Cyberpunk's topics - tribe.net

Inexpensive cyberpunk outfit?

2008-06-27T04:03:56Z

Just found I am going to a bug festival in 2 1/2 weeks and would like to bring along one cyberpunk outfit...any ideas and or suggestions on how to make a decent to great inexpensive outfit?

I will be outdoors in the heat so looking for something tolerable in the heat.

posted in Cyberpunk - 9 replies

Tech Related Tribes Question

2008-06-26T21:20:27Z

So, slightly off topic, but I've been wanting to get into hobby electronics. Anyway, I went looking for some possibly relevant tribes, however, almost any I can find have all been inactive for at least six months if not longer. Does anyone have any recommendations and or explanations? Thanks, and again, sorry for being a bit off topic.

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Science, it works Bitches~!!!!!

2008-06-22T06:07:09Z

Internet up to 10,000 times faster deployed, may see consumer use within a year or two

CERN, the Geneva-based particle physics center which spawned the world wide web in 1989, is looking to create the next internet, and has already laid down the essential ground work for it. Experts say it is sorely needed. Recent industry analysis, such as DailyTech's recent piece "American Broadband: Pathetic and Disgraceful," has revealed that most customer languish under poor data rates and high costs.

The new internet from CERN could change all that. The proposed system averages speeds of up to 10,000 times the typical broadband connection today. The new internet is known as "the grid" and could send the entire Rolling Stones catalog from Britain to Japan in two seconds, a scenario akin to the RIAA's worst nightmare.

Among the fields the new internet may revolutionize are online gaming, holographic image transmission, and HD video telephony. Under the new internet you would be able to complete a high definition video telephony call for the price of a normal call on a land line.

David Britton, professor of physics at Glasgow University says that the grid will surpass many peoples current conceptions of the internet. He states, "With this kind of computing power, future generations will have the ability to collaborate and communicate in ways older people like me cannot even imagine."

After years of work the grid is coming online this summer on what is termed the "red button day". The new network will help to transmit the massive data load from CERN's new Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The LHC designed to probe some of the most complex mysteries of the physics world is a prime example of research application, which would be impossible without the grid. The LHC creates an amount of data equivalent to the content of 56 million CDs annually -- or a little more than 36 petabytes per year. If the data demands were steady this would equate to almost two CDs per second, but unsteady demand leads to a need for the ability to transmit dozens or more CDs worth of data in a second.

The demands of the LHC meant that the CERN scientists could not use the traditional internet, created by CERN researcher Sir Tim Berners-Lee, for fear of a worldwide collapse. The current internet, a hodge-podge of high speed equipment and older equipment originally designed to work with telephone calls, simply is not robust enough to handle the capacity needed for the LHC or other potential future internet applications.

The grid, on the other hand, has been built from the ground up to a high tech standard. It utilizes almost entirely fiber optics and has numerous cutting-edge routing centers. The new network will not be slowed by outdated components. The new grid already has 55,000 servers, and this is expected to rise to 200,000 within two years.

Professor Tony Doyle, technical director of the grid project explains the need for it, stating, "We need so much processing power, there would even be an issue about getting enough electricity to run the computers if they were all at CERN. The only answer was a new network powerful enough to send the data instantly to research centres in other countries."

The new "parallel internet" runs along fiber optic lines from CERN to 11 research locations in the United States, Canada, the Far East, Europe and around the world. Each of these 11 locations radiates out to other academic locations, using existing academic high-speed networks. In Britain, 8,000 servers are current online and it is projected that by the fall a student at any university could connect to the grid rather than the traditional internet.

Ian Bird, project leader for CERN's high-speed computing project, believes that the grid will make desktop data storage obsolete. With the incredible speeds and data rates, it is only a matter of time, he says, before people entrust all their information to the internet. Says Bird, "It will lead to what’s known as cloud computing, where people keep all their information online and access it from anywhere."

By using its blazing speed, the grid can leverage the power of thousands of connected computers, when challenged with a particularly tough task. Researchers hope the new power will allow the LHC to detect a Higgs boson, an elusive never-before seen theoretical particle, which is supposed to be what gives matter mass. The LHC will only be able to detect a few thousand particles a year and will need to leverage the grid's full power to analyze these particles in coming years.

It is uncertain whether the grid will branch into a domestic network, or whether business will elect to build their own similar networks. Some telecom providers and businesses are beginning to implement one of the grid's most powerful features, so-called dynamic switching. Dynamic switching gives the user a dedicated channel during a particularly big task. This can allow a movie to be downloaded in 5 seconds instead of 3 hours.

For now students and other researchers such as astronomers and molecular biologists will be able to use the grid, though. Using the grid's power scientists analyzed 140 million possible malaria fighting compounds to develop more effect drugs. This analysis would have taken a traditional internet PC hundreds of years.

Doyle believes strongly that the grid's technology is coming soon to businesses and the consumer. He says, "Projects like the grid will bring huge changes in business and society as well as science. Holographic video conferencing is not that far away. Online gaming could evolve to include many thousands of people, and social networking could become the main way we communicate. The history of the internet shows you cannot predict its real impacts but we know they will be huge."

http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=11394

posted in Cyberpunk - 12 replies

gibson dodges first draft

2008-06-21T21:42:12Z

http://io9.com/5015137/william-gibson-talks-to-io9-about-canada-draft-dodging-and-godzilla

Yesterday William Gibson rolled into San Francisco to do a book signing for the paperback release of Spook Country, his recent novel about surveillance, augmented reality, dream politics, and advertising. The novel is also, incidentally, a fairly overt critique of the idea of "cyberspace," a term Gibson invented early in his career, and which several characters in Spook Country describe as something that has been surpassed by newer ideas.

posted in Cyberpunk - 6 replies

ONE TIME "BLADE RUNNER" SCREENING EVENT!

2008-06-06T06:12:53Z

THE ULTIMATE SCREENING OF "BLADE RUNNER: THE FINAL CUT," presented in stunning 2K digital projection in the state-of-the-art Steven J. Ross Theatre at the Warner Bros. Studios. That's right: the same backlot where "BLADE RUNNER" was produced more than a quarter century ago!

http://www.filmthreat.com/index.php?section=headlines&Id=3855

Director RIDLEY SCOTT himself will be on hand for a rare Q&A, along with MANY OF "BLADE RUNNER'S" ORIGINAL COLLABORATORS. (Attending cast and crew members will be announced soon.)

We will also be auctioning (through eBay, starting on TUESDAY 6/3) TEN PREMIUM PASSES for an amazing opportunity that no serious "BLADE RUNNER" fan will be able to pass up: A PRIVATE WALKING TOUR OF THE "BLADE RUNNER" LOCATIONS on the Warner Bros. backlot, HOSTED BY RIDLEY SCOTT HIMSELF. You'll walk the very streets where this science fiction classic was filmed! The top bidder will win A ONE-OF-A-KIND PIECE OF "BLADE RUNNER" HISTORY!

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Ubik to be made into a movie

2008-06-06T01:29:31Z

http://sffmedia.com/content/view/202/37/

Looks positive although (I confess) I'm not enough of a movie buff to know the work of Celluloid Dreams....
http://www.celluloid-dreams.com/company_profile/

Great that it's going to be done in collaboration with Electric Shepherd Productions - company founded by Philip K. Dick's daughters. Makes you wish ole Philip K. could be here to check it out, doesn't it.

I'm imagining it in French with subtitles and a Vangelis soundtrack... :)

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Photosynth

2008-05-14T12:36:50Z

This is from last year's TED but it's pretty mental and I only just saw it. Some nice cyberpunk implications to "semantic linking based on content"......

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129

posted in Cyberpunk - 5 replies

"Hardware" movie soundtrack d/l

2008-05-06T01:29:10Z

happy beltaine space cadets!

http://www.everythingisundercontrol.org/soundtrack.html

"as for the good news... there is no fucking good news" :)

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Not necessarily steampunk...

2008-05-05T00:08:06Z

But one of Babbage's has been brought to life from his designs and is on display at the Computer Museum right now.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/05/exclusive-video.html

posted in Cyberpunk - 3 replies

Emotiv

2008-05-02T23:31:19Z

At risk of not getting into the beta process myself I give this link to you!

http://emotiv.com/corporate/6_0/6_2.htm

If you're in SF or Australia and want to do neural interface testing then click that thang!

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Exoskeletons, life imitating art

2008-04-18T22:51:17Z

Popular Science has an article about the exoskeleton that appeared on a youtube video last year.

http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-04/building-real-iron-man

posted in Cyberpunk - 15 replies

From Wired.com: Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops

2008-04-11T08:24:53Z

Here's a copy & paste of the article with a link at the very bottom:

Futurist Ray Kurzweil Pulls Out All the Stops (and Pills) to Live to Witness the Singularity
By Gary Wolf
03.24.08 | 6:00 PM

Ray Kurzweil, the famous inventor, is trim, balding, and not very tall. With his perfect posture and narrow black glasses, he would look at home in an old documentary about Cape Canaveral, but his mission is bolder than any mere voyage into space. He is attempting to travel across a frontier in time, to pass through the border between our era and a future so different as to be unrecognizable. He calls this border the singularity. Kurzweil is 60, but he intends to be no more than 40 when the singularity arrives.

Kurzweil's notion of a singularity is taken from cosmology, in which it signifies a border in spacetime beyond which normal rules of measurement do not apply (the edge of a black hole, for example). The word was first used to describe a crucial moment in the evolution of humanity by the great mathematician John von Neumann. One day in the 1950s, while talking with his colleague Stanislaw Ulam, von Neumann began discussing the ever-accelerating pace of technological change, which, he said, "gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs as we know them could not continue."

Many years later, this idea was picked up by another mathematician, the professor and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who added an additional twist. Vinge linked the singularity directly with improvements in computer hardware. This put the future on a schedule. He could look at how quickly computers were improving and make an educated guess about when the singularity would arrive. "Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence," Vinge wrote at the beginning of his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era. "Shortly after, the human era will be ended." According to Vinge, superintelligent machines will take charge of their own evolution, creating ever smarter successors. Humans will become bystanders in history, too dull in comparison with their devices to make any decisions that matter.

Kurzweil transformed the singularity from an interesting speculation into a social movement. His best-selling books The Age of Spiritual Machines and The Singularity Is Near cover everything from unsolved problems in neuroscience to the question of whether intelligent machines should have legal rights. But the crucial thing that Kurzweil did was to make the end of the human era seem actionable: He argues that while artificial intelligence will render biological humans obsolete, it will not make human consciousness irrelevant. The first AIs will be created, he says, as add-ons to human intelligence, modeled on our actual brains and used to extend our human reach. AIs will help us see and hear better. They will give us better memories and help us fight disease. Eventually, AIs will allow us to conquer death itself. The singularity won't destroy us, Kurzweil says. Instead, it will immortalize us.

There are singularity conferences now, and singularity journals. There has been a congressional report about confronting the challenges of the singularity, and late last year there was a meeting at the NASA Ames Research Center to explore the establishment of a singularity university. The meeting was called by Peter Diamandis, who established the X Prize. Attendees included senior government researchers from NASA, a noted Silicon Valley venture capitalist, a pioneer of private space exploration, and two computer scientists from Google.

At this meeting, there was some discussion about whether this university should avoid the provocative term singularity, with its cosmic connotations, and use a more ordinary phrase, like accelerating change. Kurzweil argued strongly against backing off. He is confident that the word will take hold as more and more of his astounding predictions come true.

Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn't have time to organize them all himself. So he's hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed.

In his childhood, Kurzweil was a technical prodigy. Before he turned 13, he'd fashioned telephone relays into a calculating device that could find square roots. At 14, he wrote software that analyzed statistical deviance; the program was distributed as standard equipment with the new IBM 1620. As a teenager, he cofounded a business that matched high school students with colleges based on computer evaluation of a mail-in questionnaire. He sold the company to Harcourt, Brace & World in 1968 for $100,000 plus royalties and had his first small fortune while still an undergraduate at MIT.

Though Kurzweil was young, it would have been a poor bet to issue him life insurance using standard actuarial tables. He has unlucky genes: His father died of heart disease at 58, his grandfather in his early forties. He himself was diagnosed with high cholesterol and incipient type 2 diabetes — both considered to be significant risk factors for early death — when only 35. He felt his bad luck as a cloud hanging over his life.

Still, the inventor squeezed a lot of achievement out of these early years. In his twenties, he tackled a science fiction type of problem: teaching computers to decipher words on a page and then read them back aloud. At the time, common wisdom held that computers were too slow and too expensive to master printed text in all its forms, at least in a way that was commercially viable.

But Kurzweil had a special confidence that grew from a habit of mind he'd been cultivating for years: He thought exponentially. To illustrate what this means, consider the following quiz: 2, 4, ?, ?.

What are the missing numbers? Many people will say 6 and 8. This suggests a linear function. But some will say the missing numbers are 8 and 16. This suggests an exponential function. (Of course, both answers are correct. This is a test of thinking style, not math skills.)

Human minds have a lot of practice with linear patterns. If we set out on a walk, the time it takes will vary linearly with the distance we're going. If we bill by the hour, our income increases linearly with the number of hours we work. Exponential change is also common, but it's harder to see. Financial advisers like to tantalize us by explaining how a tiny investment can grow into a startling sum through the exponential magic of compound interest. But it's psychologically difficult to heed their advice. For years, an interest-bearing account increases by depressingly tiny amounts. Then, in the last moment, it seems to jump. Exponential growth is unintuitive, because it can be imperceptible for a long time and then move shockingly fast. It takes training and experience, and perhaps a certain analytical coolness, to trust in exponential curves whose effects cannot be easily perceived.

Moore's law — the observation by Intel cofounder Gordon Moore that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every 18 months — is another example of exponential change. For people like Kurzweil, it is the key example, because Moore's law and its many derivatives suggest that just about any limit on computing power today will be overcome in short order. While Kurzweil was working on his reading machine, computers were improving, and they were indeed improving exponentially. The payoff came on January 13, 1976, when Walter Cronkite's famous sign-off — "and that's the way it is" — was read not by the anchorman but by the synthetic voice of a Kurzweil Reading Machine. Stevie Wonder was the first customer.

The original reader was the size of a washing machine. It read slowly and cost $50,000. One day late last year, as a winter storm broke across New England, I stood in Kurzweil's small office suite in suburban Boston, playing with the latest version. I hefted it in my hand, stuck it in my pocket, pulled it out again, then raised it above a book flopped open on the table. A bright light flashed, and a voice began reading aloud. The angle of the book, the curve of its pages, the uneven shadows — none of that was a problem. The mechanical voice picked up from the numerals on the upper left corner — ... four hundred ten. The singularity is near. The continued opportunity to alleviate human distress is one key motivation for continuing technological advancement — and continued down the page in an artificial monotone. Even after three decades of improvement, Kurzweil's reader is a dull companion. It expresses no emotion. However, it is functionally brilliant to the point of magic. It can handle hundreds of fonts and any size book. It doesn't mind being held at an angle by an unsteady hand. Not only that, it also makes calls: Computers have become so fast and small they've nearly disappeared, and the Kurzweil reader is now just software running on a Nokia phone.

In the late '70s, Kurzweil's character-recognition algorithms were used to scan legal documents and articles from newspapers and magazines. The result was the Lexis and Nexis databases. And a few years later, Kurzweil released speech recognition software that is the direct ancestor of today's robot customer service agents. Their irritating mistakes taking orders and answering questions would seem to offer convincing evidence that real AI is still many years away. But Kurzweil draws the opposite conclusion. He admits that not everything he has invented works exactly as we might wish. But if you will grant him exponential progress, the fact that we already have virtual robots standing in for retail clerks, and cell phones that read books out loud, is evidence that the world is about to change in even more fantastical ways.

Look at it this way: If the series of numbers in the quiz mentioned earlier is linear and progresses for 100 steps, the final entry is 200. But if progress is exponential, then the final entry is 1,267,650,600,228,229,400,000,000,000,000. Computers will soon be smarter than humans. Nobody has to die.

In a small medical office on the outskirts of Denver, with windows overlooking the dirty snow and the golden arches of a fast-food mini-mall, one of the world's leading longevity physicians, Terry Grossman, works on keeping Ray Kurzweil alive. Kurzweil is not Grossman's only client. The doctor charges $6,000 per appointment, and wealthy singularitarians from all over the world visit him to plan their leap into the future.

Grossman's patient today is Matt Philips, 32, who became independently wealthy when Yahoo bought the Internet advertising company where he worked for four years. A young medical technician is snipping locks of his hair, and another is extracting small vials of blood. Philips is in good shape at the moment, but he is aware that time marches on. "I'm dying slowly. I can't feel it, but I know its happening, little by little, cell by cell," he wrote on his intake questionnaire. Philips has read Kurzweil's books. He is a smart, skeptical person and accepts that the future is not entirely predictable, but he also knows the meaning of upside. At worst, his money buys him new information about his health. At best, it makes him immortal.

"The normal human lifespan is about 125 years," Grossman tells him. But Philips wasn't born until 1975, so he starts with an advantage. "I think somebody your age, and in your condition, has a reasonable chance of making it across the first bridge," Grossman says.

According to Grossman and other singularitarians, immortality will arrive in stages. First, lifestyle and aggressive antiaging therapies will allow more people to approach the 125-year limit of the natural human lifespan. This is bridge one. Meanwhile, advanced medical technology will begin to fix some of the underlying biological causes of aging, allowing this natural limit to be surpassed. This is bridge two. Finally, computers become so powerful that they can model human consciousness. This will permit us to download our personalities into nonbiological substrates. When we cross this third bridge, we become information. And then, as long as we maintain multiple copies of ourselves to protect against a system crash, we won't die.

Kurzweil himself started across the first bridge in 1988. That year, he confronted the risk that had been haunting him and began to treat his body as a machine. He read up on the latest nutritional research, adopted the Pritikin diet, cut his fat intake to 10 percent of his calories, lost 40 pounds, and cured both his high cholesterol and his incipient diabetes. Kurzweil wrote a book about his experience, The 10% Solution for a Healthy Life. But this was only the beginning.

Kurzweil met Grossman at a Foresight Nanotech Institute meeting in 1999, and they became research partners. Their object of investigation was Kurzweil's body. Having cured himself of his most pressing health problems, Kurzweil was interested in adopting the most advanced medical and nutritional technologies, but it wasn't easy to find a doctor willing to tolerate his persistent questions. Grossman was building a new type of practice, focused not on illness but on the pursuit of optimal health and extreme longevity. The two men exchanged thousands of emails, sharing speculations about which cutting-edge discoveries could be safely tried.

Though both Grossman and Kurzweil respect science, their approach is necessarily improvisational. If a therapy has some scientific promise and little risk, they'll try it. Kurzweil gets phosphatidylcholine intravenously, on the theory that this will rejuvenate all his body's tissues. He takes DHEA and testosterone. Both men use special filters to produce alkaline water, which they drink between meals in the hope that negatively charged ions in the water will scavenge free radicals and produce a variety of health benefits. This kind of thing may seem like quackery, especially when promoted by various New Age outfits touting the "pH miracle of living." Kurzweil and Grossman justify it not so much with scientific citations — though they have a few — but with a tinkerer's shrug. "Life is not a randomized, double-blind, placebo-controlled study," Grossman explains. "We don't have that luxury. We are operating with incomplete information. The best we can do is experiment with ourselves."

Obviously, Kurzweil has no plan for retirement. He intends to sustain himself indefinitely through his intelligence, which he hopes will only grow. A few years ago he deployed an automated system for making money on the stock market, called FatKat, which he uses to direct his own hedge fund. He also earns about $1 million a year in speaking fees.

Meanwhile, he tries to safeguard his well-being. As a driver he is cautious. He frequently bicycles through the Boston suburbs, which is good for physical conditioning but also puts his immortality on the line. For most people, such risks blend into the background of life, concealed by a cheerful fatalism that under ordinary conditions we take as a sign of mental health. But of course Kurzweil objects to this fatalism. He wants us to try harder to survive.

His plea is often ignored. Kurzweil has written about the loneliness of being a singularitarian. This may seem an odd complaint, given his large following, but there is something to it. A dozen of his fans may show up in Denver every month to initiate longevity treatments, but many of them, like Matt Philips, are simply hedging their bets. Most health fanatics remain agnostic, at best, on the question of immortality.

Kurzweil predicts that by the early 2030s, most of our fallible internal organs will have been replaced by tiny robots. We'll have "eliminated the heart, lungs, red and white blood cells, platelets, pancreas, thyroid and all the hormone-producing organs, kidneys, bladder, liver, lower esophagus, stomach, small intestines, large intestines, and bowel. What we have left at this point is the skeleton, skin, sex organs, sensory organs, mouth and upper esophagus, and brain."

In outlining these developments, Kurzweil's tone is so calm and confident that he seems to be describing the world as it is today, rather than some distant, barely imaginable future. This is because his prediction falls out cleanly from the equations he's proposed. Knowledge doubles every year, Kurzweil says. He has estimated the number of computations necessary to simulate a human brain. The rest is simple math.

But wait. There may be something wrong. Kurzweil's theory of accelerating change is meant to be a universal law, applicable wherever intelligence is found. It's fine to say that knowledge doubles every year. But then again, what is a year? A year is an astronomical artifact. It is the length of time required by Earth to make one orbit around our unexceptional star. A year is important to our nature, to our biology, to our fantasies and dreams. But it is a strange unit to discover in a general law.

"Doubling every year," I say to Kurzweil, "makes your theory sound like a wish."

He's not thrown off. A year, he replies, is just shorthand. The real equation for accelerating world knowledge is much more complicated than that. (In his book, he gives it as: .)

He has examined the evidence, and welcomes debate on the minor details. If you accept his basic premise of accelerating growth, he'll yield a little on the date he predicts the singularity will occur. After all, concede accelerating growth and the exponential fuse is lit. At the end you get that big bang: an explosion in intelligence that yields immortal life.

Despite all this, people continue to disbelieve. There is a lively discussion among experts about the validity of Moore's law. Kurzweil pushes Moore's law back to the dawn of time, and forward to the end of the universe. But many computer scientists and historians of technology wonder if it will last another decade. Some suspect that the acceleration of computing power has already slowed.

There are also philosophical objections. Kurzweil's theory is that super-intelligent computers will necessarily be human, because they will be modeled on the human brain. But there are other types of intelligence in the world — for instance, the intelligence of ant colonies — that are alien to humanity. Grant that a computer, or a network of computers, might awaken. The consciousness of the this fabulous AI might remain as incomprehensible to us as we are to the protozoa.

Other pessimists point out that the brain is more than raw processing power. It also has a certain architecture, a certain design. It is attached to specific type of nervous system, it accepts only particular kinds of inputs. Even with better computational speed driving our thoughts, we might still be stuck in a kind of evolutionary dead end, incapable of radical self-improvement.

And these are the merely intellectual protests Kurzweil receives. The fundamental cause for loneliness, if you are a prophet of the singularity, is probably more profound. It stems from the simple fact that the idea is so strange. "Death has been a ubiquitous, ever-present facet of human society," says Kurzweil's friend Martine Rothblatt, founder of Sirius radio and chair of United Therapeutics, a biotech firm on whose board Kurzweil sits. "To tell people you are going to defeat death is like telling people you are going to travel back in time. It has never been done. I would be surprised if people had a positive reaction."

To press his case, Kurzweil is writing and producing an autobiographical movie, with walk-ons by Alan Dershowitz and Tony Robbins. Kurzweil appears in two guises, as himself and as an intelligent computer named Ramona, played by an actress. Ramona has long been the inventor's virtual alter ego and the expression of his most personal goals. "Women are more interesting than men," he says, "and if it's more interesting to be with a woman, it is probably more interesting to be a woman." He hopes one day to bring Ramona to life, and to have genuine human experiences, both with her and as her. Kurzweil has been married for 32 years to his wife, Sonya Kurzweil. They have two children — one at Stanford University, one at Harvard Business School. "I don't necessarily only want to be Ramona," he says. "It's not necessarily about gender confusion, it's just about freedom to express yourself."

Kurzweil's movie offers a taste of the drama such a future will bring. Ramona is on a quest to attain full legal rights as a person. She agrees to take a Turing test, the classic proof of artificial intelligence, but although Ramona does her best to masquerade as human, she falls victim to one of the test's subtle flaws: Humans have limited intelligence. A computer that appears too smart will fail just as definitively as one that seems too dumb. "She loses because she is too clever!" Kurzweil says.

The inventor's sympathy with his robot heroine is heartfelt. "If you're just very good at doing mathematical theorems and making stock market investments, you're not going to pass the Turing test," Kurzweil acknowledged in 2006 during a public debate with noted computer scientist David Gelernter. Kurzweil himself is brilliant at math, and pretty good at stock market investments. The great benefits of the singularity, for him, do not lie here. "Human emotion is really the cutting edge of human intelligence," he says. "Being funny, expressing a loving sentiment — these are very complex behaviors."

One day, sitting in his office overlooking the suburban parking lot, I ask Kurzweil if being a singularitarian makes him happy. "If you took a poll of primitive man, happiness would be getting a fire to light more easily," he says. "But we've expanded our horizon, and that kind of happiness is now the wrong thing to focus on. Extending our knowledge and casting a wider net of consciousness is the purpose of life." Kurzweil expects that the world will soon be entirely saturated by thought. Even the stones may compute, he says, within 200 years.

Every day he stays alive brings him closer to this climax in intelligence, and to the time when Ramona will be real. Kurzweil is a technical person, but his goal is not technical in this respect. Yes, he wants to become a robot. But the robots of his dreams are complex, funny, loving machines. They are as human as he hopes to be.

LINK TO THE ARTICLE:
http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil

posted in Cyberpunk - 3 replies

Flashback to Tron

2008-04-02T15:59:27Z

http://blog.wired.com/underwire/2008/03/trons-classic-l.html

posted in Cyberpunk - 9 replies

Arthur C Clarke R.I.P.

2008-03-28T16:56:38Z

http://www.arthurcclarke.net/

One of the truly great writers of our time - and the man who put the science in science fiction.

Clarke recently completed a new novel - "The Last Theorem" - apparently it will be released this year.

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Boston Dynamics Big Dog

2008-03-28T16:53:43Z

This is very creepycool:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1czBcnX1Ww

Of course DARPA is behind it.

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Dead Pixels

2008-03-15T14:32:00Z

http://xkcd.com/395/

posted in Cyberpunk - 0 replies

Wired Cyberpunk Art

2008-03-11T05:33:21Z

http://www.wired.com/culture/art/multimedia/2008/01/gallery_conte

posted in Cyberpunk - 5 replies

Time for a CP tribe fieldtrip

2008-03-11T05:28:23Z

The Landmark Theater After Dark in San Francisco will be showing “A Boy and Dog” with the director L.Q. Jones as the guest host. It will be showing on both February 29 & March 1 at the Clay is anyone up for a movie? Let pick a day.

http: // landmarkafterdark.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=236&Itemid=1

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Conspiracy History compilation DVDs torrents

2008-03-09T20:56:58Z

**************************************************

Greetings to all my relations.

This is the last step of our project History Watch. If History is
defined and known by the texts, we can now add to this definition the
recorded events of the filmed archives. Animated images are harder to
deny than printed words. Our objective is to spread out freely some of
the little broadcast, even hidden informations about our collective
History.

We put online a collection of 391 documentaries and other selected and
recut videos, to offer to a wide public the best of the infos
available on the net in english and in french. If you are interested,
you have the time, the right equipment and connection, all you have to
do is open the joint document and decompress it if needed (but normaly
your system should do it automaticaly). You'll find therein nine links
that will open the torrents for the nine DVDs we compiled (around 4.6
Gig each, for a total of a little over 41 G, being over 100 hours of
videos).

Otherwise, you can go directly to btjunkie.com and search for these titles.

11 Septembre 2001 - 9-11
Bush family & friends
Capitalist & Communist regimes
Capitalist conspiracy
Mind Kontrol - Secret Programs
New World Order - Secret Societies
Secret services - cover up - covert ops
Secret weapons - UFO
Terrorism Theories propaganda

Torrents are a system of peer to peer data transfer. The more people
download a torrent, the faster it spreads and the longer it stays on
the net. If you don't have a bittorrent software, we suggest that you
download uTorrent on utorrent.com. If you want to participate in
facilitating the diffusion of these infos about our collective
History, download these torrents on as many computers as possible,
whether it is in cybercafes. It takes one or two minutes to open up
the links and the downloading will keep proceeding on its own.

Please spread this out, take part in this action for social education
on a planetary scale. Thanks.

For more info: watch.history@gmail.com History Watch

posted in Cyberpunk - 8 replies

Proof - god hates everyone

2008-02-27T04:01:04Z

DiCaprio 'to produce anime film'

Leonardo DiCaprio is to produce a live-action version of anime classic Akira, according to Hollywood Reporter.

The 1988 Japanese film was considered to be a groundbreaking piece of animation, co-written and directed by Katsuhiro Otomo.

It is set in 2019 in post-nuclear war New Tokyo where a biker gains super powers after being subjected to experiments.

Warner Bros is aiming for a release in 2009, it is reported.

Unlike the original, the new movie will be set in New Manhattan, a city rebuilt with Japanese cash.

posted in Cyberpunk - 26 replies

Cyberpunk Fashion

2008-02-16T19:24:11Z

Does it even exist? I'm not really talking about cyber-goth clothing which I've seen before or weird fetish clothing.

posted in Cyberpunk - 39 replies

Sticky

2008-02-14T22:58:07Z

Gecko tech:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23073427/

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

SUPERHUMAN VISION: Contact lenses with circuits & lights & stuff

2008-02-12T22:02:56Z

FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON

I'll do a copy & paste of the article here and link it at the bottom of this post:

Jan. 17, 2008 | Technology | Science

Contact lenses with circuits, lights a possible platform for superhuman vision

Hannah Hickey hickeyh@u.washington.edu

Movie characters from the Terminator to the Bionic Woman use bionic eyes to zoom in on far-off scenes, have useful facts pop into their field of view, or create virtual crosshairs. Off the screen, virtual displays have been proposed for more practical purposes -- visual aids to help vision-impaired people, holographic driving control panels and even as a way to surf the Web on the go.

The device to make this happen may be familiar. Engineers at the University of Washington have for the first time used manufacturing techniques at microscopic scales to combine a flexible, biologically safe contact lens with an imprinted electronic circuit and lights.

"Looking through a completed lens, you would see what the display is generating superimposed on the world outside," said Babak Parviz, a UW assistant professor of electrical engineering. "This is a very small step toward that goal, but I think it's extremely promising." The results were presented today at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers' international conference on Micro Electro Mechanical Systems by Harvey Ho, a former graduate student of Parviz's now working at Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif. Other co-authors are Ehsan Saeedi and Samuel Kim in the UW's electrical engineering department and Tueng Shen in the UW Medical Center's ophthalmology department.

There are many possible uses for virtual displays. Drivers or pilots could see a vehicle's speed projected onto the windshield. Video-game companies could use the contact lenses to completely immerse players in a virtual world without restricting their range of motion. And for communications, people on the go could surf the Internet on a midair virtual display screen that only they would be able to see.

"People may find all sorts of applications for it that we have not thought about. Our goal is to demonstrate the basic technology and make sure it works and that it's safe," said Parviz, who heads a multi-disciplinary UW group that is developing electronics for contact lenses.

The prototype device contains an electric circuit as well as red light-emitting diodes for a display, though it does not yet light up. The lenses were tested on rabbits for up to 20 minutes and the animals showed no adverse effects.

Ideally, installing or removing the bionic eye would be as easy as popping a contact lens in or out, and once installed the wearer would barely know the gadget was there, Parviz said.

Building the lenses was a challenge because materials that are safe for use in the body, such as the flexible organic materials used in contact lenses, are delicate. Manufacturing electrical circuits, however, involves inorganic materials, scorching temperatures and toxic chemicals. Researchers built the circuits from layers of metal only a few nanometers thick, about one thousandth the width of a human hair, and constructed light-emitting diodes one third of a millimeter across. They then sprinkled the grayish powder of electrical components onto a sheet of flexible plastic. The shape of each tiny component dictates which piece it can attach to, a microfabrication technique known as self-assembly. Capillary forces -- the same type of forces that make water move up a plant's roots, and that cause the edge of a glass of water to curve upward -- pull the pieces into position.

The prototype contact lens does not correct the wearer's vision, but the technique could be used on a corrective lens, Parviz said. And all the gadgetry won't obstruct a person's view.

"There is a large area outside of the transparent part of the eye that we can use for placing instrumentation," Parviz said. Future improvements will add wireless communication to and from the lens. The researchers hope to power the whole system using a combination of radio-frequency power and solar cells placed on the lens, Parviz said.

A full-fledged display won't be available for a while, but a version that has a basic display with just a few pixels could be operational "fairly quickly," according to Parviz.

The research was funded by the National Science Foundation and a Technology Gap Innovation Fund from the University of Washington.

###

For more information, contact Parviz at (206) 616-4038 or babak@ee.washington.edu

HERE'S THE LINK TO THE PRESS RELEASE:

http://uwnews.org/article.asp?articleID=39094

posted in Cyberpunk - 6 replies

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

2008-02-07T20:54:31Z

Is anyone planning to watch this? It looks like it could be bearable, which is all I ask for. Then again, I thought Bionic Woman would be bearable, but...well....sigh...

Anyway, Summer Glau returns to TV playing essentially the same thing she was on Firefly: a combat robot that looks like a teenage girl. Wikipedia has some general info about it. Does this look worthwhile to anyone else? I figure I'll give it 2-3 episodes.

posted in Cyberpunk - 24 replies

Holograms

2008-02-07T05:03:04Z

Pretty cool holographic re-recordable polymer here. Now if they can just get the recording process up to between 24 and 60 frames a second, then we'll have holographic video:

http://uanews.org/node/18022

Then there's this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k5nt541SE0

And this - - not a hologram but a very cool display:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd7NClJOUOI

posted in Cyberpunk - 0 replies

The Panther Moderns

2008-02-05T10:02:08Z

Ever since reading Neuromancer, I had been fascinated with the Panther Moderns. I thought no group could be like this in real life.

I was wrong.

Meet Anonymous. They are actually pulling off raids in real life against targets like the Church of Scientology (speaking of whom are mentioned in Count Zero). http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=5476

Right now, I'm grinning from ear to ear!

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

synthetic DNA has arrived...

2008-01-26T00:28:21Z

http://www.sptimes.com/2008/01/25/Worldandnation/Scientists_boast_brea.shtml

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Now Dance, Monkey, Dance!

2008-01-24T21:56:10Z

A step closer towards working exoskeleton technology (recall Lise in Gibson's "The Winter Market"):

http://videos.howstuffworks.com/reuters/3626-monkey-mind-control-video.htm

posted in Cyberpunk - 4 replies

Cyberpunk - Movies List

2008-01-22T11:51:07Z

This one doesn't claim to be an all inclusive or 'best of'... just a simple, chronological list - but it *does* need updating (hasn't been updated since 08/24/03).

Maybe we could compile a list here & suggest some additions?

http://www.cyburbiaproductions.com/Cyberpunk_Course/movieList.asp

posted in Cyberpunk - 17 replies

Blade Runner: The Final Cut

2008-01-16T16:36:00Z

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000UD0ESA/ref=pd_cp_d_3?pf_rd_p=316286001&pf_rd_s=center-41&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0790729628&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=1XDH0SAWKD2RC8GA8GCV

Drool. Drool. Drool.

posted in Cyberpunk - 9 replies

Gee.

2007-12-27T02:27:44Z

I wonder where they got the aesthetic design concept for this motorcycle.

http://www.tfot.info/pod/88/ev-x7-electric-motorbike.html

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Top 50 Dystopian Movies of All Time

2007-12-03T22:18:47Z

as according to Snarkerati

http://snarkerati.com/movie-news/the-top-50-dystopian-movies-of-all-time/

posted in Cyberpunk - 42 replies

American Gladiators

2007-11-28T04:50:58Z

While this topic may seem to have nothing to do with Cyberpunk and this tribe, having this show back on TV only takes our future one step closer to The Running Man.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Py-cf0Ktj3k

And because The Sci Fi Channel ( aka "Skiffy") is owned by NBC I can guarantee this will be on the Friday night schedule.

Only one thing comes to mind....
Oh no! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_gBM8EPXF_Y

posted in Cyberpunk - 6 replies

Spook Country

2007-11-24T22:03:34Z

Anyone read the new William Gibson novel?

posted in Cyberpunk - 4 replies

Kneel Before Skynet -- Really!

2007-11-16T07:44:40Z

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7095344.stm

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Mean Automakers Dash Nation's Hope For Flying Cars

2007-11-16T07:41:48Z

Video from the Onion News Network:

http://www.theonion.com/content/video/mean_automakers_dash_nations_hope

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Ninjas or Samurais?

2007-11-14T16:31:59Z

OK, cyberpunks: Ninjas or Samurais?

Silver or gold?

Anarcho-individualism or anarcho-communalism?

Rolling Stones or Beatles?

Convertibles or hard-tops?

Long hair or short (and dreds or not)?

posted in Cyberpunk - 6 replies

YankoDesign.com and Tron-esque electricity generating clothing

2007-11-06T01:10:36Z

Ok, so maybe these two links might not be as "cyberpunk" as they are just "really fucking cool" but nobody else is really posting anything

YankoDesign
http://www.yankodesign.com/

Article about electricity generating clothing:
http://ecotality.com/life/2007/11/01/electricity-generating-clothing-right-around-the-corner/

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Holograms!

2007-10-23T05:26:57Z

And the coolest video of a TIE Fighter and a man running you'll see all day.

From TFOT again. Of course.

http://www.tfot.info/news/1025/360-degree-holographic-display.html

http://gl.ict.usc.edu/Research/3DDisplay/

posted in Cyberpunk - 5 replies

Wired Blogs: Steampunk Robots

2007-10-21T00:11:47Z

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/07/steampunk-robot.html

posted in Cyberpunk - 8 replies

Milan

2007-10-15T08:32:04Z

"Computer scientists see a near future of ubiquitous computing, where people are surrounded by intelligent surfaces."

http://www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/05/microsoft_surface_multito.html?CMP=OTC-0D6B48984890

posted in Cyberpunk - 14 replies

Evolutionary Engineering

2007-09-15T00:44:53Z

"Even though the circuit consists of only a small number of basic components, the researcher, Adrian Thompson, does not know how it works. He can't ask the designer because there wasn't one."

http://www.netscrap.com/netscrap_detail.cfm?scrap_id=73

posted in Cyberpunk - 7 replies

20% Chance We're Already Living in a Simulation?

2007-09-12T20:38:02Z

From the NY Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/14/science/14tier.html?_r=1&8dpc&oref=slogin

I'm posting the entire article because of the Times' annoying habit of making you log in to read articles once they are archived.

* * *

Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch
By JOHN TIERNEY
Published: August 14, 2007

Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else’s hobby. I hadn’t imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.

But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This simulation would be similar to the one in “The Matrix,” in which most humans don’t realize that their lives and their world are just illusions created in their brains while their bodies are suspended in vats of liquid. But in Dr. Bostrom’s notion of reality, you wouldn’t even have a body made of flesh. Your brain would exist only as a network of computer circuits.

You couldn’t, as in “The Matrix,” unplug your brain and escape from your vat to see the physical world. You couldn’t see through the illusion except by using the sort of logic employed by Dr. Bostrom, the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford.

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.

There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.

The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.

“This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,” Dr. Bostrom says. “Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.”

Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out. “My gut feeling, and it’s nothing more than that,” he says, “is that there’s a 20 percent chance we’re living in a computer simulation.”

My gut feeling is that the odds are better than 20 percent, maybe better than even. I think it’s highly likely that civilization could endure to produce those supercomputers. And if owners of the computers were anything like the millions of people immersed in virtual worlds like Second Life, SimCity and World of Warcraft, they’d be running simulations just to get a chance to control history — or maybe give themselves virtual roles as Cleopatra or Napoleon.

It’s unsettling to think of the world being run by a futuristic computer geek, although we might at last dispose of that of classic theological question: How could God allow so much evil in the world? For the same reason there are plagues and earthquakes and battles in games like World of Warcraft. Peace is boring, Dude.

A more practical question is how to behave in a computer simulation. Your first impulse might be to say nothing matters anymore because nothing’s real. But just because your neural circuits are made of silicon (or whatever posthumans would use in their computers) instead of carbon doesn’t mean your feelings are any less real.

David J. Chalmers, a philosopher at the Australian National University, says Dr. Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis isn’t a cause for skepticism, but simply a different metaphysical explanation of our world. Whatever you’re touching now — a sheet of paper, a keyboard, a coffee mug — is real to you even if it’s created on a computer circuit rather than fashioned out of wood, plastic or clay.

You still have the desire to live as long as you can in this virtual world — and in any simulated afterlife that the designer of this world might bestow on you. Maybe that means following traditional moral principles, if you think the posthuman designer shares those morals and would reward you for being a good person.

Or maybe, as suggested by Robin Hanson, an economist at George Mason University, you should try to be as interesting as possible, on the theory that the designer is more likely to keep you around for the next simulation. (For more on survival strategies in a computer simulation, go to www.nytimes.com/tierneylab .)

Of course, it’s tough to guess what the designer would be like. He or she might have a body made of flesh or plastic, but the designer might also be a virtual being living inside the computer of a still more advanced form of intelligence. There could be layer upon layer of simulations until you finally reached the architect of the first simulation — the Prime Designer, let’s call him or her (or it).

Then again, maybe the Prime Designer wouldn’t allow any of his or her creations to start simulating their own worlds. Once they got smart enough to do so, they’d presumably realize, by Dr. Bostrom’s logic, that they themselves were probably simulations. Would that ruin the fun for the Prime Designer?

If simulations stop once the simulated inhabitants understand what’s going on, then I really shouldn’t be spreading Dr. Bostrom’s ideas. But if you’re still around to read this, I guess the Prime Designer is reasonably tolerant, or maybe curious to see how we react once we start figuring out the situation.

It’s also possible that there would be logistical problems in creating layer upon layer of simulations. There might not be enough computing power to continue the simulation if billions of inhabitants of a virtual world started creating their own virtual worlds with billions of inhabitants apiece.

If that’s true, it’s bad news for the futurists who think we’ll have a computer this century with the power to simulate all the inhabitants on earth. We’d start our simulation, expecting to observe a new virtual world, but instead our own world might end — not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a message on the Prime Designer’s computer.

It might be something clunky like “Insufficient Memory to Continue Simulation.” But I like to think it would be simple and familiar: “Game Over.”

Further Reading
"Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?" Nick Bostrom. Philosophical Quarterly, 53:211, 2003.
"How to Live In A Simulation." Robin Hanson, Journal of Evolution and Technology, September, 2001.
"The Matrix as Metaphysics." David J. Chalmers, Matrix site.
"Historical Simulations - Motivational, Ethical and Legal Issues." Peter S. Jenkins, Journal of Futures Studies, 11:1, 2006.
Simulation-argument.com. Nick Bostrom.

Also see: http://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/

posted in Cyberpunk - 13 replies

"Cyberspace"?!

2007-09-10T18:55:07Z

Gen. Petraeus just used the word "cyberspace" several times in his congressional testimony today.

Makes me feel like it's 1997 all over again.

In the film "No Maps for These Territories" (2000), William Gibson, who gave us the word, said that he expected the prefix "cyber" to become as obsolete as the prefix "electro." It looks like it may take another few years for the technologically un-hip to catch up.

Whereas "cyberpunk" is a recognized genre (so we have an excuse!), using "cyberspace" to describe the Internet is just lame. At least until being online is a sensory-immersive experience like users have in "Ghost on the Shell."

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Synthetic life in 3-10 years / DeLoreans back in production

2007-09-03T07:58:26Z

Just came across two non-related articles that piqued my interest & thought I'd share them here.

Scientists expect to create life in next 10 years:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20249628/

For the DeLorean, it's back to the present:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-garage28jul28,1,6560463.story?ctrack=1&cset=true

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Greetings From Idiot America.

2007-08-16T02:34:42Z

In my mind this article would apply to a cyberpunk forum although like anything that can be debated. I read this constantly thinking about our future, burbclaves, that trailer park in All Tomorrows Parties (I think) and the general decay of the intrepid US intellectual ideal. Regardless of whether it belongs here or not its incredibly well written and for the first time in a while actually has made me think a little more about the shape of things than a normal main stream media or fringe thinking article.

http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0207GREETINGS

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

KNEEL BEFORE SKYNET: Update

2007-08-03T22:51:57Z

For those you who continually worry about Terminator or autonomous mecha scenarios, the Brits are taking the DARPA road race challenge to the next level:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6919271.stm

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Gauss Pistol

2007-08-02T18:40:15Z

http://www.gausspistol.com/

FAQ:
http://www.gausspistol.com/faq.html

the videos:
http://www.gausspistol.com/Video001.html

http://www.gausspistol.com/Video002.html

my birthday's in october, btw...

;~)

posted in Cyberpunk - 11 replies

Starting a Shadow Run 4.0 game in Berkeley/Oakland

2007-07-06T03:10:02Z

If you are interested e-mail me at w.westbrook@gmail.com. I'm just looking for a few more players.

posted in Cyberpunk - 0 replies

WE WANT A TANK, WE NEED A TANK, HELP THIS GOOD CAUSE!

2007-06-28T18:56:32Z

WE WANT A TANK, WE NEED A TANK, HELP THIS GOOD CAUSE!

Who are the Space Hijackers?

The Space Hijackers are a bunch of misfit troublemakers who have been
kicking up a storm since 1999. We have held parties for 3000 people
on the
London Underground circle line, we have tricked Nike Town into a half
price sale by printing our own “EVERYTHING INSTORE HALF PRICE TODAY”
T-shirts and tidying up. We have bought a boat and invaded an island in
the Docklands in London to host a pirate party and we have smashed the
Capitalists for six in our midnight Anarchist Vs Capitalist cricket
tournaments.

What’s this all about?

There comes a time in every activist groups development when they
realise
that there is something missing in their set up. We have been
striving to
cause trouble, save the world and wind up the powers that be for 8 years
now. However we still don't own a tank, or indeed any kind of armoured
personnel carrier.
Please help us right this wrong.

Why do you need a tank?

Every two years the ExCeL exhibition centre in East London plays host to
DSEi, Europe’s largest arms fair. Representatives from all of the major
arms manufacturers pimp their wares to rogue states, impoverished
nations
and invading armies with the full support of the UK government. In fact
the police firearms squad tried to raid the fair in 2005 only to be
turned
back by the government.

On the last two occasions we have attempted to infiltrate the fair,
embarrass the dealers and cause a ruckus. In 2003, we caught the
trains to
the fair with the arms dealers. Suited up and looking business-like we
pulled prosthetic limbs (arms) from our cases and attempted to sell them
to the dealers. In 2005, worried about their obsession with phallic
objects such as rockets we attempted to sell sex toys to the dealers to
make up for their lack of “weapons capabilities”. Generally however
we are
escorted out by the police.

This year we have decided to take things up a notch or ten. We want
to buy
a tank, we want to drive it into the arms fair! We don’t want to be
shoved
around by burly policemen any more. Can’t really say much more at the
moment, but you get the gist.

What about after the Arms Fair?

Assuming they haven’t tested their anti tank missiles on us. We are an
enterprising group, with mischief simply brimming out of our beer
fuelled
brains. We have many many many plans for the tank in the future,
especially once we have kitted it out with a full sound system (which
has
already been donated!)

How can I help?

You can help by lending us one of your tanks if you have any spare.
You can help by offering us free secure parking for our tank.
You can help by lending us your mechanic skills to turn our gas guzzler
into a bio diesel green tank.

Of course the simplest way of helping is by giving us a small amount of
money towards the tank or by passing this email on to your rich mates
and
getting them to donate us a slightly larger amount of money.

Click on the link below and forward this to your friends

http://www.spacehijackers.org/tank

http://www.spacehijackers.org/index.html

posted in Cyberpunk - 0 replies

Artist Jeremy Mayer

2007-06-04T14:49:26Z

Very unique work w/ a nice cyberpunk feel...

"...I disassemble typewriters and then reassemble them into full-scale human figures, sometimes encasing them in clear casting resin. I do not solder, weld, or glue; the process is entirely cold, mechanical assembly. I also do charcoal drawings based on ideas about biotech and nanotech.

I'm interested in time spent and the future. I use CAD and 3D programs to do the studies of my drawings (backwards, I know), which essentially are studies for sculptures that I cannot afford to make. The typewriter pieces take about 1200 hours for a full-scale human figure.

Any long-winded tirades about recycling or nostalgia for mechanical machines would be absolute bullshit, and I'm renowned for bullshitting . I was broke and bored when it all came to me. The romantic high ideals that people have about art are moronic. Art is a disease and a curse if you do it for the right reasons.

I try my best not to fill the world with more contrived and saccharine shit..."

CLICK THIS LINK FOR PHOTO SAMPLES:
http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/yourgallery/artist_profile/Jeremy%20Mayer/23860.html

I also posted some to the Cyberpunk Tribe gallery.

HERE'S A LINK TO HIS WEBSITE:
http://jeremymayer.com/

FROM HIS STUMBLEUPON PAGE:
"...I disassemble typewriters and then reassemble them into full size human figures. No soldering, welding or gluing. I also do charcoal drawings based on ideas about biotech and nanotech. People keep telling me to find a way to make things that take less time and that I can sell more of. Your planet is still so strange to me. Do things because you love to. Share it with your friends. Everything else is waste..."

HERE'S THE LINK:
http://mayerific.stumbleupon.com/

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Max Headroom DVD

2007-05-26T07:01:08Z

I just noticed that the DVD is listed as "not yet released." Is it out of print, or yet to be released? It seems impossible that there isn't an edition already out there.

posted in Cyberpunk - 23 replies

The Zenith Angle--It Sucks!

2007-05-18T09:30:41Z

I just found a copy of the Zenith Angle. I haven't read any of Sterlings other books. But I was very disappointed with this one. It was like a bad Tom Clancy tale. Any thoughts on this?

posted in Cyberpunk - 4 replies

The Five Biggest Neuroscience Developments of the Year

2007-05-17T20:13:19Z

....as found on Slate.com

By William Saletan
Posted Wednesday, April 25, 2007, at 7:25 AM ET

1. The arrival of mind reading.

2. The neural alteration of morality.

3. The medicalization of sexual orientation.

4. The discovery of vegetative consciousness.

5. The progress of artificial intelligence.

Click on the story link for details and very good crossreferences:
http://www.slate.com/id/2164996&GT1=9330

posted in Cyberpunk - 6 replies

cyberpunk nonfiction

2007-05-05T20:59:54Z

I've never been into reading those 'story' things. Anyone have any good non-fiction to recommend?
Recently i've been into Hakim Bey and Alvin Toffler.

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Burroughs Meets Spam

2007-04-26T05:41:12Z

We were talking before about how Burroughs influenced Gibson. Then I noticed this spam in my inbox that is a perfect example of the cut-up method at work -- it's like computer-generated cyberpoetry that covers current events, the fleeting nature of celebrity, and even a Burroughs-ian ending with a dash of self-depreciating homoerotic sexuality! There are also some great Joycian invented hybrid words and misspellings that create double meanings. Even the title is rife with meaning and humor!

I wish all spam were this interesting.

* * *

Get Hepatitis from Wolfgang

Molly good, mondo, ricko, famous national ledger notorious.
Breslin spotted during oscars wasnt order, innout protected security?
At on amy stars you.
Vince vaughn feeds send, news tips. Tip let, us know sign up.
Kiss making sense celeb.
Picture thursday looking acting set try hand singer.
Audio cater married jordan bratman executive saturday november.
Moving onmiss york, busting loose. Stand whole, idea perfumes, never. Announced teaming procter gamble prestige!
Missed, fun newswire blogmoving moving.
Then films ends hep scarewhy viagra metamucil abigail.
Hold down fighter lyrics press room albaeva, linksrss.
Adoption update met mother fiero pmthe amazing. Breakfast tiffanys bricks stones expert.
De, say noposted suki year. Marathon touring began fearlessly break free, mass, mask hid! Thanks, dear, ol grandaddys dont, purfume thing think.
Abigail breslin spotted during oscars wasnt order innout protected. Sharon, stone aguileras longtime manager irving azoff introduced couple.
Gallery absurd, gilded moose give remote. Lachey, kidman richie pamela, anderson rosie odonnell, shakira.
Foreign, born golden road richard simmons. Improve grammys poked night offered event exciting late.
Okay woweau de say noposted, suki year old, daughter. Entry level heiress faded youth!
Album basics ive been, number am? Mondo ricko famous national ledger notorious fag.

posted in Cyberpunk - 11 replies

Enhanced Sensory Devices

2007-04-21T21:12:54Z

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/15.04/esp.html

"""
The effects of the "feelSpace belt" — as its inventor, Osnabrück cognitive scientist Peter König, dubbed the device — became even more profound over time. König says while he wore it he was "intuitively aware of the direction of my home or my office. I'd be waiting in line in the cafeteria and spontaneously think: I live over there." On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown.
"""
.
.
.
"""
The researchers started testing the device on people with damaged inner ears. Not only did it restore their balance (presumably by giving them a data feed that was cleaner than the one coming from their semi circular canals) but the effects lasted even after they'd removed the mouthpiece — sometimes for hours or days.
"""

posted in Cyberpunk - 10 replies

www.tfot.info

2007-04-21T04:21:39Z

The Future Of Things

damn insanely entertaining - TONS of shiny stuff to look at here. Be sure to check out the ARCHIVE section.

http://www.tfot.info/

posted in Cyberpunk - 8 replies

Controlling Electronics Using Your Mind

2007-04-07T05:42:44Z

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/478259/controlling_electronics_using_your_mind/

well holy crap.

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

EMERGENCY ALERT: F.C.C MEETING ON MEDIA CONSOLIDATION 4/29/07 TAMPA FLORIDA

2007-04-06T19:14:40Z

EMERGENCY ALERT: F.C.C MEETING ON MEDIA CONSOLIDATION 4/29/07 TAMPA FLORIDA
Category: News and Politics

Official FCC Hearing on
Media Ownership
Monday, Apr. 30, Tampa, Fla.

http://www.stopbigmedia.com/=tampa

Tampa Speaks Out
OWNERSHIP HEARING 101:

Learn the FCC Basics
The FCC's rulemaking process and how you can make a difference.

What Should I Say?
Tips for testifying before the commissioners.

Four Points to Remember
Some important points to take to the hearings.

Read About the FCC's 'National Disgrace'
The FCC has abandoned its mandate to ensure diversity in U.S. media.

Recursos en Espanol

The FCC is holding its fourth official public hearing on media ownership issues in Tampa, Fla.:

Date: Monday, Apr. 30, 2007
Time: TBD (likely late afternoon)
Location: TBD

The hearing will feature panel presentations by local broadcasters and community leaders with opportunities for public comment after.

This public hearing is one of the public's few chances to speak out against Big Media before FCC Chairman Kevin Martin moves to lift the last significant limits to runaway media consolidation.

Martin has promised to "hold public hearings in diverse locations around the country to fully involve the American people" in the FCC's review of media ownership rules. The Tampa event will be the fourth of "half a dozen" proposed hearings.

At the first official hearing, held in Los Angeles, more than 1,000 members of the public attended and overwhelming expressed their opposition to any rule changes that would let Big Media companies swallow up more local outlets. Similar sentiments were expressed in Nashville and Harrisburg, Pa..

..

The F.C.C. wants to change the rules to let multibillion dollar media companies like News Corp, Viacom, Disney and Time Warner get even bigger. They're preparing to let giant media corporations buy up more local TV channels, radio stations and newspapers across America.

http://www.stopbigmedia.com/=fcc
Learn about the FCC's rules
..

The largest media conglomerates rake in billions by owning TV stations, cable channels, newspapers, radio stations, publishing houses and more.
Check out our interactive ownership chart
http://www.stopbigmedia.com/chart.php
What's at Stake
http://www.stopbigmedia.com/=learn

The Federal Communications Commission is once again taking up the issue of media ownership and deciding how media ownership rules should be changed. As FCC Commissioner Michael Copps has warned: "They screwed it up once. Believe me, they're 100 percent capable of screwing it up again."

That's why it's crucial for the public to weigh in now. Here's what's at stake:

* Big Media stifle viewpoints: If a corporation like News Corp. can buy multiple media outlets in a single city or town, it gains immense influence over what information is available. Consolidated corporations strip local newsrooms of staff, while pushing aside competing points of view. That means less diversity of voices and a narrower range of debate.

* Big Media don't serve local communities: In exchange for their free and exclusive use of the public airwaves, broadcasters such as Sinclair are supposed to serve the public interest. Yet they frequently ignore important local issues, pander to sensationalism, provide biased coverage of elections, and stifle diverse viewpoints.

* Big Media ignore diversity: Corporate media conglomerates like Tribune Company are more concerned with profits than responsible programming. Coverage of issues important to people of color, the working class and rural citizens are squelched or ignored because these people aren't advertisers' target audiences.

Without ownership limits, giant national corporations can buy up local stations and newspapers, eliminate diverse, local and independent programming. If the FCC is serious about fostering localism and diversity, it must enact protections against consolidated corporate ownership.

For decades, the biggest media companies have had the ear of the FCC and Congress, while the public has been ignored. As the FCC rewrites is ownership rules and Congress debates legislation that will shape the entire media system for years to come, it's time our policymakers listened to the public, not just the corporate lobbyists.
Costs of Consolidation
In 2003, the Federal Communications Commission attempted to loosen media ownership rules that would have unleashed a massive wave of corporate consolidation of radio, television and newspapers entities across the country.

The courts sent these rules back to the FCC for a rewrite. Now, as the FCC embarks upon writing new rules, the stakes are even higher:

* A handful of media companies dominate what you watch on television. As their influence spreads to other outlets, the diversity of what you see diminishes.

Five media conglomerates — Viacom/CBS, Disney, Time Warner, News Corp. and NBC/GE — control the big four networks, 80 percent of the primetime television market share, most cable channels, as well as vast holdings in radio, publishing, movie studios, music, Internet and other sectors. (To learn more, visit StopBigMedia.com's ownership charts)

Minority ownership — a crucial source of diverse and varied viewpoints -- has declined significantly over the past decade. Today, only 3.3% of television stations are minority-owned.

* Media conglomerates now stand to make incredible new profits from the public airwaves with no accountability to the public interest.

Over the next few years, television conglomerates will begin broadcasting digitally. This means that in the space it used to take to broadcast the local affiliate of ABC, NBC or CBS, these corporations will now be able to fit six or more stations — ABC-1, ABC-2, and so on. This opens up countless new revenue streams, and indeed, plans are already in the works to have infomercial-driven new channels pump up corporate profits.

The total worth of the publicly owned airwaves that U.S. broadcasters utilize has been valued at $367 billion -- more than the GDP of many nations — but the public has never been paid a dime in return. Now, these conglomerates claim they can't afford to be accountable to the public interest.

* Media consolidation has stifled independent voices and threatened public access to information.

Consolidation is killing local media choices. Since 1975, two-thirds of newspaper owners have disappeared, and one-third of television owners have vanished. There are less than 300 unique owners of the nation's 1,500 daily newspapers, and more than half of all U.S. markets are dominated by one paper.

Moreover, the number of radio station owners has plummeted by 35 percent since 1996, when ownership rules were gutted. That year, the largest radio owners controlled fewer than 65 stations; today, radio giant Clear Channel alone owns over 1,100.

* If the current ownership rules are eliminated, local communites will be turned into "company towns," where one media conglomerate dominates the public discourse.

Big Media wants the FCC to lift the restrictions on newspaper-broadcast cross-ownership and allow one company to own two or more television stations in a single market. If the rules are changed, the largest conglomerates will immediately begin swapping newspaper and television properties. Then the radio giants like Clear Channel will begin selling off their already consolidated radio holdings for billions to the other dominant companies, creating local and regional media fiefdoms.

If FCC Chairman Kevin Martin tries to push through changes similar to those rejected in 2003, one company could potentially own the major daily newspaper, eight radio stations and three television stations in the same town. Once the digital television transition is completed in 2009 – allowing stations to broadcast multiple signals – one company could control 12 or even 18 television channels in a single city.

posted in Cyberpunk - 0 replies

Speakers sought for arse.elektronica

2007-03-20T15:02:38Z

"According to a study by Simon Smith, more than 800 items were registered with the United States Patent and Trademark Office as sex toys between 1840 and 1997. Among them was a condom with a built-in computer chip that can play music. Progress?"
--Monochrom

Everyone's favorite Austrian post-modern art collective, is returning to San Francisco in September to host arse.elektronika, a conference about sex and technology.

They're still looking for speakers with expertise and motivation, especially in the following areas:
- people with a porn industry tech perspective (executives, technicans, etc.)
- economy research
- social history and history of sex technology
- (insert your own tech angle here)

Though it's not stated on the page, there may be room for performance art or small installations.
Contact them here:
www.monochrom.at/arse-elektronika/

posted in Cyberpunk - 0 replies

Shift Happens

2007-03-12T23:25:35Z

I thought this was atleast entertaining even if the music got on my last damn nerve:
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/shift200702/

"...This is a video that was created by Karl Fisch, and modified by Scott McLeod..."

Karl Fisch's blog:
http://thefischbowl.blogspot.com/

posted in Cyberpunk - 3 replies

HELP! what is this book?

2007-03-02T18:16:37Z

ok i read this 5 (more?) years ago. this is what I remember: direct brain cyberspace connection, cultivation of multiple personalitys for specific strengths; buisness, personal defence, relationships, etc., ability to comuicate with personalitys and "ai"s in real time allowing the writing style to have two colums of text to be happening at the sme time...
ok sucky discription, but i want to reread this book and have NO clue what it was (i must have been high!)
any ideas?
thanks in advance
vlad

posted in Cyberpunk - 2 replies

Hard Core Cyberpunk?

2007-02-28T09:57:14Z

I was following the thread for "New Cyberpunk" light, and there was some great suggestions there, like Altered Carbon, but was curious if any one out there has read any really good hard core cyberpunk they would recomend?

posted in Cyberpunk - 1 reply

Cyberpunk People

2007-02-26T22:38:11Z

just came across this today & thought it was pretty interesting
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/people.html

i found parts of this laughable:
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/analysis_of_cyberpunk_subculture.html

and never having heard this term before, Otakus...
I found this story amazingly disturbing:
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/otakus.html

finally - this page i decided to bookmark for when i have more time to play:
http://project.cyberpunk.ru/idb/style.html

fun site.

posted in Cyberpunk - 22 replies

new cyberpunk?

2007-02-25T15:06:55Z

I've read nearly all Gibson and Stephenson. I'm now looking for new cyberpunk authors. Can anyone recommend any light cyberpunk (or for that matter, what's new & good in light sci-fi)?

posted in Cyberpunk - 51 replies