Open Government Dialogue
« Back To OpenGov - Open Government Brainstorm

longshot9999

User Profile Image longshot9999
Member since : May-29-2009 (Verified)
40 Ideas, 35 Comments, 551 Votes

User Activity Stream

Ideas Posted

A drug known on the streets as Special K (Ketamine) is said by its users to produce out-of-body experiences. While these are most likely just hallucinations it wouldn't be hard to test. Just ask some soldiers to volunteer for a test. Give them the drug and if they report an out-of-boy experience have them say what they saw on a computer screen facing away from them. If by some weird chance people really could throw their consciousness this way, sort of like ventriloquists throwing their voices, then it would be a handy tool for the military to have. They have send soldiers in their out-of-body state to search buildings and report back where ambushes had been laid (among many other things).
This would simply be a web site where each elected official's promises were stated and flagged showing whether they were kept, broken, in-process or inactive. A percentage based on kept divided by (kept + broken) would give us a fairly accurate estimate of their reliability when re-election time comes around.
If we're not going to create a National Idea Bank we should at least make the idea banks that are being maintained by various agencies like the Dept of Homeland Security, TSA, etc.. more easily accessible. (A centralized portal might actually become the de facto national idea bank after awhile.)
An avatar for spotting dangerous personalities. This idea is for a set of computerized avatars to be sent into some of the more violent online games in search of gamers who fit the profile of someone who might lose track of the distinction between the game world and the real world and go out on a shooting spree like some young people have done recently. When one of these personalities was found they'd be flagged in the real world for a hands-off analysis. An avatar under the control of an actual psychiatrist might also be sent to meet with that person in the game to perhaps do a little subtle counselling. Spotting one or two of these people in the game world might save a few lives in the real world.

The U.S. Army is currently researching the idea of creating helmets that can automatically pick up short thought command sequences to be relayed from one soldier to another without any visible motion. Ignoring the possibility of false commands being transmitted into the data stream for a minute, another version of these helmets could be put into production fairly fast. This version would just monitor the brain waves associated with sleepiness and shout 'WAKE UP SOLDIER' into an earpiece linked to the helmet. If we didn't want to take the blunt instrument
approach, a soldier's musical preferences could be programmed into the helmet. When the helmet sensed the soldier was getting overly nervous it would play some soothing melody; if it sensed they were getting bored or sleepy it would play an uptempo number.

** Note: This wouldn't be like the nod-off alarms that some truck drivers use. If the soldier started to nod off in the middle of the night it might be too late. We need them wide awake the whole time.

Since the government has already accepted the principle that it's okay to take an ownership stake in companies for the common good (GM, the banks, etc...) it should take a stake in companies where, with a little support, new products could be brought to market, giving the government a share of the profits to help pay down the debt. Buying a stake in a lightbulb manufacturing company and helping it develop the self-changing lightbulb is one example of how this could work.

The self-changing lightbulb would have a tiny Ferris Wheel of tungsten filaments in it. When one filament burned out then the bulb, sensing the connection had been broken, would simply turn the wheel until the next filament on the wheel was connected. We'd still have to change the bulbs now and then but much less often (10 times less frequently if there were 10 filaments on the wheel). I'd be willing to pay a little more for this kind of bulb because it's a pain changing the outdoor lights when they burn out. An added bonus from this particular idea would be its effect on the environment - the disposal problem posed by the newest generation of long-lasting bulbs would simply go away.

Note: The electricity supplied to the bulb is what would also be used to turn the wheel when required.

When in Rome do as the Romans did... In this case the idea would be to create a public-private partnership that promoted the sport of Mixed Martial Arts Rugby and split the profits evenly, the private side using its profits for whatever it wanted to and the public side using its profits to pay down the debt.

The sport itself would combine the basic rules of rugby with the more primitive rules of mixed martial arts tournaments. Basically teams would be able to kick the crap out of each other on their way towards scoring a goal. It wouldn't be a game totally lacking any element of strategy though. For instance, each team would have to decide whether to keep all of their players concentrating on moving the ball or give some of them the task of trying to put opposing players into submission holds (which would remove those who submitted from the field and give the team who won the submission a numbers advantage).

A lot of times when I vote I choose whoever\\'s platform comes closest to my preferences. The problem with this approach is that there might be one or two significant issues that I really really disagree with them on. What I\\'d like to do is be able to vote on major policy issues at the same time. That way if I\\'m in the majority and we elect candidate X then the winner would be able to see which policies we really don\\'t care for. If enough of us hated a specific policy then maybe the winner would change their position on it, making them even more favorable from our point of view.
I posted this as a comment but decided it really needed to be out front where people will notice it. So here it is.

Here's an interesting side note. At this time 14,161 people have registered on this forum. Out of all those members 10 members have contributed more than 10 percent of the ideas. If you categorize the ideas, counting all the birth control ones as a single idea for example, then those 10 members have contributed a much higher percentage of the ideas. So while it might look like the President is getting a significant amount of input it really boils down to probably about a couple of dozen people speaking up.
Gangs in prison, and elsewhere, have all sorts if tattoos showing which gang they're affiliated with. We should add a new intake procedure at all prisons that says if you have a tattoo for any gang anywhere on your skin then you'll get free tattoos from several other gangs added to your skin. This could cause a tattoo arms race, with prisoners trying to convert the new symbols into some other sort of picture (probably some sort of insult). The remedy to that would be to simply add the same embellishment to the insignia they already have on their skin for their own gang.
It might be easier to just put a link to my ideas here instead of adding each one individually again. Here's the link - http://www.fastbreed.com/#Random
This is what we really need - an idea bank that the government can draw inspiration from. A bill to create one was passed in the Florida House but didn't make it through the Senate. Since we're talking about a National Idea Bank it seems like the U.S. government should really be the entity that supports the idea.
I guess I misunderstood the purpose of this site so I only have myself to blame for feeling more depressed than excited about my experience. Depression translates into less participation of course. It would be interesting to take a survey to find out how each participant - i.e. did this experience increase or decrease the feeling that they were really participating in a dialogue that would be read by the President. This idea could easily serve as that survey. 'Looks promising' means you think your comments will be read (positive reinforcement); voting the other direction would mean you felt it was a waste of time and would be less enthusiastic in participating in the next state. I don't mind starting the survey off with my vote - it's a negative for me (and I'm definitely not one of the birth certificate ranters).
Is there a way to do that (aside from sending an email to the moderators, which I've already done)?
A lot of times I have an idea for an invention that other people might find useful but don't have the time or energy to go through the patent process. There's also no place for me to just go ahead and donate the idea to the public. This suggestion is to create a government that will do just that - accept ideas for inventions, evaluate them, patent them on behalf of the public, and then seek out companies who'd be willing to create the product. Profits could be split evenly between the company's who make the product and the government (the government's portion would go towards funding this department; if anything was left over it could be used to pay down the national debt.
This idea would start out with a contest. Maybe someone like the Gates Foundation could sponsor it to make it worthwhile. The contest would present a list of critical scientific concepts that every educated person should know. Contestants would then submit the simplest possible method they could think of for getting the concepts across. Methods would be categorized by visual, tactile and auditory to cover different learning styles. Rewards would be given to each person who came up with the simplest method of getting one of the concepts across in each of the categories. Bonus dollars might be awarded based on entertainment value. After the contest was over the winning entries would be published in grade-level textbooks, giving us a set of learning guides written for all types of learners based on the thoughts of our most creative teachers (winners).

I'm not sure if I like this idea or not.

If the manufacturers of plastic bags, cups -basically anything that traditionally becomes litter - sealed a few seeds into a small storage section at the bottom of their product then when non-green people tossed them out the window sooner or later some of the seeds would sprout. If they were flower seeds then we'd start seeing colors in unusual places, if they were crop seeds then the homeless might wind up with an unexpected bit of extra food.

Aside from letting the manufacturers of these products claim they were going green this would at least turn some of the garbage into less of an eyesore. On the negative side though, more people might be inclined to litter figuring they'd be doing less harm. Hence my ambivalence.

At first I thought the continuous entry of birth certificate ideas was a bad thing but I'm beginning to realize it might work out well, at least for those of us who stick aroud long enough to post ideas on other topics. When it comes time to go through all of the ideas the birth certificate ones will simply be lumped together and tossed leaving only the ideas from those of us who weren't driven off by them for consideration. The net effect is that they're weighting the process in my favor.

Oh, and they're also creating a backlash against their position by being so strident about it. The law of unintended consequences rears its head again :)
Is this issue more important than coming up with new ideas on how to house the homeless, develop energy independence, protect our borders from terrorists, provide jobs for unemployed workers, etc, etc...? I think whoever is behind this campaign has expressed their only idea sufficiently for the rest of us to know it's important to them. Now if they only had one or two new solutions for more important problems....
Let's see now, the big accounting scandals like Enron were due to accountants. So what did the government think the best way would be to make them pay for this - create a new law requiring the oversight of a business function that was in no way responsible for the accounting scandals and...wait for it...wait...pay accountants to do the oversight. This in effect financially rewards their profession for causing harm to thousands of people. Not only that, it makes the companies who have to pay for this compliance (on average 5 million dollars for a fair-sized company) less competitive in global markets because they're incurring a cost that their competitors in other countries don't have to pay.
The goal of having the most popular ideas bubble up to the surface for discussion in the next phase is a good one, but ideas that generate a huge amount of voting could sink to the bottom the way the votes are logged now. If half a million people like an idea and half a million don't then it will show up with zero votes on the balance. Personally I'd like to see the total number of votes displayed too so these ideas could get noticed. It might be worth having a discussion about them too.
Millions of dollars are wasted in this country on an inefficient educational system that is rooted in constitutional law that gives each state the right to determine its own standards. Examples of federal laws that create unnecessary waste and cost in education because of the lack of provision for a natioanl education system under our current contsitutional system are - the individuals with disabilites education act (IDEA) and No Child Left Behind. Both federal laws require states to come up with their own processes and forms for documenting compliance with the law. In addition, No Child Left Behind and lawas that led to that Act, required states to each identify their own standards for student learning and to develop assessments for measuring student growth for each of those standards. Given the fact that for most content areas a developmental scope and sequence is fairly standard (for example children in any state will learn to count before they learn to add, and they will learn to add before they learn to subtract) the cost to taxpayers when each of the 50 states are required to develop their own state standards and practices is astounding. And frankly a crime in a nation in which 20 to 25 percent of the children live in poverty. Developing a national scope and sequence for curriculum and national assessment practices would require an amendment to the U.S. Constitution and would benefit our nation by reducing dramatically the cost of education as well as allowing students to move from state to state without a major disruption in their learning processes.
This should have happened when the government took over WAMU but there will be more opportunities with other big banks that are still floundering out there. When the next big bank fails turn it into a true National Bank(providing the new bank with accessible branches). Part of the stimulus money would be used to make it solvent. Once it's up an running it should offer credit to qualified customers/buisnesses at a rate that's half of a point higher than the best run banks are offerring. This would almost immediately ease the credit crunch. Banks that weren't well run would fail as they should. Their depositors could then either go to one of the better run banks or do their banking at the National Bank. By keeping the interest rate slightly higher than the good banks are offering it wouldn't drive the good banks out of business. It would however encourage them to take a closer look at potential customers so they could grab the good ones and make some money instead of letting them fall through the cracks to the National Bank.
For all anyone knows this might already be being done. If it's not it could save the government a lot of money when it comes time to build the next version of the web. The current system uses IP addresses formatted in such a way that the root servers can pretty much look through something akin to a phone book to determine the address the user is looking for. These addresses are based on a very specific format. Anything that's not in that format won't be recognized and the browser will display a message saying something like "page not found". There's no reason a second version of the root server phone books couldn't be created though. The format for addresses in this phone book would be entirely different (and each address would be encrypted to help prevent line snifferes from even coming close to guessing what it is). Once in place government agencies could send messages using the web in a layer that's outside the current system, opening whole new channels at a minimal cost.

Speaking of the web, it's far more vulnerable than most people, and most governments for that matter, think it is. And I'm not talking about hackers here. Nor am I going to say exactly how it could easily be compromised.
Displaying 1 - 25 of 4205 Ideas

Comments Posted

longshot9999 8 months ago
Big Rooster, LSD, XTC and other street drugs don't dependably reproduce this experience on-demand and have other side effects that would make them poor candidates for this idea. Ketamine is a disociative drug that's kind of in a class all by itself when it comes to this issue. The dame experience can be reliably reproduced by stimulating specidic areas of the brain with an instrument probe (google Swiss epilepsy experiments) but that's a bit invasive. The subject was actually given a serious test for unrelated purposes several years ago by Massachusetts General Hospital. They'd had so many people report out-of-body experiences on the operating table that they put a monitor up on a shelf facing away from the operating table and for 6 months had a random phrase appear on the screen. They were hoping to happen into a case where one of the patients could read the screen. Using special K would take away the randomness inherent in their experiment.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I had something like what shows up on the right side of this link in mind, only for all politicians -

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/

By the way, very few people would be able to break every single promise they make. If only by accident they'd end up keeping some of them.
longshot9999 9 months ago
Don, I'm well aware that our country is not a real democracy. In point of fact it's a Federated Republic. As far as "what ever happened to 'I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the REPUBLIC..." goes you should devote more time to your own education. If the same question had been posed to our founding fathers their answer would be - What the hell are you talking about? They would have never heard of the pledge and would have been totally against it. During their lives each state was considered a country unto itself. That was the case up until the Civil War. General Lee refused to serve as the leader of the Union forces on the grounds that he could never attack his own country, meaning Virginia. After the Civil War perceptions changed and the One Nation concept of our country came into being. This led in part to the creation of the Pledge of Allegiance in 1892.

1st Sidebar - The words "under God" were unofficially added in 1942 and officially added in 1948.

2nd Sidebar - The original placement of one's hand while saying the pledge wasn't over the heart, it was an outstretched arm with the palm facing upward. Shortly thereafter it was changed to the palm facing downward. This looked way too much like the Nazi salute when World War II came around so FDR changed it to hand over heart.


longshot9999 9 months ago
Well, if there's a bias against psychiatry we could always have scientology avatars roaming the gaming world to 'clear' the gamers with dangerous thought patterns.
longshot9999 9 months ago
Sometimes a little government involement can be good. If it never got involved we'd be driving down dirt interstate highways. As to it's meddling resulting in us having to deal with mercury-filled bulbs, this would get rid of that problem. It would also reduce the number of incandescent bulbs by a significant percentage.
longshot9999 9 months ago
This idea probably should have been put under Collaboration Between Federal Agencies.
longshot9999 9 months ago
It's true this is a garbage post. The only reason to keep it going is to catch the birthers curiousity and draw them into this black hole so they'll have less time to pollute the rest of the site with their repetitive ideas.
longshot9999 9 months ago
After the dream ended we woke up to find out that we were all liberals, even nikkrahed, and also discovered much to our surprise that the birthers and their ilk only existed in nightmare worlds where paranoia runs deep. In the land where the sun shone brightly reason ran deep. It's a wonderful world.
longshot9999 9 months ago
it was time to put some intelligent people on the so-called illegal supreme court so they could settle the case of the birthers' moaning and groaning once and for all. The End.
longshot9999 9 months ago
off-topic ideas and drove off a cliff like Thelma and Louise.
longshot9999 9 months ago
This isn't a foolproof way, but if you go to the lefthand side of this web page you'll see a small link under the 'Subscribe' link. Clicking on that will bring you to another page that ranks users by the number of ideas they've submitted. I click on each one, do a quick skim for birther ideas, and jump to the next user if I see any. That way I bypass a lot of junk and get to users who have posted some interesting ideas. Of course this doesn't help you find any unique ideas by posters who might have submitted only one or two ideas.
longshot9999 9 months ago
bsmolko, I find the idea of creating idea-based groups quite appealing. The moderators could then steer often-repeated ideas into groups specifically designed for them, getting rid of all the censorship objections, and what we'd have left is a list of idea-groups we could jump into for a discussion as they caught our eye.

As far as the vote display goes, it would be better if they just showed the positive and negative counts instead of forcing you to click on the number to see how the votes are falling.
longshot9999 9 months ago
Here's an interesting side note. At this time 14,161 people have registered on this forum. Out of all those members 10 members have contributed more than 10 percent of the ideas. If you categorize the ideas, counting all the birth control ones as a single idea for example, then those 10 members have contributed a much higher percentage of the ideas. So while it might look like the President is getting a significant amount of input it really boils down to probably about a couple of dozen people speaking up.
longshot9999 9 months ago
The survey wasn't really a response to the birth certificate trolls. After reading the ideas and comparing them to the phase II discustion it became clear that this was really just an exercise for academics to talk to academics in academic-speak. Although I can wade through the overly verbose language to reach their pertinent points it's liking reading pages of acronyms to decipher a theme. Someone should put a syllable restriction on their posts - maybe only one word per sentence with more than 3 syllables in it. That might force them to present their points in the same way that normal people speak.
longshot9999 9 months ago
Doug - The idea was actually intended to improve the government by improving the quality of the ideas available to it. Wouldn't that fall under collaboration - public/private partnerships?
longshot9999 9 months ago
I tried to edit the idea and remove the reference. Got a "fatal error" and sent the report to whoever it was supposed to go to. Tried four more times, at different times of the day, and received the same error.
longshot9999 9 months ago
That would only serve to further irritate the owner of the web site that was named.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I was the one who originally posted that idea. It was just as surprising to me as it was to everyone else when it jumped to the top of the list. The only thing I could conclude was that people who were tired of seeing the birth certificate issue continually being brought up voted for the idea as a form of protest.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I think the discussion of ideas is scheduled for the next phase of this project.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I wholeheartedly agree. I've been posting my ideas on the halfbakery for quite awhile and continue to get inspiration from the ideas posted by other people there.
longshot9999 9 months ago
So it's okay if we waterboard people as long as we get a chance to see Obama's birth certificate (given a choice between the two priorities)?
longshot9999 9 months ago
The math is all wrong. I don't think we've even got enough paper to print 40,000,000 million times 1,500,000 dollars.
longshot9999 9 months ago
What did the Supreme Court say those 3 times?
longshot9999 9 months ago
Our government was originally a Federated Republic. In theory it still is but as the states become less and less like countries (which they were oginally considered to be) we have a hybrid system, Federated Republic when it comes to voting and One Nation when it comes to reality.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I don't have anything against the Israeli's but I do wonder how we reconcile the fact that the Constitution prohibits the government from sponsoring a religion with our foreign aid to a government that is quite clearly religious. It does call itself a Jewish State afer all. No harm intended. Just a little perplexed.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I still think we should just trade them for other prisoners. Some of our allies, like Pakistan, probably have soldiers they'd like to get back. The assumption would be that after the exchange took place both sets of prisoners would go back to fighting, them against us and us against them. Sounds fair to me.
longshot9999 9 months ago
It would also be nice if our country wasn't biased towards its own inventors. A lot of inventions that Americans are given credit for, either explicitly or implicitly, were actually created by inventors in other countries.
longshot9999 9 months ago
"The Palestinians refuse every 'peace deal' because they refuse to allow any other culture any claim to the Temple Mount." Kind of like Israel does with Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. Your point did inspire another thought though. How about if we combine the aid for both groups into one pot and give it to the Palestinians to split in half? The basic idea is to create a peaceful forum that both sides have a vested interest in making sure it succeeds. If they can work together in this one area then maybe that coorperation will spread to other areas. It's worth a shot - we're spending the money on them anyway so we might as well see if something new works.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I wonder if those who are voting against this idea really realize how curriculum is currently determined. Each state might cross a few t's and dot a few i's but the truth is we already have an unofficial semi-national curriculum. Textbook publishers wait for a few key states, like Texas and California, to decide what their curriculum is going to be and then tailor the textbooks to that curriculum. Other states get modified versions of this same curriculum. Of course they spend millions and millions of dollars to get the modifications. Oh well, it's only money.
longshot9999 9 months ago
Since my wife works in a Title 1 school in an urban environment and has worked with children with various disabilities for the last 30 years (and has published a couple of books on the subject of how to do it correctly) I'd probably give a large percentage to the dept of education. If the DMV fell under the dept of Transportation it would get a good chunk too. My percentages would probably look something like this - defence (35%), education (30%), healthcare (15% - including NIH, FDA and the CDC), NASA and related sciences (10%), other depts (10%). This is just a rough draft. If I took a closer look at the cabinet positions there would probably be some minor changes (the State Dept, Justice, Congress etc.. should probably get something).
longshot9999 9 months ago
When entire neighborhoods were stripped away and the debris stacked in random piles during hurricanes Andrew and Charley even the locals had a hard time figuring out where they were. All of the landmarks were gone. A GPS system isn't very helpful when it tells you to take a right down street X and street X is blocked with one of those piles of debris. It would be much easier for a local to guide them to where they're needed by telling them which streets would work as alternatives.
longshot9999 9 months ago
1. True, it would be an expensive device. It would be far less expensive than paying a 100 million dollar ransom though.
2. The design could be tweaked so it was carried above the water line.
3. Nothing in the idea would prohibit us from helping the economies of the nations involved. This is just a short term solution.
4. The Japanese devices would be fine with me too, although non-lethal deterrents like this sometimes become lethal.
5. It's unlikely that small fishing vessels would be deliberately taking an intercept course.
6. Eight seems like a lot of pirate vessels involved in a single attack but even if there were that many we could easily install as many jellyfish as needed.

I'm in favor of addressing the root cause of piracy but it would be overly optomistic to think we could solve that problem before the next hijacking takes place.

Some ships do arm themselves. The problem with this approach is that they can't bring weapons into most harbors. Of course they could always stash the weapons in a lifeboat and leave it outside the harbor along with a couple of guards to protect the weapons.
longshot9999 9 months ago
This suggestion doesn't preclude the creation of a Palestinian state. It's a way to jumpstart the bridge-building process. It would be in both of their interests to make sure the money was spent wisely, giving them a common cause. Something they don't have right now.
longshot9999 9 months ago
Interesting point about the people who mapy the most taxes being able to dictate all government programs. It shows I wasn't clear about the suggestion. The idea wasn't to slot the amount of dollars a person paid in taxes, or the percent they paid compared to others. It's the percentages that would be divied up, not the dollars. For example, if I paid 2 dollars in taxes and you paid 2 million and I said 100 percent should go to the dept of education and you said 100 percent should go to the defense dept then the budget would divide our taxes evenly between the two depts (transporation getting 1,000,001 and defense getting 1,000,001). In effect, we'd get an equal say in the final budget regardless of how much money we were actually contributing.
longshot9999 9 months ago
I realize that responsibility for the web is maintained by ICANN, not the US government. That organization is heavily weighted in favor of the US though, regardless of whether or not it should be. So as to the first response, ICANN could let each country develop its own phonebook (laymen's language) and then just host it on the root servers.

As to the second comment, I'm not proposing the increased space afforded by IPv6 (at least I don't think I am). I'm proposing alternate address naming schemes. For example, alpha-alpha.numeric-alpha, would become a valid address in the alternate phonebook.