Month: July 2003

The Village Voice on Transhumanism

The Village Voice has an extended look at last month’s World Transhumanist Association held at Yale. The author hits briefly on the Singularity, nanotech, and all of the rest of the transhumanist panapoly. But what attracted my attention was this quote from Bill McKibben,

I go straight to the question of why on earth we would want to do this in first place. I’ve been unable to come up with an answer. All of this enhancing and souping up presupposes a goal or an aim. What is that goal? What is it we’re not intelligent enough to do now? It’s not to feed the hungry—that has to do with how we share things. Fighting disease? We’re making steady progress in conventional medical science with the brains that we have right now. There are a thousand reasons not to trade in people, as we have known them throughout human history, for something else.

I can envision McKibben’s distant ancestors lecturing anyone who will listen,

What good is this whole agriculture thing for? What is the goal? Who needs this? We’ve been hunting and gathering for thousands of years, why switch now?

People want to transcend humanity because it is one of the most deep-seated desires in most human beings. This is usually expressed in the context of religion in which such transcendce occurs after death. Transhumanists want to avoid the whole “wait until you die” version of transcendence and instead transform themselves and others into something more than human in this universe.

A major theme of the last 10,000 years is of human beings increasingly exerting control over both themselves and their environment. Transhumanism is simply the logical extension of that in the face of the often bewildering pace of technological change.

On one end of the spectrum, McKibben rejects technological change, complaining that we are in danger of leaving the “natural world” (whatever that means) behind. On the other, transhumanism says “bring it on,” betting that the pace of technological change will continue to accelerate until what comes next becomes inherently unpredictable (the Singularity) and that this will be a very good thing.

Vietnam Casualties

This weblog is rightly criticizing Washington Times columnist Jack Kelly for Kelly’s racist dig at Arabs,

The North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies were bright, skilled, resourceful, well-led, and very brave.

In Iraq, we’re fighting Arabs.

Kelly is also one of many people who do not appear to understand commonly touted statistics about deaths in the Vietnam theater,

In Vietnam, more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives. At the height of the war, 500 soldiers were being killed each week.

In the Iraq war and the subsequent occupation, we have lost fewer men to hostile fire than in a single terrorist attack in Lebanon in 1983. We’ve been losing about a soldier a day since the first of June. At this rate, we’ll reach the Vietnam total in about 158 years.

Sorry, but no. The 58,000 figure is of combat and non-combat deaths in the Vietnam theater. If you’re going to use that statistic, then you need to compare it with total combat and non-combat deaths in Iraq (which, the last time I checked, sat at about two deaths per day).

The level of violence in Iraq is still extremely low — I get the feeling that your average L.A. street gang would be more vicious than these rather ineffective holdout Saddam loyalists. As Kelly points out in another part of his colum, the suicide bombers who attacked the Marine compound in Lebanon killed more Americans in one fell swoop than these jokers in Iraq have been able to do since the beginning of the war.

Not very impressive, except perhaps to the media who seem to find a annual death rate of less than 1 per 100,000 in a war zone to be indicative of enormous problems.

BuyMusic Apparently *Really* Sucks

In response to my previous post about problems with Buy Music, Greg Pierce points out this ArsTechnica article pointing out that BuyMusic.Com is even worse than I had originally thought.

Apple did the smart thing and negotiated the same rights deal with the various companies it dealt with. On the one hand, this has meant that its music store doesn’t include some artists. BuyMusic negotiated different rights deals with different companies in order to increase the number of tracks it could sell, but also making it ridiculously complex for users to track exactly what they’re getting for their money,

different songs/albums carry different use restrictions. Using DRM, publishers can put limitations on how many times you can download a file, burn it to a CD, and put it on a SDMI-compliant player. Browsing around I found that most songs/albums had unlimited burns and player transfers, with one (initial download). But if you want to buy the latest album by Audioslave, be prepared to put up with only 5 burns and 5 transfers. Some music can’t be burned or transferred to a player at all!

Not only would that be a nightmare to track, but come on — I can only transfer some tracks to a portable device a limited number of times. How stupid is that restriction?

As ArsTechnica points out, the whole BuyMusic moniker borders is deceptive since you can’t actually buy any music from the site. Instead, as its user agreement puts it,

All downloaded Content is sublicensed to End Users and not sold, notwithstanding use of the terms “sell,” “purchase,” “order,” or “buy” on the Site or this Agreement.

That sounds like a Monty Python routine.

A Really Private File Sharing Network

CNN has a story on the obvious way to route around the RIAA lawsuits against Napster, Kazaa, etc. — smaller, private file sharing networks.

These private file-swapping networks have surfaced just as the music industry has been granted dozens of subpoenas seeking the names of those who trade copyrighted material on popular services such as Kazaa, Imesh, and Gnutella.

The private networks are open to smaller groups of perhaps 20 to 30 people who liberally share music, television shows, movies and computer programs. Members of such networks believe they can avoid legal consequences because their identities and actions are masked with the same technology used to protect online credit card transactions.

Why not just take this idea a step further? A 200mb external hard drive goes for about $330 or less these days. Find five or 6 friends, put up $60 or $70 apiece, have someone partition the hard drive into separate areas for each individual, and then mail the hard drive across the country from one friend to the next.

Much higher bandwidth (this would be an excellent way to deal with large video files), more files, nobody sniffing packets looking for illegal activities. What’s not to love?

BuyMusic Apparently Sucks

Apparently BuyMusic.Com is a less than enjoyable experience,

First problem. After you buy an album, you need to download it. Sure, I knew that. What I didn’t know is that you have to download EACH SONG INDIVIDUALLY. One click per song. With two large sized albums with many songs on it – it can be just a LITTLE annoying.

Ok. We’re compromising, right? I’ll suck it up and deal.

After all the songs downloaded, I tried to play them. Second problem. Before each song plays – it has to download and verify your license. You can’t mulitple select a bunch and do this. You need to do this before EACH SONG will play. [Edited to add: “Verifing your license” means another window pops up that asks for your buymusic login and password… you enter it… it thinks awhile… it thinks some more… Then it comes back and says click “play” to actually play the song…]

Gee, why don’t they just make you install a dongle to your PC while they’re at it. Then again, these are the same folks who thought they’d attract me to their service by taking out full page ads featuring loser/wife beater Tommy Lee.

I have no idea whether or not BuyMusic.Com is a useful service. Every time I try to visit their home page I get a message saying,

In order to take full advantage of BuyMusic.com’s offerings you must be on a Windows Operating System using Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher.

Installing a Desktop Wiki

A couple months ago I wrote about installing Movable Type on my laptop to do some personal knowledge management. Movable Type might be a great weblogging tool, but it really didn’t work well for what I was trying to use (largely because it wasn’t designed to).

So today I downloaded and installed SnipSnap, a Wiki/Weblog tool. That was more like it.

I wouldn’t use one to manage a web site, but I love the way that a Wiki turns the browser into a sort of canvas for adding and connecting information.