Remember Big Dog? He had his day. Now it's time for Alpha Dog.
H+ - September 27, 2011 by Paul Hughes
The first person to introduce the concept of Future Shock was Alvin Toffler in his 1970 book, Future Shock. The main argument is that society is undergoing an enormous structural change, a revolution from an industrial society to a “super-industrial society”. This change will overwhelm people, the accelerated rate of technological and social change will leave them disconnected, suffering from “shattering stress and disorientation” – future shocked. Toffler stated that the majority of social problems were symptoms of future shock.
A few years earlier, Gordon Moore in his now famous paper (PDF) introduced the idea that would eventually be called Moore’s Law, that states that the speed and density of microprocessor design will follow an exponential curve. This was at a time when computers had barely had any impact on society, nearly 20 years before PC’s made hardly a dent on the economic landscape. 30 years later we saw the explosion of the Internet into the world. Now 40 years later, microprocessors speed is doubling almost every year, and its effects are extraordinary. Not a day goes buy now when some scientific or technological advance isn’t hitting the front pages. As Ray Kurzweil suggest with his Law of Accelerating Returns, microprocessor are such an integrated part of our lives of economic progress, that now society too is caught up in this accelerating change, suggesting that we could see as much change in the next 25 years, as we saw in the last 10,000 years combined!
As one of the leading thinkers on the singularity, Eliezer Yudkowsky is someone accustomed to thinking about extremes of future technological change and advancement. After having many wide ranging discussions with futurists of all stripes, he noticed that certain technological implications can be too “far out” or shocking to some groups more than others. So he came up with what he calls Future Shock Levels or the level that different people find themselves in terms of their concept of the future, and what they are willing to consider, or which is too futuristic or even shocking for them.
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Fox News - 9/23/11
Leading scientists said on Friday the discovery of sub-atomic particles apparently traveling faster than light could force a major rethink of theories on the makeup of the cosmos if independently confirmed.
Jeff Forshaw, a professor of particle physics at Britain's Manchester University, told Reuters the results if confirmed would mean it would be possible in theory to "send information into the past."
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BBC News - 9/23/11 by Jason Palmer
A meeting at Cern, the world's largest physics lab, has addressed results that suggest subatomic particles have gone faster than the speed of light.
The team presented its work so other scientists can determine if the approach contains any mistakes.
If it does not, one of the pillars of modern science will come tumbling down.
Antonio Ereditato added "words of caution" to his Cern presentation because of the "potentially great impact on physics" of the result.
The speed of light is widely held to be the Universe's ultimate speed limit, and much of modern physics - as laid out in part by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity - depends on the idea that nothing can exceed it.
Thousands of experiments have been undertaken to measure it ever more precisely, and no result has ever spotted a particle breaking the limit.
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Mashable - 9/9/11 by Charlie White
If you want to make processors 1,000 times faster, you’re going to need some serious technology, right? That would be the conventional wisdom. But 3M and IBM have unlocked a secret low-tech shortcut.
The companies found a much simpler way to hit that elusive goal — not by creating some spectacular new circuitry or using exotic quantum mechanics, but with the invention of a new variety of a mundane substance: glue.
This is not just any glue. It’s an adhesive that dissipates heat so efficiently that layer upon layer of chips can be stacked on top of each other into silicon “towers” up to 100 layers high, glued together with this special adhesive that keeps things cool. The result? Faster chips for computers, laptops, smartphones and anything else that uses microprocessors.
With IBM supplying its microprocessor and silicon expertise and 3M contributing its super-cool adhesive, the two companies aim to stack together processors, memory chips and networks into monster “skyscrapers” of silicon they say will be 1,000 times faster than today’s fastest processor.
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An online PhD is of
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This is the second time that Apple has shown its goonier side when one of its hapless employees loses an as-yet-unreleased iPhone...
NYT - 9/2/11 by DAVID STREITFELD and VERNE G. KOPYTOFF
If Apple thinks you have something that belongs to it, can its security personnel come to your house, gain entrance with the help of the police and search for physical and electronic evidence among your possessions?
While many details are still sketchy, that is apparently what happened in San Francisco in July when, for the second time, an Apple employee lost a test version of a future iPhone model in a bar. According to CNet, which broke the story, and SF Weekly, which provided a fuller picture of the incident, Apple went to great lengths to try to get its errant property back.
Apple used a GPS feature of the phone to trace it to a house near the bar. Sergio Calderon, a 22-year-old resident of the house, was quoted by SF Weekly as saying that he had visited the bar where the iPhone 5 disappeared, the tequila lounge Cava22, but that he did not have the phone. Mr. Calderon said he was visited by six people, four men and two women, none in uniform. He presumed they were all police officers, an assumption they made no effort to correct.
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