And if they put DRM into it so you can't just "print up whatever you want"?

Then I start IDA, Replicator Edition -- or wait for the kind folks at Razor (or Reloaded, Deviance, whoever) to do that if I don't know how. At least for current "digital content", those who don't like pirates can claim to some degree that pirating deprives the producers of money - but if the DRM is just a scheme to keep poor (who otherwise could print anything they wanted) poor, that logic kinda goes out the window.

Just like North Korean radio!

And if they're going to implement another image format, why don't they do it right and pick some form of embedded zerotree wavelet? Those beat the pants off JPEG (and most other DCT codecs) while being perfectly progressive (i.e. you can truncate the picture data itself at any point and get the same result as you would if you had compressed to that size).

Instead we'll get yet another block coding format, for what? So that Google can use it to leverage WebM?

Specialization is for insects.

No, but one of the passengers is a Belgian detective, and then the train gets stuck in a snowdrift.

The distributed approach—a market economy—solves the problem by accepting that information is never perfectly complete or accurate, but tends to be more complete and accurate at a local level; in short, people look out for their own interests far better than even the most benevolent central planners (or AIs). A high degree of global efficiency is an emergent by-product of distributed local efficiency.

Couldn't the AI act as the superstructure of that distributed approach? As it is, in the ideal case, the market economy converges on prices through a process of trial and failure (tatonnement); but given more detailed data (say, input-output information), the AI could converge more quickly towards equilibrium. It's still a distributed approach because all the actual innovation happens at the hands of the participants - the people - but the mechanism itself would be much more responsive. The additional information could also be aggregated by the AI for the people to use. For instance, input-output data could show what the limiting resources to production of a given sort are, and people could then try to find better ways of producing those resources if they value the good in question -- and such could happen without having to go through multiple stages of tatonnement.

Or the interactive fiction game A Mind Forever Voyaging

There's such a thing as a PR ranked ballot system. The most well known one is the single transferable vote, but Schulze (for which the election method used by the German Piratenpartei is named) has devised a proportional representation variant called Schulze STV, too.

Unlike first past the post, STV does work in providing competition. When New York tried it in the late thirties, it proved to work so well that the corrupt machines had to red-scare it to death.

That would have serious incentive incompatibility. You think for-profit prison lobbyists pushing for harder terms is bad now? If the police were to be for-profit, it would benefit from catching "criminals" - and from redefining what a criminal is, and squeezing as much labor out of them as they could manage, and if possible, encouraging criminals to commit greater offenses. Every arrested person would mysteriously resist arrest so that could be added to the charge sheets. The prisons would be harsh and have no rehabilitation - if they turn into academies of crime, all the better, because it increases the revenue stream of recidivists.

In short: if it's profitable to catch criminals, the private police would farm them. Like any other company, if they get paid for X, then well, you'll get plenty of X.

Sure, if he can find a perfectly reflective mirror. Even if it's 99.9% reflective, the 0.1% will destroy the mirror in short order.

You jest, but that kind of thinking actually happened, once. Team B argued that the Soviet Union had developed a new submarine detection system that didn't depend on sound. When faced with the fact that nobody had found anything like it, they argued that this only proved the point: since the detection system didn't depend on sound, it could not itself be detected.

On the other hand, Bernard Cohen considered plutonium less dangerous than caffeine, at least in terms of ingestion.

GPGPU and coding for 216-core systems. Engineering peer-to-peer networks that stay robust in the face of attackers tinkering with the protocol. Quantum computers if you focus on the science, huge datacenters if you focus on the engineering.

That was sort of what they tried in the US with Eldred v. Ashcroft, but it failed. The "nice" thing about doing copyright extensions with a finite creep each time is that it stays de jure finite while it is de facto infinite, so the people doing it never have to show their true intent as they stay within the letter of the law.

And like all proper internet addicts, they don't have care how they look either :p