Alcor Excerpt From Tim Leary’s Book

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The story I just blogged about the nano tech talks at the cryonics conference reminded me that Timothy Leary wrote about Alcor in the book I worked on with him (Surfing the Conscious Nets). (Contrary to popular belief, however, Tim did not freeze his remains.)

I went and dug up the reference to Alcor, just for fun. For those of you with a copy of Surfing the Conscious Nets around, it’s on page 16. For the rest of you, I’ve created a scan here:

I’m sure this is OK with both Last Gasp publisher Ron Turner, who is a friend of mine, and would consider it promotion for the book, and Tim Leary himself, because he told me in 1995 that it was his dream to have all of his works freely available online. A dying wish, if you will.
(Yeah, we’re talking everything. So I’m sure he wouldn’t mind a few scans.)

On the bright side of the ledger, John Lilly, Jack Nicholson and Michelle Phillips have escaped with their “souls” intact. So far! Several of the lesser known Gabor sisters, rumor has it, had their pretty heads sliced and diced by Dr. Sidney Cohen’s gang. Elvis Presley? Who knows? Walt Disney? Janis Joplin? Jim Morrison? Just who exactly still lives frozen in blessed hibernation in the re-animation vaults of the Alcor-CryoCare Cryonics Foundation, in Riverside, California, as Jimi Hendrix does? — no thanks to Nick Rogue–all credit to Michael Hollingshead.
Then Andy Warhol started phoning me day and night. Cryonics is all Andy thinks about these days. So he says.

Spam Justice

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Mike Wendland Interviewed bragging spam king Alan Ralsky for the Detriot Free Press. The article got Slashdotted, and then someone on the discussion list got the idea to spam back. (I can’t find the exact thread, but would love to link to it from here.)
Now the Spam King is complaining that…well…that it really sucks to be spammed.
This is a stretch on “spam tech” — more like good old fashioned grass roots organizing in action, but I think it’s interesting that Ralsky doesn’t seem to grasp the irony of the situation.

“They’ve signed me up for every advertising campaign and mailing list there is,” he told me. “These people are out of their minds. They’re harassing me.”
That they are. Gleefully. Almost 300 anti-Ralsky posts were made on the Slashdot.org Web site, where the plan was hatched after spam haters posted his address, even an aerial view of his neighborhood.
“Several tons of snail mail spam every day might just annoy him as much as his spam annoys me,” wrote one of the anti-spammers.
Ralsky is indeed annoyed. He says he’s asked Bloomfield Hills attorney Robert Harrison to sue the anti-spammers.

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It’s A Nano-Crypto-Cryo Love Fest Baby

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Hey man, we’re all just doing the same thing: crunching numbers, creating submolecular-sized robots with organic cell-like properties, using those robots to re-animate the frozen remains of the deceased…

Mark Frauenfelder has written an article for Small Times about the Robert Freitas and
Ralph Merkle talks at
Alcor’s fifth annual Conference on Extreme Life Extension.

Cryonics Conference Brings Out Nanotech’s Extreme Optimists

These nanorobots, Freitas and Merkle believe, could be designed to perform any number of remarkable medical functions. Some could work like superpowered white blood cells that seek out and destroy pathogens. Others could serve as artificial red blood cells, charged with enough oxygen to allow their hosts to hold their breath for up to an hour. Still other nanorobots would repair broken chromosomes, or do a kind of Roto-Rooter on clogged arteries…

The presentations were greeted with enthusiasm by conference attendees, many of whom are members of Alcor, an Arizona-based organization that freezes its recently deceased members in liquid nitrogen in the hopes that they

New Post-Singularity Fiction From Sci-Fi’s Dynamic Duo

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Charlie Stross and Cory Doctorow have written a short story (being published on four parts) that’s already considered a classic in my mind.
I’ve already read the whole thing, and I can’t imagine reading this story in pieces — so I’ll re-blog accordingly after all four pieces are up.
I don’t want to make any more comments about the subject matter so as not to risk giving any of the story away, but let’s just say that since reading this story, I think about meatspace a lot differently now.
I whole heartedly recommend taking ten minutes to treat yourself to a little glimpse of one possible future.
In many ways, we’re already there…Jury Service

Welcome to the fractured future, at the dusk of the twenty-first century.
Earth has a population of roughly a billion hominids. For the most part, they are happy with their lot, living in a preserve at the bottom of a gravity well. Those who are unhappy have emigrated, joining one or another of the swarming densethinker clades that fog the inner solar system with a dust of molecular machinery so thick that it obscures the sun. Except for the solitary lighthouse beam that perpetually tracks the Earth in its orbit, the system from outside resembles a spherical fogbank radiating in the infrared spectrum; a matrioshka brain, nested Dyson orbitals built from the dismantled bones of moons and planets.
The splintery metaconsciousness of the solar-system has largely sworn off its pre-post-human cousins dirtside, but its minds sometimes wander nostalgiawise. When that happens, it casually spams Earth’s RF spectrum with plans for cataclysmically disruptive technologies that emulsify whole industries, cultures, and spiritual systems.
A sane species would ignore these get-evolved-quick schemes, but there’s always someone who’ll take a bite from the forbidden Cox Pippin. There’s always someone whom evolution has failed to breed the let’s-lick-the-frozen-fencepost instinct out of. There’s always a fucking geek who’ll do it because it’s a historical goddamned technical fucking imperative.
Whether the enlightened, occulting smartcloud sends out its missives as pranks, poison or care-packages is up for debate. Asking it to explain its motives is roughly as pointful as negotiating with an ant colony to get it to abandon your kitchen. Whatever the motive, humanity would be much better off if the Cloud would evolve into something so smart as to be uninterested in communicating with meatpeople.
But until that happy day, there’s the tech jury service: defending the earth from the scum of the post-singularity patent office.

Video Footage of Nancy Pelosi’s Celebration Party

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I finally finished transcribing the speeches and organizing my video footage from Nancy Pelosi’s Celebration Party on November 23, 2002 in San Francisco, California.

I say to people “you can take any issue or you can take any day of the week, and there is a case to be made against the Republicans.” But let’s just take yesterday.

Yesterday, Congress adjourned without passing unemployment benefits for Americas workers — who worked hard, played by the rules, lost their jobs through no fault of their own but because of the downturn in the economy.

On December 28, 800,000 hard working Americans will no longer have their benefits because the Republicans refused to pass that. There was even a compromise from the Senate, which we still controlled up until yesterday, that said: ‘Let’s extend the benefits until February at least to give people a chance past the holidays and the rest.’ They absolutely refused.

The Democrats said ‘We’re going to hold up the adjournment of Congress so that we cannot leave until you pass these benefits.’ They said ‘you can bring the Congress back here every single day from now on. We’re never going to pass those benefits.’ That’s who the Republicans in Congress are…insensitive to the concerns of working families in America.”

For The Most Part, Colleges Remember That Education Comes First

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How nice to see during this current frenzy of copyright vigilantism.
Students Learning to Evade Moves to Protect Media Files
By Amy Harmon for the NY Times.

Nor does Cornell consider the trading of copyrighted music files to be among the more serious infractions. Students are typically required to perform a few hours of community service.
“It’s theft and you’re not supposed to steal, but this is different from someone engaging in credit card scams or breaking into a building to steal a computer,” Ms. Grant said. “We’re not in the business of trying to punish a student; we want them to learn from their mistake.”
Indeed, the push from copyright holders for universities to police their networks has raised questions in the academic world about how to instill students with a sense of morality

More On The Homeland Security Act

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Taking Liberties With Our Freedom
By Lauren Weinstein for Wired News.

Law enforcement interests pushed through a variety of surveillance measures, including some unrelated to terrorism, that had long been rejected as inappropriate in a free society.
Important protections related to monitoring and intelligence gathering, established after serious past abuses, were swept away with the assurance that this time the government won’t abuse its powers.
Among various alarming provisions, the law opens up enormous avenues for monitoring Internet communications, without even after-the-fact notifications. Virtually any government agency at any level can initiate surveillance on flimsy grounds. No subpoenas or court oversight are required.
Not to be left off the gravy train, big business also pushed through its own grab bag of perks in the new legislation.
One of the most egregious and potentially dangerous of these travesties is the Homeland Security Act’s creation of new and very broad exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act.
Businesses now have a new way to evade liability for safety violations, hazards to consumers and other abuses. They need merely report the information about their behavior — even totally unclassified activities — to the federal government, and claim it’s related to homeland security. In the parlance of the Homeland Security Act, they declare the data to be “CII,” or Critical Infrastructure Information.
Instantly, the company filing drops that information into a black hole of secrecy, hidden from public view. If a government employee releases any such data without the permission of the company that submitted it, regardless of its importance to the public, they could be subject to jail time.
That’s potentially a major blow to the government’s regulation of corporate misdeeds, since it’s often not until such abuses become publicly known that officials take steps to deal with them properly. As long as there’s cover, the urge to let sleeping dogs lie is strong indeed.
Ironically, the existing statute, the Freedom of Information Act, already had exceptions for information that truly needed to be kept private. The new homeland security law goes much farther, creating a magic rubber stamp that can make a host of problems disappear from the public radar.
The dangers of the new restrictions extend beyond obvious infrastructure risks related to power, water, manufacturing, pollution and the like. They could also strike to the heart of the computer industry and Internet as well.
By invoking the exemptions of the Homeland Security Act, software and computer hardware companies could hide the existence of critical security flaws or other bugs, claiming (with a familiar refrain) that letting anyone know about them was just too big a risk.

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Ms. Magazine Blogs The Radar

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Yes I am getting a kick out of this. Thanks for asking:
Ms. Musings

She is wary of generalizations, however, admitting that many women, such as Leslie Veen, Lisa Rein, and Lynne Kiesling, are writing about current political, legal and economic issues. Guernsey, in fact, sees her own blogging about technology as

Some Constructive Suggestions Towards Stopping Identity Theft

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Here’s a nice article about the subject that isn’t just trying to scare you, and actually tries to answer the question “What can really be done about it?”:
Some Simple Solutions to Identity Theft
Credit agencies must be more vigilant. A first step: quickly and routinely alerting consumers that their credit histories have changed
By Alex Salkever for BusinessWeek.

Most of the damage could easily have been prevented if the credit agencies adopted the common-sense practice of directly notifying individuals whenever a change on his or her report occurs, and whenever a third party accesses their credit report. Yes, it might cost the credit agencies more in overhead. But credit agencies spread such costs around to customers, banks, car dealerships, and others that pay to access consumer credit ratings. How hard is that?
This criminal case has many security experts worried because it points up some glaring weaknesses in credit reporting. Your credit information — in effect, your financial identity — can easily be stolen by alert thieves with access to sensitive information. Yet, credit agencies don’t share with individuals what’s going on with their credit reports — unless consumers ask. This anomaly will become a national economic issue as identity theft grows.

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