At 12:40 AM 4/13/00 -0500, you wrote: >Currently 'interesting' things going on, > > >- In the middle of last year two seperate biological fuel cells > were announced. Both in research stages and about 2-5 years from > market. Any URLs to these? >- With the recent announcement that 'justification' of IP usage > will now be required does this impact the potential for > indy name servers? Does this bode well for services such as > orange.net (commercial)? What about Open Source servers? An > attempt to manage centraly the fundamental identity mechanism of > the global internet is surely worth some Cypherpunks time? It > after all has at least as fundamental aspect of civil rights > as recognising source code as speech. Distributed servers systems, such as FreeNet, could become an effective end run around the restrictions of ICANN, WTO and their ilk. >- It is currently still illegal to use cryptographicaly secured > communications over the air-waves for amateurs. How is this > constitutional? What would it mean if individuals could put > their own private cryptographicaly secure tone-decoded > packet system in for a few hundred dollars? What would be the > impact on conventional communications systems? Would neighborhood > repeaters privately funded be feasible? How might one approach > an Open Source project with such a goal in mind? When I worked at Cylink in the mid-90s I tried to build industry interest in a spread-spectrum distributed cordless phone system. Unfortunately, everybody of importance was busy on 802.11 and VoIP was a pipedream. It seems feasible today to consider Bluetooth-based cordless handsets which do soft handoffs between base stations (your or someone else's) use MobileIP technology and a IP phone service (e.g., DialPad) which enables free IP to PSTN and IP to IP calls. The handset's 'registered' base station tracks which current base station is hosting it. Incoming calls from the PSTN are converted to VoIP and relayed to the hosting base, as are incoming VoIP connections. Outgoing calls are placed using VoIP and the free service, incurring no direct costs to the hosting base owner, except of course that their base station and its wireless link are engaged (assuming it supports only one wireless link). If the host base station owner wants to use their base they can interrupt the 'guest' at any time forcing the guest handset to switch to another base (assuming that there was available). If no alternate base is available then the call is dropped, a not too unusual occurrence to cellular users. >- Richard Garriot (Lord British) announced his retirement from > game design and will focus his attention on purchasing rides > into space. There is currently an attempt by at least two > groups to be first in reaching LEO. What does it mean to > transportation and exploration of the local Earth area over the > next couple of hundred years? How does this change when one > includes distributed power and support services coupled with > 200 - 300 life spans? NASA has collected quite a library of > Near Earth Objects and Earth Crossing Asteroids. Couple this > with Robert L. Forwards 'rotovator' and laser lift systems > (potentialy $1000/lb to LEO & $2-5B for initial start-up) and one > potentialy sees a new horizon of expansion. > > Does it seem reasonable that these groups will adopt centralised > authority mechanisms? Could it be that governments are nothing > more than a function of a gravity well and a Gaian ecology and > that synonymous with space technology is a support technology > that allows humans to exist collectively but individualy? > > What sorts of societies might be ameniable to life on a Earth > Crossing Asteroid. Is something like Zebrowski's "Brute Orbits" > or Mixon's "Proxies" reasonable? What might it take to create > a business of raw resource collection and delivery? Would > such an economy be more ameniable to cryptographicaly secured > mechanism verus a planet side economy? Isn't a key factor the > distance over speed issue? It means we may get to see L. Neil Smith's "Pallas" sooner than some thought. --Steve
