Brad Templeton is Chairman Emeritus of the EFF, Singularity University founding computing faculty, software architect and internet entrepreneur, robotic car strategist, futurist lecturer, photographer and Burning Man artist.
This is an "ideas" blog rather than a "cool thing I saw today" blog. Many of the items are not topical. If you like what you read, I recommend you also browse back in the archives, starting with the best of blog section. It also has various "topic" and "tag" sections (see menu on right) and some are sub blogs like Robocars, photography and Going Green. Try my home page for more info and contact data.
Last year at Burning Man, I built a free phone booth out on the desert. Using VoIP, 802.11, batteries and a satellite uplink, it sat there on the playa floor and let you make free calls anywhere in the world. I blogged about that story, but there was an untold part of the story. 
Everybody is having a great time these days with the new and increasing satellite imagery found at Google Maps, finding their own houses and world landmarks.
I found a database built by a Keyhole user describing all the coordinates of the 788 Unesco World Heritage Sites. With a bit of perl magic I turned the Keyhole format into a series of web pages with links to Google satellite imagery.
Right now the push in displays is all for computer and TV displays, with fast response time, and ideally in a flat form-factor. But these are expensive, really expensive if you want more than 2 megapixels.
What if we bring back an old technology -- long persistence phosphors -- and use them to make displays intended for still images, such as photography and art, at high resolution. They are cheap and bright. And if you don't need to do 60 frames/second, you can also get away with cheap electronics are more resolution per persisting frame.
Well, the Supreme Court ruled today that expropriation for private development can still be legal if the town council seems to think there's a public benefit. It's a terrible decision, with strange logic, and strange votes from the judges, but you will probably read many other articles about that today. What I want to figure is, given this ruling, what can we do to make it better?
What we will see happening is a land developer coming to the city with a plan to demolish a redevelop a block in a way that they claim will be good for the city -- perhaps bringing in tourists, jobs, business, whatever. Of course the deal is very good for the land developer, or they would not be drafting it.
I suggest we make it less sweet for the developer in such cases and give some of that sweetness to the expropriation victims. Today they get a "fair market value" for their property (that part of the 5th amendment wasn't shredded) but I say, if the expropriation is for private use, let's give them more.
First, start by paying them this fair market value at the date of expropriation, as we do now.
Then, after the deal is complete (with some time limits and other good constraints) we want to determine just how much "value" came from aggregating the properties. Right now this value goes to the developer. We're going to give most or all of it to the expropriated folks. So we come up with a value for the amalgamated property. (More below on how to do that.) This pre-opening profit would go, all or most of it, to the landowners. The developer keeps any further appreciation of the property as they operate it -- they need an upside too, of course.
More ideas follow...
Corporate servers have used network storage, ranging from fileservers, to SAN for several years. Now, with USB IDE external drive cases selling for as little as $20, people are using external drives on their PC, and get pretty good response with 400 mbit USB 2 or with 1394/firewire. You can get most of the capacity of a 7200 rpm drive over USB 2.
So I want to call for the production of a cheap home external storage box. This box would have slots for 4 or 5 drives and cooling for them, ideally as big a fan as possible to keep the rpms and noise low in the desk model, and an even more powerful fan in the basement model. The desk model might have sound insulation though that's hard to combine with good cooling.
While this box could and probably should have USB or 1394, even better would be gigabit ethernet, which is fast enough for most people's storage needs, especially if there is a dedicated gigabit ethernet card in the PC just for talking to the storage.
This could allow for a radical redesign of PC cases of all types, with no need for the space and heat of drives. And of course these diskless PCs would be much quieter. You could put your disk cube under your desk (and thus have it be a bit quieter) but ideally you would like the basement model, to which you string cat5e cable and get a mostly silent PC.
read on...
When I switched to drupal, I lost the "type in my first name" code to stop comment spam that I had written for Movable Type. I used drupal's systems for spam spotting and comment moderation, but in fact those are not very good yet, so I re-coded the system so that anonymous commenters can comment directly if they answer a simple question on the comment form.
In much of the animal kingdom, mating involves the males putting on a display, and the females choosing the male they like, and the male pretty much always going off with the female who chooses him, certainly for a short interlude but also for a child-raising length of time.
In our closest relatives, the chimp and bonobo, there is extreme female promiscuity, with various theories as to why. In chimps, there is an alpha male but females will mate secretly with lessers. Bonobos do it with any other bonobo, any time, any place.
I've written a few times about Peerflix the P2P DVD trading system similar to some of my own ideas. After trying it for a few months, I have to report trouble.
Sunday, I was invited, along with a crowd of other local friends and bloggers, to a preview screening of the new art film "Yes" by Sally Potter. I'll review Yes, but what was interesting was the idea of Sony Pictures doing free screenings of movies for the "blogger" demographic. As I noted earlier, I'm also in this group called the "Silicon Valley 100" where they send us free stuff in the hopes we'll generate buzz and useful feedback. (The last few products they sent have not been exciting enough to inspire me to write about them, though.)
Here's an entry in my new "solve this" cateogry, which asks for reader input on solving problems.
When flying on a very full flight yesterday, we had an example of what my approach for faster airplane loading would have helped with. But until we get that, are there other solutions?
On the full flight, passengers would stand in the aisle trying to store their bags. With the compartments full they took a long time doing it, sometimes found themselves unable to. This blocked the loading and even though we started boarding 30 minutes before the flight, we were not finished by departure time. The flight attendants were on the PA every few minutes telling people not to stand in the aisle, to instead step into the row and let people pass, but very few paid attention to it. We don't seem inclined to do this, and not just because we are desperate for storage space. (I'm one of the desperate, I carry on fragiles like camera gear that I refuse to let them throw around.) We just don't believe that our own efforts will slow things much, and we also believe it will take "just a few more seconds" to get the bag in right.
...
I am told an interview I did a few months ago on USENET and elements of its history will air today on the American Public Media show "Marketplace." The audio can be played from the Marketplace web site in realplayer format. It airs on most NPR stations at times ranging from early afternoon to about 6:30pm.
So if you travel to different countries, you know that cellular roaming can be a pain, even with a GSM world phone, because they ding you for very high roaming charges.
So here's a service I want. A kiosk in the airport to sell, or ideally rent me a GSM SIM card for a prepaid account, right in the airport. The kiosk would also sell me unlocking service for my phone, and of course prepaid cards. (By renting the SIM card, I mean it would sell it, and then buy it back at a reduced price on the way back out.)
Update Note: I've created a Special Forum to share information on the best SIM card sources in different countries. Search there for info on each country or enter your own findngs. ...
ICANN is pleased to announce that the independent evaluation process, which began last year, has resulted in a further sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLD) application moving to the next stage.
As the process for selecting new sponsored Top Level Domain (sTLDs) continues from a pool of ten applications, ICANN has now entered into commercial and technical negotiations with an additional candidate registry, ICM Registry, Inc, (.POLINC).
The .POLINC top level domain will be a voluntary arena for sites that wish to express ideas that are politically incorrect or inflammatory. Sites that promote ideas including racism, homosexual advocacy, embryonic stem cell harvesting, creationism, evolutionism, opposition to the war in Iraq, defence of the liberation of Iraq and other topics that are inflammatory can voluntarily register in the .POLINC domain to make it clear what sort of material can be found on the site.
"We're not trying to suprise anybody with the fact that our sites have unpopular an inflammatory opinions on them," said Brad Templeton, Chairman of the www.eff.org web site notorious for its opposition to the surveillance tools the Justice Dept. says are needed for the War on Domestic Terror. Templeton also operates the www.netfunny.com site, which contains jokes, some of which lampoon stereotypes of all manners. "By giving us our own domain, people will know exactly what they are getting. Our views are for adults. We're not trying to push them on kids."
Operators of .POLINC domains believe that by using this domain, they will have an answer to any user who complains about finding their material on the internet, in particular parents who don't want their children exposed to highly radical views. Internet filtering software, commonly sold to parents, schools and libraries, will be able to easily and reliably block access to .POLINC sites by children and library patrons.
...
I have written before about what a terrible idea it is to generate top level domains that are generic, and have a meaning, because they create artificial monopolies over real words and generic terms, something even trademark law figured out was stupid centuries ago.
Now ICANN has gone one worse and annouced that a .XXX domain is underway. It is also talking about TLDs for jobs, and travel as well as .CAT, .POST and .MOBI.
I'm writing a larger essay on this topic, but I recently posted the following to Interesting People and it was requested to put it here. It relates to the theme of "light" DRM.
I used to wonder if you made a DRM system that was so well designed that only a serious pirate would notice it was there, if this might be a workable system.
When our society got rich, we started living much more sterile lives, and a whole bunch of diseases cropped up which are autoimmune disorders. These range from allergies to Chrohn's Disease, which destroys the bowel. Many of these syndromes did not exist in the pre-sterile world. (Not all autoimmune disorders are this way, of course.)
I've switched the blog from Movable Type to drupal. Drupal is a PHP based, open source blog and community system that will allow me in the future to support all sorts of fancy things, such as discussion forums, polls, multi-user blogging and a lot of other stuff. Drupal is entirely another class of application beyond MT, though I won't be using all of what it has at first.
There's a lot of talk about the coming threat of Avian H5N1 flu, how it might kill many millions, far beyond the 1918 flu and others, because of how much people travel in the modern world. Others worry about bioterrorism.
Plans are underway to deal with it, but are they truly thinking about some of the tools the modern world has that it didn't have in 1918 which might make up for our added risks? We have the internet, and a lot of dot-coms, both living and dead, created all sorts of interesting tools for living in the world without having to leave your house.
In the event of an outbreak, we'll have limited vaccine available, if there's much at all. Everybody will want it, and society will have to prioritize who gets what. While some choices are obvious -- medical staff and other emergency crews -- there may be other ideas worth considering.
Today, a significant fraction of the population can work from home, with phone, computer and internet. The economy need not shut down just because people must avoid congregating. Plans should be made, even at companies that prefer not to allow telecommuting, to be able to switch to it in an emergency.
Schools might have to close but education need not stop. We can easily devote TV channels in each area to basic curriculum for each grade. Individual schools can modify that for students who have internet access or even just a DVD player or VCR. For example, teachers could teach their class to a camera, and computers can quickly burn DVDs for distribution. Students can watch the DVDs, pause them and phone questions to the teacher. (However, ideally most students are able to make use of the live lectures on TV, and can phone their particular teacher, or chat online, to ask questions.) Parents, stuck at home would also help their children more.
Delivery people (USPS, UPS etc.) would be high in line for vaccination to keep goods flowing to people in their homes. You can of course buy almost anything online already. Systems like Webvan, for efficient grocery ordering and delivery could be brought back up, with extra vaccinated delivery drivers making rounds of every street.
Of course not everybody has a computer, but that need not be a problem. With so many people at home, volunteers would come forward who did have broadband. They would take calls from those who do not have computers and do their computer tasks for them, making sure they got in their orders for food and other supplies. Of course all food handlers would need to be vaccinated and use more sterile procedures.
I recently read the story of the coffee shop that's shutting down their free wifi on weekends because it mostly gets them moochers who, far worse than simply not buying anything, sit and stare at computers and don't talk to anybody. They found that when they shut down the free network, they not only got people to buy more coffee, the place was also more social.
Fast food outlets all have drive-throughs, and they are popular though sometimes it's hard to figure out why, since you get a slow simulation of being stuck in traffic. "Oooh, are we going to move! Yes, he's released his brakelights!" You may also have heard that McDonalds is outsourcing the order-taking part at some restaurants to teleworkers in the midwest, where wages are lower.