Pirate Bay is on trial, the latest on a string of such test trials.
Once upon a time, people photocopied books from friends and exchanged cassette tapes. Nevertheless, those kinds of copies took time and money to make, and everytime a copy was made the “fidelity” decreased. We all know the story. That was illegal too – but the entertainment industry still thrived because the spawn rate of the copies back then was low.
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intellectual property, piracy
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All that’s going on in the Middle East these days, it got me thinking. What would it actually take to resolve the conflict?
Clearly, this is not an easy problem. If it was, it’d have been solved ages ago. Also, I think it’s safe to say, politics don’t work. Just about everyone has given it a go, and they’re still killing each other – and themselves.
So, for what it’s worth, here’s my idea: an artificial moral edict for voluntary sterilization in the military. It goes like this. If you have children, you should never be allowed to fight. If you are allowed to fight, then you must submit yourself to be sterilized. This way, militants will be removed from the gene-pool. Sure, this will not deter everyone. But it will demoralize and deter a lot – perhaps enough to make a difference.
So what does it take to change the morality of a society? We know that morals change over time. What would it take to introduce this moral edict into Israeli and Palestinian cultures?
In a previous post, I wrote:
There are many animals that see in the dark. If we could somehow extract this “night-seeing” property of animals and add it to our genome, then we could significantly reduce global warming! Think about it. If we can see in the dark, then we can turn the lights off!
Well, I had another idea along the same lines. Electric fish can generate electric fields. If we could generate electric fields to charge our laptops, mobile phones, and the like, we would significantly reduce our fossile fuel consumption.
The possibilities are limitless!
genetics, transgenics
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You’ve heard of Open Source, right? Why not Open State?
It’s a simple idea.
Your average western government consists of the following four elements:
1. The Politicians
These are our elected representatives. They are members of a legislature. They are our congressmen, senators, presidents, prime ministers, ministers, members of the parliament. I say our, because, even though it is not relevant to this proposal, we should always remember they are our employees.
For the sake of simplicity, I will not address the issue of bicameral legislatures possessing a chamber of appointed, as opposed to elected, members. I hope it will become evident that such legislatures could also adopt this proposal without any problems.
2. The Beaurocrats
Barring politicians, these are all the people on the government’s payroll. They consist the machinery of government.
3. The Law
With “The Law”, I mean all legislation, and the constitution.
4. Operational processes
Operational processes are the processes that define the day-to-day life of the politicians, and the bueaurocrats. These processes include – by my definition – everything from purchasing paperclips for a minister, to making appointments, archiving documents, taking minutes, and so on. Every procedure and everything that leaves a paper-trail is an operational process.
That’s it. That’s all a government is: politicians, beaurocrats, laws, and operational processes.
If it is true that we can define a government this way, if all governments can be described by these elements, then we can work out an abstract unified government model and use it to build a single software application to automate every government function.
Here’s why we would want to do that: It would allow us, the people, to easily audit the government. We would be able to see how our money is spent and why, and it would force the government to be more efficient and accountable. After all, it would be that much easier for the opposition to demonstrate that replacing workflow X with workflow Y would increase performance and decrease costs and waiting times. Also, it would allow us to simplify the law. The law is too complex. A typical article of law refers to tens of others of articles of law. With the right software, we could easily track down the references, find the dead ends, the redundancies, the cyclic references, and so on. We could actually make it possible for people to know the law.
Of course, the model and the software should be open source so that everyone can suggest improvements and corrections. I already have a name for the application: “Open State”. It’s short and simple and it feels appropriate. But if you have a better name for it, please let me know. Names are important.
As with all software projects, acceptance is very important. It’s especially important in this case, I think. After all, this software would – by design – make the lives of people in government more difficult. To make acceptance somewhat more easier, and difficult to decline, we would have to make sure that the software is modular. It should not be an all-or-nothing deal, at least not at first. The next step would be to get an international think-tank started with the mandate to promote the acceptance of the software. The think-tank would organize international concert & media events with rock-stars and ex-politicians saying what a great idea it is, it would have a website where people can download draft letters to their congressmen and MPs – that sort of thing.
Who knows, maybe some day.
Religion sell magic: gods, demons, angels, miracles… Well, not quite: Religion does not sell real magic. Rather, it sells comfort and solidarity to those who want to believe in magic. You pay now, but you don’t get the magic now – miracles don’t happen when you want them, after all. What you get is the promise that your beliefs will be verified to you after you die.
Science neither makes nor tolerates such nefarious promises. And science does deliver true magic: artifial limbs, airplanes, automobiles, computers, internet, vaccines – the list is enormous. Furthermore, it exposes religion for the dubious promise, human weakness, and unsupported belief it is.
This, I think, is where science and religion conflict. Science infringes on religion’s market. The appeal of the deliverables of science is too great, and its rewards are obvious and immediate. In contrast, religion is chain-bound to its one and only proposition: “Pay now, receive when you are dead.”
monopoly, religion
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Someone should put Numenta HTM and Photosynthtogether. I think HTM could speed up the process of finding associations between pictures, and probably also reduce the capacity demands. Just an educated guess, of course.
pattern recognition, visualization
Posted in Ideas, Technology | 1 Comment »
“Transparency” – There’s a word not often heard from the mouths of politicians, unless it’s directed at the opposition. Who are these people who govern us? We do not know. We know all too little about their beliefs, their goals, their actions, their failures, and their successes. We need to know, for we have given them the power to govern over us.
So let’s keep tags on them. Let’s collect information about them, let’s share the information we have. Let them not hide anymore from us behind the power we have given them.
If you agree, then you should consider the following idea. Let’s setup a wiki where people can collect information on parties, politicians, and high government officials from every government in the world. Let’s publish their CVs on the internet, and let’s talk about what they do and have done. There should be forums, articles, pictures, and videos.
Let politicians be haunted and humbled by their failures, and let them take pride in their successes. Let them know the true burden they carry. The established media have too short a memory and attention span. We should not.
global, Politics, wiki
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Idols, Big Brother, Fame Factory etc.
Their effect on their public is clear: Disillusionment. It’s hard to stay spellbound by a person, by a celebrity, when you’ve seen and heard them bickering for hours on end on television.
Sure, you will enjoy the entertainment and the schadenfreude. Perhaps you will vote, talk about the show with your friends, or buy the CD (if applicable) when it comes out. At some point, however, you will lose interest in the people, for you will have seen them for what they are. They are people, just like you. The mysterious spell of the celebrity will have been broken. All things considered, only the truly talented or charismatic will stand the test of time.
In the words of Aesop, “familiarity breeds contempt”.
So how about a Reality show about an MP, a senator, a congressman or -woman – a Prime Minister even? Perhaps an “El Presidente”? It may not be as popular as Idols – I can’t imagine it holding the interest of 11 year-olds unless it’s also combined with song & dance, or X-Factor-like challenges, but it will be viewed, I think, by voters of all ages. They are the demographic I am interested in.
There are two ways to do this, and I’m sure you’re familiar with them.
The first one is a 24 / 7 dive into the life of an elected official. We get to see how they treat their spouse and children, what they do in the office, and so on.
The second one is a competition open only to people who have never run for any office before, but who will be candidates in the next elections, pre-approved by major parties. They get to debate each other and to answer questions from the public, be interviewed by seasoned journalists, and so on. They must pledge to remove their candidateship if they get voted off.
Familiarity does breed contempt, and we need to be at least as contemptuous of politicians, our employees, our civil servants, as they are of us.
And I have the name for the show : Realpolitik.
reality, realpolitik, television
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Every now and then I read the news, and an interesting story catches my eye. Here’s an interesting one:
Scientists at the company, Stemagen, which is based in San Diego, said Thursday that they were the first to use human adult cells to create cloned embryos that advanced to the stage known as a blastocyst, from which embryonic stem cells typically are extracted.
There must be something to it, because the Vatican was quick to condemn it:
“This ranks among the most morally illicit acts, ethically speaking,” said Monsignor Elio Sgreccia, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, the Vatican department that helps oversee the Church’s position on bioethics issues.
The story got me thinking about GM – not just about blastocysts and stem cell research, but about GM in general.
And I had an idea.
There are many animals that see in the dark. If we could somehow extract this “night-seeing” property of animals and add it to our genome, then we could significantly reduce global warming! Think about it. If we can see in the dark, then we can turn the lights off!
Mature Human Embryos Created From Adult Skin Cells
Cloning Said to Yield Human Embryos
Vatican condemns cloned human embryo research
genetics, transgenics
Posted in Ideas, News, Technology | 1 Comment »
I’ve been reading a lot of Pinker, Dennett and Dawkins (P.Diddy?) lately, so I’m in an evolutionary state of mind.
Here’s a question that’s been troubling me for some time now:
Why do people find it so easy to steal intellectual property? (This is a loaded question, I know.)
Photocopiers enabled us to make copies of copyrighted documents and books. Tape recorders and cassette recorders enabled us to make copies of copyrighted audio recordings. Then came CD’s and DVD’s and suddenly it was possible to make very cheap copies of audio recordings, and, because these media are digital, without any loss of quality. Today we don’t even have to make the copies, we just have to know where to find them on the Internet. (Yes, someone has to make the copies, but if you wait long enough someone else will.) Even the less tech-savvy among us usually have a friend, or a friend of a friend, who can get them what they like. In general, it has become cheaper and easier to make high-fidelity copies of copyrighted material, while a lot more material has become accessible to a lot more people. I suppose everyone knows this story.
I think that most of us will agree that we have an aversion to theft – I feel a wave of guilt washing over me even at the thought of stealing something. (Here we go again…) Is this nature, nurture or a bit of both? Maybe it’s just bullshit, in the philosophical sense, of course, but I believe research has been done that suggests the latter. (Dear reader, I’m too faineant to look it up for you.) On the other hand, when I duplicate a file on my hard disk, I do not feel guilty at all. Does that make me an intellectual property sociopath, an infopath? (Sadly, the term InfoPath has been trademarked by Microsoft, so I don’t think it will catch on.) Actually, I believe most of us, if not all of us, do not feel any guilt when we make copies of intellectual property.
So why do people find it so easy to steal intellectual property?
Let me propose two evolutionary conjectures to answer this question.
Maybe evolution has failed to catch up with us. Physical property has been around much longer than intellectual property. (The proof is left as an exercise for the reader.) Maybe we do not feel remorse when we make illegal copies of intellectual property because we are not built that way.
But there is another evolutionary way to look at this. Perhaps this inability of ours to acknowledge or even register intellectual theft has nothing to do with us. Perhaps “information wants to be free” is true in an evolutionary sense. Perhaps, memes suppress our remorse for intellectual theft so that they can spread more easily. Perhaps we have co-evolved, and there is nothing to suppress. It may even be to our benefit that memes procreate easily and uninterrupted – or not hazardous enough to cause any evolutionary reaction.
copyright, evolution, infopath, intellectual property, meme, property
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I had a few minutes to kill, so here’s my conjecture on the evolutionary history of tattoo’s.
A long time ago, before the dawn of civilization, a big strong guy, at the prime of his life (he is probably all of twelve years old) is out on a stroll, minding his own business.
Suddenly, a tiger appears out of nowhere. She’s a formidable beast that triggers his instinct to flee. But what would be the point? He reckons, the moment he turns the back to her, he’s dead.
So, our man stands his ground. The tiger jumps. Our man pulls his colt and plants one between her burning eyes (tiger, tiger…)
However, the tiger does land on him with her full weight , throwing him on the tar-covered ground (the road had just been paved) and her fangs tear at his shoulder. Our hero manageth to push the beast off of him, but not before his wounds soak the tar in.
In the weeks to come, the wounds will heal, sealing in the tar, marking our man forever as a tiger-slayer … and a ladies-man. The man killed a tiger, and he can prove it. Lo and behold, Tattoo’s are born.
And they’re a Good Trick. They give this guy a biological advantage: He’s got something the others don’t. Soon, men everywhere will be tattooing themselves. First it’s fangs, then it’s dinosaur teeth. Before long, it’s I HEART SARAH, a song, a Buddha and some pornography.
So there you go.
Another interesting idea I’ve been playing around with:
The Tamakicka (plural: Tamakickas), the anti-social networking device.
It’s a melt of Tamagotchi and kickin’ ass.
You wear a device on your key-chain that beeps when you are close to a person whose ass needs kickin’, aka the target. The target’s thingy beeps too, but with a different tone so that it’s immediately known to both parties who’s attacking whom.
If you kick the target’s ass, you get points that you can use to have someone else’s ass kicked. If the target kicks your ass, he (or she, let’s not be, like, sexistic about this) gets to choose between points or finding out who put a contract on him (or her).
And if you’re wondering who decides who’s ass was kicked, it’s easy: it’s the one who gets to punch his code in the other’s Tamakicka.
Obviously, the Tamakicka will have to be able to stand a few blows. And, of course, we’ll need the mother of all disclaimers to cover this baby internationally.
Now, if this isn’t a million dollar idea I don’ t know what is. Imagine the spin-offs and the merchandising!
The first rule of Tamakicka is: You don’t talk about Tamakicka.
While driving the other day, I had a revolutionary idea:
Each one of us, as an individual, could offset our own carbon emissions by paying a poor person in a developing country to commit suicide.
By doing so, not only would we help solve the problem of the greenhouse effect, we would also help provide a steady income for developing countries and tackle the problem of global overpopulation. The wealth of participating developing countries would increase at a rate proportional to the lessening of their populations.
I expect the interest within a developing country for “green” suicides to eventually taper off once the remaining population becomes rich.
And, to avoid people being fooled into committing suicide by environmentally friendly bastards who won’t pay out, an independent organization could be setup that transfers the funds to the inheritors once the suicide has been committed. And I have a name for it: RestInGreenPeace.com. The url is available.
How about it?
Of course it’s outrageous. But – what’s wrong with this picture?