The fundamental problem is that people do not understand the concept of switching inputs. They simply do not get it that video and audio are separate. They don’t get that the audio and video come out of one box into another box. They do not comprehend that on the receiving box you must manually select which input you wish to currently be active. Now, people should learn this, but with a change to the HDMI spec, I think we can eliminate the problem in the long run.

Every cable box I have seen has a power outlet on it. Why is that? The reason is that you are supposed to plug your television into the cable box, and then plug the cable box into the wall. This will allow you to have the TV turn on and off when you turn the cable box on and off. Ideally this will eliminate the need for the TV remote control. Sadly, this only makes trouble in a more complicated system. For one thing, it means I have to turn the cable box on in order to play a video game. That’s just a waste of electricity.

The solution is to add one single additional wire to every HDMI cable. That wire will allow the devices to tell each other if and when they are on or off. The devices will also be able to command each other to turn on or off, or to switch inputs. It’s really so simple, I’m amazed it doesn’t already exist.

Here is an example scenario. You have a TV with an XBox and a DVD player. They are all off. You turn on the XBox. The XBox signals over the wire to the TV that it has turned on. The TV notices that it is off, so it turns on. Then it notices the XBox is the device which told it to turn on, and is the only device sending a signal. Therefore it automatically switches to that input.

Think about the difference that makes for the end user. They push the green button on the XBox controller, and they’re good to go. No fiddling with other remote controls. No juggling inputs. No nothing. Logitech probably wouldn’t like it, though, because it would ruin their Harmony product line.

I’m sure that you intelligent readers can figure out how the system will work in all sorts of other typical situations, but let me make a couple more examples. You turn off the TV, and it tells everything connected to it to turn off as well, saving lots of electricity. You turn off the XBox, and nothing else connected to the TV is still on, so the TV turns itself off. You have the XBox already on, but you turn on the Blu-Ray player. Well, it would be worse to switch away from a game in progress, so it should stay on the XBox. However, if the XBox turns off, it can switch to the Blu-Ray automatically.

Of course, the user will still need the ability to take manual control over which inputs are active, because the automatic setting will not be able to handle every single use case. Even so, such a system will drastically decrease the amount of times the user will have to manually switch inputs or turn devices on or off. It will also drastically reduce electricity usage because devices will almost never be on when they are in use.

Now, there are some extremely complicated situations that require figuring out. The best example I can think of is picture in picture. The TV and/or receiver has to be aware that picture in picture is a possibility. Maybe if you have picture in picture, and you turn on a second device, it opens in the small picture. Then if you turn off the second device, the small picture disappears. Even this complicated situation isn’t that difficult, you just have to spend some time figuring out the best possible default behavior for every possible scenario.

They’re adding all sorts of other great features to the HDMI specification like Ethernet, higher video resolution, audio return, etc. Those are far more complex than this simple one-wire feature. It will cost next to nothing to implement, and it will make a huge difference. There’s no rush, we can just do the usual thing we do with car safety equipment. All new products as of X date must support this feature. It will save a ton of electricity and reduce a ton of headaches. Too bad I’m just some guy and not an electronics manufacturer. I don’t even know the second step towards trying to make this a reality. The first step was this blog post.

I think the primary thing that confuses people about Git is that it assumes that if you are developing software on a team, that you actually talk to people. Whether it’s by IM, IRC, a web site, Twitter, Git doesn’t care. It just assumes that you actually have some form of regular communication with the other developers.

You see, the non-distributed version control systems do not make this assumption. If you are using subversion, your work flow is dictated by the limitations of the software. You do some code. When you commit, you also share. Everyone commits to the same place.

With this sort of system, you don’t need to talk to the other developers to know what to do. There is only one canonical current version of the code in one repository. If you do an svn update, you know everything you need to know. If you change the code, you just commit, and you don’t need to tell anybody. They will see your changes when they eventually do an svn update.

This system inevitably leads to the many problems that Git solves. The one I always like to point to is the situation where you need to make a quick bug fix while you are in the middle of working on a big new feature. You need to make a version of your code that has the fix, but not the new feature. If you committed the feature, it’s going to be a nightmare to get a version of the code without it. If you didn’t commit the feature, it is very hard to collaborate with others. Branching solves it, but branching in subversion is slow and difficult, and it’s shared. You might ruin everyone else in the process.

Git lets you do absolutely anything that is possible to do with your code. You can branch, tag, commit, share, patch, and unpatch your code any which way you can imagine, and some you can’t yet imagine. As long as you are aware of all the commands and features, you can never dig yourself into a hole. You will always be able to deliver the code with the combination of patches that you need.

The problem with this is that since you have so many capabilities, there is no dictated work flow. Should you have a central repository? Should you push back and forth between individual developers? Should we have any shared branches? Should we use tags? Should you use soft tags or hard tags? Should you merge? Should you rebase? All of these questions, and more, are the subject of much debate.

I think that all of these debates are silly. The correct answer is that there is no correct answer. All of the features of Git are just tools to help you get your code the way you need it to be. If rebasing saves the day, then rebasing is awesome. If sending patches by email works for you, then that’s also awesome. Whatever process you come up with for your team to work together on the same code is fantastic, if it works for you.

Even if you decided to follow a subversion style of development, you can absolutely just do it with Git instead. Git can work exactly the way SVN works, if you wish it to. The best part is that you can use it exactly like SVN, but because it is Git, you can escape the usual SVN traps when they come up. Therefore, I see absolutely no reason for a new project to use SVN when you can simply use Git and have developers agree to work in an SVN flow.

And that is the beauty of Git, is that it lets you come up with your own process. How you work is no longer dictated by the limitations of the software you are using. It is decided by the developers themselves. And even if developers like to work differently, as many do, they can each work in a way that is comfortable for them without interfering with anyone else. As long as the team communicates with each other, and agrees on how to share code, all is well.

Just to drive the point home, Git was made by Linus Torvalds to use for developing the Linux Kernel. How do you submit a patch to the kernel using Git? You put your patch up in your Git repository, and you email someone requesting them to pull the patch from you. Email!? With SVN you just commit, no need to talk to anybody. I don’t know about you, but do you think that forcing code changes on other developers without having to talk about it a good idea?

If you actually bother to talk to people then 500+ forks is not a problem. You ask someone and they tell you what fork to clone. Just ignore all those graphs, they mean nothing.

However, I must admit that the 500+ forks is indeed a symptom not of Git itself, but github’s design, and users not understanding Git. Github makes the fork button very prominent, but forking a project on Github is not really something that people should do that often. Github is not Git. The design of Github, intentionally or unintentionally, leads users into doing something they don’t actually want to do. It doesn’t really help people understand Git, and it doesn’t help people communicate.

What most people should be doing is just cloning repository to their local machines, and making changes there. If they want to submit the changes, then they should use non-Git communication tools to talk to the person they cloned from. They only need to fork on github if they want to publicly share changes that have not yet been, or will not be, merged into the actual project. Otherwise, they should not fork, just clone.

If you do have changes that are not accepted, then sharing them publicly on github in a fork is a very useful thing. Maybe there is someone out there who needs a copy of djata with a slight tweak, but someone else made the tweak already. The tweak may never be accepted to the canonical codebase, but it can still be made available in a form. That might save someone the time of making that same tweak themselves on their own, which is what they would likely be doing on a project managed by subversion.

Right now I see people with SVN mindsets who won’t switch to Git because they don’t truly understand DVCS. Likewise there are people with SVN mindsets who don’t understand DVCS who switch to Git anyway for whatever reason. The missteps of the latter group provide many of the stories that will keep the former group scared away.

All in all, I’m not too worried. When I was in college, less than a decade ago, the CS department taught us RCS and the software engineering department taught us CVS. In my senior years some people starting using SVN, which was bleeding edge at the time. Git was released in 2005. The world of version control moves surprisingly rapidly. I think Git’s dominance is pretty much guaranteed at this point. It will just take time for programmers to escape the SVN mindset and understand the, admittedly more complicated, DVCS world.

We Git users are here to help, so ask before you run away or jump to conclusions.

HTML5 is on the move. Pretty much every browser other than Internet Explorer is supporting it pretty well. However, the codec issue on the video tag is going to be a major headache for Firefox. YouTube, which is really the only video site that matters, has decided to go with H.264. Firefox can’t include H.264 because of patents, and can only support Ogg Theora. Chrome and Safari do not have this problem. IE will also not have this problem, if and when they get their act together.

This is due to the balance of open source that people like RMS do not understand. If you demand everything be purely open source, you will be missing out on something. The same goes if you demand everything be purely closed source. Some applications only exist closed, and some only exist open. You will have to use both to get an optimal user experience, especially on the desktop.

The overwhelming majority of users do not care about whether something is open or not. They only care that it is free as in beer, and that it has all the features they desire. Regardless of speed benefits, Chrome will beat Firefox because of its willingness to not be 100% pure open source, and include things like the patented H.264 video codec.

For those of you who do not know, Ubuntu has a very strict release cycle. Every six months they release a new version of Ubuntu. The most recent release is 9.10, released in October 2009. It includes version 2.6.31 of the Linux kernel. If there is a bug or security patch to that kernel, Ubuntu will push out an update to the users, such as the current version 2.6.31-17. The thing is, the current version of the Linux kernel is actually 2.6.32.5. Ubuntu 9.10 users will never get version 2.6.32. In order to get a newer version of the kernel, they will have to build it by hand, or wait for Ubuntu 10.4 in April.

What’s the big deal? The kernel version barely makes a difference in the user experience. Most users will probably not notice or care, even if they are stuck with a very old kernel version. Well, what if you apply the same update policy to something like Firefox? Firefox 3.6 was just released, but Ubuntu users will not get that update. Windows and Mac users will, because Firefox updates itself on those platforms. Ubuntu users will have to wait for Ubuntu 10.4, or jump through hoops to update Firefox by hand. They have to wait 3 months for a very significant user experience update.

The problem with these two open source projects, and others, is not that they are open source. Open source is awesome, and it’s the only reason these projects can even compete in the first place. The problem is that unlike say, the Apache web server, these target every day users. However, their philosophies and policies do not make the experience of the user their number one priority.

Yes, there are good reasons behind these policies. I support stable software releases and being as open as possible. It’s simply that the user experience is even more important than either of those. You need to make exceptions to policy when the user is suffering. If a store didn’t make a reasonable exception to its return policy, you would give it a bad review and maybe even stop shopping there. Why can’t open source projects also make reasonable exceptions? If they don’t, they’ll just slowly lose ground to their competitors.

I remember when I was a kid, and landline phones were still huge. Sprint made a big deal about their ten cents a minute.

The number of cents you paid per minute was a huge deal. I remember my grandmother would dial a five digit number before making a long distance call in order to get the price down to five cents per minute. With truphone you can now make many international calls for under three cents per minute. Taking inflation into account, voice calls have gotten ultra cheap over the years.

Now, I’m someone who doesn’t talk on the phone much at all. I still need a phone number because it’s sort of necessary for engaging with society. I also do call family and relatives, and occasionally friends when necessary. But most of my calls are very very short.

So what am I paying for this voice service I hardly use? I have AT&T’s “Nation 450 Rollover & 5000 Night/Weekend & Unlimited Mobile-To-Mobile Minutes” plan. It costs me $39.99 a month. There is no smaller plan available. If you do the math, this comes out to under ten cents per minute. If I’m paying for just the 450 minutes alone, each minute is under 9 cents. Good deal right?

It would be a good deal if I talked on the phone. As it stands, 4135 rollover minutes available. Oh they’re so generous letting me rollover the minutes, right? Wrong. The rollover is just an excuse. It makes you feel less bad about paying for all these minutes you never use. The thing is, if you never use them, you’re paying lots of money for absolutely nothing.

On my last bill I used 20 of the 450 minutes, 4 unlimited M2M minutes, and 64 night & weekend minutes. Even if I were paying a ludicrously high price of 25 cents per minute, for all the minutes, my bill would have been $22. Instead, I’m paying 45 cents per minute.

The way they structure the plans is highly deceptive. You don’t think about your voice costs in terms of cents per minute anymore, because you are paying a fixed rate. But when you really think about it, you’re either paying for something you don’t use, or you’re paying way too much for the little that you do use.

Now, for someone who talks on the phone a lot, this probably isn’t a problem. If I actually used all those minutes, I would actually be getting a pretty good deal. It wouldn’t be an amazing deal, but certainly not a rip-off.

The other carriers are no better. T-Mobile and Verizon have similar minimum plans of 450-500 minutes for $40. Sprint has a voice plan of 200 minutes for $30. I think somewhere in the fine print there’s the option to not pre-pay for any minutes, and pay only for the minutes you actually use. Of course, they charge 45 cents for those minutes, making it moot.

There is an argument to be made that wireless minutes should be more expensive than land line minutes. That’s acceptable, but it’s not true. Remember, if I used all my minutes, I’d be paying a reasonable price for them. The problem is that the minimum tier is much too high.

I’m willing to bet if you looked at the books for any of these wireless companies you would see millions upon millions of dollars paid for unused minutes. I’m paying as much money for unused minutes as I am for unlimited data, which I use a lot. It’s about 30% of my phone bill, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was 20-30% of their revenues.

Yes, text messages are a rip-off. Yes, data plans are secretly and evilly limited. But most of the money people like me are losing is paying for minutes we never use. Over the course of my two year iPhone contract, I’ve probably paid over $700 for unused voice minutes.

It’s nice that we’re actually seeing a little price war for the unlimited plans. These guys are actually starting to cut some of their ludicrously high margins on the high-end in order to push high-end smart phones to more customers. That’s well and good, but let’s also see some competition for the lower end plans. I want to see unlimited data and text for $30-40 with 100 voice minutes for $10-20. Even those prices are a little high, but they are far more reasonable than what I’m forced to pay now.

Maybe soon I’ll be able to ditch voice service altogether and use a VOIP solution. Perhaps the reason they don’t improve their data networks and expand coverage more quickly is to prevent me from doing that very thing.

Mark Maunder suggests we crowdsource the terrorism fight. He’s on the right track, fundamentally speaking. Our government is clearly incapable of intelligently combating a non-military threat. It must be the citizens themselves who help to stop terrorism. However, Mark’s specific suggestions are not all that great. None of them would stop a terrorist with a working explosive device. The people were only saved by the stupidity of the terrorist. There was nothing they could have done to save themselves from an intelligent attacker.

And that is the one thing that gives me hope. So many of the terrorists are just complete morons. Terrorism isn’t really rocket science. Just about any reasonably good engineer could cause massive amounts of destruction. I can personally come up with any number of plans to cause a very large amount of destruction. The reason we are save is because these smart people are smart enough to have jobs, and money, and such. When you’re smart enough to be a good terrorist, you’re smart enough not to be a terrorist in the first place.

Despite this, we can not rest easily. Even morons who fail most of the time are dangerous. They did succeed in 2001, in the London underground, in Oklahoma City, and many other times throughout history. They will fail often due to their lack of brains, but they will succeed sometimes, and it is those sometimes we need to prevent.

Start thinking about ways to prevent terrorist attacks. What do you think of? You think of physical defenses. Locking doors, searching people and bags, detecting explosives and weapons, these are all physical defenses. They all try to stop an attack right before, or as, it is about to happen. They also don’t work. If someone has a bomb at an airport, they can just set it off in the security line. Heck, trains have almost no security whatsoever. As long as you have a situation where there are many people together, it is next to impossible to physically prevent a terrorist attack. Even if everyone is on the lookout, and the crowd reports suspicious activities, that isn’t going to stop anything.

What you need to do is prevent terrorism way in advance. Intelligence is absolutely the most effective weapon against terrorism. If you know that a terrorist is going to go on a shooting spree tomorrow, you can have police arrest him today. If you know that someone bought a whole bunch of fertilizer, in the winter, and they aren’t a farmer, and it’s for a crop that doesn’t grow in the area, that they are probably up to something.

You might think this information is difficult and expensive to collect, parse, and act upon. You’re right, it is. But this is exactly where the crowdsourcing comes in. We need to crowdsource the intelligence to pre-empt terrorism. Let ordinary citizens keep a watchful eye about them. Then we can pool, share, and filter to turn the information into intelligence. Then the authorities can use that to pre-empt villainy.

This kind of crowdsourcing can work, but you can already see it’s a minefield. Untrained citizens are not that great at collecting intelligence. He who has a hammer sees nails everywhere. If you’re on the lookout for terrorism all the time, suddenly everything looks like terrorism. Is that a homeless guy, or is it a disguise? Is he hiding a bomb in his shopping cart? Is that guy really a utilities worker, or is he putting a bomb in the subway? What’s that weird device he has? That computer guy’s screen is weird, is he hacking?

Is there another kind of crowdsourcing we can do that is actually useful, and doesn’t require as much training? I think there is. We can find terrorists while sitting on our asses, on the Internet. For real.

I assume people reading this are fairly technologically competent. If you wanted to get illegal things online, like pirated media, guns, drugs, child porn, etc. do you think you could do it? It’s quite trivial. Yet, law enforcement agencies can’t seem to figure it out. If my only job was to find illegal activity on the Internet, I could have people arrested faster than they could be processed.

Do terrorists use the Internet just like pirates and pedophiles? You bet they do! Our recent terrorist Mutallab posted all over the Internet. He wasn’t particularly secretive either. He openly displayed his unhappiness and fundamentalist beliefs. It was a textbook case of a terrorist to be, right out in the open where anyone could see it. The same sort of thing goes not just for terrorists, but school shootings, and other criminals. A great many of these people posted their craziness all over the web before they acted.

These terrorists are not ultra smart super villains like Doctor Doom. They’re mostly just really sad individuals who reach the breaking point. They post their plans openly. They’re not hatching an evil scheme in secret, they’re crying for help. By searching Google, newsgroups, IRC, and Facebook we can find the next Mutallab or Seung-Hui Cho before they strike. The authorities can’t even figure out BitTorrent, but we can. We can find these sad people on the ‘net and then do something to make sure they never fall so far as to actually try something.

You’re probably sitting at your computer right now, and you’ve had enough free time to read this blog post. You probably also have enough free time to do some searching. Go out there, and see if you can find people on the web who are actually likely to be real terrorists in the making. Maybe you can save lives without getting out of bed.

This same phenomenon can be seen in many other places. The highways are the easiest example. Ignoring the debate about speed limits, I’m sure every driver reading this has been stuck behind  an elderly person driving extremely slowly. Everyone must suffer and lose precious time because one person is ruining things for everybody.

If you go to ride the Go Karts at an amusement park, they are stupidly safe. Their top speeds are capped by a governor. They are configured in such a way that you can make it around every corner just by steering with the throttle wide open. There is no chance of flipping over, and very very little chance of hurting yourself. They are also much less fun. Why can’t I ride dangerous go-karts at my own risk, rather than eliminating them entirely?

Notice how whenever you board an airplane, there are all sorts of slow people who waste everyone’s time? They can’t get their carry-ons into the overhead bin. They can’t find their seats. They hang out in the aisle forever. They’re slow getting through security as well, because they don’t know the drill. Frequent fliers are made to suffer because these people are so slow. Why not special lanes, or even flights, where only experienced travelers are allowed?

On Metro North trains, and many others, there are touch-screen ticket vending machines. Some people use these things all the time, so buying tickets takes a few seconds. Many people fail to use them, and cause people behind them in line to miss their train, or to spend extra money to buy a ticket from the conductor. Why not have a few machines for first-time ticket buyers where there is a person to help you and teach you how it works. Have all the other machines give a time limit before sending you to the back of the line.

Lastly, let’s bring it back to technology. Why does almost every ISP block port 25, preventing you from running a mail server? It’s because most people let their computers get filled with malware and viruses that start sending out tons of spam. The result is that good netizens can’t run legitimate and safe mail servers from their homes. How about allowing people to unblock the port at the risk of severe financial penalties if they screw up?

Life needs a fast lane. People should always have the safe option available to them. That option should even be the default, but that doesn’t mean we need to eliminate the risky options entirely. Many people aren’t afraid of danger, and aren’t afraid to fail if it means they can go faster the majority of the time.

I’m not saying we should go back to the olden days where everything was risky and dangerous, and safety really wasn’t an option. Forcing grandma and the tourists to drive in the fast lane is just as ridiculous as me getting stuck behind them. In all areas of life we need more choices for people to make in terms of risk and reward. One size does not fit all. The slow people want to get away from us just as much as we want to zoom past them. I think the net benefit to our society’s productivity and happiness would be tremendous. Let’s make it happen.

If you accept that, then you must also accept that open source is the only environmentally responsible method of software and hardware development.

A month ago I went to the Boxee Beta unveiling in Brooklyn. I asked Avner Ronen why the Boxee Box didn’t include Cable Card, DVR, Blu-Ray, etc. Because the Boxee Box only ran Boxee, it would increase the number of boxes under a TV, not decrease them. He agreed that there was definitely a box fatigue, and he also wanted fewer boxes under his TV. He expressed hope that another electronics manufacturer would produce a machine that would run Boxee and all of those other applications simultaneously, but the Boxee Box would not be that device.

There was a time where typewriters were obsolete, but PCs hadn’t yet become affordable, there was a product known as a word processor. All that machine did was process words. Imagine if today you bought one computer that only ran Microsoft Word. Imagine if you had to buy a separate machine for iTunes, and a separate machine for web browsing, and so on. It’s so obviously ridiculous, even normal people would laugh. You have a general purpose computer that is capable of running a wide variety of software. There is no reason to have specialized hardware for a single piece of software for the vast majority of applications, especially consumer applications.

As you are reading this right now, I want you to think about the boxes you have under your TV. I imagine that most people have a cable box, some game consoles, a DVD or blu-ray player, a DVR, maybe a Slingbox, and maybe even an old VCR. Some of these have been combined. Many cable boxes have a DVR in them. Game consoles tend to include DVD or Blu-Ray players. That being said, people I know have a lot of boxes in their primary entertainment centers.

This is just as ludicrous as having a separate computer just for word processing. All of those boxes are general purpose computers. There is absolutely no reason that you can’t have one box that is a cable box, DVR, DVD/Blu-Ray player, game console, and all around media handling machine. How come such a box doesn’t exist? Sure, some nerds have built such boxes on their own, but there aren’t any that are available to consumers on the mass market.

The reason is closedness. Cable boxes are closed. DVD and Blu-Ray decoding is closed. Game consoles are closed platforms. A DVR doesn’t have to be closed source, but many things it deals with, like video codecs, DRM, and other media protocols, are closed. Even VCRs have Macrovision DRM to deal with.

To protect the closed nature of all of this software, it is delivered to the user in a black box. They provide unopenable and unmodifiable hardware with the software built-in. If you want to add any features, you need to get more boxes or different boxes. Sometimes those other boxes do not work well in concert with the black boxes, and you get duplicate functionality. This is ludicrous and technologically unecessary.

The only benefit of this system is that it gives the media companies some slight protection against piracy and such. As I’m sure you are well aware, it is working really really well. No matter how hard I try, I can’t find any high definition movies or TV shows available for free. Man, it’s so worth wasting all this extra energy on electronics to prevent piracy.

The benefits of opening all these systems are that consumers will have an infinitely better experience, and we will reduce a tremendous amount of waste. There is no reason that we all can not have one single computer under our TVs that runs any and all living room entertainment software.

Game console makers should even pack it in. Their insistence on making games for proprietary consoles is silly. There is no reason people can’t just make PC games that have different modes when hooked up to a TV instead of a monitor. Gaming controllers like Wiimotes (unofficially via Bluetooth) and XBox 360 controllers (officially via USB) already work with PCs just fine.

If all of this software were open source, then everyone would be able to have one, and only one, box under their televisions. That box would handle everything from watching YouTube to watching the pre-recorded evening news. The software on it could be upgraded almost perpetually to handle any new applications, like 3D movies. You might not even need a power strip behind your TV. Heck, you could reduce the audio and video cable rats nest to just one or two wires. We would all save a lot of money and space in the landfill thanks to reducing our box count. Not to mention our entertainment centers would be a lot less cluttered and more aesthetically pleasing.

Also, be aware that I’m just using the home entertainment system as an easy example. There are plenty of other areas in which lack of openness increases our need for extra devices. Almost every electronic device you see nowadays has a general purpose processor inside. If it does, then it is capable of handling far more functionality than the built-in software allows. Even for all of the things an iPhone can do, the piles of rejected apps are clear evidence that the hardware is capable of far greater functionality than the software allows for. You can also see clear evidence by looking at the wide range of devices which have been made to run Doom and/or the Linux kernel.

If all of these things were open source, we could exploit every piece of hardware to its fullest potential by modifying the software. A black box is almost always going to fall short of achieving its full potential. It will always have possible capabilities that go unused due only to lack of software. If that capability is desired, it will only be achieved through the production of yet another piece of hardware, and expenditure of more money and energy.

Waste not with open source.

And the problem is pretty obvious. Companies want to make tablet PCs, but they don’t know the use cases. So far, tablets have just been crappy laptops without keyboards. That’s because the use cases that the manufacturers have in mind are the exact same use case that a laptop has. The result is devices that have the same use case as laptops, but are crappier than actual laptops. This is why tablets have been utter failures. The best they could come up with was that maybe a doctor would want one because it could be used while standing up near a patient’s bed.

Also, the original tablet computers all had resistive touch screens. The capacitive touch screen didn’t really exist yet. Everything was designed around a stylus without multi-touch. You couldn’t type with two thumbs, pinch, scroll, etc. They also had no accelerometers or other sensors. Designing around those technologies prevented them from making a worthwhile device, even if they had the right uses in mind.

Even today, people are only starting to get the right idea about the uses for a tablet PC. People are suggesting to use them as remote controls for home media centers. That’s a good start, the <a href=”http://www.pepper.com/”>Pepper Pad</a> was doing it years ago. Some are using them as e-readers. You could even argue that the Kindle and other e-readers are actually tablets. Even so, these limited uses are not enough to justify the expense of a tablet PC when you can just get a Logitech remote control and a netbook.

It’s looking like the long awaited Apple tablet is finally moving from rumor to reality. I anticipate that this iSlate, or whatever it will be called, is going to satisfy one of the two worthwhile use cases for tablet computing, but there is still one other use case that has been completely ignored. That second use case offers a land of opportunity for any electronics company that is willing to go for it.

But first, let’s discuss Apple’s tablet. Where could it fit into the lives of consumers? Well, I don’t know about other people, but I can tell you where it fits into my life. Every morning I am awoken by the alarm in my phone. I pick up said phone and check it before getting out of bed. I then go through my morning routine on my desktop. Then I go to work, using my phone in transit if necessary. I use a desktop/laptop at work. I return home to use my desktop for personal work, like this blog post. If I go out to a friend’s house or such, I bring my laptop for when my phone won’t suffice.

Where does the tablet fit in? It fits in for comfortable non-work home computing. When I wake up in the morning and check my phone, that kind of sucks. Even if you have an iPhone, it is small and harder to use than something with a bigger screen. That lack of comfort and size are exchanged for portability. But if I’m in bed, I don’t need portability. My laptop can get the job done, but it sucks to use a laptop in bed. I have to sit up and type. I only need a keyboard if I need to work, not to read some emails and web comics.

If I’m eating lunch, and I want to read some news while I eat, I have to sit at a table or desk, upright, in front of a desktop or laptop. There is no way I can lay down and recline on the couch while simultaneously browsing the web comfortably. Sure, I can use my phone, but again, it is tiny and uncomfortable.

This is the use case that Apple’s tablet is going to fulfill. You’ll use it in bed, on the couch, or anywhere else around the house you just want to be comfortable and read the web. I’m probably not going to get one, due to cost and closed Apple-ness, but I will probably get a competing device when they inevitably appear within a year.

So what’s the other use case for a tablet PC? If you have been paying attention, ever since tablet PCs hit the scene, only one group of people have wanted them very badly. Go and search the web for tablet PC discussion groups. Who will you find in there? Artists, that’s who.

Tablet PCs are perfect for artists. Most artists get by using Wacom tablets to draw in the digital world. The problem with them is that you look at the screen and draw on the tablet. It’s much more natural to draw directly on the screen, simulating drawing on real paper. Wacom does make a product called the Cintiq that does just that. The problem with the Cintiq is that it is incredibly expensive, and it’s basically a monitor. It is not portable at all.

What someone needs to do is make a tablet PC with a Wacom-powered screen. Make it just powerful enough to run Photoshop nicely, comfortable to hold, and at a good price. Artists will buy it like crazy. Right now these artists have to huddle over their desks, or carry around lots of equipment in their bags. Making a Wacom tablet computer will free them, and they will thank their saviors with piles of money.

Anyone out there who is looking at the tablet world, and trying to make sense of it, just think of the two use cases. Tablets will allow people to compute comfortably from their bed, couch, back porch, etc. They can also help out digital artists a great deal. If you find yourself wanting a tablet, think about what you are actually going to use it for. You’ll easily see how pointless existing tablets are, but you’ll also realize the potential of what they could be.

Might as well get to the point. The solution is to hire one or two people to follow you and force you to quit. There would be some legal papers necessary for this to work because you would have to give the person permission to follow you everywhere, and maybe even restrain you if necessary. But even so, it wouldn’t be much more difficult than hiring a personal bodyguard. They’re just guarding you against yourself.

Despite the fact that this solution is a little extreme and silly, it’s guaranteed to work. How many people have spent tons of money on pills, patches, fad diets, hypnotists, and other things that don’t work? How many people have tried to go cold turkey and have nothing to show for it? Depending on the addiction, and depending on the person, I can’t imagine this solution ever taking more than a few months, max. For most people I see it taking just a few weeks. I also can’t imagine that the success rate wouldn’t be 100%.

Let’s say you are an alcoholic. You hire the person. First thing, they come and remove all alcohol from your house. They search everything, even your body. They then proceed to follow you 24/7. You might need two people, with one working the night shift. These people simply do not let you drink any alcohol, even in the bathroom. If necessary, they may go so far as to physically restrain you.

Obviously in some cases there may be withdrawal symptoms. In those cases, you will just suffer through them until they end. If they get really bad, the person can bring you in for medical attention to fix you up, rather than letting you fail.

Once the pain of withdrawal has subsided, they can watch you for a little while longer just to make sure. They can even slowly disengage just to make sure. Maybe after they think you’re ready, you can switch from 24/7 monitoring to random spot-checks. They just randomly show up anytime and any place to make sure you haven’t un-quit. If you have, then you return to full-on watching.

A side bonus of this is that you will hopefully make a new friend, much like rich and/or famous people become friends with bodyguards, drivers, maids, nannies, or other servants.

The biggest problem I see with this idea, besides the obvious legal unrealisms, is the price. The bare minimum cost is the minimum wage times twenty four hours per day. Even if this service existed, it would be priced out of range for those people who probably need it most.

However, the high price is advantageous in some ways. The cost can act as an incentive to quit and stay quit. The sooner you break your habit, the sooner you stop paying for 24/7 service. If you get caught by a random spot check later on, it’s going to cost you a lot of money all over again. Also, if you paid a huge sum of money to quit, and then you un-quit, it will all have been spent for naught. Thinking of that might aid people’s will power.

Thinking more realistically for a moment, I do think that this could actually work. What I would suggest is that someone do a scientific study, and use the research budget to hire these watchers. Compare the rate of successful quitters after X amount of time to other addiction curing methods. If it really is super effective, then we really should consider turning it into an available option, especially since it should create a lot of new jobs.

Lastly, there is one way to try this method out right now. Find a friend, family member, co-worker, etc., and get them to watch you. Maybe get one or more people who also have bad habits, and simply agree to mutually watch each other. My guess it that this will work very well because people will try very hard to catch you. It will be almost like a fun game of hide and seek.

It’s obvious that there is a serious will power deficiency in our society. If we can not figure out a way for people to build up the necessary will within themselves, then perhaps the solution is to borrow the will of others.

The fundamental problem here is that people want fancy phones. The thing is, fancy phones cost a whole lot of money. If you pay full retail price for an unlocked smartphone, it can cost up to $1000, depending on the phone. You can get a really big TV for $1000. Most people, in the US at least, won’t pay that kind of money for a tiny phone, even though it is something they use constantly.

The solution is to subsidize the phones. Sell the phone for $200 or $100. Then, simply require the customer to stick with your service for two years. Over the course of those two years, you will make back the cost of the phone. If they leave early, you’ll take a loss, so charge them an early termination fee. Makes perfect sense, on paper.

In reality, it just doesn’t add up. Let’s say I already own an unlocked phone. I go to a carrier and ask for service. Even if I don’t get a contract, I’ll be paying the same data and voice rates as someone who had their phone subsidized by the carrier. Shouldn’t my monthly fees for data and voice be less? The carrier didn’t subsidize a phone for me, but I still have to pay them just as much money as if they had? If I stick with them for two years, then I’ve paid for a phone subsidy without receiving a heavily discounted phone! People who did not have their phones subsidized should pay less monthly than those who have.

Also, keep in mind that early termination fees never reduce to zero. The fee exists, supposedly, only because of the phone subsidy. Therefore, the cost of the ETF should be equal to the remaining unpaid value of the phone. Let’s say I get a phone and $400 of the price was subsidized down to $0 with a two year contract. 400 divided by 24 is about $17. The fee in the first month of service should be $400. The fee should then decrease by $17 each month, and in the final month the fee should be $17.

Wait, this payment structure sounds familiar. That’s right, it’s called a loan! Actually, it’s a 0% interest loan. It’s also exactly what mobile phone carriers need to replace subsidies with.

Step one is to lower all voice/data/text charges. They are absurdly high. Because there will be no more subsidies, there will be no more need for that kind of ripoff. Existing users with subsidized phones will still pay the old fees, or early termination fees, to grandfather them into the new pricing structure.

Step two is to advertise the true cost of phones. Let everyone know the full MSRP of each and every phone. This allows the customer to make a much more informed decision when they select a phone. It also gives people the option of buying phones without service. Carriers won’t like this, because most people will opt for the cheap phones once they realize the trust cost of the expensive ones. Those cheap phones don’t require the data plans and other features that the carriers also like to charge an arm and a leg for.

The final step is to offer financing. Even affluent people don’t want to shell out that much money on a phone all at once. Instead, the carrier offers financing at zero or a very low interest rate, obviously depending on the customer’s credit rating and such. The monthly payments for this loan will be included in the monthly bill for voice and data. Even if someone cancels their voice and data contract, they will still have to pay off the device itself, or return it.

This is really a win win solution. Carriers will save money from subsidies, and maybe make money with a small and reasonable amount of interest on the financing. Customers will have the freedom to switch carriers as they please, and pay reasonable prices for voice and data service.

The last piece of the puzzle are the device manufacturers. Because of carrier lock-in and subsidies, most handset manufacturers are really selling their product to carriers, not to customers. Motorola and LG make a handset that Verizon loves, not one that you and I love. I think that Apple has demonstrated with the iPhone that by creating a handset for the customer, you can make the real bank. If subsidies go away, perhaps we will see some real competition between the manufacturers for the consumer’s love. That should result in the current phone arms race escalating and resulting in better cheaper devices for everybody.

Kill subsidies. Get rid of the contracts. Charge full price for devices, but allow financing. Problem solved. Do it now.

I imagine that most people, even those who only slightly care about fair play, will not tolerate this. The absurdity of it is laughable. Why should a previous game of you played against other people have anything to do with the game we are about to play today? Should we give the previous Olympic gold medal sprinter a ten second head start? It’s obvious that this is wrong.

Now, having a handicap in a game is frequently acceptable. If you were going to bowl or golf against a professional, they would give you a head start. This is because these are competitions of almost pure skill. You are not on the same competitive level, and your loss is a foregone conclusion. Giving you a handicap is just a way of making the competition interesting for all participants when the skill differential is so great.

These kinds of handicaps are not the same as head start in Monopoly. For one thing, Monopoly is a game that is largely based on chance, not skill. Also, the head start is given to a player who just won, not the one who just lost. It’s bad enough that you give one person a head start, but you give a head start to the person who doesn’t need it. That’s just wrong.

To compound the issue, this sort of head start creates a momentum issue. Whoever wins is likely to keep winning because they will continue to receive bonuses. In a game with a strong momentum mechanic only the early game matters. The player that strikes first will get boosts that allow them to keep winning and winning and winning. You might as well not even play beyond the beginning of a game with momentum.

I would hope that all of these things are pretty obvious, even to novice gamers. What surprises me is that these persistent momentum mechanics are being added to an increasing number of new video games. Why? Because it is those same mechanics that increase sales and popularity.

Think about that. A game that gives players bigger and bigger head starts based upon previous games they have played will be more popular than a game which provides fair and balanced competition.

Just yesterday I played a game called Altitude. My initial experience was very good. It’s a multiplayer team versus game. Each player pilots an airplane in a two dimensional playing field and shoots at the opponents. The controls are tight. The gameplay is complex enough to be interesting, but simple enough to pick up easily.

The one problem with this game is that it has a strong leveling mechanic. The more you play, the more levels you get. As you gain levels, you gain access to better planes, weapons, and abilities. The players who have been playing longer are given a humongous advantage.

Yet the game had a lot of players, and none of them had a problem with this at all. It didn’t even cross their minds that this mechanic was a problem. In fact, they would cite it as a part of the game they like the most!

How can this be? It’s quite simple. People like head starts when they are the recipients of them. Also, it’s basic Skinner box psychology that an organism will superstitiously repeat a behavior that it associates with reward. Give a mouse a treat every time it jumps, and eventually it will think that jumping gives treats. It will be a very jumpy mouse.

Games like Altitude put the player in a Skinner box. As long as you keep playing the game, you will continue to get levels. Your actions might result in getting the levels faster or slower, but you’ll get them. Those rewards will encourage you to keep playing. They’ll also make you very happy as they increase the head start you receive in the next game, and the next game, and so on.

The same mechanic can be seen in all sorts of games these days. Achievements, levels, upgradeable items, and unlockable abilities are the hot mechanics in video games these days. Who needs to make a game that actually has good mechanics and quality fair competition? That’s hard! It’s much easier to make a Skinner box that takes advantage of basic psychology to control player behavior, and get them playing your game for hours on end.

What’s even worse is you have culprits like MMORPGs, Farmville, and others who are effectively extorting money out of the player with the sunk cost fallacy. Want to keep all the bonuses you earned in that MMORPG? Better keep up with the monthly fee. Want to get more money in Farmville? Just cough up some real cash for an instant hit you won’t have to work for.

If you are playing one of these games, I strongly encourage you to think seriously about what you are doing. Are these games actually good games? Are they good for you? Are they worth your time and money?

For game designers, can we please put some ethics ahead of our wallets? When we hear about certain advertising techniques, we deem them to be unethical. They take unfair advantage of human psychology to deceive and/or coerce people into spending money. These game mechanics are no different, except that they are present in the product itself and not the advertisement.

It is possible, and in fact trivial, to make games that effectively control people’s minds. We need to recognize this fact, and work together to create a code of ethics for game designers. Games which are designed specifically to addict players can be, and are, harmful. People are being deceived into playing golf against Tiger Woods, giving him a head start, and preferring it to a fair competition. You know something is wrong.

You can already see this anarchy happening in the realm of intellectual property law. Our current technology gives us the wizard-like power to instantly, and deniably, distribute perfect copies of any digital data anywhere in the world at effectively no cost. No matter how many DMCAs there are, no matter how many RIAAs there are, they’ve already lost. The spread of information, of any kind, can not be stopped. The dam burst long ago, and can not be repaired.

What I find funny is that many people who agree the intellectual property damn has burst, do not also believe that the privacy dam is equally affected. The record and movie studios will be frustrated that they can not control who has access to their information, and people will laugh at them. Yet, these folks who are laughing will express the same exact frustrations when it comes to not being able to control access to their personal information.

It is as impossible to control access to your personal information as it is impossible for the old entertainment industry to control access to content. If you’re a privacy advocate, the number of early leaks of Hollywood movies on bittorrent should scare you.

There are a lot of arguments to be made for why we should have privacy. I agree with many of them. It’s not right for employers to make hiring decisions based on things like medical conditions or sexual orientations. It makes life a lot harder if annoying acquaintances are immediately aware of juicy details in your relationships. It’s not cool that stalkers have the ability to follow your every move, and make your life miserable.

If privacy were possible, I would love it for all the reasons above, as well as others. If people were able to choose which pieces of personal information were private, and which were public, that would be a perfect world. The fact is, it’s not a perfect world. It’s a very imperfect world. Rather than waste time in this futile and impossible battle for privacy, we should instead concentrate on developing ways to get on in a world without any privacy.

The first thing we need to do is implement much greater computer security systems with multi-factor authentication. Giving everyone a yubikey will go a long way towards allowing people to store personal data digitally, but also give them complete control over who can access which information under which circumstances. Too bad we are all relying on useless things like social security numbers and handwriting.

Also, people need to start realizing that the value of sharing information can often outweigh the costs. Look at the kinds of people you see on the TwiT podcasts. They are very public figures who are very digitally connected. They share all sorts of information about themselves directly, and it is trivial for a tech savvy person to get all of their pertinent information such as addresses and phone numbers. Yet, this kind of thing has only helped them, not hurt them. The sharing has made them more popular, allowed more people to connect with them, and their audience feels a much better relationship with them.

I can give some personal examples as well. As a podcaster, I have shared my phone number and address with many of our listeners. Those that do not know this information can acquire it trivially on the Internet. Despite sharing our address, nobody has stalked us. Instead, they just send us wonderful gifts. And despite sharing my phone number, nobody crank calls me. Instead, they call to meet up at various conventions and have a good time.

I saw today that some guy who lost American Idol was all over the news because he came out of the closet. How come he is on the front page, and the winner is nowhere to be seen? Because he shared information about himself. The benefit of sharing the information for him was tremendous. The harm, if there is any, is negligible by comparison. Even if there is some harm due to lack of privacy, it’s worth dealing with those problems in order to get the benefit of sharing.

In my opinion, the most fascinating field of scientific discovery right now is neuroscience. Thanks to things like the FMRI we are learning more and more every day about how the human mind actually works. The inevitable result of advancing this technology is that in the future, we will be able to read people’s minds. Not even your own thoughts will be protected from being shared. A world where minds can be read is a world that many people will be very uncomfortable living in, but it’s also an unavoidable reality.

The world can’t be perfect. If we want to have a free flow of information, that is going to necessarily include personal information whether we like it or not. Our society will be much better off if we give up the fight for privacy, and instead concentrate on developing strategies for coping in a world without it. If we continue to lean on privacy, we will collapse the day it disappears. If we can somehow learn to stand without it, then we can can let it go in peace.

Take for example this story. A man came to the US from South America to work. As many who follow that same path in life, he was saving money so that one day he could return home and support his family. After years of hard work, he had built up a tidy pile of cold hard cash. We’re talking about many thousands of dollars in paper money.

He was finally on his way back home to see his family, when he was pulled over by police for a traffic violation. They ended up searching his car and finding the cash. Even though there was no evidence of any other wrongdoing, the police confiscated the cash, and they were not legally obligated to ever return it. Why does this law exist? Because drug dealers often have lots of cash on hand. This law lets cops arrest drug dealers, and take their cash away when the drug dealers are too smart to get caught actually dealing.

There is another law, in some places, that makes it illegal to have a large number of small zip-lock bags. Very small plastic baggies, the kind I use to sort out pieces in board games, are also the kind that drug dealers use to sell drugs. Depending on where you are, how many bags you have, and the size of the bags, you could be arrested and convicted even if you have never touched illegal drugs in your entire life.

The United States has a strong interest in preventing the hunting of bald eagles. They are an endangered species, last I heard, and they are a national symbol. Thus, it is illegal to possess any part of an eagle. Veterinary places that handle eagles have to document and send all Eagle parts to a central authority. Native Americans who want Eagle feathers and such for their rituals, and what have you, must officially request them.

If we find a poacher who has some eagle feathers in his truck, but we can’t actually prove that he poached an eagle, this law makes it possible to convict said poacher. I guess that’s a good thing, except for the fact that someone who happens to live near some eagles might be convicted despite a complete and utter lack of wrongdoing.

There are many other laws out there which revolve around the concept of tool possession. Guns are sort of the obvious tool, but what about lock picks, chemistry sets, or bongs? Sure, there are correlations between these objects and illegal activities, but is that really enough? What if someone is honestly a bong historian, and just likes to collect them? What if someone else just likes to pick locks for Houdini reasons? Modern chemistry sets don’t have nearly any of the fun stuff they used to have back in the day.

People like to say that it is better for ten guilty to go free than one innocent to be imprisoned, but I don’t think too many people really believe it. So much of our entertainment media is about beating or catching the bad guys. When it is about a wrongly accused innocent, the audience is always 100% sure that the accused is truly innocent. When an obviously guilty person gets away on a “technicality” it is portrayed as a win for the bad guys. I think that some more stories about people of ambiguous guilt will help Blackstone’s formulation really become a part of the public consciousness.

We need to stop letting law enforcement be lazy. If someone is dealing drugs, then catch them dealing drugs. If someone is poaching eagles, catch them poaching eagles. If all you can do is catch someone with a pile of cash and some eagle feathers stored in plastic baggies, then either the criminals are smarter than the cops, the cops just suck at their jobs, or the person is actually innocent.

Lastly, I think we have a major problem coming up in our society in that we will find an ever increasing number of laws absolutely unenforceable. Imagine if you lived in a typical high fantasy setting, with wizards and dragons. How would you enforce laws on the wizards? You really can’t. Sufficiently powerful magic allows for absolute deniability. You know the old saying that sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic? Well, it’s true in this regard. People with access to sufficiently powerful technology will be able to do whatever they please with no possibility of being caught.

If we start living by Blackstone’s formulation now, we can ease ourselves into the future techno-anarchy. If we continue along our current path, it’s going to all come crashing down one day when online money laundering spirals out of control.

Even as a kid, going to a doctor’s office is typically unpleasant. Most people hate getting pricked with needles, drinking nasty liquids, or swallowing strange pills. People hate being in hospitals more than anything. They never want to go there, and they want to leave as soon as possible. People hate real medicine so much, they will avoid going for as long as possible, until they are very ill and have no other choice.

Yet, when it comes to snake oil, people love it. In fact, people love it so much, they will take it even if they aren’t sick. Going to phony healers is so fun, people go when they are in perfect health. People who are genuinely ill will avoid getting real help. People who are just fine will seek out completely fake help. What is going on here?

Some of it is just that reality sucks. Snake oil is usually very pleasant when compared to real medicine. Surgery, radiation, chemotherapy, injections, strong medications, etc. are all very unpleasant things. They have lots of side effects, and pain is only the first one. Most, but not all, snake oils have no effects whatsoever other than placebo. You can’t have a side effect if you don’t have a primary effect. The only way to make medicine more pleasant is with scientific advancement. More investment in medical research is the only way to solve any of these problems.

There is another side of this problem that we can solve. You see, real medicine isn’t nice. When you’re in the hospital, you rarely see the doctor. Nurses don’t come immediately when you push the call button, if at all. Emergency rooms have long waits. You never really get to spend a lot of time talking with your doctors. They can’t sit around for an hour chatting with you. They have a lot of patients to see, and not enough hours in the day to see them all.

Not only that, but because of ethical concerns, doctors will only talk to you in a certain way. They don’t talk like a normal person. They are often cold and clinical. There are many things they can not, or will not, say. Even a doctor who has what most would consider excellent bed-side manner does not speak in a way that is as reassuring and comforting as is possible.

On the other hand, a snake oil practitioner is the exact opposite. They will sit and talk with you all day. Most of them actually aren’t scam artists, but actually believe in the snake oil they are peddling. They are well-meaning normal folk, who want to, and believe they are, healing their fellow humans. They really do care about you. They don’t have ethical qualms because they don’t know ethics. They engage you in warm environments like living rooms and local shops, as opposed to sterile offices. They also speak in the most reassuring manner possible, with lies. Nothing is more comforting than someone guaranteeing a perfect recovery with no side effects, no pain, and trivial treatments.

Obviously there is a limit to how much nicer doctors can be. I am not suggesting in any way that we should give up the aforementioned ethical concerns doctors have when speaking with patients. In fact, I think that many doctors need to be more ethically conscious than they are. I obviously don’t think doctors should start lying to patients, as the scammers do, just to make them happy.

What I do think is that we need a new profession. We need someone whose only job is to talk with patients and doctors. It should be someone who is knowledgeable in the areas of medicine and psychology. They should be able to speak with patients, both to assess the patient’s situation and to make sure the patient fully understands their conditions and treatment. They should also be able to efficiently communicate to doctors the information they need to treat the patient, of course without actually practicing any medicine.

Let me use my own hospital experiences as some examples. Personally, I have only been to a hospital because of myself twice. Once was for a broken bone, which needed no treatment, and once was a quick emergency room trip to get stitches. However, I have been to the hospital quite a few times to visit friends and relatives.

Let’s begin with the time my roommate cut his finger while making dinner. It definitely needed stitches. We drove to the nearest emergency room, and of course we expected to wait, but they took him in right away. Time passed, and nothing happened. It was late at night, and the people at the desk could not offer any information. We also could not leave the waiting room. There was no communication with my roommate whatsoever. Eventually hotel staff starting leaving, and there was nobody to talk to at all. Waiting was not a problem. What was the problem was there was nobody to talk to. All we needed was someone to estimate the waiting time, keep us informed, maybe predict what the doctors would do. We couldn’t even get some assurance that care would actually be provided. I guess its fitting that there was no assurance, as no care was provided. My roommate left without treatment after an ungodly wait, and no communication from the staff. He went to the clinic the next day for treatment, and part of his finger is still numb to this day.

Let’s talk about my grandparents. When they go to the hospital, they have many doctors. Cardiologists, internists, gastroenterologists, and more. I’ve been to these hospitals on successive days, and you never see these doctors. You can spend a week there, and you’re lucky if you see a doctor once. You’re lucky if they call you more than once every few days. Any non-nurse who comes to see you tends to ask the same questions, even though you know that information is on the chart. It’s a miracle if they stay more than a few minutes.

There’s also no way to know that your multiple doctors are communicating with each other. You want to be assured that all the doctors are discussing your case together, and they all have up to date information. Yet, never have I seen such a thing. You talk to one doctor, then the next one won’t even ask what the previous doctor did. You have to make the initiative to tell them. And even when you do tell them, they don’t indicate in any way that they care, are paying attention, or are taking that information into consideration.

If you are a doctor, and a patient tells you something, even if it is stupid and useless information, you have to at least pretend that what they are saying is the most important thing in the world. Lying to the patient about their condition or treatment is unacceptable. But a doctor lying about their own feelings has the potential to decrease the stress and anxiety of the patient, and therefore smooth the path to recovery. Based on that, I can make the case that doctors are obligated to do this, otherwise they are being negligent in their treatments.

If the profession I suggested actually existed, that person could solve these problems. They could make sure both the patient and doctors are all up to date with the latest information. They could reassure the patient that they are receiving the best treatment possible, and they could save doctors a lot of time dealing with inefficiencies. They could even fill the role of translating complex medical knowledge into terms that patients can understand.

We need medical care in this country, and around the world, to be nicer. Anyone who engages the medical system as, or with, a patient, has a very strong possibility of meeting with a very stressful, unpleasant, and anxiety-ridden scenario. It’s no mystery at all as to why people are flocking to fake medicine. It’s so warm and welcoming. If fake medicine worked, nobody would ever use evidence based medicine.

While I fully support evidence based medicine, we need to realize that there is more to medicine than the medicine itself. The experience is just as important as the product. The great experience is why people go to Starbucks instead of making something in their kitchen. Doctor’s offices and hospitals really need to work on providing this better patient experience, and having a person to sit and talk with can go a long way towards achieving that.

Let me begin by talking about what local stores already win at. They win at customer service. If someone runs a tiny shop, they are much more likely to actually care and know about the products. They also excel at proximity and speed. When you buy something, you get it immediately. Because they are close to your house, you don’t have to travel far to get there. You might even be able to walk there. They have the advantages that all brick and mortar stores have, that you can see and try the product before you buy. And because they are local, money you spend there stays in your community and boosts the local economy, which is good for you. It’s almost like getting a discount in the form of the rising tide lifting your boat.

Now for the problems. Local businsses have a severe lack of product selection. This isn’t just a problem for local stores, though. It’s a problem for brick and mortar stores of all sizes. I look around at a lot of the stuff on my desk, and in my room. Very little of is has ever been available in a brick and mortar store. My laptop, my monitors, many of my books, and almost all of the parts in my computer are almost impossible to find anywhere other than Amazon, Newegg, etc.

How can we increase the selection of goods at a local shop? Right now distribution is setup such that the giant warehouses ship things to a few relatively spaced out big box stores like Best Buy. What if instead of a Best Buy ever few towns, there was a tiny electronics store in every town, more like Radio Shack size. Now what if all of those stores got a daily shipment from a regional warehouse that carried absolutely everything. You could order online, but then pick it up in a very local store within 24 hours at no shipping cost. I’m not a distribution expert, so I don’t know if this would work, though.

The other major problem in local shops is higher prices. Look at the insane discounts Amazon is able to give on just about everything. Even if you go to a big store like Borders can you get that kind of discount without a coupon or special deal. Those discounts are Amazon’s every day prices. How can a smaller store possibly compete? They can’t work in the same sort of volumes as bigger stores, and thus can not get the same bulk discounts.

I think the answer to this might lie in taxes. I’m talking about business taxes. Obviously the employees of small businesses will still have to pay income tax on their wages, but there should be no taxes on businesses that have smaller than X employees and make less than $X in revenue. Amazon will still be able to lower their prices and pay their taxes no problem, but a local business with no tax might be able to compete. Maybe we can do something with sales taxes, too. If you live in the same town as the store, you pay less or no sales tax. Something like that.

Another problem with local businesses is hours, even with restaurants. Most people with money work all day, and maybe they evne commute. They can only patronize a business that is open before or after work. When I was in college, many things were open 24/7. Near my house now, many places open late, close early, and are not open at all on Sunday, holidays, etc.

For non-food businesses I think the simple answer is technology and delivery. Imagine if instead of going to Amazon.com I went to my local bookstore’s web site. It would have live updates of what was in stock, prices, everything. As I said before, I would be able to order something that could arrive in store the next day. However, I should also be able to get home delivery for a much lower cost, since only local postage would be required. Heck, the proprietor of the store might even be able to deliver it themselves, or have an employee do the deliveries. This way, even if the store is physically closed, it is effectively open 24/7.

With things the way they are now, shopping online is really the only way to go for someone like me. Even in the cases where a local store has great customer service, which I do appreciate, that doesn’t justify the higher prices and decreased product selection. I do think, though, that if local businesses step up their game, they can definitely compete, if not beat, the big competitors. As of now, they just aren’t.

Pretend you are at the movie theatre. There is a movie there that you want to see very badly. You’ve got your money ready to buy a ticket. There are two other movies in the theater. One of them you hate, and you wouldn’t watch it unless under duress. The third movie seems ok, but you don’t actively want to see it.

While you are waiting in the ticket line someone comes up to you and offers free tickets to the third movie. You are now choosing between paying for a movie you really like, or paying nothing for a kind of ok movie. You might go either way, depending on the movies, the cost of the ticket, and other factors. The point is that if the second movie were not free, you would not watch it.

The same goes for digitally pirated music, movies, videogames, etc. Back in college I decided I was going to try to watch all of the top 250 movies on IMDB. I haven’t finished that, but I’ve seen a lot of them. Of course, I saw most of these movies by downloading them. If I had to actually pay for all of them, how many would I have paid for? Probably zero. I was in college, I couldn’t afford to start collecting DVDs.

Take a look at something like World of Goo. Ars TEchnica says it is a crying shame that the piracy rate is near 90%. World of Goo is a very good video game. There is no denying that. But how many people out there really like it a whole lot? How many people have $15 worth of like for it? Apparently the answer is 1/10. Those people who are pirating it might like it, and might have fun, but if piracy were not an option, they simply wouldn’t pay.

There’s this conception that piracy is stealing. And true, it is illegal. But illegal doesn’t mean wrong. Ever hear of no harm no foul? Who is hurt by piracy? If you believe me that the people who pirate would rather not play than pay, then the copyright holders are losing almost nothing to piracy. In fact, they are gaining because when their products are enjoyed by people who would have otherwise ignored them, it is excellent marketing. It creates more fans, and makes sure that the maximum number of people willing to pay money get that opportunity.

Let’s pretend we have perfect replicators. We can create perfect copies of any inorganic object at no cost. First we woudl replicate the replicators until everyone had one. Then everyone would have the best TV, the best car, the best furniture, the nicest house, the best everything.

In such a world, would it not be cruel to deny someone something? How could you deny someone the best food if it cost nothing to create? How could you deny someone the biggest television, or the most luxurious car, if it were free to produce and equally easy to produce as a smaller television or a less luxurious car? If replicators didn’t exist, of course those people wouldn’t have a luxury car. But replicators do exist, so how can you deny them to everyone who wants one? How can you not replicate the Mona Lisa for everyone who wants one in their house?

Just to reiterate the point. Let’s pretend I had infinity apples. Literally infinity apples. Everyone knows I have infinity apples, and they are the best tasting apples in the world. If I try to sell those apples for $5 each, am I not an asshole? I have infinity of them! It wouldn’t hurt me at all to give them to everybody at no charge. What’s better for the world as a whole? Infinite delicious apples for everyone, or $5 for me? Would people even pay the $5 for my apples if they had to? No, because I’m a jerk and nobody will give me money.

We all know what is legal and what is illegal. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about what is right and what is good. In a world without piracy the company that made World of Goo ends up with roughly the same amount of money that they do in the world with piracy. However, in the world of piracy, ten times as many people experience the joy of playing World is Goo. The world without piracy is only different in that there is less joy and more jerks hoarding apples.

You may go on about the consequences of copyright for artists and such and such. And I may even agree with many of those things you say. The reality is that any sort of copyright on anything that can be expressed digitally is absolutely unenforceable. That’s reality. Piracy is here, and it can’t be beaten. There is no way. If you’re against it, you’ve already lost. The only possibility is that you may temporarily reduce the amount of joy in the world for some people who are not technologically inclined.

I really think that digital piracy just needs a makeover. We need to stop thinking about pirates as thieves, and start thinking about anti-piracy folks as apple-hoarding jerks. It will take some marketing, and probably won’t ever happen. The saddest part I think is that so much energy is being spent fighting a battle that is already over. If those resources were spent elsewhere, the world would be a better place twice over.

To demonstrate what I’m talking about, I will use the example of this cute YouTube video.

Ok, it’s a cute and catchy computer generated song and dance number, not too miraculous on the surface. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s nothing earth shattering. That may be so, but if you think about the entire history of this video is epic.

In Japan in 1941, twin girls were born who later became the ver popular singing duo The Peanuts. If you’re not Japanese, you might know them as the twin girls from the Mothra movies. At one point in their illustrious singing and acting careers they performed the song in this video, Koi no Fuga, on Japanese television. I think it was part of a New Year’s special. The video of that performance has been removed from YouTube.

Much more recently, a Japanese singing and dancing duo named W performed this song to a choreographed dance, which you can see here.

In 2004 Yamaha released the initial version of a software program called Vocaloid. Vocaloid is very cool. It allows someone to control a virtual singing voice. It allows you to map the fundamental elements of human speech patterns to a musical score. From that, it will automatically generate an audio track performed by a virtual singer. Each new version of Vocaloid has greatly improved this virtual singer, and also changed their voice. For marketing reasons, they create a new virtual idol character to represent each new singing voice, the most popular of which is Hatsune Miku. The girls in this video are another Vocaloid character, Sakine Meiko.

Vocaloid characters, and Hatsune Miku in particular, are so popular that some fans in Japan have created a free program called MikuMikuDance. MikuMikuDance is a 3D animation program which makes it relatively easy to create animated videos of computer generated models dancing. It’s specifically built for Miku and other Vocaloid characters. There is even an option to load Vocaloid files into the program itself, and it will automatically animate the model’s mouth to lip-sync to the song.

Now look again at the first video I posted, and think about it in the context of all these things. The Peanuts, W, Vocaloid, MikuMikuDance, YouTube, etc. Think about all of the things that had to happen, and did happen, in order for that video to exist. It goes deeper, though. Think about the futher miracle of you actually watching the video. The rabbit hole goes much deeper.

You’ve got to add in the entire history of the human race, specifically as related to science and technology. Without electricity, transistors, the Internet, GPUs, or a million other things which are miracles in and of themselves, this video would not be possible. This video is Japanese in origin, and if World War 2 had gone differently, this would probably not exist. If some character designer at Yamaha had changed his design, this video would likewise be different than it is.

Let’s take it a step further. Think about the entire lives of all the human beings involved in the making of this video. If the Peanuts had grown up in a different circumstance, they might not have become stars and performed this song. I doubt they wrote the song themselves, so think of the song writer. The two girls in W were formerly of Morning Musume. Think about their entire lives up until the point of making this video, and how under a different circumstance this might have not come to be. Think about the life of the people who created the MikuMikuDance application, and the life of the person who actually made this video.

Now branch it out even further. Think about the parents of The Peanuts. Think about the lives of all the people around them who made their career what it was. Their friends and family. Two girls singing a song is a huge production. There were many people who made that possible. And the same goes for W, Vocaloid, YouTube, or any other component you see here. You have a huge group of people contributing to any individual component, and each individual person in each group has a long chain of human ancestry that resulted in them existing and living their life the way they lived it.

And of course, before any of that, you have the history of the Earth, specifically life on Earth, and the history of the Universe. Everything from dinosaurs to evolution to the black plague  in some way made this cute little YouTube video that you just watched.

While you are thinking about how miraculous that YouTube video is, why not think instead about something like Star Wars, The Empire State Building, or a Formula 1 car. If you examine all things from a universal view across all space and time, you can not help but see the absolute awesomeness of everything, even the things that suck.

Let’s think about stereotypes of Florida: immigrants from the carribbean, senior citizens from the Northeast, Disney, and a few major universities. Sure, plenty of people down there don’t fall into those categories, but the stereotype is predominantly true. That truth has some very large economic consequences.

The generally bad economy made the real esate problem of Florida painfully obvious. You’ve got lots of cheap land. Builders bought this cheap land and constructed housing developments for seniors to live in. Seniors came from the North to fill them up. Demand was up, prices were up, times were good.

As time went on, the developments got old. The builders bought some more cheap land, and built newer and fancier housing developments. People kept retiring and moving down South. Newer developments had higher prices than older ones, but they all kept filling up. The lower prices of the older developments actually made it possible for less wealthy people to retire in the sun. They kept making newer, bigger, better developments and filling them up at high prices.

There’s also decreasing demand for houses in Florida. People are retiring later in life, and Florida is not as popular a retiring destination as it once was. Arizona, Texas, and other places are increasingly more popular than Florida. This decreased demand combined with the bad economy is dropping housing prices across the board. The people that do move to Florida can live in the newest and nicest houses at very reasonable prices. The older developments remain empty, and become more empty as people pass away. If you already own a place in an older development, good luck selling it.

On top of all those real estate troubles, you’ve got some more cascasing consequences. If you drive around town near those senior developments, you will notice that most of the economy revolves around supporting those senior citizens. Pharmacies, doctor’s offices, and restaurants with early bird specials stretch as far as the eye can see. You should see the size of the Social Security Administration office down there.

With fewer seniors moving there, and the existing ones dying off, these other business will be in big trouble. The influx of money from the North will dry up, and the working people in Florida will have to move elsewhere to find jobs.

At least in other parts of Florida, there is an influx of money from tourism. Especially Disney, but other things like Daytona, cruise ships, the keys, etc. bring a lot of money into the state. Even before the economy went down, popularity of amusement parks was going downhill. With the Internet, people are entertaining themselves more and more at home. Disney is giving away free hotel stays because attendance is down so much.

Tourism going down, fewer retirees from the North, real estate drying up, how is money going to go into the state of Florida? Kids going to the big universities, and selling oranges. Florida still has those two ways to make money.

As long as people are drinking Tropicana in the morning, and watching college football, Florida will have something to go on. Even so, the situation in parts where the population is primarily seniors does not have a very good outlook. I fully expect in my lifetime to see urban explorers posting photos and videos of entire towns full of abandoned housing developments. Maybe they’ll be able to start up a new economy using them as airsoft and paintball arenas.

The first decision I made was to build the site with Django. It has been my web framework of choice for many months now. I used it to build the new frontrowcrew.com, and I’m very satisfied. The thing is, Django wasn’t always usable.

Some months ago Django 1.0 was not released yet. Yet, when you went to the Django web site and community, it seemed as if nobody was using 0.96, the stable version. When you go to the Django documentation online, it defaults to showing you the documentation for the version currently in development, rather than the latest stable version.

If at that point in time you wanted to start a new project with Django, you had a tough decision to make. Do you start with 0.96 and stick with it? Do you start with 0.96 and go through the hassle of porting over to 1.0 later? Do you deal with the hassle of building on the development version and build your way up to the actual release? Do you just not start your project and wait for the release? This is a difficult decision to make, and there’s an easy answer I left out. Maybe you just shouldn’t use Django, and go find something else that isn’t in a state of flux?

Happily, Django 1.0 has been released now, and this is no longer a problem. Well, at least it isn’t a problem for Django itself, but it is a problem for many things built around Django. Take Pinax for example. Pinax is a project that builds on top of Django. They implemented a lot of solutions to things that are common to all web sites, such as registration, password management, blogging, friend, and tagging. My new site idea will need some of those things, and I want to reinvent as few wheels as possible, so Pinax was very appealing to me.

The problem is that Pinax is currently in the state of flux that Django used to be in. There are sites out there which are built using Pinax, so it can be done. However, the current stable version seems to have been largely abandoned by the community. In my limited experience, the development version appears to be far superior, but it’s still in development. Worse, as a newcomer to the Pinax project, their documentation is very unreliable. I find myself asking those same questions all over again. Maybe it’s easier to reinvent those wheels than it is to deal with the hassle of closely tracking someone else’s project?

Let’s say I just want to add tagging to my Django application. Why should I bother with Pinax, I can juse use django-tagging. It has a stable version 0.2 that came out, over a year ago? The site says that version 0.3 is targeting Django 1.0. In other words, it’s completely useless. I’m not going to use Django 0.96 just so that I can use the stable version of django-tagging. I’m also not going to go through the hassle of using an unstable version of django-tagging 0.3 from their SVN trunk. Since their project was dependent on Django, it was their job to follow Django’s SVN trunk and have django-tagging compatible with Django 1.0 the day that Django 1.0 was released, or very soon after. Their failure to do so has made their project useless.

Just for kicks, let me talk about Laconica. Laconica is an open micro-blogging platform. Think of it as a Twitter clone, but with a different, and better, system architecture. I’ve been running an installation of it for our podcast community, and it’s very nice for the users.

The problem with Laconica is that it’s a nightmare on the back-end. The project has noble goals. They want it to be as easy to install, upgrade, and administer as WordPress. And while they have the first verison of a web installer, the underlying architecture is frighteningly bad. You have to run a set of daemons to handle the queueing of in and outbound messages. That kind of design is going in the exact opposite direction of making things easy. What’s worse is that in the latest version they added even more daemons, and two of them decided to eat up all my CPU. Because it’s under constant development, there are frequent updates with awesome and significant improvements. That’s very good, but the upgrading process is nightmarishly difficult. I want to keep the Laconica server running for the users who enjoy it. It’s just that the administration is far more work than it’s worth.

Here’s the one piece of advice I can give to open source project managers out there. Make sure to maintain a degree of separation between your development community and your user community. A very small percentage of the people who want to use your project actually want to get involved in working on the project itself.

My web site is going to use Linux, Ubuntu, Apache, Python, Django, numerous Python modules, CouchDB, Postgres, memcached, and many other open source projects. If I’m working to build the site, I need all those things to “just work.” I don’t have time to get heavily involved in the communities for any of them. Any effort I have to spend tracking development versions, or dealing with bugs in someone elses code, brings me closer to the point where I would have been better of building it myself.

Actually, let me offer one more piece of advice. Lots of small easy upgrades are better than a few big ones. The difference between Pinax’s stable and development versions is enormous. What if instead of having that huge gap, they had instead made many small upgrades to the stable version over time? The gap between stable and development would be much smaller. Using the stable version wouldn’t be such a bad idea after all, and upgrading to newer stable versions wouldn’t be as big  a deal.

I’m a programmer trying to do a project on my own. I’m smart and full of enthusiasm for the latest and greatest open source goodness. I want to do everything the right way. I want to utilize as much open source code as possible, so that I only have to write the code specific to my project. Sadly, I am unable to do that if the open source projects are in a state of flux, or can’t be relied upon. When reusing code requires just as much effort as rewriting code, you know something is wrong.

Here’s a quote from the New York Times article that I found most interesting.

“We got blindsided by two idiots with a video camera and an awful idea,” said a Domino’s spokesman, Tim McIntyre, who added that the company was preparing a civil lawsuit. “Even people who’ve been with us as loyal customers for 10, 15, 20 years, people are second-guessing their relationship with Domino’s, and that’s not fair.”

Not fair, eh? Well, it’s the new reality, so deal with it. For decades the media has been completely controlled in a top-down fashion. Big media like newspapers, television, and radio where the only way to get a message out to a lot of people. Thus, other companies and advertisers were able to manage people’s perceptions of brands.

Lexus is luxurious, Ford is tough, but why? They’re just brands. Ford is nothing more than a logo. The meaning behind that logo is completely artificial. It’s simply because of a top-down media that the Ford company was able to completely control use of that name and logo in the media that they were also able to completely control which emotions people associated with it.

Thanks to the Internet, that is gone now. Brands are now controlled by the people, not the companies that are associated with them. Reality will slowly take hold, and small negatives will outweigh all the positives. There’s a reason that one booger video makes a huge stir, and no number of  “Domino’s is yummy” videos will ever get any attention.

Is it really unfair? If your ethical and moral structure is built upon the realities of the old world, then it is not hard to see why it’s unfair. If you adapt your ideas of right and wrong to accept the realities of modern technology and a rapidly changing society, then this is no big deal.

My suggestion to companies out there who want to manage their brands, like the old days, is to concentrate on managing your products. Nobody will make yourcompanysucks.com if they love your products. Learn from Apple. If people love your products so much they will line up in advance, then some negativity doesn’ t really matter. Nobody ever waited in line a day in advance for a Domino’s pizza.