| I must strongly disagree with you. It sounds like you have already given up. On this forum someone posted a way to visualize factorizations of numbers in Haskell. Quickly someone put up a javascript version. Soon I expect someone will turn it to a webapp that makes it possible for anyone to use and if lucky may go 'viral'. The power of networks is in that kind of recursive mashup. This is a toy now but hopefully is a sign of things to come. Consider that in a way, google and stackoverflow are caches for experience. Memoizing experience to increase efficiency. In a very real sense the ease of networks and communication results in a non trivial increase in the intelligence of the society. We hope that there will be a whole group of researchers willing to take the different parts of this process [(e.g. model organisms, high throughput omics technologies, drug development and repurposing, cellular and stem cell research)] and produce enough data so that it will become a whole new line of research. Like the small amounts of giving inherent in crowdfunding, we think many experts, each contributing a small amount of research, can accomplish much in aggregate. Crowdsourced research may enable new advancements that were not possible before. http://www.genomesunzipped.org/2012/07/guest-post-jimmy-lin-... Also worth pointing out is that while the specific instance of drones was not foremost in the list of dystopian worries, a surveillance society has existed as a worry since at least the 1940's. But despite the worries of Orwell and Huxley society is not near as bad as they expected. Indeed on average things are better for most people. From the average poor European to the average African. It is easier to focus on the bad aspects of a thing and worry on the worst possible outcome. Indeed that is the nature of humanity for that Type of error is least costly from an evolutionary perspective. But networks are a tool. A tool which gives more than it takes, A good thing. Information is power. Anything that increases the fluidity of its flow and its abundance is on the side of freedom. While it is true that everyone will be watched. It is also true that everyone will be watched, it will be ever harder for political leaders to deceive. The answer is not to stifle information flow but to make tools that make it possible to be hidden in plain site. Push decentralization, Encryption, clothing, tattoos, camera detection, IR accessories or private camera detecting-IR emitting drones. Action is the answer not worrying and lamenting. A Good thing can only be illegal if the governed quietly succumb to the inevitability of its occurrence. |