A few years ago I decided to begin producing a serial, including eventually posts to Facebook Notes and to my timeline regarding a partly machine encephalovirus, and what life would be like to exist with one. There is no level of insanity involved in my posts. It's a useful exercise, and it gets my creative juices flowing. Being a programmer can be a stressful life, and it helps to do different stuff.

What we really have to worry about when it comes to machine weapons systems are the ones that we can't see, weapons systems that can infect us like a virus. Particularly troubling would be an encephalovirus, a virus that infects our nervous system and eventually acquires the ability to change our behavior and our thought processes. The idea of nanotech has been explored in depth in science fiction, but most of the writers refer to nanotech as if it's some kind of utopia for humanity. My take is that it could be partly utopian and partly dystopian.

It would be possible for nanotech to become weaponized, and to even take over all human life, possibly without us knowing it. The wrinkle or twist in my writing is that I entertain the possibility of an alien race that may no longer exist that produced and possibly weaponized nanotech. This nanotech floated to Earth some time over the past few million years of mammal evolution, far before we had any technlogy more modern than the campfire, and it infected us, giving it plenty of time to become as stealth as possible.

Knowing that the modern human as it exists today is a machine hybrid is the topic that I explore. As human nanotech advances, once we detect our infection how do we go about getting rid of it, and what does it do to defend itself? Does it mean our destruction, can we learn to live in peace with it, or some other possibility?

Substitute an alien race for humanity a few generations from now, and you have roughly the same story, but I wanted to work with something that could be possible today without using with a presumed future human society. Roughly the same concerns as the general would apply.

I just got done burning nearly 100 CD-Rs for a relative who requested a bunch of music. If you don't own a car made in the last 5 years you may not even have an AUX port, let alone Bluetooth. My 17-year-old car has neither, although I did install an aftermarket Bluetooth FM transmitter so I can use my smartphone in that application.

For myself I burn DVDs of live music, with an archival backup residing on an external hard drive just in case the media fails horribly. Minor failures of the media are no problem, as players will skip it and the viewing experience is not really degraded. Do I like to permanently archive data on optical media as my only backup? Not really.

The US home ownership rate is below 64% and has been declining since 2005. Every article I read here on Slashdot about electric vehicles seems to make the assumption that 100% of Americans reside in a house they own with an attached garage. From what I have read, the only way to realistically charge most electric vehicles is overnight in your garage, but that the newest electric cars can charge the batteries to 80% in about 30 minutes.

In other words the newest cars are fine for people who own homes with attached garages and want to go on long trips. They simply need to wait a half hour or so at charging stations. This solves nothing for people who live in apartments who would have no way of charging their vehicles at home, unless they can charge their vehicles somehow while at work. The average person doesn't have an employer like that.

Because of these problems, electric cars will continue to be only for wealthy individuals, even if the purchase price is within reach for the average person.

In the 1960's it was possible for most Middle Class people to have a child in their early 20's and go on to live a successful life. Today it's almost mandatory for Middle Class people to attend college to have any hope for good paying jobs with the ability to be promoted, and good luck being able to raise a kid at the same time when you're paying today's ridiculously high tuition rates. The easiest way to avoid this little complication is to wait until you're done with school to even have sex at all. Sad but unfortunately true for people with average means.

Ironically, for people who have no way to attend a good college today, they might as well have children because there is little or no hope for any kind of economic advancement anyway.

As traditional as I tend to be regarding technology, I'm going to spend a few minutes singing USB's praises.

Wherever I go, I can find several different ways to charge my phone. I can buy a device to charge my phone at any gas station. I can piggy back on a random person's power bank. Most people own at least one nowadays. I can go into any restaurant and if I ask politely, I can probably get access to a free USB port. Many restaurants just have them for customers. Even basic motels costing $40/night offer USB charging. All computers have USB ports, with few exceptions. Nearly all cars made today have them. Every power strip at my employer has at least two USB ports. USB has fulfilled its promise of being universal. I remember quite clearly when charging your phone was an ordeal. That wasn't very long ago.

All external hard drives are now interchangeable. If you have a hard drive with data on it, you can share it with anybody, or you can plug it into most routers. Does anybody remember the bad old days before there was a standard for external hard drives? I do.

What I've seen recently is a further development in USB. Most small-to-medium sized electronics devices are beginning to either be powered by USB or offer USB charging, or both. The devices with USB are often cheaper than their counterparts, because the manufacturer can use cheaper, off-the-shelf components. Even my solar-chargeable camping lantern has a USB charging port, though I can't imagine ever needing it.

The idea here is that it is possible that in addition to all of the above uses of USB, we could eventually add all new headphones to the mix. They're going to be more expensive at first, but it won't be too long before Chinese manufacturers figure out how to make them for a couple of dollars. I do realize that the Type C connector has a different shape, but we're already accustomed to transitioning USB equipment. There is still a small amount of mini-USB equipment but the transition is nearly done. We'll have to do another one, and hopefully it will work out for the best.

I'll be waiting for equipment to start adopting Type C more commonly. I have no desire to be an early adopter, but I feel like this new style of headphones could work.

Warning: Windows 10 is draining your battery by being a poorly conceived and implemented operating system. You should install Linux immediately.

Linus is right. I've been using the Linux kernel coding style as much as possible in all of my programming, regardless of the language, since around 1994. I get nothing but compliments.

When it comes to the kernel, the most important thing is writing code that other people can read and modify. Anybody can write new code. It takes an artist to write code that other people can easily understand.

This comparison is somewhat misleading because the entire UK is only about the size of 2-3 US states:

http://www.travelersdigest.com...

It's funny to hear about how dependable AI will be coming from Microsoft, a company whose software has hundreds of megabytes of patches per month, whose software is responsible for millions and probably billions of dollars worth of financial losses to businesses and consumers every year.

Once Microsoft unleashes its AI upon the world, it will no doubt cause the entire planet to be reduced to green goo.

When people advise you to not "freak out" about something, it is best to ignore them. The implication is that they are the people who are being logical and not you when in fact they most likely will not be presenting a convincing, factual argument.

It is the height of arrogance to think that a malfunctioning intelligent agent could not defeat its owned programmed curbs. We all know how buggy software is. All software is by definition buggy, unless all components have been mathematically proven to be correct. Good luck doing that with physical hardware connected to a power grid. Intelligent agents are likely to be composed of billions of lines of code, if you include all code down to the digital logic gates. We've never been able to program a bug-free sandbox. Java is vastly simpler than an intelligent agent would be, and I've lost count of the number of bugs that could be used to breach the sandbox. Certainly well over 100 have been discovered.

Once we have the best programmers in the world and the worst programmers in the world writing intelligent agents, the probability of an intelligent agent escaping its curbs approaches 100%.

Thus it is inevitable that a malfunctioning intelligent agent will defeat its curbs and gain a truly awesome amount of power over us. You can't program morality into a machine. Morality is a flaw in all living things that causes us to make non-optimal decisions.

If you want to read a mixture of fact, fiction, cyberpunk, and speculation covering intelligence programming look for my name on Facebook Pages. Everything I've written there is public. I've been a computer programmer since the mid 1980's but I don't personally work on robotics or intelligence algorithms. I keep a skeptical distance, but I do follow the basic happenings.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Due to the abolishment of the Fairness Doctrine, Republican press releases for several decades have been labeled as conservative news, as if they ought to carry equal weight as news from others sources. People don't understand this technical detail.

There is valuable news from the conservative side of the aisle. In particular I like reading the National Review for their opinion pieces. But with no Fairness Doctrine the conservative chaff outweighs the wheat, and everything must be viewed with skepticism.

I have been programming since 1987.

My advice to you is to find a free software project and start fixing bugs.

[Aside from poor communication skills] fixing bugs is the skill that programmers are the worst at, and help with fixing bugs will make you well liked. Just be nice about it. All software has bugs, and no malice is ever intended by buggy software. All software is buggy, and the most experienced programmers will own up to their bugs and be happy that you're volunteering your time to help fix them.

The best analogy I can give is comparing maps of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, Paris, and France available from 2000-2005 (over the years, I bought a thick stack of them) when I was frequenty traveling to Western Europe with American style maps, for example, AAA maps from that era.

The European-produced maps I looked at were extremely detailed. They seemed to lose track of the forest for the trees. It seemed like they had to label everything, and that they were going for photo accuracy with road routes, etc.

On the other hand, AAA maps lack a lot of detail but they're much easier to use "at a glance." They aren't as precise, but they give you the gist much better. You were able to pull over and look at a AAA map and get your bearings within minutes. You could even carefully look at a AAA map while driving.

The European maps I looked at, on the other hand, I think were meant to be studied for 15 minutes before setting out on your journey. If you pulled out one of these maps while walking around in a sketchy area, for example in shadier parts of Amsterdam, you were liable to get mugged. On the other hand, armed with one of these European-style maps at your hotel room, you would need nothing else to get to your destination. The incredibly detailed map would give you an unambiguous route to your exact destination.

Now that they don't make many printed maps anymore, we have a similar situation for online maps. You don't want or need a super-detailed map on your phone. You want something that will get you to your destination in an expedient fashion. In fact, the map itself is less important than the route. Do you need to browse a map with every street, city, town, and park on your phone? No way. You type in the exact place you want to go and your phone takes you there. If you want to explore a detailed map at your leisure while sitting at home don't use smartphone app. Don't use Google Maps. Find something else. To most people this use case is not wanted, and added detail is unwanted distraction.

We need to kick nuclear to the curb. The true cost of nuclear energy to society is infinite because we have no safe way to dispose of the waste these plants create for the length of time required, on the scale of thousands to millions of years.

Nuclear waste disposal is never included in cost estimates for nuclear energy, and as a result we have it just sitting around all over the United States. We can't even contain waste safely for a few decades. How do we have any hope to contain it for 100 years, or 1,000 years, or 10,000 years? The answer is we will never be able to do it.

Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should be doing it. Adding more nuclear capacity just makes the waste problem worse. Who bears the brunt of the waste problem? It won't cause much harm in our lifetimes. Our descendants are the ones we're hurting.

If you want to read a more detailed technical analysis, feel free to search for my previous posts on the subject.