Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Legacy politics assured that Iowa and New Hampshire would get the lead in setting the political agenda of a Presidential race. If you can't please them, it's hard to get nominated. And now they protect this position as hard as they can. Florida tried to move and got slapped.

There is a better way. There should be a lottery, or simply a rotation, on who gets to go first each time. All parties in a state would have to agree, but I can't see why not, and really all you need is the Republicans and Democrats. Hold the lottery several years in advance.

I wrote before about how the fancy bags they give away at conferences very rarely get used. I have a stack in the closet, and I'm not going to use them as my bag with sponsor logos plastered all over them. The people who attend such conferences aren't the sort who want to carry your advertising everywhere, or scream out "I'm so cheap I'm using a sponsored bag." And you can't give them to friends as gifts, even if they are nice bags. So I suggested that they put logos on the inside but of course that doesn't yet happen.

A story from the New York Times suggests it costs over $12,000/year to store a movie in digital form.

I'm not sure why, but beaming business cards between PDAs never caught on as much as I would have liked. Of course Palm and Wince PDAs don't speak the same beaming language (of course) and I never saw it much in Windows anyway.

With my new fancy scanner, I can scan a stack of 60 business cards in a minute, so it's not going to take me long to do the physical scanning. Business card scanning has been around for a while, but it still presents challenges.

Digital Picture Frames are finally coming down to tolerable prices and decent resolutions. We are about to give my mother one that's 1024x768 and 15" on the diagonal. In part that's because I never got around to building one out of a laptop though I still think a linux distro that turned an old laptop into a digital PF would be a great idea because the ability to do wireless networking to subscribe to flickr and other feeds is the waiting killer app for these frames.

A card from Ty. (My brother, the comic book artist, if you didn't know.)

I guess in the linux community it is slightly more acceptable.

This week, like many, I have gotten a bunch of invites to join people's trust networks on the people-search/social networking site called "Spock." Now normally I have started to mostly ignore new invites from social networking services. There are far too many, and I can't possibly maintain accounts on them all, so a new site will have to get very, very, very compelling before I will join it.

Update: Harry Reid has delayed the bill until 2008. Let's hope we can keep the immunity out when it returns again next year. Let your senators know.

Usually, when you start a legal action, you consider the merits and go ahead when you have a good case. If your case is just, you should win.

Here's an idea for a way to bring reputation based shopping to the brick and mortar world.

I was intrigued by this report of a russian chatbot fooling men into thinking it was a woman who was hot for them. The chatbot seduces men, and gets them to give personal information that can be used in identity theft. The story is scant on details, but I was wondering why this was taking place in Russia and not in richer places. As reported, this was considered a partial passing of the Turing Test.

Computerworld has been nice enough to include me in their series on unsung innovators of the net. I should point out that I try to downplay the dot thing -- to me it's an amusing anecdote of having participated in the right mailing lists at the right time. I remain much more interested in whatever I will do next!

All over the net, a huge number of sites offer you the option of E-mailing you your password if you have forgotten it. While this seems to make sense, it is actually a dreadful security policy, and if you see it, you should complain and point them to this article or others to get them to stop. As an alternate, they should at most offer to E-mail you a new, randomly chosen temporary password, which you can use to log in and set a more memorable password.

If you have bought a home router or access point, you know it comes by default listening to some NAT based IP address, and the setup guide tells the user to type "http://192.168.1.1" or similar into their browser.

The hot new thing of the web of late has been facebook apps. I must admit Facebook itself has been great for me at finding old friends because for unknown reasons, almost 20% of Canada is on Facebook compared to 5% of the USA. Facebook lets 3rd parties write apps, which users can "install" and after installing them, the apps get access to the user's data (friend list) and can insert items into the user's "feed" (which all their friends see) and sometimes send E-mails to friends.

Among many patent reform proposals it is common to have a desire for better examination, and more detection of prior art and obviousness. But the patent office only has so much money for so many examiners.

So here's a simple solution. If you want to apply for a patent, you must put in some time, as an expert in your field, examining other patent applications, searching for prior art and giving opinions on the obviousness. Alternately, this duty could be given only to those who actually are granted patents, to make more sure they are "skilled in the art" of their fields.

Many in my futurist circles worry a lot about the future of AI that eventually becomes smarter than humans. There are those who don't think that's possible, but for a large crowd it's mostly a question of when, not if. How do you design something that becomes smarter than you, and doesn't come back to bite you?

The strike by screenwriters in the Porn Writers Guild of America is wreaking a less public havoc on the pornography industry. Porn writers, concerned about declining revenue from broadcast TV, also seek a greater share of revenue from the future growth areas of DVD and online sales.

"Online sales and DVD may one day be the prime sources of revenue in our industry," stated union spokesman Seymour Beaver. We want to be sure we get our fair share of that for providing the writing that makes this industry tick.

Ok, I haven't had a new laptop in a while so perhaps this already happens, but I'm now carrying more devices that can charge off the USB power, including my cell phone. It's only 2.5 watts, but it's good enough for many purposes.

There's a lot of equipment you don't need to have for long. And in some cases, the answer is to rent that equipment, but only a small subset of stuff is available for rental, especially at a good price.

So one alternative is what I would call a "ReBay" -- buy something used, typically via eBay, and then after done with it, sell it there again. In an efficient market, this costs only the depreciation on the unit, along with shipping and transaction fees. Unlike a rental, there is little time cost other than depreciation.

I have sympathy for the TV writers, because I believe the 3 most important elements of a good TV show are story, story and story. You need more than that, but without them you are toast.

But my reaction is not likely to help them. One of the things they are striking for is to make more money off DVD sales and online delivery of their video. But with The Daily Show off the air, we found ourselves reaching for... other old shows on DVD.