From extropians-request@extropy.org Mon Sep 27 23:55:48 1993 Return-Path: Received: from usc.edu by chaph.usc.edu (4.1/SMI-4.1+ucs-3.0) id AA05270; Mon, 27 Sep 93 23:55:36 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: from ude.tim.ia.ung.gnu.ai.mit.ed (ude.tim.ia.ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu) by usc.edu (4.1/SMI-3.0DEV3-USC+3.1) id AA16836; Mon, 27 Sep 93 23:55:29 PDT Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Received: by ude.tim.ia.ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu id AA15463; Tue, 28 Sep 93 02:50:46 EDT Received: from news.panix.com by ude.tim.ia.ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu via TCP with SMTP id AA15458; Tue, 28 Sep 93 02:50:13 EDT Received: by news.panix.com id AA18807 (5.65c/IDA-1.4.4 for exi-maillist@ung.gnu.ai.mit.edu); Tue, 28 Sep 1993 02:50:13 -0400 Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 02:50:13 -0400 Message-Id: <199309280650.AA18807@news.panix.com> To: Extropians@extropy.org From: Extropians@extropy.org Subject: Extropians Digest X-Extropian-Date: September 28, 373 P.N.O. [06:49:39 UTC] Reply-To: extropians@extropy.org Errors-To: Extropians-Request@gnu.ai.mit.edu Status: RO Extropians Digest Tue, 28 Sep 93 Volume 93 : Issue 270 Today's Topics: [1 msgs] AGITPROP: Robin Hood (was: Lloyd's) [1 msgs] BASICS: Death [3 msgs] BOOKS: by Stonier [1 msgs] Come buy books? [1 msgs] Congratulations! [1 msgs] DisappointNet and the PostModern world order [1 msgs] DisappointNet and the PostModern world order [2 msgs] HUMOR: Drugs Don't Work in NJ [1 msgs] PPL: Lloyds and crypto-anarchical insurance [1 msgs] Reading cure for Objectivism [1 msgs] etymology of anarchy [2 msgs] extropian vices [1 msgs] philosophitis [1 msgs] Administrivia: No admin msg. Approximate Size: 51420 bytes. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 13:13:15 -0800 From: lefty@apple.com (Lefty) Subject: HUMOR: Drugs Don't Work in NJ >On my way to work I passed a billboard sign with the following notice >in large green letters: > DRUGS DON'T WORK IN NJ >Of course, I was heartbroken to receive this sad news. It's clearly a hoax. Drugs _do_ work in New Jersey. Trust me on this. -- Lefty (lefty@apple.com) C:.M:.C:., D:.O:.D:. ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 22:36:17 +0100 (BST) From: Charlie Stross Subject: DisappointNet and the PostModern world order jfitz@techbook.com (John Fitzpatrick) writes: >Subject: DisappointNet >CS> Where do _you_ think we're going? What is the net going to >CS> look like when it finally erupts into public view, and how >CS> will it compare with its present form? > >Something like a cross between cable television and >video poker, I'm afraid. But at least your up-to-the-second >horoscope will be available, from a wide variety of experts. while szabo@netcom.com (Nick Szabo) writes: >* Use of increasing bandwidth for video. This is being >promoted not due to user demand, but because turning >the NSFNet into an Information Highway pork barrel requires the need >for very high bandwidth "backbones". Centralization is not >justfied by widespread decentralized use of text, graphics or voice >mail. Hmm. Use of video: yes. But use of video over NSFnet? I'll take issue there, because I _think_ video will come for different reasons. In the UK, cable TV is finally being installed -- and they're putting in fibre optic links to the street corners, using co-ax only for the last few yards to the TV set. In the US, I read that the third largest cable-TV company on the Eastern seaboard is going to provide a subscriber netnews feed to all its subscribers -- presumably over the curren copper core network. Back in the US again, a friendly hardware hacker at the BBC (who do a fair bit of digital imaging work, for obvious reasons) mentioned that he knows of people who are trying to get a full newsfeed broadcast over one of their unused satellite channels when the next Astra satellite goes up. It hasn't happened yet, but there was some sympathetic interest. The UK is a special case -- a single satellite can saturate an area with c. 60 million residents -- but cerainly a similar situation can be envisaged in the US if a major broadcaster with spare capacity could be convinced to fill it with data rather than video. Here's a hypothesis; even in the age of interactive media, 99.9% of net bandwidth is soaked up by _incoming_ information. Broadcasting is a natural model for disseminating a usenet feed. After all, while a 2400 baud modem would be swamped by the demands of the near-future's 100Mb/day newsfeed, a satellite channel could comfortably dump the entire feed in under a minute, and the modem will _certainly_ not be swamped by the demands of an outgoing load of, say, 10-20K/day of posts (even by an active participant). So I suspect we are a lot closer to seeing usenet being generally available than previous experience may suggest. (Note that I do _not_ mean the term "available" to be confused with "utilized".) Then there's World Wide Web. This shows signs of delivering -- albeit in embryonic form -- what Ted Nelson has been promising for years with Xanadu. We now _have_ a global hypertext system that spans hosts and can deliver text and graphics. Future directions involve multimedia; given the SGML-derived ancestry of HTML I'd expect to see HyTime adopted as the standard (especially when a PD HyTime parser becomes available), but even now the beta-test version of Mosaic for the Macintosh can handle QuickTime movies. I run a World Wide Web client on the net from my Mac, over a modem. Want to find out the Library of Congress catalog entry for a book? Read the recently published literature on the Bassen-Kornzweig Syndrome? Retrieve a piece of shareware? Read netnews? It's all available through a single connection-rich interface. Then there's the cost of getting a net feed. This appears to be dropping, and it's not far off an exponential curve. I live in the UK. Two years ago I decided I wanted a home net connection. I investigated, and discovered to my horror that the hardware would cost on the order of 1000 UK pounds, and a net feed would cost >2000 pounds ($3000) per year, plus phone bills. Six months ago I got my feed. The host was a Mac Classic with a V22bis modem; both second hand, costing a grand total of 300 pounds (under $500). The feed cost me 15 pounds to sign up, plus a tenner a month: less than a daily newspaper. In return, I got a ppp/slip dial-up link to the internet. I've upgraded since then, but the point is the same; if you're a member of the anorak brigade a limited usenet feet costs less today than a new TV and VCR in hardware terms, and a daily newspaper in running costs. I now have a fast modem and a machine as powerful as a Sun 3/80; I'll soon have [I hope] a floptical drive for offline storage. With this kit, I should be able to pull in 20-30 newsgroups as easily as today I pull in three newsgroups plus email. My conclusion, which prompted my post: usenet is coming, and it won't be NSFnet that's important -- it'll be the small, private hosts that matter. But how will it look? Nick predicted, among other attractive propositions: >* "Talk" and "IRC" bloom into a mind-numbing variety of net-shared >interactive apps with text, voice, still and animated graphics. Virtual >whiteboard plus voice and muti-user CAD software will spread. The >simple net-sharable interfaces of relational databases, source-code >control systems, etc. get extended to the graphical world of engineering >and artistic design. MUDs with spreadsheets, on-line markets, etc. etc. >etc. I'm not sure. I think this depends on who the carrier is, and whether the net follows the one-to-many or many-to-many broadcast radio/telephone paradigm. (There's also a more subtle issue, of client/server versus peer/peer communications, which I'll get to later.) The issue for me looks like the balance of chanrges for incoming v.s. outgoing messages. If we see stiff charges for outgoing but low charges for incoming, then interactivity will fade; we'll see something like John's pessimistic prediction: > I sometimes think that some members of this list (and other > "free-(as-long-as-you-have-money)-market" or "capitalist" > flagweavers) will be the ultimate death of this great > social achievement. All the good stuff will cost money, the > crap will be free, with commercial interuptions. MUDs and IRC soak up outgoing bandwidth as much as incoming, when you add interactivity and graphics. It's an essentially real-time occupation, and if your IP provider charges by the byte or the minute it will cost you dearly. Offline stuff -- batched netnews, WWW searches conducted by knowbot worms using something like DCE to execute on foreign hosts -- costs less in connect time (albeit more in computing resources). It's worth noting that today business oriented operating systems are driven by connectivity and the open systems shtick. Even Bill Gates has been heard to declare that "Windows NT is a kind of UNIX" (!) in an attempt to prove MicroSoft's devotion to open systems standards. I'll stick my neck out and make a prediction. We've seen Nintendo signing a strategic alliance with Silicon Graphics, and other weird signs of the apocalypse; the hardware market is rapidly homogenizing as consumer demand for virtual reality converges with high-end demand for multimedia ready scientific visualization systems. Some PC games software actually demands more processor resources, and takes up more disk space, than a medium- sized UNIX server installation. (Not to mention costing more than the average business spreadsheet.) So the hardware barrier between the home and business hardware markets is dissolving. The distinction between systems is moving from hardware into operating systems, as demonstrated when Apple CEO John Sculley (okay, this was early this year :) declared that "within two years Apple will be an operating systems corporation with a hardware subsidiary". This showed a rare perception that then 386's cost $25 a shot, it's not what you've got but what you do with it that counts. The main battle for the future shape of PC's is moving from the Intel/ACE/Alpha controversy to Windows NT/UNIX/Pink. I suspect that we will shortly see the OS market fission into "home" and "enterprise" operating systems. Ostensibly they will be the same, but in practice their functionality will be determined by the clients and subsystems they come with; and the differences will be substantial. Windows for Workgroups was the first sign that Windows was fissioning; I think that it's possible that Cairo (Windows 4) will appear in Personal and Business (Win32 API) versions. The former will have lots of connectivity clients and backward compatability boxes, so that the users can run old stuff like DOS on them and connect to commercial services; the enterprise systems will focus on high performance and high security, with C2 being seen as a lower permissable standard. (Most TCP/IP based systems automatically violate the C2 standard, but Kerberos and other network authentication/- encryption systems redress the balance.) Gradually, the decade of the LAN will give way to the decade of the WAN. Home hardware will be made by Nintendo, 3DO, or whoever wins in the high performance home virtual reality arena, running an operating system that provides network clients with a visualization platform. Commercial system will be built by Apple, IBM and the big guys, running high performance object-oriented server systems like Pink, Windows NT Release 2.?, or whatever the next USL release of UNIX (SVR5?) is. Copy protection based on node-licensing systems (that use DCE to execute an RPC on a license server host, without which the client cannot run) will gradually creep in as standard, gutting the software piracy business. Home PC developments will gradually drop back to built-in obsolescence and styling exercises while performance remains static at a level just high enough to support real-time photorealistic rendering. Business systems, in contrast, will go massively parallel and performance will continue to follow the curve of decreasing chip fabrication sizes, decreasing power consumption, and increasing speed. The reason for this is that home systems don't need security, or servers, or [much] real-time responsiveness, but corporate information providers do. Those who have security have a position of strategic informational superiority from which to leverage their profit-making enterprises at the expense of others. (Note: I see this kind of commercial enterprise not as a positive-sum game, creating wealth, but as a zero-sum gain, sequestrating other people's money through a process of monopolizing information.) If we're not lucky, if the net grows as slowly as Nick suggests, I think we'll see a future in which 99% of the population have internet access -- and 99% of them use it to load the license modules of their Nintendo games or spreadsheets, paying by direct debit over the net. The telcos may contribute by charging for telephone calls by the byte, thus discouraging private citizens from making use of the new broadcast media. And so, a one-to-many broadcast paradigm mediated by large scale IP's may evolve. On the other hand, if access to the net becomes generally available in <5 years, many users will become habituated to the current anarchic freedom _before_ the corporate client/server model is sufficiently generalized throughout the home computer market to suppress the "spirit of usenet". Group hobbyist projects like Linux will provide home users with commercial -grade software, free of charge. (Clue: I know some of the guys who wrote bits of Linux. They say it looks great on their CV's when they go for job interviews ...) Hardware for the next generation could be as much an off-the-shelf item as it is today; there are encouraging signs, like Apple licensing the Newton architecture, Sun proposing the SPARC as an IEEE standard, and proposals to turn PCMCIA into a general-purpose bus architecture to add small peripherals to PC's. If Nintendo can't move upmarket from their current near-monopoly on the games industry, or if they can only do it at the expense of adopting open systems, or if MicroSoft goes the way of IBM, then the field's wide open for a global internet based on peer-to-peer networking rather than a commercial client/server model. Prophetic sign of the times: watch what happens when the dreaded TCP/IP address space dragon finally forces itself upon the net. Some way will have to be found to extend the 2^32 possible internet nodes; or it will be necessary to drop TCP/IP and switch to an OSI-based protocol instead. I predict that if the TCP/IP replacement relies on some kind of central or distributed node-registration authority, rather than the current domain- registration system, things may begin to look a little oppressive. Of course, this may not be in our hands. Because, as Nick says: >* Spread of Internet to Third World countries. Look for 100,000's >of sites and millions of users in India and China in 2000. > >* Many engineers and most programmers will be working for an overseas >employer by 2010, albeit describing an employer as "overseas" will have >become less meaningful. Yourdon observed in a recent book (wasn't it, The Decline and Fall of the American Programmer?) that it's far cheaper to hire sweated third world labor -- and if they speak english they can be very useful as programmers. I will go further and state that I believe a lot of the reason the net has grown to its present state is because it is the product of a wealthy community of nations, whose citizens have sufficient money and free time to indulge in troublemaking, hacking, and the creation of brilliant, publicly available utilities: moreover, a net shaped by citizens with a general cultural comittment to freedom of speech and action. A net shaped by corporations employing impoverished, overworked labor from third-world nations with oppressive governments (like the UK :) would be a very different net. What are the geopolitical corollaries of internetworking? When, and how, will governments interfere? And is there any chance of preserving and expanding what has got to be, already, the largest, oldest, self- sustaining anarchist system in the world? -- Charlie Charlie Stross is charless@scol.sco.com, charlie@antipope.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 18:37:47 -0400 From: tburns@gmuvax.gmu.edu (T. David Burns) Subject: PPL: Lloyds and crypto-anarchical insurance At 1:18 AM 9/27/93 -0700, Nick Szabo wrote: >Tax insurance would serve both to hedge risk and >to dissiminate information on offshore banking, judgement proofing, >etc. to the $trillions worth of potential customers worldwide. >This information channel would have much higher bandwidth than >the current system of whispered trade secrets and high-fee 1-on-1 >consulting by a wide variety of uncoordinated agents. Tax insurance >would provide one-stop, risk-hedged access to tax freedom. Is there a problem in making this information more easily available? That makes it easier for congress and IRS to take countermeasures. Or are we assuming they know how their enemies operate? I should go look up what Harry Browne wrote on this, he had some nice insights as I recall. Dave Burns tburns@gmuvax.gmu.edu (T. David Burns) ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 15:43:05 PDT From: mlinksva@netcom.com (Michael R Linksvayer) Subject: BASICS: Death Elias Israel writes: > Daniel Green writes: > > Then you would consider me dead even if a complete map of my > > neural state had been saved onto a CDROM sitting in a safe > > after my body had had broken down and then been cremated? > > I would. I would say he's dead, with the possibility of reanimation. > A creature created from that CDROM, no matter how stridently they > claimed it, wouldn't really be *you*, in my opinion. Maybe it's a > conceit, but I think that the *me* that I am today is not separable > from this body, because mind and body are not separate. At best, the I think I agree that mind and body, at this point, are not separate. This does not mean that they are inseparable. > creature would be someone very much like me, but the person typing this > message today would still be just as dead, just as incapable of > experience. For this reason, I have serious doubts about uploading as a > path to immortality. I think of it as a way of leaving behind my memes, > perhaps as a way of having the ultimate child: one you *know* will > follow in your footsteps, but I don't think that it really thwarts the > grim reaper. This really has nothing to do with the points made by Elias in the text quoted above, but I must object to the use of the word 'immortality' by any extropian. It just makes us sound silly. What is forever? What we really want is indefinite life, where we decide when we cease to exist (suicide, radical transformation that 'destroys' the previous self, death as the result of taking a calculated risk) rather than allowing a disease, old age, or some other entity decide for us. Now, on to Elias' point, what is death? To a primitive, a suspendee or uploadee is dead, end of story. To one who sees life as information, it is not the end of the story. It just depends on one's perspective. Is a once dead, suspended, then uploaded entity *really* dead? Who cares? If I find myself in that position, I won't worry about it. I'll go on living. > Some will offer a "softer" version of uploading by proposing something > like the Star Trek scenario we saw this weekend: gradually substitute > neurons with nanocomputers until you're more of the latter than the > former. I have two objections to this idea: first, if you have a > bicycle and you replace all of the parts, is it still the same bicycle? > My answer: no. Second, this seems a relatively expensive way to > transition from humans to post-humans. Nature has a more efficient > means: kill off the obsolete. I expect that post-humans will be our > descendants, not ourselves. Oh come on. Am I 'the same' Mike Linksvayer I was twenty years ago, even though all of the atoms are different? Depends on what one means by 'the same.' No, I'm not the same Mike Linksvayer. I'm a very different Mike Linksvayer. However, I'm still Mike Linksvayer. I have no idea if gradual replacement is relatively expensive, but it may not matter. Humans may prefer gradual replacement, and when uploading becomes viable, humans, not as yet uncreated entities, will control most of the wealth. > Does this make me a deathist? Some might say so, but I disagree. I know > I might be wrong. For example, in the future we might not choose to > define identity the way we do today. Or, other possibilities may > present themselves. (As an aside, I find it a little amusing for people > convinced they'll never die to deride people who disagree as > "deathists." Surely, being convinced of your own immortality is > evidence of at least as much preoccupation with death as anyone else.) > Still, with today's understanding, I can't see much hope for beating > Thanatos at a game he's had a long time to perfect. I do not deride those who wish to die or who do not think I'll manage to survive beyond my 'natural' lifespan as deathists. I reserve that term for those who try to make the means of life extension illegal, or who claim that I must die, for the good of the planet, society, or whatever. -- Mike Linksvayer mlinksva@netcom.com MLINK on HEx ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 00:11:22 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: philosophitis Since James Donald hasn't posted his non-operational definition of electron spin let me point people at the excellent discussion of the Stern-Gerlach experiment in the Feynman Lectures. Spin is observed as the quantisation of angular momentum. An electron's spin, which is quantised into two states (up or down, relative to the applied magnetic field direction), determines the angular deflection of an electron as it passes through an inhomogeneous magnetic field. In flipping from one spin state to the other the electron absorbs or releases a quantum of conventional orbital angular momentum. This transference of angular momentum between orbital and spin states is necessary to conserve total angular momentum. Don't let all this talk of science obscure the reason why James is so hostile to the economy of concept and precision of language that operationalism engenders. He knows that under its probing beam that natural law and the divine right of kings will be exposed for what it is. James thinks that rights are derived from the "kind of animals that we are", the interpretations of which are endless. He would be better advised to examine how to derive rights from the way people interact with eachother, which is more amenable to scrutiny and measurement via market forces, protection agencies, insurance, PPLs etc. Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 19:14:31 -0400 From: "Perry E. Metzger" Subject: DisappointNet and the PostModern world order Charlie Stross says: > Use of video: yes. But use of video over NSFnet? I'll take issue there, > because I _think_ video will come for different reasons. Video is already being sent over NSFnet. Has no one been paying attention? The Information Superhighway is a real need, folks. It is a need already being filled by the private sector. I can, and likely will soon, get a 10Mbit/second link for my company directly into the net. Its real cheap, too, if you happen to be at a metrofiber site here in NYC. > In the UK, cable TV is finally being installed -- and they're > putting in fibre optic links to the street corners, using co-ax only > for the last few yards to the TV set. > > In the US, I read that the third largest cable-TV company on the Eastern > seaboard is going to provide a subscriber netnews feed to all its > subscribers -- presumably over the curren copper core network. Copper is not what the network looks like. Here in NYC, Time-Warner's local cable division, Manhattan Cable, has fiber to every block. > Back in the US again, a friendly hardware hacker at the BBC (who do a > fair bit of digital imaging work, for obvious reasons) mentioned > that he knows of people who are trying to get a full newsfeed > broadcast over one of their unused satellite channels when the next > Astra satellite goes up. It hasn't happened yet, but there was some > sympathetic interest. This has already been tried -- see the failed "Stargate" system. No one wanted it, or at least not enough people to make it work. The market said no. > Here's a hypothesis; even in the age of interactive media, 99.9% of > net bandwidth is soaked up by _incoming_ information. Broadcasting > is a natural model for disseminating a usenet feed. After all, while > a 2400 baud modem would be swamped by the demands of the near-future's > 100Mb/day newsfeed, a satellite channel could comfortably dump the entire > feed in under a minute, and the modem will _certainly_ not be swamped > by the demands of an outgoing load of, say, 10-20K/day of posts (even > by an active participant). Why should I use a 2400 baud modem when I can now get my hands on ISDN? Soon, ISDN will be obsolete, since some carriers are now talking about offering 10Mbit service to ordinary subscribers over a metropolitan network set up over their existing fiber systems. Look for this development soon: the destruction of conventional cable TV, and the return of the "bookstore" paradigm for entertainment. Why should I buy a 24 hour package of programming in a silly container like a "channel" when I can just download any program I like at any time? I can download the morning news from "The Economist on Video", get a movie any time I like, see idiotic sitcoms or intelligent theater when I feel like it, etc. The studios, networks, and other organizations who base their power on the capacity to distribute entertainment to a limited number of outlets will be destroyed as a guy in a basement somewhere gets the same power of distribution that a major network does.... Perry ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 18:15:50 CST From: "Daniel S Goodman-1" Subject: Reading cure for Objectivism I would suggest reading: John Stuart Mill, _On Liberty_; easily available. Josiah Warren, _Equitable Commerce_ -- you'll almost certainly have to look in a library for this one. Warren is the only person I know of who actually set up an individualist anarchist community (in the 19th century, which is why you haven't read about it in recent newspapers). In fiction, one possibility is _Escape to Witch Mountain_ by Alexander Key (I think I've got the name right.) I don't think much of the anti-statism came through in the Disney version.... It might also be useful to go to a very well-stocked library and read the political magazines -- all of them. Or at least glance through them. Dan Goodman dsg@maroon.tc.umn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 18:21:51 CST From: "Daniel S Goodman-1" Subject: Come buy books? On Fri, 24 Sep 93 00:53:49 -0700, Kennita Watson wrote: >Armed with a list of nearly 40 books/authors to consider (I'll post a >consolidated list sometime soon), and blessed with a blank calendar >for the weekend, I plan to divest myself of some time and money in >Palo Alto used bookstores this Saturday. Anybody care to join me? > >Kennita > If none of them appeal to you, you can always declare yourself a chapter of the John Lilburne Society. (Lilburne lived around the time of the English Civil War; before, after, and during, he managed to offend every government of England at the time. He wrote pamphlets denouncing all the politicians he had ever heard of, and one denouncing his wife.) Dan Goodman dsg@maroon.tc.umn.edu ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Sep 1993 1:30:54 +0100 (BST) From: Charlie Stross Subject: DisappointNet and the PostModern world order A being alleged to be "Perry E. Metzger" writes: > > Charlie Stross says: > > Use of video: yes. But use of video over NSFnet? I'll take issue there, > > because I _think_ video will come for different reasons. > > Video is already being sent over NSFnet. Has no one been paying > attention? Uh, I think I truncated the earlier post too early. I was talking about the growth of the net, and what would be its shape over the next few years. That video is sent over NSFnet and is a major justification for the expansion of same is not an issue. That video will be the main cause of growth in the net is another species of fish. NSFnet <> Internet! > The Information Superhighway is a real need, folks. It is a need > already being filled by the private sector. I can, and likely will > soon, get a 10Mbit/second link for my company directly into the net. > Its real cheap, too, if you happen to be at a metrofiber site here in > NYC. : > Why should I use a 2400 baud modem when I can now get my hands on > ISDN? Soon, ISDN will be obsolete, since some carriers are now talking > about offering 10Mbit service to ordinary subscribers over a > metropolitan network set up over their existing fiber systems. Well yeah, but I think you're missing a critical point. I'm talking about the internet's impact on the general public, and Joe Schmoe <> Perry Metzger. It is estimated that something like 70% of the _installed_ base of UNIX boxes are still communicating by UUCP at 1200 baud. Why? Well, the owners -- mom'n'pop businesses running Xenix, for the most part -- don't need, or don't see the need for, anything better. The online services -- like Compu$erve -- are still pretty much limited to V32 or V32 bis. I know there're these real neat protocols for pumping 1.2 Mbits/sec over twisted pair from the telephone exchange, and when the fibre optic cable TV companies are allowed to convey phone services the bandwidth will go through the roof -- but do you really believe that in the short term (3-5 years, which was what my initial post was talking about!) J. Random Consumer is going to shell out for a 10 mbit/sec _data_ service, as opposed to fifty more channels of cable TV? Sure they'll want fibre for the eye candy -- but the people crying out for high-res video over WAN today are the people who fund NSFnet, for whom NSFnet is provided. Until Nintendo turn VR into a commercial entertainment medium that is mature enough to go multiuser, the general public may have difficulty seeing the need for high bandwidth datacomms that go out of the house, as well as in. (BTW, I just noticed that I made a critical typo in my last post, when I mentioned that some guys were thinking about bunging out usenet via satellite; I spelled "UK" as "US". Call it subliminal confusion, as I'm posting this from Santa Cruz rather than London. Hope it didn't confuse you -- what's being proposed is nothing like Stargate.) > > Look for this development soon: the destruction of conventional cable > TV, and the return of the "bookstore" paradigm for entertainment. Why > should I buy a 24 hour package of programming in a silly container > like a "channel" when I can just download any program I like at any > time? I can download the morning news from "The Economist on Video", > get a movie any time I like, see idiotic sitcoms or intelligent > theater when I feel like it, etc. The studios, networks, and other > organizations who base their power on the capacity to distribute > entertainment to a limited number of outlets will be destroyed as a > guy in a basement somewhere gets the same power of distribution that a > major network does.... Yes, definitely! By the way, here's another proposition. Take the current state of the art in realtime photorealistic rendering and animation. Extrapolate the curve of decreasing prices. How long will it be before you and I can go forth and spend $5000 for a system capable of scripting, rendering, and cutting on videotape a TV-quality animation equivalent to the dino-sequences from "Jurassic Park", but including human animation? I did this calculation three years ago and came out with a target in the range 1998-2003. But looking at the ads for the SG Indy, I'm beginning to think I was pessimistic. Extrapolating from current developments (MIME, HyTime) we may be a matter of months away from seeing newsgroups devoted to multimedia postings, and little further away from seeing groups where instead of flat text postings consist of MPEG-compressed home videos, both camera-captured and scripted. Maybe usenet will turn into the public access TV of the 21st century? Now _there's_ a horrible thought ... -- Charlie > Perry > Charlie Stross is charless@scol.sco.com, charlie@antipope.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 17:45:44 -0700 From: cappello@cs.ucsb.edu (Peter Cappello) Subject: Congratulations! Our own Sandy Sandfort has an article in Wired: "The Intelligent Island?" 1(4), September/October 1993):52-55). Its citation and summary are included in Current Cites (4(9), Sep. 1993). Current Cites, in turn, is distributed through PACS-P (Public-Access Computer Systems Publications), an email list sent to a wide variety of information systems professionals (e.g., professional librarians). This means that many people, even those who do not get Wired, now are aware of Sandy's article. Congrats Sandy! -Pete ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 01:37:32 GMT From: sjw@liberty.demon.co.uk (Stephen J. Whitrow) Subject: extropian vices >> Small flattened *HEAVY* furry animals... anyone know how to calculate the >> surface gravity of a Jupiter-sized sphere with density approximately that of >> diamond? > Lessee, gravitational force goes as M/(R**2), but mass scales as R**3, so >overall the scaling is linear in R. Jupiter's R is about 10 times Earth's, >and I *think* I remember that diamond's density is low compared to Earth's >average density. So my off-the-cuff estimate is that Perry's brain will >have surface gravity of 5 to 10 gees. > I will tempt fate by posting this without checking it... > -- Jay Freeman My calculations seem to agree rather nicely with the above. Density of water @ 4C (specific gravity = 1) = 1000 kg / m^3 Density of diamond (specific gravity = 3.5) = 3500 kg / m^3 Radius of Jupiter (Rough av. of equatorial & polar) = 7E7 m . . . Volume of Jupiter = (4/3)pi(7E7^3) = 1.44E24 m^3 . . . Mass of Jovian diamond = 5E27 kg ag = Mc^2/(2R^2b) where b is the universal mass/space ratio of 6.8E26 kg / m (Well, we use c, so why not something a bit more natural than 'G'?) . . . For Jovian diamond, acceleration due to gravity = 67.44 m / s^2 ----- = 6.87g ----- If the furry animals want to escape:- Ve = sqrt(Mc^2/Rb) = 97,200 m / s Steve Whitrow sjw@liberty.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 21:09:28 WET DST From: rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu (Ray) Subject: BASICS: Death Elias sez that even if you "soft uploaded" by adding implants which gradually take over the function of biological cells it still wouldn't be _you_ I assume this can be extended to the molecule-at-a-time slow-replacement scenario. If this is so, what is the physical reason? Are you claiming that the matter in your brain has a unique quantum state apart from generic elements? This isn't consistent with physical theory. (e.g. one electron/proton/atom is just as good as any other) If I secretly replaced a single carbon atom in your brain with another, would you no longer be the same person? What if I replaced 1 atom per year? per second? per nanosecond? What rate of transformation is required for the operation to produce a "non-you?" What happens when your natural chemistry starts replacing materials in your brain? Your viewpoint would also negate cryonics. The revived person wouldn't be you since the repair process will probably exchange lots of matter. I think the arguments against pattern-identity on this list are dangerously close to dualism. -- Ray Cromwell | Engineering is the implementation of science; -- -- EE/Math Student | politics is the implementation of faith. -- -- rjc@gnu.ai.mit.edu | - Zetetic Commentaries -- ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 20:10:24 -0500 From: "Phil G. Fraering" Subject: etymology of anarchy Paul Whitmore mentions Marc Shell's question: Why did philosophy, tyranny, and coined money begin in the same time and place? Are you sure it did? Tyrrany only began near philosophy if you use the narrow greek meaning of the word (a revolutionary, sometimes democratic, despot). Coined money began, apparently in Asia Minorm , I thought... (close to Greece, but also close to the Hittites, etc...) So Philosophy and Tyranny started in Greece mainly due to the definition of tyranny; I'm sure by modern standards many pre-greek societies were tyrannical. Whether Ionia or Lydia owe more to Greece or Asia is a good question... (rather two separate questions...) Anyway, could you rephrase the question, maybe? pgf ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 18:33:28 -0700 (PDT) From: jfitz@techbook.com (John Fitzpatrick) Subject: BOOKS: by Stonier Information and the Internal Structure of the Universe Tom Stonier Springer-Verlag, 1990, 0-387-19599-8 "...all forms of energy other than heat exhibit, or are dependent upon some sort of organization or pattern in respect to space or time." "Potential energy is a term which describes a process in which the expenditure of energy has brought about a change in the organizational state of a system such that its information content has increased." "One entropy unit equals approximately 10^23 bits/mole." "Living systems are energy transducers which use information 1. to perform work more efficiently, 2. to convert one form of energy into another, and 3. to convert energy into information." "Is it possible for entropy to exist in a negative state, and if so, what is negative entropy?" Stimulating thoughts. Does anyone on the list care to comment? -- John K. Fitzpatrick (not affiliated with techbook.com) jfitz@techbook.com Your part in the dance is to disapprove of my part in the dance. - Bela Bartok ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 20:37:55 -0500 From: "Phil G. Fraering" Subject: etymology of anarchy >How probable is this? I find it more likely that the >permanent recording of philosophy and the history of >tyranny began around the same time money was first coined. Perhaps there's a Hofferian train of Coinage -> Widespread Trade -> Widespread Traders -> Widespread literacy and recording of history? pgf ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 93 18:42:19 PDT From: Eli Brandt Subject: extropian vices > Density of diamond (specific gravity = 3.5) = 3500 kg / m^3 Ah, anybody know the bulk modulus of diamond? (Would you believe my CRC doesn't?) Actually, diamond may not be the stable phase at the center of this thing. I don't have a phase diagram for carbon that goes to very high pressures, but extrapolation suggests liquid carbon at moderate temperatures once we reach the megabar range. What's the pressure in the center of Jupiter anyway? > Steve Whitrow sjw@liberty.demon.co.uk Eli ------------------------------ Date: Mon, 27 Sep 1993 20:42:57 -0500 From: "Phil G. Fraering" Subject: AGITPROP: Robin Hood (was: Lloyd's) Just thought I'd mention on a side note to Tim Hruby's message where he talks about democracies and their "Robin Hood" ethics: Didn't Robin Hood steal from Tax Collectors and give to the taxed? Doesn't have anything whatsoever to do with the faults of modern democratic socialism, does it? Isn't it about time we reclaimed this proto-anarchist as one of our own? Phil ------------------------------ Date: Tue, 28 Sep 93 00:56:32 GMT From: price@price.demon.co.uk (Michael Clive Price) Subject: BASICS: Death Elias Israel: > > A creature created from that CDROM [backup] ... wouldn't really > be *you*, in my opinion. Some questions. Is this true no matter how good the fidelity? What about if the backup is made, down to atomic precision, *after* you've passed into unconsciousness (ie copied whilst in coma, but before information death) and the revivee, built from the data, is returned to awareness by some trivial biochemical interference (say, a stimulant)? If your answer is that the copy still isn't you, how could you test this idea? What test could reveal the identity of the revivee? If the answer is no test can reveal this (ie you need to know the history of the individual's constituents to determine identity) then aren't you arguing that there's a difference where there's no difference, if you see what I mean? Mike Price price@price.demon.co.uk ------------------------------ End of Extropians Digest V93 #270 *********************************