Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

Everybody loves their webcams (though the surveillance aspects of some are to be worried about.)

What about a way to make them cheap and easy to put in cool places. Combine a webcam with a solar panel, 802.11 link and small bettery. The webcam charges the battery off the panel, and when there is enough charge to take a picture, it takes one and spits it out the wireless link. You don't need much of a battery or much of a solar panel, because the amount of power simply controls how often it can take a picture.

Later I will blog my observations on an attempt to do a 2 week working trip to Toronto, but before I do let me throw out and idea to make technomadism easier.

A network of condos, of similar value (with some exceptions) in the most interesting cities of the world. The condos would be "standardized" to include the following:

I'm not the only one to have thought of this, but as yet no real work has been done. How about a hybrid car powered with a Stirling Engine? (Not spelled Sterling, btw.)

The Stirling is more efficient than the internal combustion or diesel engine, and it's also a lot quieter. Sounds great, but it's not good for cars because it can't rev up quickly and it takes about 5 minutes to get the engine hot enough to run well. We want our cars to start the minute we put the key in.

I am on the road in Toronto, so not a lot of blogging, but let me point to an idea that should spread. The Toronto Globe and Mail has a regular feature called Reality Check, where they take claims by politicians and officials, especially ones in negative ads, and research them.

Commodities traders buy gasoline futures all the time. Could they work at the gas pump? Imagine a big gas chain willing to sell you future gas today. You would buy a coupon, good for 15 galons of gas in August, the month you plan a big family trip in the minivan. You're afraid the high prices in the future might hurt the trip, you can be protected against them. The futures might even cost less than gas at the pump today due to widespread belief that supplies will open up. In times of heavy fear they would cost less.

The new genertion of WiFi equipment supports WPA (WiFi Protected Access) a version of the IETF's EAP protocol, so that superior key authentication with different keys for each user and the keys are much harder to crack. In corporate networks, the keys can be fetched via RADIUS -- effectively allowing a single login password to provide all network access securely.

It's always dangerous to predict that soon we will all videoconference, but the technology really is getting better (See the Marconi ViPr, for example.) And bandwidth is getting cheaper. The Marconi system wants 8 megabits bidirectional -- the secret being not to do very fancy compression to instead push for really low latency and hi resolution -- but this is getting to be more affordable.

Thought of the day...

Spam is there to teach us just how many different ways there are to spell Viagra.

When SIP was designed for internet telephony, the feeling was to get rid of the phone number and replace it with IDs with the form of email addresses. E-mail addresses are of course easier to remember and read, though as a downside they tie your address to a domain, which is fine if it's yours, but silly if it's your service provider's.

Of course the Iraqis have not enjoyed having an American Military Governor, but are they ready now for a U.S. pullout? Here's an alternative.

The most remarkable man I have read about in the Arab world is Sheikh Hamad, the Emir of Qatar. How about giving him temporary power with a later handoff date to an Iraqi parliament. There's not a lot of coverage about him on the Web, but consider the following.

His family has been an absolute monarchy for a century. In 1995, however, he deposed his father in a family-supported takeover to become the new young Emir.

I've often wondered why, when you have an electric train line that has a terminus as the main destination, you can't give everybody an express train.

To do this, imagine for the commute home, a 5 car train starts downtown. It leaves and expresses a few stops down the line. (A local car leaves after to handle the stops close to downtown.) When it gets to point one, with sufficient warnings and many safeguards, it decouples, and the rear car brakes to stop at the first of its stations.

I have finally realized why this White House is so concerned over the Iraqi Prison abuse scandal.

They fear they have been caught doing something really serious -- lying about sex.

(Of course, they may point out that what the prisoners were forced to do was not sexual relations according to the prior administration.)

Whenever I see a First Nation's (That's the Canadian politically corect term for Indians) Casino, I have a cynical thought along the lines of "ah, the great Indian tradition of video poker."

So here's a good idea for folks in the gambling machine industry: Track down some traditional native games that can be turned into gambling games on machines. Make machines to play them.

You have all seen them standing on sidewalks, talking loudly to nobody, waving their arms. Too well dressed to be crazy homeless folks -- then you notice the earbud, and know they are on a cell phone. We need a term for these people and this phenomenon.

Some ideas:

• Cellchotic (and Cellchosis)
• Schizophonia (And the afflicted are Schizophonics)
• Celliloquists (not as derogatory)

Your ideas?

I have accepted an invitation to join the Board of Directors for the Foresight Institute for Nanotechnology.

Foresight was created by Chris Peterson and Eric Drexler, author of "Engines of Creation" to act as advocate and watchdog in the field of molecular nanotechnology, of which Eric can claim to be the modern father. I've been a senior associate of the institute for some years and spoken at their conference. I will MC the conference coming up next weekend.

No, I don't mean Google is the new overly aggressive, cut-throat monopoly on the block. What I mean is that with the IPO hype and dominant brand in search, Google is the new #1 on the block, and that's going to have a price.

I wrote some time ago of how I would like a car's MP3 player/computer to have 802.11, so that when it parks in my driveway, it notices it is home and syncs up new data and music.

I recently spoke to Gordon Bell about the Digital Life Bits project he's doing at Microsoft Research, digitizing his entire life. I'm seeing more and more evidence that a prediction I made several years ago for "P-Day" may already have come true.

In 1965, Gordon Moore of intel published a paper suggesting that the number of transistors on a chip would double every year. Later, it was revised to suggest a number of 18 months, which became true in part due to marketing pressure to meet the law.

Recently, Intel revised the law to set the time at two years.

So this suggests a new law, that the time period in Moore's Law doubles about every 40 years.

In thinking about the GMail encryption problem, I came to realize that for ordinary users liable to forget their passwords, it would not be suitable to tell them after such an event that all their email archives are forever lost. This means some sort of Key Escrow. Not the nasty kind done with the clipper chip, but one done voluntarily.

I came up with a system I call Friendscrow. (I suspect others have also thought of the same thing.) This is a ZUI (Zero User Interface) system, at least for normal operation.