It's no worse than the "trespassers will be shot, hung, drawn, quartered and then shot again" posters liberally stuck over many of the woodlands in the southern States. I've seriously considered buying some land there and putting up a sign saying "trespassers will be served tea and cookies - you're finally getting some decent exercise", only I suspect that would be illegal.
I suspect that nobody is really that bothered by laws requiring those under 16 to practice with the longbow or cabs to carry bails of hay. I also seriously doubt that many people even know that many laws, let alone which ones are absurd.
If the rupture in the oil well has spread from the original site to within 20' of the beach, we've bigger problems than photography. Besides, the photographs that really matter are the ones from the plume. ROVs have been available for news outlets to buy for years. If we haven't seen independent media photographs from the site of the action yet, we're not losing anything with a ban on a paltry 20'.
(The oil slick has spread for miles beyond the booms, and if the newspapers could photograph Lady Di sunbathing topless from half a mile away a decade or so ago, they can photograph a ruddy great oil slick from outside the booms.)
Thermodynamics students would benefit from a correct understanding of heat transfer. If the model is faulty, then their calculations will be in error. If the counter-claims are faulty, knowing and understanding why will prevent them from going in messed-up directions. Extracting useful work is only possible (on any quantitative level) if you know what work can be usefully extracted.
Your private thoughts cannot be taken from you, so there is the first right. Your emotions, state-of-mind, knowledge, intellect and understanding are likewise yours and yours alone.
Secondly, there's very little you really own anyway - virtually everything you claim is rented, licensed or mortgaged - and it's actually quite hard to take something you don't have in the first place.
Thirdly, the ability of group X to take something is not the same as group X then owning it. Let us say that the US enshrined the true right to own some specific type of property. That property would then be yours absolutely and no seizure - by other individuals or by the Government - could alter your ownership. This actually applies to certain classes of antiquity, which is why those items cannot be owned by Governments, museums or private collectors - no matter how obtained - unless the accepted owner authorizes that transfer of ownership. New Zealand, Egypt and Iraq have obtained many items back that way, as have some percentage of Jewish families persecuted in WW2. Of course, this implies a means of enforcement. The US doesn't recognize the ICJ and the ICJ - unlike the European Court of Human Rights - doesn't deal with disputes between individuals and governments. However, recognition of the ICJ and abandonment of Sovereign Immunity would certainly cripple opportunities for abuse.
The freezing point of water is altered by pressure. The triple point (where water can be solid, liquid and gas) is fascinating. I've not looked this up in a while, but IIRC there is a pressure/temperature combo where ice sublimes without going through a liquid state at all. With sufficient pressure, of course, anything at any temperature will set solid. You just need a pressure so great that the molecules are locked into a single position.
Nuclear fusion is easy. We've been able to do that for 50 years. Sustainable fusion reactions that release more energy than they require - that's trickier. (Sarcasm mode on.) Doubtless the real-term cuts in science spending and the active efforts to scrap ITER will help with that. (Sarcasm mode off.)
Fusion reactors would not only help with helium, they'd slash the need for coal- and gas-powered generators. The heat should also be more than sufficient to recycle many materials by reducing them to pure elemental form. Temps should be way hotter than any blast furnace even a long way off. There is no end to their value. How to get them - well, that's going to take heaps of effort, heaps of money and starting construction on the housing for them now (before we have the designs) since that will take decades and we really don't have a huge amount of time we can waste given the lack of uranium reserves or meaningful oil reserves. I'd also suggest a Manhattan-style brainstorm, with some real pressure for practical results rather than nice theories that can get lots of citations in journals.
If evaporation is considered a possible explanation, then the containers aren't sealed. If the containers aren't sealed and have equal volumes of water, then they have unequal masses of water. The specific heat is the amount of heat per unit mass required to raise the temperature by one degree Celsius. In order to prove that hot water can freeze faster, you must have an equal mass. Since radiation is a function of surface area, you must also have an equal volume. Therefore you must have sealed containers and unequal pressures. This is not the experiment described on Wikipedia.
However, it would be an extremely interesting experiment to perform. I'd actually suggest three closed containers (one with cold water, one with hot water and equal pressure, one with hot water and equal mass). I'd also suggest running thermocouples to the center of each container and plotting the temperature over time. This will eliminate all of the unknowns and variables not accounted for in the original experiment or in the Wikipedia write-up.
Regardless of what the results show, they will be quite interesting and useful for students starting on the topic of thermodynamics.
Actually, no. Since there are endless debates over whether there are Constitutional rights to Native Americans, children, criminals, foreigners, illegal aliens, tarrarists (though what's wrong with paving roads, I don't know), etc, it follows that the Bill of Rights is really just a list of permissions. A right is just that, a right. It cannot be given, it cannot be taken away. It is. A permission must be given and may be taken away at the discretion of the giver. It follows that there is no, and never really has been, any "Constitutional right" to free speech.
(The original draft of the Magna Carta got very close to actually creating legal rights, by openly stating that violation of those rights by the Government was a criminal offense that could be punished as such, eliminating any notion of Sovereign Immunity. Neither the final version nor the US Constitution has such a clause, and both the US and UK exempt the Government from any legal action.)
It's not like you could seriously do anything. The majority of Americans would be more likely to regard you as an economic criminal than to agree with the publication of anything that could make them aware of the risks. America is a very risk-averse culture - not through not taking risks, but through not wanting to think about them too much. Far from becoming a folk hero and/or a martyr to free speech, if you got thrown in jail, you'd be much more likely labeled "one of the Bad Guys". The Government might even end up more popular, not less. The quaint but utterly incorrect notion that an individual can do anything worth a damn might apply to small towns but never applied to the US historically and certainly doesn't in a country estimated at 300 million. Especially in a country where people have always played second-fiddle to corporate culture.
No problem. If the water is coming away from the machine at 80'C, run it directly to the soup kitchen and connect the hot water pipe from the kitchen back to the computer.
Hot water doesn't freeze faster. However, water at 80'C will cool to 60'C much faster than water at 60'C will cool to 40'C, given standard atmospheric temperature and pressure for the ambient temperature of the room. The flow of heat from a hot medium to a cooler medium varies non-linearly with temperature. For example, as you approach the same temperature, the flow of heat approaches zero.
(In other words, if they piped through cold water which was heated to room temperature, a passive radiator would be useless.)
There is a drawback with hot water, though. The temperature gradient issue cuts both ways. As the temperature of the water approaches the temperature of the chips, the heat flow from the chips is reduced. Thus, water at 60'C will not draw off as much heat as water at 40'C, if the chips were to run at 80'C. You've got to balance this sort of approach fairly carefully.
I rather like the Cooling Tower approach (evaporative passive cooling). Basically, you blast the water through a nozzle that turns it into a fine mist. You collect the water that actually reaches the reservoir at the bottom and top it off. The drawback of this method is that it is somewhat bulkier than a radiator system. It is also not a closed system and therefore is a bit more expensive to run. On the other hand, evaporative cooling is much more effective than relying on simple heat flows, so you can get away with a lower temperature gradient at the cooling end. This, in turn, means you get a steeper temperature gradient for the chips, which means they're cooled much more effectively and can therefore be driven much harder without loss of reliability.
The bottom line: If you want a product to do specifically what you want you have to do it yourself.
If that were true, there would be no standards, no Ethernet, no Unix, no Linux, no Slashdot. Re-usability, The Creed of the True Programmer, would have been long overthrown. Meaning: no libraries, no utilities, no concatenation of tools, no pipes, no Computer Science, no Software Engineers, no IT jobs at all. There would be no point and no value. The whole of the US would require three computers and you wouldn't be using any of them.
If he still has those ideas somewhere, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I could code them up. As for the GIMP developers - remember the XFree86 group? Nobody else does, either. GIGO. If you discard quality input, you can only produce garbage output.
I would agree that you can't go by physical analogies. I would think that the best place to start is with a barter system and allow an information economy to evolve naturally, just as the physical economy did. That can be problematic, though, as people want results now and you only need to look at blog sites to realize that most people don't have information worth trading. However, it does avoid the problem as person X starts with knowledge X', person Y starts with knowledge Y', and at the end both X and Y have both X' and Y'. It retains the symmetry of the physical system and it is the symmetry that I think is the important part.
Software-as-a-service won't work either as it is developed only once but can be mass-distributed. Bugfixes may be a service, but they're not on the same scale as the initial design and implementation. Always assuming there WAS an initial design.
Software-as-a-book (a model Borland came up with) is a reasonable approximation. Books are also only written once but sold to many. But books can be photocopied in part legally (under fair-use rules), whereas outside of Open Source, it's a license violation at best, copyright infringement + DMCA violation at worst, to even inspect the code, let alone extract some percentage for review purposes. Also, whereas when copyright expires, books are free to be repackaged, closed-source software can NEVER be repackaged - well, not until decompilers can translate binaries into sufficiently structured source that it could be sensibly edited and recompiled on another system.
In lieu of a good idea for an informational exchange system for bartering, I'd say the book model is the best anyone has come up with. However, to do so would mean that closed-source as it exists today would have to be prohibited. (The source code would have to be on file with a public body, so that it could be accessed when copyright expired. Otherwise, the owner retains control even after expiration of rights - an impossibility with books.) It may be possible - certainly many Governments are quite competent at handling the 25-, 50- and 100-year rules for the release of classified and confidential information. Getting any of the corporations to agree - that's another matter.
In light of the rapid devaluation of computer software, relative to the devaluation of material in books, I'd argue that either the 25-year rule should be applied or a 10-year rule should be developed specifically for information that rapidly decays.
That's computer software. The article, however, dealt with sheet music. Can we do something similar there?
I'd argue yes. Sheet music and journals have been covered by "fair usage" rules and book-style distribution systems forever. In the case of journals, it is considered valid to copy 10% or 1 article, whichever is the lesser. For sheet music, I don't recall exactly what the rule is but I would imagine it would be something comparable.
Sheet music has one complication that no book or journal has, though. You can reverse-engineer a score. I've done so plenty of times. The reverse-engineered form won't be identical to the original, as it is based on a specific interpretation and will also contain any errors in the playing. However, it is arguably the same piece of music. If you were to play that reverse-engineered piece in a public performance, the RIAA would expect royalties even though it was NOT the original. I suspect the composer described would feel the same way.
On the other hand, it is not only acceptable for papers in a journal to cite other papers and to describe the outcome of reverse-engineered experiments in efforts to duplicate results, it is actually considered highly desirable. University departments get paid according to how many people have copied their work.
Software can also be reverse-engineered. Thus, in some ways, sheet music and computer software are closer analogies than books are to either.
At present, the entire music industry is seriously borked. Thus, it is useless to look to sheet music for an answer. Rather, sheet music and software will need to develop a solution in tandem.
The pull-yourself-up-by-the-boostraps-can-do is the very attitude that creates empire-building people. Why? Because if you don't =need= other people, then you cannot help but see them as merely using up resources you could be using for yourself. If you have no use for other people, why take the chance that they might try and use you? Ultimately, the only person who needs nothing from any given person is an Emperor.
To me, the only "correct" solution is a society in which there is a recognized level of inter-dependency (and the welfare network needed to support that inter-dependency). Notice I say inter-dependency. It has to be a two-way street and it has to be done from the position of true equals. (Useful education makes equals. Craft training can make equals. Competition can NEVER CREATE equals, although it is an effective and useful way to test for equality. It is this last point that the US has largely forgotten and Communist countries never learned.)
A trivial example. The more you =productively= learn, the more cost-effective you will be able to work, thus the more profitable you will be for yourself, your company and your country. Thus, the more the Government invests into productive education and the more companies sponsor students rather than have them take out loans, the richer you and they end up being. By taking care of you, they take care of themselves.
But the example can be extended. Government costs only so much, if it is efficient. How can Government be efficient? By not having stupid people being elected or hired, for a start. That means that the more Government gets education right, the fewer stupid voters there will be and the fewer stupid candidates there will be. Smaller Government just means concentrating the stupidity, which is never good. Smarter Government is the way to cut costs. Since your wealth is a function of how intelligent or brainless the people you are around are, it is in your interests to make them as brainy as possible.
There is no society out there that operates off true inter-dependence. It is unclear if such a society would even be stable, as people ARE "pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps"-style greedy. However, if it could be made to work, it would be socially and economically optimal -- at the price that individual freedom would be about as restricted as in Western Europe (which is barely at all, but still far more restricted than the US).
If the reporters wrote up the specific problems they were finding (such as what was slow, what was particularly difficult, etc) and submitted them to the developers, the developers would have a potentially very rich mine of information to work from. Sure, some of the issues will be ones of "X doesn't work the way Microsoft does it" - annoyances that slow adoption rates but not really bugs per-se. But there will likely be other comments along the lines of "in reporting, it would be very useful to do Y", or "as an editor, back in the cut-and-paste days I could do Z but this is so hard to do in software" - things neither FLOSS nor commercial WP/DTP does well, that FLOSS could potentially overtake on.
Does this mean I can pester ICANN for a TLD using the ancient Nordic Futhark? Or does the board have members that would be opposed to the casting of runes?
This being Slashdot, the first priority is to determine the physics needed to gain the superpowers. Why make jokes when you can make it real? P.s. I hates Bagginses! Hates them forever!
Slashdot Mirror
It's no worse than the "trespassers will be shot, hung, drawn, quartered and then shot again" posters liberally stuck over many of the woodlands in the southern States. I've seriously considered buying some land there and putting up a sign saying "trespassers will be served tea and cookies - you're finally getting some decent exercise", only I suspect that would be illegal.
I suspect that nobody is really that bothered by laws requiring those under 16 to practice with the longbow or cabs to carry bails of hay. I also seriously doubt that many people even know that many laws, let alone which ones are absurd.
These aren't complete idiots. Everyone knows the First Law is what prevents robots doing harm to humans.
If the rupture in the oil well has spread from the original site to within 20' of the beach, we've bigger problems than photography. Besides, the photographs that really matter are the ones from the plume. ROVs have been available for news outlets to buy for years. If we haven't seen independent media photographs from the site of the action yet, we're not losing anything with a ban on a paltry 20'.
(The oil slick has spread for miles beyond the booms, and if the newspapers could photograph Lady Di sunbathing topless from half a mile away a decade or so ago, they can photograph a ruddy great oil slick from outside the booms.)
There's something below Fox News in integrity? That's very difficult to imagine - even Cthulhu has some principles.
Thermodynamics students would benefit from a correct understanding of heat transfer. If the model is faulty, then their calculations will be in error. If the counter-claims are faulty, knowing and understanding why will prevent them from going in messed-up directions. Extracting useful work is only possible (on any quantitative level) if you know what work can be usefully extracted.
I considered joining the apathy party, but it seemed like too much effort. I prefer the Official Monster Raving Looney Party anyway.
Your private thoughts cannot be taken from you, so there is the first right. Your emotions, state-of-mind, knowledge, intellect and understanding are likewise yours and yours alone.
Secondly, there's very little you really own anyway - virtually everything you claim is rented, licensed or mortgaged - and it's actually quite hard to take something you don't have in the first place.
Thirdly, the ability of group X to take something is not the same as group X then owning it. Let us say that the US enshrined the true right to own some specific type of property. That property would then be yours absolutely and no seizure - by other individuals or by the Government - could alter your ownership. This actually applies to certain classes of antiquity, which is why those items cannot be owned by Governments, museums or private collectors - no matter how obtained - unless the accepted owner authorizes that transfer of ownership. New Zealand, Egypt and Iraq have obtained many items back that way, as have some percentage of Jewish families persecuted in WW2. Of course, this implies a means of enforcement. The US doesn't recognize the ICJ and the ICJ - unlike the European Court of Human Rights - doesn't deal with disputes between individuals and governments. However, recognition of the ICJ and abandonment of Sovereign Immunity would certainly cripple opportunities for abuse.
The freezing point of water is altered by pressure. The triple point (where water can be solid, liquid and gas) is fascinating. I've not looked this up in a while, but IIRC there is a pressure/temperature combo where ice sublimes without going through a liquid state at all. With sufficient pressure, of course, anything at any temperature will set solid. You just need a pressure so great that the molecules are locked into a single position.
Nuclear fusion is easy. We've been able to do that for 50 years. Sustainable fusion reactions that release more energy than they require - that's trickier. (Sarcasm mode on.) Doubtless the real-term cuts in science spending and the active efforts to scrap ITER will help with that. (Sarcasm mode off.)
Fusion reactors would not only help with helium, they'd slash the need for coal- and gas-powered generators. The heat should also be more than sufficient to recycle many materials by reducing them to pure elemental form. Temps should be way hotter than any blast furnace even a long way off. There is no end to their value. How to get them - well, that's going to take heaps of effort, heaps of money and starting construction on the housing for them now (before we have the designs) since that will take decades and we really don't have a huge amount of time we can waste given the lack of uranium reserves or meaningful oil reserves. I'd also suggest a Manhattan-style brainstorm, with some real pressure for practical results rather than nice theories that can get lots of citations in journals.
If evaporation is considered a possible explanation, then the containers aren't sealed. If the containers aren't sealed and have equal volumes of water, then they have unequal masses of water. The specific heat is the amount of heat per unit mass required to raise the temperature by one degree Celsius. In order to prove that hot water can freeze faster, you must have an equal mass. Since radiation is a function of surface area, you must also have an equal volume. Therefore you must have sealed containers and unequal pressures. This is not the experiment described on Wikipedia.
However, it would be an extremely interesting experiment to perform. I'd actually suggest three closed containers (one with cold water, one with hot water and equal pressure, one with hot water and equal mass). I'd also suggest running thermocouples to the center of each container and plotting the temperature over time. This will eliminate all of the unknowns and variables not accounted for in the original experiment or in the Wikipedia write-up.
Regardless of what the results show, they will be quite interesting and useful for students starting on the topic of thermodynamics.
Actually, no. Since there are endless debates over whether there are Constitutional rights to Native Americans, children, criminals, foreigners, illegal aliens, tarrarists (though what's wrong with paving roads, I don't know), etc, it follows that the Bill of Rights is really just a list of permissions. A right is just that, a right. It cannot be given, it cannot be taken away. It is. A permission must be given and may be taken away at the discretion of the giver. It follows that there is no, and never really has been, any "Constitutional right" to free speech.
(The original draft of the Magna Carta got very close to actually creating legal rights, by openly stating that violation of those rights by the Government was a criminal offense that could be punished as such, eliminating any notion of Sovereign Immunity. Neither the final version nor the US Constitution has such a clause, and both the US and UK exempt the Government from any legal action.)
It's not like you could seriously do anything. The majority of Americans would be more likely to regard you as an economic criminal than to agree with the publication of anything that could make them aware of the risks. America is a very risk-averse culture - not through not taking risks, but through not wanting to think about them too much. Far from becoming a folk hero and/or a martyr to free speech, if you got thrown in jail, you'd be much more likely labeled "one of the Bad Guys". The Government might even end up more popular, not less. The quaint but utterly incorrect notion that an individual can do anything worth a damn might apply to small towns but never applied to the US historically and certainly doesn't in a country estimated at 300 million. Especially in a country where people have always played second-fiddle to corporate culture.
They weren't just live and naked, either. I hear Arachnids Gone Wild is paying him a fortune for the originals.
Sorry, some conditions are beyond any medication known to man. However, the GP may have a bright future in politics.
No problem. If the water is coming away from the machine at 80'C, run it directly to the soup kitchen and connect the hot water pipe from the kitchen back to the computer.
Hot water doesn't freeze faster. However, water at 80'C will cool to 60'C much faster than water at 60'C will cool to 40'C, given standard atmospheric temperature and pressure for the ambient temperature of the room. The flow of heat from a hot medium to a cooler medium varies non-linearly with temperature. For example, as you approach the same temperature, the flow of heat approaches zero.
(In other words, if they piped through cold water which was heated to room temperature, a passive radiator would be useless.)
There is a drawback with hot water, though. The temperature gradient issue cuts both ways. As the temperature of the water approaches the temperature of the chips, the heat flow from the chips is reduced. Thus, water at 60'C will not draw off as much heat as water at 40'C, if the chips were to run at 80'C. You've got to balance this sort of approach fairly carefully.
I rather like the Cooling Tower approach (evaporative passive cooling). Basically, you blast the water through a nozzle that turns it into a fine mist. You collect the water that actually reaches the reservoir at the bottom and top it off. The drawback of this method is that it is somewhat bulkier than a radiator system. It is also not a closed system and therefore is a bit more expensive to run. On the other hand, evaporative cooling is much more effective than relying on simple heat flows, so you can get away with a lower temperature gradient at the cooling end. This, in turn, means you get a steeper temperature gradient for the chips, which means they're cooled much more effectively and can therefore be driven much harder without loss of reliability.
I'm much more puzzled by what a hot water tap would snort. There can't be much that would give a lump of metal much of a buzz.
The bottom line: If you want a product to do specifically what you want you have to do it yourself.
If that were true, there would be no standards, no Ethernet, no Unix, no Linux, no Slashdot. Re-usability, The Creed of the True Programmer, would have been long overthrown. Meaning: no libraries, no utilities, no concatenation of tools, no pipes, no Computer Science, no Software Engineers, no IT jobs at all. There would be no point and no value. The whole of the US would require three computers and you wouldn't be using any of them.
If he still has those ideas somewhere, I'd be happy to take a look and see if I could code them up. As for the GIMP developers - remember the XFree86 group? Nobody else does, either. GIGO. If you discard quality input, you can only produce garbage output.
I take it you didn't see the SciAm article that showed bringing money into negotiations tends to destabilize them and cause offense.
I would agree that you can't go by physical analogies. I would think that the best place to start is with a barter system and allow an information economy to evolve naturally, just as the physical economy did. That can be problematic, though, as people want results now and you only need to look at blog sites to realize that most people don't have information worth trading. However, it does avoid the problem as person X starts with knowledge X', person Y starts with knowledge Y', and at the end both X and Y have both X' and Y'. It retains the symmetry of the physical system and it is the symmetry that I think is the important part.
Software-as-a-service won't work either as it is developed only once but can be mass-distributed. Bugfixes may be a service, but they're not on the same scale as the initial design and implementation. Always assuming there WAS an initial design.
Software-as-a-book (a model Borland came up with) is a reasonable approximation. Books are also only written once but sold to many. But books can be photocopied in part legally (under fair-use rules), whereas outside of Open Source, it's a license violation at best, copyright infringement + DMCA violation at worst, to even inspect the code, let alone extract some percentage for review purposes. Also, whereas when copyright expires, books are free to be repackaged, closed-source software can NEVER be repackaged - well, not until decompilers can translate binaries into sufficiently structured source that it could be sensibly edited and recompiled on another system.
In lieu of a good idea for an informational exchange system for bartering, I'd say the book model is the best anyone has come up with. However, to do so would mean that closed-source as it exists today would have to be prohibited. (The source code would have to be on file with a public body, so that it could be accessed when copyright expired. Otherwise, the owner retains control even after expiration of rights - an impossibility with books.) It may be possible - certainly many Governments are quite competent at handling the 25-, 50- and 100-year rules for the release of classified and confidential information. Getting any of the corporations to agree - that's another matter.
In light of the rapid devaluation of computer software, relative to the devaluation of material in books, I'd argue that either the 25-year rule should be applied or a 10-year rule should be developed specifically for information that rapidly decays.
That's computer software. The article, however, dealt with sheet music. Can we do something similar there?
I'd argue yes. Sheet music and journals have been covered by "fair usage" rules and book-style distribution systems forever. In the case of journals, it is considered valid to copy 10% or 1 article, whichever is the lesser. For sheet music, I don't recall exactly what the rule is but I would imagine it would be something comparable.
Sheet music has one complication that no book or journal has, though. You can reverse-engineer a score. I've done so plenty of times. The reverse-engineered form won't be identical to the original, as it is based on a specific interpretation and will also contain any errors in the playing. However, it is arguably the same piece of music. If you were to play that reverse-engineered piece in a public performance, the RIAA would expect royalties even though it was NOT the original. I suspect the composer described would feel the same way.
On the other hand, it is not only acceptable for papers in a journal to cite other papers and to describe the outcome of reverse-engineered experiments in efforts to duplicate results, it is actually considered highly desirable. University departments get paid according to how many people have copied their work.
Software can also be reverse-engineered. Thus, in some ways, sheet music and computer software are closer analogies than books are to either.
At present, the entire music industry is seriously borked. Thus, it is useless to look to sheet music for an answer. Rather, sheet music and software will need to develop a solution in tandem.
The pull-yourself-up-by-the-boostraps-can-do is the very attitude that creates empire-building people. Why? Because if you don't =need= other people, then you cannot help but see them as merely using up resources you could be using for yourself. If you have no use for other people, why take the chance that they might try and use you? Ultimately, the only person who needs nothing from any given person is an Emperor.
To me, the only "correct" solution is a society in which there is a recognized level of inter-dependency (and the welfare network needed to support that inter-dependency). Notice I say inter-dependency. It has to be a two-way street and it has to be done from the position of true equals. (Useful education makes equals. Craft training can make equals. Competition can NEVER CREATE equals, although it is an effective and useful way to test for equality. It is this last point that the US has largely forgotten and Communist countries never learned.)
A trivial example. The more you =productively= learn, the more cost-effective you will be able to work, thus the more profitable you will be for yourself, your company and your country. Thus, the more the Government invests into productive education and the more companies sponsor students rather than have them take out loans, the richer you and they end up being. By taking care of you, they take care of themselves.
But the example can be extended. Government costs only so much, if it is efficient. How can Government be efficient? By not having stupid people being elected or hired, for a start. That means that the more Government gets education right, the fewer stupid voters there will be and the fewer stupid candidates there will be. Smaller Government just means concentrating the stupidity, which is never good. Smarter Government is the way to cut costs. Since your wealth is a function of how intelligent or brainless the people you are around are, it is in your interests to make them as brainy as possible.
There is no society out there that operates off true inter-dependence. It is unclear if such a society would even be stable, as people ARE "pull-yourself-up-by-the-bootstraps"-style greedy. However, if it could be made to work, it would be socially and economically optimal -- at the price that individual freedom would be about as restricted as in Western Europe (which is barely at all, but still far more restricted than the US).
If the reporters wrote up the specific problems they were finding (such as what was slow, what was particularly difficult, etc) and submitted them to the developers, the developers would have a potentially very rich mine of information to work from. Sure, some of the issues will be ones of "X doesn't work the way Microsoft does it" - annoyances that slow adoption rates but not really bugs per-se. But there will likely be other comments along the lines of "in reporting, it would be very useful to do Y", or "as an editor, back in the cut-and-paste days I could do Z but this is so hard to do in software" - things neither FLOSS nor commercial WP/DTP does well, that FLOSS could potentially overtake on.
Does this mean I can pester ICANN for a TLD using the ancient Nordic Futhark? Or does the board have members that would be opposed to the casting of runes?
This being Slashdot, the first priority is to determine the physics needed to gain the superpowers. Why make jokes when you can make it real? P.s. I hates Bagginses! Hates them forever!