Am I a Prude?

I have just finished watching Miley Cyrus’ performance at the VMA music awards. There has been a lot of discussion in the media about how disgusting it was, but I believe this performance is a symptom of something potentially more serious.

I’m not religious at all and I enjoy perving as much as anyone. Women should be allowed to dress in whatever way they please. Women are also equal in our society a belief that I hold deeply.

Women have not had full rights for very long. We are still seeing a lag effect of previous discrimination - women are still catching up. When I was young there were still bars where women were excluded. Large pay discrepancies between the sexes were common. There was also segregation with whole industries only allowing a single sex to be part of them. The “fact” that women were the inferior sex was openly celebrated in some circles.

I think particularly in the US music industry there is a “bitch ‘n ho” culture. In many music videos women aren’t only depicted as sexual objects, but denigrated as being less than then men. Many female performers seem to be trying to take their sex back, turning the sexiness into Women Power. I think this is very hard to do with very few female artists doing it successfully. Ultimately, many female artists are only perpetuating this culture.

Young people watch of lot of music videos and this culture would have to be having some sort of impact. In this culture women are perpetual strippers and prostitutes. The men being disrespectful arseholes - pimps who are continuously having women throw themselves at them. Young women may think that being sexy and promiscuous are both necessary elements to success. Young men may feel it is okay to be disrespectful and even abusive to the opposite sex.

I think this culture has been allowed to appear as an unexpected consequence of the feminist movement. A counterculture that has gone way out of hand. Many men feel unable to comment about the sexual depiction of women. Men that do have an opinion on the subject are often labelled misogynists, prudes or poofs.

Ultimately, what I am talking about is respect. Everybody is deserving of a certain amount of respect. People also need to be able to respect themselves. Self respect is not a commodity that can be traded away in an effort to earn fame and fortune.

Tecoma McDonalds - Community Conflict and the Internet

An interesting thing that I noticed today was about the infamous Tecoma McDonalds that you have undoubtedly heard about. McDonalds wish to build an outlet in Tecoma - a small town nestled in the foothills of the Dandenong ranges. There have been numerous very vocal protests against the Macdonalds proposal. Often in community arguments like this there is a very vocal minority who is against, a majority who couldn't really care either way and a minority that supports it, but is too apathetic to bother fighting such a passionate crowd.

But then, along comes the Internet. The Internet allows the apathetic group the ability to tell people how they think without getting into a potential physical or verbal confrontation. It is a lot easier to sit at your keyboard, with all the comforts of home, than to walk down the street carrying a placard - those placards can be heavy after a couple of hours.

Now I don’t live in Tecoma and I really know nothing about the debate, I just think it is interesting the way the Internet has changed the nature of this sort of conflict.

There is also a dark side to this, with disinterested pretending to be interested for the sake of trolling. These very vocal minorities are very easy to tease and to troll. It raises the question is a conflict on the Internet a real conflict or a troll? Also does the Internet increase how divided such arguments make communities or lessen it?

We live in interesting times.

Displaying HTML Code On Your Website

Displaying HTML code to your website, as I did in my previous post, can be difficult. If you type in the raw code it could break your website.

Fortunately there is an easy way to do it. Go to this website: www.simplebits.com/cgi-bin/simplecode.pl paste your code into the top box press process, cut 'n paste from the bottom box and you are done!

How to Add an Excerpt of Your Blog Post When Posting a Link on Facebook - Instead of the Blog Description

When I write a blog post I like to put a link on my Facebook page to try to increase visitors. Facebook has a feature where it will grab a brief excerpt off the website you are linking. Unfortunately with blogger, on my blog, it will always grab the description of the blog and not an except of the blog post like I wish it to.

Facebook grabs the first paragraph, this is a piece of text which has the p tag. So all you have to do is to remove the <p> tag around the description and add up a <p> tag around the blog post. This is easier said than done.

Log on to Blogger click template then on edit HTML. Scroll down until you find code like this. It can be extremely difficult to find, it is probably easier to copy it into a text editor and do a search.

<b:includable id='description'>
  <div class='descriptionwrapper'>
    <p class='description'><span><data:description/></span></p>
  </div>
</b:includable>

I edited it removing the <p> tag as you can see below.

<b:includable id='description'>
  <div class='descriptionwrapper'>
    <span class='description'><data:description/></span>
  </div>
</b:includable>

Now all you need to do is find the body, select the jump to widget drop down box and select blog. Code that you need to find could be hidden as Florida likes to collapse the code to make things easier to find - which actually makes everything a lot harder to find. To expand the code you click of those arrows next to the line numbers.

The code should look like this:

<data:post.body/>

Change the code to look like this:

<p><data:post.body/></p>

Warning: Please back up your blog template before doing this. I take no responsibility for your blog gaining sentience and then destroying the human race.

Good Possibilities

This is my last installment of my three part series: Chris Predicts the Future click the link to read it from the start.

There is a looming demographic crisis throughout the Western world with the proportion of working people that pay taxes compared to those of retirement age declining. There just won’t be enough working age people to care for the elderly population. The economic burden will be too much for western economies. I do not believe the solution is large-scale euthanasia. The solution will be robots - lots of robots. Large-scale automation will allow western countries to compete in manufacturing while eliminating the need for large amounts of low paid workers.

These robots could also be used to care for the elderly in a way that they want. Automated cars will drive them around to shopping centres and appointments. Retirement homes may not be necessary for many elderly people. In some cultures the elderly are cared for in the home by relatives. This could be done here with advanced robots taking the place of relatives. This would give the elderly and disabled far greater quality of life and independence. Robots also do not need to be paid after a large initial investment - is this that will save us from economic ruin.

Wide adoption of renewable energy. Solar panels are getting cheaper and cheaper. Soon it will be silly not to have them on your roof. I do not believe it will be long until almost every roof has solar panels attached. The adoption of solar panels may make other forms of renewable energy more palatable with windmills appearing throughout suburbia.

Electric cars. Sooner than you may think electric cars will be commonplace. It will be a while before they can match the range of efficient petrol cars and charging will be a problem on long journeys. But for 99% of journeys this will not be a problem. Electricity is still a hell of a lot cheaper than petrol. With solar panels getting cheaper and more efficient, you could plug your car in and charge it using the solar panels on your work place’s roof. Driving a car could be free. Electric cars also have far fewer moving parts meaning they do not need to be serviced nearly as often. It is for these reasons that electric cars will become increasingly popular.

The industrialisation of space. There are many new space companies out there such as SpaceX. The CEO and founder of SpaceX, Elon Musk, has a goal of making the human race interplanetary. As anybody who has ever heard of an asteroid or a super volcano if the human race is to survive into the distant future we need an insurance policy. The combination of robotic and robotics advanced robotics and additive manufacturing will allow the industrialisation of space. Simply land a spacecraft on an asteroid. Advanced material processors and 3-D printers could to the material of the asteroid to make virtually anything. They can build machines that could harvest the valuable materials on the asteroid and also build a large spacecraft that could transport them to low Earth orbit. These materials could be further processed and used to make space habitats. Earth millionaires would be willing to pay a lot of money for real estate in space with the most incredible view you can possibly imagine.

If we work out how to mass manufacture carbon nanotubes out of asteroid material we could manufacture a space elevator. Carbon nanotubes have the highest tensile strength out of any known substance. It is the only things that could span from the earth’s surface to 36,000 km to geostationary orbit. Such a large object cannot be built from the ground up - instead it will be manufactured in space and gently lowered through Earth’s atmosphere and secured to the surface.Such an elevator would give access to space to anyone can afford a small aircraft journey today. If the human race manages to exploit the vast resources solar system - there is nothing that can stop us.

Back to the present.

Whatever happens, if I am able to successfully predict the future or not, the not too distant future is going to be very interesting. We are all lucky to be alive in this time.

This is my last installment of my three part series: Chris Predicts the Future

Possibilities That Could Go Either Way

This is the second part of my series Chris Predicts the Future!

The collapse of the patent system. Patients are supposed to be used by inventors to protect their inventions and allow them to profit from them. It also allows others to see how the invention works in an effort foster further innovation. The patent system has gone a bit astray of late with some patents never being used to create anything. Instead they are used in litigation in an effort to win court cases against those infringing the so-called patents. There are entire legal firms dedicated to patient litigation - they are called patent trolls. These organisations never create anything, many of their patents are never used to create anything.

Some countries such as China have a poor record of enforcing patents and some Chinese companies have been accused of going through patents and simply stealing inventions - not giving the inventor a single cent.

These problems have led some companies to not use patients at all and instead they have started using secrecy to stop the theft of their ideas.

Large numbers of people have also come to believe that the patents system is immoral that it stifles innovation. They believe that an inventor automatically has a head start and all patents do is hold us back. In a world of additive manufacturing - I believe these people are right.

Many companies will be unable to make the adjustment if the patent system falls. The small-time inventor will thrive without fear that they can develop their inventions, sell them, and not worry about litigation.

New types of government. Many of the technologies that have been developed for the Internet could be used to create new forms of government such as democratic anarchy. In a democratic anarchy anybody is allowed to vote on legislation. This idea has been talked about seriously and explored in science fiction. No one really knows exactly how it would work. It would turn into a tyranny of the majority? Or will form a truly enlightened egalitarian society?

Further into the future the development of artificial intelligence could allow for a truly benevolent dictatorship. With an artificial intelligence making all the difficult decisions, without emotion or popularity coming into it - it would make the best decisions based on science that result in the greatest amount of happiness and well-being for the population. You never know.

Stay tuned for the finale Good Possibilities.

Chris Predicts the Future

The Present

We are living in an incredible time - the accelerating rate technological development is creating a rate of change that is unprecedented in our history.

Just in my short lifetime computers have gone from the playthings of nerds to entering almost every facet of our lives. Everybody carries around what would have been the equivalent of a supercomputer only 15 years previously. People can be contacted from anywhere in the world instantly. Social media has created an entirely new method of communication and even redefined friendship.

Money has gone from being a physical thing to almost entirely electronic. Transactions can be made easily without the need to meet face-to-face. Stock markets have been opened to the masses with anybody who has the will and a bit of spare cash to create their own stock portfolio - buying and selling shares is as easy as clicking a button.

There has also been an explosion in additive manufacturing with 3-D printers being available for anybody who is interested. The maker movement means that a wide array of electronic devices can now be created easily in the home.

We now have robot drones that patrol our skies governments can kill anybody at will with the press of a button. Some governments are also using the enormous power of supercomputers to troll through the data we create.

In this post I will try to predict the future. In these fast changing times this could be difficult. The rate of change will continue to accelerate - this is certain barring a civilisation ending calamity.

I will do my best to predict the future over a series of three blog posts. I will explore evil possibilities first, possibilities that could go either way second and finally good possibilities.

Evil possibilities.

Governments could monopolise the use of robots in combat. The American military industrial complex already has a massive head start in this kind of military technology. This could allow them to enter war with very little risk to human life. This technology can also be used on their own citizens, with drones monitoring the streets for any illicit activity.

With soldiers being replaced by machines governments will no longer need the consent of the people to create large powerful armies. This could be followed by governments no longer believing they need the consent of the people at all. There are a few developments in recent years that I believe signals a possibility of this occurring. The US government refusing to confirm or deny that American citizens on US soil could be the target of assassination by aerial drones. Those who don’t live in the US, of course, could be targeted with impunity. Also the massive collection of personal data, the equivalent of an illegal search in my opinion, is also a worry and at least a breach of the spirit of the American constitution.

The accumulation of robotic weapons by numerous governments makes war more likely. If a government knows they are not going to lose the lives of their own citizens it is politically far easier to go to war. There is also a flipside to this argument. Sometimes it is necessary to go to war to protect people’s lives. If it is easier to go to war evil dictators have a lot more to fear.

There is a slim possibility that we could lose control of the Internet. The Internet is the one thing that could unite the human race and create a far better world - but only if it remains free. In China the Internet is already strictly controlled. They even go so far as to create their own separate versions of massively multiplayer computer games such as Eve Online. Such computer games allow people from across the globe to meet in a completely different environment, to fight and to cooperate. I have met people from vastly different backgrounds and different countries such as Iran. I have met very few from mainland China. If you play a game like this you quickly realise, people are the same no matter what their background.

The Internet is a truly global village a cultural melting pot that may unite the world into one people. In such a world war may be a thing of the past. There are many governments and corporations that are threatened by the Internet, and some of them should be scared. The people that would seek to control the Internet could very well destroy a peaceful future for humanity.

The accumulation of personal data is also something we should be worried about. In a democracy that follows the rule of law it is probably a relatively benign thing. But as those who lived in Nazi Germany or in Egypt this year would tell you - some democracies don’t always remain democratic. A democracy that made the transition to a dictatorship could use all the data they have accumulated to put almost anybody behind bars. Many of us conduct criminal activity, casually smoking marijuana, or downloading Game of Thrones. Some of us have had our picture taken holding large guns. Or maybe even platonically kissing or hugging a member of the same sex. All of these could be used by a dictatorship to lock you up.

Stay tuned for my next installment: Possibilities That Could Go Either Way.