Sirius editorial

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Because of the timely reminder of James Hughes on wta-talk about R. U. Sirius's new H+ magazine, and the recent headaches over the Wikipedia transhumanism article, this page has been thrown up to get suggestions or content to integrate into an editorial to get into Sirius' magazine. The idea here is to avoid the POV bias that we see on Wikipedia, and instead inform on current tech, trends, the Big Picture Ideas, plus lots of references. Personally, I'd like to avoid an ethics section except for a later portion. I don't mean to censor it, but rather to focus on the positive developments throughout the internet and in the end provide a trail for their own ethical explorations - to various websites (universalimmortalism is a new one, then there's imminst, fuckdeath, bio-ethics sites like the european synbio-econference thing, and so on).

[edit] General outline or talking points to include

These are just some options to pick from that can get people interested in what's going on.

month before that. I was mentioning that I join a few guys in #hplusroadmap on irc.freenode.net (see irchelp.org for information on getting on IRC). Also, there's some discussion on the hplusroadmap mailing list, accessible through biohack.sf.net or from heybryan.org, either way. Now on to the actual issues at hand. So, debian. It's one of the older linux distribution projects. Linux, the kernel, doesn't entirely make up an operating system, there needs to be other tools. So most projects then go pair up with GNU tools (gnu.org) and then go add in some configuration details, etc. Wikipedia on debian: "Debian is known for strict adherence to the Unix and free software philosophies. Debian is also known for its abundance of options — the current release includes over twenty-six thousand software packages for eleven computer architectures. These architectures range from the Intel/AMD 32-bit/64-bit architectures commonly found in personal computers to the ARM architecture commonly found in embedded systems and the IBM eServer zSeries mainframes. Throughout Debian's lifetime, other distributions have taken it as a basis to develop their own, including: Ubuntu, MEPIS, Dreamlinux, Damn Small Linux, Xandros, Knoppix, Linspire, sidux, Kanotix, and LinEx among others. A university's study concluded that Debian's 283 million source code lines would cost 10 billion USA Dollars to develop by proprietary means." Knoppix is a good option, it's a Live CD, meaning you download the ISO file, burn the image to the CD, put the CD in the drive, turn off the computer, and boot from the CD -- nothing on the hard drive is edited -- allowing you to test out knoppix (which is sufficiently similar to debian for starters). In truth, ubuntu is the more popular live cd these days, especially ever since they got some serious funding from a philanthropist [I forget his name]. "Ubuntu's popularity has climbed steadily since its 2004 release. It has been the most viewed Linux distribution on Distrowatch.com in 2005,[4] 2006,[5] In an August 2007 survey of 38,500 visitors on DesktopLinux.com, Ubuntu was the most popular distribution with 30.3 percent of respondents using it.[7] Third party sites have arisen to provide Ubuntu packages outside of the Ubuntu organization. Ubuntu was awarded the Reader Award for best Linux distribution at the 2005 LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in London.[107] It has been favorably reviewed in online and print publications.[108][109][110] Ubuntu won InfoWorld's 2007 Bossie Award for Best Open Source Client OS.[111] Mark Shuttleworth indicates that there were at least 8 million Ubuntu users at the end of 2006.[112] The large user-base has resulted in a large stable of non-Canonical websites. These include general help sites like Easy Ubuntu Linux,[113] dedicated weblogs (Ubuntu Gazette),[114] and niche sites within the Ubuntu Linux niche itself (Ubuntu Women).[115] The year 2007 saw the online publication of the first magazine dedicated to Ubuntu, Full Circle.[116]" Anyway, what makes this all so popular? Social aggregation. The apt-get command line program (which has GUI equivalents like synaptic, aptitude (ncurses, not true gtk/qt GUI)) allows users to immediately install software, of any name, from any developer that got the package into the main repositories (if not, you have to add a line to install from a certain foreign repository into /etc/apt/sources.list (a file)). This means that usually, within learning of a new software package, you can be using it within 10 seconds, uness it's something horrendously large -- the firefox source code took me a few hours to download once, it was 130 MB, despite the installation from apt-get install taking only 30 sec (10 MB download, IIRC). Compiled code is much more compact, of course. And firefox/mozilla is a beast anyway, not a good example in retrospect. So, the usual structure of open source projects is to have a revision control system, programmers and others drop files into the repo to play around with, and then periodically releases are made for those who don't know how to compile programs and so on, sometimes the packaging and compling is automated ("nightly builds" - there are thousands of firefox users that download new versions every night and test them for bugs, as an example). And this is all asynchronous, distributed, not centralized except in as much we all share the same DNS servers and thus, theoretically, can follow all of the links on the web to find any other age (the "visible web" upon which Google makes its 'money' (by selling its services for free? hehe)). I have not *ever* seen a group of people that focus on getting programmers introduced into the social circles of open source developers, how to adopt the tools to getthings done, etc. So a large part of the issue might be social, in that sense. Dunno. Lots of people (me?) seem to have been able to figure things out [to some extent] by randomly clicking around the web until some internal coherence, directionality, developed -- and it turns out I might just know what others are talking about from time to time (hurray, all the better). -- Kanzure 13:44, 9 May 2008 (CDT)


  • nanotech, biotech, neurotech (IF prize), space tech (von Neumann Award, N prize, space colony design competition, Google Lunar X Prize, the general X Prize, etc.),

[edit] Target audiences

[edit] Motivation


Another thread:


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