nooneelse

Yeah, and we learn to finger-paint very early, it being quite intuitive and all... but then we grow up and the overwhelming majority of people learn to use writing implements (and other such tools of numerous sorts). I haven't been able, nor wanted to, turn in finger-painted work since early elementary school. Adults use pens (and other such) to write, as well they should, since doing so increases the efficiency of complex output from mind to page.

If information from the inside is never whistle-blown, how will the people know to be upset about something, and who/what to vote, protest, bear arms for/against?

But I (and probably no one) trust(s) all my friends about every topic or type of product/service. So better to show me the ad and which friend(s) gave the review so I can determine if that is actually a mark against the ad or not.

So perhaps someone should enable a layer of plausible deniability in the form of a program which makes it look like your machine(s) has been compromised and controlled for a long time now.

> ...just have it log findings and generate reports.

And send you a text if it thinks it sees a Hornworm larva on your tomatoes, so you can rush home.

I think it a pretty good argument that the voting age should be less than the conscription age by enough that the person conscription has had a chance to participate in the voting that led to the government which is conscripting them. It sets the order of events more in line with a hypothetical ideal social contract to which one agrees by one's actions and then owes such a high price to.

Perhaps the cultural pendulum has swung a bit too far into elevating the voices of those with traits of psychological neoteny. How could we insert a counterbalancing force of support for mental gerontomorphic features in online discourse?

How much slower would someone drive if they knew they had a good shot at 2000 healthy years ahead of them? Would the airline industry be able to survive and still use jumbo jets? Perhaps the long-lifers would pay to ride in pods with parachutes which that can be ejected from the plane.

> In fact it's quite hard for something random at that level to have any noticeable [to a human] effect at all. So basically all the multiverses are identical.

If and what particular type of tissue damage and/or cancer(s) is caused in someone by exposure to radiation damaging their cells in repairable or unrepairable ways (which depends on the particular times at which particular radioactive atoms decay and the paths of the resulting particles and their interactions with with the small-scale constituents of the person's biology). I would think that whether a person recovers from some radiation exposure or the exposure went just beyond what their cells could handle and thus causes a fatal cancer, that is noticeable to a human. Finding that wasn't altogether hard.

Given a sufficiently long time horizon (some physicists at UC Davies got some press arguing it could be on the scale of months), future weather conditions at individual moments are currently in the realm of quantum uncertainty/randomness. The people who have/don't-have car accidents due to the rain&sleet or not on some winter day a few years hence will easily notice which of the multiple worlds they ended up in.

Also, should anyone so choose, they could easily make world-history-scale decisions based on Geiger counter readings or some other implementation of a quantum-coin-flip. Imagine an assassin setup and ready to take out a large nation's leader(s), and taking the shot or not based on such a random quantum outcome. Scale is no barrier to such things.

> Unlike governments, companies like Facebook have never morphed into tyrannies.

I largely agree with your overall point, but this particular sub-point could do with a bit of modification in light of the history of company towns/stores. Unless you were including a division between social-network companies and the extractive industries in which companies towns were frequently found.

Almost every time I see a really big political event held outside, I wonder if it will be the one that starts a wave of automated drone assassinations. Then again, really big events might have a Centurion C-RAM or two secretly parked nearby.

Could a Leap be mounted on the side of a laptop looking sideways at whatever table surface happens to be there (if there is one), so as to functionally give the laptop a big touchpad off to the side?

How about this as a starting point...

Terminals with access to the DB and analysis tools in every city hall. Accounts and access for all citizens of good standing (make a new security clearance level for this to codify the notion - revoked for stalking, felonies, publishing DB information outside the terminals etc). Access is logged and also in the DB. A set of forums reachable through the terminals that allow discussion of findings and policies (some with real names attached some with pseudonyms).

The implication being, that you could read someone's email, but it is a matter of record that you did. Or perhaps the new citizens' security clearance would be stratified so that one needs to earn one's way up the scale of accessing info about other people, perhaps quorum's to grant higher clearance levels or temporary opening of some records.

Yeah, rather unrealistic techno-utopian in thinking, I admit. But this is an entry-level idea of equal access taken straight-forwardly. Born a bit from me trying to keep myself wondering, how would this work in Banks' Culture?

> ... and nearly no-one re-writes an academic paper afterwards for it to be more understandable.

Survey papers would seem to fill that role. They are a useful step for information moving from being on the research frontier to being in a textbook.

Having an international inspection system to watch for the development of nuclear weapons would seem a much easier task than one that would be needed to monitor for the development of robotic warrior/weapon systems. The pieces needed for the later can much more easily look like normal production/assembly tool development given that they are, in fact, largely the same pieces.

Instead of pills, what about little wet-wipe like rags bearing germs in packaging labeled with the age at which one should have one's child play with the rag (or wipe it on their favorite toy) in order to safely, effectively expose them and work-out/teach their immune system.

For a good long while, starting in 2002, I tried to convince people to adopt and promise to use the term "criminal mass murder conspiracies" (CMMC) in lieu of "terrorism". Dinner parties, discussions in bars, whenever the language of the topic came up I flogged that point. I don't think I got a single convert even among people who liked the point I was making. "Terrorism" is a memorable and virile meme.

I never really decided to stop flogging that point. But I haven't in years. Maybe I'll start up again. Maybe people are more ready to hear it. Perhaps you would care to take up the term too?

There is an important distinction to be made, though, between employees at Google having access to read the contents of emails and them being able to run text analysis on those contents for ad-able words and phrases (what I was trying to get at by having the bank-generated weight-log in the example). Most people know that Google does the latter, but it is dubious that many people at Google have access (especially the kind of unconstrained access connoted by the term "rifled" in your modification of the deposit box) to do the former.

Also, it is not like a friend's garage; they aren't hosting people's email as a favor. It is more like a rent-a-storage-room place with a peculiar method of paying the rent; there is a business relationship/transaction going on. We trade algorithmic-advertising access to our emails in exchange for them providing hosting.

So if the bank weighed each box before and after our access, and wrote the weight of what we stored there on the outside, made some guesses about what might be in there, and/or maybe sold some ad-space next to that info on the box to offset their costs... that would make the contents less ours, or we in some other way have less right to privacy about them?

Whenever I've watched this, I've stopped it several times and just tried to think of/like the people in the audience. What were they thinking? What previous and familiar techniques and technologies were they using as the lens to see this through? If you had them brainstorm in small groups about how they could use this if they had it for the next year, what would they think it was good for? Is it something they saw as useful for themselves or just for record-keepers and report writers?

Last I read up on such ideas, the better design was to use a sail in front of the ship to catch the push from each explosion, then you only need the one radiation shield. I think it also allows for making a larger surface to catch the explosive push, and it depends on materials absorbing loads through tension rather than through compression.

Indeed. If the objection is that people drop off the easy to see communication systems and start having more shielded communications as they radicalize, then the objection carries within itself a description of very pattern that one can use such a internet traffic surveillance program to search for.

A naive version would generate plenty of false positives, but following up on random entries in the list generated would quickly reveal classes of other reasons that people's comms go dark (having children, new job, moving to a new town, major injury or illness, depression, etc.), and one could start filtering using that. Also one might get some use out of looking for clusters of people going dark in various social-connection graphs, and commonalities of what people fitting the comms-going-dark pattern read and say online.

Why just from withing the one party? Why not have two wings and field primary candidates in both parties? That way, if ever a sufficient density of such candidates make it into office in some part of the nation, they can switch over to the new party in a coordinated manner.

> A government that is so efficient that it is basically impossible to even get into trouble with these kinds of administrative things can be a very good thing, as long as it is sufficiently good-natured.

Indeed. One route (the one that I'm trying to keep echoing in my head these days) to thinking about such a nicely-efficient government is to ask how something would go in Iain Banks' Culture.

I'm not in the domain, so this is probably naïve thinking, but it seems to me it could lend itself that direction.

Considering that many skeuomorphic designs involve a layout which spatially mimics some particular object. One can't scale that up and down in size to fit on any screen without also changing the size of the actionable interface areas (buttons, toggles, and such). And since the controls have their meaning implied/explained to the user by where they are on the layout of the mimicked object, rearranging the location of control areas takes away from the meaning that the mimicry is made to communicate. If the physical object mimicked is larger than the screen, and the layout and control area sizes must be preserved, then scrolling the entire view or something like it is needed.

With a flat interface, the actionable control areas can be grouped, for example by type (do they alter something global, domain related, context-specific, or only a single item). Membership of a control in a type could be communicated to the user by something like grouping all the controls of that type together in a box with a particular background color. Since the scope meaning of the controls is encoded by which color box they are each in, but not at all by where in that box they are, nor necessarily what shape that color box is, nor the box's location relative to any other color boxes which hold controls of different types, then the color/type boxes can be reshaped and reflowed to fit many screen sizes while keeping the size of the controls themselves constant (easy to hit with a finger, or mouse, or whatever).

Edit-addendum: Of course, this line of thinking simplifies skeuomorphic design too much. Such designs allow for more conceptual or cartoonish representations of the controls from familiar objects, so that the scaling factor used for any given control doesn't have to correspond to the scaling factor of other controls or the overall mimicked object. Still, flat design gets a great deal of rearrangement of controls for the price of the user learning to associate the box with color scheme foo as holding things that change the global context of the app. And the amount a user needs to learn can be smaller still. Even just using the principle of up-and-to-the-left is more general while down-and-to-the-right is more specific can give flat designs some structure (enough for many uses) while allowing a great deal of rescaling of the screen.

If the system has enough lag, clever cats might dart in and out before the shower sprayed for a brief bit, so as to get some fresh water (which they like more).

Another scenario, Google constantly runs a system looking at tweets, texts, and news stories. Anytime something happens that is criminal and significant enough for it to notice, it turns up the logging for all the Glass devices in the area.

If it were opt-in to send the resulting log to law enforcement, that would be totally fine. If not, things get worrisome. But what about in between? Say sending the log in is only done when the user clicks ok, but the police subpena Google for who all had their Glass devices in that area, so they can contact them directly. Gets into the area of withholding evidence and such.

Right, and it can be a smart intervalometer, with a little pop-up, "taking a picture in 5, 4,... (to skip taking a picture this time, tilt your head to the left)". Or, "you seem to still be sitting in that waiting room, skipping the timed picture as per your settings (tilt your head left to make an exception this time)." And "you will soon be arriving at the party on your calendar, increasing rate of auto-pictures and going into silent-running mode for two hours (tilt your head left to cancel)."

Why would it have no sensation and experience? Give it some from a simple simulated environment and body. Assuming it takes a freshly dead brain, vitrified, ultra-microtomed, and scanned in to be reconstructed for simulation. The mind wakes up in a sparsely decorated hospital looking room, remembers having just been out for a walk and crossing the street, then something about an oncoming car. A friendly looking doctor appears through a window.

"Morning," the doctor says, "you've been asleep a while and probably feel foggy and confused. You were injured, but your body healed a while ago. We can get to all your questions later. But first we want to test your thinking and rule out any brain damage... could you go to that computer and type out brief descriptions of the images that it shows you?"

When the simulated mind gets frustrated with typing about pictures, and stops producing good output, clear the running simulation and load it from the start again, with new pictures. This gives a strong-AI image labeling system. For more in depth tasks more simulated world interaction is needed between waking up and getting some work out of the mind, but you can also try lots of times and variations to get that right and once the mind is at the work-table store the state right before the mind begins working. Use that as the starting point each time.

Does a license plate, legally speaking, have to be visible when the car is parked? If not, then covering it would be a stop-gap against cops driving through a parking lot and collecting the info on who is in that area.