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All stand by for your daily scan

If this research pans out then we can all look forward to having our brains scanned on a regular basis. All to prevent terrorism of course.

On the plus side of course everyone will trigger this alarm as showing pictures of a city which they have associations with or a bomb should elicit strong reactions in anyone. If they showed me a picture of Cameron, Clegg or Obama they would whisk me away pronto and I have not thought, yet, about bumping them off.

I would envisage that despite what they say they may only get anough info to put the suspects in Guantanimo Bay without trial as they would certainly not get enough evidence to charge them with anything in a court of law.

One to be put aside for specific use I think. And not one in any way associated with real Justice. Maybe UK/US justice though.

Target identified. Send out Plod to <strike>terminate</strike> investigate

Well it seems that Mexico is now turning into more of a surveillance state than the US. At least now I understand why so many of them are risking death to escape to the US. I used to believe it was because there was a better standard of living in the US. Now it looks like they are running to escape Big Amigo.

Leon — one of the largest cities in Mexico, is being fitted with Iris scanners with a laughable aim of making it the most secure city in the World with Fraud completely eradicated. Criminals Iris scans will be loaded into the system and they can be tracked wherever they go. Limiting their access to certain areas and alerting Plod to their whereabouts. Of course, ordinary people will also be picked up and the hope is that they will sign up voluntarily to be ~~tagged like animals~~ scanned where they can be validated and have the ‘benefit’ of not needing to carry a bank card or ID. The implied threat for those that don’t sign up is ‘Opting out actually puts more of a flag on you than just being part of the system’ Read that as you will be stopped at every door and checkout until we validate your ID and Plod will pull you over every ten minutes until you give in. Make like you are resisting and suddenly you will find you do have a criminal record, if you live.

There are so many things wrong here that it will be interesting to watch. People being scanned to pay for others drinks, people being denied access to services because they have a criminal record and people breaking in your home when the system detects you are just entering your local restaurant for a meal and someone informs the local crooks. However, regardless of the outcome you can be sure that controlling eyes in other countries will be watching this social experiment. If it succeeds then it will be rolled out here soon enough. If it fails then it will be rolled out here with a few minor mods that the Mexicans got wrong. It will make the the old USSR, China, North Korea and New Labour look like amateurs and you can be sure they will be quick to pick up this technology, for security purposes of course.

The manufacturers claim that with the advance in technology no one can fool the system with dead eyes which is fair enough. Interestingly enough though by hiding your eyes you can avoid the system completely. How useful is ‘I was mugged and the scanners couldn’t identify the assailant’. Plus I keep hearing how there are frauds over the internet worth billions and they are increasing with real life fraudulent transactions reducing. How does it stop that?

In addition once the Iris scanning is the subjugation tool of choice then there will be many bright young minds turned into cracking the system. False eyes will be created and contact lenses, glasses etc. will be produced to counteract them. Everyone knows that once cracked, and it doesn’t take long, it takes a lot longer to find a fix and then apply that fix to every scanner out there. I claim Blair’s Iris scans. Let us see what trouble I can get him into. In the meantime a can of spraypaint should be fine.

Personally, if I lived in Leon I would be making my move now. Leon is turning into the biggest open prison on the planet. As well as this the US border looks like it will be tightening up and you may leave it too late.

A versatile touch interface

We now have a touch interface in a roll on form that can be used to cover any surface. It is a thin polymer skin that can detect up to 16 touches at once. And as this picture shows it can be used to cover excising output panels and add touch capability.

This is going to make the production of interfaces so much easier. Print out your custom interface on card and then apply this to cover it. Configure the software, which I would guess would be supplied, and test each coordinate and away we go. It will make an ordinary monitor into a touch screen monitor at a fraction of the price and enable tables and walls to be used for the input of data from projection outputs. Soon we can all have futuristic displays and input devices in our homes and offices on our existing devices and on our walls and furniture.

It would be ideal in security field as well. Having an alarm panel that was a montage of photographs. Just touch Uncle Bob (No sniggering at the back) and disable the alarm while touching Little Johnny sets off the alarm (serves you right). Having light switches and volume controls that are actually just pictures on a wall. Having a MP3 player that is a picture of a jukebox on the wall.

The next stage, hopefully a quick step away, is for this to layered on top of the roll on screens we have already developed to make a roll on wallpaper that can display images and also take input. This can enable photographs that cover a wall and will change when you touch them or a wall as a TV that pops a panel up where you touch and allow you to change the channel, volume or see who is at the front door via a camera.

If this is EMP proof it would also be very useful in military situations. Making consoles easier by allowing them to be configured by programming. Drop a config for a weapons control system in and see what is on a weapons control panel. Next person along configures it for a communications panel whilst it is reality a cardboard box covered in this new film. A bargain at $30K. Hell, there will be a console in every house that we can use for all our games than can interface into our computers and consoles.

Identity crisis

It seems the internet has yet to make its most significant contribution to our lives. Screwing up our reputations. Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has suggested that everyone will change their name as a rite of passage because of what they have done on line on Facebook and tweets etc. so they can leave their youthful mistakes behind them.

Of course its firms like Google that actually make this data easily accessible and able to be searched and collated so readily. So it’s actually a problem that is exasperated by their software. I would suspect that they are looking at expanding into the identity market. They can sell a name change service to you and to then they can sell all the information they have collected on you to anyone with the money.

Basically, it’s a niche market. Many others are in there and Google will have to buy out one of the established business link it with the Google databases and it would become the biggest in the world and with Google propensity to just take what they want I wouldn’t be surprised to find them trawling your machines pulling data for their databases.

I bet we would all be surprised by the amount of data Google has on each and every one of us now when the proper algorithms are applied. Once they turn their skills and access their databases for that use it will be a massive invasion of Privacy. Helped of course by our own useless governments giving them free updates of our data on a regular basis because they are so inept.

Something needs to be done all right. I’m sure though that the proper solution won’t be acceptable to the government and thus I think we should end up changing our name every few years. You can do it here cheaply enough here. One question, don’t tell the missus, does it invalidate a marriage license?

The difference between theory and practise

I always liked Maths at school. It was a subject that was not subject to opinion and if you could do the basics then you could build on that to do almost anyting. Unlike art where a big blob painted on was boring and lacked imagination but a blob put on a canvas by your bottom shows imagination and a new outlook on life. Life was good and understandable and the basic maths I was taught has lasted me well and even now after all these years 1 + 1 = 2. Bliss. I’m still up to date….. or am I?

Along comes modern mathematics, and like physics, it starts looking outside the real world and suddenly they turn everything on its head. They go all 11th dimension on me and now they are not so sure 1 + 1 = 2 and long known truths are now considered invalid. Who the hell has ever worked outside our normal 4 dimensions where 1 + 1 = 2? Do we ever think we will need to work in the 8th dimension? Where exactly are these dimensions anyway? How relevant is it to the real world really?

This is the problem nowadays. Everything that was so simple now seems so complicated in a theoretical way, a way that will never be of interest in the real world. Yet my real world practical understanding of everything is being mauled by theoretical constructs which 99.999% of the population don’t understand and 99.9999% of the world have no real practical use for.

I only hope it leads to a warp drive or something. In the meantime I’m sticking to my 1 + 1 = 2 and thats what I’ll be using in all my real world stuff.

An innovator playing catch up

Porn is and always has been an trigger for innovation. Never mind what you think of the contents porn has driven several technological innovations to prominance where it would have taken much longer for them to rise on their own. Cameras, Video, Digital, DVD, Multi-Angle and the Internet have all been utilised by the porn industry. Porn has provided a reason for many people to buy technology to enjoy themselves. Not forgetting of course that despite Porn films being copied time and time again, certainly much more than normal films, the porn industry is still bigger than Hollywood.

Yet, in one area porn seems to be behind the times. 3D movies. Although since the success of Avatar 3D movies are now the big thing and the race is on to produce the first 3D porn film. The mind boggles. I wonder what innovations this will spawn.

Personally, I’m still awaiting the total immersion system, self cleaning model of course, myself.

Baby steps

I hate exercise. My lifestyle is such that I never get much real exercise and since I left my teens a long way behind I’ve been more into minimal sweating.

I do have a few items of gym equipment though although it took me a while to work out the claims made by the manufacturers is rubbish. Buy this item and in six weeks you will have six pack abs. Here I am ten years later still the same. The Trades Description Acts doesn’t seem to apply to these scammers. A fitness expert I consulted said that it wasn’t owning the item that gave you the six pack it was by using it regularly. Oh! I thought that building the thing up was exercise enough.

Anyway, I did try to use them but I found it really boring. Simply listening to music was not keeping me from getting bored and I found that although I didn’t mind the thirty minutes or on the machine I found it so monotonous that I come to hate it. What I did want was a DVD player. Something that I could watch an episode of something or a film while I exercised.

The latest though is to play games or watch TV on the machines. Better I suppose but not quite what I had in mind. Maybe next time we will have a DVD player until, of course, we get the ultimate system. One that puts you into a dream state which will count towards your nightly quota of sleep and exercises your body all at the same time. If we can then add one of those sleep training machines so we could learn something as well then we would have a winner.

Exaggerating the case

Seems we have a new invisibility cloak. Not quite Harry Potter cloaking as it doesn’t work on visible light.

Now I think they may be missing the point here. If I want to be invisible to infrared I wear some silver foil. Makes me stand out a bit to real live humans but it will fool the PIR on an alarm system. To actually work on visible light and be effective is going to be some trick.

To bend light round an object like a Romulan Warbird or James Bond’s Aston Martin ‘Vanish’ is going to take some doing. You see by creating a light hole humans, and computers, can see it and investigate. It’s one of those things that sounds easy but is in fact going to be difficult. To put it in context it’s going to be harder than getting an honest politician in Westminster.

You see our eyes spot movement and anomalies easily and you might be able to set up a scene where something is hidden easy enough but then view that scene from a different angle or even by moving a few inches [Spit to metric] you have an entirely different picture. No cloak can do that nor is it likely to do so in the near future. Now making a space ship invisible in the dark of space or a man invisible on an artic plain. Providing that the stars were nicely placed or there was very little movement But Harry Potter in the library with or without a candlestick not for a long time yet I suspect.

So the claim that we have an Invisibility Cloak needs to be taken with a big pinch of salt or as I like to say a big porky.

Government planning

Looks like the Iranian people are being helped to access the Internet by the development of a new tool called Haystack. Haystack works by hiding the real destination by encrypting the traffic between the client and Haystacks servers. This stops the Iranian government monitoring the clients browsing habits and then using the recorded sites to break down his door and arrest him, killing him if he resists, and keeping him in a dark prison where his rights do not exist. Clearly they don’t deserve that and so we must help them.

One of lifes ironies is that the US state department is helping the developer of Haystack.

Now if you don’t understand what I mean think about the fact that the US government is currently collecting data from all its allies around the world. All their browsing habits and URLs are being stored and analysed by the US so they can go and break down our doors and arrest us, killing us if we resists, and keeping us in a dark prison where our rights do not exist. Clearly we must do what we can to stop these traitors.

So they are helping fund a tool to stop another country doing exactly what they do.

Once Haystack has gone live can we look to the Iranian goverment funding a Western version to enable us to bypass the monitoring by our governments. I hope so. I even think that we would get more use out of it because there must be more of us in the West wanting to bypass monitoring than in Iran. So the Government that may have the most to lose is funding the development of a tool that will be used against it in the future.

Governments do this sort of thing all the time but they never learn. Just think about the stinger missiles given to the Taliban in Afghanistan so they could shoot down Russian helicopters and planes in the 80s. The Taliban were a proxy for us against those evil Russians so we trained and armed them. Fast forward 25 years and those same stingers are shooting down our helicopters and planes and killing our troops while they prosecute a war to put a free government in that hell hole of a country. There is real irony for you.

Rejuvenation

Researchers have found a new way of repairing damaged nerve connections in mice. OK, still a long way from human use but never the less still a step forward which will bring hope to millions as well as opening new avenues of research in prosthetics and augmentation.

Now it seems to me that there are several techniques recently that are based on rejuvenation of something or more accurately tricking something into thinking it is part of a baby. I wonder if this could be used as a way to regenerate lost digits by making the stump think it is still in embryonic stage. Taking it further could we regenerate an eye or an inner ear. What about a limb? A kidney or liver would be nice. Think of the millions of lives that would enhance.

It sounds ridiculous imaging a small finger or eye growing whilst attached to a person but I would envisage that there would be advantages in doing that. Sure, it sounds easier to grow a cloned appendage but attaching it later would require linking the nerve cells. Growing a new one would have all that already sorted. More of an issue with eyes and ears than with fingers, appendages and organs. Swings and roundabouts.

Of course if we try and graft on new appendages like a third arm for parcel wrappers or something that will require linking into the nervous system. Will our nervous system be flexible enough to handle that? I think so because we are adaptable but only time will tell.

We could have two hearts installed, two livers. In fact two of everything. It would boost our immune systems. Make us handle accidental poisoning and more robust to accidents overall. In fact when we finally manage to isolate biological functions in other life forms maybe we could add them on to us. Gills anyone? Or knowing our species it would be more like poisoned claws.

In case you are wondering if anyone would get these changes done. Look at this.

Now bearing in mind that all that requires surgery. How many people do you think will do this if it can be done with simple injections and grown in situ? More than I care to think about. It will be the new fashion.

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All stand by for your daily scan

Target identified. Send out Plod to <strike>terminate</strike> investigate

A versatile touch interface

Identity crisis

The difference between theory and practise

An innovator playing catch up

Baby steps

Exaggerating the case

Government planning

Rejuvenation

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