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This article:
      http://ideas.4brad.com/it-cert...
suggests that the LIDAR was turned off, and has some technical explanation around why things might have failed.

While this is an interesting variant, it faces the same problem that vehicle-2-vehicle communication based on the DSRC and 802.11p protocols does.

Nobody has ever, as far as I know, built a network technology where you must network with random strangers you encounter out in the physical world. You can't build that because there is no value to the first people to install the tech, no value even to the first million in a country with 250 million cars like the USA. The odds of any 2 given cars being able to talk is one in 62,000 at that point. How can you sell a tech that provides no value to the first millions of customers? Even with the legal mandate they are hoping for, it will take decades before there is wide deployment of the 2013 designed technology that is then very obsolete.

I explained this in more detail in my series on V2V at http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/v2v

Let's all invest our tax money into public health, and if it works, we'll all be healthier. And so forth.

I'm fine with that.

Hell, the American economic system is basically, "Let's create an aristocracy, and hope they don't screw us over." It's appropriately named "trickle down economics," and they keep telling me it's raining.

And it's a disaster, because people are allowed to operate without liability. These corporations have gotten to big, bought out the government, and now are slapped on the wrist for their mistakes. In a real economic system, we'd say, keep what you create. The government provides basic services on a user fee basis, where a basic service is defined as anything that runs on a singleton basis. I.E., roads, water, power, even public transport. As well as police, health, and fire.

I'm not buying it.

And neither am I.

Rethink mass transit.

This suggests transit is a bad idea. China is not going to be an oil powered car society. It is going to be a coal powered car society, love it or hate it.

Culture change time. Rethink atomic power. Rethink public transport.

Actually, he could promote economic development in Africa, to reduce pop growth.

Or he could build an EV, insulate his house better, install solar, wind (generation > conservation).

Public transport is not a good idea. Ride a motorcycle.

Perhaps you might want to review the four criteria determining whether a fair-use defense can be raised from 17 USC (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml):

"(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work. "

These parodies can all point, at a minimum, to the "substantiality" clause as a defense. They're not using the entire movie, just a clip. They all meet the non-commercial requirement of item (1), and their effect on the commercial value of the film is at least arguable (some may claim it broadened the film's audience). Determining whether a potentially infringing item can be viewed as a fair use of the material is a complex and nuanced process that can only be resolved in a court of law. Automated content matching tools just don't cut it in this arena.

Read Templeton's blog entry for more insight.

Work out the math yourself or try the spreadsheet at http://ideas.4brad.com/are-solar-panels-wasteful-way-go-green

Note that being economically viable is *not* the same as being the most cost effective way to reduce load on the dirty grid. When it's not viable, it is silly to do it from a financial standpoint, and your only reason is to waste some money making the world a greener place. After it's viable you can come up with a more direct justification. But If you can make the world 10x greener with your money by not using solar panels, what is the right decision?

Oh shit, you're right... ICANN Has Cheezburger

First of all, here's my more detailed review of Anathem, including a latter half (with warnings) that is discussion of the ending of the book, which of course means spoilers.

http://ideas.4brad.com/book-review-anathem-neal-stephenson

But some short responses:

I guess you will either hate or love the made-up words. No questions they are not for everybody, and they do create a barrier to some who want to read it, but by the end you are enjoying them, even speaking them in your geeky conversations. I think you will find people in the nerd community using these words in conversations for years to come.

This book does indeed have the best ending of a NS work -- but that's not saying much. While now there is an ending, the question is how much the ending makes sense (see the spoilers for more discussion of that.)

However, one thing I will give the ending -- the very last 3 pages give you important realizations that reinform your reading of the entire book, and see it in a new light, and that's pretty high praise for an ending. However, not everybody gets these big revelations, I have seen, so see my spoilers as to why.

Clearly this book is only for those who like exploring philosophy and science. But for those who do like these things, this book is a must-read.

As for length, I agree somewhat, in that I think the book could have worked by removing the trip over the pole (moving the few plot-essential elements from that to other circumstances) but I don't think the beginning is slow. I think a lot happens in the beginning.

The reason I didn't compare scooters is because thats not what most people take to work. But I might have done well to recommend people consider scooters instead of or along with bicycles.

Its rather interesting that the numbers for bicycles and cars are closer than I had though (except my banana number which is way off). This guy suggests, with numbers to support for USA conditions, that walking and driving are not too far separated for same distance trips.

And that bicycling is about twice as efficient as single passenger car trips in fuel efficient cars.

So riding to work is still a good thing, especially if it doubles as part of your exercise habit. But is nowhere near as good idea as riding somewhere in your recreational time, where time and not distance might be more of a factor. And sharing a car might be more efficient that riding a bike.

Honestly speaking, I still have a slightly hard time believing it. But I don't have a better story. The whole thing does bear a bit more investigation.

cheers,
david

This is a very complex issue. We moved from time-sharing and mainframes to PCs, even though the PCs were slower and with clunky software because they were under our control. They had one super powerful attribute: Nobody could tell you "no" when you wanted to do something on them.

People will put up with a lot, in order to not have somebody who can tell you no.

That's why, even when the timesharing has had many technological advantages, such as greater efficiency, ability to roam, and having somebody else maintain things for you, the "inferior" PC has always won.

However, it's possible that this new wave of cloud computing/web 2.0 might be the first real incursion. That's because you can choose from a variety of different places to host your web apps, and also because we've made maintaining the software on your own computer harder and harder and harder.

But it's dangerous. The courts ruled that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to your data in the hands of 3rd parties. It really means your data in your house. Cloud computing runs the risk of erasing the 4th amendment as we store all our lives in the hands of 3rd parties. No small feat.

And now there's a movement afoot under the name "data portability" which sounds nice but really means "bulk export of your personal data made easy." What can be shared, will be shared. What you make easy to do will be done.

I've written some essays on these topics you may find of interest, including:

http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/openid

And these on a proposal to reverse could computing that I call "data hosting." In such a system, you have a server (or pay for one) which holds your data, and applications come to your data and run in sandboxes on it, sending output to your browser.

http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/data-hosting

There is no easy answer. People will love the positive features of cloud computing, and it will be a tall order to get them to switch to something that keeps those and doesn't have the negatives.

This is a very complex issue. We moved from time-sharing and mainframes to PCs, even though the PCs were slower and with clunky software because they were under our control. They had one super powerful attribute: Nobody could tell you "no" when you wanted to do something on them.

People will put up with a lot, in order to not have somebody who can tell you no.

That's why, even when the timesharing has had many technological advantages, such as greater efficiency, ability to roam, and having somebody else maintain things for you, the "inferior" PC has always won.

However, it's possible that this new wave of cloud computing/web 2.0 might be the first real incursion. That's because you can choose from a variety of different places to host your web apps, and also because we've made maintaining the software on your own computer harder and harder and harder.

But it's dangerous. The courts ruled that the 4th amendment doesn't apply to your data in the hands of 3rd parties. It really means your data in your house. Cloud computing runs the risk of erasing the 4th amendment as we store all our lives in the hands of 3rd parties. No small feat.

And now there's a movement afoot under the name "data portability" which sounds nice but really means "bulk export of your personal data made easy." What can be shared, will be shared. What you make easy to do will be done.

I've written some essays on these topics you may find of interest, including:

http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/openid

And these on a proposal to reverse could computing that I call "data hosting." In such a system, you have a server (or pay for one) which holds your data, and applications come to your data and run in sandboxes on it, sending output to your browser.

http://ideas.4brad.com/tags/data-hosting

There is no easy answer. People will love the positive features of cloud computing, and it will be a tall order to get them to switch to something that keeps those and doesn't have the negatives.

The article claims to be about reputation but mostly talks about the various "identity" efforts out there. Yes, a reputation is associated with an identity, but most of the identity systems being promoted focus on real identity rather than pseudonyms which you can choose to associate with yourself or not.

There is a paradox to those systems -- the easier they are to use, the more they will get used -- and demanded. We'll go from a web where most web sites can be used casually, with no "sign on" (single or otherwise) to a web where far more sites demand you use the single sign on and thus have an account, because it's easy for them to ask.

This paradox is described at http://ideas.4brad.com/paradox-identity-management

Remember the search for the Kim family, lost on a snowy mountain pass in Oregon?

At the time, people wrote about potential ways to make searching distributed: "traditional aerial photography is far better, because it's higher resolution, higher contrast, can be done under clouds, can be done at other than a directly overhead angle, is generally cheaper and on top of all this can possibly be done from existing searchplanes." And if the lost person has a cell phone, then the plane can also have "a small mini-cell base station (for all cell technologies) that could be mounted in a regular airplane and flown over the area." Traditional aerial searches are limited to only a couple of pairs of eyes, but continuous hi-res photos can lead to thousands of viewers. Of course, there was the question of what to do with gigabytes of photos- how to automate distribution.

The Jim Gray search team found a way to distribute aerial photo searches. Using Mechanical Turk was a good idea, because the infrastructure was already there.

Now, for the next lost family, or lost child, it'll be much faster to get photos up and examined.

They're helping physical search enter the 21st century, not because he or his friends were money rich, but because his and his colleagues were data rich. i.e. if you look up petabyte science, Jim Gray's name shows up a bunch. If there was any quid pro quo it wasn't because the searchers were giving agencies money, it was because they gave new methods.

Some good discussions are here here and here. This sounds like a great idea, I'm all for it. But, the collective 'naysayers' have a lot of really good points, and several misconceptions. The misconceptions are quickly and vociferously explained. The numerous good points, however, are usually met with changing of the subject. The best of those points are:
Q: Who is financing the $650mil? Where is the manufacturing plant?:
A: 'We'll release that info in the next few days... er, next couple weeks....er, end of January...er, 1st ½ of February...er, end of February':
People in the solar manufacturing business know when any new plant is being built. Somebody, somewhere, will leak that info to the blogosphere. It takes many months of planning, then 6 months to years to build the plant, then another 6 months to years to get the equipment going, and the first product they produce never actually works - it takes at least another few months to a year to get even 20% working. But for the biggest solar plant ever built, not a word? Hundreds of workers at every step of the process, but nobody leaks any info? In January, they said 20% capability by Sept. 07.:
:
Q: How much will it cost per kWh?:
A: $1.53. This was mentioned on a conference call end of January, but it wasn't printed anywhere on any advertisements, or even the internal website, including the knowledge base. I've been looking, and didn't see it anywhere, ever, until mdsolar wrote it today. Why not? For a piece of info that the 'naysayers' have been screaming for, why not reply to them?:
:
Q: Solar power cheaper than coal is the 'holy grail' the industry has been searching for relentlessly. Citizenre claims not just to have broken that barrier, but smashed completely through it, like skipping 5 years of Moore's Law in 1 year. 'Vertical Integration', while very buzzy, doesn't explain that. If you could do it, people would hear about it, and sign up. You dont need the risks, bad name, and expense of MLM - you'd max out your capacity by putting a website up.
A: Long answers that dont add up usually follow, but sometimes, "Forget the numbers, you have to just believe. I believe in a green future, dont you?"
:
My conclusion is that there is definitely some scheming going on. I just hope its of the Bill Gates variety, like when he licensed 'his' OS to IBM before he owned it (at least that's what I remember from Pirates of Silicon Valley). I believe there is no manufacturing plant or $650 mil, but the Citizenre guys hope to drum up enough hype that they can go to potential investors and say - look, we've presigned 10k customers - give us the startup capital, and we'll chia-grow a business. Every year they delay roll out, the silicon and technology gets cheaper, so they're in a win-win situation, going from investor to investor, every month the numbers get a little better. All the while the hype drives Rob Styler's book sales.:
:
The darker possibility in my mind is that they're after the security deposit, which is size dependent. If your system requirements are bigger, you pay more than the $500. The average size people are signing up has been said (without refutation) to be close to $1300. If they could actually convince people to pay the deposit without getting the systems, then they would make 10k customers X $1300 = $13mil. Oh, they are upfront paying the sales associates 10% of the $500 potential commissions, so they would only make $12.5mil. Split that between 5 core people, $2.5mil is not bad for a couple years work. If it were me, I'd sacrifice my good name for $2.5mil and travel the world on a yacht under a false name. Maybe I'd write a book about it - hope it gets turned into a movie.:
:
All this said, you don't seem to lose anything to just sign up on the w

This is now a hot topic and you'll find a couple of detailed threads about CitizenRe at my blog. Executives of the company have been participating there and trying to give some (not too satisfactory) answers to critics.

You may wish to check out the original thread at:

http://ideas.4brad.com/node/504

And then the followup thread with my summary of what was learned at:

http://ideas.4brad.com/citizenre-real-or-imagined- challenge

Normal solar is not yet close to economical. That's why everybody is skeptical about CitizenRe's as yet unfulfilled promise to deliver economical solar. The combination of secrecy, multi-level-marketing and astounding claims has many people feeling it sounds too good to be true.

This is now a hot topic and you'll find a couple of detailed threads about CitizenRe at my blog. Executives of the company have been participating there and trying to give some (not too satisfactory) answers to critics.

You may wish to check out the original thread at:

http://ideas.4brad.com/node/504

And then the followup thread with my summary of what was learned at:

http://ideas.4brad.com/citizenre-real-or-imagined- challenge

Normal solar is not yet close to economical. That's why everybody is skeptical about CitizenRe's as yet unfulfilled promise to deliver economical solar. The combination of secrecy, multi-level-marketing and astounding claims has many people feeling it sounds too good to be true.

It's not just true that your rights have been lost, more Americans have died due to the Iraq war than due to the 9/11 attacks.

As I blogged yesterday, you don't need to get half the electoral votes to make this work. Since
the electoral vote and popular vote are likely to differ only in a very close election in the modern world, all you need is a small set
of "opposite" safe states from the alternate sides to get enough to compensate for any likely difference. That could be just a few states.

Of course if you do get 270 votes in your compact, you can do anything at all, including instituting preferential ballots, forcing the other states to follow along if they want to be counted. In theory a set of states with 270 votes could just say, "Listen, we're going to elect the President amongst ourselves. What the rest of you do is irrelevant" though it would get a challenge.

An excellent resource (aside from eBay's own discussion forums, which I find lacking in substance and too emotional) for informed discussion on sniping, the feedback system and eBay in general is Brad Templeton's website. Here's a link to a recent post on sniping and how it affects the delicate balance of power between the seller and buyer. Read the comments as well as they're also pretty good.

Cheers,
Ed T.

An excellent resource for the different possible solutions is Brad Templeton's website. A recent article on ebay sniping, touching on most of its facets can be found here (read the comments too as they expand on it).

• Web Version 2.0 (if Hitachi doesn't mind)
• WWW 2.0
• Web II, or Web II Punctum Nihil, or continuing on the Latin theme 'EbWay 2.0'
• Entanglement 2.0 (and other fun from a thesaurus)

At any rate, their "the web is buzzing" dismissal-phrase isn't helping. Bees buzz. People have a glut of ebWay 2.0 conferences to choose from (not to mention the 1/1000 priced ad-hoc conferences that Web TwoPtOught tech makes possible), so bad publicity isn't going to help the conference. All its going to do is make web 2.0 seem so web 1.0. or 1999 2.0.

Didn't they think to run this application by a mailing list or two? Does O'Reilly not have a panel of no-men: a group of folks comfortable with saying "dude, that sux" to Tim if he needs to escape the echo-chambers of normal CEO-hood?

I just came across an interesting statistic on Brad Templeton's blog: the number of American deaths due to the war in Iraq has exceeded the 9-11 death toll. Of course, the total number of civilian deaths exceeds it many times over, but these are American deaths directly due to the invasion of Iraq.

If Iraq was a reaction to 9-11, what should be the reaction to Iraq?

Odd coincidence, just today I put up a set of pages derived from a database of the coordinates of all 788 of the Unesco World Heirtage sites, which includes many interesting landmarks.

Here is the page of Google Maps for World Heritage Sites, and there is also a blog entry for comments and corrections. Many can be zoomed in on. Enjoy.

No, you are wrong. What we are seeing are bad patents that are neither unique nor novel and companies abusing the patent system here in the US.

So we end up with patents like Amazon's assinine "one-click" patent, to Kodak pulling out their Wang patents against Java.

I could post links to bad software patents all day long that pretty much 'eclipse' your idea of "really good arguments".

Personally, I take a more balanced view

But the problem is that the system is so abused that it is dishonest, if not immoral. You would think that EU representatives/legal committees would recognize this, hence my parent post.

Also, I find your comment about little software companies really offensive, as many of us work for such companies and it's how we put food on the table.

Paying for access doesn't solve this cafe's problem, which is not so much the moochers as it is the environment where everybody just stares at a screen all day instead of socializing.

I have come up with a solution that fixes both problems. An AP that does intermittent access, so that you can connect, but after enough time to do a basic session of E-mail or web research, it refuses you for 5 minutes.

I outline more about the solution of intermittent wifi in this blog entry

I certainly was planning to be open about how I got products if I talked about them. I suspect most of the other folks are too. I jotted a brief note in my blog about it like some of the others.

It's really not some sort of elitist club, not even a club, nor much that new.

I do agree that by giving stuff to folks who write or are influentical, they do increase the chances that they will get written about. I presume that's their goal. There are certainly no requirements that we speak fondly of the products, but the historical tradition is people are far more likely to evangelize a new product they've seen than they are to curse something new nobody knows about, so on the balance it's been a win for vendors to do giveaways like this.

I know in the old days of magazines it was worse. Most software reviews were good for the same reason. If an obscure product came along and was bad, they just didn't write about it. If it was good, they might write. If it was famous or the company pulled enough strings (ie. bought lots of advertising) that got them a review, even at places with decent editorial firewalls, though it didn't assure a good one. If you saw a scathing review, it usually meant the company was so famous they had to review the product, or the company had pushed super hard to get one, good or no.

Truth is though, I, nor most of the people on the list aren't bought so easily. If you hear about something from somebody, you should judge how much you trust them in general, not whether they got the thing free.

If you think about it, what logic in there is giving a false good review for a bribe, if the bribe is a free version of the product you don't like very much?

Bonus: the exhaust smells like French fries.

Yes, definitely research into better catalytic converters! Or, Stirling Cycle series hybrids! Since Stirling engines are external combustion, we can tailor conditions to acheive nearly complete combustion.

If political spam is, well not allowed, but actually done as a service by the elections officials as a means to allow registered candidates to, for free, reach registered voters who have not opted out of their communications, I think it can be a good thing.

The great flaw in the political system is how candidates must raise money to buy advertising to push their messages at voters indiscriminately. Mostly TV. We've built a vastly more efficient medium on the internet for doing that. If we can reform campaign finance for real with the internet it could be the biggest thing we do with it.

More details in this blog entry on political spam

I call "Bogus" on PanIP even before the patent review is over because if you really felt your patent is good, you'll go after the big fish. Go after Amazon.com or Buy.com for $50,000,000 instead of tiny companies for $5,000. PanIP probably wasn't expecting the little guys to group together.

The EFF is adding to their history of being a group defense for technological innovation in free speech areas. For example, Chilling Effects helps anyone dealing with a C&D letter. Their DirectTV fight helped protect individuals who couldn't afford to do anything but settle, given DirectTV's threats, even when innocent.

The EFF is small enough (come on everyone, buy coffee instead of TripleTallLattes for 2 weeks and DONATE to the EFF) and doing so much already that they're not going to choose patents just because the patent-holder is suing. They're choosing patents where the EFF thinks prior art exists or the patent isn't novel and the patent is hurting free speech and the right to technological innovation.

Even if there isn't prior art per se, a patent can still be far too obvious yet be granted. On this topic, I like this essay on telling good patents from bad:

"But I have found a common thread in many of the bad patents which could be a litmus test for telling the bad from the good. Patent law, as we know, requires inventions to be novel and not obvious to one skilled in the art.

But the patent office has taken too liberal a definition of novel. They are granting patents when the problem is novel, and the filer is the first to try to solve it. As such their answer to the new question is novel. The better patents are ones that solve older problems.

Amazon was one of the earliest internet shopping operations. So of course they were among the first to look hard at the UI for that style of shopping, and thus were first to file an invention called one-click-buy. But one-click-buy was really just an obvious answer to a new problem. The same applies to XOR cursors, browser plug-ins, and streaming audio and video

...While it would not solve every problem, I think if patent examiners asked, "How long has somebody been trying to solve the problem this invention solves?" and held off patents when the problem was novel, or at least applied more scrutiny, we would have a lot less problem with the patent system.... many of the bad patents (notably the bad software patents) that are causing trouble these days fail my test -- they were not very clever solutions to novel problems, not novel solutions to hard problems.

As I just referenced from telling good patents from bad patents:

Patent = a new solution to an old problem? Possibly a good patent. Patent = an old solution applied to a new problem? Probably a bad / stupid patent.

Its as if Microsoft got a patent for GUIs simply by moving them from Xerox or Mac machines into IBM machines. Or in the case of the Neem or Yellow Bean patents, its like Microsoft got a patent on Babbage engines or Turing machines- simply because the original work had been done in other countries.

"Patent law, as we know, requires inventions to be novel and not obvious to one skilled in the art. But the patent office has taken too liberal a definition of novel. They are granting patents when the problem is novel, and the filer is the first to try to solve it. As such their answer to the new question is novel. The better patents are ones that solve older problems.

Amazon was one of the earliest internet shopping operations. So of course they were among the first to look hard at the UI for that style of shopping, and thus were first to file an invention called one-click-buy. But one-click-buy was really just an obvious answer to a new problem..."

• Patent = a new solution to an old problem? Good patent.
• Patent = an old solution applied to a new problem? Possibly a bad / stupid patent.

They're patenting "method to find gene for making dragonfly wings as used by dragonflies in flying," which was only novel about, say 300 million years ago. Now if instead they were patenting "method for gene for making dragonfly wings added to tomatoes so they fly straight to the harvest box" that would be a new and original idea.

And in agricultural patents they've been able to patent genes / traits that were previously developed by groups of farmers. i.e. its like they're not only violating the GPL, but patenting the software they've borrowed.

Most media SF is 30-40 years behind written SF, both in topics and style. Few current SF movie or TV shows show concepts that weren't already old-hat in the 1970's SF literature. This museum doesn't seem to be afraid of gently pointing this out. As many board members are SF writers I could guess how they'd push giving credit where it is due. Of course the movies have had much more influence in terms of numbers of people seeing them (I read a calculation saying 23 of the top 25 movies by popularity have been SF/fantasy).

But for influence on science and technology- the books and stories have done quite a lot more. For one example, I like a quote that Cory Doctorow (who does fine post-singularity writing) has on Neuromancer:

"Neuromancer didn't predict the future. Neuromancer *created* the future. If you would understand the past twenty years' technological advance and retreat, this book is required reading. I re-read it every year, just to get an edge on the year that's coming, and to glory in Gibson's prose and cunning artifice."

(1) When talking about SF topics, pop writers can get away with a show of ignorance that wouldn't work for many other genres. How many reviewers compare a movie to anything more than other movies and/or "the Time Machine, F451, Ray Bradbury, Star Wars, the Matrix [and if they've done extra research] P.K.Dick"? That'd be like mystery reviewers starting with A.C. Doyle and ending with Agatha Christie. How many reviews of books like "Prey," "Oryx and Crake," "Children of Men" or "Fatherland" mention anything about similar SF books (books written in some cases decades before) and instead talk about how original the popular author's idea is? (For example CoM published in the early 90's, vs Greybeard published in the early 60's. Many reviews of the former didn't mention the latter.)

Not true, it doesn't necessarily follow that a C&D letter means a court case: many matters are resolved prior to court, and often in these cases the parties want to keep the matter confidential for commercial reasons. These letters are no different to any other business letter.

While Key Escrow was a nasty idea in the Clipper Chip debate, with Escrow by the government, it's a good idea if you want some or all of your data to be available to your heirs after you die.

One could use conventional (overseas) escrow agencies to take keys or key fragments with instructions to hand them over to your heirs or executor upon proof of your death.

Another would be the idea I recently blogged which I call Friendscrow.

In this system, your key is distributed among your closest contacts, possibly without them even knowing it's happening. But when you die, you presume your heirs will be able to figure out who your contacts were and reassemble your key.

Of course you thus might want to have at least 2 keys. One for stuff you want your heirs to see, and one for stuff you definitely don't want them to see!

A camera tapes you. If one tape-reviewer doesn't know you, he can ask until he finds someone who does. The tape can be matched with other tapes to see where you were and where you're going. The tape will be stored and reviewed by ever better automatic recognition tech, and those results stored in ever larger and cheaper databases.

I think this is a quantitative change in the "expectation of privacy" one has in public.

We are getting very close to "P-day" (coined by Brad Templeton): the last day of privacy, because from then on all our actions will be tracked retroactively if not currently. Or, as he puts it: "So you're already being watched. The computer that is watching you just hasn't been born quite yet."

Two good essays on why this type of surveillance hurts society and violates our rights:

• From the Best Essay Ever on why privacy is a fundamental right: [Its not too long- just go read it]

  "[Talking about Canada...] If these measures are allowed to go forward and the privacy-invasive principles they represent are accepted [then before long] our movements through the public streets will be relentlessly observed through proliferating police video surveillance cameras. Eventually, these cameras will likely be linked to biometric face-recognition technologies ... [indentifying] us by name and address as we go about our law-abiding business in the streets... I am well aware that these scenarios are likely to sound, to most people, like alarmist exaggeration. Certainly, the society I am describing bears no relation to the Canada we know. But anyone who is inclined to dismiss the risks out of hand should pause first to consider that the privacy-invasive measures already being implemented or developed right now would have been considered unthinkable in our country just a short year ago."

  The place to stop unjustified intrusions on a fundamental human right such as privacy is right at the outset, at the very first attempt to enter where the state has no business treading. Otherwise, the terrain will have been conceded, and the battle lost...

  Imagine, then, how we will feel if it becomes routine for bureaucrats, police officers and other agents of the state to paw through all the details of our lives: where and when we travel, and with whom; who are the friends and acquaintances with whom we have telephone conversations or e-mail correspondence; what we are interested in reading or researching; where we like to go and what we like to do...

  If we allow the state to sweep away the normal walls of privacy that protect the details of our lives, we will consign ourselves psychologically to living in a fishbowl...Anyone who has lived in a totalitarian society can attest that what often felt most oppressive was precisely the lack of privacy.

• A Watched Populace Never Boils "People often ask why a loss of privacy... is a restriction on freedom. ... Some welcome it, feeling that the extra surveillance will cut down on crime, and provide some increased level of safety or imagined safety. But the truth is that invasions of privacy invade our freedoms quite directly. This is true even if the surveillance isn't abused by the watchers, even though history shows that it always is.

  When we feel watched, we feel less free. We censor ourselve

So we've ended up in this strange zone where email could be encrypted as a matter of course, but it isn't. There is no inherent reason why email has to be public, but by our design (or lack thereof), this major massive system of communications is public, and for what benefit?

I'm not saying that people must be forced to use encryption, but that the ability to choose it should be there. To me choice means the two alternatives are sitting there, equally available... If there were big "Send: This is Private" and "Send: This is Public" buttons. Right now the "choice" is "Send" vs "Spend hours retrofitting your system and writing to your recipient to explain to them how to read your email, and getting your grandpa to use it- just give up trying to go there..."

As an analogy, if I say "lets start building doors and doorjams with locks built in," I don't think that equals "force everyone to lock their door." To me it means "make it as easy to choose to lock your door as keep it unlocked."

Imagine an alternative history where we on "Exchange-Dot" are talking about telephone design...

• "Phone calls are on party lines, anyone can listen" (Score: 3 Just Delightful)
• Of course phone calls are public- if you want privacy send a telegram. Get over it (Score 5: A Pearl of Wisdom)
• "If you want privacy, get a private line and ask the person you wish to call to install a private line too."(Score: 2)
  • "But what if I know I might want to talk with more than that one person, wouldn't it be better if all phones were private lines? What if my elderly aunt cannot easily get a private line?"(Score 3: Quite)
  • "What, have you something to hide? What type of gentleman are You? (score 0: Moderately Scandalous)
  • "You should just refuse to talk with people on party lines: if your dear Aunt in Toledo is unable to install a private line then she isn't worthy of conversation" (Score: 1)
  • "You have the right to a private line, but demanding all lines are private? How about we let people choose?"(Score: 1)

"The key to deploying private phone calls is to make it happen with close to zero involvement by the user... The reason is that I converse with tons of people, not just my closest Bell/linux-using electrophilosopher friends. If I want my conversations to be private, I have to get the general public using private lines...."

It, in retrospect, wouldn't be such a bad request for consideration by Google / GoG&G.

Why would Brad Templeton give anything to the EFF? It's obviously something he doesn't care about.

For Everybody else there's The Chilling Effects Clearinghouse. Don't leave a threat to your homepage without it. As the ever busy EFF is part of ChillingEffects, if Brad Templeton hadn't hadn't already known about the right to parody vs. scare tactic legal letters he could just call them up and ask.

But if you yourself have received one of these letters, you also can report it to Chilling Effects and ask for help from the EFF. But the EFF can only be there to help you later if you support the EFF through joining now.

1. Science fiction and fantasy (SF/F) and comic books are popular,
2. SF/F fans think about other worlds
3. you can't think about two worlds at once,
4. internet interactions retreat from the real world
5. retreating from the real world is bad
6. on the internet you never have to argue with people who disagree with you
7. if you feel you can't change the world you read fantasy so
8. SF/F keeps us from exploring our world and should be less popular.

Where to start? Addressing these in no particular order...

• 5: Then books in general are bad: there's just nothing worse than someone sitting around thinking.
• 5: And as the essay point out, many common activities keep people from reality (or make you talk for hours about trivia or statistics): TV, baseball games, video games, golf, martha stewart trials. These are quantiatively different from fandom how?
• 6: Huh? I suppose if you only IM with a few people and have an interlocked set of livejournal users, perhaps. But otherwise anyone with a blog with comments, or anyone on usenet is exposed to more arguments and opposing viewpoints than ever. You can keep atheists out of your physical church: its much harder to keep them out of Talk.religion.mychurch.
• 3: Not only can you think about two worlds at once, you have to if you want to understand your own time and milieu. Understanding implies the ability to step outside of it- examine it from the outside. Knowing history and traveling to other countries is critical, of course. But if your goal is understanding humanity overall you need a bigger mental space to step back in: science (evolution, anthropology) and SF/F provide this space.
• 1: Yes, SF/F movies are big- 23 out of 25 of the top grossing movies are SF/F. But modern written science fiction isn't the same as modern SF/F movies: most SF movies are 30 years behind written SF
• 7: Much popular written SF/F analyzes or confronts our society. For example, I'd done a quick analysis of Hugo award finalists for last year (what SF/F fans consider to be the best of the year). Few of the stories were standard fantasy: most were about how humans might deal with the inevitable changes coming to our society in the short and long terms.
• 2 & 4 & 8: those who "inhabit imaginary worlds" are often the ones inspired to start new science and technologies, explore our world and local neighborhood, and get us to confront upcoming problems
• 2 & 5: What conventions does he go to? The science fiction conventions I go to are filled with lectures about cutting edge science, technology, health and physiology... they're also filled with scientists [physical, bio and social]. Many fans are scientists, many SF writers are scientists, many scientists were inspired by SF to go into their careers.
• 2 & 6 & 7: Again, I think he's not at the same conventions: anyone who has seen the debates about Trotskyite libertarian cyberpunks vs. K.S.Robinson style socialism vs. LeGuin's anthro-SF isn't going to think that SF cons are a mutual agreement-fest. (Eric Raymond vs. Charlie Stross: now *that* was fun)

I've been interested in this topic for a while. You may wish to check out some articles on the subject in my blog.

For example, I talk about how oil companies should fund automatic car development because it would make people tolerate longer drives and commutes.

I also talk about how self-parking might be the big early application. Not the already existing parallel parking, but the ability to do automatic valet parking in special parking lots.

Alas, I finally realize that the government will try to ban drive-by wire cars because they are a great terrorist's tool if they become common.

I've been interested in this topic for a while. You may wish to check out some articles on the subject in my blog.

For example, I talk about how oil companies should fund automatic car development because it would make people tolerate longer drives and commutes.

I also talk about how self-parking might be the big early application. Not the already existing parallel parking, but the ability to do automatic valet parking in special parking lots.

Alas, I finally realize that the government will try to ban drive-by wire cars because they are a great terrorist's tool if they become common.

I've been interested in this topic for a while. You may wish to check out some articles on the subject in my blog.

For example, I talk about how oil companies should fund automatic car development because it would make people tolerate longer drives and commutes.

I also talk about how self-parking might be the big early application. Not the already existing parallel parking, but the ability to do automatic valet parking in special parking lots.

Alas, I finally realize that the government will try to ban drive-by wire cars because they are a great terrorist's tool if they become common.

It seems to me that if you could build a scanner able to tell the difference between one tag answering and two tags answering, you could still read tags in spite of the blocker tags.

Those who wanted to plant scanners in the doors to see who comes and goes are not above buying a next generation fancier scanner to see the people carrying the blocker tags.

More details in the first article at my blog.

Only in an emergency need you tell the outsiders where you are. You don't even want to always tell trusted people where you are. That's like being lojacked. Given the ability, how can you say to your wife, "Honey, I don't want you to see my location every minute of every day?"

Unless she's a good, understanding privacy advocate.

For an example of a nice location aware app that doesn't have to tell the network where you are, check out this blog entry about The Big Yellow Button

Trains are great in cities where they will run frequently. Over long haul routes, trains consume vast quantities of land (and present a problem when they intersect roads and rivers and bisect fams.) Yet the land is in use just a short portion of every hour.

We like high speed train proposals because of the downtown to downtime time. But this can be done with planes. Just send the high speed train to the airport, and do the pre-flight prep (security, check-in) on the train. Thus resulting in effectively zero transfer time. Then no way the long haul train can beat the plane, downtown to downtown.

Of course airports take land too, and planes need to be made less polluting, but this is where the effort should go.

More info on these ideas is on this blog.