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I'm a third year Furniture Design student at the Rhode Island School of Design. I previously spent three years attending the Kansas City Art Institute, majoring in sculpture. I transfered to RISD shortly before graduating, finding a need to explore more challenge. In attending the furniture department of RISD, I am finding it more and more difficult to experiment with new materials, and even some traditional materials, because of cost. I work primarily in wood and metals, however I'm beginning to branch into solar energy and fiber optic lighting. I have written to many manufacturers of these technologies asking for donations, but very few reply (none with optimism). I have one year left in this department after this semester ('02). The struggle of finances and material will be pushed, however, it's unfortunate when things that can happen won't silmply because the material is not there. Thank You

My name is Oleg Kaganovich, and I am a second year grad student at Columbia Business School. While my primary career is focused on technology and venture capital, I have always been fascinated by nanotech, and would enjoy both learning from what everyone has to say, along with adding my own thoughts when the opportunity allowed. As I am a student in the last stretch of grad school, paying to become an associate (this year) is not a feasible option. Nevertheless, by this time next year, I look forward to applying for full-paying associate status. Thank you.

I am an undergraduate physics student at UCLA and I would like to apply for the fee waiver to the Sr. Assoc. Gathering in Palo Alto. I don't have the financial resources to become a senior associate, but I would if I could. I'm not sure what I could contribute to the gathering technically as I am just starting my second year, but I would certainly enjoy a chance to meet some of the people that I have been reading about. I read the Foresight updates, nanodot, nanozine, and am a regular poster on sci.nanotech. I believe that nanotech will change the world and the "human condition" both of which I am anxious to escape by some other means then dying, IE major augmentation and/or uploading, and space travel. I would be very interested to find out about how far along we are now from some of the "insiders" in the field and what their thoughts are about things like assemblers, medicine, nanocomputers, AI, etc. I would like to be able to meet other people who are transhumanists, extropians, or nanotech people, people who think about the singularity and nanotech and it's impact on our lives and what we can do to make a nice world in which to spend our millennia. Sincerely, Max Comess

Hello, my name is Alex Future Bokov. I am a cell and molecular biology student at the University of Michigan. I've started TransDot, helped start ExtroDot, administer the TransEast and transhuman@logrus.org mailing lists, and am working on a number of other online community and online collaboration projects both professionally and as a matter of personal interest.

Thanks for clarifying 'gift culture' for me, Mr Bruns. -"Lee"

"Open source makes eventually come a lot sooner."

*cough*Mozilla*cough*

Open source is not a panacea. Don't make it into a religion. Linux is dangerously close to becoming one.

Actually, let's talk about the nukes. So far, our anti-nuke tactics fall into two categories:

1. Have more bombs, scare the other guy.
2. Shoot down the missiles.

I think the first of the two we can safely ignore. Mutually Assured Destruction is not really a defense so much as a scare tactic.

Shooting down oncoming missiles is where we can concentrate this inquiry. Open source doesn't make this kind of problem any easier. Many of the components of the missile tracking-and-neutralizing problem are already "open sourced" in the sense that they are problems that have been worked on for a long time, not under the DoD. These are things like anticipation, recognition, tracking, and so forth. They'll show up in robotics work, facial recognition, pretty much everywhere. Being "open source" has not helped out our nuclear defenses.

Let's now turn to guns and Kevlar. Well, you don't really need much of an insight into guns to figure out that you need a bulletproof vest, you just have to design one properly. That problem was "open source" in that the information relating to the problem was open to all comers. How long did it take to solve that again?

HIV, while not a weapon (unless you're a conspiracy nut like the other guy on this thread), is pretty much the same problem. Here we have all the info on this problem, open sourced to everyone. Where's our solution?

Open source does not instantly guarantee an answer, it doesn't even guarantee that there will be an answer. It is not a "one-size-fits-all" solution to any problem.

All "open-sourcing" nanotech will do is to up the general arms race. We had guns, so they had to have guns. Then Kelvar vests. Then someone else develops copkiller bullets. They got bombs, so we have to get bombs. Then we start up with SCUDs. Open source has not exactly calmed down the arms race.

Ahh, but open source makes eventually come a lot sooner. For example, it can take years for bugs and security holes to get fixed in proprietary OSes (if they ever get fixed!), yet most open source OSes fix bugs and (esp.) security holes in a matter of hours and, at the worst, days. Most of the long standing bugs in open source projects have to do with dealing with proprietary hardware/software. With prorietary nanotech, it could still take years before nanodefense is available, just as it took years for bullet proof vest to develop and is still taking a long time to come up with some kind of nuclear defense system other than moving everything underground, providing renewable resources, et al.. If nuclear defense were opened up to day to the average scientist (even undergrads) rather than held tightly by the reigns of the government and defense corporations that occasionally call on academica when they hit a really tough problem, we would probably already be safe enough that it would take millions of missles and very rare computer computation glitch for one to get through. In the same way, with open source nanotech we would probably have defenses for terror goo (and just about any other goo) within a matter of hours, if lots of people became good at programming nanobots and had home nanofabs. If the skills of the people who read BugTraq were directed towards nanotech, the world would be safe from just about any kind of goo.

You keep ignoring my main points.

• Timing: The defense will be developed long after the weapon. This is a classic pattern. Currently, we don't even have an effective nuclear defense. It took centuries to get a Kevlar vest after guns were made. In that period between development of the offense and development of the defense, which will be years, we are totally and utterly vulnerable to complete annihilation. It's just that simple.
• Non-publishing: The more information people have about how to make it, the faster the terror goo will be developed. Think of the Rosenbergs and the nuclear bomb. As soon as they gave the secret to the USSR, bombs popped up there. As the secret has filtered out (mostly due to the cash-poor ex-USSR members selling secrets and technology for quick money), more countries have developed nukes (India, Pakistan, with Iraq just itching for the capability). And you don't have to just lay out the blueprints to terror goo. Any sufficiently detailed and documented "source code" to an assembler will give any skilled recipient absolute license to make anything they want, however malign. It has always been easier to destroy than to create, and, if you think open sourcing will allow for quicker defenses, see the "timing problem" above.

Think of Alfred Nobel. He felt so guilty that he had to come up with the Nobel Prize. Think Oppenheimer, "I have become Shiva, destroyer of worlds." When gunpowder was first invented, people weren't using it for thoughtful construction projects: it was wasted on firecrackers and quickly made into guns, defenses for which evolved much, much later.

Until someone can solve the timing problem, stating that "we'll just have nanotech defenses" reveals ignorance of the history of the impacts of each and every Janus-faced scientific development that has the potential for destruction and creation. With previous developments, the Timing Problem could almost be ignored. "So a few people die," or "so a few villages die," or, with nukes, "so we irradiate 100 square kilometers of land." "We will figure out a defense eventually." With nanotech, we may not have that "eventually."

I can see where you are comming from, but there is something you seem to be forgetting: some of those "Good Guys" happen to be in the defense business (which generally means some weapons are going to be made). Maybe we won't make them here in America, but why wouldn't some Iraqi 'defense' corporation license rights to certain kinds of nanotech and then use this to build terror goo and brown goo (I not going to refere to grey goo in this sense since I consider grey goo mostly to be an accident, not an intent). Think of this like a cracker who gets a contract from Microsoft to put a feature in OutlookExperss, get some source code to the program along the way, and after leaving the job writes a nasty worm based on that knowledge. Then, he gives it to the script kiddies (whether this macro worm is binary only or not at this point is moot). Thus, the Iraqi corproation develops terror goo, gives it to terrorist, and they go about their thing. Whether or not nanotech is open sourced, some people are going to put it to bad uses.

Back on to why open source nanotech is better, I'll once again state that we can better build defenses to a weapon if we know how that weapon works (in the way we can build nuclear defenses since we know how nuclear bombs work).