A recent Forbes items pointed to my earlier posts on eBay Feedback so I thought it was time to update them. Note also the eBay tag for all posts on eBay including comments on the new non-feedback rules.
I wrote earlier about the controversial topic of discriminatory pricing, where vendors try to charge different customers different prices, usually based on what they can afford or will tolerate. One particularly vexing type of such pricing is the mail-in rebate. Mail in rebates do two things. In their pure form, they give a lower price to people willing to spend some time on the bureaucracy. As such, they would work at charging richer customers more because richer customers tend to value time more than money compared to poorer customers.
I've thought digital picture frames were a nice idea for a while, but have not yet bought one. The early generation were vastly overpriced, and the current cheaper generation still typically only offer 640x480 resolution. I spend a lot to produce quality, high-res photography, and while even a megapixel frame would be showing only a small part of my available resolution, 1/4 megapixel is just ridiculous.
While I've written before about the trouble in making solar competitive with grid power, this is not true when the grid is being blown up by geurilla fighters on a regular basis. Over the past couple of years, Bechtel has been paid over 2 billion dollars, mostly to try to rebuild the Iraq electrical infrastructure. Perhaps it's not their fault that power is only on in Bagdadh for 2 hours a day after these billions have been spent -- but their might have been a better way.
I was seduced by Google's bribe of $20 per $50 or greater order to try their new Checkout service, and did some Christmas shopping on buy.com. Normally buy.com, being based in Southern California, takes only 1 or 2 days by UPS ground to get things to me. So ordering last weekend should have been low risk for items that are "in stock and ship in 1-2 days." Yes, they cover their asses by putting a longer upper bound on the shipping time, but generally that's the ship time for people on the other coast.
Last week, I wrote about new ideas for finding the lost. One I've done some follow-up on is the cell phone approach. While it's not hard to design a good emergency rescue radio if you are going to explicitly carry a rescue device when you get lost, the key to cell phones is that people are already carrying them without thinking about it -- even when going places with no cell reception since they want the phone with them when they return to reception.
This week I participated in this thread on Newcomb's Paraodox which was noted on BoingBoing.
The paradox:
A highly superior being from another part of the galaxy presents you with two boxes, one open and one closed. In the open box there is a thousand-dollar bill. In the closed box there is either one million dollars or there is nothing. You are to choose between taking both boxes or taking the closed box only. But there's a catch.
I've been writing recently about the linux upgrade nightmares that continue to trouble the world. The next in my series of ideas is a suggestion that we try to measure how well upgrades go, and make a database of results available.
I've spoken before about ZUI (Zero User Interface) and how often it's the right interface.
One important system that often has too complex a UI is backup. Because of that, backups often don't get done. In particular offsite backups, which are the only way to deal with fire and similar catastrophe.
Here's a rough design for a ZUI offsite backup. The only UI at a basic level is just installing and enabling it -- and choosing a good password (that's not quite zero UI but it's pretty limited.)
A new program has appeared at San Jose Airport, and a few other airports like Orlando. It's called "Clear" and is largely the product of the private company Clear at flyclear.com. But something smells very wrong.
To get the Clear card, you hand over $99/year. The private company keeps 90% and the TSA gets the small remainder. You then have to provide a fingerprint, an iris scan and your SSN, among other things.
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