"Unless you insist they -must- give their works away for free, and rely on the pittance given by the few people who will actually pay (which as Stephen King and Radiohead found out, is an unsustainably small group of people when the option of -free- is available.)"
That's why people who attempt Street Performer Protocol in the future should start by actually playing by its rules.
1. Set a fixed fee. Once you receive a total of $X, you release the work.
2. Don't provide a 'free' option until you receive $X
3. Promote it well, since it will only work if people trust your reputation and believe work Y is worth a total of $X and their contribution $Z.
4. Apply science and see if it works.
But nobody I know has actually done that. Stephen King had a weird system where you downloaded for free and then had the option of paying; he didn't set a fixed amount but based his judgement of 'failure' on the *percentage* of people who paid. Well, duh. There always could be *more* free money coming your way. The question is, was what you got enough to pay for itself?
Radiohead also provided a 'free' option as well as the donation, so it wasn't SPP. And yet it made a large sum of money, as I recall. And they then sold it in stores as well. They got it both ways. So where does this judgement of 'failure' come from? They didn't get as much money as some hypothetical alternative self could have? Again, sorry, not much pity there.
Sadly, I'm probably a person who skewed the statistics toward 'failure' on both of those attempts. I sampled pieces of both, for free, and decided that I didn't like them enough to keep reading/listening for free, let alone for pay. And yet I donated to King's experiment just to reward him. Boy, was I pissed when he called it 'fail'.
Moral: Don't do real SPP, set a moveable goalstick of 'success', don't be surprised if you decide it wasn't a success.
"No, I'm not talking about forever. I mean probably just for part of my lifespan. Not life+75 or whatever."
I'm happy with the idea that some mechanism *like* copyright should exist to pay for the production of new works...... as long as authors are perfectly clear that they do not actually have any such thing as a 'right' to arbitrarily control the minds of others who have once been exposed to their thoughts, but have been granted an enormously powerful *priviledge*.
A generous social contract, sure. But it's not actually a right. And increasingly, we should be reviewing the existence of that contract and asking if there isn't a better way.
Seriously, you should realise that you're asking for the ability to control the thought and speech of 6 billion people for decades. That's more power than most tyrants could ever dream of! It's an insane amount of power, actually. And you want that just for, what, scribbling a few words or strumming some chords?
Think what you're asking. Think how much economic power that translates to. Think how you want that automatically. Think how much power it concentrates in the publishing houses and in the state which backs them. Think what happens to people who 'violate' this 'contract'.
Then wonder if you really, really want that kind of responsibility on your shoulders just so you can get a few dollars.
"It's not a gut-level bias against anybody getting anything for free. It's a bias against having my creation distributed for free without my permission."
The problem with that is that now you have a bias against the way the universe works. Good luck with that.
I have a bias against anyone thinking about me. My persona is my own and nobody should have that in their mind without my permission.... right?
Sorry, no. I might have the desire, but I have neither the natural right nor the ability to prevent people thinking about me.
Neither do I have the natural right to prevent people thinking any of my *thoughts*, once I've codified them in human- or machine-readable form.
Once a thought leaves my brain and enters someone else's, *it's now part of their brain and their personality* and will be forever. I can't remove that without doing invasive damage to their psyche.
Or holding a gun to their head - which is what copyright is all about. "You will NOT talk about this thought that's now in your mind."
That's why copyright is, fundamentally, not supported by reality. Sorry.
Now, that does not mean that nobody who creates art should be compensated. They should, and preferably before their art is released to the public. Their compensation just must not require the invasive thought-control of the entire rest of the human race.
"The book that I wrote is mine. It's content belongs to me. Period."
No, it doesn't.
Once you've printed your book, given it to someone else, they've read it, and it's inside their juicy brain chemicals, their content is now part of their brain as well as yours and you're not going to get it out of either without vivisection.
Welcome to the physics of information. Things can be in two places at once and 'ownership' is restricted to 'not telling anyone, ever'.
Sorry, but that's the bare metal reality. Everything else is collective hallucination to make it easier for the market to pretend to deal with bits as if they were atoms.
"I think people realize without thinking that these type of "it makes sure the artist gets paid" arguments are bogus. If copyright actually protected authors, musicians, etc. I think people would be more likely to care about it, but as we have seen with the RIAA, MPAA, etc. in the end its all about whether that corporate middle-man is getting their pounds of flesh and nothing about encouraging the creative to work which is what the entire idea is supposed to be about."
This is true. However, a world where authors get nothing at all would seem to be even worse.
What we need to do is take advantage of this period of uncertainty and change to build a new system which both rewards authors without penalising copyers.
Since a work can be copied an infinite number of times, while it takes a finite amount of effort to create one, it seems like there ought to be a system where perhaps 'the first X' users of a work shoulder the burden of paying for it. And perhaps a collective fees-collecting organisation to distribute those fees in proportion to how many users there are.
Oh wait - that would be the same thing as limited-term copyright, wouldn't it? Darn.
What's the better way? Well, one suggestion would be the Street Performer Protocol idea that every work cost a FIXED SUM posted in advance which, once that amount of money was raised, would be paid to the author, and then the work released to infinite free copy heaven.
"Because the demand for good books, good music, and interesting movies isn't going away. If the only way to get those things is to pay an artist to make them, then artists will get paid."
Will they?
I have the choice to pay X dollars and get a new book, or pay zero dollars and let someone else pay and get a new book anyway when it turns up on the torrents.
Hmm, which do you think I'm going to do? Classic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Paying creatives is a hard problem no matter how you look at it. The core problem is that the people who make the product, the people who consume the product, and the people who pay for the product are all different people, and everyone wants free money from everyone else.
Selling the 'right' to copy doesn't seem right since everyone actually has that right by virtue of being born, and you have to artificially restrict people's free speech to create such a 'right'...... but how *do* you get people to pay for something they're going to get for free anyway? Some kind of collective pay-first escrow/auction system like Street Performer Protocol still seems to be the best way - but I've yet to see anyone actually implement it. Is it time to try again?
Or some kind of 'distributed patronage networks' where fans commit to ongoing support subscriptions to artists they like.
Basically it seems like all creative endeavour naturally wants to be funded by a 'creative vanguard' who don't personally benefit from their forethought and generosity. Either that or we all build and live in a mass prison state that bills us for every act of speech.
"The law gives authors the right to choose who can and cannot make copies of their work, and under what terms. Are you suggesting that authors shouldn't have the right to choose? Are you suggesting that you have the right to make that choice for them?"
The law gives authors the artificial 'right' to 'choose' who can and cannot exercise their *natural* right to copy works, yes. And gives them the 'choice' as to whether or not people who exercise that natural right should be literally arrested and thrown in jail.
Some, naively perhaps, might think that a natural right ought to trump an artificial right, and that 'choosing' to deprive someone else of physical liberty is... perhaps a choice that *should* be taken away.
"You can't make a freedom argument against copyright - you never had the right to take what isn't yours to take."
You can't make a freedom argument against slavery either - if you're owned by another person, by legal definition you don't have the right to take what isn't yours to take. Circular argument.
But on what ethical foundation does such a llegal definition rest?
So now I know what 'USIDent' in Southland Tales is referring to. I thought it was a kind of clumsy half-capitalisation that wouldn't appear in real life... but no.
"The government can simply sell all its property to private management companies, and then lease it back from them, and suddenly you can't even protest on the street."
That's exactly what's happening in my city... well, not so much the 'can't protest', but certainly our outgoing mayor and city council managed to buy a new $100 million building by not buying it but having a shell company buy it then lease it back to the council so it wouldn't appear on the annual balance sheet. Meanwhile, they were closing swimming pools due to 'lack of funds'.
We had similar problems with street renovations: the council outsourced to a private contractor (that happened to be owned by the council and was its previous works division) so when the contractor stuffed up, we the residents couldn't contact them because we weren't party to the contract... and the council couldn't change the contract... everything had to go through 'proper channels' but nobody knew what they were and... it was all a big mess.
Outsourcing public functions to the private sector is a big problem, and it usually is done in the name of 'streamlining' and 'efficiency'. These are code words for 'cutting the public out of the loop'.
"DoD doesn't need a botnet of worm-riddled, broadband connected civilian computers."
They also don't need to smuggle drugs and arms to insurgents, pay dodgy informers to tell them lies, and invade countries on false pretences... yet they do.
"4. Have it lined up with thermite and other explosives so that it can be controllably demolished."
That's the bit that gets me in the 'controlled demolition' theory.
That's a heck of a lot of explosives to install, and that means a heck of a lot of wiring, with some robust remote control ability. And you have to do it all while the building is occupied by thousands of people, without changing any visible interior panels or accidentally setting anything off. That's much, much harder than just planting a bomb.
There are persistent rumours that, eg, the Moscow apartment block which got blown up by 'terrorists' was a Russian operation - but that was an exceedingly messy explosion, not a 'controlled demolition' and it was obvious it was a big ugly bomb. I've never heard of a single example of a Western skyscraper being covertly wired for demolition while people are in it - most demolition jobs I've read about appear to take days to weeks to set up the charges, in full public view, including removing lots of cladding and sometimes cutting into parts of the building.
Add to that the complexity of coordinating with the planes, and you've got a logistical nightmare. And intelligence operations are crazy enough without starting with a ridiculous Bond villain spaghetti plan.
So why not just go for the simpler approach of, I dunno, just crashing some fully-fuelled planes into the thing and letting the fuel make a big bang?
I believe in a fair few things that lie outside mainstream consensus reality. But this stretches my belief too far. If anyone in the 9/11 Truth Movement has *any* credible evidence that a 'covert demolition of inhabited skyscraper' capacity exists in ANY armed service in the world - not just 'plant a truck bomb in the basement', or 'blast your way into the bunker' but 'fake a huge explosion on primetime news' level - then I'd love to see it. But nobody yet has presented anything that comes close.
"We are good guys because we do not intend on killing civilians, and we certainly attempt to keep innocent deaths at an absolute minimum."
Good advice, yes, and good ethics where practiced.
Except for the elephant we don't want to talk about: whole 'strategic bombing' and 'nuclear deterrence' thing. There's no way to use that without 'intending' to kill civilians, and everyone knows it. Indiscriminate civilian deaths are a known and unavoidable outcome of deploying nuclear weapons, and in countervalue targeting the civilian deaths are the desired effect.
Okay, sure, the nukes are hypothetical and haven't actually been used. But they're there, the will to use them 'just in case' is known and on the table, and the moral calculus that considers them acceptable is enough to make us not actually a 'good guy', and we haven't been on since 1945.
That's without even getting started on the CIA's role in small arms smuggling, insurgency/counterinsurgency, torture training, and the drug trade, activities which are also on the other side of 'good' but sadly have also been typical of US defense policy for a long time.
"Meanwhile, people who actually need to do this open a Google Doc or Spreadsheet in their browser and are done with it. If they need to go off-line, they use Google Gears. (I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps.)"
But the problem with that is you are now trusting your data to a corporation - an *American* corporation at that, which for those of us who are not US citizens is pretty much the same as handing our country's information wealth to the NSA.
Sorry, but though I use Google for search, I don't trust them at all for anything more. They don't need to read my email and they sure as heck don't need to read my documents.
I'm a GNOME fan but this Social Desktop thing seems to be the right direction, and KDE is looking a lot more interesting because of it.
"Sure there's tons of energy in seawater... the nuclear reactor required to extract hydrogen from it is just a minor process detail. If that's the current state of the art in Army logistics, I fear for the future:/"
Though I am extremely cynical about the current rebirth of nuclear fission and claims of its absolute safety (I'd believe the industry more if it didn't have a track record of lying), this actually makes a lot of sense.
The big problem with nuclear is you can't run small vehicles on it, because you need a certain minimum size for shielding, etc. Why the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program failed.
But you've got the ship reactors which have been working perfectly for fifty years, and where there are ships there's seawater, and where there's seawater plus a ship reactor there's hydrogen, and where there's hydrogen you can run vehicles on it.
I bet THIS is why the Bush Administration went all gung-ho about hydrogen cars. Not for civilian use, but for military. Because if they run out of oil, the entire US Army grinds to a halt. But if they can replace petrol engines with hydrogen engines, then even in the Mad Max future you can invade the country of your choice, pull up a reactor ship at the coastline, start pumping out compressed hydrogen for your tanks, and blow stuff up until you get bored.
And I'm sure Obama is thinking along much the same lines.
Sort of. A wiki is great for topic-based material. Not so great for time-based (blogs and calendars) or thread-based (comments/forums).
It seems like there should be a framework sitting midway between wiki, blog, forum and calendar: something which deals with chunks of text in a standard safe markup language (Textile/Markdown or the like), tagged with fields (date created, date modified, date due, creator) and then aggregated into views (blog post, blog comment, forum thread, forum comment, wiki page, wiki edit, wiki history).
Yes. But not every *self-identified* skeptic really is one.
Dean Radin is a good introduction to this field. There really is something going on, it's not electromagnetically mediated, the best physical analogy we have for it is quantum entanglement (but that does NOT mean it IS a quantum effect, just that it behaves similarly in some respects).
There's actually been 150 years of good research (since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research) which is mind-boggling but is simply ignored most of the time. It's actually the reverse of the infamous 'file drawer problem' - the really good cases for psi are usually thrown away precisely *because* they're too good, they don't fit expectations.
No, it's not always reliably repeatable in individual cases. That's not a problem, it's just a feature of the territory. Neither is human genius (that's not just a red herring -- there are strong arguments that the functioning of extraordinary states of human creativity is very similar to the psychological states which facilitate psi).
(A serious textbook with biomedical and cognitive science arguments)
The short summary is: after 150 years of serious scientific investigation of the paranormal, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there IS an effect.
We just don't have a mechanism for it. But that's where science should *start*, right? Not by rejecting the evidence.
Slashdot Mirror
"Unless you insist they -must- give their works away for free, and rely on the pittance given by the few people who will actually pay (which as Stephen King and Radiohead found out, is an unsustainably small group of people when the option of -free- is available.)"
That's why people who attempt Street Performer Protocol in the future should start by actually playing by its rules.
1. Set a fixed fee. Once you receive a total of $X, you release the work.
2. Don't provide a 'free' option until you receive $X
3. Promote it well, since it will only work if people trust your reputation and believe work Y is worth a total of $X and their contribution $Z.
4. Apply science and see if it works.
But nobody I know has actually done that. Stephen King had a weird system where you downloaded for free and then had the option of paying; he didn't set a fixed amount but based his judgement of 'failure' on the *percentage* of people who paid. Well, duh. There always could be *more* free money coming your way. The question is, was what you got enough to pay for itself?
Radiohead also provided a 'free' option as well as the donation, so it wasn't SPP. And yet it made a large sum of money, as I recall. And they then sold it in stores as well. They got it both ways. So where does this judgement of 'failure' come from? They didn't get as much money as some hypothetical alternative self could have? Again, sorry, not much pity there.
Sadly, I'm probably a person who skewed the statistics toward 'failure' on both of those attempts. I sampled pieces of both, for free, and decided that I didn't like them enough to keep reading/listening for free, let alone for pay. And yet I donated to King's experiment just to reward him. Boy, was I pissed when he called it 'fail'.
Moral: Don't do real SPP, set a moveable goalstick of 'success', don't be surprised if you decide it wasn't a success.
"No, I'm not talking about forever. I mean probably just for part of my lifespan. Not life+75 or whatever."
I'm happy with the idea that some mechanism *like* copyright should exist to pay for the production of new works... ... as long as authors are perfectly clear that they do not actually have any such thing as a 'right' to arbitrarily control the minds of others who have once been exposed to their thoughts, but have been granted an enormously powerful *priviledge*.
A generous social contract, sure. But it's not actually a right. And increasingly, we should be reviewing the existence of that contract and asking if there isn't a better way.
Seriously, you should realise that you're asking for the ability to control the thought and speech of 6 billion people for decades. That's more power than most tyrants could ever dream of! It's an insane amount of power, actually. And you want that just for, what, scribbling a few words or strumming some chords?
Think what you're asking. Think how much economic power that translates to. Think how you want that automatically. Think how much power it concentrates in the publishing houses and in the state which backs them. Think what happens to people who 'violate' this 'contract'.
Then wonder if you really, really want that kind of responsibility on your shoulders just so you can get a few dollars.
"That assumes that I released it for the public. Or does simply writing it down constitute releasing for public?"
Transferring *anything* into my brain constitutes releasing it to me, yes.
Or do you want the right to reach into my skull and suck out my neurochemicals? Good luck with the jury, Sylar.
"So you will agree that your car ceases to be "yours" when you take it out on a public road. Hand over the keys. And I like your watch, too."
Sure, let me pull out my magic Star Trek replicator... zzzurrrp...
Here's a perfect digital copy of my car and my watch. Enjoy them! I'll throw in the blueprints to my house and some seeds from my garden too.
And I'll drive off in my own which is still right here.
Now, you were saying something about how the notion of 'ownership' in the information realm is exactly the same as in the physical realm?
"It's not a gut-level bias against anybody getting anything for free. It's a bias against having my creation distributed for free without my permission."
The problem with that is that now you have a bias against the way the universe works. Good luck with that.
I have a bias against anyone thinking about me. My persona is my own and nobody should have that in their mind without my permission.... right?
Sorry, no. I might have the desire, but I have neither the natural right nor the ability to prevent people thinking about me.
Neither do I have the natural right to prevent people thinking any of my *thoughts*, once I've codified them in human- or machine-readable form.
Once a thought leaves my brain and enters someone else's, *it's now part of their brain and their personality* and will be forever. I can't remove that without doing invasive damage to their psyche.
Or holding a gun to their head - which is what copyright is all about. "You will NOT talk about this thought that's now in your mind."
That's why copyright is, fundamentally, not supported by reality. Sorry.
Now, that does not mean that nobody who creates art should be compensated. They should, and preferably before their art is released to the public. Their compensation just must not require the invasive thought-control of the entire rest of the human race.
"The book that I wrote is mine. It's content belongs to me. Period."
No, it doesn't.
Once you've printed your book, given it to someone else, they've read it, and it's inside their juicy brain chemicals, their content is now part of their brain as well as yours and you're not going to get it out of either without vivisection.
Welcome to the physics of information. Things can be in two places at once and 'ownership' is restricted to 'not telling anyone, ever'.
Sorry, but that's the bare metal reality. Everything else is collective hallucination to make it easier for the market to pretend to deal with bits as if they were atoms.
But they aren't.
"I think people realize without thinking that these type of "it makes sure the artist gets paid" arguments are bogus. If copyright actually protected authors, musicians, etc. I think people would be more likely to care about it, but as we have seen with the RIAA, MPAA, etc. in the end its all about whether that corporate middle-man is getting their pounds of flesh and nothing about encouraging the creative to work which is what the entire idea is supposed to be about."
This is true. However, a world where authors get nothing at all would seem to be even worse.
What we need to do is take advantage of this period of uncertainty and change to build a new system which both rewards authors without penalising copyers.
Since a work can be copied an infinite number of times, while it takes a finite amount of effort to create one, it seems like there ought to be a system where perhaps 'the first X' users of a work shoulder the burden of paying for it. And perhaps a collective fees-collecting organisation to distribute those fees in proportion to how many users there are.
Oh wait - that would be the same thing as limited-term copyright, wouldn't it? Darn.
What's the better way? Well, one suggestion would be the Street Performer Protocol idea that every work cost a FIXED SUM posted in advance which, once that amount of money was raised, would be paid to the author, and then the work released to infinite free copy heaven.
"Because the demand for good books, good music, and interesting movies isn't going away. If the only way to get those things is to pay an artist to make them, then artists will get paid."
Will they?
I have the choice to pay X dollars and get a new book, or pay zero dollars and let someone else pay and get a new book anyway when it turns up on the torrents.
Hmm, which do you think I'm going to do? Classic Prisoner's Dilemma.
Paying creatives is a hard problem no matter how you look at it. The core problem is that the people who make the product, the people who consume the product, and the people who pay for the product are all different people, and everyone wants free money from everyone else.
Selling the 'right' to copy doesn't seem right since everyone actually has that right by virtue of being born, and you have to artificially restrict people's free speech to create such a 'right'... ... but how *do* you get people to pay for something they're going to get for free anyway? Some kind of collective pay-first escrow/auction system like Street Performer Protocol still seems to be the best way - but I've yet to see anyone actually implement it. Is it time to try again?
Or some kind of 'distributed patronage networks' where fans commit to ongoing support subscriptions to artists they like.
Basically it seems like all creative endeavour naturally wants to be funded by a 'creative vanguard' who don't personally benefit from their forethought and generosity. Either that or we all build and live in a mass prison state that bills us for every act of speech.
"The law gives authors the right to choose who can and cannot make copies of their work, and under what terms. Are you suggesting that authors shouldn't have the right to choose? Are you suggesting that you have the right to make that choice for them?"
The law gives authors the artificial 'right' to 'choose' who can and cannot exercise their *natural* right to copy works, yes. And gives them the 'choice' as to whether or not people who exercise that natural right should be literally arrested and thrown in jail.
Some, naively perhaps, might think that a natural right ought to trump an artificial right, and that 'choosing' to deprive someone else of physical liberty is... perhaps a choice that *should* be taken away.
"You can't make a freedom argument against copyright - you never had the right to take what isn't yours to take."
You can't make a freedom argument against slavery either - if you're owned by another person, by legal definition you don't have the right to take what isn't yours to take. Circular argument.
But on what ethical foundation does such a llegal definition rest?
Or like literature is the study of literati.
So now I know what 'USIDent' in Southland Tales is referring to. I thought it was a kind of clumsy half-capitalisation that wouldn't appear in real life... but no.
And they're called Heighliners because the navigators are on drugs.
"There's no such thing as proof that something ISN'T possible"
Isn't that what Popper falsifiability is?
Those barbarians need to go back to Barbary, where they came from.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary
Not that the Barbary Pirates were very nice people, but it is a place, not an existential state of being.
"The government can simply sell all its property to private management companies, and then lease it back from them, and suddenly you can't even protest on the street."
That's exactly what's happening in my city... well, not so much the 'can't protest', but certainly our outgoing mayor and city council managed to buy a new $100 million building by not buying it but having a shell company buy it then lease it back to the council so it wouldn't appear on the annual balance sheet. Meanwhile, they were closing swimming pools due to 'lack of funds'.
We had similar problems with street renovations: the council outsourced to a private contractor (that happened to be owned by the council and was its previous works division) so when the contractor stuffed up, we the residents couldn't contact them because we weren't party to the contract... and the council couldn't change the contract... everything had to go through 'proper channels' but nobody knew what they were and... it was all a big mess.
Outsourcing public functions to the private sector is a big problem, and it usually is done in the name of 'streamlining' and 'efficiency'. These are code words for 'cutting the public out of the loop'.
"... is in itself a conceptual tyranny."
---
"And let me guess, you don't have any actual legions of doom either."
"I'm a CONCEPTUAL tyrant! I don't expect the likes of you to understand."
Teletubbies say 'Uh-oh! No data returned for query!'
"DoD doesn't need a botnet of worm-riddled, broadband connected civilian computers."
They also don't need to smuggle drugs and arms to insurgents, pay dodgy informers to tell them lies, and invade countries on false pretences... yet they do.
"4. Have it lined up with thermite and other explosives so that it can be controllably demolished."
That's the bit that gets me in the 'controlled demolition' theory.
That's a heck of a lot of explosives to install, and that means a heck of a lot of wiring, with some robust remote control ability. And you have to do it all while the building is occupied by thousands of people, without changing any visible interior panels or accidentally setting anything off. That's much, much harder than just planting a bomb.
There are persistent rumours that, eg, the Moscow apartment block which got blown up by 'terrorists' was a Russian operation - but that was an exceedingly messy explosion, not a 'controlled demolition' and it was obvious it was a big ugly bomb. I've never heard of a single example of a Western skyscraper being covertly wired for demolition while people are in it - most demolition jobs I've read about appear to take days to weeks to set up the charges, in full public view, including removing lots of cladding and sometimes cutting into parts of the building.
Add to that the complexity of coordinating with the planes, and you've got a logistical nightmare. And intelligence operations are crazy enough without starting with a ridiculous Bond villain spaghetti plan.
So why not just go for the simpler approach of, I dunno, just crashing some fully-fuelled planes into the thing and letting the fuel make a big bang?
I believe in a fair few things that lie outside mainstream consensus reality. But this stretches my belief too far. If anyone in the 9/11 Truth Movement has *any* credible evidence that a 'covert demolition of inhabited skyscraper' capacity exists in ANY armed service in the world - not just 'plant a truck bomb in the basement', or 'blast your way into the bunker' but 'fake a huge explosion on primetime news' level - then I'd love to see it. But nobody yet has presented anything that comes close.
"We are good guys because we do not intend on killing civilians, and we certainly attempt to keep innocent deaths at an absolute minimum."
Good advice, yes, and good ethics where practiced.
Except for the elephant we don't want to talk about: whole 'strategic bombing' and 'nuclear deterrence' thing. There's no way to use that without 'intending' to kill civilians, and everyone knows it. Indiscriminate civilian deaths are a known and unavoidable outcome of deploying nuclear weapons, and in countervalue targeting the civilian deaths are the desired effect.
Okay, sure, the nukes are hypothetical and haven't actually been used. But they're there, the will to use them 'just in case' is known and on the table, and the moral calculus that considers them acceptable is enough to make us not actually a 'good guy', and we haven't been on since 1945.
That's without even getting started on the CIA's role in small arms smuggling, insurgency/counterinsurgency, torture training, and the drug trade, activities which are also on the other side of 'good' but sadly have also been typical of US defense policy for a long time.
"Meanwhile, people who actually need to do this open a Google Doc or Spreadsheet in their browser and are done with it. If they need to go off-line, they use Google Gears. (I'm just giving Google as an example, there are many other similar multi-user web apps.)"
But the problem with that is you are now trusting your data to a corporation - an *American* corporation at that, which for those of us who are not US citizens is pretty much the same as handing our country's information wealth to the NSA.
Sorry, but though I use Google for search, I don't trust them at all for anything more. They don't need to read my email and they sure as heck don't need to read my documents.
I'm a GNOME fan but this Social Desktop thing seems to be the right direction, and KDE is looking a lot more interesting because of it.
"Sure there's tons of energy in seawater... the nuclear reactor required to extract hydrogen from it is just a minor process detail. If that's the current state of the art in Army logistics, I fear for the future :/"
Though I am extremely cynical about the current rebirth of nuclear fission and claims of its absolute safety (I'd believe the industry more if it didn't have a track record of lying), this actually makes a lot of sense.
The big problem with nuclear is you can't run small vehicles on it, because you need a certain minimum size for shielding, etc. Why the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program failed.
But you've got the ship reactors which have been working perfectly for fifty years, and where there are ships there's seawater, and where there's seawater plus a ship reactor there's hydrogen, and where there's hydrogen you can run vehicles on it.
I bet THIS is why the Bush Administration went all gung-ho about hydrogen cars. Not for civilian use, but for military. Because if they run out of oil, the entire US Army grinds to a halt. But if they can replace petrol engines with hydrogen engines, then even in the Mad Max future you can invade the country of your choice, pull up a reactor ship at the coastline, start pumping out compressed hydrogen for your tanks, and blow stuff up until you get bored.
And I'm sure Obama is thinking along much the same lines.
"I think it's called a wiki."
Sort of. A wiki is great for topic-based material. Not so great for time-based (blogs and calendars) or thread-based (comments/forums).
It seems like there should be a framework sitting midway between wiki, blog, forum and calendar: something which deals with chunks of text in a standard safe markup language (Textile/Markdown or the like), tagged with fields (date created, date modified, date due, creator) and then aggregated into views (blog post, blog comment, forum thread, forum comment, wiki page, wiki edit, wiki history).
Why don't we have this yet?
"By definition skeptic has an open mind."
Yes. But not every *self-identified* skeptic really is one.
Dean Radin is a good introduction to this field. There really is something going on, it's not electromagnetically mediated, the best physical analogy we have for it is quantum entanglement (but that does NOT mean it IS a quantum effect, just that it behaves similarly in some respects).
http://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Minds-Extrasensory-Experiences-Quantum/dp/1416516778/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240988259&sr=8-1
There's actually been 150 years of good research (since the founding of the Society for Psychical Research) which is mind-boggling but is simply ignored most of the time. It's actually the reverse of the infamous 'file drawer problem' - the really good cases for psi are usually thrown away precisely *because* they're too good, they don't fit expectations.
No, it's not always reliably repeatable in individual cases. That's not a problem, it's just a feature of the territory. Neither is human genius (that's not just a red herring -- there are strong arguments that the functioning of extraordinary states of human creativity is very similar to the psychological states which facilitate psi).
Read the following for more information:
http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240988146&sr=8-1
http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240988177&sr=8-1
Thank you!
Dean Radin is very interesting. His Entangled Minds is a good summary of research including autoganzfeld (which is one of the most promising I think).
http://www.amazon.com/Entangled-Minds-Extrasensory-Experiences-Quantum/dp/1416516778/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240988259&sr=8-1
Some more good books:
http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240988146&sr=8-1
(A good entry-level roundup of the field)
http://www.amazon.com/Irreducible-Mind-hard-find-contemporary/dp/0742547922/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1240988177&sr=8-1
(A serious textbook with biomedical and cognitive science arguments)
The short summary is: after 150 years of serious scientific investigation of the paranormal, we know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there IS an effect.
We just don't have a mechanism for it. But that's where science should *start*, right? Not by rejecting the evidence.