Author: m1k3y

In order to bring broadband to the moon, scientists used four separate telescopes based in New Mexico to send an uplink signal to a receiver mounted on a satellite orbiting the moon. Each telescope is about 6 inches in diameter and is fed by a laser transmitter that beams information in coded pulses of infrared light.

Since our atmosphere bends the signal as it travels to the moon, the four telescopes transmit the light through different columns of air, each with different bending effects. This setup increases the chance that at least one of the laser beams will interact with the receiver, and establish a connection with the moon.

And if you’re fixing to binge on Netflix on the moon, the connection isn’t too bad, either. Scientists managed to send data from Earth to the moon at a rate of 19.44 megabits per second — on par with slower broadband speeds — and could download information from the moon at a rate of whopping 622 megabits per second. According to Wired UK, that’s over 4,000 times faster than current radio transmission speeds.

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wolvensnothere:

a-b-c-demise:

after we go extinct, nature will reconquer the earth.

Depends on how we go extinct, and what you mean by “nature.” Venus is also “natural” but that way lies an antiseptic, brutally extreme planet with not a drop of life on it.

People, lots of things are natural.

Cf. My thesis: http://scholarworks.gsu.edu/philosophy_theses/37/

And this project: https://www.inkshares.com/projects/techne-investigating-the-state-of-the-art

LOTS of things are natural.

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First of all it’s clear that after 70 years without war in the West, we are no longer aware of the danger posed by the government’s file cabinets. The censuses, the raids, and the killing of communists, homosexuals, the mentally ill, gypsies and Jews would today be facilitated by a tool a thousand times more tragically effective and finely tuned than those available back in 1940. But very few people truly realize this because they did not live through the war. What are the Chinese or Korean dictatorships doing on this subject, the Russian crypto-dictatorship, the Israeli police state so prodigiously equipped to track any Arab dissent? We turn our heads away so as not to see. OK. There are two possible reactions (ignorance, detachment), but both undoubtedly miss the essential point of our acceptance of the worst.

Here I’d like to venture a hypothesis; actually a thesis. This thesis would be the following: the delicate web of surveillance on citizen-customers by those who govern us “vertically” (State powers as well as the liberal powers held by multinationals on the internet) is so amazingly tolerated because it is anchored, “horizontally” in the social practices of mutual checks that occur daily, are familiar, and have become natural. In other words, the NSA sprouts from a social soil that has made self control, control of others and control of the world through technology, proof of a bond, an ethos, a way of life. The stem grows from the rhizomes.

I control myself, you control me, we control ourselves, they control us. Surveillance, management and control become fractalized so that between the mother who sneaks onto the Facebook account of her daughter, the employer who scans the flaws of a job applicant on the web, the husband who reads his wife’s SMS messages and looks at her credit card bills, the retiree who monitors his vacation home with a webcam connected to a motion detector, and the NSA, all the way on top, which runs surveillance on Alcatel, Merkel, J. Schmoe, and Strauss-Kahn. Between all these there is one recurring theme, the same sordid twist, the same economy of desire focused on prevention, fear, and the total control over anything that can surprise, can divert, and can live.

This morning, January 8, 2014, a Palestinian was killed by an Israeli drone, at distance, “cleanly”. Cameras are put in Teddy Bears to reassure parents. Babysitters and our empty houses are filmed. Our cell phones are triangulated, our travels are synchronized, our breathing space is restricted. We put tracking devices in our shoes, toll passes in our pockets because we are in flux, and microchips in the ears of our cats, our dogs and our sheep. The trees in Paris are barcoded. They can remotely hack into the braking system of a car, into a pacemaker in a beating heart. They can disrupt a GPS so that you get lost, activate the webcam on your computer, listen in around you with your smartphone. They manufacture the Xbox One which can constantly monitor your game room, can know which movies you watch, can know which games you play, can know how many people are on your couch, and can measure the volume and the light that enters. These features were quickly removed after facing an outcry that Microsoft never anticipated given that the logic of control has become so natural.

The truth is that we are being mithridatized. We are becoming dangerously acclimated to this subtle poison ingested daily, to this new form of an intimate grip of control and the extensive power that Deleuze diagnosed back in 1990 as our entry into the Societies of Control; and under this yoke we are being gently twisted. The truth is that this control is no longer simply placed and received. It is no longer simply imposed contemptuously, in the form of a pyramid of discipline, which falls upon us, the sad victims of the panoptic powers of the State, of Capital and of Mafias – inciting by its alienating grip strength, resistance, and revolts. No, it’s much better than that.

This desire to control, this impulse towards surveillance and frantic security now runs through each of every one of us. It takes shape and wires itself into our nerves. Everyone becomes the relay, the peddler, the exchanges are made with joy and fear. Everyone gets off on playing their roles as cops, all-powerful bosses, or low-life voyeurs. You control your house, your car, your purchases. He scans his wife’s emails, tracks his daughter with geolocation, and limits the duration of his son’s internet connection. She checks her pulse, controls her blood pressure, counts her calories, and her steps. You filter your calls, track down your ex on Facebook, Google the chick you met at the bar yesterday rather than letting her reveal as much as she wants you to know. And you are offered all the personal and idle tools for that; all the apps; all the flashy hardware for geeks with just a click of a mouse and a beep.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2014/01/alain-damasio-nsa-701000-hours-custody.html
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Yeon-mi Park: The hopes of North Korea’s ‘Black Market Generation’

The second characteristic: Our Black Market Generation has had wide access to outside media and information. The private market has provided more than food and clothing — it has also provided TVs, bootleg South Korean movies and K-pop videos, USBs and DVDs. As a girl in North Korea, I saw “Titanic,” “Cinderella,” “Pretty Woman” and “Snow White” — not to mention WWE wrestling.

As American philosopher Eric Hoffer wrote: “It is not actual suffering but a taste of better things which excites people to revolt.”

Yeon-mi Park: The hopes of North Korea’s ‘Black Market Generation’

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Watch Dogs takes a great idea and bludgeons it with normality · Game Review · The A.V. Club

An all-seeing Internet is a potent specter because it threatens to enforce normality. Risk, weirdness, lawbreaking—all the mutations that fitfully evolve society’s DNA—are more dangerous in a world where every choice you make is watched and therefore has the potential to define you. Yet the residents of the ctOS-blanketed Chicago don’t care. Most of the time, when you eavesdrop on someone, you find them breaking the law, or engaging in some low-level sexual perversion, or mistreating a woman somehow. (Once again, developers fill in the cracks with misogyny, the game industry’s storytelling spackle.) The people you observe also say “fuck” and “shit” a lot; the latter profanity seems to have replaced the comma in the English parlance of Watch Dogs’s future. In essence, the Chicagoans of the game embody a 12-year-old boy’s idea of what people do behind closed doors. They don’t behave like the subjects of an ominous technological overseer.

Watch Dogs takes a great idea and bludgeons it with normality · Game Review · The A.V. Club

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Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW: Gore] — The Airship

“
m1k3y, who has no lack of speculation about possible societal collapses, admits he considers the neoreactionaries’ goals and “can’t imagine anything more terrible.”

As for his own vision, beyond magnets and garage science, the sky’s the limit:
“Saving the world as penance for the sins our fathers, building a life worth being near immortal in, then exploring the galaxy. It’s a plan.”
”

Interview we did late last year finally went live. I said a few things.

Grinders: Tomorrow’s Cyberpunks are Here Today [NSFW: Gore] — The Airship

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Nearly twice as tall as Mount Everest, Arsia Mons is the third tallest volcano on Mars and one of the largest mountains in the solar system. This new analysis of the landforms surrounding Arsia Mons shows that eruptions along the volcano’s northwest flank happened at the same time that a glacier covered the region around 210 million years ago. The heat from those eruptions would have melted massive amounts of ice to form englacial lakes — bodies of water that form within glaciers like liquid bubbles in a half-frozen ice cube.

The ice-covered lakes of Arsia Mons would have held hundreds of cubic kilometers of meltwater, according to calculations by Kat Scanlon, a graduate student at Brown who led the work. And where there’s water, there’s the possibility of a habitable environment.

“This is interesting because it’s a way to get a lot of liquid water very recently on Mars,” Scanlon said.

While 210 million years ago might not sound terribly recent, the Arsia Mons site is much younger than the habitable environments turned up by Curiosity and other Mars rovers. Those sites are all likely older than 2.5 billion years. The fact that the Arsia Mons site is relatively young makes it an interesting target for possible future exploration.

“If signs of past life are ever found at those older sites, then Arsia Mons would be the next place I would want to go,” Scanlon said

Based on the sizes of the formations, Scanlon could estimate how much lava would have interacted with the glacier. Using basic thermodynamics, she could then calculate how much meltwater that lava would produce. She found that two of the deposits would have created lakes containing around 40 cubic kilometers of water each. That’s almost a third of the volume of Lake Tahoe in each lake. Another of the formations would have created around 20 cubic kilometers of water.

Even in the frigid conditions of Mars, that much ice-covered water would have remained liquid for a substantial period of time. Scanlon’s back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests the lakes could have persisted or hundreds or even a few thousand years.

That may have been long enough for the lakes to be colonized by microbial life forms, if in fact such creatures ever inhabited Mars.

“There’s been a lot of work on Earth — though not as much as we would like — on the types of microbes that live in these englacial lakes,” Scanlon said. “They’ve been studied mainly as an analog to [Saturn’s moon] Europa, where you’ve got an entire planet that’s an ice covered lake.”

In light of this research, it seems possible that those same kinds of environs existed on Mars at this site in the relatively recent past.

There’s also possibility, Head points out, that some of that glacial ice may still be there. “Remnant craters and ridges strongly suggest that some of the glacial ice remains buried below rock and soil debris,” he said. “That’s interesting from a scientific point of view because it likely preserves in tiny bubbles a record of the atmosphere of Mars hundreds of millions of years ago. But an existing ice deposit might also be an exploitable water source for future human exploration.”

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