Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

I recently read it costs about $150,000 to put in traffic lights here in California. That's a heavy duty pole, the lights, the power, the connection to other lights and the vehicle sensors. Seems to me modern technology should be able to make that a lot cheaper. New lights are all LED (the energy savings pay for themselves quickly) but that should also mean smaller safer power lines with special digging under the road. (Wonder if they could do it with light pipes and have no electricity up there.)

Today, the U.S. Agriculture secretary issued a call that nations not ban beef imports from a country (like the USA) just because a single cow has been found with Mad Cow disease.

In other words, exactly what the USA did to Canadian beef when a single cow was found in Alberta with the disease.

And let's not get started on the Weapons of Mass Destruction question.

For the second year in a row, I'm having a "Superbowl Commercials" party featuring my Tivo. Since the Tivo lets you watch a program while it's being recorded, you can watch the football at 20x speed and slow down for the commercials, and be finished when the game finishes.

To start and give the Tivo a chance to buffer up some game, we head for the hills in a renunciation of the couch potato for a hike. Then we return for the commercials and party.

I often talk about Challenge Response spam filters because I wrote the first one. One complaint people make is that the filters will challenge even forged mail, causing a challenge to be sent to the forgery victim. While this is not a DOS attack window as some people believe (since you can as easily DOS the target directly as get others to do it for you) it does need more consideration.

I seem to be thinking a lot about the future of automatic cars these days. Already we're seeing cars in Japan that can park themselves in a tight parallel parking spot, and this leads me to think that the next market for the technology, after the basic automatic highway, won't be the city street but the parking lot.

I went around and counted that we seem to have around 30 birick and wall-wart DC power supplies plugged in around the house, and many more that are not plugged in which charge or power various devices. More and more of what we buy is getting to be more efficient and lower power, which is good.

But it's time for standardization in DC power and battery charging. In fact, I would like to move to a world where DC devices don't come with a power supply by default, because you are expected to be able to power them at one of the standard voltage/current settings.

Another transportion item, because last night the train I was on hit a car stalled on the tracks (the occupant is OK, though was hit by the car when the train bashed it.)

Since trains do hit things, why aren't solutions to this more common in our data network world? A laser detector over the grade crossings would be simple enough.

I'll be writing more in the future on ideas for auto-drive cars (both plus and minus) but let me start by asking the question of why the oil companies haven't jumped up to foot the bill for the development of automatic cars and highways?

It seems a big win for them. Given the availability of a car that would drive itself on the freeway and perhaps a few major roads, people would be much more willing to tolerate longer commutes, and that seems a win if you sell gasoline. A multi-billion dollar win.

Like many, I am interested in reputation systems, and eBay has built the largest public reputation system. Many have noted how feedback on eBay is overwhelmingly positive -- a 97% positive rating would be a reason to be wary of a seller.

It's also noted that people do this because they are scared of revenge feedback -- I give you a negative, you do it back to me. One would think that since the buyer's only real duty is to send the money that the seller should provide positive feedback immediately upon receipt of that money, but they don't.

Thinking more about the future of mobile audio (see Tivo for Radio Entry) I start to wonder if XM and Sirius satellite radio are doomed propositions. They seem like a good idea, nationwide radio, 100 channels, many commercial-free.

But how many of the stations does any given listener actually use? I would guess most people only listen to a few of them, just as they only listen to a few on the local dial.

I plan for this to be mostly an essay blog rather than a link blog, but I could not resist this story of yet another nightmare at airport security, as a student is ordered to "dispose" of her pet fish while trying to take it home with her on the plane.

We're not there yet, but let me write my notes about what future digital cameras might do to help us organize our huge collections of photos:

• GPS and compass in the camera knows where it is, and where it was pointing. Thus, if standing on the south rim of Grand Canyon and pointing north, probably a picture of the Grand Canyon. Organize your photos on a map.
• Record audio said while taking photo if special button pressed. Later, upload audio to PC where it's able to do speaker-dependent speech to text at its leisure to caption the photos.
• Face recognition. No, I'm not kidding. While this is Big Brother technology, and not very useful in airports, one thing it can do is try to find similar faces. So once you tag your mother, it will be able to search your photo collection for other shots with your mother. This is much easier than trying to take a random person and see if they are on the FBI wanted list.

The USA and Canada have agreed to tell each other before deporting citizens to third countries.

In theory, that's to not repeat the horrific story of Maher Arar, the Canadian programmer, born in Syria, who, while changing planes in New York on a flight from Europe to Montreal, was grabbed by U.S. agents, grilled and then deported to Syria, allegedly so the Syrians could torture him in ways the U.S. could not.

Recently, we picked up a Rio Karma, which is a 20gb handheld jukebox that plays MP3, WMA and Ogg Vorbis. Particularly nice things about it include the Ogg support and the fact it has Ethernet, so that any machine on our net can transfer music into it. That's about all it does with the ethernet (it also has a small web server to serve the manual and a java transfer app) but I expect it will do more later, like be a streaming media gateway when docked on the stereo, allowing control from anywhere.

For some time I have been musing over the design of an ideal home A/V system using digital technology. Sadly it's not coming, in part because it's illegal under the new Broadcast Flag rules.

To read my design of this system, and the musings of the legality of it and why that presents a problem, see a draft on an Ideal A/V digital system

Just about every blog has pointed to Moveon.org's Bush in 30 Seconds contest for anti-Bush TV spots.

The candidate spots are witty and clever, but I think they miss the mark. For those who have already decided they will vote for anyone-but-Bush, they bring many cries of approval. But that's not who they have to convince.

Transit idea #2. Air travel is getting to be like hell, with searches and the need to get there so far in advance of the flight to be sure you will get through security that it cancels much of the benefit, turning 40 minute flights into 3 hour ordeals. High Speed train advocates point out the downtown-to-downtime time of the train on routes of 300-500km beats or is competitive with the plane, and it's true.

I'm going to write more in the future about how transportation is not making using technology. Let me start with streetcars and the bus.

People use transit a lot more if it is able to beat the car, or at least keep pace with it. Thus we spend a lot of money on dedicated right-of-way for subways, trains and streetcars.

But this is really inefficient. The dedicated right-of-way sits empty 95% of the time. It does nothing so that a train can pass over it every 10 minutes (or more.)

There is much talk of Location Based Services and geographical annotation these days. We either see scary LBS (network tracks you all the time, sends you Latte coupon when you walk near Starbucks) or query based services -- "based on where I am, where's the nearest good place to eat?" That's something Vindigo does without nearing a GPS, and does it fairly well.

I've been wondering about proactive location based services and annotations that work for you and protect your privacy.

There's a growing and dangerous movement to try to stop spam by forcing all mail senders to provide ID with each mail they send. Signing mail is not a bad idea, in fact it's quite useful, but to stop spam you have to make everybody sign their mail.

In the past this was a non-starter because this means forcing everybody who mails you to get new mail sending software, or at least to have their ISP do this. But spam has made us so angry people are talking about doing this, even though we don't demand ID for paper mail that, in theory, can contain white powder that can kill you.