Month: September 2001

Dan Gillmor: Safety in spreading out. # [Scripting News]

Is knowledge inherently dangerous?  A decade ago I read a book by Frank Herbert called the White Plague.  It changed me. Bill Joy read it too and it lead him to write, “The Future Doesn't Need Us.”  The concept is simple.  A single biotechnologist has his family blown up in a IRA attack.  He decides… Continue reading Is knowledge inherently dangerous?  A decade ago I read a book by Frank Herbert called the White Plague.  It changed me. Bill Joy read it too and it lead him to write, “The Future Doesn't Need Us.”  The concept is simple.  A single biotechnologist has his family blown up in a IRA attack.  He decides to make war on the world.  So, for less than $200,000 he builds a basement biotechnology lab (I researched it and it can be done) and designs a airborned virus that targets females.  He wants the world to feel as he does, bereft.  He succeeds.

The question for Joy and myself became after reading this:  is specific knowledge or will specific knowledge become too dangerous for society to let an individual know unsupervised?  Will we need to control all people that know too much?  I had an advanced physics instructor once (I almost became a physicist because it was easy and fun), that built designer nukes (BTW, you can do a lot with nukes.  You can vary the radiation output, you can make it blast only without much radiation, you can shape the charge to have it blow in a single direction, and you can select the form the energy to yield).  He was a controlled person.  Why?  Because he knew too much.  Will that be the same with nanotech, biotech, and AI tech?  My gut tells me yes. [John Robb's Radio Weblog

NY Times: “For many Iranians, America is a country full of the scantily-clad, available women of Baywatch and MTV. First-time visitors to the United States are often shocked by the more spiritual and socially conservative side of America. 'What surprised me the most when I came to the United States was how many churches there… Continue reading NY Times

Argus ACIA: Q&A with Peter Bogaards. Everybody with a background and experience related to people and their communication can become an information designer. If you have a passion for the motives, needs, emotions, cognition, circumstances and values of people, you are more than half way there. [Tomalak's Realm]

Andre Durand, the founder of Jabber, Inc. has a new Manila Weblog.  Welcome!   This is a well done site and a good demonstration of why every founder, CEO, or clear thinking executive should have their own site(s).  Andre is able to post his point of view on current events, enhance his personal brand, and share his vision of where… Continue reading Andre Durand

Interactive Week: Google Buys Xerox PARC Spin-Off's Assets. Search engine Google on Thursday announced that it will buy the intellectual property assets of Outride, an online information retrieval technologies developer that was spun off from Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. [Tomalak's Realm]

News.Com: New DSL standard offers faster speeds. Although DSL speeds vary widely, the new G.SHDSL could be two to three times faster than most versions of DSL targeted at business customers. The G.SHDSL standard also can deliver data farther than earlier DSL technologies, which are limited to a relatively short distance. [Tomalak's Realm]

The view from Beirut. An American in Lebanon warns that despite Bush's efforts, Arabs will likely view an attack on terrorism as a war on Islam. [Meerkat: An Open Wire Service]