We have a credo around here: The future will be better.

headline::::popsci

As it turns out, the end is not near after all. While you can’t keep a good doomsday rumor down, NASA Senior Scientist David Morrison is trying to dispel widely circulated rumors that cosmic events will lead to the end of life on Earth, if not outright destroy the planet, on Dec. 21, 2012.///popsci

“If it works, we will have built the most complex machine in history,” said one. “If not, we will have assembled the world’s most expensive piece of modern art.”///guardian//Second chance for Large Hadron Collider to deliver universe’s secrets

. “As the sensors associated with the various surveillance missions improve,” says the report, referring to a variety of technical collection methods, “the data volumes are increasing with a projection that sensor data volume could potentially increase to the level of Yottabytes (10²⁴ Bytes) by 2015.”//James Bamford/nybooks.com:who is in big brothers database

uTorrent 2.0, which is currently being tested by thousands of people, will eliminate the need for ISPs to throttle or stop BitTorrent traffic, and will optimize the download experience for its users.//torrentfreak

15 Free Guides That Really Teach You USEFUL Stuff

Aktuelle Hardware

“MARTIAL LAW AREA. ILLEGAL ALIENS
LIABLE TO BE SHOT BY ORDER U.S. SUPREME COURT.”

The Mark-13’s are in mass production. The US government is employing them to patrol the US-Mexican border and deal with illegal aliens.

Droids don’t kill people, people kill people, they’re very much an extension of state policy. But if you meet the video games fans who run the droids, they’re probably pretty approachable!//RS

Hardware 2: Ground Zero, the unproduced sequel to Hardware

Nachdem kürzlich eine britische Special Editon des Sci-Fi-Horrorfilms “M.A.R.K. 13 – Hardware” erschien, folgt nun auch eine deutsche Neuauflage//wicked-vision

Out of your head: Leaving the body behind

::::::

Mac Tonnies makes the internet more strange

Than it already is. That’s quite a feat!

But he’s an eye for signs of hoped-for change,

For beautiful decay, for all that’s neat.

Just an indescribable loss

Mac Tonnies was 34.

Mac Tonnies was found in his apartment on October 22, 2009, what a tremendous loss.

Mac wurde am letzen Donnerstag tot in seiner Wohnung aufgefunden. Er starb anscheinend eines natürlichen Todes.//kp

Ich vermisse dich schon heute

Fearless Futurist Mac Tonnies Goes Off On Mars

The prodigious blogger was a fixture of the online esoteric community

a rising intellectual presence in Fortean thought

Mac was a great thinker and a thoughtful individual. He was a person with much to say and who had the skills to say it, too.

Whip-smart young Fortean surrealist dudes are too thin on the ground to begin with.

Mac appreciates thought-provoking literature, weird and/or subversive ideas, and bleeding-edge art and science.

Mac was a thoroughly decent and sensitive guy, and an unflinching contrarian thinker

some degree of comfort that such a person existed

We’ve blundered into an existential interzone of instantaneous wireless communication, blogs, Mars probes, big-box stores, freak weather, artificial life, and high-tech warfare. Whatever emerges from this will be something significantly new, maybe even ‘postsingular’. Ultimately, I wonder if we really want free will. Is it worth the effort? Considering how accustomed we’ve become to a numbed, automated existence, the phenomenon of consciousness could be on the brink of fading out or becoming vestigial.//MT

Mac suggested that UFO sightings are the visible incursion into our universe of intelligences that inhabit an existence of pure information–what I call the “symbolic realm”–a non-space and time bound dimension. This would explain the strange nature of many encounters and our seemingly futile efforts to comprehend them.//radiomisterioso

We boldly speculate about the potential of mind-uploading and the promise of designer bodies. We plunge forever deeper in to the resplendent weave of our own genome, shuffling molecules with Frankensteinian resolve. The Grays might be projections from our own future: imaginal constructs so heavily freighted with our own unresolved anxieties that they’ve become effectively palpable.//MT

Ultimately, we have two options: self-mutate by venturing off-planet in minds and bodies of our own design, or succumb to extinction.

Mac’s light, which burned brightly, but for far too short a time, will never go out.

There is no reason my self-pattern cannot be synthesized, reconstituted, modified, relayed through space in the form of modulated radio waves or laser pulses, hacked, distributed as freeware to denizens of some future Internet, or uploaded to artificial bodies that may or may not resemble my present meatware incarnation. Electronic communications activists proclaim that “information wants to be free.” So do I. I speak from experience.//MT

For long hours she immersed herself in the sheer amniotic newness of her body, aware of its patient coagulation, its inexorable stiffening into something that, ultimately, would serve her in her new life. The gloved hands of the biotechnicians slowly receded and she found herself in succulent darkness, a creature of transition.//MT

blip.fm/Macbot