Tomorrow is Today

100 Years Later, China to Build Nicaraguan Alternative to Panama Canal

This new project is going to dwarf the Panama Canal in every way. HKND Group will be permitted to choose any route it likes, but even utilizing the large Lake Nicaragua on the Pacific side will mean cutting through about 178 miles of earth to reach the Caribbean. It will also be 22 meters deep at its shallowest points.

The Panama Canal was completed long before supertankers existed, and that continues to cause headaches for shipping. Many of today’s largest vessels are unable to fit in the canal, leaving them with little choice but to take the Cape Horn route around the tip of South America. The Great Nicaraguan Canal would be wide and deep enough to accommodate such ships.

Advanced global positioning technology and super-precise surveying will make the design of this canal much easier than it would have been over a century ago. The building process will also be completely mechanized, whereas the Panama Canal relied on huge numbers of laborers who could contract diseases or become injured. Satellite imagery could also play a crucial role in planning and monitoring the construction process. The world will be able to watch from space as the canal is carved out over the course of 10 years.

If a route is decided on soon, construction on the Great Nicaraguan Canal could begin as early as 2015. If it completes the canal as agreed, HKND Group will be granted a 100-year concession to operate the canal.

(via Chinese company plans to build Nicaraguan canal to compete with Panama | ExtremeTech)

New York’s Mayor Bloomberg Commits $40B to Prep City for Climate Change

In what may some day be termed a landmark speech in modern urban history, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City proposed this afternoon an aggressive, long-term plan to protect the city against the ravages of climate change and forestall a future Hurricane Sandy.

The elaborate climate fortification program, spelled out in a 400-page report, has elements ranging from public assistance to protect buildings and harden critical infrastructure to far-out concepts for construction of both permanent and temporary seawalls to protect both waterfront and the creeks and canals that can be “back door” gateways to flood waters.

The total cost of the program comes to about US $19.5 billion, which is roughly equivalent—perhaps not coincidentally—to the estimated cost of Sandy. Much of what the mayor talked about calls for further study, which he is initiating, and much of it will never happen. Some sea barriers would require the kind of water control engineering the Dutch have pioneered on a grand scale.

But perhaps the feasibility of particulars matters less than the forceful commitment the mayor made to comprehensive protection of the city’s waterfronts, a promise his successors may find difficult to back way from or ignore.

(via A $19 Billion Plan to Fortify New York City Against Climate Change - IEEE Spectrum)

Death of Gun Control Update: Defense Distributed’s 3D Printable WikiWeapon Coming in Mid-May

The Wiki Weapon will be made of 12 parts, printed out of ABS — conventional, fairly sturdy 3D-printed thermoplastic. According to Wilson, there will probably be just one metal part, the firing pin, while the rest — including the barrel — will be made out of plastic. As for whether it’ll actually work, Wilson and co won’t know until they actually build it, which will hopefully be in a couple of weeks. If all goes to plan, Wilson says the 3D-printed gun — which will be a custom design, rather than a reproduction of an existing pistol — will be able to fire a “few shots” before melting or breaking. After testing, the design will be uploaded to the web, so that anyone with a 3D printer can print out the handgun. You’ll still need to source your own ammunition and firing pin, though.

As you can imagine, a gun made entirely out of plastic, except for the very tip of the firing pin, would be almost undetectable by security scanners — which is a problem, because there’s the  Undetectable Firearms Act of 1988. The Act prevents DefDist from making or selling undetectable guns. ”We’re gonna be flirting with the edge of detectability,” Wilson says. ”It’s possible that there is no good way for us to comply [with the Act] and that would open up a line of prosecution.” While it seems almost certain that Wilson himself will break the law by making a 3D-printed weapon, it’ll be interesting to see if the law also prevents him from uploading the design to the internet.

(via The first all-plastic 3D-printed gun will be available to download in ‘two weeks’ | ExtremeTech)

Genetic Copyrights: You Do Not Own Your Own Genome

On the surface, genetic copyright in just another form of the classic problem: Can we better afford to deal with the pricing that results from strong biomedical patents, or with the lack of innovations that may result from their prohibition?

This is one of the main problems facing the drug industry, which sees the vast majority of new medications developed by companies that, arguably, gouge customers in their most desperate times. We’re often presented with a dichotomy — do we want poor sick people, or dead sick people?

Yet, this study represents a growing movement within biomedical research, one aimed at changing the way we treat biological products. Traditionally, one could patent “anything under the sun that is made by man”, which would seem to exclude biological patents, but American and European patent authorities accept them by the thousands.

(via Do you own your genes, or can Big Pharma patent them? | ExtremeTech)

Feds Set to Crack Down on BitCoin Anonymity, Targeting Exchanges Under Money-Laundering Laws

The federal agency charged with enforcing the nation’s laws against money laundering has issued new guidelines suggesting that several parties in the Bitcoin economy qualify as Money Services Businesses under US law.

Money Services Businesses (MSBs) must register with the federal government, collect information about their customers, and take steps to combat money laundering by their customers.

The new guidelines do not mention Bitcoin by name, but there’s little doubt which “de-centralized virtual currency” the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) had in mind when it drafted the new guidelines.

A FinCEN spokesman told Bank Technology News last year that “we are aware of Bitcoin and other similar operations, and we are studying the mechanism behind Bitcoin.”

America’s anti-money-laundering laws require financial institutions to collect information on potentially suspicious transactions by their customers and report these to the federal government.

Among the institutions subject to these regulatory requirements are “money services businesses,” including “money transmitters.” Until now, it wasn’t clear who in the Bitcoin network qualified as a money transmitter under the law.

(via US regulator: Bitcoin exchanges must comply with money-laundering laws | Ars Technica)

DARPA’s “Augmented Cognition” Program Raises Ethical Problems for Neuroscientists

The Pentagon’s expanding work in neuroscience in recent years has focused on medical applications, like research to understand traumatic brain injury and on concepts intended to help the military fight wars more effectively, such as studying ways to keep soldiers’ brains alert even after days without sleep.

But under the rubric of “Augmented Cognition,” DARPA has also pursued a number of military technologies, like goggles that would monitor a soldier’s brain signals to pick up potential threats before the conscious mind is aware of them.

While some of the applications might be a generation away, or may never arrive, like mind-controlled drones, others, like the brain-monitoring goggles, are already in testing (though probably not ready for use in the field).

[This raises] questions from ethicists, who are pushing for the government to begin now to think about “neuro ethics.” In a 2012 article published last year in the journal Plos Biology, Jonathan Moreno, a professor of medical ethics, and Michael Tennison, a professor of neurology, argued that many neuroscientists don’t think about the contribution of their work to warfare, or consider the ethical implication of such work.

The question they raise is what choice future soldiers might have in such cognitively enhanced warfare. “If a warfighter is allowed no autonomous freedom to accept or decline an enhancement intervention, and the intervention in question is as invasive as remote brain control,” they write, “then the ethical implications are immense.”

(via Ten extraordinary Pentagon mind experiments | KurzweilAI)

Anonymous PWNS The Fed

The Federal Reserve said on Tuesday that one of its internal websites had been briefly breached by hackers, though no critical functions of the U.S. central bank were affected by the intrusion.

The admission, which raises questions about cyber security at the Fed, follows a claim that hackers linked to the activist group Anonymous had struck the Fed on Sunday, accessing personal information of more than 4,000 U.S. bank executives, which it published on the Web.

“The Federal Reserve system is aware that information was obtained by exploiting a temporary vulnerability in a website vendor product,” a Fed spokeswoman said.

“Exposure was fixed shortly after discovery and is no longer an issue. This incident did not affect critical operations of the Federal Reserve system,” the spokeswoman said, adding that all individuals effected by the breach had been contacted.

(via Fed Confirms That Hackers Breached Its Internal Site - Business Insider)

The End of Gun Control: Wiki Weapon Inventor Demos “Cuomo” 3D Printed High-Capacity Magazine

Defense Distributed, the Austin, Texas-based project by 24-year-old law student Cody Wilsonand several others to develop 3D printed firearms and firearm components, or “Wiki Weapons,” on Thursday posted a new video online showing a successful test firing of a new 3D printed high-capacity (30-round) automatic rifle (ArmaLite, or AR) magazine, named “Cuomo,” after New York State’s gun-control supporting governor Andrew Cuomo.

New York recently passed a law banning all magazines in excess of 7 rounds (except for law enforcement use), the nation’s toughest magazine regulation.

“He [Cuomo] wants to be associated with these magazines,” Wilson told TPM, reached by phone on Thursday. “Lets make that association permanent.”

(via Defense Distributed’s New 3D Printed High Capacity Gun Magazine ‘Cuomo’ (VIDEO) | TPM Idea Lab)

Creator of CV Dazzle Debuts Anti-Surveillance Clothing Line

Brooklyn-based artist Adam Harvey is scheduled to unveil a line of fashion called Stealth Wear at a London studio. Working in collaboration with fashion designer Johanna Bloomfield, Harvey used materials designed to disguise and protect the wearer from thermal imaging, X-rays, and other technologies commonly used in surveillance. The garments include “an anti-drone hoodie and matching scarf…and a pocket protector that he says blocks cell phones from sending and receiving signals.” At the exhibit, each garment will be accompanied by information about the relevant technology and counter-technology behind its creation.

(via Worried About Drones? Try Wearing This Hoodie | IdeaFeed | Big Think)

NYPD Closer to Deploying Teraherz Radiation Scanners on The Street

The device is small enough to fit inside a police car or on a street corner where gun violence is common, Rocco Parascandola of The NY Daily News reports.

It works by testing for terahertz radiation, which is the natural energy that both people and inanimate objects emit. 

“If something is obstructing the flow of that radiation, for example a weapon, the device will highlight that object,” NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly said Wednesday.

The NYPD hopes to deploy these devices soon, but Kelly said that there are still “a number of trials to run” before that actually happens. 

(via New Technology Helps Cops See Hidden Guns From Far Away)