1998: "'God of the Internet' is dead "
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/sci...
"Jon Postel, a key figure in the development of the Internet from its inception, died at the weekend of heart problems aged 55."

Now, thanks to a successful internet, I have learned all about how to prevent and reverse heart disease by eating more vegetables and getting enough vitamin D (a problem for many indoors-oriented technies). Sadly, too late for Jon. Hopefully not too late for Roblimo though?
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

The failure to adopt SQLite as a de-facto "Standard" for web browsers shows a deep problem, since a shared FOSS codebase is probably the best standard we can have.
http://programmers.stackexchan...

Contrast that with suggestions of making de-facto standards by on the ground successes with working code. Which is what SQLite has done in a whole area of embedded storage.

Like Alan Kay has said, any standard with more than three lines is ambiguous. I can agree having had to work implementing a couple standards at IBM.

http://drhyman.com/blog/2010/1...
"The mitochondrial dysfunction identified in the JAMA study I've been talking about is ultimately only one downstream symptom of many upstream causes. Other researchers have found systemic inflammation,(ix) brain inflammation,(x) gut inflammation,(xi) elevated levels of toxins and metals, gluten and casein antibodies,(xii) nutrient deficiencies including omega-3 fats,(xiii) vitamin D,(xiv) zinc, and magnesium, and collections of metabolic dysfunction related to quirky genes that make it difficult to perform chemical reactions essential for health in the body such as methylation and sulfation.(xv)
    The take home message here is that the answer to autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders will not be found in one of these factors, but in all of them taken together in varying degrees in each individual. There is no such thing as "autism." Rather there are "autisms"--different patterns of biological dysfunction unique to each child that result in multiple insults to the brain that all manifest with symptoms we call autism."

Also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org...
http://www.dailycal.org/2014/0...
"To further validate their theories, the researchers cited a study involving Somali mothers, who naturally absorb less sunlight due to their dark skin pigmentation. When they moved north to Stockholm, a less-sunny region, they were found to be 4.5 times more likely to have autistic children, compared to the the country's lighter-skinned natives."

Also may help:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/chil...

Good luck!

Even to suggesting a "basic income": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://www.rawilson.com/home.h...
http://www.rawilson.com/though...
http://deoxy.org/raw.htm

Thanks for the pointer. I'd be curious where specifically (which book or other writing) wherein he says that, if you know off-hand.

But, would be nice to develop it before-hand; from: http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
---
Self-replicating technical artifacts such as dogs, corn, and trees have been in use by humanity for thousands of years. While humans cannot lay credit to the original creation of such systems, they can claim the adaptation and selective breeding of these for defense, food, and building materials.

In the past few millennia, many people have become dependent on technology that is not self-replicating. Primarily this technology involves fairly pure forms of metals, plastics, and crystals. These technologies have expanded the earth's human carrying capacity in the short term, but are not sustainable in the long term. Such technologies lack the closed resource cycles, independent operation, redundancy, and resiliency found in natural systems. A symptom of the use of such non-sustainable systems is the fear that a single problem (like Y2K) could cause a major disruption of life-support infrastructure in the developed world.

For example, both Brittle Power (Amory and Hunter Lovins) and Energy, Vulnerability, and War (Wilson Clark and Jake Page), make clear how vulnerable our energy infrastructure is. As Brittle Power (pg.391-392) mentions, this vulnerability also holds for food and manufacturing production:

"The production and distribution of food are currently so centralized, with small buffer stocks and supply lines averaging thirteen hundred miles long, that bad weather or a truckers' strike can put many retail stores on short rations in a matter of days. This vulnerability is especially pronounced in the Northeast, which imports over eighty percent of its food. In a disaster, the lack of regional self sufficiency both in food production and food storage would cause havoc, but no one is planning for such possibilities."

And in reference to energy production:

"The Joint Committee on Defense Production notes that American industry is tailor made for easy disruption. Its qualities include large unit scale, concentration of key facilities, reliance on advanced materials inputs and on specialized electronics and automation, highly energy- and capital- intensive plants, and small inventories. The Committee found that correcting these defects, even incrementally and over many decades, could be very costly. But the cost of not doing so could be even higher -- a rapid regression of tens, or even hundreds of years in the American economy, should it be gravely disrupted."

In a long-term space mission or a space settlement, a self-sustaining economy must be created and supported. Therefore, addressing the problem of technological fragility on earth is an essential step in the development of the development of human settlement in space.
The heart of any community is its library, which stores a wide variety of technological processes, only some of which are used at any one time in any specific environment. If an independent community is like a cell, its library is like its DNA. A library has many functions: the education of new community members; the support of important activities such as farming and material extraction; historical recording of events; support for planning and design. And the library grows and evolves with the community.

The earth's library of technological knowledge is fragmented and obscure, and some important knowledge has been lost already. How can we create a library strong enough to foster the growth of new communities in space? How can we today use what we know to improve human life?
---
The development of the Oscomak infrastructure will be an ambitious undertaking, requiring the involvement of tens of thousands of knowledgeable individuals over a period of years. There is no way one single entity can fund this work. However, there is a way to allow such individuals to cooperate -- as an "open source" community, sharing knowledge and building a distributed repository over the internet.

The revolutionary aspect of this project is to leverage a small investment into a much larger effort by fostering an internet-based community which develops this knowledge and tools using an "open source" model similar to those used by Linux, GCC, Python, and Squeak. Individuals will participate in this process for rewards of status, advertising, friendship, self-esteem, reciprocity, and contribution toward a common goal.

Open-source software projects such as Linux, GCC, Squeak, and Python are an exploding phenomenon. However, successful open-source efforts still need a substantial investment of human capital to create the initial seed and to shepherd the development process over a period of years until it becomes self-sustaining. To date the successful open-source projects have been primarily in the areas of operating systems and programming languages. The next open-source frontiers are applications and knowledge repositories.

It is the aim of this project to create an open-source community centered around applications and knowledge related to space settlement. To gain the broadest participation, the project will also include knowledge related to terrestrial settlements. The initial focus will be on collecting "manufacturing recipes" on how to make things: for example, how to make a 1930's style lathe. Information collected will range from historical interest (fabrication techniques of the stone age to make flint knives) to current (fabrication techniques to make stainless steel knives) to futuristic (fabrication techniques requiring nanotechnology to make diamond knives). This project will involve potentially hundreds of thousands of individuals across the globe. It is expected that ultimately millions of individuals (many in developing nations) will benefit from use of this database directly or indirectly.

We take our lead from several projects on the internet. For example, the Educational Object Economy is a collaborative effort to collect 10,000 educational Java applets (it currently has about one thousand). There are also numerous food-related recipe collections on the internet.
----
The Oscomak project is an attempt to create a core of communities more in control of their technological destiny and its social implications. No single design for a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So this project endeavors to gather information and to develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos. The result will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve any degree of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any size community, from one person to a billion people. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their needs and ideas.

As the internet has grown, it has enabled collaborative work which has created many success stories, including Linux, Python, GCC, Squeak and other projects. We want to harness that power and apply it to organizing technological knowledge in concert with many interested individuals.

The main project goal is to develop an on-line library of technology ideas, techniques, and tools, including a range from high-tech processes like plastics to medium-tech like ceramic houses to low-tech like spinning wheels. Also included will be biotechnology processes, like perennial agriculture, companion planting, sheep farming, and eventually cloning and DNA synthesis.

One process to be included is a way to convert the high-tech computerized library to a low-tech paper one as desired. Key to the whole endeavor will be to present everything in a how-to fashion. Also needed is a way to map out and simulate the interrelations of processes; for instance, sheep raising requires veterinarians, antibiotics, feed, fencing, and shears; shears require a blacksmith, metal, and a furnace. This latter feature also would be used to keep track of the product flows into, out of, and within a community's entire economy.
---
Vannevar Bush, "As We may Think", The Atlantic Monthly, July 1945: Volumne 176, No. 1; Pages 101-108
    "Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. He has built a civilization so complex that he needs to mechanize his records more fully if he is to push his experiment to its logical conclusion and not merely become bogged down part way there by overtaxing his limited memory. His excursions may be more enjoyable if he can reacquire the privilege of forgetting the manifold things he does not need to have immediately at hand, with some assurance that he can find them again if they prove important.
  The applications of science have built man a well-supplied house, and are teaching him to live healthily therein. They have enabled him to throw masses of people against one another with cruel weapons. They may yet allow him truly to encompass the great record and to grow in the wisdom of race experience. He may perish in conflict before he learns to wield that record for his true good. Yet, in the application of science to the needs and desires of man, it would seem to be a singularly unfortunate stage at which to terminate the process, or to lose hope as to the outcome."

Robert Muller, Assistant Secretary-General (retired), United Nations, quoted in Surviving: The Best Game on Earth by Norrie Huddle, Schocken Books, New York, 1984, pg. 251 - 252.
    "The present condition of humanity was best described by the philosopher Gottfried Leibnitz a few hundred years ago when he said that humans would be so occupied with making scientific discoveries in every sector for several centuries that they would not look at the totality. But, he said, someday the proliferation and complexity of our knowledge would become so bewildering that it would be necessary to develop a global, universal, and synthetic view. This is exactly the time and juncture at which we have arrived. It shows in our new preoccupations with what is called 'interdisciplinary', 'global thinking', 'interdependence', and so on. It is all the same phenomenon.
One of the most useful things humanity could do at this point is to make an honest inventory of what we know. I have suggested to foundations that they ought to bring together the chief editors of the world's main encyclopedias to agree on a common table of contents of human knowledge. But it can be a dangerous idea. Why? Well, when the Frenchman Diderot invented the first encyclopedia, the archbishop of Paris ran to the king of France to have the book burned because it would totally change the existing value system of the Catholic church. If we developed a common index of human knowledge today it would similarly cause a change in our value systems. We would discover that in the whole framework of knowledge the contest between Israel and the Muslims would barely be listed because it is such a small problem in the totality of our preoccupation as a human species. The meeting might have to last several days before the editors would even mention it! This is exactly the point: some people don't want to develop such a framework of knowledge because they want their problem to be the most important problem on earth and go to great lengths to promote that notion.
    So that is what I believe to be most necessary for global security: an ordering of our knowledge at this point in our evolution, a good, honest classification of all we know from the infinitely large to the infinitely small - the cosmos, our planet, humanity, our dreams, our wishes, and so on. We haven't done it yet, but we will have to do it one way or another."
---
In 1928, J.D. Bernal (in the book The World, The Flesh and the Devil) proposed creating a network of self-replicating space habitats which duplicate themselves from sunlight and asteroidal ore. He wrote:
    "Imagine a spherical shell ten miles or so in diameter, made of the lightest materials and mostly hollow; for this purpose the new molecular materials would be admirably suited. Owing to the absence of gravitation its construction would not be an engineering feat of any magnitude. The source of the material out of which this would be made would only be in small part drawn from the earth; for the great bulk of the structure would be made out of the substance of one or more smaller asteroids, rings of Saturn or other planetary detritus. The initial stages of construction are the most difficult to imagine. They will probably consist of attaching an asteroid of some hundred years or so diameter to a space vessel, hollowing it out and using the removed material to build the first protective shell. Afterwards the shell could be re-worked, bit by bit, using elaborated and more suitable substances and at the same time increasing its size by diminishing its thickness. The globe would fulfill all the functions by which our earth manages to support life. In default of a gravitational field it has, perforce, to keep its atmosphere and the greater portion of its life inside; but as all its nourishment comes in the form of energy through its outer surface it would be forced to resemble on the whole an enormously complicated single-celled plant. ... Yet the globe would be by no means isolated. It would be in continuous communication by wireless with other globes and with the earth, and this communication would include the transmission of every sort of sense message which we have at present acquired as well as those which we may require in the future. Interplanetary vessels would insure the transport of men and materials, and see to it that the colonies were not isolated units. ... However, the essential positive activity of the globe or colony would be in the development, growth and reproduction of the globe. A globe which was merely a satisfactory way of continuing life indefinitely would barely be more than a reproduction of terrestrial conditions in a more restricted sphere."

It is the ultimate aim of the Oscomak project to begin to create the social and technological infrastructure required to bring this seventy year old dream into reality.
Obviously, a project like designing such a habitat network is vast in scope, and will involve many thousands of people. The revolutionary aspect of this project is the use of the internet to allow large numbers of interested individuals to work together to accomplish this goal. A small investment used in this way can have a large outcome by leveraging the collective contributions of large numbers of individuals.

Long before space applications are feasible, this library will someday be at the center of a Community Development Corporation incorporating both the library and physical technology. If the library and CDC proves successful, it will start replicating in nearby neighborhoods until it spans the globe. Someday this network will have the resources to launch a project to create the first Bernal sphere.

The result of the interaction between tools and people will be a library of possibilities that individuals in a community can use to achieve many degrees of self-sufficiency and self-replication within any sized community from one person to a billion people. At the core of this knowledge-gathering process is the notion of a "manufacturing recipe" defining a possible manufacturing process. Within every community people will interact with these possibilities by using them and extending them to design a community economy and physical layout that suits their unique needs.

Aerospace designers will be able to use this knowledge base for designing long duration space missions, lunar colonies, or space habitats that are replicated from sunlight and asteroidal ore. By including such a knowledge base, crews on such long-duration missions will be able to adapt their available technology to new needs by creating new tools and products on an as-needed basis. One can think of this library of possibilities as like the DNA of a cell, with the cell deciding which processes to use based on environmental conditions.

In addition to the obvious result, the knowledge repository, the work will also produce research knowledge on the use of collaborative environments to build shared repositories of technological knowledge. We anticipate writing a series of papers on the project to share the understanding gained by shepherding the repository.

The success or failure of this project can be judged on three counts:

The level of interest as shown by accesses and downloads of the software and knowledge base.
The level of participation as shown by contributions to the knowledge base and collaborative improvements to the software tools.
The degree to which this database is used for education (such as in the Space Settlement contests) and in design (such as in mission planning for long duration space flight).
---
The race is on to make the human world a better (and more resilient) place before one of these overwhelms us:

Autonomous military robots out of control
Nanotechnology virus / gray slime
Ethnically targeted virus
Sterility virus
Computer virus
Asteroid impact
Y2K
Other unforseen computer failure mode
Global warming / climate change / flooding
Nuclear / biological war
Unexpected economic collapse from Chaos effects
Terrorism w/ unforseen wide effects
Out of control bureaucracy (1984)
Religious / philosophical warfare
Economic imbalance leading to world war
Arms race leading to world war
Zero-point energy tap out of control
Time-space information system spreading failure effect (Chalker's Zinder Nullifier)
Unforseen consequences of research (energy, weapons, informational, biological)
---
No single design for such a community or technology will please everyone, or even many people. Nor would a single design be likely to survive. So the project will gather information and develop tools and processes that all fit together conceptually like Tinkertoys or Legos.

The recipes database will consist of primarily macro and micro manufacturing technology. It may also include some information applicable to nanotechnology manufacturing (such as the atomic composition of products, or ways to combine nanosynthesized components). The database will include information about patented processes with an eye towards the future when such patents have expired and can be freely used in space habitat construction.

In addition to the recipes database, a cross-platform simulator will be developed that will allow users to select recipes from the database and simulate an arbitrary technological infrastructure, such as one based primarily on extruded plastics (with feedstock derived from corn or algae). It will also be possible to print detailed reports on such infrastructures.

The simulation will be able to be used in a scenario mode in which simulated settlers are provided for by the users' actions. Several users may collaborate while the simulation runs to support the settlers by building a web of manufacturing processes selected from the recipes database. The goal of the scenario will be to construct a schematic connecting the resources of the solar system (sun, moons, asteroids, comets, etc.) to the web of manufacturing processes in order to deliver manufactured goods to the settlers. The simulation will evaluate the sustainability of the users' choices based on time constants (for example, time to depletion of air, water, or a critical material or tool). This will create an intrinsic motivation to explore the database as well as to contribute to it.

Eventually, various design and simulation tools will be created to assemble and organize this information in order to design communities with various levels of self reliance (given specific inputs of energy, raw materials, and manufactured goods). The software will also help to determine the minimal amount of technology needed to create these various communities and infrastructures (as a "seed" factory deployed onto in-situ resources such as an asteroid). At some point ten to forty years in the future, seed factory designs created using this database and simulator will be created and launched at near-earth asteroids to bootstrap space settlements.
---
We will develop software tools to enable the creation of the Oscomak knowledge repository: to collect, organize, and present information in a way that encourages collaboration and provides immediate benefit. Manufacturing "recipes" will form the core elements of the repository.

Our choice of software tools will emphasize cross-platform and open-source issues to maximize the potential for collaboration. Participants will download the software (and source) and some subset of knowledge modules in the repository, modify existing modules and/or create new modules, and communicate with other participants by sharing their changes. Many concurrent scales of collaboration will be supported, including local copies of the repository, small-group servers (for individuals with a particular interest, for example), and a central high-speed server which will coordinate activities. Changes to the software tools will work in the same way.

The US great plains over the last two hundred years in some places went from two feet or more of topsoil covered with with Prairie grass, Native Americans, and Buffalo to now more like six inches of topsoil mostly due to atrocious soil farming practices by the European invaders more akin to strip mining than stewardship. That is a lot of carbon loss.
http://bigprairieprepress.com/...
"The farming practices of early settlers caused erosion of the topsoil. By the late 1870's the topsoil had vanished in the center of the prairie and the settlers who farmed there moved out to its edges. This was the beginning of the process that would create the Big Prairie Desert. This pattern of land use, dry conditions and soil erosion is what caused the dust bowl that was begining at about the same time in states further west."

Related (although perhaps an underestimate of the total loss):
http://boingboing.net/2011/05/...
"These pillars --- located outside a rest area off Highway 80 in Adair County, Iowa -- represent the topsoil Iowa has lost since large-scale farming began 150 years ago. In the 19th century, Iowa had 14-16 inches of topsoil. Today, it has just 6-8 inches of the stuff, and more is being lost all the time. The irony: The very farms that are depleting the topsoil desperately need it, too. "

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/inde...
"Although the figure is frequently being revised upwards with new discoveries, over 2,700 Gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon is stored in soils worldwide, which is well above the combined total of atmosphere (780 Gt) or biomass (575 Gt), most of which is wood. Carbon is taken out of the atmosphere by plant photosynthesis; about 60 Gt annually is incorporated into various types of soil organic matter (SOM) including surface litter; about 60 Gt annually is respired or oxidized from soil.[2] "

So, three-quarters of more of the carbon-rich top soil of the center of an entire continent (North America) was lost, much of it a century ago. That I think may help explain some global climate changes even more than recent fossil fuel use.

From:
http://people.oregonstate.edu/...
"When we lose soil, we are losing a resource that is, for practical purposes and human timespans, essentially non-renewable. An inch of soil takes between 200 - 1000 years to form, yet it can be swept away in a few seasons."

Ways to create topsoil faster included organic farming (focusing on adding organic matter to the soil) and remineralization from ground-up rock dust.
http://remineralize.org/

Still, maybe without all the extra carbon in the air we'd already be in another mini ice age?

As I'm too often involved in myself sometimes: :-)
http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-d...
"This approximately 60 page document is a ramble about ways to ensure the CIA (as well as other big organizations) remains (or becomes) accountable to human needs and the needs of healthy, prosperous, joyful, secure, educated communities. The primarily suggestion is to encourage a paradigm shift away from scarcity thinking & competition thinking towards abundance thinking & cooperation thinking within the CIA and other organizations. I suggest that shift could be encouraged in part by providing publicly accessible free "intelligence" tools and other publicly accessible free information that all people (including in the CIA and elsewhere) can, if they want, use to better connect the dots about global issues and see those issues from multiple perspectives, to provide a better context for providing broad policy advice. It links that effort to bigger efforts to transform our global society into a place that works well for (almost) everyone that millions of people are engaged in. A central Haudenosaunee story-related theme is the transformation of Tadodaho through the efforts of the Peacemaker from someone who was evil and hurtful to someone who was good and helpful."

But more seriously, there are a lot of fine dedicated well-meaning people who work at three letter agencies. There are no doubt a lot of not-so-fine ones too. Any big bureaucracy has complex and often self-perpetuating social dynamics. If such places are to improve, IMHO one needs to support and encourage the fine people there and hope their actions can outweigh the not-so-fine ones. For example, IMHO Tom Armour was one of the finer ones:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...

Saying the KGB, the NSA, the Russian Oligarchy and so on are empty husks is a bit like saying capitalism is full of contradictions and unfairness and so it will fall apart on its own. I've said such things myself sometimes:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/post...
"Wikipedia. GNU/Linux. WordNet. Google. These things were not on the visible horizon to most of us even as little as twenty years ago. Now they have remade huge aspects of how we live. Are these free-to-the-user informational products and services all there is to be on the internet or are they the tip of a metaphorical iceberg of free stuff and free services that is heading our way? Or even, via projects like the RepRap 3D printer under development, are free physical objects someday heading into our homes? If a "post-scarcity" iceberg is coming, are our older scarcity-oriented social institutions prepared to survive it? Or like the Titanic, will these social institutions sink once the full force of the iceberg contacts them? And will they start taking on water even if just dinged by little chunks of sea ice like the cheap $100 laptops that are ahead of the main iceberg?"

Yet capitalism is still here and seemingly stringer than ever (as far as control of the US political machinery). And may well be for some time as the underlying power system morphs into new forms. Ancient China went hundreds of years at a stretch with peasants suffering all sorts of things, especially famine, and not much changing. Yet, something like a "basic income" might be a step towards improving capitalism even if it would not fix everything about it (the worst of consumerism, addictions, waste, short--term planning, systemic risks, externalities, etc.).

Short-term power in human societies also translates itself into sexual access and the spread of genes (e.g. Bill Clinton, theoretically). The best we can perhaps due as a society is structure how the competition for mates plays out in our society, as in what is valued. James P. Hogan wrote about that in his sc-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear". I'd suggest societies with a scarcity-based world view or at their current carrying capacity for their technology and cultural practices are probably more internally competitive and willing to accept competition and related cruelty than societies with an abundance-oriented world view and which see the potential in their technology and social practices for expansion (into whatever realms, including digital) and producing more than enough for all.

Most of the proto-mammals probably got killed off when the dinosaurs got wiped out too... Only a few small shrew-like creatures of probably large numbers by luck near huge supplies of seeds probably made it through, living underground. Do we really want that kind of global collapse, probably including global thermonuclear war and engineered plagues and killer robots and so on if these organizations become increasingly dysfunctional?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
"Visualization of asteroid impact that killed dinosaurs 65 million years ago, based on accurate research and scientific fact. Created by Radek Michalik "

What are realistic and lower-risk ways forward, given all that?

By Marine Major General Smedley Butler: http://www.ratical.org/ratvill...
"WAR is a racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small "inside" group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. ..."

Of course, "heart disease" is a racket too these days:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"The sad thing is surgical interventions and medications are the foundation of modern cardiology and both are relatively ineffective compared to nutritional excellence. My patients routinely reverse their heart disease, and no longer have vulnerable plaque or high blood pressure, so they do not need medical care, hospitals or cardiologists anymore. The problem is that in the real world cardiac patients are not even informed that heart disease is predictably reversed with nutritional excellence. They are not given the opportunity to choose and just corralled into these surgical interventions. Trying to figure out how to pay for ineffective and expensive medicine by politicians will never be a real solution. People need to know they do not have to have heart disease to begin with, and if they get it, aggressive nutrition is the most life-saving intervention. And it is free."

Possibly could draw an expanded parallel between "terrorism" and "heart disease" as far as causes and cures? As in invading Afghanistan and Iraq was like giving a world with morally-clogged arteries an angioplasty and then a triple bypass? At great costs? And without really solving the underlying problem (from past short-sighted behavior by the USA and others)? While people who sell arms and people who own domestic oil sources and drilling equipment (Bush friends?) profit greatly from all the uncertainty?

By someone else: http://www.amazon.com/The-Diff...

By me on the need for better intelligence tools for the public: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...

By me on the security clearance process reduces cognitive diversity in three letter agencies: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"This essay discusses how the USA's security clearance process (mainly related to ensuring secrecy) may [ironically] have a counter-productive negative effect on the USA's national security by reducing "cognitive diversity" among security professionals. "

So much of the discussion on this topic ignores that some people like working around plants in agriculture, or like building things with machine tools, or like working with heavy equipment, and so on. Granted, they may not like their boss, or may not like being overworked, or may not like low pay. To suggest such people become programmers (or nail salon workers or whatever) ignores that a lot of a person's life satisfaction may come from doing work they love. I love programming and think it is a useful thing for many people to know, but I accept most people may not like to do a lot of programming, say if they like working outdoors or like working with people or plants or visibly moving machines. It is a deep flaw in our current discussions to ignore the potential positive value of meaningful work in someone's life and just focus on getting people to do work they may not like 40 hours a week so they can get a paycheck to buy stuff, raise a family, and maybe have a hobby they enjoy in their remaining time. "Work" can be better than that.

Two essays on that, one by EF Schumacher:
http://www.centerforneweconomi...
"The Buddhist point of view takes the function of work to be at least threefold: to give man a chance to utilise and develop his faculties; to enable him to overcome his ego-centredness by joining with other people in a common task; and to bring forth the goods and services needed for a becoming existence. Again, the consequences that flow from this view are endless. To organise work in such a manner that it becomes meaningless, boring, stultifying, or nerve-racking for the worker would be little short of criminal; it would indicate a greater concern with goods than with people, an evil lack of compassion and a soul-destroying degree of attachment to the most primitive side of this worldly existence. Equally, to strive for leisure as an alternative to work would be considered a complete misunderstanding of one of the basic truths of human existence, namely that work and leisure are complementary parts of the same living process and cannot be separated without destroying the joy of work and the bliss of leisure."

And one by Bob Black:
http://www.whywork.org/rethink...
"What I really want to see is work turned into play. A first step is to discard the notions of a "job" and an "occupation." Even activities that already have some ludic content lose most of it by being reduced to jobs which certain people, and only those people, are forced to do to the exclusion of all else. Is it not odd that farm workers toil painfully in the fields while their air-conditioned masters go home every weekend and putter about in their gardens? Under a system of permanent revelry, we will witness the Golden Age of the dilettante which will put the Renaissance to shame. There won't be any more jobs, just things to do and people to do them."

Still, with more and more AI and robotics, there will be less and less jobs where it makes sense to pay a human to do them. So, we need a mix of a "basic income" for the exchange economy, an expanded volunteer/gift economy, improved local subsistence via 3D printing, solar panels, cold fusion, and agricultural robotics, and improved democratic participatory planning at all levels of government. Then at least parents will be able to spend more time raising their kids well, a job that can take about as much time and energy as most people can put into it, especially if you forgo institutionalizing kids from an early age in prison-like compulsory schools. More ideas on this:
http://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a...

http://www.google.com/intl/en/...

It turns out they are not that much cheaper though, so I don't really see the value proposition in practice implied by Phil Shapiro since they are not yet $100 and screens still cost money:
"Review: Asus crafts a tiny $179 Chromebox out of cheap, low-power parts"
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets...

I'm surprised Roblimo could miss pointing the Chromebox out, just mentioning the Raspberry Pi. Although he was right to point out the SSD speedup is significant for any small computer.

Another big miss is that for US$50 you can buy an Android Smartphone and use it only with Wi-Fi. Example of what we paid $50 for a few months ago, but now is $31?
http://www.amazon.com/Kyocera-...
"The Kyocera Hydro is sophistication and style in a mainstream Android smartphone that can work for everyone. Plus it offers water-resistance, giving consumers the âoeno-fearâ durability and security they demand. With a 3.5 inch HVGA touchscreen, 3.2 MP camera and video, and Android 4.0, you get the best of all worlds."

Although I would much rather use the Chromebook with a keyboard for making content than trying to use an Android phone. But $30 to be connected with the global internet? That is an amazing realization of many educational technologist's dreams (e.g. Alan Kay Dynabook or OLPC XO-1). And perhaps also some nightmares... See also the 1950s short story by Theodore Sturgeon called "The Skills of Xanadu" on where that all could lead.

My own hopes and predictions from 2000 based in part on seeing the "Cybiko":
"[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

Also, I don't see why a teacher or librarian is so keen to limit people's mobility (although it doesn't surprise me, going with the "school is prison" meme).

A big value to my $250 Samsung Chromebook is how light and portable it is. I still use my Quad Core Mac Pro Desktop with three big screens for work and running VirtualBox VMs (and the Chromebook could not replace that, especially the screens) -- used to run Debian for about five years until we (my wife especially) got tired of all the random breakage with every "apt-get dist-upgrade" around 2008 (probably much better now). But I use my Chromebook (with Linux under the covers) for just noodling around or surfing the web and posting on Slashdot sitting in our living room, or doing some light for-fun development work. As I said in another post, I wrote this JavaScript-based information manager tool bootstrapping system entirely on the Chromebook:
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

Why do I use the Chromebook instead of my desktop (treadmill workstation actually) Mac Pro? Psychological and social, mostly. I gain some distance from my daily paying work by using a different computer in a different place. I also have done it partially as an experiment in learning about the next generation of computing. It's true that our two-year old Macbook Pro is still a much better computer as far as keyboard and screen and CPU and what it can do -- but it is often otherwise in use these days. My wife would always complain about me leaving a lot of tabs open in Firefox. And so on. The Chromebook is more a personal computer just for me. And it was cheap enough that I could justify it as an experiment compared to another $1000-$2500 Macbook.

We did however buy a $1000 Win 8 ASUS laptop a few months ago anyway. What a disappointment as a laptop. Even with a bigger screen and much faster processors than the Chromebook, I'd rather use the lighter Chromebook with better battery life and more robustness if I drop it (no HD). The Chromebook is not constantly hassling me about upgrades and reboots and having to install new apps to get basic functionality or get the trackpad to work right and so on (even if it does upgrade itself). Windows (now 8.1) seems to mostly just get in my way. Every time Win8 updates itself it seems to break something or lose a custom setting for the trackpad (maybe an exaggeration, but not much). And the less I use Windows, the higher percentage of the time using it is spend in system administration and reboots. Still, the ASUS would make an OK desktop and in an emergency if my 4+ year old Mac Pro failed (one reason I got it), I could do my day-job work on the ASUS, connecting it to a big screen via HDMI and a USB keyboard and trackball and an external USB disk.

I've been using computers for more than thirty years and have had enough of all that system administration in my spare time (for pay it is different). And for what? What do either the Mac or Windows really provide me for my spare time use and system administration? It would be different if I was a gamer more than an author and programmer, I admit. Both Mac and Windows have value still as gaming platforms -- but less and less for anything else. The web and HTML5/CSS/JavaScript with URLs for everything is such an amazing "platform" for me compared to a desktop -- much better than a conventional desktop in many ways. Yes, the web could be better, and web browsers coudl be better (better standards, better support for local apps, etc.), but I have less and less need or interest in desktop stuff. I can see the value in porting our old educational software from Delphi and Java and Python and Smalltalk and C++ to HTM5/CSS/JavaScript (or using emscripten perhaps).

I still want local storage though. We have a $250 MyBook Live for a local server that can even run Python and PHP code I write. Why don't I run that server code from my more powerful Mac Pro? The MyBook Live uses less power and is always on (maybe a 10 second delay if it spins down the disk). I don't have to worry too much about a clean shutdown of the MyBook Live. I put my work desktop to sleep when I am not using it. From a security perspective too, it is better to not be serving data from my workstation. Chromebooks would be much better if they supported mounting remote drives with WebDav or Samba or stuff like that (they may by now with plugins?). I feel that is a weekness in Chromebooks to not have that connectivity. Still, I can get around it. If I wasn't worried about bricking my MyBook Live with complex upgrades, or working towards my own "Pointrel" flavor of social semantic desktop, I'd put "OwnCloud" on it.
http://owncloud.org/

True, after a year of moderate use in my spare time for making Slashdot posts and such, the "space" key on the Chromebook seems to be having issues, so I can see a limit to the life for this device just from that. It might support a USB keyboard, but tethering it to one place would make it less valuable to me. Although it was impressive when I hooked it up via HDMI to a big TV and if just worked with two screens. I remember how much trouble getting two screens to work (and stay working) used to be under Debian around 2004. I can see other possible downsides if Google pushes an "Evil upgrade" at some point for Chrome. On my desktop, I set up Chromium instead of Chrome and I still rely of FIrefox for privacy reasons and NoScript. Once can criticize Google and privacy or spying or mistakes, like a recent bug (?) that lets Chrome provide speech-to-text transcripts of your microphone even when you have not asked it to -- but what bugs do WIndows, Mac, or desktop Linux have?
http://www.ibtimes.com/google-...
"A security flaw in Google Chrome, currently the world's most popular Web browser, could allow a hacker to turn on a user's computer microphone and secretly obtain a Chrome-generated transcript of the user's conversations, according to an Israel-based software developer who highlighted the flaw in a blog post this week."

Anyway, I can see the niche for the Chromebox vs. the Chromebook, depending on the context and availability of existing displays. I can even see why some schools would like it for computer labs and ease of maintainability. But I think most people would probably be better served by the laptop or all-in-one form factor in practice, especially for machines that likely have a limited lifespan and given teh cost difference is so small. What I paid for the Chromebook last year is probably less than I used to spend annually on paper and (expensive) inkjet cartridge two decades ago like for reviewing documents and code printouts (and even printing web pages) which I now do mostly all look at now on the computer. You did not used to be able to carry a big PDF document with you on a lightweight device you could read from. So, if I need to replace a Chromebook once a year or so, and re-purpose the old one somehow (perhaps to give it to another homeschooling family who wants to use it with a USB keyboard, or just using it for checking the weather in the kitchen), it is not that big a deal to me. Personally, I would like a 14 inch screen for older eyes, and that is probably what I would get next. A little heavier perhaps for a 14", but worth it to me. A backlit keyboard would be really nice, too, as otherwise sometimes I have to tilt the screen forward to light up the keys temporarily.

For the average home use who is not a heavy gamer (like in "education"), the Chromebook is a great value proposition for most people. Granted if you can spend more money or more time, or have heavier needs for work, or have legacy apps to use, other options may be better choices. But as above for me, it's not like you can;t have a Chromebook as well as something else. Chromebooks make great second or third or fourth computers for a family.

Sorry to say, from the slurring of the interviewer in the video, which suggested clogged arteries throughout your body. Check out health ideas here for unclogging them through nutritional changes:
http://www.drfuhrman.com/libra...
http://www.diseaseproof.com/ar...
"Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounted for 32.3% of deaths in the United States in 2010, but you can protect yourself. A significant number of research studies have documented that heart disease is easily and almost completely preventable (and reversible) through a diet rich in plant produce and lower in processed foods and animal products."

More in general:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://www.changemakers.com/mo...
http://www.changemakers.com/di...
https://www.newschallenge.org/...

Good luck Rob, I think we may have we met once briefly around 1999 at an Open Source conference in NYC (one where Ralph Nader spoke), and thanks for all the stories.

And the shift does not have to be that unpleasant as your tastes will adapt after six weeks:
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
"Scientific evidence suggests that the re-sensitization of taste nerves takes between 30 and 90 days of consistent exposure to less stimulating foods. This means that for several weeks, most people attempting this change will experience a reduction in eating pleasure. This is why modern foods present such a devastating trap--as most of our citizens are, in effect, "addicted" to artificially high levels of food stimulation! The 30-to-90-day process of taste re-calibration requires more motivation--and more self-discipline--than most people are ever willing to muster.
    Tragically, most people are totally unaware that they are only a few weeks of discipline away from being able to comfortably maintain healthful dietary habits--and to keep away from the products that can result in the destruction of their health. Instead, most people think that if they were to eat more healthfully, they would be condemned to a life of greatly reduced gustatory pleasure--thinking that the process of Phase IV will last forever. In our new book, The Pleasure Trap, we explain this extraordinarily deceptive and problematic situation - and how to master this hidden force that undermines health and happiness."

Another good health resource if you are willing to take one week to do a medically supervised water-only fast in Santa Rosa, CA for a quick reboot of your taste buds. Compared to a heart bypass operation or years of physical therapy for a stroke, you won't even have to stop posting to Slashdot the whole time during a fast. Posting would help keep you busy and distracted as your body re-calibrates itself and goes into "garbage collection" mode and shifts to new biological pathways during the fast. See:
http://www.healthpromoting.com...
"TrueNorth Health Center was founded in 1984 by Drs. Alan Goldhamer and Jennifer Marano. The integrative medicine approach they established offers participants the opportunity to obtain evaluation and treatment for a wide variety of problems. The staff at TrueNorth Health Center includes medical doctors, osteopaths, chiropractors, naturopaths, psychologists, research scientists, and other health professionals. The Center is now the largest facility in the world that specializes in medically supervised water-only fasting.
    The doctors at TrueNorth Health Center have extensive experience in the evaluation and conservative management of high blood pressure, diabetes, autoimmune disorders, and a wide range of other health conditions. Participants come to fast and detoxify, lose weight, and make diet and lifestyle changes while enjoying a health-promoting diet derived from whole natural foods. The extensive educational program, including food preparation classes with Chef Ramses Bravo, make this a unique place to rest, rejuvenate, and learn to achieve optimum health."

I gave a book on Dr. Fuhrman's work to John Taylor Gatto who was sounding the same -- about a year before he had a massive stroke. Only afterwards now that he is bedridden is he now looking to follow improved nutritional advice. Don't wait like John did. Clogged arteries can be cleared in most people by aggressive nutritional intervention like Dr. Joel Fuhrman or Dr. Caldwell Esselstyn do (see Bill Clinton). You will start to feel so much better and have more energy for more interviews and posting more stories. At the very least, if not for yourself, do it for your family. Good luck!
http://www.thejohntaylorgattom...
https://www.drfuhrman.com/libr...
http://www.vegsource.com/news/...

https://chrome.google.com/webs...

I just wrote a completely open ended HTML5/CSS/JavaScript app on my Samsung $250 Chromebook using the regular user mode and "Caret". I saved versions of the files on the Chromebook and ran them locally from Chrome. The app I wrote uses IndexedDB for local storage of snippets of HTML (which can include JavaScript). The app is intended to support boostrapping a better app by supporting experiments with HTML5/CSS/JavaScript. You can edit text and have it included as a section of HTML on the page. From start to finish (well, it's not really "done") I wrote it on the Chromebook.

I just put the code up on GitHub as an example for you (again using only the Chromebook) :
https://github.com/pdfernhout/...

You can try a demo version here which will store data in your browser: http://rawgithub.com/pdfernhou...

Here is a direct link to the bootstrap.json content to paste in as a start: https://raw.githubusercontent....

See the GitHub repo for basic instructions on how to use it.

Granted, to do C compiling I'd need some tool that converted C to JavaScript in a special way, but more and more such tools exists.
https://github.com/kripken/ems...
http://www.infoq.com/research/...

So, more and more things are possible with Chromebooks or similar devices.

in that the universe seemingly must exist for us to perceive it

Specific intelligence are apparently limited by many things whether the size of the brain/processor, or the materials it is made of, or the amount of energy to run it. But more than that, the though processes seem to be shaped by some combination of evolutionary pressures and chance (or possibly even design, like if we are living in a simulation). So, an extension of what you are suggesting is that all those shaping forces in some sense may limit the kind of ideas we can have about the universe as well as the questions we might think to ask about everything. I wrote my undergrad thesis in Psychology related to this topic in 1985 called "Why Intelligence: Object, Stability, Evolution, and Model".

A related book from a database perspective:
"Data and Reality" by William Kent
http://www.bkent.net/Doc/darxr...
"Data and Reality illustrates extensively the pitfalls of any simplistic attempts to capture reality as data in the sense of todayâ(TM)s database systems. The approach taken by the author is one which very logically and carefully delineates the facets of reality being represented in an information system, and also describes the data processing models used in such systems. The linguistic, semantic, and philosophical problems of describing reality are comprehensively examined⦠The depth of discussion of these concepts, as they impact on information systems, is not likely to be found elsewhere.⦠the value of this book resides in its critical, probing approach to the difficulties of modeling reality in typical information systems... it is very well written and should prove both enjoyable and enlightening to a careful reader. -ACM Computing Reviews, August 1980"

There are other possible implications as well if we are living in a simulation -- although it is still possible we may live in the simulation but our minds could also not be of it (like a human can play a video game without the video game simulating the player's mind).

By coincidence, I just read this to my kid the other day.

We watched the video of it first, but the written text is so much funnier than an otherwise confusing-conceptually video set in a diner.

"Rapidly losing the will to live here."

If not a joke, your contributions would be missed, whether agreed with or not. See also my comment to someone else related to depression: http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

And on the value of public disagreements:
https://sites.google.com/site/...
" The theory Dan Sperber suggested--the argumentative theory of reasoning--proposes that instead of having a purely individual function, reasoning has a social and, more specifically, argumentative function. The function of reasoning would be to find and evaluate reasons in dialogic contexts--more plainly, to argue with others. Here's a very quick summary of the evolutionary rationale behind this theory. Communication is hugely important for humans, and there is good reason to believe that this has been the case throughout our evolution, as different types of collaborative--and therefore communicative--activities already played a big role in our ancestors' lives (hunting, collecting, raising children, etc.). However, for communication to be possible, listeners have to have ways to discriminate reliable, trustworthy information from potentially dangerous information--otherwise speakers would be wont to abuse them through lies and deception. Listeners must have mechanisms of epistemic vigilance. One way listeners and speakers can improve the reliability of communication is through arguments. The speaker gives a reason to accept a given conclusion. The listener can then evaluate this reason to decide whether she should accept the conclusion. In both cases, they have used reasoning--to find and evaluate a reason respectively. If reasoning does its job properly, communication has been improved: a true conclusion is more likely to be supported by good arguments, and therefore accepted, thereby making both the speaker--who managed to convince the listener--and the listener--who acquired a potentially valuable piece of information--better off.
    Our evolutionary account is much more in touch with the prevailing view of the evolution of human cognition. According to this view--alternatively named the social brain hypothesis, or the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, among others--most of human cognition evolved to answer the demands of our social world. ..."

And:
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes....
"We do not claim that reasoning has nothing to do with the truth. We claim that reasoning did not evolve to allow the lone reasoner to find the truth. We think it evolved to argue. But arguing is not only about trying to convince other people; it's also about listening to their arguments. So reasoning is two-sided. On the one hand, it is used to produce arguments. Here its goal is to convince people. Accordingly, it displays a strong confirmation bias -- what people see as the "rhetoric" side of reasoning. On the other hand, reasoning is also used to evaluate arguments. Here its goal is to tease out good arguments from bad ones so as to accept warranted conclusions and, if things go well, get better beliefs and make better decisions in the end."

So, thanks for being part of that process. In any case, hang in there, there is a chance it might get better.

Also, tangentially, on things "getting better" and depression and being in a minority:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...
"Its goal is to prevent suicide among LGBT youth by having gay adults convey the message that these teens' lives will improve."

Example:
"It Gets Better - Princeton University"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

But that sentiment can apply to lots of things given a life so full of so many unexpected changes...

See also Howard Zinn:
http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
"In this awful world where the efforts of caring people often pale in comparison to what is done by those who have power, how do I manage to stay involved and seemingly happy? I am totally confident not that the world will get better, but that we should not give up the game before all the cards have been played. The metaphor is deliberate; life is a gamble. Not to play is to foreclose any chance of winning.
    To play, to act, is to create at least a possibility of changing the world. There is a tendency to think that what we see in the present moment will continue. We forget how often we have been astonished by the sudden crumbling of institutions, by extraordinary changes in people's thoughts, by unexpected eruptions of rebellion against tyrannies, by the quick collapse of systems of power that seemed invincible. What leaps out from the history of the past hundred years is its utter unpredictability. This confounds us, because we are talking about exactly the period when human beings became so ingenious technologically that they could plan and predict the exact time of someone landing on the moon, or walk down the street talking to someone halfway around the earth."

In 1964, gay people were afraid of arrest by the police in NYC. What a probably-hard-to-believe-was-possible change from then -- an example of Zinn's point.

BTW, Slate has a lot of great articles on all sides of the Eich controversy:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/sal...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/out...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/out...
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/fut...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/sal...

From the last: "Maybe what we're seeing in Eich is the kind of complexity that liberals tend to accept when we talk about a person's gender or sexual orientation. Maybe we ought to entertain the same complexity when we talk about a person's morality and fair treatment of others."