Little Brother versus Big Brother

"Orwell feared that one day a ruthless, omnipotent state would train cameras on its citizens, surveilling them into obedience. Yet as the gruesome digital photos from Abu Ghraib prison demonstrate, something different can happen. Instead of merciless totalitarians keeping the people in check, citizens can hold the state accountable. Today, armed with a cheap digital camera, Little Brother is watching."

"In the age of Photoshop, anyone can operate their very own Ministry of Truth. If reality bites, we can just defang it and alter the picture to better serve our aims. Power corrupts; digital power corrupts digitally. The result could be a Gresham's law of photography - a proliferation of images in which the fraudulent drives out the authentic. Or perhaps, bewildered by false documentation and unsure of whom to trust, we'll simply believe the images we want to believe - the ones that confirm our prejudices and ennoble our cause. Those instruments of accountability could morph again - into cudgels of confirmation whose purpose is as propagandistic and dishonest as the programs that blared through Winston Smith's telescreen.

So while we cheer the ability of individuals to keep an eye on those in charge, we should be wary - as Orwell would have cautioned - that technology is no substitute for integrity. In 2004, Big Brother can't hurt us, because Little Brother has the power. Be thrilled. Or worried. Or both."

Link
Source: Wired
See also:
No Where To Hide - PC Magazine
IT on the Campaign Trail - CIO
Supernova: Networks and identity - Red Herring
Total Info System Totally Touchy - Wired
Information Awareness Office - Wikipedia
Privacy - Wikipedia
Spyware - Wikipedia
Pretty Good Privacy - Wikipedia
The Transparent Society - Wired
How Carnivore Works - Howstuffworks
How Workplace Surveillance Works - Howstuffworks
Echelon Watch
The Privacy Arms Race - Fast Company
Bizarre Facts From Digital Fortress - Dan Brown
Privacy Foundation
The secrets your computer just can't keep safe - BBC
Who are the New Intelligence Pioneers? - Intelligenceonline.com
Personal data privacy news - Moreover

Lifetime Digital Memory

"We're off to the races; soon massive amounts of memory will be virtually free. Now the question becomes: How will we use that much storage? The obvious answer is that we can just start saving everything we do -- and even all the media we consume -- for as long as we live: enter Lifetime Digital Memory, or LDM for short."

Link
Source: MSNBC
See also:
Readers on Lifetime Digital Memory - MSNBC
Every move you make could be stored on a PLR - USA Today
Web E-Mail: The New Hard Disk - Jeremy Zawodny
Internet Operating System - Tim O'Reilly
A Spy Machine of DARPA's Dreams - Wired
Pentagon Revives Memory Project - Wired
Pentagon Alters LifeLog Project - Wired
MyLifeBits Project - Microsoft Research
The Mind Is Immortal - Business Week
Future Heroes 2035: My Friends and I - Singularity Watch
Future Heroes 2035: The Big Picture - Singularity Watch
The Teddy - jnd.org
The Long Now Foundation: library
Yafro Moblog
Weblog - Wikipedia
The Web As Platform - Searchblog
Internet Archive

The Nuclear 9/11

"Osama bin Laden may soon have his hands on three Agosta 90B next-generation stealth submarines capable of carrying sixteen sea-to-land cruise missiles each. Those missiles can deliver atomic warheads. And Osama, I suspect, will have access to the forty nuclear warheads constructed by Pakistan.
Washington and New York, two primary targets for Al Qaeda, are near bodies of water from which these nuclear-tipped missiles can be launched. So are many other major American cities.
Here are the skeletal details:

In 1994, DCN, the government-owned company that builds France's naval vessels, agreed to help the Pakistanis build and learn to operate a rather amazing shipyard. It was a next-generation facility building next-tech, Agosta 90B stealth submarines. As of today two of these subs have been built and a third is scheduled for launch by 2006.

Each Agosta 90B is able to carry sixteen Harpoon Stand-Off Land Attack cruise missiles. According to the Pakistani Navy Captain Iftikhar Riaz Qureshi, who commanded both of these subs in their test phases, Pakistan purchased its Agosta 90Bs to provide itself with 'second strike nuclear capability.' Qureshi's words imply that from day one, Pakistan's intention has been to tip these missiles with atomic warheads. And guess what? Since Pakistan tested its first nuclear bomb in 1998, every nuclear device it's made has been a missile warhead.

According to Defence Journal, Pakistan's subs have a range of close to twelve thousand miles…they can travel to the Hudson River or the Chesapeake Bay, unleash their missiles on New York and Washington, then still be able to take refuge in mid-ocean, lay low and threaten other world capitals with a similar fate.

The United States operates a network of hydrophones scattered all over the Atlantic and Pacific seabed. We are listening for subs like these. But we may not be able to hear them. The Pakistani subs use a methanol-and-liquid-oxygen engine bedded on a suspension system that quiets its purr to a whisper. We may not be able to detect their silent running beneath the sounds of zebrafish fanning their tails.

Many a Pakistani would love to see the nuclear destruction of America's key cities. Pakistan has one of the most violently fundamentalist and anti-American populations of any of the world's 57 Islamic states. And that's saying something.

From 1979 to 1995, Pakistan was the headquarters for a group of 'Afghan freedom fighters' who were not Afghans at all. They were an international army paid for by the US, Saudi Arabia, and China, armed by the CIA, and trained, in part, by China's Peoples Liberation Army. We trained an army of 50,000 men from 30 nations to bring down the Soviet Union's most advanced tanks, jets, and helicopters. Why? Our mutual goal was to embarrass a common enemy--the Russians. Chief among the recruits to our proxy Jihad were Osama bin Laden and the founding members of Al Qaeda.

Pakistan is the nation whose citizens rioted in the streets in 1989 over the title of a novel they didn't like--The Satanic Verses. It was Pakistan's street activists who forced the Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a Fatwa offering five million dollars to the Moslem who killed Salman Rushdie. The Pakistanis were more extreme than the most extremist Islamic leader of his day. And that was fifteen years ago! Since then anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism has grown.

Pakistan is also the nation that educated a generation of Afghan refugees who later went home to take over their country in the name of Islamic purity and justice. We know those refugees as the Taleban.

Today Osama bin Laden is one of Pakistan's two biggest pop-culture heroes. The other is 'The Father of the Islamic Bomb', Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. Khan and Osama have reportedly met in Afghanistan. Khan is the weapons expert. Osama is the weapons user.

Many a Pakistani militant fundamentalist cell identifies itself as an Osama ally. One of the strongest among these Osama-loyalists is arguably Pakistan's most popular leader, Fazlur Rahman Khalil, the man who told 60 Minutes that: 'God has ordered us to build nuclear weapons.'

On the other hand, the base of Pakistan's military dictator, Pervez Musharraf, is a slender reed. According to Syed Adeeb, head of Information Times, a militant Pakistani press outlet based in the National Press Building in Washington DC, 'an Urdu-language letter written by Pakistan Army officers on a Pakistan Army letterhead and sent to many members of the Pakistan Parliament' calls, 'Pervez Musharraf and his clique…a band of thieves and looters…imposed on this nation' by the United States.

Musharraf has been the target of at least five assassination attempts. The latest took place the very day Saddam Hussein was captured in December 2003. Yet only he stands between Osama and the Islamic submarines. Only Musharraf stands between Osama and the cruise missiles Pakistan's subs can carry. And only Musharraf stands between Osama and the 40 or more nuclear warheads Pakistan has built since it exploded the first Islamic atomic bomb.

Which means that only Pervez Musharraf stands between Osama and what bin Laden, in a January 2004 speech broadcast on Al Jazeera, called, 'a surprising blow…one that…due to its magnitude…will change the international balances of powers….'

Here's what I strongly suspect is Osama's dream endgame: Nuke a few key cities in the United States. Blind and devastate the Great Satan. Then watch while France, Germany, Italy, and England capitulate. Capitulate to what? To Osama's dream, his passion, his vision of truth and freedom--to a global Islamic caliphate.

I want a world of peace. So do you. But until our understanding of ourselves goes a good deal farther, we have to face the fact that we live in a world of violence. If we pledge to remain non-violent, those who've declared themselves our enemies and who love 'death more than you love life' will chuckle at our weakness…and use it to cheer their comrades on to new atrocities. They will fight the battle of the faithful and the good--the fight for what Osama calls 'justice, manners, and purity'-the battle for the truth of God's messenger. They will assert the truth expressed by an al-Qaeda-allied author, Seif Al-Din Al-Ansari, that we live on an 'speck of dust called Planet Earth.' They will use our reticence to make the mother of all wars. And it will not be environmentally friendly."

Link
Source: Howard Bloom
See also:
Osama bin Laden - Wikipedia
Hunting Osama bin Laden - CNN
Supernova: Fighting networked wars - Red Herring
Pakistan - Wikipedia
Submarine - Wikipedia
How Submarines Work - Howstuffworks
National Reconnaissance Office - Wikipedia
National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency - Wikipedia
Defense Tech
Peace Is War - Wired
Fighting The Network War - Wired
How to Stop Nuclear Terror - Foreign Affairs
Divided We Stand - Wired
Stopping Loose Nukes - Wired
Future Suitcase Nuke attacks - TimeBomb 2000
Bizarre Facts From Deception Point - Dan Brown
Inside soviet military intelligence - Viktor Suvorov

Human Being 2.0

"It was an astounding request. A year ago, neuroscientist Mitsuo Kawato called on the Japanese government to commit 50 billion yen ($446 million) a year for the next three decades. The dream: an Apollo-like program to build a robot with the mental, physical, and emotional capabilities of a 5-year-old child. Kawato called his plan the Atom Project, named for the popular postwar cartoon Tetsuwan Atom (known as Astroboy in the US), the story of a superhero boy robot.

Today the Atom Project remains little more than an audacious proposal. But the science behind it is quite real. With each advance in computing speed, battery capacity, camera and motor miniaturization, and software capability, the world grows closer to the ultimate goal of robotics: a walking, talking, feeling android worthy of our cinematic inspirations.

Consider the progress of just the past 15 years. There are now robots that can get around on two legs, participate in simple conversations, and manipulate objects in rudimentary ways. Of course, we don't yet have a bot that can navigate downtown Manhattan, tie its shoelaces, or even tell a chair from a desk. MIT's Cynthia Breazeal holds out hope that within five years, robots will cross a critical threshold, becoming partners rather than tools - in other words, we'll have friends, not appliances. And while there are a number of extremely complex problems to solve before we can make something as advanced as Sonny, the star of I, Robot, we're getting there, one piece at a time. To find out where the state of the art lies, Wired surveyed the projects that might one day add up to an android just like the rest of us."

Link
Source: Wired
See also:
Rise of the Machines - Wired
I, Robocop - Wired
Robotic Nation
Robotic Nation News
The Age of Spiritual Machines
KurzweilAI.net
Machine Watch
Robots.net
Generation 5
Robotics news - Moreover
Robot - Wikipedia
How Robots Work - HowStuffWorks
AI in the news
I, Robot
The ethical questions of robotics - Kuro5hin
Supernova: Autonomic computing - Red Herring
Isaac Asimov - Wikipedia
Stanislaw Lem - Wikipedia
The Artilect War
Hans Moravec
Marvin Minsky
MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Robots and AI - Wired
AI and A-Life - New Scientist
Artificial Intelligence - BBC
Lexicon of the Future
Bill Joy - Wikipedia
AI Forums
DARPA Grand Challenge 2004 - IT Conversations
What 2034 will bring
21st century - Wikipedia
The Bicentennial Man - Slashdot
Science Fiction - AI in the news
The Animatrix
Terminator 3
Kubrick 2001: The space odyssey explained

Net pioneer predicts web future

"The net is only in the Bronze Age of evolution, according to the pioneer who invented the Domain Name System (DNS)."

"Ten years from now, we will look back at the net and think how could we have been so primitive."

" 'All communication will be over the net', he predicts, 'and we will no longer need phone numbers, just web addresses.' "

"Searching and finding people are certainly the two areas that still need to develop further, according to Dr Mockapetris, and replacing numbers with web addresses will help that, he says."

"Part of the challenge for the net's next 21 years is to make sure people can be certain they are using the net safely."

Link
Source: BBC News
See also:
Tim Berners-Lee - Wikipedia
Impact Lab: Internet
World Wide Web Consortium
WebmasterWorld
The Industry Standard
Searchblog
Google Labs
Information security - Wikipedia

The Best Things In Life Are Free

"In an excerpt from his new book, Free Prize Inside! , Seth Godin shows how anyone can champion new ideas."

"Most writing on innovation is about paradigm shifts, big projects, huge R&D, and technical innovations. It's about nanotechnology and space farming. Most real innovation, though, is actually about stuff such as fast lube-job shops, cell-phone pricing plans, and purple ketchup.

These are what I like to call 'soft innovations.' That's what really works--the commonsense, creative stuff that requires initiative and curiosity, not an advanced degree. If it satisfies the consumer and gets him to tell other people what you want him to tell them, it's a soft innovation. And if it catches on and becomes something the consumer wants, then it becomes a 'free prize.'

A free prize is the thing that makes a product remarkable. It's the thing that gets talked about. And more often than not, the free prize has nothing to do with the core benefit the product offers. It's something extra. Free prizes are fashionable or fun or surprising. They rarely deliver more of what we were buying in the first place."

Link
Source: Fast Company
See also:
Seth's Blog
IdeaFlow - Corante.com
Disruptive Innovation - AlwaysON

The Future of Business Intelligence

"We asked some industry leaders for their boldest predictions about the future of business intelligence tools, and here's our collection of the most interesting ideas."

Highlights:
- Image is everything
- The end of gut feel
- A sixth sense
- Petabyte mining, no sweat
- Accountability matters
- Radio frequency identification
- Mining the clickstream
- Location, location
- Learning your mining habits
- BI for IT
- Research and development goes mainstream
- BI meets AI
- Visualizing the problem
- Getting in synch
- Automatic insurance decisions
- Not just interesting info
- Embedded BI
- First things first
- Altruistic analytics
- On-the-fly management
- Oops!

Link
Source: Computerworld
See also:
DM Review
Business Intelligence - Google News
Moreover News
Business Intelligence - Wikipedia

SpaceShipOne Makes History

"The first non-governmental rocket ship has successfully flown to the edge of space, piloted to a safe landing on a desert airport runway here.

Civilian test pilot, now turned astronaut, Mike Melvill, brought SpaceShipOne down to a Mojave Airport tarmac after flying some 100 kilometers (62 miles) in altitude, leaving the Earth’s atmosphere during his history-making sub-orbital space ride.

SpaceShipOne's pioneering flight lasted some 25 minutes after being released from the White Knight carrier craft. The jet-powered aircraft took SpaceShipOne to 47,000 feet, taking roughly an hour to reach that altitude."

Link
Source: Space.com
See also:
SpaceShipOne Flight Completed Successfully - Slashdot
SpaceShipOne - Google Images
SpaceShipOne - Google News
Space pilot 'ready to go' - BBC News
Space Shot on a Shoestring - Wired News
X-Prize
After SpaceShipOne - Karl Schroeder

You are who you know

"The new social software turbo-charges friendships, sexual hookups and the business of human relationship -- and could turn our lives into an open book."

"Social software pioneers have the Internet biz buzzing again. But their new networks are even more valuable as booster shots for human connection."

Link
Source: Salon.com
See also:
You are who you know: Part 2
Marc Canter
Joi Ito
The Blog of Things To Come - Fast Company
Ross Mayfield
Danah Boyd
Tribe.net
AlwaysOn
Social software - Wikipedia
Social network - Wikipedia
Many-to-Many
The Connectors - Wired
Social Nets Not Making Friends - Wired
Social Nets Find Friends in VCs - Wired
O'Reilly Digital Democracy
O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference

The Next Trillion-Dollar Industry

"Steve Jurvetson: Nanotechnology will affect everything from IT to medicine."

"Jurvetson: Steve Jurvetson is a managing director of Draper Fisher Jurtvetson. A variety of people who have looked at this, from NSF researchers to well-known prognosticators, think that there isn't an industry that won't be revolutionized in the next 50 to 100 years by nanotechnology. Nanotech could bring a fundamental change in how we manufacture things, how we think about materials, how we think about structures."

"Nanotech is the next great technology wave, the next trillion-dollar industry."

Link
Source: AlwaysOn
See also:
Steve Jurvetson
Draper Fisher Jurtvetson
Venture capitalist chastises buzz around nanotech - SiliconValley.com
Moreover - Nanotechnology news
Small Times
Nanotechnology Now

The Digital Convergence

"Digital convergence is finally happening -- and that means new opportunities for upstarts and challenges for tech icons."

"For nearly two decades, industry sages have heralded the coming age of converging digital technology. But it remained an empty slogan. Now, thanks to faster chips, broader bandwidth, and a common Internet standard, technologies are quickly merging."

"Hundreds of thousands of political bloggers, fly fishermen, chefs, and Oprah wannabes will be uploading gobs of video programming -- creating their own channels. This plethora of Web shows will joust for attention with television fare, Internet radio, video e-mails, and games. All of it will play on televisions, computers, and cell phones, which will be different flavors of the same machine."

Link
Source: Business Week
See also:
Timeline of Future Technology and Social Change
Book of the Future
Visions of the 21st Century
Chronicle of the Future
Views of the future

The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole

What does Bruce Sterling think about the Singularity?

"He has big reservations against hard AI. Used MS Clippy's demise as an example on how far away we are. [Kurzweil's Ramona is another example.]

Then he looked at Singularities in history and he found three:
1. 1945 after the first atomic bomb dropped. For 6 years humanity was struggling to come to terms with this event.
2. LSD in the 60s presents you with the perception of a Singularity.
3. Computer viruses singularitarian event.

All of these have no staying power, all got swamped. LSD even fallen off the planet."

"Everyone claims, that we are on the edge of something big, but what if we are on the edge of nothing critically important?"

Listen to Bruce Sterling

Link
Source: Future Salon
See also:
Bruce Sterling's blog
The Evolution Will Be Mechanized - Wired
The Long Now Foundation
Singularity Pre-Readings

Redefining Retirement in the 21st Century

"The demographics of today’s workforce, employee expectations about retirement and the types of retirement options offered are all in a state of flux, making retirement policy a moving target for those charged with researching and administering pension plans. That was the message at a recent Wharton conference titled 'Reinventing the Retirement Paradigm' co-hosted by Wharton’s The Pension Research Council. Experts from academia, government and industry debated what’s ahead for the baby boomers, and those coming up behind them."

Link
Source: Knowledge@Wharton
See also:
The 21st Century at Work - RAND
Embrace the End of Work - Betterhumans
Robotic Nation - Marshall Brain
Robot Nation? - Tech Central Station
The Law of Accelerating Returns - KurzweilAI.net

Nanotechnology pioneer slays “grey goo” myths

"Eric Drexler, known as the father of nanotechnology, today (Wednesday, 9th June 2004) publishes a paper that admits that self-replicating machines are not vital for large-scale molecular manufacture, and that nanotechnology-based fabrication can be thoroughly non-biological and inherently safe. Talk of runaway self-replicating machines, or 'grey goo', which he first cautioned against in his book Engines of Creation in 1986, has spurred fears that have long hampered rational public debate about nanotechnology. Writing in the Institute of Physics journal Nanotechnology, Drexler slays the myth that molecular manufacture must use dangerous self-replicating machines."

" 'Runaway replicators, while theoretically possible according to the laws of physics, cannot be built with today’s nanotechnology toolset,' says Dr. Drexler, founder of the Foresight Institute, in California, and Senior Research Fellow of the Molecular Engineering Research Institute (MERI). He continued: 'Self-replicating machines aren't necessary for molecular nanotechnology, and aren’t part of current development plans.' "

Link
Source: PhysOrg.com
See also:
Nanotech guru turns back on 'goo' - BBC News
Foresight Institute
Responsible Nanotechnology
Drexler Clarifies Grey Goo Scenario - Slashdot
Special report: nanotechnology - Guardian
Why the future doesn't need us - Wired

Strugatsky Brothers - Russian SF Writers

"Thinking is not entertainment but an obligation!"
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky

"Arkady Natanovich Strugatsky and Boris Natanovich Strugatsky are probably the most famous Russian SF authors. They became the spiritual leaders of Russian science fiction literature in the 60-s, and to this day, their influence remains immense.

Entire generations were brought up on their books, and the authors managed to impress their ideas and principles on millions and millions of people. The number of their fans in Russia is really impossible to count, and even abroad, their works have found way to the hearts of the readers. The key to their success is, in their own words, that they write "about adventures of the spirit, and not about adventures of the body.

Any Strugatskys' work is very different from an ordinary SF book in that it is not 'pure science fiction.' Strugatskys always write about people and their problems, and not about spaceships, technology or other things that the ordinary SF literature is full of. There are so many layers of ideas and thoughts in their works that you have to read them several times if you want to really grasp all that authors packed in. Their books stir up the desire to understand other people."

Link
Source: Russian Science Fiction and Fantasy
See also:
Boris and Arkady Strugatsky - Wikipedia

Generation S, or the Future of Streaming Media

"Let's forget Sci-Fi and let’s take a look at what should we expect to see in the next 5-10-15 years.
1. The TV and the computer will merge once and forever. We will still have our TV’s as we know then, but I think we will see the combo version very soon on the market.
2. Streaming movies and songs will overtake DVD’s and CD’s. You will be able to download a High Def movie on your set-top box, laptop, portable PVR, phones and cars (minivan’s mostly)
3. Wearable PVR’s a.k.a. personal black boxes or vlog boxes may be used by kids, police and military personal or in our cars. The ability to transmit live video over xG networks or Ultra-hi-def–Fi IP networks at speeds of 100 MBps or higher.
4. VOIP will be Video-over-IP or some mix of video, text and GPS location will rule the world.
5. Video collaboration will change how enterprise, small businesses, government and individuals communicate and work. Telecommuting will have a whole new meaning, since now you will be able to virtually be there from anywhere.
6. People will have their own media servers ( I have one now) with their videos, pictures and MP’s)
7. We will have video or virtual answering machines to take our massages, since we will know who and why they are calling us. ( I want the virtual Nicole Kidman to be my virtual secretary) This should be part of the media server functionality.
8. CNN will no longer be the news network that 'brings you the world.' I think some VLOG news network will have all up to date, live and on-demand vlogs from ordinary people from around the world. And it will be up to us to make our own decision whether to watch it or not and what to watch. There will be Streaming only 'TV' channels that will overtake the stream generation.
9. We will have our personalized video pages on our TV’s, laptops or phones, with news, movies, live feeds, vlogs and video massages.
10. You will be able to see and track traffic in your car or fingertips.
11. We will have live streaming from our video-stream cams of weddings, birth, death, concerts, or developing news. You will never miss one of these any more.
12. Learning will never be the same. All universities and even schools will offer live and on-demand programs for their students. Kids in China will be able to get their Stanford degrees on-line. More people will have better education, and maybe at lower costs than what they want us to believe (save, save for college). Why, if the content is syndicated this will save us time and money. You will be able to get the best from around the world in less time and in better format.
13. Books will start changing, as we will be able to stream the text and the images on-demand of any book in any language to any device anywhere.
14. E-Commerce will never be the same. Virtual house tours that have been here for years will soon let you buy your next house over the web, without living your living room. E-bay will have live video auctions for their hi-end sales. Yahoo, MSFT and Google will fight for it too."

Link
Source: AlwaysOn
See also:
New media - Wikipedia
How E-learning Works
E-learning - Wikipedia
Wearable computer - Wikipedia
Smart Mobs
Executives see swell of Net offerings on horizon - USA Today

Anime and Robotics: A Symbiotic Relationship

"The end of World War II and the subsequent evolution of technology has caused pop culture to become pervasive in every facet of modern-day society; from television to cinema and magazines to the exponentially-growing World Wide Web. Within Japanese pop culture, anime has become progressively more influential and commands true worldwide recognition since the Oscar-winning production, Spirited Away.

Similarly, in recent decades, the field of robotics has also been spurred on by technological advances, and is becoming increasingly prevalent within society, industry and our homes. While robotics and anime have originated in very different ways, as both advance they are forming a unique and multi-faceted symbiosis."

Link
Source: Generation 5
See also:
Anime - Wikipedia
Robot - Wikipedia
Japan - Wikipedia
Anime Dreams
Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence

Fundamental limitations on 21st century biotechnology

"All important substrate emergences, or phase transitions, appear to require both primarily bottom up, and secondarily top down control processes."

" 'Genetically engineered humans,' redesigned for increased performance, now appear to be the 'atomic vacuum cleaners' of the 1950's—fantasies that will never come to pass, for a host of complex reasons."

"We are stuck with our genetic legacy code, and we won't be able to significantly reengineer it until we move to an entirely new computational substrate."

"It appears that the era of genetic exploration in human organisms is largely over."

"In summary, biology, while it will still yield a host of socially valuable benefits in coming decades, is essentially a saturated substrate. We will gain a host of new knowledge from the biological sciences, but we won't use that information to redesign humans, in any significant biological sense. There won't be time or reason to do so.

Infotech, not biotech, now appears to be the constrained developmental future for local intelligence."

Link
Source: Singularity Watch
See also:
Artificial life - Wikipedia

Interview with Intel's CEO

"Let's turn to the technology business. Do you see a faster PC upgrade cycle in the future?"

"You are probably going to see more distributed upgrade cycles. It is not going to be big lumps of stuff happening all at once, but I am sure people will upgrade their (PC) clients in the U.S. Consumption in the emerging economies is growing much faster than the U.S.--and will continue to do so."

"We have seen Intel move away from clock speed and talk more about things like processor speeds. Is that going to be the company's future focus?"

"We are still interested in performance, but you can drive performance in a whole bunch of different ways. We have not lost any enthusiasm toward faster transistors or toward higher performance. We will just be able to get performance using different technology and different techniques."

"What sort of markets are ripe for digitization? What are the industries you see that are going to need this?"

"Health sciences is a big one just because it is such a huge piece of the gross domestic product of the established economies and they are such relatively slow adopters of technology. With their basic infrastructure in the back office, the health care industries have been pretty sluggish in terms of computerizing and taking the cost down."

"How about the energy field? A few years ago you were talking about alternative energy and people looked at you like you were crazy. Now Stanford says it is one of their top three research areas."

"When I ask people what their initiative would be if they were president for a day, most come back with the same answer: something to do with the energy ecosystem.

Going to the moon was the great Sputnik challenge. Today I think the challenges we face are a little bit different, and I would think it would have something to do with the energy environment that we have. It's not surprising to me that a lot of other people are thinking in that same way."

Link
Source: CNET News
See also:
Barrett's Next Challenge
Intel
AMD

Supercomputing

"The race is on. Superfast computers are essential to high-level scientific research."

"The secrets of fusion energy, subatomic behavior, and more are being attacked by supercomputers capable of supersimulations."

Link
Source: Business Week
See also:
Supercomputer - Wikipedia
Supercomputing - CIO
U.S. targets fastest supercomputer
FlashMobComputing.org
Mac Supercomputer Joins Elite
Spain unveils supercomputer plans
The Secret Source of Google's Power
Windows For Supercomputers
TOP500 Supercomputer sites
Supercomputing Online
Silicon Graphics
IBM Opens Supercomputing Center in Europe
The Beowulf Cluster
Hugo de Garis
The Superwoman of Supercomputing
Chinese supercomputer headed to top ranks
Gene Machine - Wired