Hi. Nice to meet you, Dana. I go by the name Sarten X, often represented with a hyphen.
When The global warming concerns were first being voiced, I was skeptical. Surely humans' influence couldn't be that severe? Then I started learning. I learned about how CO2 traps heat. I learned how human CO2 production has been increasing exponentially. I learned how small shifts in ocean temperatures put far more moisture into the air, producing more severe storms.
I learned too much to doubt. Even if half my knowledge turns out to be wrong, the other half still leads to the same conclusion: Our society is royally screwed because of global warming, and we're making it worse every day.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope that we've been terribly mistaken in our analysis. I hope the solar system drifts into a previously-unknown dust cloud, and the greenhouse gasses save us. Hope, though, will not explain to my great-grandchildren why they can't leave the tunnels during storm season.
At this point, I am still skeptical of many of the claims. A world covered in poison ivy by 2015? I doubt that. The east coast of the United States submerged in a decade? Probably not. Regardless of what preposterous scare-tactic forecasts are made, there is still too much evidence for me to ignore. Though the outcome is uncertain, the trend is clear. We, as the current dominant species on this planet, should do what we can to reduce the approaching threat of a warming planet. We should strive to make our pollution as harmless as we can, and keep our industrial processes as flexible as we can to allow future change if similar problems are discovered. We should have been more cautious in our designs over the past century, and we may not even have another century to live if we do not change our ways now.
I am Sarten X. I was a skeptic of global warming, and I now support the efforts to fight it.
$8.8 billion is indeed a lot of money, and this screwup will cost some HP employees their jobs, but the proportion is important to consider as well. Losing 5% of a company's value is only 5% of a company's value. It will be recovered from in a few years. I'd say it's squarely in the "serious improprieties" territory, but not so much in the "epic, the-whole-boardroom-is-going-to-federal-country-club-for-maybe-five-years-or-so, fraud" area. The whole point of my post is to remind us not to think "OMG BILLIONS!", but rather to think "What's the actual damage this failure has done to HP?"
For a company like HP, which has practically nothing in investment gains, lawsuit settlements, or other non-revenue income sources, their only income is revenue.
Gross income is the $127 billion figure I quoted. That's the income before taxes and expenses, which is comparable to the $50,000 income I quoted for a middle-class (American) family, which is also before taxes and expenses.
If it weren't for the almost $11 billion in unusual expenses they incurred this quarter, they would have earned about $5 billion in net profits. Instead, they lost over $5 billion for the year. That's more than two year's worth of profit gone up in smoke. It doesn't take many of those to make a bankrupt company.
Blowing $3,500 on a crappy car also wipes out a hefty chunk of a middle-class family's profits, and might even take multiple years to save up for.
In HP's case, since they also hold almost $129.5 billion in assets and have only $22.5 billion in debt, they have $109 billion in net assets (or $104 billion including this loss). They'd need to have about two straight decades like this to actually go bankrupt, assuming they don't close up and sell off first.
To continue tormenting this deceased analogous equine, that's like having a middle-class family with a $50,000 income losing $2,000 each year, but starting with $41,000 already in the bank. It's certainly not a desirable situation to be in, but it's not imminently disastrous.
Or losing $8.8 billion isn't that big of a deal to a company with revenues of $127 billion. A proportional loss to a middle-class family ($50,000 income) would be about $3,500. To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like buying a car that turns out to be a cleverly-concealed rusted-out lemon. Serious improprieties, and someone clearly screwed up badly, but it's not a company-risking mistake.
Of course, the biggest security vulnerability is on one end of the connection, and the biggest threat to privacy is on the other. HTTPS won't help much for those.
As with most ideas in the Bible, the original concept goes much farther back. The specific "eye for an eye" law dates to as early as 1700 BCE, and the philosophy of reciprocal justice is likely older still.
Of course, the Bible contradicts itself as well, and in other places says that absolute restraint is the preferred resolution of conflict (turning the other cheek, giving one's robe, and other such verses). This notion also dates even further back, as early as ancient Egypt's concept of the goddess Ma'at, who was the personification of justice. Ma'at's judgement (as interpreted by priests) would often be considered final in a legal case, and the belief was that upon death, one's heart would be weighed against Ma'at's ostrich feather (the manifestation of truth), to judge the amount of unrepented evil the person had committed. Thus a questionable crime could be allowed to pass, under the belief that the person would be ultimately judged by an omniscient goddess later.
Control is taken, and usually cannot be recovered. Control over one's identity is extremely valuable, as maintaining that control allows one to also maintain control over one's finances and reputation, and in turn that affects one's control over the record of their history, which can heavily influence later abilities.
A question of legality depends heavily on the location, time, and far more other circumstances... let's reduce it to morality, instead.
On the one hand, you have "an eye for an eye", where it's allowed to return in kind any grievance, such as a hack's damage to one's reputation and possible loss of control over one's identity. On the other hand, you have "two wrongs don't make a right", where it's best to let society's authorities deal appropriate punishments to serve justice, and everyone leaves unhappy, but fairly so.
These two viewpoints have been debated for several millenia already, with religions and political systems growing up around various interpretations of each ideal. Throwing a computer into the mix and using new words doesn't change the underlying philosophical debate, and certainly won't ever bring it to an end.
I do like to know about the patent system and its troubles, but I'd just prefer stories without the heavy dose of sensational bias dumped on top.
Discussing a pervasive and growing problem in our industry isn't thinking really, it's just repeating dogma, and nothing good has ever come from a group of like-minded citizens getting together to discuss the common problems of their community.
The summary for this article (and so many others like it) doesn't invite discussion. It invites hatred and bandwagon-inspired repetition of the dogma, by espousing one extreme opinion as a starting point. Here's a rewriting, that is far less inflammatory:
An anonymous reader refers us to the NY Times Bits blog. Apple has apparently filed for design patent D670,713, approved this week by the United States Patent Office. Titled 'Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,' this patent covers the visual appearance of a turning page as used in e-readers. Though Apple argues that its patented page turn was unique in that it had a special type of animation other page-turn applications had been unable to create, but also cites similar animations used in Flash from 2004.
Of course, we could and would still discuss the problems of the patent system, but starting from neutral territory, rather than a heavy bias. Maybe then we as a civilization could get something done to fix our problems, rather than wasting our time on an endless cycle of blame and defense.
As an aside, if I ever care about new hair-styles for the winter (other than the I'm-too-cold-to-go-out-and-get-a-haircut shaggy look), please shoot me.
Interesting that my sensationalist post gets modded troll, yet we still get the same crappy stories...
This is my sentiment, exactly. I, for example, think the patent system is only mildly broken, in that the benefit of getting a broad patent far outweighs the cost of getting useless ones. Broad method patents and minimal design patents are applied for in bulk at little cost, and the few that are actually granted stand to bring in huge profit over a very long time.
Sure, that's bad, but I think it's bad because I've thought about it and came to my conclusion. I don't need Slashdot's summaries commanding me to follow the hivemind.
Oh, good. Another patent article. This one even cheerfully tells us how to think, calling us to see the patent system as broken because of one particular patent. The sensationalism really adds something to Slashdot... It's not like I come here for actual news or anything.
Money laundering means the same thing it always has: hiding the origin of income.
In small quantities, it happens all the time, and nobody cares. This morning I found a coin on the street. It could have once been a part of a hitman's fee, or an investment fraud, or the purchase of an underage sex slave. I don't know, and that information's irretrievable now. It's just a coin.
It's the larger quantities that matter. A few hundred or thousand dollars a week can be easily lost in the noise of any business doing cash transactions, but it takes a pretty big shop to sell enough stuff to hide a multi-million-dollar drug deal. That's where the multiple countries and briefcases full of money comes in. The details of the money's origin still exists, but by being transferred through five countries, five different police organizations must be involved to investigate the connection.
Carrying cash in person to another country effectively ends the trail, because there's no indication whether the cash was spent locally on shell companies to launder it, or handed off to another courier to another country. By the time one country's gotten enough diplomacy worked out to continue the investigation wherever a plane lands, the suspect passenger has already landed and is likely long-gone.
Transferring money through a bank preserves the trail, and they'll often play nice with (and give records to) any law enforcement authorities. That's why no one minds if you transfer through them. It has nothing to do with paying a 6% fee to a global banking overlord. It's just that you seem to be going out of your way to be avoiding leaving a trail law enforcement could follow, and that raises suspicion.
When I traveled to Africa, I transferred money through a Barclay's account. They had a branch in the area I has going to, and I don't recall any significant fees.
I'm a fan of reform to reduce the life of patents, preferably based on industry (or more precisely, based on the time it takes to bring a new product to the applicable market and succeed). Software patents could be applicable for perhaps one year. A vehicle or other major physical item could be five. The only thing I could see as still being 20 years is household goods that aren't expected to ever need repair.
I'll also add that we hand out patents for useful inventions to the people who worked out the invention's problems (or at least we try to). No, putting a power connector in an electronic device isn't patent-worthy. Designing a physically-tiny connector that's capable of transferring significant (charging) power, resistant to accidental damage, also usable for data transfer, and durable through millions of use cycles to boot, is something that is definitely worth a patent, but it'll cost you hundreds of hours of planning and testing time to get it.
Didn't you read the summary? It tracks every move you make, just like GPS vehicle trackers, RFID door keys, and a jingle bell on your kid's shoelace. Clearly this is something worthy of widespread panic.
Just like vacuum tubes or computers... But how many people do you know that have ever hand-made either?
Offhand, I can think of two, one for each. The computer builder is an elder in-law, who was a logic designer and electrician for the first computer in a certain European country. The vacuum tube builder is my old physics professor, whose research involved many kinds of tubes, some of which he designed himself (though I can't really say he hand-made them, as he had professional glassblowers do the actual work while he directed).
The Google patent covers, in short, getting an expectation of a user's content by reviewing the content of their friends.It's a generalization of PageRank, but instead of looking only at a single numeric value for a site's worth, it looks at various other criteria.
The only meaningful "guilt by association" reference is claim 12:
12. The method of claim 1, wherein the particular subject of interest comprises at least one of the group consisting [of] adult content and illegal content.
Claims that short are usually defensive, to prevent trolls from getting a patent of "do this prior art, but looking for porn". Now Google can use their algorithm for content filters, without fear that a troll will use their own work against them. It is interesting that that's the only particular subject mentioned, but that's not very meaningful, since the general method is patented in claim 1. It could just be a writing technique to patent the technique and have the given examples be specifically covered. IANAL, so I'd love some lawyers to explain if there's something odd here.
As usual, it's a benign patent on a data mining technique that Slashdot whips up into a frenzied sensational theory about corporations working to quash the individuality of the common man.
What's wrong with data mining? It's effectively the same job that campaign managers have been doing for decades (or more), but now more accurately. In the 1800s, a candidate could campaign on a platform of what he thought the voters wanted to hear. Now, candidates can know the views of their constituents, and make plans and promises based on more accurate information.
Now, I'm not naive enough to think that all those promises will be kept, but it does bode well that the elected officials have a pretty accurate model of their constituents, should they actually decide to refer to it.
Are the vehicles expected to remain in constant communication with the central location, which may be impossible in some areas?
In the river valley in my city, where cellular coverage is spotty and the twists cut walkie-talkie range to less than shouting distance, what then? Heck, I know of residential places in my city where police radios don't even cover.
Then it's a good time to change tactics. Instead of flyers, carry a Bible and become a proselytizer. Actually run the Craigslist business for a while, putting flyers in several neighborhoods with antiques that you won't rob. As mentioned below, sell candy bars for a charity fundraiser. Volunteer to canvass to encourage voting. Invite people to a public event. Wander around "lost" at dusk, asking other pedestrians for directions to some landmark in the direction you're already headed.
The excuses to walk down a sidewalk are endless, and in modern society the chances of being recognized are infinitesimal. Just beware the old guy in a rocking chair. If I had to pick favorites, I'd start with the voluntary canvass or proselytizing, to identify the riskiest houses with nosiest people. Then switch to jogging, with the ready excuse that you like the neighborhood's scenery. Jog for a few months before starting the robberies, then continue afterward.
If the police ever ask for your name, give it readily, then find a new line of work (or at least be prepared to move out of the country). Be content with the robberies you got away with, and stay out of the public eye for the rest of your life. This assumes, of course, that the robbery was for thrill rather than financial necessity, but that's really necessary for the perfect heist.
Disclaimer: This is starting to get creepy, so I may as well mention that I'm professionally paranoid. Part of my job is evaluating security at a financial institution, so I get to sit at my desk and think up interesting ways to avoid suspicion (and triggers for our employees to be more suspicious). Mostly I'm concerned with information security, but there's some physical aspects as well.
The ones that don't move a stick from their front porch or a flyer stuck in their door? They're probably not home.
Don't expect people to notice a stranger. A salesman sticking flyers in people's door handles is annoying, but not very suspicious. A jogger who looks similar to the salesman from the day before will be unnoticed. If, by some fluke, a police officer asks, they can show off the flyer promoting their services selling old junk (which they suspect these old houses are full of) on Craigslist for a 10% cut. It's often not a crime to advertise one's own business, and it's plausible to deny knowledge if it is.
So the keys stay in a central location, meaning that any recheck for verification (like when a meter says someone used a million kilowatt-hours in a month) requires another vehicle being sent out, and the reading technician/driver has no indication that there might be something wrong. Everybody loves needlessly increased expenses, right?
Slashdot Mirror
"Gross" is not "net". Gross income is the income before expenses. Net income is the income after expenses, commonly meaning profit.
Hi. Nice to meet you, Dana. I go by the name Sarten X, often represented with a hyphen.
When The global warming concerns were first being voiced, I was skeptical. Surely humans' influence couldn't be that severe? Then I started learning. I learned about how CO2 traps heat. I learned how human CO2 production has been increasing exponentially. I learned how small shifts in ocean temperatures put far more moisture into the air, producing more severe storms.
I learned too much to doubt. Even if half my knowledge turns out to be wrong, the other half still leads to the same conclusion: Our society is royally screwed because of global warming, and we're making it worse every day.
I hope I'm wrong. I hope that we've been terribly mistaken in our analysis. I hope the solar system drifts into a previously-unknown dust cloud, and the greenhouse gasses save us. Hope, though, will not explain to my great-grandchildren why they can't leave the tunnels during storm season.
At this point, I am still skeptical of many of the claims. A world covered in poison ivy by 2015? I doubt that. The east coast of the United States submerged in a decade? Probably not. Regardless of what preposterous scare-tactic forecasts are made, there is still too much evidence for me to ignore. Though the outcome is uncertain, the trend is clear. We, as the current dominant species on this planet, should do what we can to reduce the approaching threat of a warming planet. We should strive to make our pollution as harmless as we can, and keep our industrial processes as flexible as we can to allow future change if similar problems are discovered. We should have been more cautious in our designs over the past century, and we may not even have another century to live if we do not change our ways now.
I am Sarten X. I was a skeptic of global warming, and I now support the efforts to fight it.
$8.8 billion is indeed a lot of money, and this screwup will cost some HP employees their jobs, but the proportion is important to consider as well. Losing 5% of a company's value is only 5% of a company's value. It will be recovered from in a few years. I'd say it's squarely in the "serious improprieties" territory, but not so much in the "epic, the-whole-boardroom-is-going-to-federal-country-club-for-maybe-five-years-or-so, fraud" area. The whole point of my post is to remind us not to think "OMG BILLIONS!", but rather to think "What's the actual damage this failure has done to HP?"
Yes it is. It's both.
For a company like HP, which has practically nothing in investment gains, lawsuit settlements, or other non-revenue income sources, their only income is revenue.
Look at their income.
Gross income is the $127 billion figure I quoted. That's the income before taxes and expenses, which is comparable to the $50,000 income I quoted for a middle-class (American) family, which is also before taxes and expenses.
If it weren't for the almost $11 billion in unusual expenses they incurred this quarter, they would have earned about $5 billion in net profits. Instead, they lost over $5 billion for the year. That's more than two year's worth of profit gone up in smoke. It doesn't take many of those to make a bankrupt company.
Blowing $3,500 on a crappy car also wipes out a hefty chunk of a middle-class family's profits, and might even take multiple years to save up for.
In HP's case, since they also hold almost $129.5 billion in assets and have only $22.5 billion in debt, they have $109 billion in net assets (or $104 billion including this loss). They'd need to have about two straight decades like this to actually go bankrupt, assuming they don't close up and sell off first.
To continue tormenting this deceased analogous equine, that's like having a middle-class family with a $50,000 income losing $2,000 each year, but starting with $41,000 already in the bank. It's certainly not a desirable situation to be in, but it's not imminently disastrous.
Or losing $8.8 billion isn't that big of a deal to a company with revenues of $127 billion. A proportional loss to a middle-class family ($50,000 income) would be about $3,500. To use the obligatory car analogy, it's like buying a car that turns out to be a cleverly-concealed rusted-out lemon. Serious improprieties, and someone clearly screwed up badly, but it's not a company-risking mistake.
Of course, the biggest security vulnerability is on one end of the connection, and the biggest threat to privacy is on the other. HTTPS won't help much for those.
As with most ideas in the Bible, the original concept goes much farther back. The specific "eye for an eye" law dates to as early as 1700 BCE, and the philosophy of reciprocal justice is likely older still.
Of course, the Bible contradicts itself as well, and in other places says that absolute restraint is the preferred resolution of conflict (turning the other cheek, giving one's robe, and other such verses). This notion also dates even further back, as early as ancient Egypt's concept of the goddess Ma'at, who was the personification of justice. Ma'at's judgement (as interpreted by priests) would often be considered final in a legal case, and the belief was that upon death, one's heart would be weighed against Ma'at's ostrich feather (the manifestation of truth), to judge the amount of unrepented evil the person had committed. Thus a questionable crime could be allowed to pass, under the belief that the person would be ultimately judged by an omniscient goddess later.
Control is taken, and usually cannot be recovered. Control over one's identity is extremely valuable, as maintaining that control allows one to also maintain control over one's finances and reputation, and in turn that affects one's control over the record of their history, which can heavily influence later abilities.
A question of legality depends heavily on the location, time, and far more other circumstances... let's reduce it to morality, instead.
On the one hand, you have "an eye for an eye", where it's allowed to return in kind any grievance, such as a hack's damage to one's reputation and possible loss of control over one's identity. On the other hand, you have "two wrongs don't make a right", where it's best to let society's authorities deal appropriate punishments to serve justice, and everyone leaves unhappy, but fairly so.
These two viewpoints have been debated for several millenia already, with religions and political systems growing up around various interpretations of each ideal. Throwing a computer into the mix and using new words doesn't change the underlying philosophical debate, and certainly won't ever bring it to an end.
I do like to know about the patent system and its troubles, but I'd just prefer stories without the heavy dose of sensational bias dumped on top.
Discussing a pervasive and growing problem in our industry isn't thinking really, it's just repeating dogma, and nothing good has ever come from a group of like-minded citizens getting together to discuss the common problems of their community.
The summary for this article (and so many others like it) doesn't invite discussion. It invites hatred and bandwagon-inspired repetition of the dogma, by espousing one extreme opinion as a starting point. Here's a rewriting, that is far less inflammatory:
An anonymous reader refers us to the NY Times Bits blog. Apple has apparently filed for design patent D670,713, approved this week by the United States Patent Office. Titled 'Display screen or portion thereof with animated graphical user interface,' this patent covers the visual appearance of a turning page as used in e-readers. Though Apple argues that its patented page turn was unique in that it had a special type of animation other page-turn applications had been unable to create, but also cites similar animations used in Flash from 2004.
Of course, we could and would still discuss the problems of the patent system, but starting from neutral territory, rather than a heavy bias. Maybe then we as a civilization could get something done to fix our problems, rather than wasting our time on an endless cycle of blame and defense.
As an aside, if I ever care about new hair-styles for the winter (other than the I'm-too-cold-to-go-out-and-get-a-haircut shaggy look), please shoot me.
Interesting that my sensationalist post gets modded troll, yet we still get the same crappy stories...
This is my sentiment, exactly. I, for example, think the patent system is only mildly broken, in that the benefit of getting a broad patent far outweighs the cost of getting useless ones. Broad method patents and minimal design patents are applied for in bulk at little cost, and the few that are actually granted stand to bring in huge profit over a very long time.
Sure, that's bad, but I think it's bad because I've thought about it and came to my conclusion. I don't need Slashdot's summaries commanding me to follow the hivemind.
Oh, good. Another patent article. This one even cheerfully tells us how to think, calling us to see the patent system as broken because of one particular patent. The sensationalism really adds something to Slashdot... It's not like I come here for actual news or anything.
Money laundering means the same thing it always has: hiding the origin of income.
In small quantities, it happens all the time, and nobody cares. This morning I found a coin on the street. It could have once been a part of a hitman's fee, or an investment fraud, or the purchase of an underage sex slave. I don't know, and that information's irretrievable now. It's just a coin.
It's the larger quantities that matter. A few hundred or thousand dollars a week can be easily lost in the noise of any business doing cash transactions, but it takes a pretty big shop to sell enough stuff to hide a multi-million-dollar drug deal. That's where the multiple countries and briefcases full of money comes in. The details of the money's origin still exists, but by being transferred through five countries, five different police organizations must be involved to investigate the connection.
Carrying cash in person to another country effectively ends the trail, because there's no indication whether the cash was spent locally on shell companies to launder it, or handed off to another courier to another country. By the time one country's gotten enough diplomacy worked out to continue the investigation wherever a plane lands, the suspect passenger has already landed and is likely long-gone.
Transferring money through a bank preserves the trail, and they'll often play nice with (and give records to) any law enforcement authorities. That's why no one minds if you transfer through them. It has nothing to do with paying a 6% fee to a global banking overlord. It's just that you seem to be going out of your way to be avoiding leaving a trail law enforcement could follow, and that raises suspicion.
When I traveled to Africa, I transferred money through a Barclay's account. They had a branch in the area I has going to, and I don't recall any significant fees.
Absolutely.
I'm a fan of reform to reduce the life of patents, preferably based on industry (or more precisely, based on the time it takes to bring a new product to the applicable market and succeed). Software patents could be applicable for perhaps one year. A vehicle or other major physical item could be five. The only thing I could see as still being 20 years is household goods that aren't expected to ever need repair.
I'll also add that we hand out patents for useful inventions to the people who worked out the invention's problems (or at least we try to). No, putting a power connector in an electronic device isn't patent-worthy. Designing a physically-tiny connector that's capable of transferring significant (charging) power, resistant to accidental damage, also usable for data transfer, and durable through millions of use cycles to boot, is something that is definitely worth a patent, but it'll cost you hundreds of hours of planning and testing time to get it.
Back when I come from, everyone has a time machine!
Didn't you read the summary? It tracks every move you make, just like GPS vehicle trackers, RFID door keys, and a jingle bell on your kid's shoelace. Clearly this is something worthy of widespread panic.
Just like vacuum tubes or computers... But how many people do you know that have ever hand-made either?
Offhand, I can think of two, one for each. The computer builder is an elder in-law, who was a logic designer and electrician for the first computer in a certain European country. The vacuum tube builder is my old physics professor, whose research involved many kinds of tubes, some of which he designed himself (though I can't really say he hand-made them, as he had professional glassblowers do the actual work while he directed).
Oh, you were being rhetorical...
The Google patent covers, in short, getting an expectation of a user's content by reviewing the content of their friends.It's a generalization of PageRank, but instead of looking only at a single numeric value for a site's worth, it looks at various other criteria.
The only meaningful "guilt by association" reference is claim 12:
12. The method of claim 1, wherein the particular subject of interest comprises at least one of the group consisting [of] adult content and illegal content.
Claims that short are usually defensive, to prevent trolls from getting a patent of "do this prior art, but looking for porn". Now Google can use their algorithm for content filters, without fear that a troll will use their own work against them. It is interesting that that's the only particular subject mentioned, but that's not very meaningful, since the general method is patented in claim 1. It could just be a writing technique to patent the technique and have the given examples be specifically covered. IANAL, so I'd love some lawyers to explain if there's something odd here.
As usual, it's a benign patent on a data mining technique that Slashdot whips up into a frenzied sensational theory about corporations working to quash the individuality of the common man.
What's wrong with data mining? It's effectively the same job that campaign managers have been doing for decades (or more), but now more accurately. In the 1800s, a candidate could campaign on a platform of what he thought the voters wanted to hear. Now, candidates can know the views of their constituents, and make plans and promises based on more accurate information.
Now, I'm not naive enough to think that all those promises will be kept, but it does bode well that the elected officials have a pretty accurate model of their constituents, should they actually decide to refer to it.
See my first comment in this thread:
Are the vehicles expected to remain in constant communication with the central location, which may be impossible in some areas?
In the river valley in my city, where cellular coverage is spotty and the twists cut walkie-talkie range to less than shouting distance, what then? Heck, I know of residential places in my city where police radios don't even cover.
Then it's a good time to change tactics. Instead of flyers, carry a Bible and become a proselytizer. Actually run the Craigslist business for a while, putting flyers in several neighborhoods with antiques that you won't rob. As mentioned below, sell candy bars for a charity fundraiser. Volunteer to canvass to encourage voting. Invite people to a public event. Wander around "lost" at dusk, asking other pedestrians for directions to some landmark in the direction you're already headed.
The excuses to walk down a sidewalk are endless, and in modern society the chances of being recognized are infinitesimal. Just beware the old guy in a rocking chair. If I had to pick favorites, I'd start with the voluntary canvass or proselytizing, to identify the riskiest houses with nosiest people. Then switch to jogging, with the ready excuse that you like the neighborhood's scenery. Jog for a few months before starting the robberies, then continue afterward.
If the police ever ask for your name, give it readily, then find a new line of work (or at least be prepared to move out of the country). Be content with the robberies you got away with, and stay out of the public eye for the rest of your life. This assumes, of course, that the robbery was for thrill rather than financial necessity, but that's really necessary for the perfect heist.
Disclaimer: This is starting to get creepy, so I may as well mention that I'm professionally paranoid. Part of my job is evaluating security at a financial institution, so I get to sit at my desk and think up interesting ways to avoid suspicion (and triggers for our employees to be more suspicious). Mostly I'm concerned with information security, but there's some physical aspects as well.
The ones that don't move a stick from their front porch or a flyer stuck in their door? They're probably not home.
Don't expect people to notice a stranger. A salesman sticking flyers in people's door handles is annoying, but not very suspicious. A jogger who looks similar to the salesman from the day before will be unnoticed. If, by some fluke, a police officer asks, they can show off the flyer promoting their services selling old junk (which they suspect these old houses are full of) on Craigslist for a 10% cut. It's often not a crime to advertise one's own business, and it's plausible to deny knowledge if it is.
So the keys stay in a central location, meaning that any recheck for verification (like when a meter says someone used a million kilowatt-hours in a month) requires another vehicle being sent out, and the reading technician/driver has no indication that there might be something wrong. Everybody loves needlessly increased expenses, right?