http://steamcommunity.com/app/...
"ishanda --- Kerbal Space Program Apr 17, 2013 @ 2:29am; If you REALLY want Star Trek Style impulse engines why not mod them yourself? All you really need is to make copies of the relevant part files, change the name of the Xenon Tank to "Deuterium" and change the Ion Engine to "Impulse Engine" and then change a few values to make them super efficient. Done."

Still looking forward to seeing how the real device pans out though... Just like I'm still wondering about all the claimed cold fusion results which may also be exploring new areas of physics and chemistry with the behavior of hydrogen atoms at the edges of metal lattices or in cracks in them perhaps in interaction with electro-magnetic pulses ...
http://www.extremetech.com/ext...

I'm still waiting on "Tom Swift and his Space Solartron" though: :-)
http://www.tomswift.info/homep...
"The main invention in this book is, of course, the Space Solartron. The Space Solartron was probably Tom Swift's most amazing -- and far-fetched -- invention. Its purpose was to make space travel practical by creating oxygen, water, and food from sunlight -- not a simple task, to be sure."

I've mused about even better tech that will extract energy and mass from zero point energy. Although we might then get a "tragedy of the commons" as so much mass and energy is created in nearby outer space as to collectively form a black hole? Now that might be another good mode for the multi-player version of Kerbal Space Program to see what happens politically as that "tragedy" plays out as the outer space equivalent of anthropogenic global warming? :-)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11...

Perhaps that political problem might already be playing out at the core of out galaxy? :-)
http://science.slashdot.org/st...

Back to the EmDrive device, it would not surprise me if the impulse provided by the microwave device is much less than the impulse imparted by photons and/or solar wind on any satellite's solar panels to capture needed electricity. But that might be a non-issue if you have a small "Mr. Fusion" fusion reactor or cold fusion LENR device onboard the satellite? :-)

Of course, station keeping is even easier if you have a "HyperEdit" debugger hook into the simulation. :-)
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/11...
"If you still think MechJeb is cheating, take a look at HyperEdit. It is cheating. Install it, tap Alt+H, and you're given a menu full of options that let you tweak and edit the game. With a few clicks, you can teleport your craft to the orbit of any planet on the solar system, then use the landing options to gracefully touch down. Alternatively, you can instantly replenish your fuel, obliterate a selected craft, or readjust Kerbin's gravity to make escaping its atmosphere unnaturally difficult. HyperEdit is a flexible toolbox that, when used without restriction, completely destroys the difficulty. With a little imagination, though, you can use it to create your own custom scenarios. It's as simple as popping an abandoned craft on a distant planet, and suddenly you've got the basis for a tricky retrieval mission."

See also:
http://www.simulation-argument...
"This paper argues that at least one of the following propositions is true: (1) the human species is very likely to go extinct before reaching a "posthuman" stage; (2) any posthuman civilization is extremely unlikely to run a significant number of simulations of their evolutionary history (or variations thereof); (3) we are almost certainly living in a computer simulation. It follows that the belief that there is a significant chance that we will one day become posthumans who run ancestor-simulations is false, unless we are currently living in a simulation. A number of other consequences of this result are also discussed."

Or perhaps that explains "Q" tech? :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q...

Although the meanings in life might change in such circumstances, just like cheating in KSP may in some sense ruin the original game while it makes other "games" or scenarios possible depending on self-restraint or agreed on rules? To cheat or not to cheat in KSP, that is the question...

See my essay here: 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. Another theme is exploring the meaning, if true, of a allegation by Wayne Madsen about President Obama's deeper connection to the CIA than was otherwise known."

As I suggested here: http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"Now, there are many people out there (including computer scientists) who may raise legitimate concerns about privacy or other important issues in regards to any system that can support the intelligence community (as well as civilian needs). As I see it, there is a race going on. The race is between two trends. On the one hand, the internet can be used to profile and round up dissenters to the scarcity-based economic status quo (thus legitimate worries about privacy and something like TIA). On the other hand, the internet can be used to change the status quo in various ways (better designs, better science, stronger social networks advocating for some healthy mix of a basic income, a gift economy, democratic resource-based planning, improved local subsistence, etc., all supported by better structured arguments like with the Genoa II approach) to the point where there is abundance for all and rounding up dissenters to mainstream economics is a non-issue because material abundance is everywhere. So, as Bucky Fuller said, whether is will be Utopia or Oblivion will be a touch-and-go relay race to the very end. While I can't guarantee success at the second option of using the internet for abundance for all, I can guarantee that if we do nothing, the first option of using the internet to round up dissenters (or really, anybody who is different, like was done using IBM computers in WWII Germany) will probably prevail. So, I feel the global public really needs access to these sorts of sensemaking tools in an open source way, and the way to use them is not so much to "fight back" as to "transform and/or transcend the system". As Bucky Fuller said, you never change thing by fighting the old paradigm directly; you change things by inventing a new way that makes the old paradigm obsolete."

Or here: http://www.phibetaiota.net/201...
"The greatest threat facing the USA is the irony inherent in our current defense posture, like for example planning to use nuclear energy embodied in missiles to fight over oil fields that nuclear energy could replace. This irony arises in part because the USA's current security logic is still based on essentially 19th century and earlier (second millennium) thinking that becomes inappropriate applied to 21st century (third millennium) technological threats and opportunities. That situation represents a systematic intelligence failure of the highest magnitude. There remains time to correct this failure, but time grows short as various exponential trends continue.
    To address that pervasive threat from unrecognized irony, it would help to re-envision the CIA as a non-ironic post-scarcity institution. Then the CIA could help others (including in the White House) make more informed decisions to move past this irony as well.
    A first step towards that could be for IARPA to support better free software tools for "crowdsourced" public intelligence work involving using a social semantic desktop for sensemaking about open source data and building related open public action plans from that data to make local communities healthier, happier, more intrinsically secure, and also more mutually secure. Secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy local (and virtual) communities then can form together a secure, healthy, prosperous, and happy nation and planet in a non-ironic way. Details on that idea are publicly posted by me here in the form of a Proposal Abstract to the IARPA Incisive Analysis solicitation: "Social Semantic Desktop for Sensemaking on Threats and Opportunities"
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
"

Or various other places...

Lately I've been thinking about such a system for collective sensemaking and public intelligence as a series of JavaScript-heavy WordPress plugins, given WordPress powers about 20% of the sites on the internet...

Actually, I think the article is talking about something entirely different than reflexes or muscle memory. I've been experimenting with this "turn off your mind" thing the past few days, and I've been finding I can do some things I normally can't. For example, I can't walk a tight rope to save my life, but I tried clearing my mind of all thought, not even thinking about the task at hand, and just started walking... Made it half way down before I became aware again and fell on my ass. I can actually feel it happen when I do it right... It's like my body is doing the thinking.

Sorry to double post this, you just seem like you might have some experience so I wanted to get your take on it. When should I use my conscious mind vs "going with the flow" (for lack of a better term)?

PS: Aikido seems like an interesting style, I will have to check it out. One of my biggest weaknesses is an aversion to punching someone in the face lol.

Actually, I think the article is talking about something entirely different than reflexes or muscle memory. I've actually been experimenting with this "turn off your mind" thing the past few days, and I've been finding I can do some things I normally can't. For example, I can't walk a tight rope to save my life, but I tried clearing my mind of all thought, not even thinking about the task at hand, and just started walking... Made it half way down before I became aware again and fell on my ass. I can actually feel it happen when I do it right... It's like my body is doing the thinking.

It would have been more accurate to say it's like the "Music Genome Project" (Pandora is the the commercial application of these efforts), but for books. The idea is to essentially categorize everything by weighted tags.

An intriguing idea if I can pull it off. I will have to give it a try! Thank you for the tip sir.

I appreciate your experience and insight, but for me at least, this is not the case. I'm a TKD/BJJ guy myself, so I need to be ready for the fight to go anywhere and be ready defend against anything. The ability to "turn your mind off" and just go with the flow is exactly what keeps me from getting my head knocked off. I would have described myself as someone who is bad at sports prior to getting into MMA. In hindsight, maybe I was just bad at sports because I thinking to hard...

Good point. Going even further, from something I wrote in 1992: https://groups.google.com/foru...
---
A letter from Gaia to humanity on the joy of expectation

Don't cry for me. When I let you evolve I knew it might cost the
rhino and the tiger. I knew the rain forests would be cut down. I
knew the rivers would be poisoned. I knew the ocean would turn to
filth. I knew it would cost most of the species that are me.

What is the death of most of my species to me? It is only sleep.
In ten million years I will have it all back again and more. This
has happened many times already. Complex and fragile species will
break along with the webs they are in. Robust and widespread
species will persist along with simpler webs. In time these
survivors will radiate to cover the globe in diversity again. Each
time I come back in beauty like a bush pruned and regrown.

Be happy for me. Over and over again I have tried to give birth to
more Gaias. Time and time again I have failed. With you I have
hope. I cannot tell you how happy I am.

Your minds, spacecraft, biospheres, and computers give me new realms
to evolve into. With your minds I evolve as ideas in inner space.
With your technology I can evolve into self replicating habitats in
outer space. Your computers and minds contain model Gaias I can
talk to; they are my first children. Your space craft and
biospheres are a step to spreading Gaias throughout the stars.

Cry, yes. Cry for yourselves. I am sorry those alive now will not
live to see the splendor to come from what you have started. I am
sorry for all the suffering your species and others will endure.
You who live now will remember the tiger and the rain forest and
mourn for them and yourselves. You will know what was lost without
ever knowing what will be gained. I too mourn for them and you.

There is so much joy that awaits us. We must look up and forward.
We must go on to a future - my future, our future. After eons of
barrenness I am finally giving birth. Help me lest it all fall away
and take eons more before I get this close again to having the
children I always wanted.

(Paul D. Fernhout, Lindenhurst, NY 6/92)

===========

The preceeding is something I just scanned in from 1992, written while I was
in the SUNY Stony Brook Ecology and Evolution PhD program (where I had gone
to learn more towards simulating gardens and space habitats). I had learned
there that it took about 10 million years to regenerate lots of biodiversity
from a large asteroid impact event, and this had happened several times in
Earth's history.

The following is a related statement also just scanned in of what inspired
it written at the same time.

--Paul Fernhout (NY Adirondack Park, Oct 2008)

=================

If one accepted that modern industrial civilization has initiated
a great die-off of species comparable to the one sixty-five
million years ago, how should one feel about this?

Is overwhelming sadness and anger the best emotional response? On
the surface it may seem so. Apparently modern civilization and
the accompanying pollution and deforestation are pulling apart a
tapestry woven over billions of years. Anger at the short sighted
and narrow values driving industry may seem well placed.
Certainly feelings of joy and excitement would seem out of place.

Here are a few thoughts that may affect one's feelings. High
levels of biodiversity can be generated from very low ones in
about ten million years. On the time scales of the earth this may
not be a blink of an eye, but it is a short nap. To humans this
may mean a great loss, but Gaia might barely notice. It has after
all been only sixty-five million years since the last die off.

Not all species will be affected equally. A simplification will
occur where the more specialized creatures will be the most likely
to go extinct. Complex food webs will either loose species to
become simpler or they will be replaced entirely by new simpler
webs. This will create opportunities for generalists to move
into vacated niches. It will also produce more robust species and
food webs. In the long term this may make the biosphere healthier
in the same way pruning a bush makes it grow more.

New forms of life existing as ideas are now living and will likely
continue to expand. Language and culture and technology are
possible with humanity's growth. These allow new patterns to be
created and selected for, giving evolution a new canvas. Also
possible are new combinations of ideas and life as philosophies
evolve in combination with ecosystems.

A process that may well lead to the extinction of 30 to 99 percent
of all species has been initiated unintentionally. Conservation
of biodiversity should be done if only for aesthetic and spiritual
reasons. Anger and sadness should not overwhelm one and keep one
from making the best of the inevitable.- Paul D. Fernhout 6/22/92

It's called "Blowback". In order to prevent another 9/11/2001 or worse, it seems important to understand the motivations behind the first one (I'm using the year to distinguish from the US-supported 9/11/1973 coup in Chile). Like you, I also doubt the Saudi government had anything to do directly with funding that 9/11. In fact, that 9/11 seems more a protest against the Saudi government by Saudi citizens, but with the protest directed at the perceived source of funding for the Saudi government by the USA. Let's turn the political situation around hypothetically to try to understand the emotional aspect of it better, imagining what it might be like if the Saudi government was meddling directly in US affairs.

Here is a first cut at trying to understand the social/psychological dynamics of the situation from a different perspective. Imagine Saudi Arabia somehow was sending billions of dollars of campaign donations annually to the USA to keep in power an oppressive administration in the USA (passing laws forcing all US women to wear burkas, only allowing males with brown eyes to hold public office or get university degrees, and with capital punishment on suspicion of premarital sex or homosexuality). Also, imagine that there were millions of Saudi soldiers stationed in US states to ensure a flow of manufactured goods to Saudi Arabia despite strikes and other unrest in the USA and nearby countries. Also imagine that the Saudis were also funding Japanese people who, from fear of earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan, had moved to Canada, bought a lot of the land, claimed a right to govern all of Canada because some Japanese people had moved to Canada 10,000 years ago across the land bridge from Siberia, and then forced most non-Japanese Canadian citizens in all of Canada to flee to the USA and were killing non-Japanese Canadians who remained and resisted the Japanese occupation. If you are a US citizen in such a hypothetical world, would you be at all upset by such a situation whatever your eye color? Imagine that some very upset and frustrated young US citizens decide to protest this situation by attacking some big buildings in Saudi Arabia by hijacking airliners to show how unhappy they are with Saudi government foreign policy and to show how they felt their hopes and dreams for a good life in the USA had been thwarted by Saudi meddling in US government. Imagine this attack is then used by Saudi Arabia to justify invading Mexico (where some of the hypothetical American hijackers trained) and Brazil (because it is claimed by the Saudis to have WMDs that hypothetical young Americans might use against Saudis). Imagine the Saudis then start supplying "intelligence" to the US government from listening to all US telephone calls about specific US citizens who might be unhappy about the situation and perhaps plotting unrest in the USA or planning more blowback against the Saudis.

Now flip this scenario around and back to reality (US funding Saudis and Israel and US troops in the Middle East) and does the fact the almost all of the 9/11 hijackers were frustrated young Saudi men make more sense?

Soon after 9/11 I saw an analysis in a magazine (maybe the Atlantic or New Yorker) of why the hijackers did what they did. I have not seen many such articles since. The point made there was that these were mostly young men whose hopes for significant advancement in Saudi society had seemed thwarted and they were led to blame the USA for that, because the USA was propping up the Saudi regime and otherwise meddling in the Middle East. Of course, being promised eternal bliss in "paradise" for becoming murderers can not be ignored as a related aspect of religious fundamentalism (including outrage about the occupation of Palestine), so there are layers of complexity here for that and other reasons. The motivations of the hijackers themselves may also be somewhat different than the motivations of the organizers at higher levels.

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
"The hijackers in the September 11 attacks were 19 men affiliated with al-Qaeda, and 15 of the 19 were citizens of Saudi Arabia. ... "

And:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/...
"The 9-11 Commission held its twelfth and final public hearing June 16-17, 2004, in Washington, DC. On June 16 the Commission heard from several of the federal government's top law enforcement and intelligence experts on al Qaeda and the 9-11 plot. It was at this hearing that the question "What motivated them to do it?" was finally asked. Lee Hamilton, vice chair of the 9/11 Commission said, "I'm interested in the question of motivation of these hijackers, and my question is really directed to the agents. ... what have you found out about why these men did what they did? What motivated them to do it?" The agents looked at each other, apparently not eager to be the one to have to say it. FBI Special Agent Fitzgerald stepped up to the plate and laid out the facts, "I believe they feel a sense of outrage against the United States. They identify with the Palestinian problem, they identify with people who oppose repressive regimes and I believe they tend to focus their anger on the United States." But this testimony was kept out of the 9/11 Commission Report and no recommendation was given to address the main motive for the 9/11 attacks."

So, it was not so much that "they hate us because we were free" (although there were some religious aspects of that). It was more that "they hate us because we fund their oppressors". Granted, there are additional layers of complexity including from religion and economics, but that is part of the bigger picture.

To bring this back to the source original article, it says: "The report also notes the MOI's use of invasive surveillance targeted at political and religious dissidents. But as the State Department publicly catalogued those very abuses, the NSA worked to provide increased surveillance assistance to the ministry that perpetrated them."

So, the USA is left in a difficult situation. Saudi citizens who resent their oppression or other treatment by a government propped up by US support still have reason to dislike the US government. But, if the US government does not help the Saudis via the NSA identify and suppress dissenting Saudi young men, then another 9/11/2001 becomes more likely in the short term, even as such a disaster or much worse becomes more certain in the long term if the USA continues to support a repressive Saudi government and otherwise take sides in Middle Eastern politics. What is the morally and politically correct solution to this dilemma? What policies should a US citizen now support? It's the kind of situation best avoided (see George Washington's farewell address which warned to avoid entanglements in foreign affairs) but it is too late for that. Also, to get to a good resolution, we have to acknowledge the truths behind the conflicts, but often conflicts include suppressing or spinning relevant details like misleadingly claiming "they hate us because we are free".

One thing I feel strongly is that given the increasing power of WMDs including bioweapons, the margin for political error grows smaller and smaller. Given that increasing risk, oppression does not seem like a good long-term strategy to ensure peace and prosperity in the 21st century. So, I feel we need to move instead towards some sort of transcendence of these 20th century (and earlier) conflicts. That included rethinking security to be mutual and intrinsic, like I mention here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...

But others have been saying similar things for a long time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://pugwash.org/
http://christianity.about.com/...

And maybe we could create better software tools to help resolve such conflicts in a healthy way? As I suggested three years ago:
http://pcast.ideascale.com/a/d...
"This suggestion is about how civilians could benefit by have access to the sorts of "sensemaking" tools the intelligence community (as well as corporations) aspire to have, in order to design more joyful, secure, and healthy civilian communities (including through creating a more sustainable and resilient open manufacturing infrastructure for such communities). It outlines (including at a linked elaboration) why the intelligence community should consider funding the creation of such free and open source software (FOSS) "dual use" intelligence applications as a way to reduce global tensions through increased local prosperity, health, and with intrinsic mutual security."

It's just muscle memory. They drill this into us all the time in martial arts. When fighting, you don't have time to sit and think about your next move, it just has to come naturally, like some kind of instinct. I'm not surprised by these findings at all. Sparring is one of the very few activities that allow me to quite my mind.

I certainly understand the frustration of dealing will overly complex systems or also a rushed language like JavaScript where variables are globals by default. Still, did you know that you can compile almost anything to JavaScript these days and have it run in the browser at near native speeds (well, only some browsers, but likely more and more). See: http://techcrunch.com/2013/12/...
"While Google is betting on Native Client to allow web apps to execute native compiled code in the browser, Mozilla is betting on its ability to run JavaScript at near-native speeds, too. While they approach this problem from very different angles, both Google, through Native Client, and Mozilla, through its Emscripten LLVM-to-JavaScript compiler, allow developers to write their code in C or C++ and then run it in the browser."

So, JavaScript is just another platform now in that sense. But it is a platform that is almost everywhere significant for substantial human interaction... And installing JavaScript software for the end-user is as easy often-times as just surfing to a web page. If people don't actually install your software, what good is it?

Does JavaScript have problems? Yes. Tons. But it also has a lot of merits.

As for gibberish -- Cantonese sounds mostly like gibberish to me, but that is because I never learned to speak it. :-)

Would I like a simpler software stack and simpler but better languages and tools? Yes. I helped fight that battle over a decade ago like with VisualWorks/Squeak and we lost to stuff like Java, PHP, and JavaScript and the associated tool chains. Squeak showed what was possible, but almost no one would install it (the Squeak licensing confusion did not help there either). See also:
http://bitworking.org/news/290...
"Regular readers are quite tired of me pointing to this video, Alan Kay: The Computer Revolution hasn't happend yet. Keynote OOPSLA 1997, but I think it's quite fundamental to understand that Alan Kay had a vision for the web, and though his understanding of the role of HTML in the world of 1996 was flawed, it seems the collective web has spent the last ten years building exactly what he described, with HTML/SVG being the display substrate and JavaScript being the code to drive that display. Ten years later we have the Lively Kernel: ..."

But the past is the past. We have to start from where we are -- and today, people live in their HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript browsers or will soon (even on phones, and especially on the emerging Firefox OS phones). I'm writing this from a US$250 Chromebook that is almost entirely just a browser as far as user experience. Any sophisticated-enough system could eventually remake the stack underneath it, like native Squeak could do. So, saying we could build on JavaScript does not mean endless perpetual complexity. Chrome OS shows how a focus on HTML/CSS/JavaScript can sometimes simplify things though from one perspective, especially user experience.

There are several issues related to complexity (inherent complexity, accidental complexity, user expectations, installability, standards, etc.). Regardless of technical merit, HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP won in key areas. Sure, you can create the next Squeak, and good luck with that, it is a fun project. And/or we can try to use the current widespread platform as best as we can. For me right now, that means minimizing the backend (PHP or whatever) while emphasizing the front-end (JavaScript) and ideally encoding data in useful long-term forms.

And for those who like their Smalltalk deployed as HTML/CSS/JavaScript, see:
http://amber-lang.net/
"The Amber language is deeply inspired by Smalltalk. It is designed to make client-side development faster and easier. Amber includes a live development environment with a class browser, workspace, unit test runner, transcript, object inspector and debugger. Amber is written in itself, including the compiler, and compiles into efficient JavaScript, mapping one-to-one with the JS equivalent."

As Manuel De Landa wrote:
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/me...
"Certain standardizations, say, of electric outlet designs or of data-structures traveling through the Internet, may actually turn out to promote heterogenization at another level, in terms of the appliances that may be designed around the standard outlet, or of the services that a common data-structure may make possible."

And that is what we are seeing with JavaScript now, where you can run anything from a KIM-1 to a Commodore C64 to Linux on it:
http://www.robsayers.com/jskim...
http://www.kingsquare.nl/jsc64
http://bellard.org/jslinux/

From: http://www.servalproject.org/ and http://developer.servalproject...
---
"Serval Mesh is an Android app that provides highly secure mesh networking, voice calls, text messaging and file sharing between mobile phones using Wi-Fi, without the need for a SIM or any other infrastructure like mobile cell towers, Wi-Fi hotspots or Internet access."
1. Communicate anytime
Mobile phones stop working when cellular infrastructure fails. The Serval Mesh changes this, allowing mobile phones to form impromptu networks consisting only of phones. This allows people nearby to keep communicating when needed most.
2. Communicate anywhere
Cellular networks are not available everywhere. In Australia for example, around 75% of the land area lacks mobile coverage. Letting mobile phones form stand-alone networks provides a cost-effective solution for communities in these remote areas to enjoy mobile communications.
3. Communicate privately
In this modern world private conversation with friends, families and service providers is vital, whether discussing medical issues or other private subjects. The Serval Mesh is built on a foundation engineered to support security. Voice calls and text messages are always end-to-end encrypted using strong 256-bit ECC cryptography. Encrypted calls work even on low-cost Android phones.
4.Communicate with people
The Serval Mesh is about enabling people to communicate with one another, regardless of what circumstances may befall them, or where they live in the world. Because at the end of the day, relationship with one another is what life is all about.
---

Serval was one of the first things I installed on a trio of cheap Android phones I bought for Andriod development and testing purposes several months ago (the Kyocera Hydro phones themselves ranged from US$35-$55 in price each). Still has rough edges, but getting there.

The Serval project is also working towards cheap rugged repeaters. "The Serval Mesh Extender is a hardware device that helps other devices to join and participate in a Serval Mesh network. ... Mesh Extenders mesh together over short distances using Ad Hoc Wi-Fi, over longer distances using packet radio on the ISM 915 MHz band"

I suggested related ideas back around 2000 based on two-mile range radios:
"[unrev-II] The DKR hardware I'd like to make..."
http://www.dougengelbart.org/c...

Very cheap insurance to make sure people have these sorts of devices for an emergency, which these days would not cost much more than a decent US$100 "weather radio" even with basic Smartphone features...

In the past, I used whether an email contained my first name as an indicator (a textual token) of whether the email was legitimate, as a sort of password to gain access to your attention. That stopped being useful several years ago as many spammers must have a name database to go with email addresses now. That also would not work for people whose entire first name was in their email address, as is often a corporate practice. Still, the idea of filtering email on a token can make sense, where the token says the sender has been authorized to send you email.

I still have filters for certain keywords like products I support as a way of doing some of this filtering. A next step could be to tell people (on a contact web page) that they need to include some token phrase like "swordfish" in any email to you if they want it to get read as a first-time sender. Or the token could be a random uuid like "f34f775b-3ccb-45e0-a75e-06f845f0c318". It is relatively easy to make filters in many email clients that would prioritize emails with an expected token. After you get such an email from someone the first time, you can whitelist the sender. Granted, phishing or spam often forges sender email addresses. So, there is a problem here that the validity token ideally should be in every email sent to you to avoid relying on whitelisting address.

Ideally, there could be one unique token per entity (or email address) you want to get emails from. Then you could selectively disable and change the token if spammers got one. These tokens then are specific to an allowed communications channel. That requires more complexity though. For example, when you signed up for a mailing list, you could give the list a token such as the above (or perhaps just accept a random one from the list signup procedure), and the list software would store that token to include in a header when it sends a message to you. You would also tell your email client about the token being associated with the sender somehow (either the email address or the sender name or perhaps some other unique sender identifier like a public key). When your client software receives email, it would check if the email has the expected token for the sender. If the email does not have the token, it would be marked as probably spam or phishing. Email tools would need to have this facility built into them, both for sending and receiving. Public mailing lists might need to filter out such tokens from their public web pages of email archives to prevent spammers from harvesting such data to spam the list.

Still, how can people contact you the first time? One answer is to separate the process of getting emails from a trusted source from the process of requesting a token. For example, when someone new wanted to contact you, they could need to go to a web page (or other means) and get a token for their sending email address (or other identifying information, like a public key). That web page might include some sort of captcha challenge or something requiring computational cost or even direct monetary cost (like a small amount of money required to be spent via Paypal or another service, perhaps as a donation to a favorite charity). A web form to do this might need to send a special email to your client that includes both its own token and the new sender and new token, which would need to be processed by your email client to make the association.

This would be a big difference from now, when the first contact you get from someone new might be directly via a new email which could be the spam or phishing attempt. Tokens could also be valid for a limited time. There could even be general tokens not associated with a specific email address, perhaps time-limited ones, ones that need to be paired with other tokens or perhaps topical key words (like a product name) to be considered valid. This does make it harder for senders to send emails, but it makes it more likely they will be read and not ignored as spam.

One advantage of this system is it could build on top of the current email architecture. Clients that don't support such tokens would just not work as well because they would not be able to distinguish Spam of Phishing as well, and emails they send without such a token would be more likely to be ignored.

There are other approaches of course to reduce spam and phishing. There are already mail receivers that will ask a first time sender to confirm identity or do greylisting. There are domain-oriented solutions too like DMARC: http://www.dmarc.org/

But a token-based system just seems appealing to me because it sort-of worked for me for a time (based on my first name). I'm sure spammers or phishers would find some new way to get around these channel tokens eventually, but it seems like a next step in the evolutionary arms race of validating wanted communications. If tokens were associated with public keys which represented identities, a next step could be to sign the entire email or at least the token and a timestamp and message ID with the associated private key. This approach relies also on the fact that much email being sent is now encrypted all along the way.

There is at least one big flaw in this approach though. What to do about the CC or BCC list? Ideally, each recipient should get a token specific to the recipient. That seems to imply each recipient will have the email sent directly to him or her or it. But that is not how email servers work now, where one server might dispatch a single email to multiple destinations. So, still things to think through, including how much email servers should get involved with such tokens.

Paul Jones has his #noemail campaign as one potential solution to email woes, but I feel that throws the locally-stored email message center baby out with the spam & tl;dr bathwater. Paul Jones pushes social media and blogs as an alternative to email, which have their merits (see below at end), but are still suffering from more and more spam too. Web solutions also make it harder to have a local copy of correspondence. For example, I have many years of emails in my local email archive which I can search and review locally including to mailing lists, but l have little history of what I have read or posted via the web. Still, private email has its limits. As with my immediately previous Slashdot post referencing a post to the FONC mailing list, I can find some of my emails to public lists via Google. Using Google to find emails I wrote to public lists can be easier than searching my my email archive which is on a different machine than I post to Slashdot from often. And it is great to be able to link to such posts via a URL. I've started saying, "if it does not have a URL, it is broken". Ultimately I feel we need something that combines the best of email and the best of the web like perhaps a "social semantic desktop" such as I and others have worked towards. That could have a better infrastructure than email with anti-spam protections built-in (including perhaps public key authentication of senders, and perhaps even using DNS records to associate public keys with domains).

From: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/inde...
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We are faced with a need for significant action and the odds are stacked against us. Invention receives no attention, and innovation (even when incorrectly understood) receives lip service in the press but no current-day vehicle exists to to nurture it. This wiki is an open invitation for talented individuals to pool their energy and collaborate towards fundamentally changing computing.

Over the years many groups have debated how to make progress in computing. There were likely as many opinions as there were people in the debates. Nevertheless personal accounts suggest that initiatives were sometimes reduced to a handful and then pursued with vigour. Consider what could be achieved by following the same pattern today, with the added benefit of doing it as a virtual, distributed team.

Our goal could be to capture the significant ideas and initiatives that we have been exposed to, are aware of, or can discover, distil them into groups, reduce them to a handful of concepts worthy of vigorous exploration, and focus our efforts on these common ideas with the eventual aim of making substantial progress towards finding a common set of fundamentals of new computing.
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See also: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki/inde...

A big focus of FONC was in reducing lots of complexity. Smalltalk shows what is possible... But in practice new languages and new standards often just add more complexity to the mix and what we often need are better tools for dealing with complexity. And community and trends mean a lot too, as does hireability and ubiquity and easy installability. So, again, in practice, I'm moving to JavaScript with conceptually simple backends (even in, yikes, PHP) -- inspired in part by Dan Ingall's own work with the Lively Kernel which shows what is possible as near-zero-effort-to-install JavaScript apps.

My own thoughts on FONC from 2010:
"fonc] On inventing the computing microscope/telescope for the dynamic semantic web"
https://www.mail-archive.com/f...
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Biology made a lot of progress by inventing the microscope -- and that was done way before it invented genetic engineering, and even before it understood there were bacteria around. :-)

What are our computing microscopes now? What are our computing telescopes? Are debuggers crude computing microscopes? Are class hierarchy browsers and package managers and IDEs and web browsers crude computing telescopes?

Maybe we need to reinvent the computing microscope and computing telescope to help in trying to engineer better digital organisms via FONC? :-) Maybe it is more important to do it first? ...

It's taken a while for me to see this, but, with JavaScript, essentially each web page can be seen like a Smalltalk ObjectMemory (or text-based image like PataPata writes out). While I work towards using the Pointrel System to add triples in a declarative way, in practice, the web of calling cgi scripts at URLs is a lot like message passing (just more like the earlier Smalltalk-72 way without well-defined syntax). So, essentially, a web of HTML pages with JavaScript and CGI on servers is like the Smalltalk system written large. :-) Just in a very ad hoc and inelegant way. :-)

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