For various reasons, a wide variety of otherwise free wifi hotspots require you to go through a login screen. (This is also common of course with for-pay hotspots where you must enter an account or room number.)
We all hate waiting on hold, and we shouldn't have to. But companies don't do a lot to make it easier, do they?
Most people, I presume, when at their desks, put the hold music on speakerphone, and turn it low. The worst hold musics are ones where a human voice breaks in every 30 seconds or so to remind us that "all agents are busy" or tries to convince us to go to the web site or buy something else. These are the worst because we have to perk up and listen to the human voice to make sure it's not the agent finally getting to us.
This idea came to me via Al Chang. I'm shopping for a new smartphone, and I have been dismayed at how hard it is to get just what I want and not pay a huge fee for it. Right now I'm leaning towards the new HTC Mogul, in part because the Sprint SERO offer is just too good to pass up.
However, in the GSM world, one thing that's frustrating is that carriers only provide a limited number of phones, and in some cases, such as the Nokia E62, they actually rip useful features out of the phones before offering them. (The E61 has Wifi, the E62 removes it!) But the subsidy, which can be $200 to $300 is also too rich to pass up if you're signing up for new service. If they are going to force you into a 2 year contract -- which they do for anything, even just a change of plan -- you are foolish not to take this subsidy.
So here's Al's plan. Go out and buy the phone you want, unlocked (or locked to the carrier you plan to use) from whatever source you like, including cell dealers, Amazon, Dell or eBay.
Next go to your carrier's web site and find the most subsidized phone they sell which works with the plan you intend to use. Find the most subsidized phone by looking at the subsidy price, and comparing it to the typical "completed auction" price on eBay for a no-contract (locked or unlocked) phone. It is often the case, by the way, that there are eBay sellers who will sell you phones that cost $200 after subsidy in the carrier's store for $1 because they kick back to you the kickback they get from the carrier for selling you a fancy phone on a fancy plan. (I have not tried these sellers but they generally have top reputations and lots of happy comments from phone buyers so I presume it works. It does not, however, work with SERO.)
It's way late, but I finally put captions on my gallery of regular-aspect photos from Burning Man 2006.
For much of history, we've used removable media for backup. We've used tapes of various types, floppy disks, disk cartridges, and burnable optical disks. We take the removable media and keep a copy offsite if we're good, but otherwise they sit for a few decades until they can't be read, either because they degraded or we can't find a reader for the medium any more.
Steve Jobs of Apple Computer warned today that a rumoured cheap Chinese iPhone knockoff making its way toward America is an inferior product which lacks many of the important features of the iPhone. "It may look a bit like an iPhone, but when consumers discover all the great iPhone features that are missing from it, we think they'll still line up at Apple Stores for the genuine article," said Jobs in a released statement. Designed by software nerds, the knockoff, dubbed the "myPhone" by fans, has not yet been confirmed.
Apple released a list of features reported to be missing from the "myPhone."
MyPhones are predicted to sell for $350 without contract, $150 with a 2 year contract to the provider of your choice.
Hotels are now commonly sporting flat widescreen TVs, usually LCD HDTVs at the 720p resolution, which is 1280 x 720 or similar. Some of these TVs have VGA ports or HDMI (DVI) ports, or they have HDTV analog component video (which is found on some laptops but not too many.) While 720p resolution is not as good as the screens on many laptops, it makes a world of difference on a PDA. As our phone/PDA devices become more like the iPhone, it would be very interesting to see hotels guarantee that their room offers the combination of:
Earlier I wrote about the frenzy buying Plastation 3s on eBay and lessons from it. There's a smaller scale frenzy going on now about the iPhone, which doesn't go on sale until 6pm today. With the PS3, many stores pre-sold them, and others lined up. In theory Apple/AT&T are not pre-selling, and limiting people to 2 units, though many eBay sellers are claiming otherwise.
The going price for people who claim they have one, either for some unstated reason, or because they are first in line at some store, is about $1100, almost twice the cost. A tidy profit for those who wait in line, time their auction well and have a good enough eBay reputation to get people to believe them. Quite a number of such auctions have closed at such prices with "buy it now." If you live in a town without a frenzy and line it might do you well to go down to pick up two iPods. Bring your laptop with wireless access to update your eBay auction. None of the auctions I have seen have gone so far as to show a picture of the seller waiting in line to prove it.
eBay has put down some hard terms on iPhone sellers and pre-sellers. It says it does not allow pre-sales, but seems to be allowing those sellers who claim they can guarantee a phone. It requires a picture of the actual item in hand, with a non-photoshopped sign in the picture with the seller's eBay name. A number of items show a stock photo with an obviously photoshopped tag. In spite of the publicised limit of 2, a number of people claim they have 4 or more.
It seems Apple may have deliberately tried to discourage this by releasing at 6pm on Friday, too late to get to Fedex in most places. Thus all most sellers can offer is getting the phone Monday, which is much less appealing, since that leaves a long window to learn that there are plenty more available Monday, and loses the all-important bragging rights of having an iPhone at weekend social events. Had they released it just a few hours earlier, I think sales like this would have been far more lucrative. (While Apple would not want to leave money on the table, it's possible high eBay prices would add to the hype and be in their interest.)
As before, I predict timing of auctions will be very important. At this point even a 1 day auction will close after 18 hours of iPhone sales, adding a lot of rish. The PS3 kept its high value for much of the Christmas season, but the iPhone, if not undersupplied, may drop to retail in as little as a day. A standard 1 week auction would be a big mistake. Frankly I think paying $1200 (or a $300 wait-in-line fee) is pretty silly.
The iPhone, by the way, seems like a cool generalized device. A handheld that has the basic I/O tools including GSM phone and is otherwise completely made of touchscreen seems a good general device for the future. Better with a small bluetooth keyboard. Whether this device will be "the one" remains to be seen, of course.
Update:
If you go to the cities of Asia, one thing I find striking is how much more three-dimensional their urban streets are. By this I mean that you will regularly find busy retail shops and services on the higher floors of ordinary buildings, and even in the basement. Even in our business areas, above the ground floor is usually offices at most, rarely depending on walk-by traffic. There it's commonplace. I remember being in Hong Kong and asking natives to pick a restaurant for lunch.
Last week I talked briefly about self-driving delivery vehicles. I've become interested in what I'll call the "roadmap" (pun intended) for the adoption of self-driving cars. Just how do we get there from here, taking the technology as a given? I've seen and thought of many proposals, and been ignoring the one that should stare us in the face -- delivery. I say that because this is the application the DARPA grand challenge is actually aimed at. They want to move cargo without risks to soldiers. We mostly think of that as a path to the tech that will move people, but it may be the pathway.
Robot delivery vehicles have one giant advantage. They don't have to be designed for passenger safety, and you don't have to worry about that when trying to convince people to let them on the road. They also don't care nearly as much about how fast they get there. Instead what we care about is whether they might hit people, cars or things, or get in the way of cars. If they hit things or hurt their cargo, that's usually just an insurance matter. In fact, in most cases even if they hit cars, or cars hit them, that will just be an insurance matter.
A non-military cargo robot can be light and simple. It doesn't need crumple zones or airbags. It might look more like a small electric trike, on bicycle wheels. (Indeed, the Blue Team has put a focus on making it work on 2 wheels, which could be even better.) It would be electric (able to drive itself to charging stations as needed) and mechanically, very cheap.
The first step will be to convince people they can't hit pedestrians. To do that, the creators will need to make an urban test track and fill it with swarms of the robots, and demonstrate that they can walk out into the swarm with no danger. Indeed, like a school of fish, it should be close to impossible to touch one even if you try. Likewise, skeptics should be able to get onto bicycles, motorcycles, cars and hummers and drive right through the schools of robots, unable to hit one if they try. After doing that for half an hour and getting tired, doubters will be ready to accept them on the roads.
At Supernova 2007, several of us engaged Andrew Keen over his controversial book "The Cult of the Amateur." I will admit to not yet having read the book. Reviews in the blogosphere are scathing, but of course the book is entirely critical of the blogosphere so that's not too unexpected.
At the recent Supernova 2007 conference, they did a session where startups presented, and to mix things up, at the end they told us that one of the companies was fake. Most people clued in, because the presentation had been funny, and had a few obvious business mistakes, but at the same time many commented that it was chosen well, because they would like it to exist. The fake company, ZapMeals claimed it would let you order delivered food from quality at-home chefs and caterers, with a reputation system that helped you choose them by quality. GPS-enabled delivery companies would show you where your meal was as it drove to your home.
Whoops, sorry. I was playing around with a shared to-do list manager in drupal, the software that runs this web site, and it seems to have poorly configured security defaults, so the test entries showed up on the home page. I've made them unpublic now.
For some time I've been warning about a growing danger to the 4th amendment. The 4th amendment protects our "persons, houses, papers and effects" but police and some courts have been interpreting this to mean that our private records kept in the hands of 3rd parties -- such as E-mail on an ISP or webmail server -- are not protected because they are not papers and not in our houses. Or more to the point, that we do not have a "reasonable expectation of privacy" when we leave our private data in the hands of 3rd parties.
Continuing our discussion of the goals of voting systems, today I want to write about ballots that let you vote for more than one candidate in the same race. Many people have seen Preferential voting where you rank the candidates in order of how much you like them. This is used in Australia, and many private elections such as for the Hugo Awards. The most widely known preferential ballot is Single Transferable Vote and its cousin the instant-runoff. Many election theorists, however view these as the worst possible system. I prefer the Condorcet method with the modification that the cases where it fails, it is declared a tie, or a second type of election is used to break the tie. While it has been demonstrated that all preferential ballots have failure modes where they choose somebody that seems illogical based on the voters' true desires, this does not have to be true when a tie is possible.
Multiple candidate votes would provide a dramatic improvement in the US -- they are already used in many other places. They would have entirely eliminated the question of minor candidates "splitting" or spoiling the vote. There would have been no question in Florida of 2000, with Al Gore defeating George W. Bush (and at least by the popular vote, some feel that Bill Clinton would have lost to George Bush the elder, and there's strong evidence the electoral margin would have at least been smaller.) This is in fact what prevents them from being used -- there is always somebody in power who is going to conclude they would have lost has there been a multi-candidate ballot in place. Such people will fight it harder than advocates push it.
Small party candidates want it because it gives them a chance to be heard. Voters who like them can safely express that preference without fear of "spoiling" the race among the frontrunners. Given that, small candidates can eventually become frontrunners. In the 2 party system, as we've seen, any time a minor candidate like Ralph Nader gets popular enough that he might actually make a difference, the result is cries of "Ralph, don't run" and a dropping of support from those who fear that problem.
Recently, Lauren Weinstein posted a query for a way to bring a certain type of commentary on web sites to the web. In particular, he's interested in giving people who are the subject of attack web sites, who may even have gotten court judgments against such web sites to inform people of the dispute by annotations that show up when they search in search engines.
I'm not sure this is a good idea for a number of reasons. I like the idea of being able to see 3rd party commentary on web sites (such as Third Voice and others have tried to do) and suspect the browser is a better place than the search engine for it. I don't like putting any duty upon people who simply link to web sites (which is what search engines do) because the sites are bad. They may want to provide extra info on what they link to as a service to users, but that's up to them and should be unless they are a monopoly.
In addition, putting messages with an agenda next to search results is what search engines do for a living. However, in that may be the answer.
From time to time I come up with ideas that are interesting but I can't advocate because they have overly negative consequences in other areas, like privacy. Nonetheless, they are worth talking about because we might find better ways to do them.
The radio had a tribute to Bob Barker, who retires today after 35 years hosting The Price is Right. I always admired the genius of that show in making product placement an essential part of the show -- the show was about the advertisers and made the audience think about how much the product was worth and remember it. I'm surprised we didn't see more copycat game shows. There's plenty of product placement today, but it's largely gratuitous, not integral as this was. The fans on the radio said that while the show was gone, they could always watch reruns.
In my series on the design of new voting systems, I would now like to discuss the question of high voter turnout as a goal for such systems.
Everybody agrees in enfranchisement as a goal for voting systems. Nobody eligible should find voting impossible, or even particularly hard. (And, while it may not be possible due to disabilities, it should be equally easy for a voters.)
However, there is less agreement about trading off other goals to make it trivial to vote. Some voting systems accept that there will be a certain bar of effort required to vote, and don't view it as a problem that those who will not make a certain minimum effort -- registering to vote, and coming down to a polling station -- don't vote. Other systems try to lower that bar as much as possible, with at-home voting by mail, or vote-by-internet and vote-by-phone in private elections. And many nations, such as Australia, even make voting compulsory, with fines if you don't vote.
What makes this question interesting is the numbers. With 50% voter turnouts, or even less if there is not an "interesting" race, not having trivial voting "disenfranchises" huge numbers of voters. The numbers dwarf any other number in election issues, be it more standard disenfranchisements of minorities or the disabled, or any election fraud I've ever heard about. A decision on this issue can be the most election-changing of any. Australia has 96% voter turnout, and it had 47% turnout before it passed the laws in 1924 compelling voting.
