There's no "tragedy of the commons" unless you can identify a common resource that there is no penalty for exploiting, causing overconsumption unto destruction. (You might be able to argue the resource is "people's attention", but that's a stretch and the pattern doesn't really follow; that's not really a common.)
This is an "arms race", not a "tragedy of the commons". Everybody has to beat everybody else, with all advantages transient, and there is no final "masterstroke" that you can win with, once and for all. See also: Spam vs. anti-spam, crime vs. law enforcement, and of course the Cold War arms race (although that had a catastrophic failure mode many other arms races lack).
I'm sick of Comcast taking channels for no reason - CSPAN2 and one of the leased access channels vanished a week ago, and the four city-run info channels are about to become digital-only at the end of the year I can't say I ever watched those channels for more than thirty seconds at a time, in passing, but they do have their uses and I know that there isn't a snowball's chance in hell that Comcast is replacing them with new content - over the past year or so, I don't think we've gotten a single new channel, but others keep vanishing, one or two at a time.
This isn't really Comcast's "fault". TV is going all digital. Analog service is going away. That's really driven by the FCC mandate more than anything else.
(I am aware that the FCC mandate does not cover cable, but I still think it can't be hurting the move to digital and is probably accelerating it even on the cable side. Comcast wants to move everything to digital that it can, to recover bandwidth, and the fact that over-the-air is going all digital provides good cover for that.)
You know, I've come to interpret "I have no counter argument left but to construct a strawman out of the most extreme case of your argument I can think of, then argue against that" as "I concede your argument in its totality."
Just in case you thought you were fooling everyone.
In the future, consider not replying at all, or (gasp) conceding that someone may have a point. It doesn't actually kill you.
I'm not sure if a few tons of plutonium distributed into a cloud by the explosion at that altitude would have wiped out life on earth as we know it,
Oh, for fuck's sake, it's radioactive material, not a RAVENING DEMON OUT TO CONSUME YOUR VERY SOUL.
Guess what? There's already orders of magnitude more plutonium in the world, distributed naturally. Along with Uranium! And Radon! And radioactive carbon! And an endless stream of cosmic rays!
If we'd tone down the mindless fear of OMG Radiation!, and treat the subject rationally, we may well not have the problems we do now, having switched to nuclear power a couple of decades ago. But no, people who's education on the topic of radioactivity comes from 1960s B monster movies continue to dominate the discussion.
You know what the most likely outcome of a shuttle explosion is? A whole lot of hand wrining, a whole lot of scare mongering, and... well... not a hell of a lot much else, since most likely it ends up in deep ocean, which doesn't have as much life as you'd think (mostly around the shelves), where it would promptly sink to the bottom, what with it being a dense metal and all. Even the volatiles wouldn't be that big a deal, though you wouldn't know it from the press coverage. Any ol' oil spill is way worse, it happens in a way worse location.
Now, that's the likely outcome. If it exploded soon enough, something might actually manage to land in Florida itself. It's still probably not the best idea. But it's not going to wipe out life on Earth. That's just mindless scaremongering. It's not anywhere near that easy with any real materials; only OMG Radiation!!1! can cause that sort of damage, and that only exists in the aforementioned movies.
'Course, that's not actually sufficient to power our civilization, leading to wide-spread collapse and subsequent famine and pestilence, but for too many "environmentalists", that's a feature, not a bug. And too many of the remaining sane environmentalists, by their actions (if not their words), apparently are more worried about the possibility of some waste and some accident or other against the certainty of widespread death.
That one was recalled after one death and 27 emergency surgeries for ingesting the conveniently candy-sized cobalt-neodymium magnets.
They're back on the market. Visibly they are the same, too, though maybe they've done something to further secure the magnets where we can't see (glue or something).
The true, original purpose of trademark law (which I am aware I'm the first to bring up) is to protect the consumer from products that are designed to fool you into believing you are purchasing a product from somebody other than the true source. That is why the touchstone of trademark infringement is "Would a reasonable consumer confuse the two products?"
As usual, you can skirt the line. You can argue about whether it claims to be a Wii, exactly what the box says, exactly what it claims to be, etc. Nevertheless, I'd say the intent here is pretty clearly to pick up sales through deception, with varying degrees of plausible deniability. That they try to stay on the legal side of the line doesn't make it automatically ethical.
They don't give me enough data to come to a conclusion. But it's certainly enough to be suggestive.
Is it also unethical to sell squirt guns on the basis that they are (or were, anyways) designed to look like guns, except instead of using gun powder to propel bullets, they shoot water?
"Guns" are not a protectable item. A closer analogy here, despite my hatred of using analogies in online debates, are the numerous "generic controllers" that you can buy that contain games in them, but are not unauthorized representations of any particular controller. Only a squirt gun that looked like a specific, trademarked gun would be comparable, and yes indeed, the law will require you to get permission. You can't make a model car that looks exactly like a real car without permission, which is why the Grand Theft Auto world is populated by knockoffs. You can't make a model Enterprise without permission from Paramount, but you can make any generic space ship you want. As is invariably the case with analogies used in debates, the difference between the analogy and the real-world situation render your analogy irrelevant.
If you're actually worried about that happening, don't be. Anything event large enough to knock the Moon into the Earth almost certainly directly sterilized Earth in the process, long before the Moon arrives.
From a purely selfish human point of view there might also come a day when people want to visit that untouched environment.
So, on the one hand, we have the Moon.
Vast energy and material resources that will allow untold bazillions of years of human lifespan.
Vast energy and material resources that will allow the flourishing ecosystems that Man will bring with him, totalling even more untold bazillions of years of life. (If we truly colonize the Moon, only the first generation or two will live in the sterile settlements we all imagine.)
Vast energy and material resources which will allow untold bazillions of years of life for new life forms, those adapted to the lunar environments and those partially or entirely created by Man.
An insurance policy for intelligent life as we know it (not just Man, you know, not for much longer) against an unfortunate accident on the Earth.
A launching base for further exploration and the spreading of yet more life, wonderful, vibrant, diverse life across the universe.
Against this, you argue
Somebody, someday, might want to see the original moon.
How unbelievably fucking selfish to deny the universe life so that you can see a pretty rock. Get a poster or something already. If you try, you might be able to get one with a unicorn on it too; bonus!
Environmentalists ought to be leading the charge for space colonization. Forget saving ecosystems that do pretty well without your help... what about the ecosystems that don't even exist yet? Biodiversity? You ain't seen nothing yet. If you love life, don't stand in front of it.
Gameline for the 2600 allowed downloaded games over phonelines. Don't think it had a matching service, though. (I'm posting because this is an interesting tidbit of history, not to defend spiderbitendeath, whom I agree wasn't reading very carefully.)
Gameline became AOL.
There was also a service for the Intellivision, IIRC.
To be fair, all of these sucked pretty hard, for a variety of obvious reasons. But they did exist. If you really dig in to the pre-Nintendo era, a surprising amount of stuff was tried long before it actually succeeded, like game downloads and rentals, and controllers that at least in button-count rival the controllers of today. (They're just laid out much less usefully.)
And remember, there are all kinds of things in the world that you don't care about and don't have to, because somebody else is caring about it for you. Satellite operators and many other people largely take care of worrying about the sun for us. God bless 'em. Not a criticism, just something I find handy to remember.
Who cares if Amazon "screws us in the end"? Amazon is selling un-DRM'ed MP3 files. They can't shut them off, not even in theory. There's no subscription to be terminated, no licenses to fail to transfer to your shiny new computer, no kernel-breaking borderline-spyware making sure you're not using a debugger or something.
If you like the price today, buy it today. Back it up. End of story. If they sextuple the price tomorrow, you don't even have to notice.
Then, when Universal is getting 50% of $0, they'll reconsider the prices. That's capitalism.
Galleon is supposed to be able to do the same thing on anything that can run Java, but I've never tried the video viewing as my TiVo is on a Wireless B network, and streaming any video to or from it is basically impossible on that setup.
I can confirm the MP3 streaming works from a computer to a TiVo.
Suddenly, I want a "This site is powered by MENTATS" badge for my website. (It's a terrible strain on their wrists to put out the pages live like that, but they're very highly trained.)
The other major problem is an occasional noticeable graphical slowdown. I have my 360 fairly well ventilated, but despite that there were several battles where a wall of oncoming enemies caused some sluggish turning. In a game where being able to execute snap turns and dodge oncoming laser fire are essential skills, that can lead to some frustrating trips back to the briefing room.
Oh come-fucking-on. An entire XBox360 and you still can't keep your game's framerate constant?
I don't even know what to say. How much computational power is it going to take to make frame-dropping a thing of the past?
(This is both rhetorical and sarcastic. I understand the situation both technical and economic. But still, I wish developers would stop assuming frame dropping is OK. It stopped being acceptable after the Nintendo era, IMHO.)
There's one and only one way to find out if ethanol-from-corn is a net win, or in fact any other alternative energy proposal: Strip it of all subsidies and throw it out into the marketplace. (More advanced students will note that we also need to internalize the appropriate externalities.)
If it is in fact an energy-positive process, the extra energy can be sold. If the process is economically viable, then pretty much by definition of "economically viable" they will be able to run at a profit. If it is not, then they will eventually go out of business.
Now, my point is not that this is desirable. It must be the ultimate goal of any alternative energy production system, but in the short-term you can make good arguments about subsidizing things to get over start-up costs, experiment with multiple things before we know which is the correct answer, etc. My point is simply that you can do math from now until the last drop of oil is pumped out of the ground and you won't really know whether such a marginal process is truly net-positive.
That's the beauty of money; it's hard to wrap your mind around it, but if you just let it do its thing, it will automatically account for labor costs, equipment costs, etc., and with some judicious law making (which has a roughly 0% chance of happening) it can account for the externalities as well, and the final result will be obvious and unambiguous. It can even account for corruption and mismanagement etc., which are really real risks, not illusions. It's the only way to go from theory to reality.
You do not understand the theory in the slightest. You do not even know enough to know whether you disagree with it. Your criticisms are utterly incoherent and sophomoric.
But I suppose that's just par for the course for someone who thinks the universe bends to their whim.
I'd be a lot more impressed overall if his ideas didn't already exist in the real world as stream programming. I have asked him what the difference is here on Slashdot before, and I all I got was another iteration of the standard algorithm rant, without any evidence that he understood or engaged with my point. This guy isn't a genius, just a standard-issue paranoid schizophrenic guy with The Unifying Theory. He differs from Time Cube Guy only in the relative coherence of his overarching theory.
He also seems to have no comprehension of the idea that his circuits are isomorphic to algorithms; pointing this out just gets another might-as-well-be-copied-and-pasted condemnation of algorithms.
Basically, as near as I can tell, he's been criticizing for years and years now and has done jack shit to actually prove anything. (Unsurprising, since he can't prove his typically amorphous Unifying Theory.) If his ideas were half as wonderful as he claimed, he should be making buttloads of money, not writing books about why everybody is wrong and he's right... but he can't show you the machine, it's for you to actually implement, I'm sure. Just like Mentifex's earth-shattering ideas on AI, which only await someone to come along and actually implement them since he can't quite seem to convert his amorphous Unifying AI Theory into running code.... (maybe because it's based on algorithms, heh. Somebody point Mentifex at this guy and let them burn each other's time...)
If quantum immortality's suppositions are true, you are simply wrong. You wouldn't get to chose what to experience because the set of things you won't experience in some worldline is empty. A choice would imply at a minimum the ability to exclude an outcome, and in a quantum multiverse scenario you don't have that ability. Fervently wishing otherwise won't change anything.
The first word of this post is not just for show. Personally, I don't accept the multiverse scenario; I think it solves a non-existent problem.
Note that this is not a very exciting kind of immortality. Especially since a goodly number of worldlines coming from here will produce computronium. At least some of which will simulate you, yes you personally for an unspeakable amount of subjective time (possibly infinite if even one non-zero probability path leads to that outcome), during which you will in some cases experience what can only be described as "as close to a literal heaven as you can get", and in other cases "as close to a literal hell as you can get", and the full range of things in between. If Quantum immortality is "true", there are things worse than death, and we will more or less all get to experience them on some worldline.
Note further that it is not meaningful to wish that "you" will end up in one of the good cases; if QI is true, all cases lie in your future equally. "You" will end up in the good and the bad and the inbetween, all at once. Perhaps some people consider this a form of escapism, but it is also fairly horrifying if you follow the implications out beyond "In some very real sense, I can not experience death."
How many civil liberties are disappearing all around the world while demagogues are distracting you by yelling about the United States' supposed civil liberty problems, which after seven years of rule by a supposed monster has mostly manifested as annoying and mostly pointless security checkpoints at airports?
While you're distracted by the mostly fanciful descriptions of the evil of Bush, Britain is being plated with surveillance cameras, Venezuela is sliding into dictatorship (just got the most popular TV station shut down by executive edict and nothing else a couple of days ago... how many media outlets has Bush done, well, anything to? How many politically-motivated national-security leaks have their been to provide more-than adequate cause that have just been ignored?), Russia looks more like the USSR every month, the entire Arabic world is consumed by a culture that muzzles women, kills gay people, and literally has roving bands of men in the streets enforcing laws like "no smoking", "no listening to music", and even various laws about facial hair with mob-justice-applied death penalties.
And that's just a partial list of the true evil that you are ignoring while you are high and mighty about the evils of the United States, the opposition of which requires uniquely little effort in practice since they mostly don't exist. (It's not a coincidence you hear the same charges over and over again, after all, because even with millions of people watching every move to look for every evidence of injustice, that same rather short list is all they can come up with.)
This British thing is a problem that needs to be faced up to and addressed. You can't just say "The US is t3h wrose!!1!" and consider yourself pure for speaking "truth" to power. It's not that easy.
Free speech zones have a long history, and it's not all American either.
It's also worth pointing out that if the intent of the protesters is to actively disrupt the target, and I think that's a fair assessment of many anti-Bush protests, the zones really are promoting Free Speech, which targets of the protest have as well. Free Speech is not an unlimited right to disrupt the speech of others.
Free Speech zones are a sort of dangerous precedent, but unfettered protesting is a problem too. If protesters believe they have a right to be disruptive and violent because of the sheer overpowering purity of their souls, they'll need to be contained to prevent them from stomping on the rights of others. The protesters are significantly responsible for these zones.
Also, due to this little thing called conservation of mass, ever gram of algae you scoop out of your pond and burn needs to be replaced with a gram of raw materials suitable for the production of algae, plus extra material which will simply be waste product when the algae get done with it (no 100% efficiency, ever).
Slashdot Mirror
Encryption? Why encrypt when you can just use a unique, unguessable ID and store everything of actual interest on a secured server?
There's no "tragedy of the commons" unless you can identify a common resource that there is no penalty for exploiting, causing overconsumption unto destruction. (You might be able to argue the resource is "people's attention", but that's a stretch and the pattern doesn't really follow; that's not really a common.)
This is an "arms race", not a "tragedy of the commons". Everybody has to beat everybody else, with all advantages transient, and there is no final "masterstroke" that you can win with, once and for all. See also: Spam vs. anti-spam, crime vs. law enforcement, and of course the Cold War arms race (although that had a catastrophic failure mode many other arms races lack).
(I am aware that the FCC mandate does not cover cable, but I still think it can't be hurting the move to digital and is probably accelerating it even on the cable side. Comcast wants to move everything to digital that it can, to recover bandwidth, and the fact that over-the-air is going all digital provides good cover for that.)
You know, I've come to interpret "I have no counter argument left but to construct a strawman out of the most extreme case of your argument I can think of, then argue against that" as "I concede your argument in its totality."
Just in case you thought you were fooling everyone.
In the future, consider not replying at all, or (gasp) conceding that someone may have a point. It doesn't actually kill you.
Guess what? There's already orders of magnitude more plutonium in the world, distributed naturally. Along with Uranium! And Radon! And radioactive carbon! And an endless stream of cosmic rays!
If we'd tone down the mindless fear of OMG Radiation!, and treat the subject rationally, we may well not have the problems we do now, having switched to nuclear power a couple of decades ago. But no, people who's education on the topic of radioactivity comes from 1960s B monster movies continue to dominate the discussion.
You know what the most likely outcome of a shuttle explosion is? A whole lot of hand wrining, a whole lot of scare mongering, and... well... not a hell of a lot much else, since most likely it ends up in deep ocean, which doesn't have as much life as you'd think (mostly around the shelves), where it would promptly sink to the bottom, what with it being a dense metal and all. Even the volatiles wouldn't be that big a deal, though you wouldn't know it from the press coverage. Any ol' oil spill is way worse, it happens in a way worse location.
Now, that's the likely outcome. If it exploded soon enough, something might actually manage to land in Florida itself. It's still probably not the best idea. But it's not going to wipe out life on Earth. That's just mindless scaremongering. It's not anywhere near that easy with any real materials; only OMG Radiation!!1! can cause that sort of damage, and that only exists in the aforementioned movies.
As usual, you can skirt the line. You can argue about whether it claims to be a Wii, exactly what the box says, exactly what it claims to be, etc. Nevertheless, I'd say the intent here is pretty clearly to pick up sales through deception, with varying degrees of plausible deniability. That they try to stay on the legal side of the line doesn't make it automatically ethical.
They don't give me enough data to come to a conclusion. But it's certainly enough to be suggestive."Guns" are not a protectable item. A closer analogy here, despite my hatred of using analogies in online debates, are the numerous "generic controllers" that you can buy that contain games in them, but are not unauthorized representations of any particular controller. Only a squirt gun that looked like a specific, trademarked gun would be comparable, and yes indeed, the law will require you to get permission. You can't make a model car that looks exactly like a real car without permission, which is why the Grand Theft Auto world is populated by knockoffs. You can't make a model Enterprise without permission from Paramount, but you can make any generic space ship you want. As is invariably the case with analogies used in debates, the difference between the analogy and the real-world situation render your analogy irrelevant.
Sorry, did you have a point in there, beyond sci-fi writers have no sense of scale?
If you're actually worried about that happening, don't be. Anything event large enough to knock the Moon into the Earth almost certainly directly sterilized Earth in the process, long before the Moon arrives.
- Vast energy and material resources that will allow untold bazillions of years of human lifespan.
- Vast energy and material resources that will allow the flourishing ecosystems that Man will bring with him, totalling even more untold bazillions of years of life. (If we truly colonize the Moon, only the first generation or two will live in the sterile settlements we all imagine.)
- Vast energy and material resources which will allow untold bazillions of years of life for new life forms, those adapted to the lunar environments and those partially or entirely created by Man.
- An insurance policy for intelligent life as we know it (not just Man, you know, not for much longer) against an unfortunate accident on the Earth.
- A launching base for further exploration and the spreading of yet more life, wonderful, vibrant, diverse life across the universe.
Against this, you argue- Somebody, someday, might want to see the original moon.
How unbelievably fucking selfish to deny the universe life so that you can see a pretty rock. Get a poster or something already. If you try, you might be able to get one with a unicorn on it too; bonus!Environmentalists ought to be leading the charge for space colonization. Forget saving ecosystems that do pretty well without your help... what about the ecosystems that don't even exist yet? Biodiversity? You ain't seen nothing yet. If you love life, don't stand in front of it.
Gameline for the 2600 allowed downloaded games over phonelines. Don't think it had a matching service, though. (I'm posting because this is an interesting tidbit of history, not to defend spiderbitendeath, whom I agree wasn't reading very carefully.)
Gameline became AOL.
There was also a service for the Intellivision, IIRC.
To be fair, all of these sucked pretty hard, for a variety of obvious reasons. But they did exist. If you really dig in to the pre-Nintendo era, a surprising amount of stuff was tried long before it actually succeeded, like game downloads and rentals, and controllers that at least in button-count rival the controllers of today. (They're just laid out much less usefully.)
Take a look at SpaceWeather.com.
And remember, there are all kinds of things in the world that you don't care about and don't have to, because somebody else is caring about it for you. Satellite operators and many other people largely take care of worrying about the sun for us. God bless 'em. Not a criticism, just something I find handy to remember.
Who cares if Amazon "screws us in the end"? Amazon is selling un-DRM'ed MP3 files. They can't shut them off, not even in theory. There's no subscription to be terminated, no licenses to fail to transfer to your shiny new computer, no kernel-breaking borderline-spyware making sure you're not using a debugger or something.
If you like the price today, buy it today. Back it up. End of story. If they sextuple the price tomorrow, you don't even have to notice.
Then, when Universal is getting 50% of $0, they'll reconsider the prices. That's capitalism.
Galleon is supposed to be able to do the same thing on anything that can run Java, but I've never tried the video viewing as my TiVo is on a Wireless B network, and streaming any video to or from it is basically impossible on that setup.
I can confirm the MP3 streaming works from a computer to a TiVo.
Suddenly, I want a "This site is powered by MENTATS " badge for my website. (It's a terrible strain on their wrists to put out the pages live like that, but they're very highly trained.)
I don't even know what to say. How much computational power is it going to take to make frame-dropping a thing of the past?
(This is both rhetorical and sarcastic. I understand the situation both technical and economic. But still, I wish developers would stop assuming frame dropping is OK. It stopped being acceptable after the Nintendo era, IMHO.)
There's one and only one way to find out if ethanol-from-corn is a net win, or in fact any other alternative energy proposal: Strip it of all subsidies and throw it out into the marketplace. (More advanced students will note that we also need to internalize the appropriate externalities.)
If it is in fact an energy-positive process, the extra energy can be sold. If the process is economically viable, then pretty much by definition of "economically viable" they will be able to run at a profit. If it is not, then they will eventually go out of business.
Now, my point is not that this is desirable. It must be the ultimate goal of any alternative energy production system, but in the short-term you can make good arguments about subsidizing things to get over start-up costs, experiment with multiple things before we know which is the correct answer, etc. My point is simply that you can do math from now until the last drop of oil is pumped out of the ground and you won't really know whether such a marginal process is truly net-positive.
That's the beauty of money; it's hard to wrap your mind around it, but if you just let it do its thing, it will automatically account for labor costs, equipment costs, etc., and with some judicious law making (which has a roughly 0% chance of happening) it can account for the externalities as well, and the final result will be obvious and unambiguous. It can even account for corruption and mismanagement etc., which are really real risks, not illusions. It's the only way to go from theory to reality.
An interesting theory... [google google google]... but apparently a false one.
You do not understand the theory in the slightest. You do not even know enough to know whether you disagree with it. Your criticisms are utterly incoherent and sophomoric.
But I suppose that's just par for the course for someone who thinks the universe bends to their whim.
Yeah, I thought it was that guy.
I'd be a lot more impressed overall if his ideas didn't already exist in the real world as stream programming. I have asked him what the difference is here on Slashdot before, and I all I got was another iteration of the standard algorithm rant, without any evidence that he understood or engaged with my point. This guy isn't a genius, just a standard-issue paranoid schizophrenic guy with The Unifying Theory. He differs from Time Cube Guy only in the relative coherence of his overarching theory.
He also seems to have no comprehension of the idea that his circuits are isomorphic to algorithms; pointing this out just gets another might-as-well-be-copied-and-pasted condemnation of algorithms.
Basically, as near as I can tell, he's been criticizing for years and years now and has done jack shit to actually prove anything. (Unsurprising, since he can't prove his typically amorphous Unifying Theory.) If his ideas were half as wonderful as he claimed, he should be making buttloads of money, not writing books about why everybody is wrong and he's right... but he can't show you the machine, it's for you to actually implement, I'm sure. Just like Mentifex's earth-shattering ideas on AI, which only await someone to come along and actually implement them since he can't quite seem to convert his amorphous Unifying AI Theory into running code.... (maybe because it's based on algorithms, heh. Somebody point Mentifex at this guy and let them burn each other's time...)
If quantum immortality's suppositions are true, you are simply wrong. You wouldn't get to chose what to experience because the set of things you won't experience in some worldline is empty. A choice would imply at a minimum the ability to exclude an outcome, and in a quantum multiverse scenario you don't have that ability. Fervently wishing otherwise won't change anything.
The first word of this post is not just for show. Personally, I don't accept the multiverse scenario; I think it solves a non-existent problem.
Quantum immortality.
Note that this is not a very exciting kind of immortality. Especially since a goodly number of worldlines coming from here will produce computronium. At least some of which will simulate you, yes you personally for an unspeakable amount of subjective time (possibly infinite if even one non-zero probability path leads to that outcome), during which you will in some cases experience what can only be described as "as close to a literal heaven as you can get", and in other cases "as close to a literal hell as you can get", and the full range of things in between. If Quantum immortality is "true", there are things worse than death, and we will more or less all get to experience them on some worldline.
Note further that it is not meaningful to wish that "you" will end up in one of the good cases; if QI is true, all cases lie in your future equally. "You" will end up in the good and the bad and the inbetween, all at once. Perhaps some people consider this a form of escapism, but it is also fairly horrifying if you follow the implications out beyond "In some very real sense, I can not experience death."
How many civil liberties are disappearing all around the world while demagogues are distracting you by yelling about the United States' supposed civil liberty problems, which after seven years of rule by a supposed monster has mostly manifested as annoying and mostly pointless security checkpoints at airports?
While you're distracted by the mostly fanciful descriptions of the evil of Bush, Britain is being plated with surveillance cameras, Venezuela is sliding into dictatorship (just got the most popular TV station shut down by executive edict and nothing else a couple of days ago... how many media outlets has Bush done, well, anything to? How many politically-motivated national-security leaks have their been to provide more-than adequate cause that have just been ignored?), Russia looks more like the USSR every month, the entire Arabic world is consumed by a culture that muzzles women, kills gay people, and literally has roving bands of men in the streets enforcing laws like "no smoking", "no listening to music", and even various laws about facial hair with mob-justice-applied death penalties.
And that's just a partial list of the true evil that you are ignoring while you are high and mighty about the evils of the United States, the opposition of which requires uniquely little effort in practice since they mostly don't exist. (It's not a coincidence you hear the same charges over and over again, after all, because even with millions of people watching every move to look for every evidence of injustice, that same rather short list is all they can come up with.)
This British thing is a problem that needs to be faced up to and addressed. You can't just say "The US is t3h wrose!!1!" and consider yourself pure for speaking "truth" to power. It's not that easy.
Free speech zones have a long history, and it's not all American either.
It's also worth pointing out that if the intent of the protesters is to actively disrupt the target, and I think that's a fair assessment of many anti-Bush protests, the zones really are promoting Free Speech, which targets of the protest have as well. Free Speech is not an unlimited right to disrupt the speech of others.
Free Speech zones are a sort of dangerous precedent, but unfettered protesting is a problem too. If protesters believe they have a right to be disruptive and violent because of the sheer overpowering purity of their souls, they'll need to be contained to prevent them from stomping on the rights of others. The protesters are significantly responsible for these zones.
Also, due to this little thing called conservation of mass, ever gram of algae you scoop out of your pond and burn needs to be replaced with a gram of raw materials suitable for the production of algae, plus extra material which will simply be waste product when the algae get done with it (no 100% efficiency, ever).
Free energy isn't.