I am also quite bothered by these virus blocker programs mailing the from line when they know it is fake.
However, the truth is they know what sort of virus they have detected, and they can know whether the virus/worm in question forges the fromline or not. If they know it forges the from line, they should not send the mail back. If they know the program does NOT forge the from line, however, it is not unreasonable to send back the bounce, though for best appearances, it should not look like an ad.
If a program on my machine is sending out worms, I want to know about it. The antivirus software should be able to tell the difference.
Nobody wants spam. (Well, except spammers.) So just because you are not for one method of anti-spam doesn't mean you want spam to continue.
There are many features of our E-mail system that were deliberate and which spammers abuse. Before we give them up to stop the abuse, we want to be very sure there isn't another way.
This is no solution. It stops the load of sending the bodies of spams, but the annoyance of spams still remains.
It also introduces a lot of problems. Unless you just immediately fetch, it tells the sender where you were (IP address) and when at the time you fetch the mail. If the sender's server is down you may not be able to fetch it at all. Response times get slower, again unless we just use this to implement the old pre-send system, in which case we don't get its benefits.
A mixed system (pre-send small mail, post-fetch large or questionable mail) can have some of the benefits but still faces problems. And spam still comes.
So now AOL users are SOL if they want to use any of the large number of applications that send mail for you, such as all those "Mail this story to a friend" links, or tools like eVite which manage party invitations for you. And tons of other applications, many of them useful.
You don't want something like SPF until a protocol is established so that if an application needs to send mail for you, it has some way of sending the mail to your browser for it to mail, authenticated by you. At the same time, this is hard because you want it to be secure (not usable against your will) but also easy (not always prompting you.)
But the bad news is that even if SPF were to make it, some planners have a long term goal of demanding it be universal. Ie. to refuse mail that does not come with some form of ID.
Moore's law has already played out. Try Vindigo, for example, a nice location based app that fits easily in any Palm Pilot, including those costing under $100. (Or under $50 used.) Cheap hardware fully able to deal with large databases of location-based info already is here.
The broadcast (or even unicast) would only be fore updates or moving to new areas you don't frequent, and easily doable with the higher bandwidth cellular services the companies want to promote.
You don't download everything, just what you care about. Restaurants, particular types of shops, bathrooms, parking, etc.
Suggesting this is a huge problem we can't yet solve is the insufficient engineering. I already have good location based services and they are getting better, and they don't depend on my devices constantly telling the network/cops/etc. where I am.
You don't have to receive everything on a cell tower (which is not much in a large city, they pack 'em closer there), you know where you are and can ask for a grid as large as you want to reveal.
You can't avoid the cell company knowing you went downtown, but you can avoid telling them what shop you were in at 3:22pm.
It is not always a tradeoff between rights and convenience. If you think there has to be a tradeoff, it usually means you haven't worked hard enough on the problem. (Same with rights and security.)
I do find it amusing that a 20 year old would make predictions about what a mature adult would think to a 43 year old.
I am fully aware that many parents believe that kids do not have rights. Indeed, most parents will believe that about their own kids at an emotional level, even though they know at an intellectual level, when thinking about how to have a just society that kids do have rights.
That's not to say the state should regularly intervene to protect children from their parents, even big-brotherish parents who slap Stasi-level surveillance on their kids up to a certain age.
But children need some basic liberties as much as adults in many cases. Especially when outside the home. Free speech. And while not total freedom of movement, some, and more as they get older. And there is no magical line at 18 where you move from being slave to citizen.
As we architect the technology of the future, we must consider just what it will mean to our rights and the rights of children.
Today of course parents give their teens cell phones 20% as gift and 80% for parental peace of mind. But it's event based -- they get to call the kid when they want to do their parenting, and the kid has the option to lie. However, now the kid has no option to explain why they didn't call when they were supposed to.
This is different from what you want. All the time surveillance, with a map popping up of all the child's movements all day long.
An intermediate step would be a query. Parent asks for location. Kid's phone beeps and says, "Mom wants your location, yes/no?" If kid says no they will of course have explaining, but they will also not feel they are being watched at all times. And after a certain (16 surely) parents should not be able to force this on the kids.
Of course some, or even most folks would understand that they don't have a right to your location at all times.
But I fear you are overly optimistic. Lots of people want this info. It's very useful and convenient. Just as millions today enjoy having their instant messaging system tell them a limited subset of info like this. We love it, we crave it, and we will get it.
Think of how many "where are you?" cell calls get placed. It's probably one of the most common type of calls. How easy to fix that problem with tracking.
And then when we don't want it, we'll have a problem. We can't easily turn it off only some of the time.
So while you and I may have understanding women, there's a large chunk would wonder (openly or privately) why you want to disable the handy "Show where your family members are" plan that comes free with the cell company family pack.
Moore's law makes it more and more practical. First of all the local area data would be broadcast, not unicast, so that's efficient.
Secondly, when this can't be efficient you can make it efficient by having your device transmit your location only to a private server owned by you (encrypted) which then figures out if there is anything you should be told, and tells it to you.
You don't have to design these apps to be usable as surveillance devices, that's just the easy way. It's well worth the added cost to make them not usable in this way.
Yes, BIG problems with that. Once you are able to transmit like this, you now have the nasty problem of having to say no to some people who think they have a right to the info. Bosses. Spouses. Parents.
Some relationships are good ones where the other party will understand why they don't have a right to the info, but some spouses and definitely some parents and bosses are going to feel bothered if you say no. Some will pretend they are not bothered but they will now start wondering, "Just what is he hiding????"
You actually have to start putting in things like a function to lie about your location, since selectively not broadcasting some times when you normally do so is a giant red flag.
Many have pointed out how ineffective lojacking kids would be if the kidnappers (who 99% of the time are relatives, the press just makes a big deal when there is a stranger kidnapping) are aware of the technology.
It can be worse, it can be used to mislead. Of course they can just turn the phone off (you going to trigger an alert on every dead battery or out of range cell phone?) but they can also plant it at the home or the home of some red herring.
But here's the real question. Kids have rights. At what age will parents finally let their kids be free of the surveillance anklet we're calling a cell phone?
I can tell you it will be later than it should be for almost all parents, that is their nature, and it's understandable.
But I think if we are going to have readily available child-lojack, there may need to be a law to protect the children from their parents, and forbid doing it after the age of 12. The kids can still have a phone, can still call 911 and transmit their location, but no parent query.
Otherwise we destroy the freedom of all kids to catch one stupid criminal out of 100,000 who doesn't know to turn off the phone. All the other times it will be used to say, "I told you not to associate with that Jimmy kid."
It's possible to produce compelling location-aware network applications without requiring the device to tell the outside world where it is. Instead, have the network provide information about the general area, and let the device decide what to do about it.
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
How about that it's $600 WITHOUT the 802.11 interface, which is an optional add-on?
Where does this price come from? It should be harder and more expensive to make a super-tiny box that also needs to have its own battery and charger than to make one in a standard case that gets 12v from the car. More expensive to install the built in, and you need a remote control panel, but only the fact that you don't think you will sell many justifies paying twice the price for the car unit than for a Rio Karma or similar.
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.
As many have pointed out, you don't want to give free hotspots and access to people who set up a hotspot where nobody else will use it.
Nor do you really need to give free access to every person in the network, though you might give reduced priced access.
There is a simple solution though, which is not revenue sharing directly. Reward based on the amount of _paid_ access to their hotspot.
If you get decent amounts of paid access to your hotspot, you get free access everywhere else. If you get limited paid access you get discounted or limited hours elsewhere.
If you get no paid access, well, you may well have to send the equipment back, or pay for it.
This makes a lot more sense, and it is still a good deal for the operator. Get free hardware, and if you are in a decent area, get free access wherever you go.
There is one way to cheat it -- clone the MACs of users with free access and have them show up as "paying" users on your network. It might require either tolerating this, or not counting free access as outsider paid access since it isn't paid.
Sure, but SSIDs are long enough that you can put a much clearer string in the name, like "FreeWifi" to make it clear to people who happen by, even who don't know about the convention, that you are ready to have them use it.
Even better, however, is to have a URL or e-mail address as your SSID. This allows people who see your SSID to mail you to ask about it. I met a neighbour that way.
Combine the two, and make your SSID freewifi@yourdomain.com, so people can know about it and can also meet you.
The usual logic for A/V is that components are higher quality than all in ones, for a wide variety of reasons you have probably all seen hashed out in many places.
But does it change a bit in the digital domain? Can some of the "components" be software now, but all run on a general purpose box? Should the components be more like PC peripherals (connected in slots or USB 2 or Firewire or ethernet) rather than standalone units?
My vision of the future of Audio is very different, though it scares me how easy it makes DRM. Namely that speakers should be digital, with amplifier and speaker together (or as paired components) and everything else just talk to the speakers over the ethernet. The speakers would know how to combine streams. Ditto eventually for video. Get a great monitor (possibly all digital with video stream decompressor on it or in it) and let many applications flower that will send it video.
But in this case, it does make sense to have an all in one box with the comoponents found in a box like this (namely a reader for the current optical disk format of choice) and networking. And then to add components (like Ogg support) in software.
Too bad this vision makes DRM so easy and strong, since finally the analog hole would get closed.
Not that more bandwidth is bad, but the real excitement in radio these days is new ways to use it, more features.
For example, since it's so easy and cheap to do, why not a car radio with Tivo like functions:
a) Recording multiple stations at once, letting me switch among the recordings, FF, pause and rewind among them. Heck, with software radio record _all_ the stations, all the time.
b) Know the local traffic stations (ie. traffic every 10 minutes on the 8s) and record that slot and give it to me at the touch of a button, or better still just tune in some digital traffic service that will tell me only of my route.
Ditto the news, always record the latest newscast, let me hear it any time I want.
c) Of course let me pause and resume. Also record my favourite talk shows (NPR for example) like Tivo, and let me play them.
d) Have a speech interface so I don't have to look at the radio to select programs or tune it or otherwise control it! Just give me a little wheel or 4-way control on the wheel similar to what MP3 players have.
e) And of course, what I am now playing with is using an MP3 jukebox to forget about radio entirely, exept for news, traffic and weather. I download NPR programs into the jukebox to listen to them. I can even record Morning Edition in the early morning and listen to it in the morning commute, except with FF and pause etc.
Plus of course, music, which Mp3 jukeboxes do just great.
f) Speaking of radio, put 802.11 in the car MP3 player so when it notices it is parked in the driveway, it syncs up my latest music and audio.
More bandwidth is of course nice, but boring. Think about cool features.
Well, it's really an older book series, but since the paperbacks only came out in the USA in 2003, I will put forward the most refreshing and amusing books I've seen in a while, The Eyre Affair and its sequel Lost in a Good Book by Jasper FForde.
A marvelous alternative Britain where everybody is highly literate, and our heroine, Thursday Next, is a Special Operations officer in the LitraTec (Literary crimes) division.
Alas, the latest one, The Well of Lost Plots, can't be recommended quite as highly, even though it centers on a concept near and dear to the/.ers heart (which I can't reveal as it is a spoiler.)
Since I'm the person who made it (well, Vernor did the hard part...)
a) You can still get the CD today, if you join the EFF with a donation of $200 or more, and make a special request to get the CD instead of a T-shirt or Hat. The CD rom has the materials in open formats, just like we at the EFF push. There's a lot on it in addition to A Fire Upon the Deep, indeed, 2 hugo winning novels (Fire and Doomsday book) and 2 nebuala winning novels (Doomsday Book and Red Mars.) as well as all that winning and nominated short fiction.
b) The format used isn't strictly Microsoft Help format, but a special book publishing product MS made (probably based on that). And it's not so bad. Read the notes on how to read an ebook on a desktop computer and you will find that it's pretty tolerable. Wide margins, large text, fill the screen and sit 6 feet away so you can change your posture frequently -- those are the key points. I designed it to do this, and the MS reader was chosen because it was about the only tool at the time that could do that. HTML couldn't. I do provide a translator to HTML though.
Well, yes, boil is just a metaphor from the steam days.
I had presumed the cost of Stirlings was high because they are made in the hundreds, while internal combustion engines are made in the 100s of millions. If they are inherently more expensive to build that puts a damper on it, though I would also venture that if there was demand, research would discover ways to make them cheaper.
Generating hybrid cars (Stirling or Internal Combustion) would still be a handy idea. Be great in RVs that spend $4000 to put a generator in. Be great for the off-grid cottage (until some people want to take the car and others stay home, I guess -- you would need batteries, I guess). However, the main idea is a grid supplement, since when you are in your home needing extra power, your car is almost always there.
One could imagine a house with say 1kw of solar for maintenance power, taking little from the grid, but when the car is home with its 40kw generator feeding back the grid and running the a/c and other big appliances. For the 2 car 2 adult house at least.
Felix Kramer of calcars.org has some interesting ideas. In particular, pushing hybrid cars with more batteries than a typical hybrid but less than a full blown electric.
And while most people think one advantage of a hybrid car is you don't have to plug it in, his idea is that you would plug it in, to charge the batteries at night, and, conversely during a period of high-power need during the day, running the generator to provide extra power for your house and for the grid.
Now with gasoline that would be more polluting, but it still has a lot of merit in that power plant contruction is all about hitting that peak load, and it may be OK to pollute a bit more just at those very peak load times if it cuts grid usage and power production at other times -- nukes, hydro etc.
I would combine the ideas as follows. If you had hydrogen hybrid cars you could use them as generators to take the peak load off the grid as well, with no pollution.
And another Idea I have not seen much talk of is putting Stirling engines in hybrid cars. Sterlings are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, but nobody puts them in cars because they take several minutes to come up to boil, and people don't want a car that won't go until several minutes after you start it.
With a hybrid car with a 10-mile battery, you can go right away while waiting for the Stirling to heat up. Plus any energy put into the engine goes into battery charging so it is not wasted.
Those in the anti-spam community who think the problem can be solved with laws regulating e-mail have mostly written their anti-spam laws to ban unsolicited _commercial_ email. They do this in the hope that commercial speech is easier to get a law against than an entire time-and-manner style restriction.
It's a backwards hope. The content of the message has little to do with whether it's spam, and in fact regulating by content may make it harder to get the law through in the end.
But one result is that it promotes commerce-based spam definitions, which makes politicians more willing to spam, because from what they have been told, political spam is not spam.
Now the Dean campaign figured it out after the fact but there are many other political spammers.
Phone spam is illegal already, but not poltical phone spam. In the last primary, a local Democrat phone spammed me 3 times in one day with recordings endorsing her. One was from Cruz Bustamante, current democrat frontrunner in the replace-Gray-Davis race.
Yes, Bustamante is a spammer. If you have decided you will not vote for a spammer, you need to take him off your list. I wrote letters to him which he ignored. His spam actually did violate the law, even for polticial phone-spams, to boot.
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I am also quite bothered by these virus blocker programs mailing the from line when they know it is fake.
However, the truth is they know what sort of virus they have detected, and they can know whether the virus/worm in question forges the fromline or not. If they know it forges the from line, they should not send the mail back. If they know the program does NOT forge the from line, however, it is not unreasonable to send back the bounce, though for best appearances, it should not look like an ad.
If a program on my machine is sending out worms, I want to know about it. The antivirus software should be able to tell the difference.
Nobody wants spam. (Well, except spammers.) So just because you are not for one method of anti-spam doesn't mean you want spam to continue.
There are many features of our E-mail system that were deliberate and which spammers abuse. Before we give them up to stop the abuse, we want to be very sure there isn't another way.
This is no solution. It stops the load of sending the bodies of spams, but the annoyance of spams still remains.
It also introduces a lot of problems. Unless you just immediately fetch, it tells the sender where you were (IP address) and when at the time you fetch the mail. If the sender's server is down you may not be able to fetch it at all. Response times get slower, again unless we just use this to implement the old pre-send system, in which case we don't get its benefits.
A mixed system (pre-send small mail, post-fetch large or questionable mail) can have some of the benefits but still faces problems. And spam still comes.
So now AOL users are SOL if they want to use any of the large number of applications that send mail for you, such as all those "Mail this story to a friend" links, or tools like eVite which manage party invitations for you. And tons of other applications, many of them useful.
You don't want something like SPF until a protocol is established so that if an application needs to send mail for you, it has some way of sending the mail to your browser for it to mail, authenticated by you. At the same time, this is hard because you want it to be secure (not usable against your will) but also easy (not always prompting you.)
But the bad news is that even if SPF were to make it, some planners have a long term goal of demanding it be universal. Ie. to refuse mail that does not come with some form of ID.
Your papers please!
Humankind got along pretty well for the past million years without that ability.
Moore's law has already played out. Try Vindigo, for example, a nice location based app that fits easily in any Palm Pilot, including those costing under $100. (Or under $50 used.) Cheap hardware fully able to deal with large databases of location-based info already is here.
The broadcast (or even unicast) would only be fore updates or moving to new areas you don't frequent, and easily doable with the higher bandwidth cellular services the companies want to promote.
You don't download everything, just what you care about. Restaurants, particular types of shops, bathrooms, parking, etc.
Suggesting this is a huge problem we can't yet solve is the insufficient engineering. I already have good location based services and they are getting better, and they don't depend on my devices constantly telling the network/cops/etc. where I am.
You don't have to receive everything on a cell tower (which is not much in a large city, they pack 'em closer there), you know where you are and can ask for a grid as large as you want to reveal.
You can't avoid the cell company knowing you went downtown, but you can avoid telling them what shop you were in at 3:22pm.
It is not always a tradeoff between rights and convenience. If you think there has to be a tradeoff, it usually means you haven't worked hard enough on the problem. (Same with rights and security.)
I do find it amusing that a 20 year old would make predictions about what a mature adult would think to a 43 year old.
I am fully aware that many parents believe that kids do not have rights. Indeed, most parents will believe that about their own kids at an emotional level, even though they know at an intellectual level, when thinking about how to have a just society that kids do have rights.
That's not to say the state should regularly intervene to protect children from their parents, even big-brotherish parents who slap Stasi-level surveillance on their kids up to a certain age.
But children need some basic liberties as much as adults in many cases. Especially when outside the home. Free speech. And while not total freedom of movement, some, and more as they get older. And there is no magical line at 18 where you move from being slave to citizen.
As we architect the technology of the future, we must consider just what it will mean to our rights and the rights of children.
Today of course parents give their teens cell phones 20% as gift and 80% for parental peace of mind. But it's event based -- they get to call the kid when they want to do their parenting, and the kid has the option to lie. However, now the kid has no option to explain why they didn't call when they were supposed to.
This is different from what you want. All the time surveillance, with a map popping up of all the child's movements all day long.
An intermediate step would be a query. Parent asks for location. Kid's phone beeps and says, "Mom wants your location, yes/no?" If kid says no they will of course have explaining, but they will also not feel they are being watched at all times. And after a certain (16 surely) parents should not be able to force this on the kids.
Of course some, or even most folks would understand that they don't have a right to your location at all times.
But I fear you are overly optimistic. Lots of people want this info. It's very useful and convenient. Just as millions today enjoy having their instant messaging system tell them a limited subset of info like this. We love it, we crave it, and we will get it.
Think of how many "where are you?" cell calls get placed. It's probably one of the most common type of calls. How easy to fix that problem with tracking.
And then when we don't want it, we'll have a problem. We can't easily turn it off only some of the time.
So while you and I may have understanding women, there's a large chunk would wonder (openly or privately) why you want to disable the handy "Show where your family members are" plan that comes free with the cell company family pack.
Moore's law makes it more and more practical. First of all the local area data would be broadcast, not unicast, so that's efficient.
Secondly, when this can't be efficient you can make it efficient by having your device transmit your location only to a private server owned by you (encrypted) which then figures out if there is anything you should be told, and tells it to you.
You don't have to design these apps to be usable as surveillance devices, that's just the easy way. It's well worth the added cost to make them not usable in this way.
Yes, BIG problems with that. Once you are able to transmit like this, you now have the nasty problem of having to say no to some people who think they have a right to the info. Bosses. Spouses. Parents.
Some relationships are good ones where the other party will understand why they don't have a right to the info, but some spouses and definitely some parents and bosses are going to feel bothered if you say no. Some will pretend they are not bothered but they will now start wondering, "Just what is he hiding????"
You actually have to start putting in things like a function to lie about your location, since selectively not broadcasting some times when you normally do so is a giant red flag.
Why push people into lying?
Many have pointed out how ineffective lojacking kids would be if the kidnappers (who 99% of the time are relatives, the press just makes a big deal when there is a stranger kidnapping) are aware of the technology.
It can be worse, it can be used to mislead. Of course they can just turn the phone off (you going to trigger an alert on every dead battery or out of range cell phone?) but they can also plant it at the home or the home of some red herring.
But here's the real question. Kids have rights. At what age will parents finally let their kids be free of the surveillance anklet we're calling a cell phone?
I can tell you it will be later than it should be for almost all parents, that is their nature, and it's understandable.
But I think if we are going to have readily available child-lojack, there may need to be a law to protect the children from their parents, and forbid doing it after the age of 12. The kids can still have a phone, can still call 911 and transmit their location, but no parent query.
Otherwise we destroy the freedom of all kids to catch one stupid criminal out of 100,000 who doesn't know to turn off the phone. All the other times it will be used to say, "I told you not to associate with that Jimmy kid."
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
How about that it's $600 WITHOUT the 802.11 interface, which is an optional add-on?
Where does this price come from? It should be harder and more expensive to make a super-tiny box that also needs to have its own battery and charger than to make one in a standard case that gets 12v from the car. More expensive to install the built in, and you need a remote control panel, but only the fact that you don't think you will sell many justifies paying twice the price for the car unit than for a Rio Karma or similar.
Oh yeah, what about Ogg Vorbis?
No, this real star wars car or this older landspeeder would really fit the bill.
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.
As many have pointed out, you don't want to give free hotspots and access to people who set up a hotspot where nobody else will use it.
Nor do you really need to give free access to every person in the network, though you might give reduced priced access.
There is a simple solution though, which is not revenue sharing directly. Reward based on the amount of _paid_ access to their hotspot.
If you get decent amounts of paid access to your hotspot, you get free access everywhere else. If you get limited paid access you get discounted or limited hours elsewhere.
If you get no paid access, well, you may well have to send the equipment back, or pay for it.
This makes a lot more sense, and it is still a good deal for the operator. Get free hardware, and if you are in a decent area, get free access wherever you go.
There is one way to cheat it -- clone the MACs of users with free access and have them show up as "paying" users on your network. It might require either tolerating this, or not counting free access as outsider paid access since it isn't paid.
Sure, but SSIDs are long enough that you can put a much clearer string in the name, like "FreeWifi" to make it clear to people who happen by, even who don't know about the convention, that you are ready to have them use it.
Even better, however, is to have a URL or e-mail address as your SSID. This allows people who see your SSID to mail you to ask about it. I met a neighbour that way.
Combine the two, and make your SSID freewifi@yourdomain.com, so people can know about it and can also meet you.
The usual logic for A/V is that components are higher quality than all in ones, for a wide variety of reasons you have probably all seen hashed out in many places.
But does it change a bit in the digital domain? Can some of the "components" be software now, but all run on a general purpose box? Should the components be more like PC peripherals (connected in slots or USB 2 or Firewire or ethernet) rather than standalone units?
My vision of the future of Audio is very different, though it scares me how easy it makes DRM. Namely that speakers should be digital, with amplifier and speaker together (or as paired components) and everything else just talk to the speakers over the ethernet. The speakers would know how to combine streams. Ditto eventually for video. Get a great monitor (possibly all digital with video stream decompressor on it or in it) and let many applications flower that will send it video.
But in this case, it does make sense to have an all in one box with the comoponents found in a box like this (namely a reader for the current optical disk format of choice) and networking. And then to add components (like Ogg support) in software.
Too bad this vision makes DRM so easy and strong, since finally the analog hole would get closed.
Not that more bandwidth is bad, but the real excitement in radio these days is new ways to use it, more features.
For example, since it's so easy and cheap to do, why not a car radio with Tivo like functions:
a) Recording multiple stations at once, letting me switch among the recordings, FF, pause and rewind among them. Heck, with software radio record _all_ the stations, all the time.
b) Know the local traffic stations (ie. traffic every 10 minutes on the 8s) and record that slot and give it to me at the touch of a button, or better still just tune in some digital traffic service that will tell me only of my route.
Ditto the news, always record the latest newscast, let me hear it any time I want.
c) Of course let me pause and resume. Also record my favourite talk shows (NPR for example) like Tivo, and let me play them.
d) Have a speech interface so I don't have to look at the radio to select programs or tune it or otherwise control it! Just give me a little wheel or 4-way control on the wheel similar to what MP3 players have.
e) And of course, what I am now playing with is using an MP3 jukebox to forget about radio entirely, exept for news, traffic and weather.
I download NPR programs into the jukebox to listen to them. I can even record Morning Edition in the early morning and listen to it in the morning commute, except with FF and pause etc.
Plus of course, music, which Mp3 jukeboxes do just great.
f) Speaking of radio, put 802.11 in the car MP3 player so when it notices it is parked in the driveway, it syncs up my latest music and audio.
More bandwidth is of course nice, but boring.
Think about cool features.
Well, it's really an older book series, but since the paperbacks only came out in the USA in 2003, I will put forward the most refreshing and amusing books I've seen in a while, The Eyre Affair and its sequel Lost in a Good Book by Jasper FForde.
/.ers heart (which I can't reveal as it is a spoiler.)
A marvelous alternative Britain where everybody is highly literate, and our heroine, Thursday Next, is a Special Operations officer in the LitraTec (Literary crimes) division.
Alas, the latest one, The Well of Lost Plots, can't be recommended quite as highly, even though it centers on a concept near and dear to the
Also, they have arranged to donate 10% of profits from the sale of these to the EFF
Since I'm the person who made it (well, Vernor did the hard part...)
a) You can still get the CD today, if you join the EFF with a donation of $200 or more, and make a special request to get the CD instead of a T-shirt or Hat. The CD rom has the materials in open formats, just like we at the EFF push. There's a lot on it in addition to A Fire Upon the Deep, indeed, 2 hugo winning novels (Fire and Doomsday book) and 2 nebuala winning novels (Doomsday Book and Red Mars.) as well as all that winning and nominated short fiction.
b) The format used isn't strictly Microsoft Help format, but a special book publishing product MS made (probably based on that). And it's not so bad. Read the notes on how to read an ebook on a desktop computer and you will find that it's pretty tolerable. Wide margins, large text, fill the screen and sit 6 feet away so you can change your posture frequently -- those are the key points. I designed it to do this, and the MS reader was chosen because it was about the only tool at the time that could do that. HTML couldn't. I do provide a translator to HTML though.
Well, yes, boil is just a metaphor from the steam days.
I had presumed the cost of Stirlings was high because they are made in the hundreds, while internal combustion engines are made in the 100s of millions. If they are inherently more expensive to build that puts a damper on it, though I would also venture that if there was demand, research would discover ways to make them cheaper.
Generating hybrid cars (Stirling or Internal Combustion) would still be a handy idea. Be great in RVs that spend $4000 to put a generator in. Be great for the off-grid cottage (until some people want to take the car and others stay home, I guess -- you would need batteries, I guess). However, the main idea is a grid supplement, since when you are in your home needing extra power, your car is almost always there.
One could imagine a house with say 1kw of solar for maintenance power, taking little from the grid, but when the car is home with its 40kw generator feeding back the grid and running the a/c and other big appliances. For the 2 car 2 adult house at least.
Felix Kramer of calcars.org has some interesting ideas. In particular, pushing hybrid cars with more batteries than a typical hybrid but less than a full blown electric.
And while most people think one advantage of a hybrid car is you don't have to plug it in, his idea is that you would plug it in, to charge the batteries at night, and, conversely during a period of high-power need during the day, running the generator to provide extra power for your house and for the grid.
Now with gasoline that would be more polluting, but it still has a lot of merit in that power plant contruction is all about hitting that peak load, and it may be OK to pollute a bit more just at those very peak load times if it cuts grid usage and power production at other times -- nukes, hydro etc.
I would combine the ideas as follows. If you had hydrogen hybrid cars you could use them as generators to take the peak load off the grid as well, with no pollution.
And another Idea I have not seen much talk of is putting Stirling engines in hybrid cars. Sterlings are much more efficient than internal combustion engines, but nobody puts them in cars because they take several minutes to come up to boil, and people don't want a car that won't go until several minutes after you start it.
With a hybrid car with a 10-mile battery, you can go right away while waiting for the Stirling to heat up. Plus any energy put into the engine goes into battery charging so it is not wasted.
Those in the anti-spam community who think the problem can be solved with laws regulating e-mail have mostly written their anti-spam laws to ban unsolicited _commercial_ email. They do this in the hope that commercial speech is easier to get a law against than an entire time-and-manner style restriction.
It's a backwards hope. The content of the message has little to do with whether it's spam, and in fact regulating by content may make it harder to get the law through in the end.
But one result is that it promotes commerce-based spam definitions, which makes politicians more willing to spam, because from what they have been told, political spam is not spam.
Now the Dean campaign figured it out after the fact but there are many other political spammers.
Phone spam is illegal already, but not poltical phone spam. In the last primary, a local Democrat phone spammed me 3 times in one day with recordings endorsing her. One was from Cruz Bustamante, current democrat frontrunner in the replace-Gray-Davis race.
Yes, Bustamante is a spammer. If you have decided you will not vote for a spammer, you need to take him off your list. I wrote letters to him which he ignored. His spam actually did violate the law, even for polticial phone-spams, to boot.