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Optimism (in the sense that I have advocated) is the theory that all failures—all evils—are due to insufficient knowledge. . . . Problems are inevitable, because our knowledge will always be infinitely far from complete. Some problems are hard, but it is a mistake to confuse hard problems with problems unlikely to be…
The more sophisticated and powerful a technology, the more people are needed to weaponize it. And the more people needed to weaponize it, the more societal controls work to defuse, or soften, or prevent harm from happening. I add one additional thought. Even if you had a budget to hire a team of scientists whose job…
After a while I noticed that the sun and all the stars in his neighborhood were ruddy. Those at the opposite pole of the heaven were of an icy blue. The explanation of this strange phenomenon flashed upon me. I was still traveling, and traveling so fast that light itself was not wholly indifferent to my passage. The…
When Mike was installed in Luna, he was pure thinkum, a flexible logic--"High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor, Mark IV, Mod. L"--a HOLMES FOUR. He computed ballistics for pilotless freighters and controlled their catapult. This kept him busy less than one percent of time and Luna Authority never…
Cow Sucking 吸牛 ・ Shee-niou - xī niú A Baboon's Asshole 狒狒的屁眼 ・ FAY-FAY duh PEE-yen - fèi fèi de;dì;dí pì yǎn Extraordinarily Impatient Buddha (True Patience of Buddha) 真沒耐性的佛祖 ・ Jen mei NAI-shing duh FWO-tzoo - zhēn méi;mò nài xìng de;dì;dí fú;fó zǔ Dog Fucking 狗操的 ・ Go tsao de - gǒu cāo de;dì;dí Panda Piss 熊貓尿 ・…
Anyone should be allowed to speak out, whoever he may be, so long as he is not a hostile element and does not make malicious attacks, and it does not matter if he says something wrong. Leaders at all levels have the duty to listen to others. Two principles must be observed: (1) Say all you know and say it without…
己所不欲，勿施於人。 "What you do not wish for yourself, do not do to others." 子貢問曰：“有一言而可以終身行之者乎”？子曰：“其恕乎！己所不欲、勿施於人。” Zi Gong [a disciple] asked: "Is there any one word that could guide a person throughout life?" The Master replied: "How about 'reciprocity'! Never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself."
Again, to be a hacker, you have to enter the hacker mindset. There are some things you can do when you're not at a computer that seem to help. They're not substitutes for hacking (nothing is) but many hackers do them, and feel that they connect in some basic way with the essence of hacking. Learn to write your native…
when a child is upset, logic often won’t work until we have responded to the right brain’s emotional needs. We call this emotional connection “attunement,” which is how we connect deeply with another person and allow them to “feel felt.” When parent and child are tuned in to each other, they experience a sense of…
am enthusiastic over humanity's extraordinary and sometimes very timely ingenuities. If you are in a shipwreck and all the boats are gone, a piano top buoyant enough to keep you afloat that comes along makes a fortuitous life preserver. But this is not to say that the best way to design a life preserver is in the form…
Conceding that the battle to stop documentation of people’s private details and lives was a lost one, the Decepticons have taken a different approach: make this data unreliable. Decepticon hackers work hard to penetrate mesh databases and seed false information. They have released numerous worms and trojans into the…
Both technological sensors and enhanced biological senses come equipped with databases of scanned “signatures” that make it easier to identify whatever the user is sensing (in the case of bioware, these databases are stored and accessed via the character’s mesh inserts). For example, infrared sensors feature databases…
Imperfect systems infuriate hackers, whose primal instinct is to debug them. This is one reason why hackers generally hate driving cars—the system of randomly programmed red lights and oddly laid out one-way streets cause delays that are so goddamned unnecessary that the impulse is to rearrange signs, open up…
It's interesting that once you have the shell of a successful mind virus set up, you can just plug in any agenda you have as long as it doesn't interfere with the virus's primary function of self-replication. There are many examples of such virus shells in modern life: - Political campaign organizations. These often…
We looked at three methods of penetration: repetition, cognitive dissonance, and the Trojan horse. When a virus of the mind infects you, it may resemble one of these scenarios: - Repetition. Repeating a meme until it becomes familiar and part of your programming is one method of mind-virus penetration: • Hearing a…
At this point I want to introduce a distinction between mind viruses that arose spontaneously and ones that were invented by human consciousness. I'll call the naturally arising ones cultural viruses and the human-crafted ones designer viruses. A designer virus is carefully crafted to infect people with a set of memes…
It was from Kuiper that I first got a feeling for what is called a back-of-the-envelope calculation: a possible explanation to a problem occurs to you, you pull out an old envelope, appeal to your knowledge of fundamental physics, scribble a few approximate equations on the envelope, substitute in likely numerical…
The relationship between a mother and her child is fairly straightforward: Both are seeking roughly the same goal—the welfare of themselves and each other. The relationship between a man and his wife's lover or between a woman and her rival for a promotion is also fairly Straightforward: Both want the worst for each…
Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system, for a few years. Then we hurried back. why? What happened? What was Apollo really about? The scope and audacity of John Kennedy's May 25th 1961 message to a joint session of Congress on "Urgent National Needs" -- the speech that launched the Apollo program--dazzled…
Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in hack mode. Some hackers report experiencing strong synesthetic imagery when in hack mode, interestingly, independent reports from multiple sources suggest that there are common features to the experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this…