Ursus Pacificus

Have you ever gone to some Big-Box retailer, found a product that you 70%-liked, but that 30% had something that was a deal-breaker for you.

You call over the Pimply-Faced-Youth and ask about the feature that’s troubling you. He/she confirms your suspicion. You don’t buy the product.

The PFY will, in all likelihood, never pass this information on to the manufacturer of the product, the manufacturer will probably never make the change you suggested, or address the concern you had, and you will never buy the product (or worse, you’ll end up buying a product that doesn’t suit your needs).

Bah! It’s a crummy system. A lot of these larger “manufacturers” (most of them are merely holding or trading companies) have made it harder and harder to pass feedback to them, unless you’ve bought their product. I think it would be valuable for them to know why I (or you or anyone) positively chose to NOT buy their product.

The market is not free. It is totalitarian. There is the illusion that you can vote with your wallet, but the vast majority don’t. There is a one way flow of “information” from “the leader” to you. When you are troubled by the leader, and can’t, as an idividual, petition the leader for redress of grievances, it’s time to beat feet.

I think the larger problem is that money does not equate to communication. If I hand you a $5 bill, with no provocation, no expression on my face, and with neutral body language, I imagine you’d be pretty confused. Speech is speech. Money is money. Money can only buy you access to communication channels. It is not communication. Voting with your wallet is a tiny part of the solution.

If I choose not to buy an HP laptop at BestBuy, for example, because it does not come with Debian Linux pre-installed instead of Microsoft Windows. Does HP know? Does HP care? Does HP know that I’ve bought 5 computers in the last year for my own personal use and they all either came with no operating system installed or with Linux pre-installed, and that’s the way I like it? Do they know that if they’re going to sell me another computer it’s not going to have MS Windows on it? Not unless they read my blog. I’m fairly sure they dont.

This article on Slashdot talks about a couple upcoming PC-based games that may (or may not, depending on who you listen to) require Internet access even for single-player action.

This is alleged to be because the portion of the game that tries to ensure you’re playing a paid-for copy of the game (always an intriguing segment of game-play) needs to phone home every 10 days.

Now, a precept of the US Justice system is that a suspect is innocent until proven guilty. I don’t know that this necessarily applies to software. Now, in light of previous DRM-gone-mad scenarios (the Sony rootkit and MS WGA problems leap to mind) my attitude is that commercial software can’t be trusted. If there is suspicion or allegation of unsatisfactory behavior, or breaches of the user’s privacy, the market should withhold its money until the software vendor proves the allegations false and the suspicions unfounded.

Yes, it’s an assumption of guilt until innocence is proven. Yes, it goes against the format of justice for humans in this country. Let me ask you this, tho… if there was an animal which exhibited symptoms that made it look like it had rabies, what would you do? Invite it in for a cookie? Offer to intorduce your toddler to it? Not bloody likely. You’d call Animal Control, and they’d probably call in a cop, who’d probably euthanize the animal (gunshot to the head) right on the spot. I’m not proposing BANNING the allegedly offending software. I’m suggesting that each of you commercial software customers has the power to send a clear message to these companies. Don’t buy the offending product.

Think of it this way: If you bought the product, didn’t like it, sued the software company and won (unlikely) the most you’d be entitled to is the purchase price of the software, but you’d have all these legals bills, and untoward software on your machine that you couldn’t be sure of removing without an OS re-install. If you simply don’t buy the software until the software company satisfactorily demonstrates that the software doesn’t violate your rights, then you’ve saved yourself and the company unnecessary legal bills, and you’ve saved yourself the hassle of an OS re-install.

I don’t like the way commercial software companies operate, and I don’t use commercial software. Microsoft is missing out on thousands of dollars of retail sales for my home systems alone. If they produced a superior product that I felt I could trust, I’d buy it. Happily, they don’t.

I run Free and Open-Source software, and am happy as a clam. If I suspect that a F/OSS program is violating my privacy, I can remove it or alter it. It cost me nothing to acquire, and virtually nothing to remove.

Do what you want with your money, I guess… but I’m getting tired of people whining about how they’re being abused by software and media companies, and then doing NOTHING about it. I say put up or shut up.

I got tired of commercials on TV. Know what I did? Stopped watching TV. I got tired of the “pusher-man” tactics of commercial software companies (first one’s free, once you’re hooked the prices keep going up and the payoff gets smaller and smaller), so I stopped using commercial software.

…and another thing: As much as these software companies bitch about piracy, they secretly depend on a little bit of it (and always have). Piracy of, for example, MS Windows means that there’s a larger installed base of users, which means wider secondary sales (MS Office, MSN advertising, HALO 3, et cetera) and broader interoperability. One thing software companies really depend on is that if I produce something with their software, you can look at it. If I produce a spreadsheet using some commercial program that is used by only one other person, then I can only share my results with one other person in the native format of the program. If, on the other hand, there are millions of users around the world, then I have a broad range of people I can share my work with, if I choose to do so. Software NEEDS market penetration to be commerically viable. If you don’t want YOUR market penetrated, it’s time to start ACTING like you don’t want your market penetrated.

For the first time in 4 years, new Dummyhead recodrings are available on the Web!

Check out the Dummyhead Home Page to listen!

Bold claim? Maybe.

It’s pretty simple, really, and I have a hard time believing that no one has ever thought of this before… but here goes…

What’s the big complaint with electric cars? The inconvenience of recharging.

What if you could take recharging out of the equation from the driver’s perspective? That’s not to say that I have come up with a battery that stays perpetually recharged, or a way to recharge a battery in the time it takes to fill the gas tank of an ordinary car. Not at all. What I propose is a quick-change battery pack. This would have to be a pretty substantial battery pack. It wouldn’t be the sort of thing that one person could lift. But what if you could come up with a “universal automotive battery pack”… one that would fit in Fords, Chevys, Toyotas and Citroens just the same? Then you could set up rechaging stations kind of like a “Blue Rhino” propane tank exchange place.

There would have to be some sort of “battery pack puller-outer thingy”, probably operated by an attendant, and there would have to be hatches on the cars to gain access to the batteries. If NASCAR pit crews can change 4 tires and fuel a car in 30 seconds, I would imagne a couple teenagers could swap out a couple battery packs in 5 or 10 minutes.

This idea requires car designers to rethink the layout of the garden variety car, but I would think that if you could put a smaller electric motor directly geared to each wheel, rather than one giant motor and a transmission, you could open up a great deal of space… the whole nose cavity, and a good chunk of the space under and behind the rear seat could be used for batteries. You could also reduce the energy wasted on bearings and gears through most of the drivetrain of a conventional car. This would also allow the drive motors, if properly designed, to act as generators to recharge the batteries a bit while stopping and going down hill.

Another advantage of the “universal automotive battery pack” idea is that, as battery technology improves, the package of the battery remains constant, but the guts get better. For radically different battery technology it may be necessary to upgrade controller firmware to accommodate the new charge rates or whatever… but that could also be included in the battery pack. The battery pack is plugged in and its charge and discharge profile is uploaded to the car’s computer. Huzzah!

…and get this! If the car was also equipped with a 120VAC charging circuit, and you were so fortunate as to be able to cover a day’s driving on one charge, then you wouldn’t even need to get your battery packs changed out… just pull the car into the garage at your house (or whatever), plug it in and go to bed.

When you DO go into the charging station, and get your batteries swapped out, the batteries that come out of your car are tested, and either reconditioned as necessary and recharged or sent for recycling. Obviously getting charged at the station would have to be more expensive than charging at home, to cover the cost of the testing and reconditioning, as well as the staff, equipment and so on. Considering that gasoline is on the fast track to $4.00 per gallon with no end in sight, and modern American cars are only getting around 20 MPG, it seems to me that paying $20 or $30 so for a quick recharge to get you another 100 or so miles down the road ain’t so bad.

“BUT,” the environmentalists may say, “Coal is far more polluting than gasoline, and most of America’s power is generated using coal, so you’d actually be polluting MORE with electric cars, than with gasoline-powered cars.” Well, perhaps. Then again, maybe not. See, when you’re sitting in traffic, you most likely let your engine idle, and that wastes energy AND pollutes. Apart form the trickle of electricity needed to run the computer, lights and radio, an electric car consumes no energy and generates no pollution on its own when stopped in traffic. In addition, replacement of coal-fired generating plants with more environmentally sound generating plants (such as nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal, and so on) can be done with virtually no change in the distribution infrastructure for electricity. This means that your car doesn’t care HOW the electricity is generated, only THAT it is generated.

I recognize that this idea would require a tremendous paradigm shift in the automotive industry, but the good news is that, if it’s done right, it would really only have to be done once. If the US can go from “we can’t get a rocket off the launch pad” to “we sent humans to the Moon and returned them safely to Earth” in a little over 10 years, we can go from being the largest per-capita polluter in the industrialized world to the smallest in the same timeframe, and probably for no more than it cost us to invade and occupy Iraq, which, lets face it was done for the oil and achieved absolutely nothing good.

After trying out the Impex Assateague back in 2005 (and every year since) at North Cove Outfitters‘ Demo Days, I’ve finally broken down and bought one.

Here she is:

I was going to buy it from The Kayak Centre of Rhode Island, but they didn’t have any in stock, and I was told that even if they did (they had their demo thing this weekend, too) the discount would only be about 3%. That was kind of a disappointment… the good news would have been that there’s no sales tax on boats in RI. HOWEVER! The boat would be a special order, and the wait would be 8-12 weeks!

Well, I decided that would not stand. I hopped in my truck and drove all the way to Deep River, CT, where North Cove was doing their thing. Not only did they have an Assateague in stock, on-site; not only was the discount 15% (offset, however, by CT’s sales tax), but they had one in the color I wanted!

Well, Duuuuuh!

So, now I have a motivator to get the house finished, so I can go out paddling! Whee!

Here’re some more pics:

Sweet boat! Can’t wait to get out in the open water!

Oh, I also ordered a new Werner cabon-fiber paddle and got a new PFD while I was there… Grand total was just over $3000, including tax.

I’ll be doing a review of the boat, the paddle and the PFD when I finally get out on the water this year. Stay tuned!

A season-3 episode orf Futurama, called I Dated a Robot depicts Fry downloading the personality of Lucy Liu into a Mac-formatted “blank robot”, which he then takes on as his girlfriend. The episode is a thinly-veiled indictment of piracy… well… to call it thinly-veiled is to hugely overstate the veiling.

Anyway… an entertaining episode.

These videos on YouTube show that we’re not there, yet, but we’re getting creepily closer.

While there’s still a little of the “Lincoln at Tomorrowland” wobble, and no sense of “relaxation” to the movement, it’s quite impressive (to me, anyway) that they can get the level of articulation they do… Watch the hands, how the fingers not only bend like hinges, but also spread out. Watch the neck articulation. OK, the movement lacks the range of speed you’d expect from wetware, but it does seem to have a lot of the subtlety and smoothness that seems to have eluded designers for a long time.

This article on Slashdot points to a wicked, and slightly creeeeeeepy video
of a robot that gets knocked apart and puts itself back together again.

The weird thing to me is that there’s a certain familiarity to the way it puts itself back together… like… maybe I’ve seen this before in a movie.

So, does art imitate life, or the other way around?

Here’s an idea for a sensible Federal fiscal policy:

Pay as you go.

Here’s how it works. Start by not borrowing any more money.

Figure out how much money the Federal Government needs to operate at current levels. Figure in a sensible debt repayment plan. We’ll call that value “B” for “budget”.

Figure out what the total reported income of every citizen and business is. We’ll call that value “I” for “income”.

Figure out the total number of taxpayers. We’ll call that “P” for “payers”.

The tax rate (”T”) would be:

T=B/I

There you go. That’s the tax code. You can fit that in “large print” font on a postage stamp.

Let’s set B at a nice round number: $3,000,000,000,000 (3 Trillion Doallars)
Let’s set I at a nice round number, too: $8,000,000,000,000 (8 Trillion Dollars)

T=37.5%

If that’s too high, cut spending.

What about people making “minimum wage”? Well, that’s pretty easy. You figure out what the minimum standard of living consists of. Food, transportation, shelter, et cetera. You do an analysis of populated areas around the country, to figure out what that costs… you take the most expensive place to live, and set the minimum wage so that, after taxes, it works out to 75% of the most expensive place to live.

Alternatively, you could take the 3 numbers you collected up there, and do another simple calculation.

We’ll use “M” to represent the Federal Minimum Wage:

M=.75(I/P)

Let’s say there are 200,000,000 Tax Payers, and the total income of all those Tax Payers is $8,000,000,000,000

That works out to a Federal Minimum Wage of $30,000 for 52 40-hour weeks, or $14.42 per hour. That’s at least a “sqeaking by” living wage just about anywhere in the country. States are free to set higher minimum wages if they like.

Simple.

Next problem?

The Bush administration, having trampled the Bill of Rights, lied to Congress and the American People, launched a horriffic and obscenely costly war under false pretenses, overthrown the governments of a couple sovreign nations, eviscerated social programs, lined the pockets of powerful business interests, invaded the privacy of ordinary citizens, fomented ethnic, racial and religious tensions… and so on… well, now there’s the question of some “lost emails”. Could this be the thing that finally (please, please, please) lands Georgee W. Bush in jail?!

This article on ars technica has excellent analysis of the situation, both from a technical perspective and from the legal angle.

The gist of it is this: A 1993 Federal law requires the White House to retain all Administration records and communications, including electronic records and communications… which includes emails.

In response to the law, the Clinton Administration installed a perfectly serviceable Lotus Notes-based system, which included an automated archiving system.

In 2002, the Bush Administration (perhaps in accord with its tendency toward medieval policies) decided to replace the Notes-based system with a Microcoft Exchange-based system, with no automated archive capability, and decided to hire a person to manually sort and move emails to “.pst” files. How could that be flawed?! Yeah, let’s replace an objective, dispassionate automated system with a wage-slave with uncertain motives and proclivities.

Idiots.

So, apparently, for the bulk of the Bush Administration, they’ve been “archiving” emails by MANUALLY dragging and dropping emails into various inconsistently-named “.pst” files, scattered on various servers located who-knows-where.

I wonder what motivated them to shift from a functional IBM system to a kludgy Microsoft system…. hmmmm