In a message dated 99-07-08 01:52:34 EDT, hal@finney.org wrote:
> This looks very interesting and I can see that a lot of work has gone into
> it. I feel that there are a couple of problemw right now though.
Hal, thanks for your (as usual) thoughtful comments. From a busy morning at work, I only have time for a quick response for now. We know that many if not most of the subjects lack specific defnitions and, you're right, there's a blank space on the specific development pages for such a definition. We simply ran out of time after having run into some (as usual) unanticipated glitches and needed to get the site up if we were to have time to collect any comments before EXTRO4. So your suggestion is most welcome that definitions become themselves a good subject for commentary through Crit.
The large number of categories is intentional. It's not expected that any one person would comment on ALL of them. In fact, my personal hope is that the large number will get folks to comment most on those subject matters where they either have a lot of knowledge or expertise or particularly strong opinions or, hopefully, both.
Please do stop by the project site
http://www.textropians.com/Timeline/home.htm
and help us out by making as many comments as you can! Some instructions from my previous post about tagging comments with CritLink follow my sig below.
Greg Burch <GBurch1@aol.com>----<gburch@lockeliddell.com>
Attorney ::: Vice President, Extropy Institute ::: Wilderness Guide
http://users.aol.com/gburch1 -or- http://members.aol.com/gburch1
"Civilization is protest against nature;
progress requires us to take control of evolution."
-- Thomas Huxley
For now, all commentary should be through Foresight's Crit Link system. Links in the Timeline web pages will lead you to Crit's view of the site and give you access to the Crit tools for inserting your comments, ideas and projections into the project. General comments on the specific developments can be tagged essentially anywhere in the text of the page or to the page as a whole.
Our goal of collecting specific projections for dates or ranges of dates when a development will become possible, available, common or ubiquitous requires a little care using Crit Link. To tag a comment to a particular year in the timeline tables you will find at the individual development pages, it is necessary to paste in the particular year in the "target phrase" area and THE TEXT FROM THE WHOLE LINE OF YEARS into the "optional context phrase". Thus, to tag a comment that you believe the development "Software Agents as Autonomous Actors" will be "Common" by the year 2020, you should paste the text from the year cell for that point ("2020 - C") into the "target phrase" Crit field and the text from the whole line for the year 2020 ("2020 - P 2020 - A 2020 - C 2020 - U") into the "optional target phrase". Although this seems a little kludgey, Crit requires the second step in order to have enough context to "know" where to place its meta-tag. Because Crit will open a new window for the commenting process, it's easy to flip back and forth between the project site and the Crit commentary page to grab the text you need to properly tag your comment.
We are also looking for feedback on improving the categories. An example is battery technology. None of us in the group that developed the site knew enough to come up with a good metric for developments in this area, so we only have an item called "Advanced Batteries". If you can offer a refinement of an existing category such as this one, or a wholly new category that we've missed, use the links available at the site to make these kinds of helpful suggestions.