Monday, May 21, 2012

One Last Thing For the Night

A little rant if you will. I have a problem with people who complain about losing our constitutional rights in this country while they at the same time bother to care about homosexuals marrying. To be fair, I could care less if homosexuals have access to the same contracts as straight people (government sanctioned marriage is nothing more than a contractual arrangement). The point is, how can you complain about losing your rights while denying others the same right? The fact is that we are losing our Constitutional rights because people are too focused on garbage and non-issues.

The only secular reason for believing in governmental authority is the social contract, the idea that we all agree on certain basic rights and fundamentals. For those who claim that our government or any government is God blessed, guess again. The bible says that we are to obey our leaders and that Satan is the leader of the world working through princes and principalities.

I have issue with control and controlling others. I don't have a problem with leadership or being in a leadership position. I don't believe in manipulating people, I believe in seeing to it that if you do the wrong thing, you pay consequences and I believe this should be understood by others. The issue has always been how much should the government be involved in our private lives, how much we should regulate one another. As much as you believe you have the right to regulate others personal relationships determines how much your choices should be regulated by the government. If you regulate homosexuality, do you not also agree to have your actions (or religious practices) regulated.

Having said all of that, I would not conduct a gay marriage in a religious service. I should have that right, the right to making my choices. If you are gay and believe that you should have the right to get married, then you would believe that I should have the right to not be involved. The issue should be rights and not restrictions or regulation. The best government is the one that is there to prevent you from doing things that you should not and the worst government is the one that is there to force you to do what it believes you should, that is tyranny.

I don't react well to people imposing their will on me and therefore I don't try and impost my will on others. Maybe we should stop trying to regulate personal relations which are not controlling or abusive. Maybe we should stop trying to regulate everything parents do to teach their children. Lets face it, we are polarized over issues related to regulating each other rather than finding where we don't need to regulate each other.

More Technology - It is Early

It's still early here so I thought I would drop a couple of extra links and words. We will start with this from Science Daily - Totally RAD: Bioengineers Create Rewritable Digital Data Storage in DNA. The article is about how some scientist has been able to program binary code into living DNA cells or turn them on or off at will. The inventor of this process says in the article that he doesn't even care how this might be used.

I also came across this from MSNBC - Gadgetbox - That 'Minority Report' interface? It's now only $70 away. It is about a new visual motion detector that allows you to interact with things without actually touching them physically. The article includes a video that shows how it works. You won't even have to know how to spell to use the internet in the future. I want to talk about this for a minute, the importance of writing.

While I enjoy the spoken word and am a good public speaker, it is not the same as writing. When one writes out one's thoughts, you have time to consider what you are saying and go back and modify it before presenting your final word on the matter. We are more and more using videos to communicate and relying less and less on the written word. We have already given up on teaching cursive handwriting to kids and it is easier and quicker than block writing.

Some Tech Stuff

The first article is Gizmodo - There’s Not an App for That: When Will Our Smartphones Be Recognized as Valid Forms of ID? An interesting perspective from a young person. What do you think, should your phone be a valid form of identification? How would you verify that it was that particular person's phone? You could if biometrics were added to your phone and I have written about that recently.

The second article is from the Activist Post - Facial Recognition Goes Trendy with SceneTap's Biometric Barhopping App. I recommend you read the whole article; but, what is says is that facial recognition technology will be used at bars in San Francisco and it will allow you to know information (limited for the moment) regarding other people.

We also have this from WZZM - Facial Recognition Software Unveiled in Grand Rapids. Watch the video. It is about how restaurants and other businesses are using facial recognition software to help you make choices by tailoring them to you. Do you really want to live in a world where your choices are made for you, mistakes can help us to learn more than always getting what you want.

In the future, well actually now, you will be scanned, analyzed and presented with the options that a computer thinks you want and you won't even know it. Google does it for you already, it presumes what you would be the most interested in when you do a search using it. This type of information filtering will only lead to people learning less as they are not presented with information that they would dislike.

The future is here and it doesn't believe in privacy. About a billion people on Facebook, one seventh of the world and supposedly we live in a world of six degrees of separation. This is why things can go "viral", a video made of a baby laughing can be seen by most of the world within minutes. A single thought can be communicated to the whole world in a moment. Those are game changers and we don't know exactly it will effect the future. For my money, if the anti-Christ were to show up, he would definitely use the internet to spread his message. Just imagine what the world would be like if Hitler had been on the internet.