Not another branded "national OS" flavour of Linux.

You can turn that around, and say that without freedoms, safety is worth very little. Identity theft and computer hacks could be stopped on their tracks by restricting the 'net to a whitelist of "licensed" sites, outlawing anonymous access, and mandating logs of all traffic for careful inspection by "authorities". Would you advocate such a design?

So much for extreme examples.

So, in your humble opinion, science publishing should continue essentially as it is, perhaps with a shift towards open publishing. And the current 'science accounting' methods (adding up citation sum-totals, relying on journal weights, or combining both) are perfectly adequate. And there the pressure from these flawless accounting systems does not drive scientists to publish un-matured, partial results in a frenzy to score more papers than their peers.

No, I do not have a silver bullet, and yes, the system sort-of, kind-of works. But I am sure that it can be improved. Funding depends very heavily on accounting.

A social network, if divorced from editors and anonymous reviewers, may not be so bad as you paint it. I, for one, would not mind to see rated and commented papers...

When building its databases, Google does not treat all links as equal. You have the 'rel=nofollow' link attribute to indicate that you don't want to attribute trust to the destination of the link, and Google can discount link weight based on the outgoing anchor text.

I would be very interested in seeing that done in scientific publications. As you said, notability can come in many flavors, and they are not equally yummy.

Citing a paper does not necessarily mean endorsement for its contents. Only that the paper you are referencing was relevant to a part of your discussion. References can be used to provide counter-examples or denounce bad research; but they are counted as a citation anyway. In scientific citation number-crunching, any publicity is good publicity.

A crazy idea would be to add metadata to references, describing the type and relative importance of the source. That would make 'paper A, main inspiration, very important' actually count more than 'paper B, cited in an off-hand comment to exemplify bad research in this field'. The crazy part is changing the established format of scientific papers to accomodate this metadata, standarizing the metadata, and convincing authors to adhere to standards and editors to enforce them.

Placing landmarks on a one-dimensional scale is a poor way of defining political thought. Additionally, if you ask a random sample for their definitions of 'left' and 'right' there would be little consensus. Trivia: 'left' and 'right' come from seating arrangements in the french parliament. The scale is not only one-dimensional: there is no consensus on the exact dimension.

Defining individualism and colletivism, beyond the extremes (cave or hive), is also quite hard. Would social solidarity count as collectivism? Is an active voice in political matters a signal of individualism (by adding liberty), or collectivism (by collaborating with the government)?

Truly nice way of getting high-level information from graphs. I'll probably use it sometime in the future, as I actually work with graph viz, and was looking for ways to visually compare related graphs.

And for those too lazy to actually open the PDF and look at the pictures, the idea is to draw histograms of 1st order vertex degree up to nth order vertex degree (where order-l vertex degree gets defined as how many other vertices can be reached in exactly 'l' forward hops, as found by a breadth-first search).

Thanks; you have also managed to keep your text free of claims of historical righteousness. No mean feat with the conflict so near to your doorstep.

I have always wondered how the problem is reported in Israeli media. I did expect something similar, but can't really judge how widespread that "stop it now, no matter how" sentiment was and is. On the other hand, there are bound to be people on the Israeli side that will be opposed (either by principle, political profit, or plain greed) to any peace gesture. I never said the "being generous" plan was easy, but I can't think of any other.

Completely with you on the hope side. No hope means nothing to lose. On the other hand, terrorists will keep terrorizing regardless of what you do (either to keep their stranglehold or to avenge Israeli raids). If you fight them heads on and any damage spills (and it will, and it does), you are feeding their ranks with new desperadoes. You *do* need a lot of courage to hold back fire, but I don't see any other long-term answer; except keeping things like they are now: a slow trickle of deaths, for a long, long time.

So what would their goals be? My bet is that Gazans thought that anything would be better than their previous corrupt politicians. They probably saw some kind of hope in voting for Hamas: after all, Hamas seemed like half-way competent (as in not stealing so blatantly), and besides, how much worse could things get? Don't underestimate the effect of nationalistic propaganda and lack of options on desperate people. Anything that makes them less desperate will increase chances for rational thought.

Good for the West Bank, but you won't convince too many Gazans that way. Stiff blockades breed a lot of resentment, and it is always easier to blame the guys imposing the blockade than to blame your own people. And nobody likes to be called a traitor.

Currently, Palestinians face a quite hopeless situation. Even if a great majority [1] wants peace and quiet for a change (and I am sure most would take it offered a credible chance), a stifling blockade (however justified) and a complete lack of institutions makes this hard to achieve. And the extremists will make sure that Israel's "no terrorism" conditions are never met [2] and the situation stays put. The future, from a Palestinian point of view, is not bright at all.

From the Israeli side of the equation, a great deal of political courage is required to stop the current knee-jerk response [3] to terrorism (namely: blockade and retaliation). However, Israel is the only side that can actually change the dynamics of the situation. Unless Palestinians see a "true chance" of stable peace, in spite of the inevitable terrorists [4], the current state of affairs will go on and on. Israel has well-established institutions and can actually enforce its own decisions.

I really believe that only great generosity on the Israeli side can put a stop to things. I don't care who started what - but the only way out of this hole is to either eliminate one side entirely (proposed by some, but unlikely and abhorring) or peaceful coexistence. Coexistence requires a compelling future for both. The Israelis have it (in spite of a constant trickle of deaths); the Palestinians don't.

[1] I don't care what statistics say about Palestinian bloodthirstyness - most humans like raising their kids in peace and prosperity. Palestinians are no different; however, when this is impossible, all humans will wish ill towards whoever they see as "preventing" this.

[2] Yes, some like things the way they are and profit from terrorism. Religious fanaticism, power, prestige, or plain greed. All the worse when combined. However, point [1] still stands.

[3] When rockets rain on a civilian neighborhood, it is perfectly understandable to want to beat the crap out of whoever is launching them, and to make sure that rocket-building materials are hard to obtain. But, in the longer run, this can backfire.

[4] Palestinian terrorism will continue, even if Israel lifts sanctions and gives Palestinians a future worth caring about. It will, given time and sound policy, peter out. Peace is a long-term strategy.