Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Blog

xkcd gets on the JFK bandwagon:

The alt text for the comic, which references JFK quotes I’ve previously slandered, is:

Also, if you read his speech at Rice, all his arguments for going to the moon work equally well as arguments for blowing up the moon, sending cloned dinosaurs into space, or constructing a towering penis-shaped obelisk on Mars.

I assume this specifically refers to:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon… (interrupted by applause) we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

As I’ve said before, doing something because it’s difficult is a very noble goal for an individual.  It is not noble to say “we are going to do this very difficult and expensive thing, and by ‘we’ I mean you will pay for it and I will sign some papers.”

I was going to say something about this article:

(CNN) — Nathanael Paul likes the convenience of the insulin pump that regulates his diabetes. It communicates with other gadgets wirelessly and adjusts his blood sugar levels automatically.

But, a few years ago, the computer scientist started to worry about the security of this setup.

What if someone hacked into that system and sent his blood sugar levels plummeting? Or skyrocketing? Those scenarios could be fatal.

But xkcd beat me to my reply, albeit in a different context:

To be fair, though, quite a bit of sci fi deals with the concept of unwanted intrusions into personal implants (take Ghost in the Shell).  One example being, if we one day have retinal implants that give us extraordinary visual acuity, will they be able to be compromised?  What if you could actually create images on the optical nerves?  My feelings on this are that unless security can be airtight (and I truly mean 100%) people are going to be very unlikely to want these things.