Ideas that could change the world
wired.com
wired.com
Make the web accessible (not in an empty gesture of what some people think that means). Make someone who is actually differently abled sit in front of their computer and see if they can use your website, read and enjoy its content.
Read: Make layouts that don't suck :/
Once upon a time, there was a movement called "Any Browser". Oh sure, it's still around, but no where near the adoption it once had. In this movement, people of all capacities, browsers and disabilities were unaffected by the layout of a webpage, because all of it can gracefully degrade to its most basic elements.
Content was king. The layout was subservient to it and, if necessary, the king may cut off its head and still be king.
Isn't it sad that in our rush to make multi-page content, and other glitter that's 50% advertizing, 30% style and just 20% content, my neighbor still can't read sites like Wired properly?
Here's a handy rule of thumb: If I can't get to your content in Lynx, you've failed.
Anyway, my point is that I think you're right, but the first step is to be the change you want to see, and provide whatever content you, personally, have produced in a way that is readable on lynx (which, by the way, is totally available on Homebrew).
Oh yeah, one other pro-tip: if you're really really concerned about accessibility, try simulating their experience to really see what works and what doesn't. There was an article posted here a while back about a guy who spent a few days using the internet wearing a blindfold. The biggest takeaway for me was that the alt attribute on images was totally ignored!
Real ideas that could change the world? I would put Big Data there, or my understanding of what Big Data could be: instead of focusing on thinking the best, fanciest hypothesis you can, focus on getting a lot of the best data you can find. Pure thinking from principia won't bring understanding to the human genome, but smart data crunching might.
Do you people have any thoughts on more ideas that could be like that? I'm actually interested.
[1] Technology provide the material/economic substrate from which philosophies and understanding comes. Automation, division of labour and credit brought capitalism, that brought bourgeois values: democracy, meritocracy, disdain for aristocracy, disdain for the disdain of "usury"... So it's given that technological progress becomes more than just "technological".
We can currently, with fMRI tech, already see a decision being made before the agent is conscious of the decision (though we can't determine what that decision is). As this technology develops, our ideas of free will, consciousness, responsibility, and ultimately justice will shift.
EDIT: not just the knowledge of this, but the general acceptance of it.
that would kill almost all journalism, which is never tired of telling us the why, when there is no why.
that would narrow a lot most social science researches.
we, humans, are still not adults, we need reasons, we need good stories, those that make sense. but the probable truth is that there are no reasons.
could be called correlationism.
Says who? I don't know if Newton would've come up with classical mechanics if you simply gave him a ton of vectors.
I'm not so sure nature is self evident once you get enough data. Maybe we need more thinking and less data harvesting. We have google for example, almost all human knowledge just seconds away, and we still don't have a clue on what's conscience and what makes us humans.
- One of the biggest problems we have is how to produce and preserve energy in large quantities in environmentally efficient way. If we are able to do that then 1, 2 and 4 are just nothing special. We will be able to tackle on the space!
- Wi-fi spots on everything? That is missing the point - I would argue that not the one-time cost is the problem but rather the cost of service associated with it.
- Idea 5 is so wrong that we must try in every way to protect from it. I can see the benefit of having the weather always in your sight, but I'm afraid that we as society will deep dive into it and never come out.
- War on asteroids? Better war on cockroaches. That is just wasting money on nothing. Now if we are endangered by some concrete asteroid, then we have to shoot it down of course.
- And building skyscrapers for me is missing the point. We have enough of these. Better spend money on preserving the environment and species on our planet then trying to squeeze more people on a square meter. Or just build the damn space elevator.
I have a dream - my son to take me on a space trip :)
Electric quadrocopters today have pretty limited range, with a flight time of about 30 minutes. You could do some pretty neat stuff if they lasted 5 hours.
Not to mention what it will mean to regular airplanes, cars and mobile technology. We'd might even start to see some futuristic weaponry, not that it would be particularly positive.
What about a global grid that spans the globe, with large solar arrays in the deserts of Australia, North America and South Africa? This way there's always an array producing power at any time during the day, although each array has to be large enough to sustain the world's power needs. Transmission would be interesting as well - anyone know how to build a TW transmission line?
Global insolation map: http://imgur.com/1p4KIMb
That would be the best of best Fuel type, require no change of Engine in Planes and Cars. But still as clean.
Of Coz i am only dreaming of one.
1) Drill wells. There is subterranean water in many places, including otherwise arid landscapes.
2) Transporting water in a pipeline is also pretty easy, especially if you need pipes to transport the gaseous products anyway.
3) Considering the energy density, you could even carry it by truck over a dirt road once in a while.
Ironically a shielding made of diamond might solve that problem..
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Are_diamonds_flammable Says diamonds are combustible around 1520 degrees.
But temperatures were 1000 degrees at the high-point in the 9/11 events (page 10 end of first paragrah): http://eagar.mit.edu/EagarPapers/Eagar185.pdf
Interesting enough. The bigger issue would have certainly been the buildings crumbling before they ever burst into flames/disintegrated.
the ideas are not ideas, they're technologies - or inventions - and most of them are blindingly obvious and already being worked on. even as far as technologies go, there is very little imagination here.
Meanwhile, thousands and perhaps even millions of humans are going to end up living off Earth and manufacturing is going to change so dramatically it'll transform our concepts of wealth. 2100 is going to look as alien from our perspective of 2013 as 2000 did from 1913.