Earlier this month, we posted "15 Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid," their answers, and then 15 more questions. Three million pageviews later, here are…

Answers To 15 More Google Interview Questions That Will Make You Feel Stupid

Specter, who covers the science beat for The New Yorker, is pissed off. Forces on both the left and right have been coming down on good clean science like never before. Yes, this "denialism," as he calls it, comes from both sides. People on the left might think of it as Bush-flavored Intelligent Design agendas and bans on stem-cell research, while those on the right would recognize liberal whining about vaccinations and genetically modified food. It's all of these factions, and plenty more.

And in his new book, Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, Specter demonstrates that ignorance is death.

For our discussion—fitting the theme of This Cyborg Life—we singled out synthetic biology, a pursuit, as Specter describes it, that "by combining elements of engineering, chemistry, computer science and molecular biology, seeks nothing less than to assemble the biological tools necessary to redesign the living world." Here's an edited version of our discussion:

So we're talking about, synthetic biology, the ability to take cells or small organisms and turn them into machines?

Yeah, that's essentially where building machines, unbelievably complex ones, that will eventually be able to do whatever we want, out of cells and chemicals.

Yeah, so we just mix some chemicals in a pot and suddenly we got a car manufacturer?

Well, it's a little more complicated than that, but that's the direction we're moving in—you put some chemicals together and you get an organism, and then you get a more complex organism, and you get organisms that'll do things, and you can get drugs, or chemicals, or plastics or fuel... These [scientists] are trying to take basic sugars, basic chemicals, and make it so they can digest carbon (which is kind of exciting though we're not there yet) or just diesel fuels, plain fuel, that doesn't emit any sort of greenhouse gasses. That has happened in small scales—we're there. It's just a question of scaling.

So why is this kind of low-level synthetic approach better doing than, say, the guys making fuel from algae?

I think the hope is that this will be cheaper and more stable. I don't know that it's better. I'm sort of agnostic on that, I think you'd rather have a lot of different approaches that are kind of greenhouse gas neutral. And whatever works, you'll use. And you know we're not gonna have one source of energy, we're gonna have a bunch. We're gonna have wind, we're gonna have solar, we're gonna have chemicals.

When we look at the malaria drug [one of the first products that can be manufactured through synthetic biology—and a project funded by the Gates Foundation], they are going to be able to make all the drug that is needed in the world in a couple of vats. One of the reasons that's exciting is because it's a stable, easy way to regulate the manufacturing, to make sure that it's done properly. We have a big problem with malaria medicine because it's misused, it's taken the wrong way, it's counterfeit—and this is a way of regulating it. I think we'll see that with energy sources too. It'll be solid.

In the book, you refer to the opening of the Will Smith film I Am Legend, when doctors say they've harnessed the measles virus and turned it into a cancer killer, a mutant virus that eventually turns everybody into zombies. But two years after the movie comes out, real doctors from the Mayo clinic say that they're using measles strains as a real cancer treatment, in real life.

The point I'm trying to make is, these things are a little scary. Anything that powerful has to have a downside. And we need to know what the downside is, we need to talk about the downside. And we need to acknowledge it exists and say to ourselves—and sometimes we won't agree—but say to ourselves, "Gee, you know what, the potential benefits outweigh the risks." Sometimes we won't think that. But I do believe that lots of times, given the information, we would think that way.

We're on the verge of creating our own viruses that go into the body—I mean, is that right?—they go into the body and they do something good rather than bad.

Yeah, but the thing is, that has a bad connotation but it ought not to. There's a guy named Eckhard Wimmer who created a fake version of the polio virus, and lots of people screamed, because why would you do that? I even trashed him in an article once and I was wrong and so were those people. What he had been trying to do was to make synthetic vaccines. In order to make totally synthetic, rapidly reproducible vaccines, you need to understand the viruses. Wouldn't it be great if, for H1N1, instead of growing tons of this stuff in eggs in Pennsylvania, we could just gear up instantly, making in factories all around this country, so that we could have millions of doses in two weeks? That's not a pipe dream; that can happen.

Who says whether this kind of research happens or not? Who pounds the gavel?

If you live in America, it'd be some sort of Democratic process. We need to have some sort of regulatory framework. Who approves a new drug? It isn't just a pharmaceutical company that says, "Hey, I've gotta drug, let's put it out there." No, there are tons of hoops to jump through, and we need to have some hoops. And we need to make those hoops reasonable so that they're not so ridiculous that no one bothers to try to jump through them but not so easy that we're endangering our citizens.

But the scientific progress will probably continue regardless of whether there's a discussion or a regulatory framework?

I've never seen anything in the history of our planet where human progress has stopped. People have gotten in the way, people have slowed things down, but yeah it continues. People do the work. And so I think we kind of need to get on board and harness that work. Some people said, "We need to stop some things," but I don't think that can happen. I don't think we can turn information back.

Right. In your book, you mention that Bill Joy's argument was to just put a padlock on certain venues.

Yeah, and I understand why he said that, I just don't think it's realistic. I don't think that's the way the human animal is built or has ever acted.

The point I think that you make in the book is that, if American science infrastructure bans certain researches, it's not gonna stop people who are outside America from doing the research, and maybe won't stop people who we definitely don't want to be doing this research.

It's true. Look at the stem cell ban. People went elsewhere to do it. It set us back, it set the world back. But it isn't like it stopped. That's a good thing, but it could be a bad thing. If we're gonna do sort of high-end synthetic biology, and be creating all sorts of exciting but theoretically scary things, let's do it in this country. Let's not have it done in some place with no regulatory system.

What's the worst thing that could happen here?

You mean like in terms of?

I mean in terms of messing around with this particular biological technology.

Look, the worst thing that can happen when you mix genes around is you can let something loose that you can't bring back that destroys, you know, fill in the blank. Humans? Animals? Life? That is the worst thing. That is the doomsday scenario and it... it can happen, these things can happen.

We have had agricultural biotechnology for 35 years and we've planted two billion acres. And people still talk about how it's untried and untested. It isn't untried. It isn't untested. It doesn't make people sick. It doesn't mean there aren't problems with it. But to go right to the idea that the worst thing will happen, it's crazy. There's always a worst case scenario. We don't need to assume it. We need to think about it.

And then obviously the upside, this is the point of the book, the upside far outweighs the downside.

Yeah, you know, the worst case scenario is something goes awry and destroys the universe. OK, that's the worst case scenario, and it's a pretty remote likelihood.

Now, a pretty good likelihood is, if we continue living the way we live, my kid, who's 16 years old, maybe she won't live a whole life because people are dying of skin cancer like crazy in 50 years. This isn't so long from now. We have really severe problems we need to address instantly. And those are the potential benefits of this research. We don't talk about that very much. We need to do the work and find out and make our decisions and not decide beforehand that it makes no sense.

If this has piqued your interest, or if you're just tired of people bitching about stem-cell research, genetically altered foods or the alleged evil that lurks in vaccinations, be sure to pick up Michael Specter's amazing book Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives, and meanwhile have a look at his most recent piece on synthetic biology in The New Yorker. Thanks Michael!

This week, Gizmodo is exploring the enhanced human future in a segment we call This Cyborg Life. It's about what happens when we treat our body less as a sacred object and more as what it is: Nature's ultimate machine.

Special thanks to Kyle the Intern for transcribing the interview

In all seriousness, Dyson's legacy is about more than a few home appliances—though they're no doubt impressive. He's a brilliant designer and inventor in an industry starved for brilliant designers and inventors; he's got a clear enthusiasm for what he does, and he's become a sort of evangelist for engineering and inventing; also he's a nerd. I had, like, three minutes with the man, but managed to blurt out a couple questions.

We started on tech:

Giz: PC or Mac?

Sir James: (Emphatically) Mac! Since 1984. I bought the first Macintosh.

Giz: What kind of phone do you carry?

Sir James: Well, I have a BlackBerry and an iPhone.

Giz: Are there any unlikely companies or designers that you see doing really interesting stuff right now?

Sir James: There's my son, who does lights where he varies the angle of the light in quite an interesting manner.

Giz: So they're not lasers?

Sir James: No, they're regular lights. They're floor lights where the shade goes up and down to create a wide or narrow beam. There are wall and ceiling lights which have barn doors as a shade; you get an amazing effect on the wall. I don't know if nepotism is allowed on Gizmodo. [Ed. note: It is! So here's how they work:]

We also run a student competition around the world, and there are some really interesting ideas that come out of that.

Giz: You're fond of removing requisite parts from things—bags from vacuums, blades from fans—is there any particular part in another device that you just want to get rid of?

Sir James: Well, I'm sure there will be, but I don't think we should talk about it now. But yes, it is quite a nice approach to minimalism, removing things—well, removing things that cause problems; that's the point.

Giz: Have you thought about directing your talents away from domestic inventions, and toward something more altruistic? Do you have any projects or dreams outside the world of Dyson?

Sir James: (Laughs) I'd like to do a better vacuum cleaner, but there's all sorts of things I want to do. We're very interested in encouraging people to get into design. In the West, we're training far too few engineers and scientists. Schoolchildren love science and love technology, but somehow their parents, teachers and society tells them that other things are going to be far more interesting, so I'm on a bit of a mission to try and change that.

And as quickly as he stepped into my mic range, he stepped back out. Later, James!

You can read Mark's review on Dyson's $300 bladeless Air Multiplier fan here, as well as the rest of our Dyson coverage.

We gather around the group in a circle, about 8 or 10 feet away from the Tesla coils as the band performs. This is not some "don't want to dance in front of the stage" kind of teenage awkwardness—if you stand too close when the band plays, you might actually get electrocuted.

When the lights go down, a loud buzz generates, followed by streaks of lighting into the air. Then the music begins, followed by the sound of drums that are precise as can be. What follows is an overload of light and sound that is pure amazing, a melange of familiar melodies from our favorite video games (Mario and Zelda themes), TV shows (Airwolf) and pop songs ("Sexyback").

Once the band stops playing, we still can't roam freely. First, they must discharge the coils, ridding them of any stray lightning bolts that might be trapped inside.

/

Consisting of a pair of Tesla coils—plus a pair of LED-equipped robotic drums and an Open Labs sound console—the ArcAttack experience is largely automated, suggestive of a future era when a musical performance isn't about the people playing the instruments, but rather the technology involved.

ArcAttack hails from Austin, Texas and certainly don't fit the mold of what most consider a band should be. But that's a good thing.

John Di Prima is the man behind the boards, responsible for the execution of the live show. He controls the coils and drums, plus mixing in a few new sounds during the set. He's also responsible for most of the songwriting and drum programming.

Patrick Brown, aka Parsec, is the master of ceremonies, decked out in steampunk-esque attire consisting of a Faraday Suit with a string of lights that react with the Tesla coils, plus the requisite lightning-proof goggles. He's the link between the crowd and the show. He found the Di Prima brothers at an Austin Burning Man event and jokes that he's managed to not get kicked out yet.

Joe Di Prima designs, builds and maintains everything for the group, serving as the technician when the show is on the road. When they're composing and recording, he plays guitar. With a background in electronics repair, Joe eventually linked up with the engineering department at the University of Texas, where he first learned about the magic of Tesla coils.

I took a few minutes to interview ArcAttack—what makes them who they are—besides the Tesla coils, of course...

——-

Gizmodo: What does your setup consist of?

Joe: It would be two DRSSTC (Dual Resident Solid State Tesla Coil) units which are MIDI controlled. There's a fiber optic cable running to some digital logic boards that are in the Tesla coils.

John: The Open Labs MiKO MIDI console hosts the PC Software (Fruity Loops) that we use to actually sequence the music.

The MiKO is just a Windows machine with a bunch of nice MIDI interfaces, cased in metal—which is nice because we have a lot of EMF emitted from the coils. I actually used to run it off my laptop, but it would crash all the time.

Patrick: The drum machine has a solenoid for every drum, and they're MIDI controlled also...from the MiKO.

Gizmodo: How did you get the idea to create a musical show using Tesla coils? Had it been done before this?

Joe: When we did it originally, it was the first time it had been done in this manner. There are a few ways that you can audio modulate a Tesla coil—this way is known as PRM modulation. Now there are a few dozen people that picked up on it, but nobody does it to the scale that we do. It's still fairly new, and surprisingly still fairly unknown.

When I first saw a solid state Tesla coil in operation, I understood how it worked. After a few minutes of playing with it, I got the idea that, many years later, I put into practice.

Gizmodo: Who are some of your musical and tech influences?

John: Well obviously Nikola Tesla. For music, we all have pretty different tastes. But the cool thing with our project is that we can do anything from Pantera to the Chicken Dance and people would dig it. I listen to electronic rock, Kraftwerk, Daft Punk...if I could do a show with Daft Punk, you could shoot me afterward.

Joe: I didn't know what music was until three years ago. For tech influences, hard to say, but Faraday, all my mentors at all the repair shops, my dad (who was a biomedical engineer) and Steve Ward, the father of the DRSSTC, who I met at the University of Texas.

Gizmodo: What are some of the weirdest/favorite/disastrous shows you've played?

John: Joe had to tackle a cop once.

Joe: Yeah the cops had come shut down this rave we were playing at, and the Tesla coils were still running. He was coming over to shut our stuff off, not knowing exactly what it was, and he was walking straight into the Tesla coils. So I grabbed him and pushed him back. Amazingly he did not Tase me. He was actually kinda grateful. Funniest part is, after they kicked everyone out, they walked around and asked if we could turn the stuff back on.

Patrick: My favorite show so far was when we played DragonCon in Atlanta a few weeks ago. We did the Mad Scientist Ball. We had our big Tesla coils and a Faraday cage, and revealed our new stage show, which assisted people in transforming themselves into true joy...by being bathed in the Tesla coil rays.

During our stage performance, there were about 15 people that we put into the cage, and this one guy named Dr. Satan had big metal wings that he put onto his back. We get him up there, but the cage is kinda small, and he has metal sticking out all over his body. So we tell him "don't move." Soon the entire crowd started chanting along. That was pretty cool. [And obviously Dr. Satan lived through it.]

John: We were in the Netherlands for two weeks, and we played a heavy metal fest where they put us in front of this church that was lit all demonic looking. On our stage, there were these big glass viewing areas where you could see the deceased founders of the town. I think that's pretty much the most epic thing ever. Heavy metal music through lightning over visible graves.

Q: What is the one gadget you can't live without?

Joe: My iPhone.

Patrick: My Dell laptop.

John: The Open Labs MiKO console. If it was human, I'd marry it.

Gizmodo Gallery 2009
Groupe
267 Elizabeth Street
New York, NY 10012

Gallery Dates:
September 23rd-27th

Times:

9/22 Tuesday
Media Day by appointment only. For info please contact gallery@gizmodo.com.

9/23 Wednesday
12-8

9/24 Thursday
12-8

9/25 Friday
12-8

9/26 Saturday
11-8
9-? - Live Musical Performance

9/27 Sunday
11-6

Read more about our Giz Gallery 09 here, follow @gizgallery on Twitter and see what else we'll be playing with at the event.And special thanks to Toyota's Prius — without their sponsorship, there would be no Gizmodo Gallery.

I asked Andy about the Cliq, and whether its heavy-emphasis on social networking would make its way into the core Android OS. He said yes, that Google likes the idea of say, Facebook or Twitter being a part of the core functionality rather than having to open a separate app to get to where you want to be.

Andy also said that there wasn't a huge differentiation between in-house and third-party when it's an open source, open platform effort like Android, so he wasn't sure who would be the team that would make something like Facebook integration happen—be it Google or Facebook.

Also interesting is his views on the Cliq as a whole. He said that he considers this something he would be happy launching as a 1.0 product—the point being that the bugs were worked out, and the extras like the social networking were there. The original Android launch, he says, was more like a 0.8 release.

The bit that's interesting to Android developers is that Rubin doesn't consider the Marketplace done, as in, they're still working on optimizing and making the experience better for both the consumer and the app maker. One of the complaints that paid apps had was that they didn't sell as much as say, a paid app on the iPhone App Store. Andy said they've been working gradually and iteratively, first separating paid apps from free apps, and then working on improving visibility of the apps themselves. So it's something they're aware of, and the fact that the "best" selling apps are only doing somewhere along the lines of 1000s of sales isn't going ignored among the Android people.

As for future Android OS development, Andy claims that you can expect more of the type of things Motorola has done, that is, replacing some of the core apps and core functionality the default Android offers with customized ones like the Cliq's social network streaming and integration.

In response to a line of questioning about problems with the Blackberry Storm, Lazardis noted that although the device was thoroughly tested before launch, there were some growing pains:

That's our first touch product, and you know nobody gets it perfect out the door. You know other companies were having problems with their first releases.

In that same statement, Lazardis hints that more touchscreen devices may be on the horizon—although he would not comment on future products (he also gives BlackBerry fans a reason to believe things will get better—in contrast to Co-CEO Jim Balsillie's belief that buggy smartphones are "the new reality"). As far the current product lineup is concerned, it's no surprise to find that Lazardis believes that they have distinct advantages when it comes to their full push technology and multitasking that doesn't waste battery life. They are also working to improve their browser to offer a broader web-browsing experience without compromising performance.

Check out Laptop Mag for the full interview. [Laptop Mag]

If you believe Singer (shown at left with an unarmed robot), the biggest revolution happening in the world today is the one taking place in military robotics, unmanned fighting systems, which were next to non-existent before 9/11, and have multiplied exponentially since the Iraq invasion of 2003.

You don't have to read Wired for War (or Gizmodo) to know why military robots are awesome: On the battlefield, they won't hesitate to take a bullet for you, and when they bite it, you don't have to go and tell their mama how sorry you are. But robots are no longer just an extra layer of protection for our flesh-and-blood warriors, they are a new fighting force—the US has 12,000 on the ground and 7,000 in the air—that are changing the way the generals see the battlefield, and the way soldiers define what it means to fight.

I got in touch with Singer after Wired for War was published, and the cool, calm way he explains how different the world will be from now on—how the extended conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have turned robots from novelty items to autonomous killing machines, how cute dormroom debates over Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics have morphed into heated arguments at the Pentagon—has really got me convinced.

This week we're celebrating the book with a series of posts on topics it covers, but at first, it's time for you to hear from Singer himself, and drink in some of that truth. As he himself would say, citing The Matrix, it's time to swallow the red pill:

Giz: One of the biggest purposes of your book is to make, for the first time, a compelling argument for the reality of the scary sci-fi future, right?

PWS: There are a couple of points of the book. One, to sell lots of books. Two, to get our heads out of the sand when it comes to the massive changes happening in war, to say this is not science fiction but battlefield reality. Next, this is not the revolution that Rumsfeld and his people thought would happen. You may be getting incredible new capabilities, but you're also getting incredible new human dilemmas to figure out. The fog of war is not being lifted. Moore's law may be in operation, but so is Murphy's law. Mistakes still happen. The final aspect is to give people a way to look at the ripple effects that are coming out of this, on our politics, the warrior's experience, our laws, our ethics.

We're experiencing something incredibly historic right now, and yet no one is talking about it. Think about the phrase "going to war." That has meant the same thing for five thousand years. It meant going to a place where there was such danger that they may never come home again, may never see their family again. Whether you were talking about my grandfather's experience in World War II or Achilles going off to fight the Trojans.

Compare that to what it means in a world of Predator drones, already. One of the pilots I interviewed says you're going to war—for 12 hours. You're shooting weapons at targets, killing enemy combatants. And then you get back in your car and you drive home. And 20 minutes later, you're sitting at the dinner table, talking to your kids about their homework. So we have an absolute change in the meaning of going to war, in our lifetime right now, and nobody was talking about it.

Giz: That's mind blowing. The thing you're hitting on here is the role of humans in war. Many argue that you can't take the human being out of war, but will there be a time when robots just fight robots? And what's the point? Doesn't there have to be a human target? If robots fight robots, who cares?

PWS: Basically you're asking the question that's the famous Star Trek episode ["A Taste of Armageddon," TOS 1967], where two machines fight each other, they calculate what would happen, and then a set number of humans are killed based on the computer calculations. That's how they do the wars.

If we do get to that scenario, is it war anymore? We'd have to reconfigure our definitions. This is something we do. Some people back in the day thought that the use of guns was not an act of war, it was murder. It was a crime to use guns. Only cowards used guns. Well, we changed our definitions.

Giz: But the human has always been in the target of whatever murderous weapon—I'm asking what happens when Predator drones on our side go after Predator drones on their side over the Pacific Ocean.

PWS: It's not a theoretical thing. Is that war anymore? Or does it take away the valor and heroism that we use to justify war, and just turn it into a question of productivity? Maybe that's where war is headed.

But things don't always turn out as you described. Every action has a counter-reaction. You develop these systems that give you this incredible advantage. But as one of the insurgents in Iraq says, you're showing you're not man enough to fight us [in person]. You're showing your cowardice. You've also shown us that all we have to do is kill a few of your soldiers to defeat you.

Another one says that you are forcing my hand to become a terrorist. Say you get to drones vs. drones. Someone else will say, "A ha! That's not the way to win. The way to win is to strike at their homeland."

And with drones on drones, this very sophisticated technology, you're also taking war in a whole 'nother direction. Because now the most effective way of defeating drones may not be destruction, it may be wars of persuasion. That is, how do I hack into your drones and make them do what I want? That may be better than shooting them down.

Or, if they're dependent on communication back to home, I've just pointed out a new vulnerability. The high tech strategy may be to hack them, and disrupt those communications, but of course there's a low-tech response. What's an incredibly effective device against the SWORDS system, a machine-gun-armed robot? It's a six year old with a can of spray paint [says one military journalist]. You either have to be bloody minded to kill an unarmed six year old. Which of course will have all sorts of ripple effects, such as who else will join the war and how it's covered. Or you just let that little six year old walk up and put spray paint on the camera, and suddenly your robot is basically defused.

Of course, in a meeting with officers from Joint Forces Command, one of them responded, "We'll just load the system up with non-lethal weapons, and we'll tase that little six year old." The point is, robotics are not the end of the story, they're the start of the new story.

Giz: Okay, so if everyone can get their hands on a crate of AK-47s these days, will robots be traded like that, on the black market? How can countries without technological sophistication make use of robots?

PWS: There is a rule in technology as well as war: There's no such thing as a permanent first-mover advantage. How many of your readers are reading this on a Wang computer? How many are playing video games on an Atari or Commodore 64? Same thing in war: The British are the ones who invented the tank, but the Germans are the ones who figured out how to use the tank better.

The US is definitely ahead in military robotics today, but we should not be so arrogant as to assume it will always be the case. There are 43 other countries working on military robotics, and they range from well-off countries like Great Britain, to Russia, to China, to Pakistan, to Iran. Just three days ago, we shot down an Iranian drone over Iraq.

The thing we have to ask ourselves is, where does the state of American manufacturing, and the state of our science and mathematics education in our schools take us in this revolution? Another way to phrase this is, what does it mean to use more and more "soldiers" whose hardware is made in China, and whose software is written in India?

A lot of the technology is commercial, off the shelf. A lot of it is do-it-yourself. For about $1,000, you can build your own version of a Raven drone, one of the hand-tossed drones [which you launch it by throwing in the air, shown at left] our soldiers use in Iraq and Afghanistan. What we have is the phenomena that software is not the only thing that has gone open source. So has warfare. It's not just the big boys that can access these technologies, and even change and approve upon them. Hezbollah may not be a state, may not have a military, but in its war with Israel, it flew four drones.

Just as terrorism may not be small groups but just one lone-wolf individual, you have the same thing with robotics and terrorism. Robotics makes people a lot more lethal. It also eliminates the culling power of suicide bombing. You don't have to convince a robot that it's going to be received by 70 virgins in heaven.

And about not being able to get it like an AK-47. Actually, two things. One, there's a bit in the book about cloned robots. One of the companies was at an arms fair and saw a robot being displayed by a certain nation in their booth. And they're like, "That's our robot, and we never sold it to them. What the hell?" It's because it was a cloned robot.

And two, there's a quote, "A robot gone missing today will end up in the marketplace tomorrow." We've actually had robots that have been captured. We actually had one loaded up with explosives and turned into a mobile IED.

Giz: So, in other words, only a few years after being deployed, they're already being turned against us.

PWS: This is war, so of course it's going to happen. It doesn't mean the AK-47 is disappearing from war. War in the 21st century is this dark mix of more and more machines, but fights against warlords and insurgents in the slums. Those players are going to be using everything from high-tech to low-tech.

[Wired for War website; Wired for War at Amazon]

Mouth: dry. Stomach: queasy. Head: racing. Not only is David X. Cohen the co-creator of one of my favorite shows of all time, he's a fellow Berkeley computer science alum, fellow nerd, and a tremendously funny guy. He also holds the dream job—comedy writer and creator of a successful Sci Fi TV show. After fully preparing myself by watching the latest Futurama movie—Into the Wild Green Yonder—I had hours worth of questions for the man, but he only had 30 minutes.

I had to get the most important question on everyone's minds out of the way: Will Futurama be coming back to Fox for a 6th season? Although Fox has indeed been making noises about the show's return, Cohen said DVD sales of the fourth movie may be a deciding factor in whether or not the project would be profitable. Basically, we need to go out and buy the DVD and Blu-ray if we want to bring Futurama back. Cohen also revealed that although there is a fifty-fifty chance of the show returning, he has yet to hear more concrete details about it from Fox—according to him, though, "No news is good news."

But how is the movie? In a word, good. In two words, very good. Into the Wild Green Yonder feels as if the Futurama writers used the first three movies as practice for getting back into the groove of writing Futurama episodes and was a final coda to the series. That's not to say that the first three movies were bad—they were just different.

If the Bender-focused, first half hour of the movie were its own episode, it would solidly land in any "top ten funniest Futurama episodes of all times" list, hands down. However, because the next 58 minutes covered some very familiar, classic Futurama-esque territory, it made Into the Green Yonder feel like the one movie—out of the four—that connected the most with the series. But why this movie, why now?

Bringing this movie back to the feel of the series, as Cohen revealed, was somewhat intentional. For each one of the Futurama movies, the writers decided that they would cover one major area of Sci Fi. The latest one, like the series itself, is more of a large space opera that comfortably cradles you back into the company of the Futurama characters you grew to love. Cohen also pointed out that a scene in the newest movie—the one where Leela is giving out space coordinates—is probably one of the "most hardcore things they've done" in terms of showing respect for actual science.

It's these science fans as well as the more hardcore viewers that would have noticed when Futurama's writers give shout outs to real-world physics in their jokes—such as when the Professor invoked the observer effect after a horse race. This ability to mix humor with scientific intelligence is one of the greatest benefits of having so many smart writers on staff. The other benefit? The ability to actually have an interesting vision of the future.

And it's this future that Fry's trying to save once again. This could be why the Green Yonder felt like it was slightly retreading old territory. If you've seen some of Fry's Nibblonian episodes, I'm sure you're familiar with the basic premise—we get it: Fry's special and he's the only one who can save the universe. But that's not to say there weren't some great moments to be had during these 88 minutes. This is more akin to strolling down a familiar street you haven't seen in years, examining which stores have changed and which haven't, and reveling in the fact that you're lucky enough to be back once more.

As the series draws to a (temporary) close, we wonder if we've learned the entirety of Fry's origin story and how he came to be in the year 3000. Not to worry, Cohen assures that he is not finished with that tale quite yet. When asked how much of it was left—after the Nibblonian saga was finished and the "Lars" adventure in the first DVD movie—he responded that there is "one sentence," uttered in the series that was left unaddressed. But it's up to superfans to figure out which sentence, not to mention which episode, he is referring to.

Because David X. Cohen helped create the entire world and backstory of Futurama, he's given a lot of thought to the future. Our future. Because he didn't want to go to extremes and create either a utopia or a dystopia, Futurama's universe is only about 50% realistic, according to Cohen. It does, however, borrow some ideas from our own world for both comedic and dramatic effect.

So what, if anything, in our real world future is David X. Cohen most afraid of? It isn't robots, surprisingly enough. It's stuff like nuclear bombs. Wars. And technology that kills people, fast. Things that—when taking the fact that Cohen grew up in the cold war and studied physics at Harvard into account—makes a lot of sense. But robots? Nope.

You would think that because Cohen is such a fan of robots, it would make sense that he'd own a Roomba. But he doesn't. He laughs that Matt Groening gives him shit for this fact (if anyone should have a Roomba, it would be Cohen).

Is there any Futurama left to tell? Cohen thinks so. Besides further expanding on Fry's origin story, he's got plans to make the Planet Express crew exhibits in an alien zoo (among other things). However, beyond little ideas here and there, what's currently occupying Cohen's mind is how to escape from the crazy corner they've painted themselves into at the end of Green Yonder. Given Fox's recent interest in bringing back the show for another season on television (50/50 chance!), it's one mess Cohen will likely have to bend his way out of.

As for the Roomba, if Cohen ever were to get one, he'd name it Browser.

As chief research and strategy officer at Microsoft, Mundie is a living portal of future technology, a focal point between thousands of scattered research projects and the boxes of super-neat products we'll be playing with 5 years, 20 years, maybe 100 years from now. And he's not allowed to even think about anything shipping within the immediate 3 years. I'm pretty sure the guy has his own personal teleporter and hoverboard, but when you sit and talk to him for an hour about his ability to see tomorrow, it's all very matter of fact. So what did we talk about? Quantum computing did come up, as did neural control, retinal implants, Windows-in-the-cloud, multitouch patents and the suspension of disbelief in interface design.

Seeing the Future
Your job is to look not at next year or next five years. Is there a specific number of years you're supposed to be focused on?

I tell people it ranges from from about 3 to 20. There's no specific year that's the right amount, in part because the things we do in Research start at the physics level and work their way up. The closer you are to fundamental change in the computing ecosystem, the longer that lead time is.

When you say 3 years, you're talking about new UIs and when you say 20 you're talking about what, holographic computing?

Yeah, or quantum computing or new models of computation, completely different ways of writing programs, things where we don't know the answer today, and it would take some considerable time to merge it into the ecosystem.

So how do you organize your thoughts?

I don't try to sort by time. Time is a by-product of the specific task that we seek to solve. Since it became clear that we were going to ultimately have to change the microprocessor architecture, even before we knew what exactly it would evolve to be from the hardware guys, we knew they'd be parallel in nature, that there'd be more serial interconnections, that you'd have a different memory hierarchy. From roughly from the time we started to the time that those things will become commonplace in the marketplace will be 10 to 12 years.

Most people don't really realize how long it takes from when you can see the glimmer of things that are big changes in the industry to when they actually show up on store shelves.

Is it hard for you to look at things that far out?

[Chuckles] No, not really. One of the things I think is sort of a gift or a talent that I have, and I think Bill Gates had to some significant degree too, is to assimilate a lot of information from many sources, and your brain tends to work in a way where you integrate it and have an opinion about it. I see all these things and have enough experience that I say, OK, I think that this must be going to happen. Your ability to say exactly when or exactly how isn't all that good, but at least you get a directional statement.

When you look towards the future, there's inevitability of scientific advancement, and then there's your direction, your steering. How do you reconcile those two currents?

There are thousands of people around the world who do research in one form or another. There's a steady flow of ideas that people are advancing. The problem is, each one doesn't typically represent something that will redefine the industry.

So the first problem is to integrate across these things and say, are there some set of these when taken together, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts? The second is to say, by our investment, either in research or development, how can we steer the industry or the consumer towards the use of these things in a novel way? That's where you create differentiated products.

Interface Design and the Suspension of Disbelief
In natural interface and natural interaction, how much is computing power, how much is sociological study and how much is simply Pixar-style animation?

It's a little bit of all of them. When you look at Pixar animation, something you couldn't do in realtime in the past, or if you just look at the video games we have today, the character realism, the scene realism, can be very very good. What that teaches us is that if you have enough compute power, you can make pictures that are almost indistinguishable from real life.

On the other hand, when you're trying to create a computer program that maintains the essence of human-to-human interaction, then many of the historical fields of psychology, people who study human interaction and reasoning, these have to come to the fore. How do you make a model of a person that retains enough essential attributes that people suspend disbelief?

When you go to the movies, what's the goal of the director and the actors? They're trying to get you to suspend disbelief. You know that those aren't real people. You know Starship Enterprise isn't out there flying around—

Don't tell our readers that!

[Grins] Not yet at least. But you suspend disbelief. Today we don't have that when people interact with the computer. We aren't yet trying to get people to think they're someplace else. People explore around the edges of these things with things like Second Life. But there you're really putting a representative of yourself into another world that you know is a make-believe environment. I think that the question is, can we use these tools of cinematography, of human psychology, of high-quality rendering to create an experience that does feel completely natural, to the point that you suspend disbelief—that you're dealing with the machine just as if you were dealing with another person.

So the third component is just raw computing, right?

As computers get more powerful, two things happen. Each component of the interaction model can be refined for better and better realism. Speech becomes more articulate, character images become more lifelike, movements become more natural, recognition of language becomes more complete. Each of those drives a requirement for more computing power.

But it's the union of these that creates the natural suspension of disbelief, something you don't get if you're only dealing with one of these modalities of interaction. You need more and more computing, not only to make each element better, but to integrate across them in better ways.

When it comes to solving problems, when do you not just say, "Let's throw more computing power at it"?

That actually isn't that hard to decide. On any given day, a given amount of computing costs a given amount of money. You can't require a million dollars worth of computer if you want to put it on everybody's desk. What we're really doing is looking at computer evolutions and the improvements in algorithms, and recognizing that those two things eventually bring new problem classes within the bounds of an acceptable price.

So even within hypothetical research, price is still a factor?

It's absolutely a consideration. We can spend a lot more on the computing to do the research, because we know that while we're finishing research and converting it into a product, there's a continuing reduction in cost. But trying to jockey between those two things and come out at the right place and the right time, that's part of the art form.

Hardware Revolutions, Software Evolutions
Is there some sort of timeline where we're going to shift away from silicon chips?

That's really a question you should ask Intel or AMD or someone else. We aren't trying to do the basic semiconductor research. The closest we get is some of the work we're doing with universities exploring quantum computers, and that's a very long term thing. And even there, a lot of work is with gallium arsenide crystals, not exactly silicon, but a silicon-like material.

Is that the same for flexible screens or non-moving carbon-fiber speakers that work like lightning—are these things you track, but don't research?

They're all things that we track because, in one form or another, they represent the computer, the storage system, the communication system or the human-interaction capabilities. One of the things that Microsoft does at its core is provide an abstraction in the programming models, the tools that allow the introduction of new technologies.

When you talk about this "abstraction," do you mean something like the touch interface in Windows 7, which works with new and different kinds of touchscreens?

Yeah, there are a lot of different ways to make touch happen. The Surface products detect it using cameras. You can have big touch panels that have capacitance overlays or resistive overlays. The TouchSmart that HP makes actually is optical.

The person who writes the touch application just wants to know, "Hey, did he touch it?" He doesn't want to have to write the program six times today and eight times tomorrow for each different way in which someone can detect the touch. What we do is we work with the companies to try to figure out what is the abstraction of this basic notion. What do you have to detect? And what is the right way to represent that to the programmer so they don't have to track every activity, or even worse, know whether it was an optical detector, a capacitive detector or an infrared detector? They just want to know that the guy touched the screen.

Patents and Inventor's Rights
You guys recently crossed 10,000 patent line—is that all your Research division?

No, that's from the whole company. Every year we make a budget for investment in patent development in all the different business groups including Research. They all go and look for the best ideas they've got, and file patents within their areas of specialization. It's done everywhere in the company.

So, take multitouch, something whose patents have been discussed lately. When it comes to inevitability vs. unique product development, how much is something like multitouch simply inevitable? How much can a single company own something that seems so generally accepted in interface design?

The goal of the patent system is to protect novel inventions. The whole process is supposed to weed out things that are already known, things that have already been done. That process isn't perfect—sometimes people get patents on things that they shouldn't, and sometimes they're denied patents on things they probably should get—but on balance you get the desired result.

If you can't identify in the specific claims of a particular patent what it is novel, then you don't get a patent. Just writing a description of something—even if you're the first person to write it down—doesn't qualify as invention if it's already obvious to other people. You have to trust that somehow obvious things aren't going to be withheld from everybody.

That makes sense. We like to look at patents to get an idea of what's coming next—

That's what they were intended to do; that was the deal with the inventor: If you'll share your inventions with the public in the spirit of sharing knowledge, then we'll give you some protection in the use of that invention for a period of time. You're rewarded for doing it, but you don't sequester the knowledge. It's that tradeoff that actually makes the patent system work.

Windows in the Cloud, Lasers in the Retina
Let's get some quick forecasts? How soon until we see Windows in the cloud? I turn on my computer, and even my operating system exists somewhere else.

That's technologically possible, but I don't think it's going to be commonplace. We tend to believe the world is trending towards cloud plus client, not timeshared mainframe and dumb display. The amount of intrinsic computing capability in all these client devices—whether they're phones, cars, game consoles, televisions or computers—is so large, and growing larger still exponentially, that the bulk of the world's computing power is always going to be in the client devices. The idea that the programmers of the world would let that lie fallow, wouldn't try to get any value out of it, isn't going to happen.

What you really want to do is find what component is best solved in the shared facility and what component is best computed locally? We do think that people will want to write arbitrary applications in the cloud. We just don't think that's going to be the predominating usage of it. It's not like the whole concept of computing is going to be sucked back up the wire and put in some giant computing utility.

What happens when the processors are inside our heads and the displays are projected on the inside of our eyeballs?

It'll be interesting to see how that evolution will take place. It's clear that embedding computing inside people is starting to happen fairly regularly. There's special processors, not general processors. But there are now cochlear implants, and even people exploring ways to give people who've lost sight some kind of vision or a way to detect light.

But I don't think you are going to end up with some nanoprojector trying to scribble on your retina. To the extent that you could posit that you're going to get to that level, you might even bypass that and say, "Fine, let me just go into the visual cortex directly." It's hard to know how the man-machine interface will evolve, but I do know that the physiology of it is possible and the electronics of it are becoming possible. Who knows how long it will take? But I certainly think that day will come.

And neural control of our environment? There's already a Star Wars toy that uses brain waves to control a ball—

Yeah, it's been quite a few years since I saw some of the first demos inside Microsoft Research where people would have a couple of electrical sensors on their skull, in order to detect enough brain wave functionality to do simple things like turn a light switch on and off reliably. And again, these are not invasive techniques.

You'll see the evolution of this come from the evolution of diagnostic equipment in medicine. As people learn more about non-invasive monitoring for medical purposes, what gets created as a byproduct are non-invasive sensing people can use for other things. Clearly the people who will benefit first are people with physical disabilities—you want to give them a better interface than just eye-tracking on screens and keyboards. But each of these things is a godsend, and I certainly think that evolution will continue.

I wonder what your dream diary must look like—must have some crazy concepts.

I don't know, I just wake up some mornings and say, yeah, there's a new idea.

Really? Just jot it down and run with it?

Yeah, that's oftentimes the way it is. Just, wasn't there yesterday, it's there today. You know, you just start thinking about it.

The Orlando Sentinel interviewed Comm for a trendstory on this new thing called Twitter and social networking with nary a mention of iFart Mobile, but in a sign that newspapers are finally getting it, interviewer Etan Horowitz posted an extended Q+A about the flatulence app that has been downloaded over 350,000 times from the App Store, and is largely responsible for plunging the App Store further into its already stinking cesspool of ridiculous and worthless apps.

When asked how something like iFart Mobile could be so successful, Comm pull out all the stops:

A: It's a subject matter that never goes out of style. If you go back to Shakespeare you can find lines about flatulence in his writing. It's something that everyone can identify with.

Somewhere, the Bard is turning in his fucking grave.

And also, it turns out Comm hosted a little something he calls the first online reality show, "The Next Internet Millionaire." That, teamed with the prevalence of the phrase "Dot Comm" on Joel's site have led me to throw up a bit in my mouth.

For more insight, hit up the Sentinel: [Orlando Sentinel via Cult of Mac]

The last time I'd traveled to Hong Kong, I'd narrowly missed meeting Brando thanks to hectic scheduling on all sides. But this time, nothing could stop me from my rendezvous with the legendary USB-gadget maven.

Except maybe... me having no clue where he was. I looked down at the text and blanked. Outback Steakhouse? Where? I consider myself pretty knowledgeable of Hong Kong geography, having traveled there at least a dozen times, but I had never heard of Tsuen before. Turns out this is why:

I don't think I ever thought of Hong Kong as big until that moment.

I was a good twenty minutes late. Red and huffy, I paused outside Outback and glanced around, trying to look for someone whose face matched the one blurry picture I had of Brando.

Maybe it's because the only things I knew about him involved his online store—a treasure trove of gadgets both useful (like the 7-in-1 USB charging orgy) and ridiculous (the choke-able chicken)—but he wasn't what I had imagined. My mental image was that of either a giant nerd, complete with dark suspenders and eyeglass frames taped in the middle, or one of those slick entrepreneurs with oiled back hair. Maybe, like most Hong Kong businessmen, a mixture of both.

Or perhaps, I gleefully envisioned, he'd be an amalgamation of his entire online store, a living embodiment of all things fanciful and useless, be-sprocketed and USB-ports-a-plenty. He'd come fully decked in Workshop regalia, sporting one of those laser pointing bluetooth headsets, his arms wrapped in data bands and possibly one of those tiny camera recorders slung around his neck (though truthfully, I wouldn't mind if that were left out of the ensemble. I'm uncomfortable in front of cameras).

Two boyish looking men, both decked out in hoodies and worn-in jeans, shyly approached me.

"Are you Elaine?" the shorter of the two asked. He waved, in his hand an iPhone. "I am Brando. Nice to meet you."

To be honest, Brando kinda looked like a blogger.

His friend, a tall shaggy-haired fellow with square-rimmed glasses, was called Lawrence and worked with him at his company. I'm still not sure why he was there, but I assume it was for support. There, as he sat across from me, munching on salad and telling me his life story, I couldn't help wondering, Did I make Brando nervous?

"I read a lot of Gizmodo," he told me. "I don't comment because my English isn't good, but I'm always happy to see our goods on there."

After a quick lunch (the first meal he'd eaten that day), we went to see Brando's Workshop.

The place looked like what would happen if a garage hobbyist, comp-sci college student, and nerdy teen mashed all their stuff together and exploded it into an otherwise sterile office. It was, in short, geek heaven.

Boxes, filled with USB cords, wacky flash drives, keychain laser pointers and who knows what else, were stacked on top of each other everywhere.

By one wall, they made a precarious citadel that towered over our heads like some gadgety sword of Damocles. According to Brando, a good chunk of these were being shipped out to other stores, including ThinkGeek. Now you know where they get some of their oddball products too.

Employees stepped gingerly around, avoiding the open containers the best they could. On several people's desks were even more boxes—full of stuff they were still testing, had just tested, were mailing out or were receiving back. Brando wasn't always sure which it was, but he assured me his employees knew.

The more I spoke with him, the more I realized Brando and Giz staffers have a lot in common.

Back in 1998, fresh out of university, Brando started a Palm enthusiasts' site. It became popular among Chinese Palm users and several accessory manufacturers started asking him to promote their products. That turned into a part-time job selling Palm peripherals.

In 2000, he quit his engineering job and went full time, founding Brando's Workshop in his apartment. Four months later, it was big enough to warrant an actual office.

In the beginning, all the Workshop sold was Palm accessories. But by the end of the year, he decided it was worth getting into other products as well.

Fast forward eight years: Brando now lords over 19 employees and takes up an entire floor of the building. He's expanded into USB trinkets, mobile peripherals, watches, toys, random electronics and most recently (and bizarrely) ladies accessories. Like blender brushes and nail stickers—serious ladies accessories.

Brando's "office" wasn't really an office at all, just a corner of the main floor, an alcove set slightly apart from the rest. Arrayed on the cabinet behind his desk were a slew of devices, including a big professional HD camera and a stack of laptops. I could see both a Macbook Air and a Toshiba R500.

“I don't use either of them,” Brando admitted. “I just like to collect things I find beautiful.”

In that vein, he told me some of the favorite gadgets he sold were the prettier ones, such as the spy camera and MP4 watch. In fact, he seemed especially hung up on the spy gadgets, pointing to a bunch that we hadn't covered and wondering aloud why not.

Despite being surrounded by the latest and greatest, Brando said his favorite and most memorable gadget of all time was still the Palm V. Back in 1999, when he used to ride an hour on Hong Kong's subway—the MTR—every morning, that's what kept him company.

“It was thinner than the iPhone but the battery lasted for very long. I would read novels and news on the train ride over. It's still very memorable for me,” he said.

“Palm didn't integrate with cellphones very well. The Palm OS is a very good OS, not like Windows Mobile. But they stopped making their own and switched to Windows Mobile... and so I switched to an iPhone,” he explained.

This was before news of the Palm Pre came out. When it got shown at CES, I sent him an email asking what he thought of it.

“I can't comment, because I haven't tested it,” he replied cautiously, sounding like a lover burnt. “I hope it has a nice open SDK for developers, then it can have a better future. If it is only a closed OS, no hope.”

Before I left, he insisted I see the storage room—the area where they keep everything they sell.

Inside, I felt like I was at a Lilliputian version of Costco: Metal shelves spilled forth a haphazardly categorized assortment of stuff. To my right was a set of tiny remote control cars. To my left was a motley of Bluetooth doodads. I turned a corner and was met by a collection of ladybug-themed fingernail clippers.

Being in there was a strange feeling—exhilarating and claustrophobic at the same time. We blog about millions of things, and the room felt like an aggregation of everything I'd ever written about in one windowless vault.

“Here are our best selling items... our hot items,” he told me, pointing at a particular bracket that, quite honestly, was hard to differentiate from others. I nodded, smiled, and scrambled to get out of there before something fell on me.

And then it was over. Brando thanked me again for coming, and as he walked me to the subway station for my hour long journey back downtown, he told me he was elated that anyone would be interested in visiting his tiny part of Hong Kong. I told him that was really sweet of him, and maybe caught a glimpse of a little blush around his ears.

The most interesting thing about Brando's Workshop, I thought, was how much his work sounded like ours.

Brando doesn't actually make the things he sells. Rather, he's more of a gadget hunter.

Brando said most of his early years at the Workshop were spent in conventions all over Asia, looking for vendors from which to source the weird and wonderful. Now that he has employees to do the grunt work, he spends a lot of time reading magazines and blogs, always on the search for new products that would be good for their company. He claims that ten new products are added to various sections of Brando's Workshop each day.

His only real criteria, he said, “I want it to be interesting. I want it to be fun.”

So do we, Brando. So do we.

This would be fair, considering his company was about to announce a sudden 90% plunge in profits. So it's understandable that, when I asked him about Nvidia's recent coup, getting Apple to swap out Intel product for GeForce 9400M chipset, he said with more than a hint of disdain, "You're obviously a Mac user." Here's a guy who is used to making judgments, and doing it quickly.

But when I told him I also built my desktop with an Intel Core 2 Duo Wolfdale chip, he reversed his decision. Laughing, he said, "You're alright for a kid that wears black Keds." This wasn't his first reference to my sneakers—they were Adidas, actually—and it wasn't his last either.

At 69, he is definitely one of the oldest guys running a powerhouse innovation company like Intel, and when he's sitting there in front of you, he conveys an attitude that he's seen it all. He hung up his labcoat for a tailored suit long ago, but talking to him, you can still tell that his degree from Stanford isn't some MBA, but a PhD in materials science. Nerdspeak flows easily out of his mouth, and he closes his eyes while calmly making a point, like a college professor. At the same, you get a sense of the agitation within. After all, he'll be the first to tell you that in business, he still lives by the mantra of his Intel CEO predecessor Andy Grove: "Only the paranoid survive."

In the end, I really liked the guy. He's tough but fair, like an Old Testament king. Here are excerpts from our conversation, chip guru to chip fanboy, about vanquishing your competition, the limitations of clock speed, the continuing rage of the multi-core race and how to keep paranoid in your golden years.

What's the endgame of the multi-core arms race? Is there one?
If everything works well, they continue to get Moore's Law from a compute power standpoint. [But] you need software solutions to go hand-in-hand with software solutions...There's a whole software paradigm shift that has to be happen.

How involved is Intel in the software side of making that happen?
Probably the best measure is that if look at the people we hire each year, we still hire more software engineers than hardware engineers.

Where do you see Larrabee, Intel's in-development, dedicated high-end GPU, taking you?
The fundamental issue is that performance has to come from something other than gigahertz... We've gotten to the limit we can, so you've got to do something else, which is multiple cores, and then it's either just partitioning solutions between cores of the same type or partitioning solutions between heterogeneous cores on the same chip.

You see, everybody's kind of looking at the same thing, which is, 'How do I mix and match a CPU- and a GPU-type core, or six of these and two of those, and how do you have the software solution to go hand-in-hand?'

So what do you think of the competition coming from Nvidia lately?
At least someone is making very verbal comments about the competition anyway.

Do you see Nvidia as more of a competitor than AMD? How do you see the competitive landscape now?
We still operate under the Andy Grove scenario that only the paranoid survive, so we tend to be paranoid about where competition comes from any direction. If you look at the Intel history, our major competitor over the years has been everybody from IBM to NEC to Sun to AMD to you-name-it. So the competition continually changes, just as the flavor of technology changes.

As visualization becomes more important—and visualization is key to what you and consumers want—then is it the CPU that's important, or the GPU, or what combination of the two and how do you get the best visualization? The competitive landscape changes daily. Nvidia is obviously more of a competitor today than they were five years ago. AMD is still a competitor.

Would you say the same competitive philosophy applies to the mobile space?
Two different areas, obviously. The netbook is really kind of a slimmed down laptop. The Atom processor takes us in that space nicely from a power/performance standpoint. Atom allows you to go down farther in this kind of fuzzy area in between netbooks, MIDs [mobile internet devices] and smartphones. The question there is, 'What does the consumer want?'

The issue is, 'What is the ultimate device in that space?' ...Is it gonna be an extension of the internet coming down, or there gonna be an upgrowth of the cellphone coming up?

Are you planning on playing more directly in phones, then?
Those MIDs look more and more like smartphones to me...All they need to do is shrink down a little bit and they're a damn good smartphone. They have the capability of being a full-internet-functionality smartphone as opposed to an ARM-based one—maybe it looks like the internet you're used to or, maybe it doesn't.

Intel and Microsoft "won" the PC Revolution. There's a computer on basically every office desk in the country. What's beyond that? Mobile, developing countries?
Well, it's a combination. There's an overriding trend toward mobility for convenience. We can shrink the capability down to put it in a mobile form factor, and the cost is not that much more than a desktop, point one. Point two, if you go to the emerging economies where you think that mobile might be lacking, really the only way to get good broadband connectivity in most of the emerging markets is not with wired connectivity or fixed point connectivity, it's gonna be broadband wireless and that facilitates mobile in emerging markets as well.

So where does that take Intel going in the next five years?
It's pushing things like broadband wireless, WiMax...It's broadband wireless capability, that's the connectivity part. It's mobility with more compute power and lower energy consumption to facilitate battery life and all that good stuff. And it's better graphics. That's kind of Larrabee and that whole push.

You've passed AMD on every CPU innovation that it had before you did, such as on-die memory controllers, focus on performance per watt, etc. How do you plan to stay ahead?
The basic way you stay ahead is that you have to set yourself with aggressive expectations. There's nothing in life that comes free. You're successful when you set your expectations high enough to beat the competition. And I think the best thing that we have going for us is...the Moore's Law deal.

As long as we basically don't lose sight of that, and continue to push all of our roadmaps, all of our product plans and such to follow along Gordon's law, then we have the opportunity to stay ahead. That doubling every 18 months or so is the sort of expectation level you have to set for yourself to be successful.

Would you consider that the guiding philosophy, the banner on the wall?
That's the roadmap! That is the roadmap we have. If you dissect a bit, you tend to find that the older you get, the more conservative you get typically and you kinda start to worry about Moore's Law not happening. But if you bring the bright young talent and say, 'Hey, bright young talent, we old guys made Moore's Law happen for 40 years, don't screw it up,' they're smart enough to figure it out.

Tell me about how you assembled the series.

In terms of structural influence, there was a series when I was a kid called the Mushroom Planet books by Eleanor Cameron. There wasn’t a lot of science fiction available for kids then (or now) and she had this great trick of finishing off a story but leaving you with an unresolved image that you couldn’t stop thinking about.

I picked up that particular trick and applied it to this series. This was not meant to be a series. It was meant to be a standalone book, My Teacher is an Alien. The thing where Peter goes off and Susan goes out and looks into the sky, wondering what’s going on, was meant to give the reader something to continue the story in their own head.

But the book became so unexpectedly popular. Literally, it sold as many copies as my first 20 books all put together had sold in the previous 13 years, and I was getting a lot of letters from kids demanding to know what happened next. The publisher, of course, wanted to take advantage of this too.

I actually wasn’t that enthusiastic about doing another book. I got a lot of pressure and I was listening to Jonathan Kozol speaking in New York. I realized the only reason to do this kind of book was to see us from the outside.

The reason I like writing this alien stuff is because when you’re in your own mess you can’t see it. You’ve probably seen this with friends. You know they’re in a horrible romance. You can see it. All their friends can see it. But they can’t see it because they’re inside of it.

We can’t see our own mess when we’re inside it, but the aliens can look at us from the outside and say, “There’s enough food an people are starving. I don’t get it,” and make us look at it too.

The publishers were just looking for a sequel at that point and I said, “We’ll do two more books, and for me to keep it interesting as a writer, I’ll do the next book from Duncan’s point of view and the last book from Peter’s point of view. And what happened was the third book got so long and complex that I had to split it in half.

It took as long as the first three books put together to write the fourth book. I kept stumbling on how to do it. I’d done each of the main kids, so I thought, who’s going to narrate the fourth book. Oh, I’ll have it be Broxholm narrate it. But that didn’t work because Broxholm was an adult and as soon as soon as he starts to narrate it, it became an adult book, not a kids’ book.

The other thing I tried was to have all three kids narrate it in alternating chapters. But that didn’t work because sometimes one kid was having a lot of adventure and another kid was having nothing going on. I was trying to force stuff in that didn’t work.

And finally I realized, the fourth book was really simply the rest of Peter’s story.

But I could not have written the fourth book—which actually sold the most of all of them—without the first three books. I mean, the publisher would not have let me go where that book goes because people wouldn’t think that kids were ready for that.

What do you mean by “could not have written it”?

It’s very dark and it’s very direct. The kids see torture and they see a starving baby. This was light paperback fiction. But the sales of the first three books bought me permission to go where I wanted to go in the fourth book.

Do you feel like that philosophy going into the fourth book, where you had more liberty and pursued content that might be heavier for kids, has followed you through the rest of your career?

Actually, I think the fourth book is the farthest step going in that direction. I consider the fourth books a secret between the kids (now the young adults) who read it and me. Because the books were paperback originals, they didn’t receive much review attention, especially as the years went on because the review media tend to pay attention to new hard covers. So when you’re writing paperbacks, it sort of circumvents the review world and a lot of adults had no idea what was going on in that book. It was me and the kids in a conversation with each other. [Bruce Coville]

Back to Part 1

As a kid, I raised my hand too often in class and looked forward to science projects. I drew pictures of space ships and aliens on my notebooks before rushing home after school to play on my IBM 386. As for many young nerds, school could make for a solitary life. I related to a set of books—the My Teacher Is an Alien series—better than I could with most of my lunch-table peers.

If you are in your mid 20s like me, chances are you've read the series, penned by Bruce Coville, one of the most acclaimed names in children's sci-fi. It's the ongoing story of a young boy named Peter who—kidnapped by an alien disguised as his teacher—visits other planets, travels on space ships and meets a universe of aliens first hand, before having to argue humanity's case against a galactic jury, lest they quarantine or even kill us for our warmongering ways. After rereading the series on a nostalgic rainy weekend, I decided to call up Coville and ask him what was going through his head when he wrote it all. It ends up, he's just as interesting now as I, at age eight, would have imagined him.

The devices Coville dreamed up for Peter's journey were amazing then, and still amazing now. Peter uses a URAT ("Universal Reader and Translator," kind of like a PDA on steroids) to teleport around a ship the size of New Jersey. Meanwhile his crush Susan is caught in a stasis forcefield, and his arch nemesis, Duncan the former dunce, is the smartest person alive following a zap to the brain. Some of the tech was and is farfetched, while much of what was once considered alien (literally) has become commonplace. The first book in the series was published back in 1989, before broadband, 3G wireless and laptops in every home.

Peter Thompson is your stereotypical dork, does well in school, gets picked on and is always reading science fiction. Do you think geeks are perceived differently in society today than around 1990?

Oh yeah. Geekhood is definitely much cooler than it used to be. It’s come a long way.

Would Peter get by better today?

Not necessarily. In the kid culture, I don’t think that’s caught up. When you enter the adult world, you realize, wow, geeks make more than I do. But in the kid world, he’s still kind of geeky.

Did you think early in your career that we’d see technology become a mainstream subject?

Yeah, actually I did. As a sci-fi writer you have to be a futurist. I was a very early adopter of a personal computer. And one thing that I try to apply when I’m thinking about things is the curve of technology and the way technology feeds on itself and speeds things up.

Science fiction is not as predictive as we’d like to think it is. Yeah, Jules Verne talked about submarines, but they were around already. What science fiction does well is not predict what the change is going to be, but make it clear that there is going to be change. What the great science fiction writers missed in computers was miniaturization. You go back to those stories and see where they were talking about the UNIVAC, these room-sized, building- sized computers. They missed miniaturization and the fact that computers would not be owned by giant corporations, that we’d all have them.

OK, now this is kind of unfair. But I made a small list of technologies that are in the My Teacher series and I thought you could say “yes” or “no” as to whether or not they’ll ever exist.

(Laughing nervously)…if I’d known there’d be a pop quiz, I would have reread the books.

Brain-zapping intelligence booster?

Yes.

Universal language translator?

Yes.

Machine-based telepathy?

Maybe.

Faster-than-light travel?

Maybe…that’s the big one…it may be that we’re limited to the world as we understand it now but my sense is that we’ll find a way around that…Yeah, I think it’s gonna happen.

Teleportation?

No.

Pocket holograms?

Yes.

Forcefields?

Yes.

Self-fitting masks?

Yes.

With 20 years of perspective, do you think you’d write the technology differently?

The Earth technology in the series is not much part of the story. It’s really about the alien technology. What the series does not include that I would have to do differently now is kids using the internet, going online or using cellphones.
Anything different in terms of alien technology?

I don’t think I’d do that much differently. We’re moving more rapidly to having something like a URAT ourselves than I thought we would. I have friends in the science-fiction world who say the ebook will never catch on because people love real books and I could never read off the screen. To me that’s like saying television will never catch on because who wants to watch a black-and-white picture on a circle that’s 12 inches wide.

The URAT was really me trying to envision where that kind of [handheld computing] technology would go, and we’re getting there faster than I anticipated.

The URAT itself combines a PDA, networking and a 3D hologram projector...

You know, it’s been a while since I’ve read it. I can’t tell you everything the URAT did.

I’m having a real SNL Star Trek moment where William Shatner starts yelling at the Trekkies.

(Laughs)

Are there any examples of a scientific announcement or invention that makes you say, “I came up with that!”

(Laughs) I do look at things and say I was talking about that. I don’t necessarily say I came up with it. The iPhone is really pushing forward what the URAT is. I look at that and think, yeah, that’s what I was talking about 15 or 20 years ago.

Do you think that Jobs ripped you off?

Oh, no no. (laughs) Even if they saw it—which I highly doubt—I would be thrilled if I had any hand in it. Ideas should be exchanged.

A lot of sci-fi shares these mutual visions.

It’s sort of an ongoing conversation in the sci-fi field that builds on itself. One thing you have to feel your way around is communication across vast spaces. Even at the speed of light, intergalactic communication would take tens of thousands of years. You either say that’s a limitation, and build a story around that. Or you say, I’m going to come up with a fix around this. Science fiction writers have come up with a few ways around this and other writers adapt and pick them up.

Kids have said to me, “you got that from Star Wars” or something. I said, actually, I wrote that book before Star Wars came out.

Do you remember any specific influences of the My Teacher series?

I will tell you where one aspect of the books came from, particularly in My Teacher Fried My Brains. When Duncan has the brain fry and he’s able to receive all those messages and read what’s going through the air.

That insight came from Buckminster Fuller when I heard him speak, a decade before I wrote the book. He talked about that idea, that there was this massive amount of information flowing through the air at all times. You have your radio on and no matter where you are, you still hear information being broadcast. That idea really sank in. I thought, what would it be like if you actually could receive that without the intervention of the machine?

Aliens… do they exist or not?

I don’t think it’s possible that they don’t exist. I cannot conceive of a universe as large as this one in which we’re the only intelligent species.

If aliens do exist, what do you think they think of us?

The might not even know of us. They might be in the same place that we are. If they do know about us, I think what’s in the books is what they think of us.

The underlying theme of the My Teacher series seems to be, “Man’s brain may be bigger than his heart.” We’re capable of technological advancements that we’re not ethically ready to handle.

I really like how you put that, though I would change it slightly: “Man’s brain is bigger than he allows his heart to be.”

Has your perspective on this moral changed in 20 years with new technology?

No, actually my perspective has not changed. I would have liked it to have. When you write social commentary, you hope it will become irrelevant. We are no further ahead in world hunger—look at Darfur right now. We are still making the same mistakes. I would like to have had the humiliation of having been proved wrong.

Do you think that good enough technology could solve world problems like global hunger and war? A device that provided unlimited clean water and food? Or is the problem the people themselves?

The "Santa Claus" machine. It would be such a radical change that it’s tough to tell what would happen. Human greed remains and the attempt to control that and profit from it—there would be a huge battle as to how that technology is used. And I’m not sure which side would win.

If you've enjoyed the interview so far, head on over to part two. Its focus is more literary, the outtakes of what wasn't quite gadget-focused enough to fit here. But if you're a fan of the series, check it out.

[Bruce Coville]

While he does have a point—we haven't gotten to the point where cloud computing can take over traditional software—is it really as far away a possibility as he makes it seem? Microsoft already missed the internet search revolution, will it miss the next big thing too? [Portal Exame]

"We're basically plugging into the larger businesses," he says. "Notebooks will be manufactured and handled in Asia where there's much broader distribution. I can't just snap my fingers and have [the Envy and Omen] in Russia, Dubai and other places where people are begging for them. To scale the business and stay true to the brand, we have to structure it accordingly." Regarding layoffs, he did acknowledge: "There are definitely going to be people impacted. With any change, we have to take that impact in stride and keep pressing forward."

Rahul also addressed the concerns that some gamers had that Voodoo had abandoned its core audience. He surprised us with an interesting statistic: 25% of the Voodoo customer base are gamers, he says. The other 75% are "fortunate people who love the style and the fact that our products are so different." On the matter of the sleek new Envy not being a gaming PC at all, he mentions that it's not the first time, and that the hot-selling 12-inch Envy had integrated graphics too.

He stresses that the crazy Omen desktop and the Blackbird are both solid gaming platform. He also says that he's interested in the new directions that DIY enthusiast gamers will soon be taking. "The DIY enthusiast market will change," he says. "They're going to focus on more efficient computing rather than speeds and feeds, to bring more value to the end than just framerates. The DIY market will evolve—that's an opportunity for us to look into."

We have no idea what that might mean. Could it be a line of Voodoo-branded accessories? Or simply designing systems themselves with more DIY tweakbility in mind, like the Blackbird? Your guess is as good, or actually probably better, than mine, so go ahead and guess.

Tomorrow night at 10PM, Food Network kicks off Alton Brown's latest TV show, Feasting on Waves, where the Mensa-smart kitchen geek and his crew hop into two 50-foot catamarans and sail around 15 different Caribbean islands in search of quality cuisine, shooting and editing the hi-def episodes right there on the boats. It turns out, despite his disdain for specialized kitchen gadgets, Brown depended on regular high-end tech to make a cooking show on a boat happen.

How do you produce a TV show from a sailboat?

One of the things about the Feasting shows in general is that they have a very small crew, and we are moving with very little space. We are extremely packed and technology dense. We had two 50-foot catamarans—it sounds fun but it wasn’t that fun.

So you shoot and edit as you go?

This year we decided to go completely tapeless: Panasonic P2 cards on 200s. We’re downloading them into our portable Avid edit system. We take as much audio equipment as we take video equipment. The funny thing is, professional audio hasn’t gotten a whole lot smaller. Although hi-def cameras have gotten smaller, lenses have gotten better and battery time has gotten better, audio is still the tricky part of the process for field reporting.

I see you were also using a little Panasonic?

I was lucky enough to be one of the first people in the US to get Panasonic’s HDC-HS100 AVCHD camcorder. It’s got a nice little Leica lens on it. We take everything through a DaVinci color correction system. Once we do that, you really can’t tell the difference between my little camera and the big cameras—it’s all 1080i. We have some scenes that were 100% shot with just my camera.

How did you connect to the internet?

It’s kinda funny, the entire time that I was in the islands, I had perfect e-mail with my iPhone. The entire time. I think there was once, during a midnight crossing, the Anegada Passage, where I lost internet for about half an hour. The rest of the time, I was getting e-mail through either EDGE or something else [probably GPRS].

I did not even take a computer with me on that trip. I decided I just didn’t want to see a computer for a while. And at the time, I figured you know, computers, boats, water, scuba diving. I thought about taking the ToughBook along, and then I thought about taking the Asus because that’s a great little box. Then I thought, the hell with it. I took a few pads of paper, some pens and my iPhone.

You also carry GPS everywhere, right?

As a motorcyclist, as a hiker and as a pilot, I’m pretty sold on Garmin. In the first Feasting on Asphalt, I had a touchscreen weatherproof version of the StreetPilot for my motorcycle that even worked with gloves on. I just really love how their interfaces work. You don’t even need manuals for most of their stuff, the stuff is so intuitive.

In New York, I use Google Maps with my iPhone, because I know where I am—I don’t need GPS. If I was going some place where I needed GPS, I’d use my Garmin Colorado [shown in top pic], which I really really like. It’s a really great marine box. It’s splashproof, but it comes loaded with all the marine functions, so it’s really easy to do marine chart info if you get the right cards for it. You can sail the world with one.

So it was your navi on land and sea?

Everywhere. We basically documented the entire Feasting on Waves journey in the Colorado. Every place we went, we popped a waypoint. It’s got so many easy functions for calculating distance it made navigating around the island easier. Even islands that didn’t have roads at all, we could get good topographic information.

Do you adhere to the old sailor’s adage that you should never have just one form of navigation?

Abso-stinking-lutely. When I fly, I may have full GPS on the plane, but I got a full set of charts too, and I keep the charts out while I’m flying to make sure I know where I am. In this day and age, if I have a major power outage, I just whip out my handheld, the 496, a spectacular handheld aviation GPS. But there could be a catastrophic satellite failure, different things could happen that could make GPS unusable—I guess.

I think your unit would fail before the satellite did.

Something could happen to satellites, you never know. So I always want to know where I am on paper, too.

And on the island, what was your backup?

There were a lot of times where I didn’t have a backup. On islands, I sometimes didn’t have anything else, because there aren't reliable paper maps for those places. The only time I wasn’t using Garmin to navigate was when we were underwater—I don’t think they have an underwater unit yet. We did a fair amount of scuba diving, and you’re still on your own under water. You still gotta use a compass.

I think you just invented something.

Underwater GPS would be spectacular. I don’t know how deep you can go with that technology without having serious problems. Even 50 to 70 feet would be useful. I wonder why they haven’t done that yet. I’ll ask Garmin when I can get that. For rec diving, having that kind of application would be fantastic.

Note: I asked Garmin why there wasn't a scuba GPS, and I got a quick reply: "The reason for no scuba GPS is simple... the signal is deflected by water."

So how do you keep everything charged up?

That’s a problem. Especially on the boats, it was really difficult. We got down there and realized that the power systems on the boats which were all 220V—the power wasn’t clean enough for our editing computers. On St. Martin, we had to go buy a Honda generator to run on the back of the boat to give us good steady clean 120V.

The Colorado runs on AAs, so I took a batch of rechargeable AAs. I ran the recharger for that in the cabin where I also charged my iPhone and my little camera batteries. I had to have three chargers. My other camera only runs on regular batteries, not rechargeables.

What kind of camera is it?

It’s an old metal Canon EF—about 30 years old. I also carry a 35mm Leica point-and-shoot with a fixed 40mm lens. I was shooting slide film in the Canon and print film in the Leica.

So you’re not shooting digital?

Not on this. I wanted Ektochrome—nothing looks like Ektochrome. I’m old school that way. I have a pretty decent Canon digital, and a Leica digital as well, but I didn’t want to have to deal with the chargers, and I wanted super robust technology, so I went film. I like film. You can’t beat it. I spent most of my career as a cinematographer before I went to culinary school, so I just got a thing about film emulsions. It’s still the way I think. I just don’t appreciate digital photography as much as I should.

I know, I know—we managed to get through an entire discussion about a food show without talking about the freakin' food. Good thing there are already clips of the show (alas, non-embeddable) up at Food Network's website, so take a look. The awesome photographs of Alton were shot—digitally—by Marion Laney, ForgottenGulf.com.

Gizmodo: What types of people do you see gravitating towards seasteading? What would the day-to-day benefits be that would draw people to the idea?

Patri: Pioneers - A lot of people have that desire to build something new on the frontier, and there aren't a lot of other frontiers left in the modern world.

Utopians - I don't mean this literally (after all, the word means "No Place"). I just mean people who see problems with current social/political/economic/legal systems, have ideas about better ones, and are into them enough to want to actually try them out.

The exact day-to-day benefits would depend on individual motivation, and what you don't like about current countries. For many it will be low environmental footprint and sustainable practices. Personally, I'm a libertarian and I want more freedom. I hate having my money stolen to fund pointless wars and biofuel subsidies that make food more expensive worldwide. I hate having to worry about going to jail just because some of my hobbies involve altering my brain chemistry with substances that don't come from big pharma companies. I hate that my hot tub has been sitting empty for months because the zoning department wants us to jump through all sorts of hoops. I hate living in a society so big that my voice doesn't get heard. And a lot of people tell me they feel the same way.

Gizmodo: What are the basic steps a normal person would have to go through to become a seasteader?

Patri: We're not quite sure how it will work, but one path we picture is slow, steady, incremental transition from ordinary life to the new one:

A person would need to find a group of like-minded folk who all agree on the vision for their society. Ideally, they'd live in the same area, and it would be on the water. Over the course of years, they'd meet, organize, set up the rules for their society, and save up the money to buy the physical platform (or build it themselves using our designs). Once they had the platform (in their local waters), they'd move onto it (as their leases come up / they sell their houses). They'd also be transitioning from their land-based jobs to seastead-based ones, and possibly becoming more self-sufficient if that's a goal of the community. Eventually, they'd move the platform offshore, perhaps first in commuting distance, and eventually out to the high seas.

Of course, someone could also join an existing community, which would be much quicker. Each community can set its own standards, but I imagine you'd have to like the society and its rules, and be able to make a living there (have a job, be able to telecommute, or be independently wealthy). Some may have more stringent requirements, others will have open borders.

Another option would be to start out vacationing there, perhaps via a 2-week / year timeshare. Over time, you could add onto the timeshare, and eventually make the transition to living there full-time. I think the timeshare model is a good one for the beginning, because there are way more people who'd be willing to try seasteading a couple weeks a year, as a vacation, than who are ready & able to move there full-time.

Gizmodo: What would you do if, say, a 30-year-old guy wanted to vacation at a seastead with his 14-year-old girlfriend? How will basic rules be enforced and decided upon?

Patri: Each community will decide and enforce its own rules. More importantly, each community will decide its own procedures for deciding on its rules. The point is not just to create one political system or type of system, but to make a turnkey product for creating new countries, so that lots of different groups will try lots of different things, and we can all learn from it.

The one rule I think seasteads should enforce on each other is the right for individuals to choose their society. As long as people are freely choosing their society, then as far as I'm concerned the society can pick whatever rules it wants.

Personally, I want a society that's very libertarian for internal affairs, except for strong national security rules against doing anything that will piss off a military power (exporting drugs, laundering money, polluting). Basically the vision of "As much freedom as we can reasonably get away with."

Gizmodo Even using a flag of convenience, do you think you'd find yourselves a target for pirates?

Patri: It's possible, but I really doubt it. You never hear of cruise ships getting attacked by pirates, only cargo ships, because the ratio of "people defending" vs. "movable cargo" is so dramatically different in the two cases. There's a huge difference between attacking a container ship with 10 or 20 crew and a sea colony with hundreds of people who would be defending their homes.

Some people have suggested that if there are rich residents, pirates would attack to get ransom, but that's just not what you see out in the world. Residensea, the first condo cruise ship, has units that start at $5M, so they have a very wealthy population, and they've had no problems. Ransom is dangerous—it's hard to hide from satellites on the ocean, so you can't easily kidnap someone, so basically you're stuck in a hostage situation with someone who has a lot more resources and power than you.

Also, the vast majority of piracy is restricted to a few areas, which we'd of course avoid.

That said, we wouldn't want to make ourselves an easy target, so having some weapons seems like a good idea, to defend against countries as well as pirates. There's nothing we can do to stop the US military, of course, but there are cost-effective defenses like ship-to-ship cruise missiles which we will want to investigate.

Gizmodo: What do you see as the biggest hurdle to this project becoming a reality?

Patri: Economics. The ocean is a harsh, resource-poor environment. Oil rigs can afford it because they are mining black gold. The price of low-end cruise lines makes me optimistic, but it's definitely going to be a challenge to make offshore real estate at a reasonable cost. Cost drives everything - if it's expensive, it'll just be for rich people, which might make a cool resort, but will fail at the goal of experimenting with new societies. If it's cheap enough, you'll get regular people just saying "screw normal life" and doing it. Or retiring there, like Americans who retire to Costa Rica. Also, there needs to be a seastead economy, or seasteads will be poor, and the cheaper the real estate, the less resources the ocean is draining, the more stuff will be profitable.

Governments are also a potential threat, but they're a bit of a wild card. I think we can live in a way which is new and different and doesn't bring down heat, but you never know when some politician will get pissed off. I think our strength will be in scale and diversity - it's easy to invade 1 sea-city, not so easy if there are hundreds and more springing up every day. That kind of success will bring govt. attention, but if it's decentralized it's going to be hard for them to do much about it. And eventually we'll be big enough to afford a military of our own. [Seasteading]