16 December - Quick Pick Articles

 Why Government is More Afraid of Debt than Depression Real News 

How do I change my password?  - Yahoo! Help

 Contrary Brin
Longevity & Life Extension
 This is a topic I’ve covered in my article, Do We Really Want Immortality? 
Quasi-debate provoked a firestorm of controversy over on my Facebook page. One of my responses: I appreciate the enthusiasm of those urging me to BELIEVE(!) that tech-delivered eternal life is just around the bend. Indeed, I am told that BELIEVING(!) is essential to get there and that NOT believing might prevent it from happening. One fellow wrote:
"The power of your expectations is crucial. "
  I get the same pitch from SETI zealots, who proclaim that detection of advanced alien civilizations will result in scientific leaps that may solve all our problems.
So why do I -- and Vernor Vinge, the coiner of the term "tech singularity" react with sighs and eye-rolls to all this fervent "hossanah" shouting over salvation from above or an imminent Day of Transcendence, when Death shalt be no more and ye true believers will all be rewarded...

  ...because we've heard it all before. The terminology may be different, but the PSYCHOLOGY is still the same as in every tent show revival meeting across 6,000 years.Find me the extropian who understands how we stand on the shoulders of every generation of parents who tried to raise better kids than themselves, or who ever speaks about the beauty of that chain of pay-forward generosity, the most tragic-poetic tale ever told. Or the noble honor we'll all have, even if we die, if we can only be one of the most important of the pay-forward generations. ALL I hear is paeans to how grand it will be to receive the end result. Never anything about the OBLIGATION that falls upon us, from that great chain.
......
A team from the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow has developed a 'pioneering' lighting system that can kill hospital superbugs such as MRSA and Clostridium difficile. The technology decontaminates the air and exposes surfaces by bathing them in a narrow spectrum of visible-light wavelengths, known as HINS-light. It works by exciting molecules within the bacteria, which in turn produces 'highly reactive' chemical species that are lethal to it.
.....
On April 8, the networking hardware that routes traffic on the Internet got new marching orders: Requests for data from 15% of Internet addresses-including Dell.com, Yahoo.com, Microsoft.com, and U.S. government sites-were directed to go through China.
Looking to the Future: Blogs to Follow
Accelerating Future
Ethical Technology
I Look Forward To
Next Big Future
Open the Future
Responsible Nanotechnology
Sentient Developments
The Foresight Institute

 KurzweilAI  
New Society for Social Neuroscience to help guide emerging field 
New Application Allows Scientists Easy Access to Important Government Data 
First issue of Semantic Web journal published 

If Extradited to Sweden, Assange Will Be Turned Over to the US 
Marianne Ny, the Swedish prosecutor who wants Assange returned to Sweden for questioning in relation to a sex crime investigation, posted the following opaque statement about Assange's possible extradition to the United States on the prosecution's website:

The decision to have Julian Assange sent to a London jail and kept there was taken by the British authorities and not by prosecutors in Sweden, as previously thought.
Lawyers for Assange reacted to the news with shock and said CPS officials had told them this week it was Sweden which had asked them to ensure he was kept in prison.

Karin Rosander, director of communications for Sweden's prosecutor's office, told the Guardian: The decision was made by the British prosecutor. I got it confirmed by the CPS this morning that the decision to appeal the granting of bail was entirely a matter for the CPS. The Swedish prosecutors are not entitled to make decisions within Britain. It is entirely up to the British authorities to handle it.

As a result, she said, Sweden will not be submitting any new evidence or arguments to the high court hearing tomorrow morning. The Swedish authorities are not involved in these proceedings. We have not got a view at all on bail.

And the conditions of Assange's confinement as a pre-trial detainee, if the ones currently experienced by Bradley Manning are any indication, won't be pleasant:

Since his arrest in May, Manning has been a model detainee, without any episodes of violence or disciplinary problems. He nonetheless was declared from the start to be a Maximum Custody Detainee, the highest and most repressive level of military detention, which then became the basis for the series of inhumane measures imposed on him.

From the beginning of his detention, Manning has been held in intensive solitary confinement. For 23 out of 24 hours every day -- for seven straight months and counting -- he sits completely alone in his cell. Even inside his cell, his activities are heavily restricted; he's barred even from exercising and is under constant surveillance to enforce those restrictions. For reasons that appear completely punitive, he's being denied many of the most basic attributes of civilized imprisonment, including even a pillow or sheets for his bed (he is not and never has been on suicide watch). For the one hour per day when he is freed from this isolation, he is barred from accessing any news or current events programs. Lt. Villiard protested that the conditions are not like jail movies where someone gets thrown into the hole, but confirmed that he is in solitary confinement, entirely alone in his cell except for the one hour per day he is taken out.

In sum, Manning has been subjected for many months without pause to inhumane, personality-erasing, soul-destroying, insanity-inducing conditions of isolation similar to those perfected at America's Supermax prison in Florence, Colorado: all without so much as having been convicted of anything. And as is true of many prisoners subjected to warped treatment of this sort, the brig's medical personnel now administer regular doses of anti-depressants to Manning to prevent his brain from snapping from the effects of this isolation.
 It is entirely possible that Assange will be held indefinitely, as Manning is now, without any charges being brought against him. It is even possible that he will be designated as an enemy non-combatant, although it is more probable that he will be treated as such without a formal designation. It is hard to imagine that the US will allow Assange to be publicly tried, given the thorny problems related to classified information and state secrets associated with such an endeavor.

U.S. Urges Web Privacy 'Bill Of Rights'
The Obama administration called Thursday for the creation of a Privacy Policy Office that would help develop an Internet "privacy bill of rights" for U.S citizens and coordinate privacy issues globally.
88-page Commerce Department report rejects the current state of Internet privacy notices. It says people shouldn't be expected to read and understand the legal jargon contained in privacy policies "that nobody understands, if they say anything about privacy at all.
It calls for a Privacy Policy Office that would "serve as a center of commercial data privacy policy expertise." The agency wouldn't oversee government use of data or existing health and financial privacy laws. Instead, it would aim to help the personal data-gathering industry develop codes of conduct that could be enforced by the Federal Trade Commission.

The report also calls for the development of a national data breach law that would make it easier for companies to navigate the current patchwork of state data breach laws.

It also calls for strengthening the existing wiretapping law—written in 1986—to protect more types of data from government surveillance.

Widows Push Congress to Act on Gulf-Spill Measure 
Two widows of men killed in the Gulf of Mexico explosion that led to the largest offshore oil spill in U.S. history say they fear Congress is losing interest in passing a measure soon that would allow them to seek damages in court for the tragedy.

Under current law, families of anyone killed at sea—rather than on land—are banned from receiving damages for loss of care and comfort. Congress is considering a measure that would change the law for families of workers who died in the BP PLC explosion.
 
Oriental hornets powered by 'solar energy'  HT  TreeHugger
The large wasp species has a special structure in its abdomen that traps the sun's rays, and a special pigment that harvests the energy they contain. PDF

Why I am not a libertarian  Dec 13 2007
To be a libertarian is to at least suspect that progress isn't all it's cracked up to be, because it is obvious to any twelve-year-old who can read Robert A. Heinlein that the world was once much more libertarian than it is now, and that it easily could become so again. Both of these conditions demonstrate nonmonotonic political change, invalidating the delusional concept of progress.

Surely only one such disproof is required before we feel motivated to perform a thorough mental audit of all historical changes in social and political systems which come to us tagged with this fascinating if deadly label.

One concept often associated with progress is revolution. Various fashionable opinions of 2007 assign various moral valences to various instances of revolution. The word is clearly extremely general. However, if we are to rid ourselves of these fashions, one simple way to start is with a simple default: all revolutions are bad.

Libertarianism is, more or less, basically, the ideology of the American Revolution. And the American Revolution was, in my own personal opinion, more or less, basically, a criminal outrage of the mob - led by leaders who were either unscrupulous, deluded, or both. A politician is a politician. The profession is a fundamentally criminal one.
 Conceived in Liberty 
the rebels in the American Revolution were motivated by an ideology that was utterly deluded, that amounted to no more than a wacky conspiracy theory. The point is not even slightly arguable. Their interpretation of British politics simply had no basis in reality.

Since this delusional interpretation was the linchpin of their argument for rebellion, and since their reliance on street violence and paramilitary formations is indisputable, they can fairly be classed as unscrupulous or deluded mob leaders - regardless of any classification in the scruples department, a historical task which often verges on the impossible.
( Which was explained in History class in secondary school by a British instructor with enthusiasm, revolving around tariffs applied using British transport actually ending up with a lower landed cost less than the alternatives.  Where are the references ? Not in the school text, I'm afraid. )
In the end I was convinced that the fear of a comprehensive conspiracy against liberty throughout the English-speaking world - a conspiracy believed to have been nourished in corruption, and of which, it was felt, oppression in America was only the most immediately visible part - lay at the heart of the Revolutionary movement.
Note how gracefully Bailyn skates over the fact that (indisputably) no such conspiracy existed. In other words, our Founding Fathers were more or less the Troofers of their day. Or, to put it differently, America obtained its independence because of a war that was started by people who were genuinely terrified of the 18th-century equivalent of black helicopters.
( Or said they were as a convenience.  :)


Study Confirms That Fox News Makes You Stupid