I didn't know you could win an argument by appending a "Period." after your thesis.
Actually the correct steps are:
* Present your thesis.
* Exclaim PERIOD!
* Clamp your hands to your ears and run away shouting "lalalalalalala cant hear you!", before any counter-argument can be made.
And there you go, argument won.
Here's one reason why... I was Bipolar II which meant I was mostly manic. As a result I was easily angered, very enthusiastic, easily empassioned and highly creative. My brain went a MILLION miles per hour in that state and I had brilliance that I couldn't contain at times. I already have an IQ of 160 and during that state it was up 5-10 additional points (when I could stay focused).
Tack onto that the boundless energy the condition gave me and the fact that I never slept in that state and you have exactly what you described. I felt untouchable and alive like no one could imagine. So why did I go on meds? Well, that's the trick. How do you get bipolars or other people who have a self destructive disorder that makes them feel superior or more intelligent go on a med that dumbs them down or slows them down?
I hit that point where I realized my condition was isolating me and shutting me off from everyone else around me. When I examined my life, I realized I had no one to blame but myself; I burnt people out like matches but couldn't see that I was the one common factor in all the damaged relationships. More exactly, my condition.
I eventually got better and now write my own documentation, get along with others, don't have mood swings at work, etc etc. It took me years and lots of hard work and effort to get over old emotional habits... the meds don't do it alone.
But I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes brilliance comes with madness. Sometimes it's just madness, sometimes it's both. Getting them to help themselves though can be almost impossible though.
Amen. The primary differences for me was that I didn't use meds*, and it took being homeless for a year to force a change. I blame it on Asperger's.:-) (see earlier in this thread...)
On the other hand, intentionally reconstructing my personality made me much better at self-analysis and learning the rules regarding social cues.
I'm less "brilliant", but people talk to me now.:-)
* No, I'm not one-upping anyone. The full story is tedious and irrelevant to this response.
Aspergers is to the body language and subtle social cues that define 2/3 of human communication as blindness is to vision or deafness is to sound. Only on the outside, no one knows you have an impaired perception. You don't get cut the slack that the person signing or the guy carrying the cane would.
You constantly monitor yourself every second to make sure you don't do anything wrong. You're labelled as weird, or rebellious, rude, or unpleasant to be around because you can't perceive the messages people are trying to send you. You have few friends because whatever secret magical language that's being spoken to generate new connections with people you totally miss. Many attempts you make to reach out to people end in disaster, and you can't for the life of you understand what the hell it is that you're doing wrong.
Those lonely nights spend in front of a computer are ones you'd probably rather spend hooking up with a girl you met at a bar instead of learning the intricacies of Yacc or device drivers. And it drives you absolutely fucking insane that everyone else is in on the fuck-fest that is life except you.
Amen to most of the above. I don't know how it affects/is applied by others in this situation, but for me it exhibits as an overriding concern for rules and rulesets. It's taken me about twenty five years to accumulate enough rules to get by in most interactions. There are times however when don't have good rules, and I stumble.
This fixation on rules has engendered a wealth of misunderstandings, ostracization and ridicule, mostly because the others don't realize that my socially awkward actions are based on something more fundamental than simple rudeness.
One effect I have noticed with my personal changes is that I am often underestimated by others, probably because my fitting in makes me appear harmless and somewhat uninteresting. So be it. Small price to pay to be involved. The ever-larger rulesets can be a trial as well, until I realized that I can dispense with them at need.
The biggest frustration is to have the right answer/response, and being utterly unable to communicate it properly; a big (possibly the biggest) advantage is that after all this practice it is relatively easy to learn the appropriate accents, colloquialisms, speech timing and patterns, and topics of discussion ("skins", if you will) that enable me to fit in almost anywhere (within my prior experience).
Any super-abilities you might gain from this condition are cold comfort, as they're used more as survival skills to get around the enormous deficits you experience in being able to read people. The money that you earn from your impressive abilities has to be the substitute for having lots of friends who could help you do stuff (e.g. you pay someone to install an super-heavy air conditioner in a second story windows because you don't have many friends you can call on to help you). It's not really a preference for certain kind of social lifestyle, it's a crappy hand of cards you're dealt that you have to make the best of.
Or you can choose to regard it as a challenge to your abilities and will, and solve it. It's up to you.
However, if I had one piece of advice, it's this: don't let it fester. Learn to communicate in whatever way makes you least uncomfortable, because it is nearly meaningless to have the ability to contribute if you can't figure out a way to make a contribution.
None of this was meant to criticize any of what I quoted. I saw an opportunity to use it as a springboard for what I've wanted for some time to write.
Why do people think that small airplane pilots need parachutes?
Because they lack information. I fly a Cessna 172 and even if the engine goes out its ~9:1 glide ratio means I have a decent amount of time to find a place to put down. I live near a number of blue shield interstate highways so in a worst case scenario I can put down on one of those or in the median between them. I haven't flown in (or around) mountains yet but I can't envision many situations in which it would be preferable to get out of my plane.
That said, if I had to get out it wouldn't be hard. If you can get the door open, once you take your seatbelt off you could just lean out and fall headfirst. For people with Archers and the other low wings getting out would not be much fun at all.
The one situation that might apply here is what I call the "death canyon". Get into a gradually climbing canyon at a good altitude, and you find yourself unable to climb out (many small aircraft don't climb well at 10,000+ feet) and you can't turn around because the canyon is too narrow. In this particular case you would have plenty of time to
1) realize that you're in trouble
2) get out of the plane, if you're wearing a parachute.
I'm not saying that is what happened in this case, merely that it would match.
Having said that, I can't imagine wearing a parachute in a small plane; it would be awfully uncomfortable.
I agree. I recall reading Thomas Jefferson's discovery of sea creature fossils in nearby mountains. He was unable to reconcile the then-dominant view of a perfect God creating a perfect world, with the idea that the mountains used to harbor sea-creatures. He examined a bunch of possibilities (including Noah's flood), and rejected all of them as illogical and non-explanatory. At the end of his paper he simply wrote, "I do not know." The answer to this puzzle was not discovered until ~100 years later (the earth's surface is like a jigsaw with pieces ramming into one another, thereby turning oceans into mountains).
Odd. ISTR that in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" he discussed the possibility (however seemingly absurd) that the mountains in question had once been on the bottom of the sea.
However, it's been awhile since I read the book, so I could be wrong.
Who is NewYorkCountryLawyer, and why does he talk about himself in third person? You must be new here. Bra-vo! Three different layers of humor, and doubly self-referential, in four words.
Nice.
...Now, if a way to award credit for this type of work were to be created that allowed:
* students to apply such work to graduation requirements;
* postdocs to apply the work to faculty job applications;
* junior faculty to apply their contributions to tenure review;
then I think this could be a viable system.
It just struck me that Google's page-ranking system might have some applicability to this problem. Not that I am claiming to know the details of their ranking system, but one could envision mining the edit history of the contributors, the utility of those edits to the final product (and possibly some other data) to arrive at a reasonable assignment of value/compensation for each contributor.
Of course, now that I have published my great idea on a public forum, someone else will steal it and make lots of money from it.:-)
Keep in mind that ethanol doesn't require the nitrogenous components, so most of the "waste" can be put back on the fields.
Yes, there will be loss, but it's not anywhere near as bad as some make out. Any decent organic farmer can lecture for hours on the wonders of compost, and as long as the farmers are careful about irrigation runoff, it isn't too bad.
No, as I see it, these guys are either idealistic but doomed, or else they've come up with an interesting hook to see if they can set up as a high-price ISP. Either way, it's hard to see them making a difference.
Or, they are trying to get the attention of Google, or they are a proxy for Google, to test the 'net neutrality/being an ISP' water...
I know you this was meant to be funny, but it hits a little close to home. For all of you who think you have your kids under control, I offer this true story:
Our 2 1/2 year old, in the space of about five minutes (or less) managed to get the keys from the hook where we keep them (about 5' from the floor), crawl through the doggie door into the garage, chirp the car open (keyless entry), get into the car and start it up. Our first warning was the engine starting, at which point we ran into the garage to see him extremely happy, with hazard lights and windshield wipers going to beat the band.
Very unsettling.
Luckily for us, he understands and obeys us when we absolutely forbid something. (Playing with power tools, going near the road, starting the car, starting the tractor, etc)
For those of you ready to flame me for my lack of preparedness, I keep the circuit breaker for the power tools off, the keys to the car and tractor are on hooks (in different places) at least 5' from the ground, I have put up a 4' no-climb fence around our yard, and generally keep the house reasonably safe. The main problem is that the use of stools and ladders present little difficulty to this adventurous inquisitive child.:-)
unless i am mistaken the only Mac hardware upgraded predicted were possible quad-core MacPros and Xserves... but that was purely based on Intel releasing the chips and not any inside info. the MacBooks and MacBook Pro portables were upgraded in the fall, the iMac was upgraded in the late summer/early Fall... the Mac Mini in there somewhere too. unless they got a major overhaul, it would not be worth pulling time away from the iPhone and Apple TV.
What is interesting to me is that the prices for the 30" monitors dropped dramatically, but they didn't update the "special deals" page. The new price is $1999 (US), whereas the old price was $3299. I didn't notice when they dropped the price, so it may not have been all that recent. It's not like I'm in the market for a 30" LCD display these days...:-)
I wonder if that means that a new mongo display is imminent.
You are correct in saying that hydrogen is rarely produced by electrolysis due to energy consumption. Do you know how it's really made? Reforming natural gas - a fossil fuel! Congratulations, you've managed to shift our dependence on fossil fuels from crude oil to natural gas (which is even more scarce) while reducing the overall energy yield from the raw fuel and still not reducing carbon emissions.
There is another process called (ISTR) the sulfur-iodine cycle, that uses high heat (a nuclear reactor is a commonly posited source) to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen. The chemistry involved is more than I care to type in here; just google for it to see what I mean.
Oh right. The Sony Handycam I bought is USB, but the Mac won't read the video. It finds the stills no problem but I can't get it to see the video, no matter what I try. So, no, the Mac is not all plug and play either.
This might be the camera's fault; I have a Panasonic something-or-other DV camera, and it requires a firewire cable for downloading video. Stills can be downloaded via USB, and the literature plays that up, but only mentions the firewire cable in fine print. I spent an hour trying to work around it, but no go; it was all on the camera end.
The nice thing about most of these systems is that the interesting stuff remains after you extract the energetic stuff. Biodiesel only contains C, H and O, leaving the N, P and other useful elements. The remainder, if one is careful about the intermediate products, makes a very nice fertilizer component.
And this is where a big part of the argument falls apart; if the mugger/robber isn't threatening you with immediate, lethal force, your justification for up and shooting him dead is not complete.
Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Someone with a baseball bat could be lethally dangerous; do you kill him? How about someone intentionally sideswiping your car on the freeway? Can you shoot him too?
I'm not a gun control fanatic. I believe that guns should be regulated at least as much as cars, and there should be a separate insurance category for gun ownership (as it is with cars; I don't agree that homeowner's insurance with a gun rider is the same). Having said that, I also believe that non-felons should be allowed to own guns; I don't have the moral/legal/ethical authority to deny anyone anything categorically.
I could have said more, but this should be enough to garner flames from both sides...
When I order an americano, it's almost always when I want to drink a cup to for, say, five minutes, and I don't want to trust their "house coffee". (A term used to describe something that has been sitting in a thermos or on a hotplate for at least an hour, probably more) The greater size of an americano means that it will cool more slowly, so I can enjoy it at my preferred temperature longer.
When I once again have the time to use/maintain a good espresso machine, that will be the drink of choice in my home. For now I fresh-grind my coffee.
What planet are you on, moron? The Democrats have always been the biggest water carriers for the entertainment industry, and have always received the lion's share of political donations from Hollywood fat cats (78% in 2002.)
If you parse the parent, you would notice that he/she is decrying the lassez-faire attitude of the current administration vis-a-vis monopolists in general, rather than its explicit support of the various parts of the entertainment industry. (Possible reference to the whole Microsoft trial fiasco)
To add to this idea, you could have a second type of trust-level where the searcher would only accept the bonafides of someone within a certain number of hops in the web of trust, or could remove nodes from the web of trust, (and any nodes dependent on this node). This would enable searchers to craft a search-space to their parameters.
(Yes, I read the link to the PGP Web of Trust, and understand that their version of trust-level is different)
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are patents on certain varieties of apple trees* that forbid grafting them without permission.**
*at least; I can only speak of apple trees because I have purchased some small trees that are accompanied by warnings not to asexually propagate (graft) them
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't know you could win an argument by appending a "Period." after your thesis.
Actually the correct steps are: * Present your thesis. * Exclaim PERIOD! * Clamp your hands to your ears and run away shouting "lalalalalalala cant hear you!", before any counter-argument can be made. And there you go, argument won.
Rush Limbaugh?? Is that you?
as a human overlord to welcome our bacteria inhabitants
You Russian?
Here's one reason why... I was Bipolar II which meant I was mostly manic. As a result I was easily angered, very enthusiastic, easily empassioned and highly creative. My brain went a MILLION miles per hour in that state and I had brilliance that I couldn't contain at times. I already have an IQ of 160 and during that state it was up 5-10 additional points (when I could stay focused).
Tack onto that the boundless energy the condition gave me and the fact that I never slept in that state and you have exactly what you described. I felt untouchable and alive like no one could imagine. So why did I go on meds? Well, that's the trick. How do you get bipolars or other people who have a self destructive disorder that makes them feel superior or more intelligent go on a med that dumbs them down or slows them down?
I hit that point where I realized my condition was isolating me and shutting me off from everyone else around me. When I examined my life, I realized I had no one to blame but myself; I burnt people out like matches but couldn't see that I was the one common factor in all the damaged relationships. More exactly, my condition.
I eventually got better and now write my own documentation, get along with others, don't have mood swings at work, etc etc. It took me years and lots of hard work and effort to get over old emotional habits... the meds don't do it alone.
But I guess what I am trying to say is that sometimes brilliance comes with madness. Sometimes it's just madness, sometimes it's both. Getting them to help themselves though can be almost impossible though.
Amen. The primary differences for me was that I didn't use meds*, and it took being homeless for a year to force a change. I blame it on Asperger's. :-) (see earlier in this thread...)
:-)
On the other hand, intentionally reconstructing my personality made me much better at self-analysis and learning the rules regarding social cues.
I'm less "brilliant", but people talk to me now.
* No, I'm not one-upping anyone. The full story is tedious and irrelevant to this response.
Just one viewpoint, take it or leave it.
Aspergers is to the body language and subtle social cues that define 2/3 of human communication as blindness is to vision or deafness is to sound. Only on the outside, no one knows you have an impaired perception. You don't get cut the slack that the person signing or the guy carrying the cane would.
You constantly monitor yourself every second to make sure you don't do anything wrong. You're labelled as weird, or rebellious, rude, or unpleasant to be around because you can't perceive the messages people are trying to send you. You have few friends because whatever secret magical language that's being spoken to generate new connections with people you totally miss. Many attempts you make to reach out to people end in disaster, and you can't for the life of you understand what the hell it is that you're doing wrong.
Those lonely nights spend in front of a computer are ones you'd probably rather spend hooking up with a girl you met at a bar instead of learning the intricacies of Yacc or device drivers. And it drives you absolutely fucking insane that everyone else is in on the fuck-fest that is life except you.
Amen to most of the above. I don't know how it affects/is applied by others in this situation, but for me it exhibits as an overriding concern for rules and rulesets. It's taken me about twenty five years to accumulate enough rules to get by in most interactions. There are times however when don't have good rules, and I stumble.
This fixation on rules has engendered a wealth of misunderstandings, ostracization and ridicule, mostly because the others don't realize that my socially awkward actions are based on something more fundamental than simple rudeness.
One effect I have noticed with my personal changes is that I am often underestimated by others, probably because my fitting in makes me appear harmless and somewhat uninteresting. So be it. Small price to pay to be involved.
The ever-larger rulesets can be a trial as well, until I realized that I can dispense with them at need.
The biggest frustration is to have the right answer/response, and being utterly unable to communicate it properly; a big (possibly the biggest) advantage is that after all this practice it is relatively easy to learn the appropriate accents, colloquialisms, speech timing and patterns, and topics of discussion ("skins", if you will) that enable me to fit in almost anywhere (within my prior experience).
Any super-abilities you might gain from this condition are cold comfort, as they're used more as survival skills to get around the enormous deficits you experience in being able to read people. The money that you earn from your impressive abilities has to be the substitute for having lots of friends who could help you do stuff (e.g. you pay someone to install an super-heavy air conditioner in a second story windows because you don't have many friends you can call on to help you). It's not really a preference for certain kind of social lifestyle, it's a crappy hand of cards you're dealt that you have to make the best of.
Or you can choose to regard it as a challenge to your abilities and will, and solve it. It's up to you.
However, if I had one piece of advice, it's this: don't let it fester. Learn to communicate in whatever way makes you least uncomfortable, because it is nearly meaningless to have the ability to contribute if you can't figure out a way to make a contribution.
None of this was meant to criticize any of what I quoted. I saw an opportunity to use it as a springboard for what I've wanted for some time to write.
Why do people think that small airplane pilots need parachutes?
Because they lack information. I fly a Cessna 172 and even if the engine goes out its ~9:1 glide ratio means I have a decent amount of time to find a place to put down. I live near a number of blue shield interstate highways so in a worst case scenario I can put down on one of those or in the median between them. I haven't flown in (or around) mountains yet but I can't envision many situations in which it would be preferable to get out of my plane. That said, if I had to get out it wouldn't be hard. If you can get the door open, once you take your seatbelt off you could just lean out and fall headfirst. For people with Archers and the other low wings getting out would not be much fun at all.
The one situation that might apply here is what I call the "death canyon". Get into a gradually climbing canyon at a good altitude, and you find yourself unable to climb out (many small aircraft don't climb well at 10,000+ feet) and you can't turn around because the canyon is too narrow. In this particular case you would have plenty of time to
1) realize that you're in trouble
2) get out of the plane, if you're wearing a parachute.
I'm not saying that is what happened in this case, merely that it would match. Having said that, I can't imagine wearing a parachute in a small plane; it would be awfully uncomfortable.
I agree. I recall reading Thomas Jefferson's discovery of sea creature fossils in nearby mountains. He was unable to reconcile the then-dominant view of a perfect God creating a perfect world, with the idea that the mountains used to harbor sea-creatures. He examined a bunch of possibilities (including Noah's flood), and rejected all of them as illogical and non-explanatory. At the end of his paper he simply wrote, "I do not know." The answer to this puzzle was not discovered until ~100 years later (the earth's surface is like a jigsaw with pieces ramming into one another, thereby turning oceans into mountains).
Odd. ISTR that in his "Notes on the State of Virginia" he discussed the possibility (however seemingly absurd) that the mountains in question had once been on the bottom of the sea.
However, it's been awhile since I read the book, so I could be wrong.
Actually it's information superhighway robbery.
That's what I thought the 'IS' stood for......Now, if a way to award credit for this type of work were to be created that allowed: * students to apply such work to graduation requirements; * postdocs to apply the work to faculty job applications; * junior faculty to apply their contributions to tenure review; then I think this could be a viable system.
:-)
It just struck me that Google's page-ranking system might have some applicability to this problem. Not that I am claiming to know the details of their ranking system, but one could envision mining the edit history of the contributors, the utility of those edits to the final product (and possibly some other data) to arrive at a reasonable assignment of value/compensation for each contributor.
Of course, now that I have published my great idea on a public forum, someone else will steal it and make lots of money from it.
Keep in mind that ethanol doesn't require the nitrogenous components, so most of the "waste" can be put back on the fields.
Yes, there will be loss, but it's not anywhere near as bad as some make out. Any decent organic farmer can lecture for hours on the wonders of compost, and as long as the farmers are careful about irrigation runoff, it isn't too bad.
The bookbinding machine? That was mentioned on Slashdot previously. It's not that novel.
Ouch. Didja have to?
No, as I see it, these guys are either idealistic but doomed, or else they've come up with an interesting hook to see if they can set up as a high-price ISP. Either way, it's hard to see them making a difference.
Or, they are trying to get the attention of Google, or they are a proxy for Google, to test the 'net neutrality/being an ISP' water...
I know you this was meant to be funny, but it hits a little close to home. For all of you who think you have your kids under control, I offer this true story:
:-)
Our 2 1/2 year old, in the space of about five minutes (or less) managed to get the keys from the hook where we keep them (about 5' from the floor), crawl through the doggie door into the garage, chirp the car open (keyless entry), get into the car and start it up. Our first warning was the engine starting, at which point we ran into the garage to see him extremely happy, with hazard lights and windshield wipers going to beat the band.
Very unsettling.
Luckily for us, he understands and obeys us when we absolutely forbid something. (Playing with power tools, going near the road, starting the car, starting the tractor, etc)
For those of you ready to flame me for my lack of preparedness, I keep the circuit breaker for the power tools off, the keys to the car and tractor are on hooks (in different places) at least 5' from the ground, I have put up a 4' no-climb fence around our yard, and generally keep the house reasonably safe. The main problem is that the use of stools and ladders present little difficulty to this adventurous inquisitive child.
unless i am mistaken the only Mac hardware upgraded predicted were possible quad-core MacPros and Xserves... but that was purely based on Intel releasing the chips and not any inside info. the MacBooks and MacBook Pro portables were upgraded in the fall, the iMac was upgraded in the late summer/early Fall... the Mac Mini in there somewhere too. unless they got a major overhaul, it would not be worth pulling time away from the iPhone and Apple TV.
:-)
What is interesting to me is that the prices for the 30" monitors dropped dramatically, but they didn't update the "special deals" page. The new price is $1999 (US), whereas the old price was $3299. I didn't notice when they dropped the price, so it may not have been all that recent. It's not like I'm in the market for a 30" LCD display these days...
I wonder if that means that a new mongo display is imminent.
You are correct in saying that hydrogen is rarely produced by electrolysis due to energy consumption. Do you know how it's really made? Reforming natural gas - a fossil fuel! Congratulations, you've managed to shift our dependence on fossil fuels from crude oil to natural gas (which is even more scarce) while reducing the overall energy yield from the raw fuel and still not reducing carbon emissions.
There is another process called (ISTR) the sulfur-iodine cycle, that uses high heat (a nuclear reactor is a commonly posited source) to decompose water into hydrogen and oxygen. The chemistry involved is more than I care to type in here; just google for it to see what I mean.
Oh right. The Sony Handycam I bought is USB, but the Mac won't read the video. It finds the stills no problem but I can't get it to see the video, no matter what I try. So, no, the Mac is not all plug and play either.
This might be the camera's fault; I have a Panasonic something-or-other DV camera, and it requires a firewire cable for downloading video. Stills can be downloaded via USB, and the literature plays that up, but only mentions the firewire cable in fine print. I spent an hour trying to work around it, but no go; it was all on the camera end.
Seems to me, even given perfect invisibility, that the object in question would radiate energy all by itself.
Do some spectranalysis, and you immediately know something fishy is going on. (Copper won't radiate like the ground, for example)
The nice thing about most of these systems is that the interesting stuff remains after you extract the energetic stuff. Biodiesel only contains C, H and O, leaving the N, P and other useful elements. The remainder, if one is careful about the intermediate products, makes a very nice fertilizer component.
And this is where a big part of the argument falls apart; if the mugger/robber isn't threatening you with immediate, lethal force, your justification for up and shooting him dead is not complete.
Otherwise, where do you draw the line? Someone with a baseball bat could be lethally dangerous; do you kill him? How about someone intentionally sideswiping your car on the freeway? Can you shoot him too?
I'm not a gun control fanatic. I believe that guns should be regulated at least as much as cars, and there should be a separate insurance category for gun ownership (as it is with cars; I don't agree that homeowner's insurance with a gun rider is the same). Having said that, I also believe that non-felons should be allowed to own guns; I don't have the moral/legal/ethical authority to deny anyone anything categorically.
I could have said more, but this should be enough to garner flames from both sides...
How about just opening your spacesuit?
(with a raise of your favorite drink to James Blish...)
When I order an americano, it's almost always when I want to drink a cup to for, say, five minutes, and I don't want to trust their "house coffee". (A term used to describe something that has been sitting in a thermos or on a hotplate for at least an hour, probably more) The greater size of an americano means that it will cool more slowly, so I can enjoy it at my preferred temperature longer.
When I once again have the time to use/maintain a good espresso machine, that will be the drink of choice in my home. For now I fresh-grind my coffee.
If you parse the parent, you would notice that he/she is decrying the lassez-faire attitude of the current administration vis-a-vis monopolists in general, rather than its explicit support of the various parts of the entertainment industry. (Possible reference to the whole Microsoft trial fiasco)
(I think)
To add to this idea, you could have a second type of trust-level where the searcher would only accept the bonafides of someone within a certain number of hops in the web of trust, or could remove nodes from the web of trust, (and any nodes dependent on this node). This would enable searchers to craft a search-space to their parameters.
(Yes, I read the link to the PGP Web of Trust, and understand that their version of trust-level is different)
Also David Brin's "Earth", if I remember the plot correctly. Actually a pretty close correspondence...
Sorry to burst your bubble, but there are patents on certain varieties of apple trees* that forbid grafting them without permission.**
*at least; I can only speak of apple trees because I have purchased some small trees that are accompanied by warnings not to asexually propagate (graft) them
**Well, they could be lying, I suppose...