For people of my generation, a great deal of history was seen on regular low-resolution TV. But a lot of it, up to the 70s or so (and often after) was shot on film, at higher resolution. Older generations saw some of this (once or twice) in newsreels at the movies.

So as HD sets become common, it would be great to see this old film footage of events like the wars, the Olympics, famous speeches, the moon landing and other space program material in high definition. I saw a DVD of the 1936 Olympics on a good screen and even that was surprising.

Some of this is already happening. HDNet is digitizing old sitcoms like Hogan’s Heroes, which was shot on film. Fun, but I think the life-changing events we’ve never truly seen (or rarely seen) at full resolution would be more important, and would also leave a legacy for education. And yes, that even includes that bad news, like the Challenger and the WTC.

Update: Discovery channel has an upcoming series of NASA footage coming up in HD. Now if only I could get discovery channel HD in a way that I can record without buying their proprietary box.

A short note, as I've been busy with a number of things including trying out PC based HDTV recording and mythtv, which I will write about shortly.

In a VoIP pricing debate, I calculated an interesting observation. Today we have voice codecs that can do very fine voice quality in about 25 kilobits. FM radio quality. Cell phone quality can be done in 7 kilobits. Anyway, that means all 200 million adult Americans could be on the phone at once and it would use 5 terabits.

Using DWDM -- dense wave division multiplexing -- where many colours of photon co-exist in an optical fiber, 5 terabits is now well within the range of a single optical fiber.

So yes, everybody could be on the phone at once, in FM quality, with just one optical fiber. Of course one fiber doesn't pass by every town, and multiplexing it all together costs money too and has overhead. But it should be clear just how silly the idea of per minute charges for voice are in the face of this statistic. And indeed they are going away.

Of course we are finding uses for more bandwidth. HDTV file transfers for example (which use 16 megabits but can be credibly done in about 6 with better codecs.) But how long before we can all have an HDTV videophone call at once over a moderate number of fibers?

This is a science-fictional idea, but strikingly probable. You are probably aware the brain is split into two halves, joined by a nerve bundle called the corpus callosum. People with severe epilepsy have had the callosum severed, and ended up having two brains in one body. A left brain controlling the right half, and a right brain controlling the left half. The left brain can speak and can lie, the right brain can write with the left hand to communicate. Until experimenters tried to communicate with each half, the people were unaware they were sharing their body with another half-brain. You can read more details if you were unaware.

Anyway, on to the idea. It seems plausible one could apply a temporary anesthetic to the corpus callosum, and temporarily split a person into two brains. Today that might require drastic steps like brain surgery. In the future it's not hard to imagine a specialized drug or highly targetted drug delivery or nanobots to temporarily numb and disable the zone, without too much shutdown of adjacent tissue.

One could even imagine recreational use if it were safe and simple. It would be quite something to learn just what happens when you are split into two and then re-integrated, and how the reformed whole you would remember the two split experiences. Would your left and right half have a conversation? What would they talk about? How long could you persist in this state before it became difficult to reintegrate? How long after the cutoff would you be cogent enough to do all this (one presumes the cutoff might be a bit of a shock.)

Imagine an SF story where one half of the protagonist's brain decides it doesn't want to re-integrate with the other half, and takes steps to assure this...

There are a number of Linix "Live CD" distributions out there. These allow you to boot Linux from a CD and run it (somewhat slowly) without ever touching the hard disk in the machine. (They can access the disk however, which makes them good for system repair, both for Linux and Windows.) One popular one is Knoppix, and Mandrake makes one called MandrakeMove, which takes the important next step of letting you store your personal config choices on a USB thumbdrive or floppy. There are distributions that can fit on a thumbrive (after all, those drives are getting quite large for little money, but this is recent enough there hasn't been as much focus on this.)

Let me suggest where I would like this trend to continue. It's great to be able to take any machine and quickly convert it to your style and environment with a CD, or even better a business-card CD or thumbdrive. (Most systems can boot from a CD, fewer from a thumb-drive, most from a floppy leading to another device.) Storing some state on a floppy, thumbdrive, CD-R session -- preferences, home directory files and scripts, browswer config and bookmarks -- is a must. Indeed, if the tools let you build a custom CD just for you with your choice of packages you can bring in much of your whole working environment.

I haven't seen anybody provide automatic storage on the net, based on the assumption the machine you take over probably has an ethernet card. If it does, it would be great to go out and suck down your latest personal changes and files, starting with the most important to get you going, and bringing the rest in the background. This doesn't need a special server, though the group making this distribution might well offer to do so. You could keep and update much of this data in a special mailbox message or mailbox folder, especially with IMAP. Anybody can get access to that. (Or a web mail tool like GMAIL.) Of course if you have actual hosting this can also be used. The data would be encrypted, you would need a password -- not just your mail password -- to use it.

As you changed the data it would be updated to the net storage. Now you could go to any machine with a non-customized CD. Indeed, you could even, on a common fast machine, download a minimal environment (perhaps 60 megabytes which is just a few minutes on a fast broadband link) and after it boots, get the custom information including which other packages are important.

The key is to do things in the Windows filesystem, most likely to be what you find on the machine where you are the guest.  read more »

David Brin, whom I debated on the topic of Transparency yesterday, has been putting forward for some time the general idea of a henchman's amnesty law. Namely that, in the event of a criminal conspiracy, the first underling who whistle-blows can get some level of amnesty, witness protection and/or cash reward. A serious reward, in the millions. Such a rule would make it harder to pick henchmen, since in effect you're making them a millionaire if they turn on you.
Indeed, you have to worry that the very reason they might be joining you so easily is they plan to rat you out for the millions.

We have had a program for whistleblowers on companies that try to cheat the government, with some success, but I might suggest a good place to try a henchman law would be vote fraud. Combined with very stiff penalties (including life in prison for major vote fraud, which is effectively a coup d'etat) this should keep the conspiracies small, and less powerful.

Howoever, hacking of voting machines at the factory is a special type of vote fraud which could be done by a very few conspirators for a big result, so we still need voter verified ballots.

Of late, I've become curious about how readily we could, using certain encryption techniques, design a ballot system which would let you change or repudiate an already cast ballot, but still preserves the important principles of secret ballot. As you might guess, that's a challenge, since it seems inherent that if you can reverse a ballot you can know what it is. But it's possible some blinding algorithms might allow this.

Another option for mail-in ballots would be to provide each mail-in voter with two or more mail-in ballots. The ballots would be marked with a code, such as a red or green sticker. The voter would be told, through a secure and in-person channel, that one of the ballots is real and the others false. They must remember the colour of the true ballot. If they send in the ballot of the wrong colour, it also contains an encoded number that only the counting office is able to tell tags it as a bad ballot (and a sign of attempted voter coercion.)

The vote-coercer might have you send in all your ballots. One defence would be to have this void your vote. This allows vote coercers to use force or money to stop people from voting (which they already can do) but not to vote a particular way. Combined with my plan for secure internet voting it could allow one half of the secret ballot equation with votes cast over the internet.

Should we be able to perfect this, by finding a means for an audit trail on internet voting, this would, aside from saving much money, eliminate the problems of lines at the polls.

We see the talk of an America divided in 2, but in fact it's not. There are more viewpoints than that. Normally a 2 party system tends towards the middle, this election was unusual in having a larger than normal difference among the candidates.

But perhaps now is the time to take the Democratic energy and try to push it into a movement for real reform. Not ballot recounts, not crazy dreams that can never happen.

By that, I mean getting at least one state to move to a preferential ballot system, such as Australian "Instant Runoff," Approval or Cordorcet, with an unfortuantely complex additional rule for how to cast in the electoral college when done.

Reforming the electoral college is unlikely (though an interesting hack is discussed elsewhere in this blog). 3/4ths of states must ratify any change to the college, and the small states would need a big constitutional price in exchange for stripping themselves of the extra power they have in the college.

However, individual states can change how they select their electors through ballot resolution or legislative action. Entirely on the local level. Ballot resolution seems the simplest approach. The only thing standing in the way is that many voters get confused by instant runoff systems. Basic Condorcet is easy to understand, but the tiebreaker modifications are often hard to understand. Still, the Australians manage it.

The first effort will probably fail and only educate the public. Eventually, some state, probably a small one, will go over and have such a ballot. This in turn will start to educate the rest of the nation. The ideas, once understood, are good ideas, and will appeal to the populace. It's hard to argue against them.

However, the 2 major parties will _want_ to argue against them because they are bad for those parties. In many elections, there is somebody who won because there wasn't a preferential ballot. In particular, Bush in 2000 and (arguably) Clinton in 1992. (On the other hand, Bush the Elder arguably _lost_ because there was such a system, and thus might support it.)

That's why a ballot proposition is the right way to do this.  read more »

Idea futures are interesting, so I went to tradesports.com to buy Kerry Futures contracts, since I believe pre-election polling is notoriously poor in quality. They were trading at 43 for a contract that pays 100 if he wins, and that seemed a good buy. By the time I could buy them (slow site, overloaded) they were 50 but now they are at 71. The bidders clearly have developed a strong reversal of feeling.

One source is the exit polls. While U.S. media are not publishing them, the CBC in Canada has few viewers in the USA and has no reason not to, and the news is good for the Senator, particularly in Pennsylvania.

Many have argued that idea futures with real money on the line are very good predictors. However people also clearly follow the polls, which is why Bush led in those futures for most of the election race, and even up to just a few hours ago. Still, Bush went south in these long before other sources so they're a good source as far as that is concerned. And perhaps I made a few bucks. (Not a lot, they limit you to $250 credit card if you do instant signup.)

Today the word went around about mypollingplace.com, a site that helps people find their local polling station, running out of bandwidth from their provider and needing somebody to help it.

At the same time I did an interview for opinions about bitTorrent, and the idea came to me that a really useful application would be a P2P generalized web hosting tool aimed at spikes.

Volunteers who have a reachable IP address (including people who can open holes in NATs) would install software to volunteer to help host sites in need during a spike. This could be client software in a browser or permanent server software.

Then a few different things could happen. Ideally a site would install a tool which activated the sharing network when their load got high (but well before their provider cut them off.) People fetching static pages that weren’t sharing bandwidth would be redirected to a port willing to share. The page would also be modified to encourage folks to join the process. Folks who were willing to share might get access or be redirected, and they would cache the page, declare where it resides and serve it there for some period of time or number of hits.

If a site didn’t install the fancy redirector, they could redirect all web hits to a volunteer tracker that would do a further redirect to a real location willing to host the item.

Finally, for sites totally unaware of this, a browser plug-in could notice when access to a page is very slow or gets a “bandwidth limit exceeded” message. It could then query to see if any of the P2P folks have cached the page, and fetch from there, or offer the user a button to check or fetch from that network.

This latter mode is good because it strongly encourages having the magic plug-in with your browser. If you don’t have it, you can’t get at the P2P cache.

I’ve been informed that Coral from NYU does some of this, though it doesn’t do the “on demand” aspect that leaves the web in normal state when not overloaded, and switches to cacheing only when needed. With Coral and other redirects, your Google adsense doesn’t show up either!  read more »

There has been much writing (including here) about problems with the Electoral College in the USA, and I've even proposed solutions such as a tiebreaking system for close votes. I also noted the amazing coincidence that in the 4 times the winner of the college lost the popular vote, 3 were the 3 times we had a son or granson of a President elected.

But I thought it might be worth exploring the merits of the college, even though most individuals want it abolished. (Though no smaller states want it abolished since it gives them disproportionate power.)

First of all, there is the "official" goal of using the college system. It requires the President, who must win a true majority of the college, to be popular in at least half, and probably more, of the country. The framers didn't want it to be possible for a candidate with extremely strong support in one particular region to win the Presidency.

Example: Say a candidate, coming from a particular region, had immense support in that region, getting 90% of the popular vote, and much lower support (10-25%) outside that region. Such a candidate could win the popular vote since all those votes in their own region would count, even though they are not a national candidate. To win the college, their "region" would have to contain half
the population of the USA.

(This is based on the traditional, but not required all-or-nothing allocation method, which states do because it makes candidates want very much to please them.)

I'm not a fan of some regions having more power than others because of the political legacy of how big states were. 2 senators for Wyoming and 2 for California is grossly unfair. However, the concept of federalism does require some protection for regions, so you don't get one region ruling the land at the expense of another, which can lead to seperatism.

Another benefit is election cost. Due to the college, candidates know to spend their election money only in undecided, "swing" states. As such, they can campaign with much less money. With a popular vote, or even a proportional electoral college, they would have to campaign everywhere. This of course has downsides in terms of fairness, but if they had to campaign everywhere they would have to raise even more money, and be more beholden to the special interests that gave it.