Death On The Phone (iPhone)

It turns that we are all going to die, gruesomely. Have you ever had your eyes gouged out by wild Dragons while your flesh melts from the searing heat of its breath, and by the way poisonous snakes are already eating you from the inside out. It happens to me all the time. While this is far worse!
Today Apple said that users who jail break iPhones are unlocking the seals of death, by unlocking the firmware necessary to access the cell tower network. You see, the patriots at Apple spent many sleepless nights insuring that there is no way possible for you to disrupt cell traffic on your phone or any other. The assholes that jailbreak iPhones could in theory unlock the “baseband processor” software that controls access to the cell network, and after that it would be child’s play to paralyze the network using a denial of service attack.
Apple is asking the Copyright Office to forbid jail breaking, but don’t expect people to quit jail breaking these phones anytime soon. There are just too many cool apps available that aren’t approved by Apple.
Returning to reality, there are all sorts of awesome and mischievous ways people can shut down cell towers. Besides dynamite, you could always hack into a less sophisticated cell phone. Any electronic engineer worth his weight could build a jammer antenna using nothing but spare parts, a simple radio tuned to the right bandwidth. If that still does not work, why not mess with its power supply.
This is all just a big waste of time, and just a desperate attempt by Apple to slow the tide of jail breaking.

Stop Messing With My Consciousness!

I’m the kind of guy to laugh at this. You know that we are both to blame for this. Consciousness it would seem is quite a problem for science. Now I know what you’re going to say. How do I know that you are not messing with me? I’ve been known to lie.
I just want to know the truth. Consciousness it seems is much more complicated than if the neurons switching on and off in that giant melon of yours qualifies for it. If the theory is correct, that iTouch in your hand may have some level of consciousness.
The story runs like this, all consciousness is based on information. The wider array of states that your mind can achieve, the higher its awareness. Consider this a count on the number of unique states that your mind can compute. The next measure is the integration of your mind or any other. It is another count on the cross-linking of the neurons in your mind or the transistors in a processor. You won’t like this, but that hard drive in your computer can hold far more memories than your mind ever will. The argument goes that since its not cross-linked, that it does not count. The computer does not give any meaning to the blood fest at your last Halloween Party, but the police will.
In neuroscience, they use the quantity phi to measure the integration of casual components. The higher that phi is, the higher your synergy. One consequence of this is that every organism from you to that Cobra about to bite you has some minimal awareness. The cache is that it is awfully hard to calculate for even the simplest organisms. All the computers in Google’s inventory can’t even computer phi for the simple roundworm and its 302 nerve cells.
This theory is still very incomplete, and in my view only philosophy. Any study deserving to be considered science must be at least testable. My view is that the definition of integration is arbitrary, and requires more specifics. The transistors inside a microprocessor may have a limited number of connections between the registers, but software provides nearly unlimited possibilities for sorting the data. The same could also be said for the performance of the human mind, using the reasonable assumption that our brains are more or less constant between individuals and that it is our innovation and experience that count. While I’m on the subject, information theory in physics has provided a basis for which all physical systems in nature can execute computations in the action of changing states, like with the fusing of two hydrogen atoms.