[psiga]

[negativedge]

I don't know that I'd want to give up typing, myself. It's so ingrained into my thinking process when I write that I think I'd find it difficult to literally stare at a screen thinking while words appeared and disappeared around me.

Also yeah how would you delete shit.

[psiga]

Guh.
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[negativedge]

I don't think that is an adequate answer, psiga.

[psiga]

You know how a lot of "old people" are sort-of baffled and put-off by the way that kids use this internet thing? You're setting yourself up for our generation's equivalent of that. Some day you will be old, and kids will be expressing their raw meanings over whatever the internet becomes, and you're already looking forward to being baffled and put-off by it.
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[psiga]

I just came across this while stumbling around a Dulce thread on Above Top Secret: http://www.thelivingmoon.com/47john_lear/02files/Lunar_Orbiter_Tapes_Found.html

There is something so epically sublime about the very idea of old, secret, unreleased lunar photographs being found in an abandoned McDonald's.

Updated page; NASA is working with them, apparently, to get everything all scanned and released: http://www.thelivingmoon.com/47john_lear/02files/Lunar_Orbiter_Tapes_Press_Release.html

For some reason I get kinda choked up when I see Earth from a distance like that.
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[Toptube]

[Toptube]

[negativedge]

[Toptube]

Whoa, that pic is pretty insane with the detail on the earth.

The moon there looks almost CG.

[psiga]

[Toptube]

**actually that's part 2. Part 1 has some fun stuff in it too.

[Intentionally Wrong]

[dongle]

I'm torn on the technology being used for law enforcement. I'm opposed to it in theory, yet on a pragmatic level it's probably for the better, particularly for suspects who can't afford high-powered attorneys or who have traits that may bias a jury (eg being black).

[CubaLibre]

Your assupmtion is that prying into people's thoughts and dreams will acquit them?
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Let's Play, starring me.

[Toups]

[dongle]

[stotelheim]

[spinach]

Even if the machine was flawless, it'd still be limited to what dudes imagine, which could very well condemn an innocent man.

[dongle]

Ah, I was thinking future-tech memory reading; yeah thought-reading would be pretty bullshit.

"what do you know about the murders? … holy shit guys now he's thinking about murders"

[negativedge]

[psiga]

The actual implementation of such technology in the public will be subjected to the rigors of science, medicine, politics, and popular opinion. If they can't dependably detect the truth, then it will not be used to determine whether or not somebody is telling the truth; it's that simple.

There was some cranky old guy I read about who said: "I think the jury is still out on whether the internet is going to be a kind of nifty telephone, that it is some device that we use for making connections with other real people that we know in other contexts, or a nifty television, that is yet one more screen in front of which we sit more or less passively."

In reality, it is both of those things and much more than those things, but he is just so outmoded, stuck in antiquated ways of thinking, that he simply couldn't wrap his brain around it.

What's happening right here is people trying to make guesses about a technology that hasn't even been developed yet, basing their presumptions off of what they know today, which will be antiquated ways of thinking by the time such technology is available to tech-savvy teenagers.

Some older people are freaked out about the openness of today's internet culture; some of you future-older-people are getting ready to be freaked out about the openness of tomorrow's internet culture.
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[CubaLibre]

[The Drunken Samurai]

minority report was a good movie
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[dongle]

[psiga]

Polygraph tests are unreliable to the point that they are not standard issue in courtrooms. If these proposed mind-reading systems really were so unreliable that the closest thing to reasonable information that we could get out of them was, as dongle said, "what do you know about the murders? … holy shit guys now he's thinking about murders," then it wouldn't be accepted in the courtroom either.

The interesting thing is that scientists have developed more advanced technologies, which can actually discern whether you're accessing the part of your brain that retains memories, or the part of your brain that fills in gaps with imagination -- but even that is not standard issue in courts of law.

So, for whatever reason, those technologies have not passed "the rigors of science, medicine, politics, and popular opinion." Even though they're real, and they work to varying degrees.

staple staple: FMRI truthiness detection for 10k monies with 90 to 95 percent accuracy. Whether that will be enough to gain momentum and earn it a place in the courts is yet to be determined.
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[Predator Goose]

Just because thought reading couldn't reliably incriminate the suspect in court it wouldn't be useless though. It could be a valuable resource for leads. Like if you start talking to a guy about murders and he starts thinking about murders that's one thing. But if he starts thinking about a gun stashed in a storm pipe the cops might do a little digging and discover the murder weapon. From that they could get prints or match bullet markings. Similarly if he starts thinking about details he shouldn't know, like details that haven't been released to the media, you've potentially got a lead on what direction to take the interrogation in (make him verbally confess he knows these things, get him to talk about how he knows them, etc.)

Still highly invasive and probably unethical though.
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I can no longer shop happily.

[psiga]

Some of the modern technologies will do things like show you an assortment of images, some of which are items of evidence and/or crime scenes, and they can detect whether or not you recognize those things on a subconscious level.

It's an unfamiliar art, though, and nobody has really developed the publicly-kosher rules as to what is "invasive" or "unethical" -- both of those things being incredibly relative.

How do you define 'leading a witness' under these new circumstances? Things like that, which have a new and unusual dynamic, and are not widely understood in society.
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[radish]

I love this kind of stuff. Especially the Voynich Manuscript. I wonder if there's any way to get a replica of it.

http://www.rense.com/general29/chin.htm
Ancient pipes found buried on an remote uninhabited mountain in China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism
Greek calculator used to calculate astronomical positions, invented invented around 100 BC.

[CubaLibre]

[Predator Goose]

[Pat the Great]

[CubaLibre]

[DonMarco]

[psiga]

[spinach]

[spinach]

[Dracko]

http://www.rincondelmisterio.com/derinkuyu-la-misteriosa-ciudad-subterranea-de-turquia/en/

http://coilhouse.net/2008/08/30/kowloon-walled-city-the-modern-pirate-utopia/
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[negativedge]

[CubaLibre]

As an old hand at Ptoelmaic astronomy, that antikythera is bad ass.

[psiga]

I would even say that "rigor" anywhere else isn't all that reasonable. Being "subjected to the rigors" of all of those things just means, to me, that society would have to accept it collectively, which will be a labored and intensive process, and we're not likely to see an oppressive and unilateral 1984-esque use of it in the first world.

So yeah, I shouldn't even have written the "it's that simple" bit, and am normally the asshole who's first to point out that nothing is so simple. Still, the tone of your response was absurd.
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