. The result is what matters, not the method used to get that result.
What I'm getting to is that different people end up with different thought patterns and physical structures. To be sure, the meta-functions may be located in the same generalized areas of the brain. Language in Broca's Area, sight in the Visual Cortex. But the specific instantiations and pathways of thought are most likely unique for each person.
And to top it all off, how fine a resolution does this machine have. Say there a million synapses firing in a specific sequence are involved in making the decision to murder someone. Now, what if these same million synapses fire in the same sequence but have been appended by, say, 25 other synapses, and prepended by another 10 or so. But now this represents the intention to buy a cup of coffee. Can this hypothetical machine detect a .0025% delta in brain activity that represents two wildly different intentions?
Of course all this could be moot anyway, depending on whether the brain is deterministic in nature or not. If it is, then perhaps, with the correct tuning for an individual, this could be used as a sort of general "reading" device. But I doubt it could ever be used as a Minority Report style pre-crime detector.
And if the brain operates on a quantum level, then all bets are off. Will the subject be aware of observation or not? Will the observers be aware of what they are observing? Will the quantum states of the observers brains affect the states of the observed? Quantum mechanics tells us yes. If the brain exists as a set of potentials and probabilities, true observation of the brain at a level that the article alludes to will be as impossible as trying to simultaneously measure an electron's position and angular momentum (can't be done).
Basically, is the act of thinking about how I think, somehow, at some level, altering how I think at that particular time?
Shit like this keeps me up at night.
So what do I think (heh) of this? I think the best that will come out of this, in terms of law enforcement, is an extremely accurate lie-detector. Lying is more or less understood in terms of gross brain activity for most people. Pathologic liars and others with sociopathic tendencies will still slip the net. But it will be much better than this bio-feedback voodoo that's in use now.
But reading intentions and specific thoughts? Very, very doubtful.
After years of dedicated service, my PS2 has decided to be persnickety about loading games. So what did I do? Opened the damn thing up and fixed it, of course!
When it died before the end section of "God of War" I was pissed, but figured it was the disc. Then, my Final Fantasy XII went tits up and at this point I ruled out coincidence. I mean, what's the odds of two discs being bad? Confirmation of the PS2 being the culprit came when I tested other discs in my collection.
After doing a quick search on Google, it turns out this is not an uncommon error. In fact, according to one site, it's not so much if the "disc read error" occurs, but when.
The error has to do with the vertical location of the lens relative to the disc (most of the time). There is a ratcheting cog in the drive assembly that will move the lens 1/32 of an inch at a time. Fortunately, it has a "reset" position that will drop the lens back to its lowest position if you need to start over.You can see the cog in question on the left, here.
This turns out to be pretty time consuming. There were four different discs I needed to test with each new lens position (I did 1/8" at a time):
∙ Old PSOne discs∙ DVDs (yeah, I have a progressive scan DVD player which is way better, but what the hell...)∙ Blue PS2 discs (the older discs have a blue coating on the data side... at least I think it's only the older discs)∙ Silver PS2 discs
Thanks to the fine people over at Arstechnia, I was able to get this thing going again. Took me about 30 minutes.
A note: Try, try as hard as you can not to pull out any ribbon cables by mistake. They are a huge pain in the ass to get re-inserted. Especially the drive eject button cable and the memory card/controller cable.
UPDATE: A friend just reminded me the difference between a normal person and a geek. When a warranty runs out, a normal person worries the device might break. A geek is just stoked that he* now gets to open the device.
* or she as the case may be.
Oh, I gotta have one!Unfortunately, it looks pretty damn expensive. Even my insane love for new and shiny gadgets may not be able to overcome that aspect.Plus, it's won't be ready until June 2007.Until then, drool...Wait a minute, Linksys actually has a product they released recently called iPhone. It's a VOIP phone, but I imagine Apple and Cisco (owners of Linksys) may get into a pretty nasty Trademark dispute here.
The elusive Methuselah gene? Perhaps not, but glimpses into preventing senility.Nothing scares me more than the thought of losing my ability to reason. Hopefully by the time it becomes an issue, it won't be an issue any longer.
This is a pretty interesting article about robotics, intelligence and inherent rights.
Robots and machines are now classed as inanimate objects without rights or duties but if artificial intelligence becomes ubiquitous, the report argues, there may be calls for humans’ rights to be extended to them.
It seems they think around 2056 we will have seen the birth of self aware synthetic intelligence. While their report raises some tricky ethical and moral questions, I have to wonder just how optimistic they are being with their estimates. Remember, we were supposed to have conquered this realm by now.
I suppose I cannot fault them for their predictions (and looking past those predictions to the impact on society). There is a school of thought that intelligence is emergent. That is, interactions between simple mechanisms become more and more complex as the scale increases. At some threshold of scale, the level of complex behavior appears to self organize and produce resultant interactions that cannot be predicted by extrapolating the behavior of its fundamental parts. Typically, this is called Strong Emergence (it's hard to see how Weak Emergence could give rise to intelligence). And as we can all testify, our computers, phones, entertainment systems are becoming more and more complex every day. So there is something to be said for this becoming a possibility due to the seemingly geometric increases we see happening.
Materialists (in the most broad sense) say our brains are purely algorithmic in nature and the mind is simply an artifact of an extremely complex machine. Forget free will. There is no such thing here. Everything is ruled by stimulus/response. Even our innermost thoughts. Hell, even this little essay has been determined by past experience and external stimulus. And every word could have been accurately predicted given a complete mathematical model of my brain.
This is called Biological Naturalism. At its core, it's a rejection of the duality of the mind and body. Given a sufficiently complex model a simulation will in essence no longer be a model but an independent, self-aware consciousness. Of course, the creation of this kind of system would make accurate weather modeling (still out of our grasp) seem simple by comparison. In essence we would be building a brain.
There's another idea in the materialist camp. That the form is much more complex than we can ever hope to understand. That intelligence is intrinsically wedded to quantum mechanics. Roger Penrose goes on about this in some of his writings. With a clever application of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem and the halting problem (knowing when a series of equations is infinite or unsolvable), he posits that while consciousness ultimately arises due to structure, it is beyond what we will ever be able to deduce due to the fact that we can never have a complete and consistant model. The ability to understand, much less create, self-awareness will forever be out of reach thanks to Gödel. This idea is very controversial and I'm not touching it with a ten-foot pole. Plus the math is way beyond me (and I'm talking many light-years beyond).
I'm going to touch on simulation in this case. Barring any major breakthroughs in nueroscience, our understanding of chaos, and fast analog, multi-state computers (or quantum computers), simulations will most likely be pale imitations of homo sapiens sapiens.
But, if a simulation is convincing enough to pass a Turing Test, we start moving out of the shallows of epistemology and into the deep scary waters of existentialism. Here, we question the validity of robotic rights. Would the concept even apply for pure simulations? Or would we be using these simulated beings as a mirror, trying to put limits and restrictions on our seemingly inherent brutality and callousness?
These are questions that will most likely never be answered. Nor should they, really. It is the searching --the blind groping --that make it worthwhile. It's what we trip over and discover, in our own ineffable, blundering way, while trying to answer the unanswerable. What we discover there --those are the real treasures of humanity.
However, there are greater, more pressing questions that we should begin to ask ourselves before it becomes moot. How will we relate to a created intelligence? What common ground can we have, given the wildly different environments?
And even more fundamental: Would we even be able to recognize the existence of an intelligence that would be so completely different from our own?
I admit, I got kind of excited when I heard the iPhone had been announced. But then it turned out to be this piece of shit.
Now, Cisco (who own Linksys) has the trademark (at least in the US market) iPhone, meaning Apple can't use probably the most obvious name for the iPod/Phone hybrid that has analysts creaming in their pants. Depending on whether they are an Apple fan or an Apple hater, people are stunned or tickled pink, respectively.
So, either Apple girds their loins for a legal battle, or they change the name. So what will it be, now?
iCell?
iPod Phone?
iTalk?
iGottaStopStartingEverythingWith"i"BecauseIt'sGettingOld?
My day job is in Information Security. Normally, I don't talk so much about that here. I get more than enough of that topic during work and with my off-hours research.
That being said, I would like to address an article that was linked to in one of the myriad of security related mailing lists I belong to. The article in question is by Greg Meckbach in IT Business titled There are only two IT network security issues.
Just from the title alone I could see I was going to have issues with this article. Some of the points are valid, such as the fact that physical security is not the domain of Information Security. Except he talks about IT managers not specifically Information Security (which is an entirely different beast). What follows is a post I sent to the security mailing list I got the link from. I have changed it somewhat, due to the fact that I am grammar impaired and I have had more time to think on this topic. However, the primary point I was trying to make is unaltered.
I agree with some of what Mr. Meckbach said, but a couple statements he made struck me as wrong (or perhaps mislabelled).
If a criminal could steal something as a result of hacking into a network, that again is a management problem. It's the manager's job to make sure sensitive information is not stored on accessible drives.
Wouldn't this fall under the category of "spying", which he specifically names as one of the two concerns?
Anyway, what does he recommend "management" do? (and which management? Operations, IT, HR?) Reduce the distribution of sensitive business information to sneaker-net? Create a secondary network which would require multiple NICs and custom config to guarantee one network cannot see another (even then, comprise a dual homed host and even that's useless), or require users to have a separate workstation for each isolated network?
The fifth issue - compliance with securities regulations - is supposedly one of the security problems with instant messaging, because some IM programs do not have an archiving capability, which would allow investigators to check every record of an employee's correspondence.
While this may be a problem, it's not a security problem. Letting employees communicate, without monitoring that communication, is the business manager's problem, not the IT manager's problem.
Mr Meckbach seems to be confusing IT management with Information Security. Yes, the decision to archive and monitor IM may ultimately be an executive-level decision, but the implementation is most definitely the communications group's responsibility (which would fall under IT). The actual risk assessment and use of mitigating controls in an attempt to pro-actively prevent or limit the type of information transmitted using IM, without a doubt, is an IS concern.
For any business that is concerned about these things, risk assessment is a major part of the security framework. And a company's Information Security team plays a large part in risk assessment and mitigation. IS's primary function is to allow the business to conduct it's day-to-day operations with as little risk as necessary. IS involves more than just securing a network and attached hosts.
Information Security is about information. While the majority of IS does involve technological systems and solutions, it also involves things like standards and practices, security policies, compliance, and risk assessment. I have seen the attitude expressed in this article before, but usually it comes from people that don't seem to understand the security is not an end unto itself. It is the means in which a company can conduct its business with relative safety.
While I do believe a line to be has to be drawn somewhere (unless we want to drown in unnecessary work), Mr. Meckbach seems to have a too strict a definition of what IS should encompass.
Well, at least we in the US aren't the only ones who overreact due to shoddy science.
David Dean, 43, a councillor in Merton, South London, and the managing director of a publishing company, describes himself as a human antenna. “The moment I go into people’s houses I know whether they have wi-fi because my head starts to buzz. I had to leave my last job because I couldn’t stand up for more than ten minutes in the office and my boss would not remove the wi-fi. My heart raced, I had double vision and really bad headaches. It felt as though my head was in an arm lock. Twice I have been into homes where the children were screaming monsters. After I suggested to the parents that they turn off the network for two days, the kids were transformed.”
Oh, and how about the guy with the lobbying group trying to stir up fear about the so-called effect of WiFi radio signals. Please disregard the fact that he "runs a company selling electromagnetic radiation detectors and blockers."
But wait, you say, what about evidence from the other side?
Dr Michael Clark, of the HPA, says published research on mobile phones and masts does not add up to an indictment of wi-fi. “All the expert reviews done here and abroad indicate that there is unlikely to be a health risk from wireless networks,” he says. “The few studies on mobile phone masts that have appeared in peer-reviewed journals claiming to observe health effects are not at all conclusive. The real problem is deciding what level of precaution is appropriate.
“When we have conducted measurements in schools, typical exposures from wi-fi are around 20 millionths of the international guideline levels of exposure to radiation. As a comparison, a child on a mobile phone receives up to 50 per cent of guideline levels. So a year sitting in a classroom near a wireless network is roughly equivalent to 20 minutes on a mobile. If wi-fi should be taken out of schools, then the mobile phone network should be shut down, too — and FM radio and TV, as the strength of their signals is similar to that from wi-fi in classrooms.”
Sorry Dr. Clark, anecdotal evidence always trumps facts and figures. Especially when we need to do it for the children.
Idiots.
Dear Santa,
I've been a... relatively good boy all year.
Please send me:
One of these.
And one of these.
Oh, and one of these, as well.
And I better get them, fat man. Or do you want Mrs. Claus to hear about the after-Christmas party at Scores, Chicago. Or the special present you gave to Brandi-with-an-"i"?
If you want to geek out, engineer style, read this article about a very cool nail. Yes, a nail.
Sutt’s bosses at Bostitch must be happy too. The company is selling every HurriQuake nail it produces and has been doubling production capacity every month. Although the nail is currently available only in the Gulf region (it adds about $15 to the cost of an average 2,000-square-foot house), the company is adding new production lines to meet nationwide demand. Meanwhile, the nail is getting rave reviews from building-technology experts.
Best Buy, quite simply, sucks ass. They have now managed to alienate potential customers who were willing to spend hundreds of dollars. I stopped buying from them about 4 years ago, and I warn others away from there. Why?
- The sales staff is so uneducated about the products they shill, they make shit up. I have witnessed sales drones spewing bullshit about what MHz/GHz ratings mean for processors, BS about memory size, and moronic statements regarding wireless security. Which leads me to my next sales person related issue:
- For the millionth time! I. DO. NOT. WANT. YOUR. WORTHLESS. SERVICE. PLAN!
- The online store "pick up" sales has never worked for me. I tried three separate times to purchase items online for pick-up, only to arrive at the store to have some apathetic little shit tell me "We don't have any." Even though the website said specifically they were in stock at that location. (And heaven forbid you tell them to reverse the charge on your card -- they act like you've asked them to undertake the Trials of Hercules)
- Geek Squad, oh how I loathe thee. I hate these smug fuckers with a passion. I have had occasion to meet Geek Squad workers from time to time. The depth of their technical knowledge is minuscule yet underwhelming. And the funny thing is, they don't realize that being on the "Squad" is the IT equivalent of working at McDonald's.
The list does go on, but those are my biggest complaints.
They are the number one reason I buy most of my electronics from Amazon these days. I can research the products online, order them, and have them delivered to my door in two days. And so far, not one hassle returning defective products or getting an exchange or refund.
And now, legions of gamers have a reason to join me in my hatred of the blue store with the yellow tag.
Solidarity, my gaming brothers and sisters!
Just a quick roundup of tech news.
New Releases
Firefox 2.0 is scheduled for release later today. Not sure on the exact time, but keep checking the site.
Fedora Core 6 (Zod) was released today. It appears the Fedora Project site is down for the count right now. I'm guessing it got hammered by everyone trying to be the first to download the installation image.
Ubunutu Linux 6.10 (Edgy Eft) is scheduled for release on October 26, 2006.
Expect An Uptick In Epileptic Seizures
Here's a raincoat that has flickering lights activated by rain hitting sensors embedded in the nylon.
Quantum Malware
It appears people are already thinking about ways to infect the new breed of computers. Still conceptual, but hell, so are quantum computers.
Hans Reiser has been arrested on suspicion of Murder.
The estranged husband of an Oakland woman who has been missing for more than a month was arrested today on suspicion of murder.
Hans Reiser, 42, was taken into custody at 11 a.m., hours after Oakland police and FBI technicians searched his home in the Oakland hills. His estranged wife, Nina Reiser, 31, has been missing since Sept. 3, when she dropped off the couple's son and daughter at his home on the 6900 block of Exeter Drive.
This is big news in the OSS/Linux world. Hans Reiser led the team that released one of the first stable journaling file systems built into the Linux kernel. However, when news broke on Slashdot, tacked onto the article summary this comment from a user:
While the disappearance (and possible murder) of his wife is tragic, Linux users will wonder where this will leave Reiser 4. If Reiser is found guilty, will Novell or IBM pick up the pieces and finish up Reiser 4 for inclusion in the kernel or is this the end of the Reiser filesystem project? Will there be any future for the Reiser filesystem, and if Hans is found guilty and the project is continued, will the project be renamed to avoid notoriety?
Slashdot has ceased to amaze me. Geeks truly are socially maladjusted.
Of all things to be concerned about... This blows my mind. While there are probably people concerned about this, I would say this was in poor taste, to say the least, to include this in a report about his alleged involvement in murder. The inclusion of this in the summary seems to equate the the concerns of the state of the latest version of the file system as nearly, if not more, equal to the murder of a human being. A more appropriate way to do this would have been to create a completely different article summary that addressed these concerns.
Of course, comment threads being as they are on Slashdot, they devolved quickly into the morality of the death penalty, how many people are truly psychopaths, punishment vs. rehabilitation in prisons, and, strangely enough, Scott Peterson (started with a comment in his defense, no less).
This is a pretty interesting power generator.
Proponents say other plusses of the merry-go-round generator are the contained cost of 360,000 euros and limited amount of space needed. Even with a modest diameter of about 320 feet (100 meters), they estimate KiteGen can produce half a gigawatt of energy. Emulators for the scalable project envision a 2,000 meter-version that would generate 5 gigawatts of power.
If true, this would be an enormous breakthrough in clean energy production. But most analysts are taking a wait-and-see stance. So am I. A 2,000 meter (that's a little over a mile) kite array (~314 m2) produces 5 gWh. US consumption approaches 3.5 tWh (7,000 times as much). To even produce a 100th of the US power needs around 11,000 m2 of kites. That's a lot of sky.
That's the problem with most alt-energy plants. They don't scale very well. However, for smaller communities (I'm thinking mostly western states, here) This could be a huge asset.
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