Those who travel on trips through many countries face the problem of how to plug in their laptops and gear. Many stores sell collections of adapters, but they are often bulky, and having multiple adapters for multiple gear can be really bulky. (Usually you get one adapter and then use a 3-way splitter or cord for your type of plug.)

Today, however, almost all my travel gear is 2-prong, not 3-prong. It’s mostly my laptop and various chargers for cameras, phones etc. And all of it runs on every voltage and hz found in the world.

It seems if you’re willing to break the rules on rigidity of plugs, one could make a very small adapter by using independent pins, perhaps with a flexible rubber strip handle between them to keep them together and make it safer, but still allowing the pins to bend and have different spacing.

If you do this, there are really just a few types of pins you need. Thin blades, thick blades, thin round pins and in a few places fat round pins. The blades come at different angles — parallel in North America, slanted in Australia, colinear for thick blades in UK. With pins it’s more a question of spacing than angles. A single plug with a way to adjust the spacing could also work. (Israel has a strange pin I haven’t used, I don’t know if other pins or blades could be adapted to it.)

Generally this would not be suitable for plugging a wall-wart into a wall, you would want to plug in a short extension cord with multiple sockets of “your” type. And it might be hard to sell a product like this due to safety standards, since they don’t want to trust the user to know what they are doing, know that they are only plugging in equipment that takes any voltage and doesn’t care what pin is live and which is neutral, doesn’t need ground and doesn’t draw lots of current in any event. But it would be very compact.

When you buy stuff with a credit card online these days, they always want your address, because they will plug it into their credit card verification system, even if they are not shipping you a physical product.

I’m trying to give my physical address out less and less these days, and would in the long term love something like the addresscrow system I proposed.

However, as an interim, it might be nice to formalize a “fake” credit card billing address, authorized by the credit card company, that you can give when placing orders that will not be shipped to your physical address.

You can already do this, in that credit card verification systems tend to focus only on your street number and zip code, and rarely on your phone number, so you can make up a fake address based on this. If you live at 124 Elm St. 60609, you can usually get credit card verification with “124 Fake St. Chicago, IL 60609” choosing a street name that doesn’t exist so the post office will discard that mail. (Though often post offices try to be “good” and will get mail to you even if the street name is wrong. I guess you could try 124 DoNotDeliver St. to give them the hint.)

If it became official, the post offices could better learn what to do. There are arguments for and against letting the biller realize the address is fake. Good billers would accept this and not add it to mailing lists. Bad billers might refuse to let you enter the address.

Got to preview a powerful and interesting movie last night, The War Tapes. The producers, one of whom I met, gave quality video cameras to various members of a National Guard company doing a tour of duty in Iraq. The goal was to show the war from the soldier’s POV. It’s graphic at times, and puts forward a variety of views (though I doubt it will make many people decide to favour the war more) and well worth a watch. It opens in San Francisco and Oakland this weekend, later in other places.

I’ve been away because I had to have my gall bladder removed, thanks to a gallstone the size of a small moon. Unfortunately they had to do it “old school” rather than laproscopically, which means the recovery is so much more fun.

The immersion into the hospitalization system (first time in the US) will generate some blog posts, but today let me add thoughts on one element that surprised me. Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote speculating on the use of Versed for torture. I still wonder about that, and now I have a direct experience. Though I was not told about it, the anesthesiologist included one of the amnesia-inducing drugs into the pre-op “calm you down” sedation coctail. I remember him doing that injection, and getting a bit flushed from that, but it’s blank after that. No memory of any discussion after, of being wheeled to the operating room and receiving the actual injection to make me unconscious for the procedure. Those events never laid down.

(When I asked the surgeon about not being told I would receive this drug, she at least had a sense of humour and said, “How do you know you weren’t told?” Indeed, I don’t know that. And to pile on the irony, I brought the movie “Momento” to the hospital, and watched it during my recovery.)

It is disturbing to have a memory deliberately erased. We’ve all lost memories, found periods in which we can’t recollect anything about particular event or stretch, but this is different.

Still, it got me wondering about bizarre uses to which this might be put. I already speculated on torture and sinister uses. And we know about the use for date-rape which is highly disturbing. I wondered about its application to deep dark secrets.

The scenario is this. You have a couple. One or both of them volunteer for an amnesia inducing drug. Then, you pour out your heart, with all the deep dark secrets you’ve been hiding, kinky fantasies you’ve been begging for, and wait for the reaction. If your own memory is not going to store, you make notes on the reactions. When you’re done, you know what secrets you can tell, and which would be relationship-destroying or particularly hurtful. Of course, the tested party needs to cooperate, and not say, “Oh, I had better pretend to not be bothered by that so that this horrible thing does not become lost to me” and and better not be a good actor. Or couples who are in the “both want to break up but are not admitting it for the sake of the other one” state could discover it and talk it out — though one could also make a computer program to solve that problem.

To be tricky, my companion in the pre-op room could have decided to tell me things there without my being aware I had received the drug — it is quite common now in sedation coctails — in which case I would not have thought to fake my reactions. Technically, though I trust her, I can not be sure via my own memory that she did not.

These drugs are currently Schedule IV, so they don’t see such non-medical use, but one can imagine other bizarre uses. For example, confidential job interviews. Consider applying for a job to work on a confidential project at a company. They might give you an NDA, or they might give you Versed and tell you the whole deal, knowing you won’t be talking about it. Or truly “embargoed” releases to the media, or trials of secret products before a focus group. And these aren’t as scary as the suggestions of use in torture or policework I already made. Certainly when it comes to any official use, we need a law requiring that any administration of such drugs be paired with complete videotaping of the entire episode and secure storage and authentication of the videotape — if we allow such use at all. (Unfortunately we are probably going to see use whether we permit it or not.)

There could be medical uses. For example, say you have the cliche’d incurable, non-communicable fatal disease and some number of months to live. You could be told, and given the choice about when you should be told in a way you’ll remember it. It’s like creating test versions of yourself to try new and dangerous ideas and report back if the real you should absorb them.

Now I should note that there are barriers to the ideas I worry about above. The drugs are not 100%. You can’t be sure they will block the long term storage of memory. And they also sedate you, put you in a calmer, non-natural mental state so they might not really be too useful in job interviews and other circumstances. (Even for torture, they might make you more able to tolerate the non-damaging torture they would want to do to you, just as they help you tolerate surgical squicks.)

But the drugs are going to get better, if they haven’t already in secret labs. There are documents of experimentation with amnesiac drugs in intelligence contexts back to Viet Nam. Who knows what the black labs have discovered? We are going to have to get used to a world where memory is more fungible, and we call can be temporarily the character from Momento.

In recent times, we’ve seen a lot of debate about eroding the 4th amendment protections against surveillance in the interests of stopping terrorists and other criminals.

It’s gotten so prevalent that it seems the debate has become only about how much to weaken the 4th. Nobody ever suggests the other direction, strengthening it.

Let’s dip back into historical perspective, and think of the late 18th century, when it was written. In those days surveillance was a simple thing to understand. It required human beings who were physically present to watch you, or search your house. The closest thing to remote surveillance was the idea of opening somebody’s mail while in transit.

More importantly, it didn’t scale. To watch 100 people you needed 100 teams. You could watch the town square but otherwise large scale surveillance simply wasn’t physically possible.

And yet, even with this limited set of things to worry about, the signers of the bill of rights felt they had plenty to fear. If you could describe today’s techniques of surveillance to them — where we can observe people from a distance, plant bugs in their homes, see them through walls, detect sounds from windows and read electronic emissions; where we can listen to a person by keying in a number at our desk, and where, most shockingly of all, through computers observe the activities of effectively everybody — they would have gasped in shock.

Their reaction would not have been to say, “We had not realized there would be all these new useful tools of surveillance. We had better open up exceptions in the 4th to be sure they can be used effectively.” I think they would have instead worked to strengthen the 4th to prevent these new tools.

After all, they were revolutionaries. Had the King been able to data-mine the call records of colonial America, no doubt he would have discovered all those seditious founding fathers and rounded them up quickly.

So I ask, as the surveillance tools become stronger, doesn’t it make sense that the protection from them should become stronger, to retain balance? Society can still benefit from better police technology by making it more precise, rather than more broad. This is not saying give up what technology can do to protect us from crime, but rather to channel it in the right direction.

Because the tools are going to get even better and “better.” The balance is going to continue to shift until there’s very little of the original design left.

Everybody who has used a microwave oven has wished at times for a "microwave fridge" that could cool things quickly. Of course the process is very different.

The fastest way to cool things, however, is to get lots of surface contact with a very cold fluid that will absorb and coduct lots of heat. And indeed, drop a drink can into ice-water, which is of course at 0 degrees centigrade (32F) and it will cool reasonably quickly.

Far faster is to drop it into icy brine water. Saltwater (brine) freezes much coooler. A 23% (by mass) brine doesn't freeze until -21C or -6 degrees farenheit. (In fact, 0 on that scale was in part derived from the freezing point of common brine, I believe.) A cooler full of salty icewater will cool drink cans much faster -- just a minute in fact, and this is well known. But it gets salt water on things, and can't be used to cool non-sealed things.

I propose packages of 23% brine in extremely soft and flexible (even at freezer temperatures) plastic packs. Perhaps moderate amounts of 1" or 2" spheres, not tautly inflated, so they can be squished and will conform to objects. The covering must be as conductive as you can reasonably get it, while staying flexible and not too fragile. Ideally dishwasher safe too...

Put them in the freezer, and then when you want to cool just about anything, pack them around it in a box. Get lots of surface area contact. Most freezers are supposed to be kept below 0F (-18C). They could even be placed on top of messy foods, if the container is easy to clean, and as noted, possibly could be dishwashable with modern ingredients. If you just slot a drink can or bottle into them, you would not need to clean them.

There are some risks. These packs could actually frostburn skin fairly quickly, I think. Small plastic pick-up handles/tabs would make sense for moving them by hand, or gloves or tongs could be used. Of course brine is not going to be toxic so puncture would generate nothing worse than a salty mess.

Brine is used in ice-cream making and other cooling applications already. For maximum cooling, a simple device with cold 23% brine, a conductive surface and some means to circulate the brine to generate convection would be in order.

There are some salts, such as Magnesium Chloride and Ca₂Cl which stay liquid at much cooler temperatures. Those could be used in a tiny mini-cooler which takes them down to seriously cold temperatures. Then items to be flash-cooled could be inserted among the chilly pillows. Of course, expect frozen condensate if there is water around.

You can test this plan out yourself with solid zipper freezer bags. Take 750ml water and about 230g NaCl salt to make your brine. You don't have to get it exactly right, your freezer is probably not at -6F.

Ok, this isn’t entirely serious but…

Just got back from a concert by Andrea Bocelli, which was 75% italian opera and then the last 25% his pop stuff. Curiously the conductor told the audience when they switched about how he was getting to the pop stuff we had been patiently waiting for and the audience applauds and laughs. If it’s really that way, it’s interesting to wonder if they still make more money doing mostly opera because opera commands more money because of implied lesser demand. (Expensive seats ran to $275 and that was a fair bit of the floor.)

Anyway, perhaps it was the different type of audience for Bocelli, but there was some talking, and people holding up cell phone cameras to take pictures, with the odd digital camera flash. It was a bit strange, mind you to see a crowd of people in fancy dress clothes and 3” heels at the hockey arena, eating nachos from the concession stands and watching opera.

Because in my mind you should not even have to think about shushing people at a classical concert. (I don’t think you should have to at a movie either, but that battle’s long lost.)

So the non-serious suggestion for all sorts of venues. Give people (with a $5 deposit) a portable laser that projects a small no talking symbol. Perhaps the word “TALK” with a circle and line, something you can do in the small resolution of laser pointers. When somebody talks (or does the cell phone thing which is distracting now just for the super-bright backlight) you beam the laser on them somewhere they will see. Ideally lots of people do it.

Of course, if people did this it would be distracting it itself, defeating the purpose. It only works if it is temporary, and people learn the lesson, and you don’t have to do it again. A digital follow-spot that identifies bright lights and sounds would also work. Pea-shooters might be better but how will people know what the message is?

Speaking of which, why don’t more cell phones dim the backlight when they are in a dark room? It would save power. (Though I know people now use these as flashlights of a sort.)

Ebayers are familiar with what is called bid “sniping.” That’s placing your one, real bid, just a few seconds before auction close. People sometimes do it manually, more often they use auto-bidding software which performs the function. If you know your true max value, it makes sense.

However, it generates a lot of controversy and anger. This is for two reasons. First, there are many people on eBay who like to play the auction as a game over time, bidding, being out bid and rebidding. They either don’t want to enter a true-max bid, or can’t figure out what that value really is. They are often outbid by a sniper, and feel very frustrated, because given the time they feel they would have bid higher and taken the auction.

This feeling is vastly strengthened by the way eBay treats bids. The actual buyer pays not the price they entered, but the price entered by the 2nd place bidder, plus an increment. This makes the 2nd place buyer think she lost the auction by just the increment, but in fact that’s rarely likely to be true. But it still generates great frustration.

The only important question about bid sniping is, does it benefit the buyers who use it? If it lets them take an auction at a lower price, because a non-sniper doesn’t get in the high bid they were actually willing to make, then indeed it benefits the buyer, and makes the seller (and interestingly, eBay, slightly less.)

There are many ways to write the rules of an auction. They all tend to benefit either the buyer or the seller by some factor. A few have benefits for both, and a few benefit only the auction house. Most are a mix. In most auction houses, like eBay, the auction house takes a cut of the sale, and so anything that makes sellers get higher prices makes more money on such auctions for the auction house.

Read on…  read more »

Of course I am disturbed to see that some of these apparently twisted men come from my home town of Mississauga, but I’m also bothered by the continuing expansion of the term terrorism.

To my mind, terrorism has always involved attacking ordinary innocents for the purpose of sewing terror to some polictical end. Attacking military targets, such as the Pentagon or the USS Cole, or Marine bases is not terrorism (though you can argue that the victims on the plane used in that attack on the Pentagon qualify it as terrorist, but sadly from their perspective, they more correctly fit the definition of what we euphamistically call “collateral damage.”)

Those arrested in Ontario, it was revealed, planned to attack Parliament and take the Prime Minister and others there hostage, demanding they pull troops from Afghanistan. While I make no excuse for their plans or actions, I can’t see attacking the very people who ordered the troops in as terrorism. (Though holding them hostage is.) You could call it treason (because many were Canadians or naturalized Canadians and had in the latter case taken an oath not to do this which they would have betrayed.) You could call it guerilla warfare if you accept them as legitimate guerrilla soldiers of that nation. You could call it insurrection. You could just call it conspiracy towards kidnapping and attempted murder. All of these crimes can offer Canada’s maximum penalty. (Which, by the way, is life in prison.)

But if this is terrorism, what isn’t? As noted, we’ve seen attacks such as that on the Cole, or Marine bases or the Pentagon called terrorist. Is the only thing that’s not terrorist sending in a ship with a flag on it full of uniformed fighters? Or lobbing a missile at a tall building with the major radio transmission towers on it, which is the first thing the U.S. does in its wars?

I should note that the definition of terrorism in the law they are charged under does not distinguish civilian from military targets. It just requires things like attacks causing serious bodily harm or death for politicial, religious or ideological purposes.

Update based on comments: As noted above kidnapping is not considered a valid tool of war. The rules of war require all captured enemy to be treated as POWs. As such, the hostage-taking part of the plan is legitimately classified as terrorist. While the leaders, including the civilian leaders at the top who issue orders to troops in my opinion count as valid military enemies in war, the role of assassination in war has always been controversial. It is however, perhaps the archetypical move of an insurrection.

Again, if guilty, these men are evil and deserve the strongest punishment whether attacking parliament is terrorist or not. What’s important about this debate is that society is using the word terrorism to redefine our laws, and make laws that punish it more, and allow law enforcement infringements of civil rights in ways that would not be allowed against non-terrorist criminals. So we must make particular care in defining the term. In particular, I hope we can define the term in a way that our own actions, and past wartime actions we approve of, would not even resemble what we define as terrorism. Civilized governments and armies should never deliberately target innocents, which is why that’s the right place to draw the line. They do, however, engage in guerilla actions, are born of insurrections, and send spies and sabateurs and assassins. They do blow up buildings with military value whether civilians in or nearby will be killed in the process. If we include such actions as terrorist, we should deplore them just as much when nations do them.

We often travel as a couple, and of course both have the same e-mail and web addictions that all of you probably have. Indeed, these days if you don’t get to your e-mail and other stuff for a long period, it becomes unmanageable when you return. For this reason, we bring at least one, and often two laptops on trips.

When we bring one, it becomes a time-waster. Frankly, our goal is to spend as little time in our hotel room on the net as possible, but it’s still very useful not just for e-mail but also travel bookings and research, where to eat etc. When we have only one computer — or when we have two but the hotel only provides a connection for one — it means we have to spend much more time in the hotel room.

It would be nice to see a laptop adopted for couple’s use. In many cases, this could be just a little software. Many laptops already can go “dual head”, putting out a different screen on their VGA connector than goes to the built-in panel. So a USB keyboard and a super-thin laptop sized flat panel would be all you need, along with power for the panel. In the future, as more and more hotel rooms adopt HDTVs, one could use that instead of the display.

Of course desktop flat panels are bigger than laptops, this would need to be a modified version of the same panels put into laptops, which are readily available. A special connector for it, with power, would make this even better. The goal is something not much larger than a clipboard and mini-keyboard. It could even be put in an ultrathin laptop case (with no motherboard, drives or even battery.)

Now, as to software. In Linux, having two users on two screens is already pretty easy. It’s just a bit of configuration. I would hope the BSD based Mac is the same. Windows is more trouble, since it really doesn’t have as much of a concept of two desktops with two users logged in. (Indeed, I have wondered why we haven’t seen a push for dual-user desktop computers, since it’s not at all uncommon to see an home office with two computers in it for two members of the family, but for which both are used together only rarely.)

On Windows, you would probably need to just have one user logged in, and both people would be that user to Windows. However, you would have different instances of Firefox/Mozilla, for example, which can use different profiles so each person has their own browser settings and bookmarks, their own e-mail settings etc. It would be harder to have both people run their own MS Word, but it might be doable.

Some variants of the idea include making a “thin client” box that plugs into the main computer via USB or even talks bluetooth to it, and has its own power supply. It might do something as simple as VNC to a virtual screen on the main box. Or of course it could plug into ethernet but that’s often taken on the main box to talk to the hotel network if the hotel has a wired connection. (More often they have wireless now.) The thin client could also act as a hub to fix this.

If you want to bring two laptops, you can make things work by using internet connection sharing over wired or wireless ad-hoc network, though it’s much more work than it should be to set up. But my goal is to avoid the weight, size and price of a 2nd laptop, though price is not that big an issue because I am presuming one has other uses for it.

Yesterday I attended Seth Shostak’s standard talk about the work at the SETI institute. I know others from the institute such as Frank Drake and Jill Tarter who inspired the Jodi Foster character in the movie Contact. I wanted to see what was new. (Once, by the way, I went on an eclipse cruise where Drake and Tarter were passengers. On a dive boat, somebody talked about the movie Contact, so I told them that Tarter was on the ship, and she had inspired the character. The woman was amazed and asked, “You mean she met an extraterrestrial?”)

I have a lot of sympathy for this cause, for the search is important and the payoff extremely so. But I must report a serious lack of optimism. Read on to find out why…  read more »

As I watch the immigration debate, I remain astounded at the views expressed by various sides. I am an immigrant to the USA, of course (of the legal type) so naturally I have some sympathies with immigrants, but the inconsistency of some viewpoints bothers me.

If you needed an argument for encouraging immigration, you should have been with me at Agenda in the year 2000. Agenda is a high-priced computer/internet industry executive conference (I used to be one). In that year, it was filled with all the people who were building all the hot new companies and the people running some of the older ones. The very people who were being held up as the engine of economic creation in the USA. That boom wilted a little bit, but there was still a lot of real stuff underneath.

Some high level government official was speaking and immigration came up. Another person at the lunch asked all those in the crowd who were born outside the USA to raise their hands. I would guess at least 60% of us raised our hands. Everybody knows that immigrants built the USA. What some people seem to have lost is that this never stopped. It’s going on just as much today.

Being anti-immigrant reminds me of racism, to use an inflamatory term. Racism is the belief that the broad circumstances of a person’s ancestry affect their worth as a person, and should affect their rights in society. Anti-immigrant nationalism is actually stronger. I was born 20 miles from the U.S. border, to parents also born there (though they were born to immigrant parents from Europe.) What moral code says that those like me deserve less of such fundamental rights as the ability to work, freedom to travel, freedom to live on my land, or to vote for those that will govern us? How can a few miles difference in birthplace morally command such a difference?

It can’t. People are not inherently superior or more or less worthy of human rights based on their parentage or the accidents of their birth. The reasons for sealed borders are entirely pragmatic, ends-justify-the-means reasons. But few are willing to admit that. This has become more true as societies move to offering not just rights but welfare and social support systems to people who live within them. No country can provide welfare to the world, so nations decide to set up an arbitrary rule (birth and parentage) to control who can get in to receive it. I’m not saying these pragmatic arguments aren’t real, just that we should admit what they are. When people get on soapboxes and decry Indians taking jobs from Americans, they seem to be saying that Indians are less worthy than Americans. That there is a moral reason we should contract for labour from people with the same ancestry or birth situation as ourselves over those who don’t share that. There is no such moral reason.

Addendum: I also think every country should encourage as many foreign students as it can. As my privacy sparring partner (but still friend) David Brin puts it, they send their children to our country and get infused with our values and ideas, and come to know us as human beings, and then some go home to spread those ideas — and they pay for this privilege. Who could possibly be against that?

So over the last 2 weeks I attended 4 nicely catered parties, starting with a dinner for O’Reilly’s Web 2.0 conference and ending with one for the SuperNova conference.

By the last party I made up a badge that said “1999 2.0” — that was after the shrimp came out. Though to be fair, it was still cash bar, so we aren’t quite there yet. Though they also gave everybody a $50 gift card at an online content store (where I couldn’t find anything I wanted to spend the $50 on…)

VC funding of speculative deals is certainly up, though of course the IPO market has yet to repeat the boom. People are watching Vonage, which spammed me with E-mail, a paper letter and a voice mail to tell me I could participate in their stock offering (except the fine print says I can’t as I am not a U.S. citizen.)

Web 2.0 certainly seems replete with companies getting funding with little sign of how to build a sustainable business.

It can be very frustrating when a PC decides to send a signal to a monitor that is outside its scan range. Yes, the systems try hard to avoid it, via things like plug and play EDID information on monitor specs, and reverting changes to monitor settings if you don’t confirm them after a few seconds, but sometimes it still happens. It happens after monitor swap, it happens if you don’t have a monitor turned on when you boot or if you have KVM switch that doesn’t talk about the monitor.

The result can be frustrating. If you know how to reboot your PC without seeing the screen you can try that but even that can fail.

So I suggest that monitors be a bit better about signals that are outside of their range. If the dot clock is too fast, for example, consider dividing it by two if the electronics can handle that, showing half the pixels. If there are too many scan lines, just show as many as you can. The bottom of the screen will be missing, but that’s better than no view at all. If the refresh frequency is too high (though usually that’s because the dot clock is too fast) you can skip every other frame, for a very flickering display, but at least not a blank one. Whatever you can do, you can save people from hitting the reset button.

If you’ve been following things, you know that after the great success of the first Darpa Grand Challenge, a new Grand Challenge has been proposed, this time for urban driving. The cars will have to navigate a city with other cars on the road. (I’m going to presume demolition derby style vehicles and speeds.) This time DARPA is providing some funding, though it was impressive how last time the modest (by military standards) $2M prize attained what would have been science fiction just years ago.

So I’m refirming my view that self-driving cars will come to us moderately soon. The technology is very near, and the case is so compelling. In spite of interesting speculations about personal rapid transit, or virtual right-of-way or other items in my transportation category, this is the likely winner because it requires no new infrastructure, and if we let it, it can grow from the ground up.

I’m talking cars that can drive today’s roads, and are better at avoiding people and other cars than we are. They do it on their own, though they cooperate where it makes sense to do so but don’t have cooperate to work.

The most compelling case is that over 1 million people are killed every year in or by cars, about 42,000 in the USA. In fact, there are over 6 million car crashes reported to police in the USA every year, costing an average of $2,900 per vehicle per year (clearly not all borne by insurance companies.) But if that’s not enough, we’ll see:

• Self valet parking — car drives you to front door, then parks itself somewhere cheap.
• Ability to read, work or web surf while in transit
• Dedicated lanes and coordination with timed lights for faster trips.
• Possible eventual ability to reliably go through stop-signs and red lights safely.
• Higher fuel efficiency
• Presumably save hundreds per year on insurace with lower accident rates
• Presumably save even thousands on parking (for CBD commuters.) Parking also possible in cheaper, super-dense remote lots when you do need to park close.
• Car will go to airport to pick up friends.
• Car will run errands to pick up prescriptions and other urgent things. Or people will own or rent small efficient mini-cars to do delivery errands.
• Can’t afford a car? Put in a lockbox for your stuff and rent it out as a Taxi when you aren’t using it. Or use the cars people are renting out as Taxis.

I would pay double for a car like this, but in fact it’s likely to save money, not cost money.

All the other alternatives seem worse. Mass transit is slow at grade and super expensive in tunnels or elevated ROW, and has slow and cumbersome transfers, no personalization and no privacy. PRT requires expensive new ROW. Private driving is of course congested and expensive.

Cost of crashes and traffic update

Let’s look at all the costs of crashes and other traffic problems:

• With fatal crashes, of course, the cost of human lives, and suffering for loved ones.
• With injury crashes, the cost of the injury, possibly a lifetime of problems, but also lost work.
• With all crashes, the cost of repairing the cars
• The cost of all the other safety equipment in the cars (though we would probably want to keep most of it unless crashes truly went to an insignificant number.) Still making a car safe in a crash is a large portion of its cost. And we still don’t have air bags for the people in the back seat.
• The cost of police, fire and ambulences and other crash-management infrastructure.
• The cost of police to enforce traffic regulations (or the cost of tickets to drivers) and parking regulations.
• For accidents during high traffic times, the cost of traffic delays — 20 minutes for 3,000 people amounts to 1,000 person hours.
• The need for wider roads to handle human driven traffic, and shoulders for accidents.

Boston Driver

In a recent discussion, the subject of the selfish driver came up. In Boston, driving in traffic is a constant game of chicken. Self-driving cars would of course be programmed to always lose a game of chicken. Done properly, a rogue driver could barrel at full speed into a crowd of self-driving cars and they would, if possible to do safely, part like water around the rogue car. You would actually have to work hard to try and hit one, especially if they are communicating to do this even better. Which brings up the problem, how to deal with the rogue driver, because it now seems the smart thing for that driver to do.

I wrote earlier about the problem of the selfish merge — a problem we have been unable to solve, where people zoom up to the end in a vanishing lane, causing a traffic jam, because somebody always lets them in, making the zoom-up the fastest strategy. I wondered if a reputation system could help. I don’t want to build a system where we track all cars and the rogue driver gets an automatic ticket. Though it would be nice if they did it constantly that perhaps vacant cars would glom around the rogue driver — reversing the strategy so that they always win a game of chicken instead of always lose — and pen him in and escort him to the cops.

Last weekend, I attended a conference (Singularity Summit) at Stanford which was free. They had a large hall ready to hold 1800, but they got enough registrations to put around 700 on the wait list. However, at the actual event there were a few hundred empty seats in the balcony.

This is because when something is free, people register to go “just in case” and as many as half of them will not show up. In fact, it’s often suggested that it’s better to charge a nominal fee that nobody will be scared of, because it can actually make more people attend, because they said they would and paid to.

(The Long Now foundation, when it decides an event is going to overflow, institutes a $5 “reservation fee” to assure a seat. Normally their events are free with $10 suggested donation. Before they did this I had the disappointment of driving up all the way to the city to be turned away.)

Everybody is so connected now that it seems a just-in-time confirmation system might make sense. Done primarily on the web, those who wish to go would have to confirm via the web or via automated phone system the day before the event. Late that evening, or even the next morning, waitlisters would be mailed and given the opportunity to confirm. In addition, a phone-in number could provide the stats for those driving to the event, to know if it’s worth going.

Airlines are doing OK allowing at-home check in 24 hours before the flight, so this can work too. Even with this, some would confirm and not arrive, and that percentage could be learned to do the right overbooking.

Attendees who confirm would be given a page to print, which would tell them the confirmation procedure, and give the URLs and phone numbers for confirmation and stats. This page would in turn be their ticket. No need for fancy bar codes on it, for a free event you aren’t going to get people copying them or forging them.

In addition, for longer events, people leave and don’t return, so the online and phone status reports could indicate that while the event had been full, it’s now safe to come. Truth is, you are still going to get enough no-shows that those who didn’t confirm can probably still show up, but this way they can be sure.

When you set up a mail client, you have to configure mail reading servers (either IMAP or POP) and also a mail sending server (SMTP). In the old days you could just configure one SMTP server, with no userid or password. Due to spam-blocking, roaming computers have it hard, and either must change SMTP servers as they roam, or use one that has some sort of authentication scheme that opens it up to you and not everybody.

Worse, many ISPs now block outgoing SMTP traffic, insisting you use their SMTP server (usually without a password.) Sometimes your home site has to run an SMTP server at a non-standard port to get you past this.

I propose that IMAP (and possibly POP) include an extension so that the IMAP server can offer your client information on how to send mail. At the very least, it simplifies configuration for users, who now only have to provide one server identity. From there the system configures itself. (Of course, the other way to do this is to identify such servers in DHCP.)

This also simplifies the situation where you want to use a different SMTP server based on which mail account you are working on, something DHCP can't handle.

The IMAP server would offer a list of means to send mail. These could include a port number, and a protocol, which could be plain SMTP, or SMTP over SSL or TLS, or even some new protocol down the road. And it could also offer authentication, because you have already authenticated to the IMAP server with your userid and password. It could tell you a permanent userid and password you can use with the SMTP server, or it could tell you that you don't need one (because your IP address has been enabled for the duration of your IMAP session in the IMAP-before-SMTP approach.) It could also offer a temporary authentication token, which is good only for that session or some period of time after it. Ideally we would have IMAP over SSL/TLS, and so these passwords and tokens would not be sent in the clear.

With a list of possible methods, the client could chose the best one. Or, of course, it could chose one that was programmed in by a user who did custom configure their own SMTP information.

It's also worth noting that it would be possible, down the road, to use the very same IMAP port for a slightly modified SMTP session to an IMAP server set up to handle this. This could handle firewalls that block all but that port. However, the main benefit is to the user with simpler configuration.

From now on, whenever I moderate a conference panel or otherwise organize a conference, I will make a rule that all speakers must make an MP3 of their talk before the conference and E-mail it. While it woudl be a good idea to then listen and see how good a speaker they are, the primary purpose is to get an idea of the length. The speaker, recording their talk at home, will notice that their 20 minute talk takes 35 minutes, and cut down the number of slides until it fits a little better. If not, and they mail in an 35 minute MP3, you can tell them what will happen at 20 minutes.

Not that I haven’t gone over time myself. Many speakers can use the discipline. And it’s a shame for both speaker and audience when you find yourself having to skip the final parts at random to stay on time, or if you don’t, eliminating time from other speakers, from questions or from hallway break conversations, which are the most important part of almost any conference.

Many conferences have a screen counting down time for a speaker, which is fine. The same idea needs to apply with questions. Along with the microphone, hand each question asker a 30 second hourglass to hold up while they’re asking. Sure, if the question is interesting, let them turn it over. But if it’s boring, say “thanks” and move on. And give a slightly longer hourglass or timer to each panelist answering the question. Again, not to be a den mother, but to have a chance to move on if things are not going anywhere. (Kathryn suggested the actual egg timers.)

A lot of the time, on web forms, you will see some sort of structured field, like an IP address, or credit card number, or account number, broken up into a series of field boxes. You see this is in program GUIs as well.

On the surface it makes sense. Never throw away structure information. If you’re parsing a human name, it may be impossible to parse it as well from a plain string compared to a set of boxes for first, last and middle names.

But this does not make sense if the string can always be reliably parsed, as is the case for IP addresses and account numbers and WEP keys and the rest. Using multiple boxes just means users can’t cut and paste. And it’s also hard to type unless you are ready to hit TAB at a point your mind wants to type something else. Some sites use javascript to auto-forward you to the next box when you’ve entered enough in one box, but it’s never perfect and usually doesn’t do backspace well.

Think about it. The multi box idea, expressed to extremes would have every form enter an e-mail address with a username box and a domain name box, with an @ printed between them. This would stop you from entering e-mail addresses without at signs. But fortunately nobody does it. We can always parse an E-mail and we don’t want to subject people to the pains of typing it in a strange way.

Now I have to admit I’ve been tempted sometimes on international phone numbers, because parsing them is hard. The number of digits in the various components, be they area codes or exchanges, varies from region to region and I am not sure anybody has written a perfect parser. But nor do people want to enter phone numbers with tabs. And they want to cut and paste. Remember this when designing your next web form.

Some years ago, Al Gore wanted to spend a lot of money to put up a satellite which would transmit a live view of the whole Earth (well the half it could see) to make people more eco-conscious.

I figured it should be possible to generate the same view with some careful combination of weather satellite images and other satellite images. Yes, sometimes the view in one place might be an hour old while it’s near live in another, but with clever blending you would never know.

So the next thing I want somebody to do with this is build a giant globe to go in some corporate or museum lobby, and project this image of the planet onto it. That’s not so easy, since I want lots of resolution which means many overlapping projectors.

Ideally you would project from inside. Antarctica would probably lose out though if you tilted the planet 23 degrees, or even an amount corresponding to the locations lattitude you could find ways to put the bottom on boring ocean. You could also project from outside, which is a challenge since the screen is not equadistant. I don’t know if a mix would be possible. As noted, one idea would be to show the Earth at is truly is, so the lit part is looking towards the sun as people see it out the windows.

I would want to get close to the globe, but I think the best view would be from a moderate distance, far enough away that we have one pixel per minute of arc or so, the resolution of the human eye. As close as we can get to seeing it in space. (In that case we would want a darker room, not a lobby, and even put a moon on the walls. But a corporate lobby seems like a better way to fund a project like this.)