Game engines already exist. People already develop content though you kind of need a working and enjoyable game first, with some content, before people will develop more content for it.

Who funded Linux development in the early days, answer, noone? Would need to be a volunteer effort to some extent.

Hopefully Carmack will be disillusioned with working for Facebook soon and do it for love of gaming and graphics programming.

Kickstarter is the obvious answer if you really want cash.

There is a pretty obvious solution to the steep decline in modern games. Its the same solution that was found to over priced, proprietary, commerical operating systems.

We need an open source gaming system. Its probably the only escape from eternal damnation to over priced, poorly designed, crap games.

Some critical issues need to addressed up front for it to work.

For starters you need to settle on an open source gaming engine. Torque3D would be one possibility, people here could probably name others. It needs to be capable, open source and multi platform, with as few licensing restrictions as possible. You need high caliber game developers, like Carmack to emraced it and work on it, with someone like Linus holding it together.

You need to develop a small number of core games based on the essential archetypes, FPS, MMORPG, Space battle/trading, racing.

You need to create councils for each game selected from game developers and excellent players who set rules, direction, maintain order and hold the game economy together.

As always if a game/council fails to satisfy their constituencey a solution is a fork but you want to ACTIVELY discourage forking when it leads primarily to fragmentation and wasted resources. You want as much wood behind one arrow as possible.

Each game needs to actively support and leverage mods and user developed content. In fact that will be the primary source of content.

The core games need to be designed for extreme longevity, its the content that needs to constantly changing and growing.

Councils need to design intelligent tournament systems and leader boards that actually put the most skilled players at the top, where they belong, not the grinders, scammers and cheats.

I'm a long time gamer who no longer plays games, because the games I loved the most died at the hands of corporate greed and stupidity. In particular they died because decisions were made by executives who were for the most part not gamers and made decisions that were all wrong.

If I could, I would probably still be playing the original EQ, the original WoW and Battlefield 2, Karkand Infantry only.

Battlefield 2, Karkand Infantry only was, in my mind the pinnacle of PVP. If you had evenly matched teams, with evenly matched gear, fighting a battle decided by 1 point there was no better adrenaline rush and it never got old. The map never changed, the rules seldom changed, the thing that constantly changed was the people playing it, their skills, their tactics and strategy. Developing huge maps like PS3 where you can never find an even fight, or in game purchases that allow the fools with the most money to win, developing massively too dense graphics, that are way to expensive to develop, require to much graphics power to run and add no FUN to the game, and adding too many gimicky weapons and gear that cause nothing but unbalanced matches, are just some examples.

If I could have kept the original EQ or WoW and just added a never ended series of new dungeons, quests gear and battlegrounds I would probably still be playing them. The first rule is you NEVER raise the level cap, because as soon as you do the game turns in to a pointless treadmill. New dungeons, gear and PVP is all a game needs to stay fresh.

I'd still be playing BF2 if there were any servers left that didn't suck.

You are correct that nothing abridges that right. (I take the highly deviant and unpopular line that rights are inalienable, that that is why we don't just call them permissions.)

To say that it is an unmitigated good is, though, perhaps not a conclusion you can safely draw. It carries the implication that all contributing causes were also good, which is self-evidently false. The right is good. The requirement that things be properly documented is good. The staffing levels are bad (police officers should be providing the raw information, not reconstructing it to fit a specific system - have data entry specialists handle data entry). The system sounds very very bad - and unstable (who wants HAL running a criminal justice system?).

Releasing the individuals was correct, but correct for the bad reason that every level of the system failed.

That they couldn't manage in three days what police in Britain were once expected to do within 24 hours (now expanded to 48, as computer technology has been added, which seems kinda weird) shows that the wrong people are doing work that is wrong. If a manual system could do the job in one day, a computer-based one should be faster. Yes, there's more complex analysis to be done, but mass spectrometers can be thrown into the back of a van and give you results in minutes. DNA analysis for a tiny handful of markers (typically 12 for criminology, versus the 150 often needed for genealogy) can be done in an hour, tops. In-the-field DNA sequencers designed to look for specific information can also be thrown into said van.

Actually searching and finding things is the slowest part, but you shouldn't be looking for evidence to convict someone, you should be looking for evidence in order to determine who it is who should be convicted. In that case, search and lab time should only ever precede an arrest, which means everything that matters will already be known and in the computer.

In that case, the only new information is that surrounding the arrest and any supplemental information provided by the suspect. Confirming that supplemental data should not be relevant to the case, if the case warranted bringing the person in at that point. Even if it is, you're looking at three or four hours in parallel with the data entry. Raw data is raw data, that can be delivered live from a mobile lab or detective, so it's merely the time to get there, find the supplemental evidence and run the analysis.

With a modern setup, the time between initial arrest and completing the filing should never exceed 6 hours. Three days is stupid.

If six hours isn't enough time to do everything, do more (much, much more) beforehand and parallelize the shit out of everything after. If you don't have the money, find it. If necessary, reduce coverage until you can afford it, then demand taxes pay to cover everyone else correctly. If a couple of extra people get robbed or murdered, you've reduced false convictions by far more than that, so there's a net reduction in deprivation and death. You trade a negligible bit of extra crime in the streets for a massive reduction in crime by cops and/or in prisons. You get a miniscule dash of extra cynicism in the populace, but carve vast chunks of cynicism and contempt within the constabulary.

Seems an acceptable price to pay in order to have acceptable cops and acceptable standards.

Start with the first ever Doctor Who. Make sure you take a break between episodes to get the cliffhanger effect. There's audios of all missing episodes. Include all of the Big Finish stories for the Eighth Doctor and the Pertwee Radio Episodes, plus the first three Stranger and Miss Brown for the missing season, plus the Auton trilogy, plus the PROBE series.

If you are still alive after all that, I suggest you follow that up with both Ivor the Engine series, Sapphire and Steel (TV and Big Finish), The Tomorrow People (ITV and Big Finish, plus maybe the latest reinvention of it, but not the Nickelodeon one) and The Avengers (British 1960s spy-fi).

To have a good Internet, you need early-spec IPv6 or TUBA, pipe-balanced network neutrality, and fully secured DNS and routing. And the complete elimination of Windows.

Books no longer exist, due to the prevalence of Kindle-style devices, so option 1 only applies to us geriatrics.

Good movies... there are two or three of those, I suppose.

Video game - Elite: Dangerous and Kerbal Space Program are brilliant but redirecting the display to something you can settle down with isn't easy.

The unknown effect involves the mysterious overlords.

Seriously, they need to spy on employees to figure out that attention spans are finite, fatigue limits effectiveness and water cooler chat revitalizes the mind? Perhaps espionage will also help directors discover that sick leave reduces illness. It may be bloody obvious to even those of us who are borderline human, but apparently it will take hidden cameras and infrared imaging for senior management to figure it out.

If you look at the fate of HOTOL, which bears a striking resemblance of the fate of the Avro Arrow, and the total lack of recent development on the Australian hypersonic engine, you get the definite impression that someone isn't keen on competition in the supersonic/hypersonic military arena.

(Yeah, I know HOTOL wasn't designed to be military, but if the engine design had been finished then those engines would have been used in military aircraft, and HOTOL would certainly have been used to put up spy satellites independently of the ESA or NASA.)

The US attempted to build a version of the British "Grand Slam" bomb. Fixing some of the aerodynamic issues and making assorted other "improvements", they ended up with a 44,000 lb. conventional unguided bomb. The Tallboy/Grand Slam series of bombs worked on a very simple principle - you send a gigantic shockwave through the ground as a result of an impact very close to mach 1, and a second shockwave through the ground as a result of a shaped charge.

This type of bomb destroys pretty much anything at the boundary between two different materials. So if you dropped one of these bombs on a reinforced concrete bunker, you'd pulverize the inside of the bunker without having to actually punch a hole right the way through. They were superb at taking out dams, far better than the bouncing bomb (Barnes Wallis designed both), because you didn't have to hit the dam at all. The interface between dam and valley was a weakpoint that, if shredded, would achieve exactly the same effect the bouncing bomb did - far more reliably and without the vulnerability.

The British version worked brilliantly. If, by "brilliantly", you mean removing all the armour, defences and bomb bay doors from a Lancaster bomber. Ok, to be fair, it did exactly what was intended. It destroyed ships, dams and factories in a way that no bomb before could.

So, what did the US version do?

What it should have done is make a mess of bunkers with 22' of reinforced concrete or less, and severely disrupt heavier bunkers than that.

What it actually did was nothing. The B-52 carrying the prototype managed to get to the end of the runway before running out of fuel.

What it did next was also nothing. The US abandoned all further work on it, as tactical nuclear weapons would have had more punch at a lighter weight.

Would it have changed warfare? It might have reduced the number of survivors from Tora Bora by a small amount, but the US had gas/incindiary bombs and air pressure bombs that could reach into the deepest caves there. An earthquake bomb might have reduced the time needed, but that's it. It might also have changed the Iraq invasion. A bomb that could pulverize deep bunkers would have made it much harder for neocons to claim WMDs were being stored in such bunkers. If you can target them directly, conventionally and reliably, your obvious next question is to ask where these bunkers are. Since US intelligence knew of no such bunkers, it would have had no positions to give.

Would it change the dynamics with Iran? The Iranians have placed their nuclear technology in bunkers with walls too thick for most conventional bombs and smaller tactical nukes. The concrete also uses a recipe that was, when last demonstrated in a technology exhibition in the US, around a hundred times stronger than the reinforced concrete used by the US military. However, strength doesn't matter here. The whole idea of sending a shockwave is that a hard, consistent medium delivers the shockwave that much better to the other side. And modern explosives are rather better than torpex. Having said that, there is still no US bomber capable of carrying such a weapon and there's no guarantee such a bomb would do anything worthwhile.

The next US project was also a variant of a Barnes Wallis design. They built a variant of the bouncing bomb. Originally, the bomb was never intended to attack things like dams, it was intended to lift ships out of the water. Military ships, especially, are not self-supporting structures. Lifted, even briefly and by a small amount, would be sufficient to break the back of a ship. Even if that didn't work, placing a bomb directly under a ship would likely crack the hull anyway. It would then sink almost immediately. Sinking at that speed would also pretty much guarantee no survivors. Barnes Wallis was incredibly sensitive to human cost, but his military inventions (only a small fraction of all the work he actually did) were designed to perform a specific task extremely well.

In this case, he was off by a bit. The bouncing bomb was used against a few ships but their frailty and the defenders' capabilities meant they never did anything at sea. On land, we all know the story there. An expensive story, to be sure, but proof of the design nonetheless.

The US decided the theory was sound enough that they wanted a version to play with. They used much better construction techniques, higher revs on the barrel and a bigger explosive. They fitted up an aircraft with a prototype and tested it out. The bomb ricocheted off the water and struck the bomber, blowing it out of the sky. No further prototypes were developed.

Would it have changed the course of warfare? A bouncing bomb that worked at sea would have rendered virtually all navies obsolete. Argentinian aircraft certainly got close enough to British ships to be able to use it, for example. They regularly dropped bombs on the Royal Navy vessels there, but the bombs had timer fuses and the hulls were thin. As a result, a few of those bombs passed through the ships and exploded at a safe depth. A bouncing bomb would have changed the story completely. They'd have been able to sink far more ships, with far fewer survivors. Possibly including the Ark Royal. Without carriers, the British would not have been able to retake the islands (a big reason why Argentinian noise right now, when Britain has no carriers at all, is troubling).

There really hasn't been any other significant battle involving a navy under serious air assault, so there has been no other conflict (so far) in which the vulnerability of ships to a working version of such a weapon would have mattered.

Ships have proven themselves far more vulnerable to navigational errors (the British and US have both lost ships to captains pitting their destroyers against charted reefs) and to commando attacks (the British sent a commando team with limpet mines against the Germans, the French sent a commando team with some sort of sticky bomb against the Rainbow Warrior, and some bunch of fanatics did EXACTLY THE SAME THING against the USS Cole). Since commandos are cheap and expendable, whereas bouncing bombs are expensive and expendable, it's no great surprise that every military and paramilitary group on the planet has adopted this approach. I don't think it's acceptable outside of a declared war, but the total action taken against France (none) shows that I'm in a minority of 1.

Doesn't matter if everything is an algorithm. You aren't patenting an algorithm when you patent a real invention. If I patented a machine that did X and then built a hundred machines off that patent, not a single one of those machines would share the same algorithm as the machine in the patent, nor would any two share the same algorithm. There would be common elements but that is it.

If someone else designed a machine that did X, in a fundamentally different way, that would have yet another algorithm, where there would be even fewer elements in common with anything I'd done.

If I design an algorithm to do X, all implementations will be precisely that algorithm and no other.

If someone else designed an algorithm to do X, no matter how hard they tried to make it fundamentally different, it would be provably identical to mine. It can be nothing else.

Do you now see why your argument simply doesn't hold up?

Software patents are not recognized in much of the world. Interestingly, said parts of the world are currently leading the US in just about every aspect of software development. Why would anyone want to continue a model that is a proven failure?

There is nothing that software can do that a physical implementation of the model cannot do. See Turing for details.

No, not all inventions can be described in the form of mathematical algorithms. Only computable ones are reducible to such a form and only computable problems with a unique solution will reduce to the -same- mathematical algorithms.

To use the example of an elevator, if you vary the shape, mass, composition, dimensions, enclosure, counterweights, or medium travelled through, you have changed the system of equations. Thus, an elevator in the abstract cannot be reduced to a mathematical description, only a specific elevator in a specific context can.

Where is the inventor? The algorithm already existed, and had done so a few milliseconds after the Big Bang. That's very much prior art.

All anyone does, when they play with mathematical systems, is record the properties the system already had. The observer has added nothing and has invented nothing.

I can see certain merits to copyrighting a specific implementation, and expecting trivial variants to be covered. That is no different from writing a book and having rights over translations.

But a patent goes beyond a specific implementation and restricts ALL algorithms that are functionally equivalent. Patents are not supposed to ban all competition, just unfair competition.

I don't see how that's a problem. I don't even see how that's a surprise, given that Turing and von Neumann were saying the same thing before there was a computer industry and back when biotech meant experiments with mould.

You can patent an elevator because you invented it. You cannot patent gravity because you didn't.

Everything that ever was, is or ever will be, in mathematics, always has been and always will be. Nothing in mathematics is invented, only discovered. (You cannot patent Antarctica, either.)

You can patent an elevator because it isn't obvious. You cannot patent a spring because it is.

Everything in mathematics is ultimately obvious. See "Spiked Maths" for details. Or, if you prefer, consider the fact that everything is built from statements already proven to reduce to fundamental axioms. Everything in mathematics is ultimately true, though not necessarily at the same time. There is no innovation, no creation. Nothing has been added. All you have done is taken two truths and constructed a composite truth. You can add whatever physical theory you like to gravity, you will never construct an elevator.

You can patent an elevator because there are multiple solutions to the same problem. You cannot patent sodium chloride because there is only one chemical that is sodium chloride, it is unique.

Any two mathematical statements which yield identical results (which implies both operate over the same domain and range) are provably identical. Thus, there is a unique solution to a given problem.

You can patent an elevator because it is man-made, artificial. You cannot patent a star because it is not.

Ok, this is my one controversial statement. However, those who disagree are wrong, so I don't care. Mathematics is natural. It exists in the same form throughout the universe. If multiple universes exist, mathematics will be the same in all of them. Including the ones in which no life can exist to make use of it. There are bits of mathematics that cannot coexist, ensuring it cannot be both complete and correct (blame Godel), but there's lots in the natural world like that. That's normal for the natural world.