Thanks for the pointer! I doubt I'll find my name there. Also, I said the 3X3 display wall panel may have sparked an interest in combining speech research and Jeopardy (perhaps, in an unconscious way?) -- but Watson itself is a much broader system. I wanted to work on such systems then, and talked a bit about "wouldn't it be nice if..." like with a display wall connected to a supercomputer for solving tough problems, but I said nothing detailed as to how it would really work, beyond creating a simple system with a Linux server where you could say things like, "put stocks on panel 3" or something like that. I don't even remember in detail what pattern of utterances I set it up to respond to (it was not very complex). So, my contribution to Watson itself technically -- probably near zilch. It's just the display wall Jeopardy connection I wonder about. But now that you raise the issue, aspects of using an AI to help solve problems was part of that idea. But, sci-fi writers like Isaac Asimov with Multivac or his robot stories have been taking about that for decades...

As for credit for being a spark, do people, say, always even remember some book they read years ago where an idea began to seep into their mind? How do you even quantify a degree of contribution? When I asked Ted Nelson (when he visited IBM once) about whether "The Skills of Xandu" short story by Theodore Sturgeon inspired his work, he thanked me said he had been looking for the story and he claimed to not even be able to remember the story's name! :-) Here is an audio version of that story, which is about a wearable nanotech computers supporting humans wirelessly sharing their knowledge and skills -- hot prescient stuff for the early 1950s:
https://archive.org/details/pr...

BTW, I gave a copy of that story to my supervisor at IBM Research, a master inventor with 50 patents to his name. He finally looked at it a while after I left, and thanked me, and said it was the story that got him interested in materials research based on its nanotech angle! But he had long forgotten it. I can wonder how many other inventors that story has inspired? I don't know what inspired it though. Maybe Memex? :-)
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

I've been tangentially around several development like WordNet (George Miller), "Mind Children" (Hans Moravec, who read my senior thesis written under Geoge about self-replicating robots as he was working on the book), Marshall Brain's early career (where he probably saw a simulation I made of self-replicating robots, and I wonder if that contributed to his later concern with "Manna"), and at IBM Research as mentioned with Jeopardy and Watson. Possibly some others (like my possibly talking with David Gelernter about triples I was enamored of, and him saying tuples were more general, at SUNY Stony Brook), my talking at Princeton about robotics and stores (Jeff Bezos was the year after me), my senior thesis which presaged "Evolutionary psychology" but I doubt that sparked much as not many people read it and that field was already developing in parallel. as I can see now. In no case would I claim to be clearly the driving force behind any of these accomplishments which are full of a lot of hard and inventive work. As with Watson, it's possible I was just a tangential spark to some of these projects to some degree -- or not! It is also quite possible that I ended up hanging around people like Hans Moravec because we already were thinking along similar lines. Also, sometime ideas seem just "in the air" for whatever reason. Or ideas come to people by other paths, often multiple times before we even notice them. (It's said in direct mail as a rule of thumb you need to send the same advertising letter three times before people pay attention to it.) And certainly, in all cases, a lot of sparks went the other way, to me. :-) For example, I worked on this essay in part because Marshall Brain in one of is essays talks about how a "jobless recovery" could be a sign of impending wide-spread automation.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/beyo...

As another case of parallel creation, I won "highest honors" in a regional science fair for a robot that looked like R2D2 *before* Star Wars came out. R2D2 though must have been made around the same time as I made my robot. Likely the relationship is that somehow we both had seen the same vacuum cleaner (which I used as the body) and also both had seen "Silent Running". Or it was just coincidence. Although it bugged me a bit that people thought I was copying R2D2 in later years and versions. :-) I actually did add a light-controlled sound system that sounded like him in a later version though (the one pictured on my site). So, certainly sparks went to me from that film -- as, even greater, from Silent Running.

And really, it is only sometime decades later when one thinks about some connections or sparks or their possible results.

I've always liked connecting up ideas and even connecting up people to each other over some common interest. It is not without its downside. I remember being around CMU and having a grad student come to me after I had said Matthew Mason's brilliant "Uncertainty Reducing Operations" idea (brilliant) about robotic grasping (move the hand in a swipe so the part is likely at the edge of a box) could be applied to better understanding biological processes like protein synthesis. The grad student told me essentially I should not be saying interdisciplinary or speculative stuff like that if I wanted to be in the graduate program there. That was a huge shock to me, to hear someone say something like that around a research labs. That was long before someone else (James P. Hogan) suggested I read "Disciplined Minds" to better understand academia and grad school.

More on me and WordNet for example, where George had also told me he was making WordNet in part to show that having a network of concepts was not enough by itself for AI which many researchers seemed to believe then and was something I implicitly believed then):
https://groups.google.com/foru...
"My 1985 UG senior thesis work ("Why Intelligence: Object, Evolution, Stability and Model") with him may have very slightly help inspired Wordnet and so even more indirectly Simpli and Google AdSense: in the sense of my enthusiastically talking to him a lot about networks of concepts for AI I wanted to put on a hard disk for a Commodore PET using Pointrel triads. That hard disk had eaten a document George was writing in his office on a deadline so he let me have it in the lab to play with (rather than throw it out) -- that file incident was the probably the only time I heard him swear. :-) Of course, the actual idea and all the hard work and the psycholinguistic design behind WordNet is all his. ... Being around young people can be inspiring in many ways that are not "plagiarism". Young people bring a hopefulness which can be infectious -- even if in retrospect my plan to build a human level AI using a Commodore PET and an unreliable 10MB harddisk was absurd. George's brilliance lay in maybe later thinking, "What AI-ish thing can I build with all I know and the tools at hand?" He may well have done WordNet whether he had met me in my enthusiastic unreasonableness or not. Still, it is often the annoying seemingly ignorant questions of youth that make us old geezers think. :-)"

But, you're probably not going to find my name on any WordNet stuff. In our society, credit can link to income though, so there is always reason to seek it (at least, until we get a basic income). Sometimes I get a mention (even if hyphenated :-) when I'm more obviously involved in something:
http://www.research.ibm.com/pe...

Yeah, and I got on a software patent. :-( Frowny face as I don't like software patents.
http://www.google.com/patents/...

Such is life. I'm glad I got (potentially) a chance to contribute, no matter how tangential. Anyway, I hope maybe I've helped the Slashdot community more than hurt it (too many links and long posts), in terms of helping connect up some ideas about technology and society,

And then of course, there are the software programs and essays, and whatever tangential impacts they may have or not have...

Anyway, by now you probably think I'm a loony. :-) Might be right. :-)

Or maybe some muse works sometimes works through me? :-) As no doubt through us all at times...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"The following morning, though, two visitors come to Steven's home, revealing that they are doctors from a mental clinic. They tell Steven that Sarah is an escaped psychiatric patient from their asylum who has multiple personality disorder. They find the whole "muse" idea hilarious. When they try to find Sarah to take her back, they discover that she has escaped."

But whatever our society can say about prizing creativity, for the most part, it doesn't (or at least, it generally rewards others):
https://johntaylorgatto.wordpr...
"Try to see that an intricately subordinated industrial/commercial system has only limited use for hundreds of millions of self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. ... Unless you do "creative" work the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be safely tolerated by a centralized command system."

For example, notice the "hard" part of getting that prototype built at IBM research was things like getting laptop locks for laptops about to be destroyed anyway. :-) Another "hard" thing I did at IBM Research was go through the "proper" process to get Python approved for use in the lab. I was a bit embarrassed when one of the lawyers wrote Guido to ask if he had actually written it .:-) But it got approved eventually.

Although "success" is more than creativity. It's hard work, connections, resources, luck, and so on. And that also shows in big companies like Microsoft or Google buying whatever successful companies they see, and letting all the other experiments just fade away as someone else's cost...

Related, by Calvin Coolidge:
http://www.goodreads.com/quote...
"Nothing in the world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan "Press On!" has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race."

Well, that may be a bit optimistic in some ways. :-) I now understand why the big names we know in technology, the ones in the news often like Gates or Zuckerberg or Ballmer or Scully and so on, were for the most part good, but not great technologists if they were technologists at all, but were excellent at starting or running tech companies, which is pretty much unrelated to actually doing invention or design of any technical sort. Jobs vs. Wozniak is another example, although at least Jobs has a sense of style. Most of them also started with a leg up in various ways (some combination of good health, fancy education up to undergrad, family money, etc.).

And they don't have to actually invent anything as long as they can buy it or just take the idea somehow if not patented (or even if it is) and use it. Around where I live now, a guy invented the railroad airbrake, but the story goes he showed it to a railroad magnate who just took the idea and ran with it (it was not patented). While one might see that as an argument for patents, alternatively, if we had a "basic income", credit in that sense might not be such a big deal... Just think of all the lives that brake concept saved by preventing so many train wrecks...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the "cultural inheritance of society" as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "

And often the problem is they don;t get the whole really big idea! See Alan Kay's talk about the Xerox ARC research for example/ He's not lamenting not getting more recognition. He's lamenting that not enough was taken! :-)
"Founder School Session: The Future Doesn't Have to Be Incremental"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Or by my wife on an open source project I've helped her with
"Steal These Ideas"
http://www.storycoloredglasses...

Also, the older I get, and the more I know, and the more I reflect on the sci-fi and various technical books I was swimming in in my teen years, the more I realize that the building blocks for so many "ideas" I've "had" were supplied by past generations... Even if I may put some of them together in new ways. Or spent my life trying to implement some of them, like Huey, Dewey, and Louie from Silent Running, or the software implied by the crystal belts in the Skills of Xanadu, or the self-replicating space habitat from "The Two Faces of Tomorrow" and so on.... When I was a kid, I rarely paid attention to the author's name on a story, and often times did not even pay attention to the title...

Anyway, now that I'm getting older, it seems like those years may be mostly behind me... Like George in his last decades, he just took that one idea, WordNet, and put years and years of hard work into it, to make it succeed. And a big part of that was convincing Princeton University to let him set it free legally. Wherever you are now, thanks for setting a good example about that, George! :-)

Of course, my obsession with triples for storing information is probably is not as good a choice as WordNet was. :-) Older stuff (pre RDF, going back to the 1980s):
http://pointrel.sourceforge.ne...

But even that triple store idea may have come (not sure in the mists of time) by maybe thumbing through William Kent's "Data and Reality" for a bit while visiting an library at IBM San Jose when I was a teenager? So, William Kent would deserve some WordNet credit too, assuming I did?

Victor Serebriakoff's book "Brain" was influential, "Steps to an Ecology of Mind" by Gregory Bateson. "The Human Use of Human Beings" by Norbert Weiner. All these and many more were influential on me. Hard to say where I got one mental building block or another. How much do you pay attention to "sources" when you are a teen soaking up everything form everywhere?

A funny/ironic thing is, I remember once telling George about how I wanted to work on a problem before reading what others had to say about it so my "creativity" was not "contaminated" by their approach or solutions. I still think that is a good idea, for a time. But what I failed to realize, is how much my own creativity or problem solving strategies were based on learning so many strategies from reading about or seeing others wrestle with various problems. And I was also selling my own creativity short, by assuming that if I tried some approach and it did not work, or even if it did, that I might not think of another approach anyway. "Standing on the shoulders of giants" is so often true. As is never really noticing or quite recalling where some spark years ago came from...

My wife likes to say that big idea are like whales. If you are lucky, you get to swim with them for a time. But eventually they swim off on their own, leaving you behind. Sigh.

And of course, there have no doubt been many, many sparks in my own life, most of which I did not notice at the time. I remember, in the 1980s the (Indian) girlfriend of my roommate saying I needed to get more color in my diet. And wow, she was right :-) But I only started paying attention to that idea a years ago for other reasons, and then remembered and better understood her words....
"What Color Is Your Diet?"
http://www.amazon.com/What-Col...

That's just one example form my own life. No doubt there are many, many more. Most of which I might not even be able to remember, including as I was not paying attention to sources at the time, just "ideas". :-)

Anyway, I hope I did not overstated the case too much for my involvement in some things I was tangentially around.

Sorry... I was going for the joke and didn't pitch it very well. My actual views are more like yours.

As for the reality of the subject matter, I would borrow the concept of "probably approximately correct" from machine learning, and give it a 90-95% chance of being ~80% correct. (The 80% is lower to allow room for some more big discoveries like inflation.)

Unfortunately, people will be (hopefully) studying this for thousands of years on top of the <100 we have so far, and none of us will live to see how it turns out in the long term.

And I'm guessing that the publishers who use region codes cry like babies whenever governments impose artificial barriers to free trade.

I always heard it as: "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me."

And of course, the word of choice usually wasn't "fool".

(Is this really a regional saying?)

Or maybe it would be an idea to not buy from the cheapest seller

What a great moral to the story! "Quit price-shopping, assholes - Pay full retail, or we... will... fuck you!"

Glad to see people feel just peach about that.

Simple, really:

Ubisoft just taught another generation of paying customers that piracy provides a superior product, regardless of price.

Congrats, Ubi! We haven't had a good DRM fuckup like this in a while - Without all your hard work, people might eventually forget how much it (and you) sucks. Keep up the good work!

"(AC:) There's always someone who wants more than safety."

And how in practice are you going to deter someone or defend yourself from someone "who want's more safety" (or even know such a person exists and is out to make trouble for you) unless you are part of a community who are all looking out for each other?

Of course, you also have to be willing to listen and pay attention in that case. Example:
"Hoekstra on Underwear Bomber: "We Missed Him at Every Step""
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/po...
"In November the suspect's father went to the US Embassy in Abuja, the Nigerian capital, to warn that his son was being radicalized in Yemen."

Still, I have to agree that the challenge of what to do about mentally ill people or politically ill countries, when they become violent, is a challenging one for any community.

Related movie:
"The Day the Earth Stood Still"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
"Klaatu warns the professor that the people of the other planets have become concerned for their safety after humans developed atomic power."

Or, as Einstein said: "The release of atomic power has changed everything except our way of thinking ... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker. (1945)"

Although, in an age where even watches have enough CPU power to do the calculations that produced the original atomic bombs, retreating from the problem gets a little more complicated...

As said by someone who studied primitive technology, when asked why he did not just go off to live by himself in the woods, "It takes a village of skilled people to live well int the wilderness" (or something to that effect).

Yeah, so most hippies were naive and also lacking technical skills and resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...

"Free love" is another "Hippy" ideal which did not work out too well either in most cases for various all-too-human reasons. Even when one rejects marriage, rejecting "relationships" is a completely different issue.

But, that the mistakes of many hippies do not prove anything about the general issue of decentralization for resiliency.

I agree with you that "equity" though is a big issue in any emerging social system. That is something that gave me pause long ago, as I write about here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/sunr...
"Basically, this all made me realized there is a difference between being an "employee" (even an employee-owner) with revokable rights or loseable equity, and being a "citizen" with irrevokable rights."

Still, the "Co-housing" movement has been addressing some of these concerns as far as US cultural expectations.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

A successful US co-housing example:
http://ecovillageithaca.org/
"EcoVillage at Ithaca is part of a global movement of people seeking to create positive solutions to the social, environmental and economic crises our planet faces. Since 1991 we have developed an award-winning ecovillage that invites you to live, learn and grow. Our mission is to promote experiential learning about ways of meeting human needs for shelter, food, energy, livelihood and social connectedness that are aligned with the long-term health and viability of Earth and all its inhabitants."

Healthy communities have rules and norms and stories that help manage them. Humans have been living in mostly independent tribal situations for hundreds of thousands of years. It is not like it can't be done, if you are willing to make certain sacrifices. The question is, how could we or should we do it now, with more technical and social knowledge?

Also, some random collection of strangers in the modern day does not have the social cohesion of an extended family or tribe from centuries ago who have known each other from birth. A random collection of strangers, sharing little more initially than some ideal, is probably going to need more formal structure and more formal processes. Also, millennia ago, there was not such a possibility of a huge rich/poor divide in such communities as regards outside work, where one person makes minimum wage at a job cooking or doing child care while another member of the community makes 100X that as a lawyer or a doctor -- or maybe a plumber in some areas these days. :-)

See also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...
"Sahlins gathered the data from these studies and used it to support a comprehensive argument that states that hunter-gatherers did not suffer from deprivation, but instead lived in a society in which "all the peopleâ(TM)s wants are easily satisfied.""

However, much of my own thinking about this came from an interest in space settlements... This is an issue anybody creating space habitats, moon bases, Mars bases, or whatever needs to think about.

Another aspect of that was figuring out how to create communities that could survive nuclear war and economic collapse. My concern about surviving war might be a bit easier to understand when you consider that this is what my Mother's home town looked like after WWII:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...

For her, as a young teen at the time, such destruction came apparently out of the blue, losing her home to fire during the initial invasion (actually, accidentally from Dutch defenders she said, but I wonder about that).

Solar sail can achieve 25% light speed, according to NASA, and Alpha Centauri is 4 light years away.

You want a manned mission (with robots doing all the actual work) to determine if the conventional wisdom that a manned mission to the outer planets is physically impossible is correct. Even if the pilot dies, you learn the furthest a manned mission can reach. There's seven billion people, you can afford to expend one or two. Ideally, they'd be volunteers and there'll be no shortage of them, but if you're concerned about valuable life, send members of the Tea Party.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
"Anders Hejlsberg (born December 1960)[2] is a prominent Danish software engineer who co-designed several popular and commercially successful programming languages and development tools. He was the original author of Turbo Pascal and the chief architect of Delphi. He currently works for Microsoft as the lead architect of C#[1] and core developer on TypeScript."

I would have used dot net and C# alone for that reason based on liking Delphi -- except that the main line of those has long been proprietary and single platform compared to other language options which are free and/or multi-platform.

I'd be curious if you have by any chance tried C# and what you thought of it in comparison to Delphi?

What about the non-criminals who want to know where the police are so they can get some help from them? Or what about the non-criminals who want to know when police officers are blocking a side of the road, or dealing with a traffic situation? If they really don't want to be bothered, they should just drive unmarked cars, make their phone numbers unlisted, and institute some kind of paywall for their official web sites.

Instead of removing information from Waze, they should just be adding information to it with their own api. They could transmit the gps location of their marked cars in real-time (like bus systems now do with the nextbus api). When responding to a call, they should just send the person who called a real-time update of their estimated arrival. And when there is a bank robbery, they should just flood the Waze api with virtual police officers everywhere.

Not only that, but if the police could try to crowdsource the effort of looking for bank robbers, child abductors, or the obvious-looking drunk drivers, through Waze instead of overburdening the outdated the 911 system, that would help them prioritize and weed out most of the false positives in real-time.

True, and that bit about Iraqis was indeed war propaganda used to justify US violence.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
"The Nayirah testimony was a testimony given before the non-governmental Congressional Human Rights Caucus on October 10, 1990 by a woman who provided only her first name, Nayirah. The testimony was widely publicized, and was cited numerous times by United States senators and the American president in their rationale to back Kuwait in the Gulf War. In 1992, it was revealed that Nayirah's last name was al-Sabah ... and that she was the daughter of Saud Al-Sabah, the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. Furthermore, it was revealed that her testimony was organized as part of the Citizens for a Free Kuwait public relations campaign which was run by Hill & Knowlton for the Kuwaiti government. Following this, al-Sabah's testimony has come to be regarded as a classic example of modern atrocity propaganda."

Except Las Casa was also Spanish, so presumably "on the same side"as Columbus (or at least his funders):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B...
"Bartolome de las Casas, O.P. (c. 1484[1] -- 18 July 1566) was a 16th-century Spanish historian, social reformer and Dominican friar. He became the first resident Bishop of Chiapas, and the first officially appointed "Protector of the Indians". His extensive writings, the most famous being A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies and Historia de Las Indias, chronicle the first decades of colonization of the West Indies and focus particularly on the atrocities committed by the colonizers against the indigenous peoples.[2] Arriving as one of the first European settlers in the Americas, he participated in, and was eventually compelled to oppose, the atrocities committed against the Native Americans by the Spanish colonists. In 1515, he reformed his views, gave up his Indian slaves and encomienda, and advocated, before King Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, on behalf of rights for the natives."

So, it is perhaps more like Pat Tillman, who left a lucrative contract with the NFL to sign up to invade Iraq, and who conveniently died from "friendly fire" before a planned meeting with Noam Chomsky over his emerging doubts?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"Patrick Daniel "Pat" Tillman (November 6, 1976-- April 22, 2004) was an American football player who left his professional career and enlisted in the United States Army in June 2002 in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. His service in Iraq and Afghanistan, and subsequent death, were the subject of much media attention.[1] ... Despite his fame, Tillman did not want to be used for propaganda purposes. He spoke to friends about his opposition to President Bush and the Iraq war, and he had made an appointment with notable government critic Noam Chomsky for after his return from the military. The destruction of evidence linked to Tillman's death, including his personal journal, led his mother to speculate that he was murdered.[31] General Wesley Clark agreed that it was "very possible". ..."

More on that:
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2...
"An NFL football star who enlisted in the Army in May 2002, he apparently became disenchanted with the conduct of the war. He not only did not support President Bush for reelection, but encouraged others to vote for John Kerry. According to his mother, a friend of his had arranged for him to meet with Noam Chomsky, professor emeritus from MIT and one of our nationâ(TM)s most respected public intellectuals, who, no doubt, could have launched him into prominent orbit as an outspoken opponent of the war, had he been so inclined."

But read for yourself what Columbus himself wrote in his log.

Or read what an otherwise admiring Columbus biographer says, quoted in here:
http://www.american-buddha.com...
"In his quest for gold, Columbus, seeing bits of gold among the Indians, concluded that there were huge amounts of it. He ordered the natives to find a certain amount of gold within a certain period of time. And if they did not meet their quota, their arms were hacked off. The others were to learn from this and deliver the gold. Samuel Eliot Morison, the Harvard historian who was Columbus' admiring biographer, acknowledged this. He wrote: "Whoever thought up this ghastly system, Columbus was responsible for it, as the only means of producing gold for exportâ¦Those who fled to the mountains were hunted with hounds, and of those who escaped, starvation and disease took toll, while thousands of the poor creatures in desperation took cassava poison to end their miseries. So the policy and acts of Columbus for which he alone was responsible began the depopulation of the terrestrial paradise that was Hispaniola in 1492. Of the original natives, estimated by a modern ethnologist at 300,000 in number, one-third were killed off between 1494 and 1496. By 1508, an enumeration showed only 60,000 aliveâ¦in 1548 Oviedo [Morison is referring to Fernandez de Oviedo, the official Spanish historian of the conquest] doubted whether 500 Indians remained."

But you're right that it can be hard to sort this sort of stuff out.

They better be better plans than the last two times the USA tried it and got its butt kicked (1175, 1812). :-) Or is it six times the USA has invaded?
http://mentalfloss.com/article...

Of course, if the USA really has to invade Canada, like say, if lots more oil is discovered there and the USA political system need to redirect who gets the profits from it, or if Canada experiments with a "basic income" again and the USA fears "contagion", then everyone will be screaming if there are no plans. :-) See also Chomsky on:
"The Threat of a Good Example"
http://www.chomsky.info/books/...
"No country is exempt from U.S. intervention, no matter how unimportant. In fact, it's the weakest, poorest countries that often arouse the greatest hysteria. ... As far as American business is concerned, Nicaragua could disappear and nobody would notice. The same is true of El Salvador. But both have been subjected to murderous assaults by the US, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and many billions of dollars. There's a reason for that. The weaker and poorer a country is, the more dangerous it is as an example. If a tiny, poor country like Grenada can succeed in bringing about a better life for its people, some other place that has more resources will ask, "why not us?" ... "

I guess Canada is safe for now because it is not weak and poor?

It's a no win situation making such plans or not if your job is to consider every eventuality.

Still, sometimes the best way to win is not to play. This was written by a Marine Major General and two-time Congressional Medal of Honor winner, Smedley Butler:
http://www.warisaracket.org/ra...
"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of 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 masses.
    I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a nation comes over here to fight, then we'll fight. The trouble with America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
    I wouldn't go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket."

Consider, for example, the Strv 103 tank that Sweden designed. They are designed for home defense on Sweden's mountainous terrain, not going abroad.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"It was known for its unconventional turretless design, with a fixed gun traversed by engaging the tracks and elevated by adjusting the hull suspension. ... The Strv 103 was designed and manufactured in Sweden. It was developed in the 1950s and was the first main battle tank to use a turbine engine. The result was a very low-profile design with an emphasis on defence and heightened crew protection level. ..."

That design reflects Major General Butler's point.

Although they have since gone more conventional in their designs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

The really laughable thing about all these plans is that, as was said in "Brittle Power" (or maybe "Energy, Vulnerability, and War"), quoting from memory from 1980s books, "a troop of boy scouts could shut down the USA's vital energy infrastructure" given the fragility of oil pipelines where every segment is essentially a single point of failure. If you want real defense, then you decentralize yoru infrastructure and make it resilient. But that would cut into the centralization of profits, so the USA remains highly vulnerable, and the only ways to minimize that vulnerability a tiny bit while still keeping the money flowing to the top is to make it more into a police state. According to Amory Lovins IIRC, just two years of the cost of the 1980s US Persian Gulf Deployment Force spent on energy efficiency including home insulation would have meant the USA no longer needed to import any foreign oil. But instead, for decades, we keep paying to defend those oil supply routes.

I discuss such issues here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/reco...
"Much current US military doctrine is based around unilateral security ("I'm safe because you are nervous") and extrinsic security ("I'm safe despite long supply lines because I have a bunch of soldiers to defend them"), which both lead to expensive arms races. We need as a society to move to other paradigms like Morton Deutsch's mutual security ("We're all looking out for each other's safety") and Amory Lovin's intrinsic security ("Our redundant decentralized local systems can take a lot of pounding whether from storm, earthquake, or bombs and would still would keep working"). "

An approach to creating solutions is suggested by me here:
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
"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."

Just imagine what the three or so trillion US dollars (or more) incurred for the US Iraq war could have done if spent on, say, fusion energy research or renewables or OSCOMAK. We are getting cheap solar panels anyway, but little thanks to that kind of highly focused massive investment that could have given us them decades earlier and spared the world (including US military families) a lot of suffering.

Meanwhile, after all those trillions of dollars, including more than enough spent on nuclear weapons to bulldoze and rebuild every house in the USA *twice*, the USA essentially remains devastatingly vulnerable because of its centralized and "just in time" infrastructure which is not designed to cope with major disasters. Even the US medical system is not scaled for pandemics, but just the most profit for the fewest MDs, as I mention here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
"Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full. Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources."

Plan to invade Canada if we must. Sounds like fun to do the plan for anyone who studies military issues. But, for goodness sake, let's make some real useful plans we *want* to put into action in a democracy, like stopping importing foreign oil, or scaling the medical system for plagues, or putting in place distributed renewables, or inventing hot and cold fusion, or ensuring 3D printers are in every Post Office and library and not just the US space station, or raising a capable healthy well-fed well-informed cooperative next generation ready to take on unexpected threats -- like zombie hoards invading the USA from Canada because they want our brains (after we've gained some). :-)

That's the problem with government conspiracies.

They don't make it into the mainstream media until the government declassifies it, or until someone is prepared to become a traitor and defect to Russia to lend some credence to the story.

No big surprise. The military are willing to invest what it takes for what they need. Military entities are, by necessity, pitifully naive when it comes to anything useful, but once they specify what they think they want, they don't shirk at the cost, they get the job done. A pointless job, perhaps, but nonetheless a completed job.

The corporate sector wants money. Things don't ever have to get done, the interest on monies paid is good enough and there hasn't been meaningful competition in living memory. Because one size never fits all, it's not clear competition is even what you want. Economic theory says it isn't.

The only other sector, as I have said many times before, that is remotely in the space race is the hobbyist/open source community. In other words, the background behind virtually all the X-Prize contestants, the background behind the modern waverider era, the background that the next generation of space enthusiasts will come from (Kerbel Space Program and Elite: Dangerous will have a similar effect on the next generation of scientists and engineers as Star Trek the old series and Doctor Who did in the 1960s, except this time it's hands-on).

I never thought the private sector would do bugger all, it's not in their blood. They're incapable of innovation on this kind of scale. It's not clear they're capable of innovation at all, all the major progress is bought or stolen from researchers and inventors.

No, with civilian government essentially walking away, there's only two players in the field and whilst the hobbyists might be able to crowdsource a launch technology, it'll be a long time before they get to space themselves. The military won't get there at all, nobody to fight, so the hobbyists will still be first with manned space missions, but it's going to take 40-50 years at best.

We have the technology today to get a manned mission to Alpha Centauri and back. It would take 15-20 years for the journey and the probability of survival is poor, but we could do it. By my calculations, it would take 12 years to build the components and assemble them in space. Only a little longer than it took for America to get the means to go to the moon and back. We could actually have hand-held camera photos taken in another solar system and chunks of rocky debris from the asteroid belt there back on Earth before Mars One launches its first rocket AND before crowdfunded space missions break the atmosphere.

All it takes is putting personal egos and right wing politics on the shelf, locking the cupboard and then lowering it into an abandoned mineshaft, which should then be sealed with concrete.