We homeschool/unschool -- however, at great expense in terms of professional opportunity cost. As others have pointed out to echo your point, there is a big difference between "schooling" and "education". This is true even in the very "best" school districts which can be terribly oppressive places for children whose interests are not mostly academic or, in some cases, artsy and who don't plan to go to a top college and so would bring down the schools college acceptance scores. This can include hands-on practically-oriented children or wide-ranging people-oriented children or free-thinking imaginative children and so on who may not do well in settings focusing on abstraction or interactions with only-same age peers and authority figures or working on assigned tasks with arbitrary structure and with arbitrary timetables.

Your point also connects with bullying, A normal resolution to bullying by another kid might be to avoid him or her and choose different kids to associate with. However, school structure does not permit that for kids crammed together in a classroom. Izzy Kalman and "Bullies to Buddies" provides help for for unavoidable bullies though.

See also by John Taylor Gatto:
  "The Seven Lesson Schoolteacher"
    http://www.worldtrans.org/whol...
"After an adult lifetime spent teaching school I believe the method of mass-schooling is the only real content it has, don't be fooled into thinking that good curriculum or good equipment or good teachers are the critical determinants of your son and daughter's schooltime. All the pathologies we've considered come about in large measure because the lessons of school prevent children from keeping important appointments with themselves and with their families, to learn lessons in self- motivation, perseverance, self-reliance, courage, dignity and love and lessons in service to others, which are among the key lessons of home life.
            Thirty years ago these things could still be learned in the time left after school. But television has eaten up most of that time, and a combination of television and the stresses peculiar to two-income or single-parent families have swallowed up most of what used to be family time. Our kids have no time left to grow up fully human, and only thin-soil wastelands to do it in. A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; a future which will demand as the price of survival that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. [PDF: I question the previous point on material scarcity...] These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it.
    I should know."

More by John Taylor Gatto (1992 New York State Teacher of the year) here: https://www.johntaylorgatto.co...

Especially: http://www.johntaylorgatto.com...
"Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."

Also: http://www.the-open-boat.com/G...
"Schooling is a form of adoption. You give your kid up in his or her most plastic years to a group of strangers. You accept a promise, sometimes stated and more often implied that the state through its agents knows better how to raise your children and educate them than you, your neighbors, your grandparents, your local traditions do. And that your kid will be better off so adopted.
    But by the time the child returns to the family, or has the option of doing that, very few want to. Their parents are some form of friendly stranger too and why not? In the key hours of growing up, strangers have reared the kid.
    Now let's look at the strangers of which you (interviewer) was one and I was one. Regardless of our good feeling toward children. Regardless of our individual talents or intelligence, we have so little time each day with each of these kids, we can't possibly know enough vital information about that particular kid to tailor a set of exercises for that kid. Oh, you know, some of us will try more than others, but there simply isn't any time to do it to a significant degree."

See also links I've collected here:
http://p2pfoundation.net/backu...

Alternatives:
http://www.educationrevolution...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/towa...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

Good luck. Hopefully there will be more and more alternatives down the road.

Related suggestion: http://vitamincfoundation.org/...
More: https://www.google.com/search?...
And in connection with scurvy: https://www.google.com/search?...

Would be good to have better software tools to try to make sense of all this often-conflicting health information...

"not really, until you can 3-d print it yourself and then verify with an xray will security be verified."

What if both your 3D printer and X-Ray data analysis software are compromised? See also:
"Reflections on Trusting Trust" by Ken Thompson
    http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/ke...
"The final step is represented in Figure 7. This simply adds a second Trojan horse to the one that already exists. The second pattern is aimed at the C compiler. The replacement code is a Stage I self-reproducing program that inserts both Trojan horses into the compiler. This requires a learning phase as in the Stage II example. First we compile the modified source with the normal C compiler to produce a bugged binary. We install this binary as the official C. We can now remove the bugs from the source of the compiler and the new binary will reinsert the bugs whenever it is compiled. Of course, the login command will remain bugged with no trace in source anywhere ... The moral is obvious. You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself. (Especially code from companies that employ people like me.) No amount of source-level verification or scrutiny will protect you from using untrusted code. In demonstrating the possibility of this kind of attack, I picked on the C compiler. I could have picked on any program-handling program such as an assembler, a loader, or even hardware microcode. As the level of program gets lower, these bugs will be harder and harder to detect. A well installed microcode bug will be almost impossible to detect."

Still, the more angles you look at something from, the more likely you might detect some discrepancy... Like excess power usage, processing delays, slightly different electromagnetic signatures, etc...

In any case, the less you want, perhaps the easier it is to secure. Look into creating or using Forth chips for simplicity... The less gates you need, and the less cycles they need, the easier it would be to make your own hardware from scratch, even from discrete components if it is simple enough.
http://www.colorforth.com/
http://www.greenarraychips.com...

For software more complex than Forth that is still fairly understandable from the ground up, see also the FONC project by Alan Kay as well as Squeak on bare metal.
http://www.viewpointsresearch....
https://www.google.com/search?...

A leader might accidentally trip and fall on the button in your scenario too. Einstein said, learning how to release atomic power changed everything except our thinking. That issue is still playing out, and motivates much of my efforts (whether towards abundance for all, better tools for civic sensemaking and education, or work towards self-replicating habitats for Earth and space). Who in the tech profession has not seen a variety of complex systems fail in unexpected ways over the years? So, speaking purely probabilistically, chances are, we will see these weapons go off sooner or later due to accident or error. They might go off because of a technical accident ("99 Red Balloons" wrongly interpreted as an attack, a massive solar flare causing a launch, bad capacitors causing a launch, etc.). Or they might be used because of a psychological or political accident (like the one your insightful story is about). As others have also pointed out, "MAD" assumes rational actors trying to act in self-preservation; if you put lunatics in charge of the button then it might get pressed for any number of crazy reasons same as many people regularly do other self-destructive things.

21st century technologies of abundance (nuclear, biological, chemical, nanotech, robotic, AI, communications, bureaucracy) create more "buttons" in more places in the hands of more people. That makes it more and more likely a button somewhere will get pressed. Worse, many (probably most) the people using these 21st technologies are still locked in a 20th century (and earlier) mindset of worrying about material scarcity. So, they ironically are willing to use nuclear energy (as bombs) to fight over oil fields, when nuclear energy could instead produce all the energy we might otherwise get from oil (not that I'm much of a conventional nuclear fan compared to renewables, energy efficiency, fusion, or LENR).

While we need to do what we can to reduce the chance that any of the buttons get pressed including by promoting a philosophy of mutual security, we should also design with the expectation they will eventually get pressed, and create an infrastructure that is resilient and distributed enough to muddle through anyway as a form on intrinsic security. The internet was supposedly designed to survive nuclear war. We need to apply some of the same thinking to agriculture, power, medicine, education, transportation, and so on. However, this strategy for intrinsic and mutual security is completely at odds with maximizing short-term economic profits by "just in time" delivery of good produced or routed through centralized hubs controlled by a few monopolistic actors.

My OSCOMAK project (and precursors) was a hope in that direction (not that I've succeeded much with it directly).
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/...
http://www.pdfernhout.net/prin...
"Why do I want to build these habitats? Most people would agree there is at least a one percent chance the human race will wipe itself out within the next century through a nuclear or biological war. The issue isn't even necessarily about our politicians making mistakes. The fallibility of the Soviet missile command computer technicians is what worries me most. Like anyone else familiar with computers, I know how easy it is to make a mistake with one. Beyond accidental warfare, expanding populations and industrial pollution threaten our lives just as much. I feel that even if there is only a one percent chance of ecological disaster over the next century, I want to do my best to ensure human survival in that case.
    Most people do not think about these issues, or if they do, rapidly dismiss the problems as too large and impossible to do anything significant about. I feel I have an alternative to apathy or despair. Some habitats in space or underwater would probably survive a nuclear war. Unlike bomb shelters, they would provide an intact technological and cultural base from which to regrow our civilization. If there is not a war, they would still serve the useful function of providing more living space for expanding populations. Being a closed environmental system, they would also make people focus on recycling industrial pollution back into raw materials, leading to safer industries and a cleaner environment."

In the USA, our lives are still completely dependent on 1970s Soviet-era technology for nuclear launching that we in the USA tried to sabotage by supplying bad computer chips and such!!! It is so easy to forget that fact which is "out of sight, out of mind". See:
http://abcnews.go.com/Technolo...
http://archive.wired.com/polit...
"Yarynich is talking about Russia's doomsday machine. That's right, an actual doomsday device--a real, functioning version of the ultimate weapon, always presumed to exist only as a fantasy of apocalypse-obsessed science fiction writers and paranoid über-hawks. The thing that historian Lewis Mumford called "the central symbol of this scientifically organized nightmare of mass extermination." Turns out Yarynich, a 30-year veteran of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Forces and Soviet General Staff, helped build one.
    The point of the system, he explains, was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.
    The technical name was Perimeter, but some called it Mertvaya Ruka, or Dead Hand. It was built 25 years ago and remained a closely guarded secret. With the demise of the USSR, word of the system did leak out, but few people seemed to notice. In fact, though Yarynich and a former Minuteman launch officer named Bruce Blair have been writing about Perimeter since 1993 in numerous books and newspaper articles, its existence has not penetrated the public mind or the corridors of power. The Russians still won't discuss it, and Americans at the highest levels--including former top officials at the State Department and White House--say they've never heard of it. When I recently told former CIA director James Woolsey that the USSR had built a doomsday device, his eyes grew cold. "I hope to God the Soviets were more sensible than that." They weren't.
    The system remains so shrouded that Yarynich worries his continued openness puts him in danger. He might have a point: One Soviet official who spoke with Americans about the system died in a mysterious fall down a staircase. But Yarynich takes the risk. He believes the world needs to know about Dead Hand. Because, after all, it is still in place."

It's a hard problem to wrestle with. See also Joanna Macy's inspiring work:
http://www.personaltransformat...
http://www.amazon.com/Despair-...

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J...
---
Joanna Macy is one of the world's leading sustainability educators. Macy shares her knowledge through her books, workshops, courses and talks. She explores the challenges communities globally are facing, and shares communal approaches to strengthen a life-sustaining culture. The workshops Macy teaches are Business Sustainability, Spiritual Ecology, Meditation, Responses to Climate Change, Wisdom of the Elders, and Tips for Activists. Many of Macy's books have a an accompanying website where readers can explore, take a course, or use tools to aid their training. On Macy's website for her (and Chris Johnstone's) book Active Hope, How to Face the Mess We're in Without Going Crazy, she summarizes the practice which sustains an active hope:

* Take in a clear view of reality.
* Identify our vision for what we hope will happen.
* Take active steps to help bring that vision about.

In the book, Macy and Johnstone explore what Active Hope is (and why it is already happening) in the chapter entitled The Three Stories of Our Time. This chapter is designed to inspire readers to gauge their states (variously) of acceptance, denial, confusion, flexibility, adaptability, compassion and resilience. While Macy's "three stories" are:

* Business as usual. Some examples are "people who believe that economic growth is essential for prosperity, nature is a commodity to be used for human purposes, and promoting consumption is good for the economy".
* The Great Unraveling: economic decline, resource depletion, climate change, social division, war, and mass extinctions. The second story is designed to provoke reflection, and even discomfort with the truth.
* A shift in consciousness. In this story a collective identity is found and built upon through what Macy describes as The Three Dimensions of The Great Turning, "Holding actions - for example campaigns in defense of life on Earth; life-sustaining systems and practices - for example developing new economic and social structures; and a Shift in Consciousness - for example change in our perception, thinking, and values.

The chapter is about the importance of change in society, and for the need to continuously nurture and educate for a life-sustaining culture.

"A pandemic like this is incredibly scary. In every major city in the US we have enough medical beds to support about 1/4 of 1% of the population being sick enough to require hospitalization. If 20% of the population needed medical attention about 19.75% probably wouldn't get any."

So true. And as I suggest in the linked essay an abundance perspective resulting in a basic income and health care for all and investing in true civil defense could help prepare for pandemics:
"Basic income from a millionaire's perspective?"
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."

Instead of empowering more people to be involved in health care, the US medical monopolies have restricted the production of US physicians to keep MD salaries up, which is tremendously short-sighted as well as indirectly cruel. Nonetheless, the internet has been broadening access to DIY subsistence health knowledge (like eating more vegetables and fruits, and getting more vitamin D and adequate iodine, and leading a healthy lifestyle with exercise, good sleep, community, etc.), but not without some downsides as shown by this Dilbert comic...
http://www.dilbert.com/strips/...

For part of the history of how US medicine got this way starting 100 years ago (which included abandoning an emphasis on prevention via lifestyle and nutrition to focus on profitable hands-on "scientific" cures for ailments), see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...

Poverty often forces people to take on risks they might otherwise avoid (like in the USA driving old rusty cars that will collapse in an accident). To the extent this current Ebola outbreak is based on poached bushmeat and ignorance, any Ebola pandemic is also in a sense a verdict on failed US-pushed global economic/defense policies promoting wealth concentration and which ignored externalities and systemic risks (like the risk of plague as a systemic risk to the marketplace). So, shortsighted global policies have not reduced such risks by helping lift Africans out of material poverty sooner rather than later and instead have pushed many impoverished people towards crimes including poaching done in secret which have made wildlife-born disease more likely:
http://www.thewildlifenews.com...
http://www.foodsafetynews.com/...
"In the U.S., all store-bought meat comes from regulated, government-inspected slaughter facilities. There are rules about using "downer" animals - animals that cannot stand up and walk to their death for one reason or another - in the food supply. But when it comes to African bushmeat, all bets are off. Poachers' wire snares catch animals indiscriminately, without regard to the species snared or the health of the individual animal caught. Poaching increases during dry seasons, when little work can be done on the farm, food left from the previous harvest may be running low and animals are easiest to snare because they must travel long distances - via predictable migration routes - to reach water. A desperate enough person may not think twice before eating or selling an animal that could have died from a disease. Two recent outbreaks of the deadly Ebola virus are now being linked to bushmeat. "

Or as the Wombat says (paraphrase): "We are all connected, if you ignore that, you are doomed, repeat, doomed".
http://globalcommunity.org/fla...

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...

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."

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...
---
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.
---

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...
---
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. :-)

---

http://www.simulation-argument...