Brad Ideas Robocars & More

I've been thinking more about environmental economics since I blogged about retail carbon credits. I was surprised about how cheap (some would say unrealisticly cheap) wholesale credits are -- about $2.20 per tonne of CO2. (Update: This price keeps changing. The U.S. price is clearly out of whack down to just 25 cents per tonne in 2009. The European price has declined too, from $20/tonne when I wrote this to $14/tonne in fall 2009.)

Today, many of my friends have bought a car like the Toyota Prius, feeling they are doing their bit to help the environment by burning less gas. The Prius costs around $3,000-$6,000 more than a comparable old-style engine car (in part because high demand keeps the price high), and the savings on gasoline don't justify it on a financial basis unless you do nothing but drive all day. So the main reason to buy it is to help the environment and to make a statement before your peer group. The Camry Hybrid, which gets 32mpg instead of 23mpg costs about $5,000 more than the regular Camry.)

Problem is, there's an argument that you're hurting the environment, counterintuitive as that sounds. And no, it's not just the unanswered questions about recycling the fancy batteries in the Prius when they fade, where fairly positive results have been returned so far. Read on...

This is an idea from several years go I've never written up fully, but it's one of my favourites.

We've seen lots of pushes for online identity management -- Microsoft Passport, Liberty Alliance and more. But what I want is for the online world to help me manage my physical identity. That's much more valuable.

I propose a service I call "addrescrow" which holds and protects your physical address. It will give that address to any delivery company you specify when they have something to deliver, but has limits on how else it will give away info from you. It can also play a role in billing and online identity.

You would get one or more special ID names you could use in place of your address (and perhaps your name and everything else) when ordering stuff or otherwise giving an address. If my ID was "Brad Ideas" then somebody would be able to send a letter, fedex or UPS to me addressed simply to "Brad Ideas" and it would get to me, wherever I was.

(Read on...)

I have been quite behind in processing my photo galleries and panoramics.

I have just now put up the gallery of panoramics from the Death Valley Wildflowers trip from March of 2005. Interesting scenery, and when you get close enough lots of fields of flowers. Of course, on most of them the flowers are so tiny that they are resolved well only when the panos are seen printed at full resolution, not when shrunk for a computer screen.

On the wall now near desks are plates with power and ethernet (and phone until VoIP takes over.) I've been wondering if we shouldn't add another jack -- air, and plumb our walls with pipes to move air for cooling electronic devices.

This idea started by reading about a guy who attached a plastic vent hose from the output of his PC fan to a hole he cut in his wall. This directs much of the heat and some of the noise into the wall and up to the attic.

I started wondering, shouldn't we deliberately plumb our houses to cool our devices? And even more, our office buildings? And can we put the blowers at the other end of the pipes, to move the noise away from our devices? How much would we save on air conditioning?

Read on...

I'm an earlier adopter with my mythTV box and fast connection. But I'm really keen to see the move to getting TV shows over IP. Cable's bulk pricing just isn't doing it for me any more.

Washington, DC: The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) issued a stern warning today to Televangelist Pat Robertson. Robertson had recently condemned the citizens of Dover, PA to the wrath of God for not voting in a school board that would teach Intelligent Design in classes.

"We'd like to say to the good Reverend Robertson: if there is a disaster in your area, don't turn to Science, you just rejected it from your life," AAAS said on its daily television show broadcast from Washington, the 3.14159 Club.

"And don't wonder why it hasn't helped you when problems begin, if they begin. We're not saying they will, but if they do, just remember, you just pushed science out of your life. And if that's the case, don't ask for its help because it might not be there," they said. "In particular, you won't have a phone to call the ambulance, and it won't exist even if you could call it. And even if the doctor lived next door and you could call her, she would only bleed you and put smelly poultices on your forehead to balance your humours. And she would be a guy."

"Actually, we're just kidding," the AAAS later corrected. "Science works whether you believe in it or not. That's what's really cool about it," they said.

"What they said," indicated Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, in an independent statement.

At my bank (Wells Fargo) and some others I have checked, the ATM lets you make a deposit with an envelope. You must key in the total amount being deposited, even if you put several cheques in the envelope. This in turn shows up as just one transaction in my statement, and in my download of my transactions to my computer.

More and more often when I tour a museum these days, I'll see either a computer terminal with some interactive exhibit, or a video screen or cinema to play a movie.

Hard disk drives these days are cheap. Too cheap, in that while we love paying 30 cents/GB, the reliability is getting pretty poor. Doing backups, especially automatic backups is a must, but what about RAID?

One of the problems with RAID, at least RAID-5 is that you need to have 3, and ideally 4 or 5 drives in a machine. That's a lot of drives, a lot of power, a lot of heat, a lot of noise. And many machines only have two IDE controllers so they can barely do 3 drives and can't readily do more even if they had the slots and power for them.

So I propose a software RAID-5, done over a LAN with 3 to 5 drives scattered over several machines on the LAN.

Slow as hell, of course, having to read and write your data out over the LAN even at 100mbits. Gigabit would obviously be better. But what is it we have that's taking up all this disk space -- it's video, music and photos. Things which, if just being played back, don't need to be accessed very fast. If you're not editing video or music, in particular, you can handle having it on a very slow device. (Photos are a bigger issue, as they do sometimes need fast access when building thumbnails etc.)

This could even be done among neighbours over 802.11g, with suitable encryption. In theory.

Not that there aren't some major issues to overcome. The machines must be on most of the time. (A single disk can be taken out of a RAID temporarily, and thus a single machine hosting one disk can be turned off or rebooted, but not for long periods.) If you lose access to two disks (or your LAN) you can't get access to the data. And it's going to use a lot of your network capacity, though gigabit networking is starting to get cheap. And the idea gets better...

(You might want to see Tivo's actual press release about being able to move programs from a Tivo to an iPod.)

ALVISO, CA -- NOV 21, 2005 -- TiVo Inc. (NASDAQ: TIVO ), creator of and a leader in television services for digital video recorders, today announced an enhancement to it's system which actually allows the copying of files from one computer device to another, at least if its one of their partner devices.

You've all heard the famous "Nokia ringtone" many times (hard to describe in text, it's 10 notes, often satirized on Trigger-Happy-TV) and even the polyphonic version.

I suggest that a symphony orchestra, around warmup time, should suddenly play this song with their full glory and set of instruments. This would be funny on its own, but could then be followed by a very memorable, "please remember to turn off your cell phone now in preparation for the performance." It might actually get people to do it.

We hate waiting in line at the cashier and stores don't like paying cashiers so some have self-service cashiers which are still hard to use. So here's an idea.

Provide shoppers who wish to self-serve a scanning wand, which is battery powered and attached by coiled cable to the shopping cart. In the shopping cart, have a number of shopping bags present and numbered. Paper bags which hold a square shape are better. Also have an open area or special bag.

I don't post most EFF news here, since the EFF has a news page and 2 blogs for that, but today I'm doing it twice because congress is voting tomorrow on renewal of the PATRIOT act. There was a lot of effort to reduce the bad stuff in the bill, efforts that seemed to be getting somewhere but were ignored.

At the EFF, we're announcing today a membership drive around our various efforts for blogger's rights.

In the EFF blogs in my blogroll, you will have read this year about our legal guide for bloggers, and the various free speech cases we've done protecting publishing rights online, anonymity and assuring reporter's privilege for online journalists.

Today there's more evidence we should be taking more and more supplements, but they often come in giant pills that are uncomfortable to take. At the same time, easy to take chewable vitamin pills are also on the market.

So I propose: Divide up all the vitamins and minerals and supplements wanted in a daily regimen. Make a chewable pill that contains all the ones that can go in a chewable pill (ie. don't taste bad, and will maintain proper cohesion.) Then take the ones that can't go in that chewable, and bundle just them in a hopefully smaller, coated pill to swallow.

Earlier I posted about my panoramas of Australia. Now I have put up the large gallery of regular spect photos from the trip. We began with a short visit to Melbourne, then drove the Great Ocean Road , ending in Adelaide. From there we flew to Darwin in the top end to visit Kakadu National Park and Litchfield National Park.

There's talk that in the battle between the USA and Europe over control of ICANN, which may come to a head at the upcoming World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis, people will seriously consider "splitting the root" of DNS.

I've written a fair bit about how DNS works and how the true power over how names get looked up actually resides with hundreds of thousands of individual site administrators. However, there is a natural monopoly in the root. All those site admins really have to all do the same thing, or you get a lot of problems, which takes away most of that power.

Still, this is an interesting power struggle. If a large group of admins decided to switch to a new DNS root, different from ICANN, they could. The cooperation of Microsoft, which includes the default root list for IIS, and Paul Vixie, who puts that list in BIND, would play a large part in that as well.

In fact, many times in the past people have split the root by creating alternate, "superset" roots which mirror the existing .com/.org/.net/etc. and add new top level domains. Some of these have been "innocent" efforts frustrated at how slowly ICANN had created new TLDs, but in truth all of them have also been landgrabs, hoping to get ownership of more generic terms, furthering the mistake that was made with .com. ICANN is also furthering the mistake, just more slowly. (The mistake is ignoring what trademark law has known for centuries -- you don't grant ownership rights in ordinary generic terms.)

All of these superset attempts have also failed. I don't think I have ever seen anybody promote a URL using one of the alternate root TLDs, or give me an email address from an alternate root TLD. I consider that failure.

This is, of course, what creates the natural monopoly. Few people are interested in setting it up so that two different people looking for a domain get different results. That applies to the fact that most people get an error for www.drug.shop (in the new.net alternate TLDs) and a few get the registrant's site, but it applies even moreso to the idea that Americans would get one answer for foo.com and Europeans a different one.

Because of this, Larry Lessig recently suggested he wasn't worried about a root split because there would be such strong pressure to keep them consistent.

The difficulty is, what's the point of creating your own root if you can't actually make it any different from the original? The whole point of wanting control is to have your way when there is a dispute, and to have your way does not mean just doing it the same as everybody else lest we get inconsistent results.

It's possible that a group of nations might try to wrest control in order to do nothing at first, but eventually create a superset of TLDs which would, for the first time, be a success. That might work, since if all the nations of the world except the USA were to go to a new root set, it would be hard for the private individuals in the USA who control name servers not to follow. But then the new group would no doubt attempt at some point to issue policies for the existing top-level-domains and country code domains.

I was amused to hear folks on PRI's Marketplace radio program say that 99 cents for a rerun on the video iPod was a good price. Turns out that 99 cents includes commercials in that rerun, because people polled said they would rather pay 99 cents with commercials intead of $1.50 without them.

Everybody is annoyed at how long it takes computers to boot. Some use hibernate mode to save a copy of the system in a booted state, which is one approach. Booting procedures have also gotten better about running stuff in parallel.

I took a lot of photos in Australia, including of course, many panoramas. I've assembled some of the best panoramas.

You can see them in this gallery: Panoramas of Australia