Technology – Page 3 – Complaint Hub

Im back

And I’m reading a new book. I got a bunch of books from my in-laws, and I’ve started reading Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau. It’s about a group of fundamentalist Christian zealots who start blowing up buildings to protest the teaching of evolution in schools.

I’m just kidding. It’s actually non-fiction about the marriage of technology and evolution, and whether we are approaching “The Singularity“, which is basically the tipping point beyond which there is a fundamental change in what it means to be human. This is not the only view of the Singularity, but this is more or less the view he’s going with. So far I’m more or less buying it. He makes some assumptions that I don’t think are true, but none of them are really important to his hypothesis. It’s a little scary/exciting, because he and others he quotes are expecting huge changes in not just the way we live, but the way we are. And they’re expecting them in the next few decades.

I’ll keep you all posted on how it’s going. If I start getting a little existential here, tell me to take a break from the science and go watch some reality tv. Nothing will destroy my faith in the imminent transcendence of humanity quicker than a few hours of prime time television.

What a nice way of putting it

Techdirt: Who’ll Pay For C3PO’s Social Security Benefits?

The paper admits we won’t be worrying about any of this for at least another twenty years, assuming robots can first hurdle the monumental task of self-sustained bipedal movement sans fatality.

This has been going around for the last few days – how will we handle things when we have artificial intelligences demanding citizenship? Frankly, I don’t think it will be that big a deal. Things are likely to be very different around here by the time robots are thinking enough to want citizenship, and this change will just be rolled into all the rest of them. Not that we don’t have to think about it – we’ll definitely have to really examine the changes and figure out a long-term solution. But it’s not like we’re suddenly going to have hundreds of thousands of thinking robots taking social security benefits all at once.

I posted this article rather than any other simply because of the “self-sustained bipedal movement sans fatality”, because I’m a dork.

Its about time

Techdirt: China To Mandate Standardized Phone Chargers

Apparently South Korea did this last year and I didn’t notice (Sorry, South Korea), but now China is standardizing its phone chargers. It is absolutely ridiculous now, when each cell phone requires a different charger. True, people like Radio Shack sell chargers with interchangeable connectors for different phones, but I can’t imagine why these things aren’t standardized. Even within one manufacturer, they aren’t standard. So every time I get a new phone, I need a new charger. And probably two, so I have one in the car and one in the house. But, no more. Now all I have to do is buy Chinese phones and make sure I have USB available everywhere. I wonder how hard it would be to install USB ports in my car?

Wait, the Post DOES get it

Rob Pegoraro – Missing the Big Picture – washingtonpost.com

In doing this, they seem to be giving in to two of their least-appealing instincts: a need to regulate every single aspect of the mobile-phone experience and an irresistible urge to nickel-and-dime the customer.

Should have known that I can’t expect the front page guy to know what’s going on. You have to look to the tech columnist for tech news with a basis in reality. This is actually a pretty good explanation of why the Verizon/YouTube deal is dumb for Verizon.

Two different viewpoints

Washington Post’s take

Verizon Wireless is hoping to parlay YouTube’s reputation as the premiere Web site for posting and sharing homemade videos into success for its own mobile-video service by delivering YouTube clips to subscribers of its premium V Cast service starting next month.

Gizmodo’s take

The deal is expected to be officially announced later today and launch next month but it’s important to note that you won’t be paying $15 per month for the YouTube you know and love. Nope, the video service will be a part of V Cast, Verizon’s multimedia hub, and won’t be a replication of the content you get on the actual YouTube Web site.

There is no chance this is successful. YouTube is successful because you can do a quick search, and find whatever video you were looking for. Your friend mentions that he saw this great video clip of something, and you go to YouTube, and there it is. You watch, it’s funny, you tell your friend, “Hey, I saw that, it was funny.”

Now, with Verizon’s YouTube-branded substitute, your friend mentions a video, you search VerizonTube, and you get a one minute clip of “24” made specially for your cell phone. You go to your friend, telling him you couldn’t find it, and he stops returning your phone calls.

It doesn’t make any sense to me. YouTube had a hugely successful idea. Now, Verizon thinks they can come in and copy YouTube without the user community that made it popular, and be successful? That’s just stupid. What they’re really doing is more like making a mobile version of network television with the YouTube brand to generate interest.

I hope Verizon loses a ton of money on this, and it teaches them (and the idiots who will no doubt follow them) a lesson. And it’s annoying, because I need a new phone, and I currently have a Verizon phone. I know that if I go to the Verizon store, they’re going to push stupid VCast junk at me that I don’t want.

256 gigs on a sheet of paper

Techworld.com – Storage News – Store 256GB on an A4 sheet via Kurzweil AI

Files such as text, images, sounds and video clips are encoded in “rainbow format” as coloured circles, triangles, squares and so on, and printed as dense graphics on paper at a density of 2.7GB per square inch.

An Indian engineering student has figured out a way to print encoded data on a piece of paper. This sounds pretty cool. Having a sheet of paper with 256 gigs on it isn’t necessarily all that great, but the applications that could come from this are exciting.

Edited to add: All this would be exciting, that is, if it were true. Now posted in the middle of the article I read is this:

Update: But following this article and widespread coverage of the claims, the claimed storage technology has been widely and roundly dismissed as not possible.

Thanks, Cheryl, for pointing that out.

Google is changing the world

Today at work, and I don’t even remember how it came up, we were talking about a movie that one of my coworkers saw. It’s about some guys who use a time machine to go back and hunt dinosaurs. One of them accidentally kills a butterfly, and this has profound effects on the time in the future that they then return to. He couldn’t remember the name of the movie.

So I type “dinosaur butterfly movie” into my handy little Firefox Google search bar. The second hit takes me to a page that currently isn’t coming up (Although Google has a cache) that gives the plot of the movie, “A Sound of Thunder”, based on a Ray Bradbury story. The page came up this afternoon when I first looked for it, though. What did we do before Google? I don’t even know. But I’ve gotten used to this instant location of whatever I need using only a vague idea of what it is to find it.

For reference, the first Yahoo result that refers to the movie is the fourth, and it’s for a Boston Globe review trashing the movie. MSN returns as the first hit the Wikipedia page for the Bradbury story, which references the movie. But I don’t use their searches, because they suck. Although Yahoo hasn’t killed Flickr yet. I do give them credit for that.

Mommies have known this for years

Natural-born painkiller found in human saliva – health – 13 November 2006 – New Scientist Link via Kurzweil AI Saliva from humans has yielded a natural painkiller up to six times more powerful than morphine, researchers say.

See? And you thought that it was just a placebo and a mother’s love when she offered to kiss your boo-boos and make them better. She was actually just trying to apply a substance that “works in nerve cells of the spine by stopping the usual destruction of natural pain-killing opiates there” to make your pain go away.

I love voting machines

Polling places turn to paper ballots after glitches – CNN.com

“We got five machines — one of them’s got to work,” said Willette Scullank, a troubleshooter from the Cuyahoga County, Ohio, elections board.

Looks like there was some difficulty voting in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Indiana, and, shocker, Florida. Some poll workers didn’t know how to use the machines. Now, I could be way off on this, but I’m pretty sure this wasn’t a surprise election. Shouldn’t someone have checked that the machines worked, and that people knew how to use them?

Tomorrow, the Republicans will probably be blamed. However, as whoever it was said (Google is not cooperating on this one), “Never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence”. I don’t think there’s any big conspiracy. I have nothing to base that assumption on, but this is a blog, I don’t have to have a basis for my sweeping judgments.

Firefox 2.0 gripe

I admit that this is a minor and easily fixable gripe, but the built in spell-check dictionary for Firefox 2.0 does not include the word “okay” or “ok” by default. Is there some fight about whether or not this is a word? I thought it was universally accepted as part of the English language. It’s pretty easy to add it, and then it’s not a problem again, but it seems strange that it’s not included.

Other than that, 2.0 is pretty cool. Memory footprint is still too big, but I like the new features. It does break the “Alt-a” add a link in the WordPress dashboard, which is annoying but not that big a deal.