Brad Ideas

Robocars & More

In the SF Bay Area, there are carpool lanes. Drivers of fuel efficient vehicles, which mostly means the Prius and the Honda Civic/Insight Hybrids can apply for a special permit allowing them to drive solo in the carpool lanes. This requires both a slightly ugly yellow sticker on the bumper, and a special transponder for bridges, because the cars are allowed to use the carpool lane on the bridge but don't get the toll exemption that real carpools get.

One growing technique for use in anti-spam involves finding ways to "fail" on initial contacts for sending mail. Real, standard conformant mail programs try again in various ways, but spammers, in writing their mail blasters, tend to just have them skip that address and go to the next one in their list.

Two common approaches include simply returning a "temporarily unavailable" status on any initial mail attempt that might be spam. Another approach is to have dead MX records both at the "try first" and "try last" end of the MX chain.

Radio technology has advanced greatly in the last several years, and will advance more. When the FCC opened up the small "useless" band where microwave ovens operate to unlicenced use, it generated the greatest period of innovation in the history of radio. As my friend David Reed often points out, radio waves don't interfere with one another out in the ether. Interference only happens at a receiver, usually due to bad design. I'm going to steal several of David's ideas here and agree with him that a powerful agency founded on the idea that we absolutely must prevent interference is a bad idea.

My overly simple summary of a replacement regime is just this, "Don't be selfish." More broadly, this means, "don't use more spectrum than you need," both at the transmitting and receiving end. I think we could replace the FCC with a court that adjudicates problems of alleged interference. This special court would decide which party was being more selfish, and tell them to mend their ways. Unlike past regimes, the part 15 lesson suggests that sometimes it is the receiver who is being more spectrum selfish.

Here are some examples of using more spectrum than you need:

• Using radio when you could have readily used wires, particularly the internet. This includes mixed mode operations where you need radio at the endpoints, but could have used it just to reach wired nodes that did the long haul over wires.
• Using any more power than you need to reliably reach your receiver. Endpoints should talk back if they can, over wires or radio, so you know how much power you need to reach them.
• Using an omni antenna when you could have used a directional one.
• Using the wrong band -- for example using a band that bounces and goes long distance when you had only short-distance, line of sight needs.
• Using old technology -- for example not frequency hopping to share spectrum when you could have.
• Not being dynamic -- if two transmitters who can't otherwise avoid interfering exist, they should figure out how one of them will fairly switch to a different frequency (if hopping isn't enough.)

As noted, some of these rules apply to the receiver, not just the transmitter. If a receiver uses an omni antenna when they could be directional, they will lose a claim of interference unless the transmitter is also being very selfish. If a receiver isn't smart enough to frequency hop, or tell its transmitter what band or power to use, it could lose.

Since some noise is expected not just from smart transmitters, but from the real world and its ancient devices (microwave ovens included) receivers should be expected to tolerate a little interference. If they're hypersensitive to interference and don't have a good reason for it, it's their fault, not necessarily the source's.

Update: Several of the spam bounces of this sort that I got were traced to the same anti-spam system, and the operator says it was not intentional, and has been corrected. So it may not be quite as bad as it seemed quite yet.

I have a social list of people I invite to parties. Every time I mail to it, I feel the impact of spam and anti-spam. Always several people have given up on a mailbox. And I run into new spam filters blocking the mail.

A recent story that United had removed all instances of the word "God" (not simply Goddamn) from a historical movie reminded me just how much they censor the movies on planes.

Here they have an easy and simple way out. Everybody is on headsets, and they already offer different soundtracks in different languages by dialing the dial. So offer the censored and real soundtrack on two different audio channels. Parents can easily make sure the kids are on whatever soundtrack they have chosen for them, as the number glows on the armrest.

(Note I have a simpler article for those just looking for advice on how to get their Widescreen TV to display properly.)

Very commonly today I see widescreen TVs being installed, both HDTV and normal. Flat panel TVs are a big win in public places since they don't have the bulk and weight of the older ones, so this is no surprise, even in SDTV. And they are usually made widescreen, which is great.

Everybody's got old cell phones, which sit in closets. Why don't the wireless carriers let customers cheaply have two or more phones on the same line. That would mean that when a call came in, both phones would ring (and your landlines if you desire) and you could answer in either place. You could make calls from either phone, though not both at the same time.

(Note: I have posted a followup article on CitizenRe as a result of this thread. Also a solar economics spreadsheet.)

I've been writing about the economics of green energy and solar PV, and have been pointed to a very interesting company named CitizenRe. Their offering suggests a major cost reduction to make solar workable.

3-D printing is getting cheaper. This week I saw a story about producing a hacked together 3-D printer that could print in unusual cheap materials like play-doh and chocolate frosting for $2,000. Soon, another 3-D technology will get cheap -- the 3-D body scan.

In one of my first blog posts, I wrote about virtual right-of-way, a plan to create dedicated right of way for surface rail and bus transit, but to allow cars to use the RoW as long as they stay behind, and never in front of the transit vehicle.

I proposed one simple solution, that if the driver has to step on the brakes because of a car in the way, a camera photographs the car and plate, and the driver gets a fat ticket in the mail. People would learn you dare not get into the right-of-way if you can see a bus/train in your rearview mirror.

Join me next Thursday (one-eleven) at the one-eleven Minna gallery in San Francisco to celebrate EFF's 16th year. From 7 to 10pm. Suggested donation $20. Stop by if you're at Macworld.

Details at http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/005055.php

A recent Forbes items pointed to my earlier posts on eBay Feedback so I thought it was time to update them. Note also the eBay tag for all posts on eBay including comments on the new non-feedback rules.

I wrote earlier about the controversial topic of discriminatory pricing, where vendors try to charge different customers different prices, usually based on what they can afford or will tolerate. One particularly vexing type of such pricing is the mail-in rebate. Mail in rebates do two things. In their pure form, they give a lower price to people willing to spend some time on the bureaucracy. As such, they would work at charging richer customers more because richer customers tend to value time more than money compared to poorer customers.

I've thought digital picture frames were a nice idea for a while, but have not yet bought one. The early generation were vastly overpriced, and the current cheaper generation still typically only offer 640x480 resolution. I spend a lot to produce quality, high-res photography, and while even a megapixel frame would be showing only a small part of my available resolution, 1/4 megapixel is just ridiculous.

While I've written before about the trouble in making solar competitive with grid power, this is not true when the grid is being blown up by geurilla fighters on a regular basis. Over the past couple of years, Bechtel has been paid over 2 billion dollars, mostly to try to rebuild the Iraq electrical infrastructure. Perhaps it's not their fault that power is only on in Bagdadh for 2 hours a day after these billions have been spent -- but their might have been a better way.

I was seduced by Google's bribe of $20 per $50 or greater order to try their new Checkout service, and did some Christmas shopping on buy.com. Normally buy.com, being based in Southern California, takes only 1 or 2 days by UPS ground to get things to me. So ordering last weekend should have been low risk for items that are "in stock and ship in 1-2 days." Yes, they cover their asses by putting a longer upper bound on the shipping time, but generally that's the ship time for people on the other coast.

Last week, I wrote about new ideas for finding the lost. One I've done some follow-up on is the cell phone approach. While it's not hard to design a good emergency rescue radio if you are going to explicitly carry a rescue device when you get lost, the key to cell phones is that people are already carrying them without thinking about it -- even when going places with no cell reception since they want the phone with them when they return to reception.

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.)