Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

This week I participated in this thread on Newcomb's Paraodox which was noted on BoingBoing.

The paradox:

A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.

I've been writing recently about the linux upgrade nightmares that continue to trouble the world. The next in my series of ideas is a suggestion that we try to measure how well upgrades go, and make a database of results available.

I've spoken before about ZUI (Zero User Interface) and how often it's the right interface.

One important system that often has too complex a UI is backup. Because of that, backups often don't get done. In particular offsite backups, which are the only way to deal with fire and similar catastrophe.

Here's a rough design for a ZUI offsite backup. The only UI at a basic level is just installing and enabling it -- and choosing a good password (that's not quite zero UI but it's pretty limited.)

A new program has appeared at San Jose Airport, and a few other airports like Orlando. It's called "Clear" and is largely the product of the private company Clear at flyclear.com. But something smells very wrong.

To get the Clear card, you hand over $99/year. The private company keeps 90% and the TSA gets the small remainder. You then have to provide a fingerprint, an iris scan and your SSN, among other things.

Normally I'm a general-purpose computing guy. I like that the computer that runs my TV with MythTV is a general purpose computer that does far more than a Tivo ever would. My main computer is normally on and ready for me to do a thousand things.

But there is value in specialty internet appliances, especially ones that can be very low power and small. But it doesn't make sense to have a ton of those either.

Last week I wrote about linux's problems with dependencies and upgrades and promised some suggestions this week.

There are a couple of ideas here to be stolen from (sacrilige) windows which could be a start here, though they aren't my long term solution.

Microsoft takes a different approach to updates, which consists of little patches and big service packs. The service packs integrate a lot of changes, including major changes, into one upgrade. They are not very frequent, and in some ways akin to the major distribution releases of systems like Ubuntu (but not its parent Debian ), Fedora Core and SuSE.

Installing a service pack is certainly not without risks, but the very particular combination of new libraries and changed apps in a service pack is extensively tested together, as is also the case for a major revision of a linux distribution. Generally installing one of these packs has been a safe procedure. Most windows programs also do not use hand-edited configuration files for local changes, and so don't suffer from the upgrade problems associated with this particular technique nearly as much.

There is a story that Ikonos is going to redirect a satellite to do a high-res shot of the area where CNet editor James Kim is missing in Oregon. That's good, though sadly, too late, but they also report not knowing what to do with the data.

We still see a lot of thermal printers out there, particularly for printing labels, receipts and the like. They are cheap, of course, though the paper costs extra so it's not always a long term win.

We all spend far too much of our time doing sysadmin. I'm upgrading and it's as usual far more work than it should be. I have a long term plan for this but right now I want to talk about one of Linux's greatest flaws -- the dependencies in the major distributions.

Parking at airports seems a terrible waste -- expensive parking and your car sits doing nothing. I first started thinking about the various Car Share companies (City CarShare, ZipCar, FlexCar -- effectively membership based hourly car rentals which include gas/insurance and need no human staff) and why one can't use them from the airport. Of course, airports are full of rental car companies, which is a competitive problem, and parking space there is at a premium.

Right now the CarShare services tend to require round-trip rentals, but for airports the right idea would be one-way rentals -- one member drives the car to the airport, and ideally very shortly another member drives the car out of the airport. In an ideal situation, coordinated by cell phone, the 2nd member is waiting at the curb, and you would just hand off the car once it confirms their membership for you. (Members use a code or carry a key fob.) Since you would know in advance before you entered the airport whether somebody is ready, you would know whether to go to short term parking or the curb -- or a planned long-term parking lot with a bit more advance notice so you allocate the extra time for that.

Of course the 2nd member might not want to go to the location you got the car from, which creates the one-way rental problem that carshares seem to need to avoid. Perhaps better balancing algorithms could work, or at worst case, the car might have to wait until somebody from your local depot wants to go there. That's wasteful, though. However, I think this could be made to work as long as the member base is big enough that some member is going in and out of the airport.

I started thinking about something grander though, namely being willing to rent your own private car out to bonded members of a true car sharing service. This is tougher to do but easier to make efficient. The hard part is bonding reliability on the part of all concerned.

Read on for more thinking on it...

There's a great tragedy going on in the Sudan, and not much is being done about it. Among the people trying to get out the message are hollywood celebrities. I am not faulting them for doing that, but I have a suggestion that is right up their alley.

Which is to make a movie to tell the story, a true movie that is, hopefully a moving as a Schinder's List or the Pianist. Put the story in front of the first world audience.

I'm pleased to see that more of my photography is getting licenced for ads and web sites these days. I like the job that this PDA ad does with my 360 degree view of Shanghai People's Square. Of course I can't read the text very well.

It's always reported how low US voter turnout is in midterm elections. 2006, at about 40%, seems pretty poor, though it was higher than 2002.

However the statistic I would like to see is "Voter turnout in districts where there is an important, hotly contested race." This is the number we might want to monitor from year to year.

Ok, this is a silly idea, but it would make a great baby shower gift. Crib sheets -- which is to say sheets to go on a baby's bed -- printed with small notes on your favourite subjects of choice -- math, physics, history, as you would need for taking an exam. And who knows, maybe you can pretend if the baby sleeps surrounded by Maxwell's equations she'll become a genius.

I'm not a gamer. I wrote video games 25 years ago but stopped when game creation became more about sizzle (graphics) than steak (strategy.) But the story of the release of the Playstation 3 is a fascinating one. Sony couldn't make enough, so to get them, people camped out in front of stores, or in some cases camped out just to get a certificate saying they could buy one when they arrived. But word got out that people would pay a lot for them on eBay.

Differential pricing occurs when a company attempts to charge different prices to two different customers for what is essentially the same product. One place we all encounter it a lot is air travel, where it seems no two passengers paid the same price for their tickets on any given flight. You also see it in things like one of my phones, which has 4 line buttons but only 2 work -- I must pay $30 for a code to enable the other 2 buttons.

I've written before about one of the greatest flaws in the modern political system is the immense need of candidates to raise money (largely for TV ads) which makes them beholden to contributors, combined with the enhanced ability incumbents have at raising that money. Talk to any member of congress and they will tell you they start work raising money the day after the election.

I go to many conferences, and most of them seem to want to give me a nice canvas bag, and often a shirt as well. Truth is though, I now have a stack of about 20 bags in my closet. I've used some of the bags, typically the backpacks, but when I have so many other bags I don't feel a strong motivation to walk around with a briefcase or laptop bag with a giant sponsor's logo on it, or worse, a collection of 10 logos. No matter how nice the bag is. In addition, even if I got logo-free bags I have no need for 20 of them, but I can't really give away logo covered bags as gifts.

It does get hard to be a privacy advocate when it's easy to think of interesting apps that make use of tracking infrastructure. Here's one.

How often have you wanted to talk to somebody in a car next to you on the road? Consider a system where people could register their licence plate(s) with their cell phone account. Then, if they had done this, you could call a special number on your own cell phone, and enter the numeric part of their licence plate.

This weekend I experienced an air travel policy that I had not seen before and which I found quite shocking. I was flying on United Express (Skywest)'s flight from San Francisco to Calgary. As we waited for the early morning flight, they announced this "weather warn." Visibility was poor in Calgary due to low clouds. Below 0.5 miles they plane would not be allowed to land there. They rated about a 1/3rd chance of this happening, 2/3 chance we would land normally.