Senator Klobuchar and cell phone contracts: America, bow before Minnesota

It's hard to believe, but Minnesota wasn't always the coolest state. I confess when I lived on the coasts I didn't really know where it was, and when I moved here 15 years ago the twin cities were only beginning the ascent to greatness. Now, of course, the coasts bow down to us.

Klobuchar is one of ours:

Senator Amy Klobuchar:

Senators Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) today unveiled legislation aimed at empowering the 200 million cell phone customers nationwide to make informed choices about a wireless service that best fits their needs and their budget. The Cell Phone Consumer Empowerment Act of 2007 will require wireless service providers to share simple, clear information on their services and charges with customers before they enter into long-term contracts; a thirty-day window in which to exit a contract without early termination fees; and greater flexibility to exit contracts with services that don’t meet their needs.

Of course I have to take some credit here, because I'm sure my senator was inspired by a Jan 2007 post of mine:

Amazon and the evil of cellphone companies (Jan 2007)

...The bottom line: If you don't want to change your contract expiry date, you go to a Sprint store and pay full price, or you buy a used phone on eBay or Craigslist. I'm told some Radio Shack stores will sell used phones, but I distrust the quality there. I have a visceral distrust for eBay, so it's Craigslist or list price.

Lastly, looking over the scam I first documented above, I'm thinking Amazon's a part of the deal too. In other words, they sold out. Well, it's not the first time.

The next time a politician hits me up for a donation, I won't ask them about healthcare reform or global warming, I'll ask them if they'll vote to require any cellphone vendor to accept a compatible unlocked phone.

Ok Amy, send me another request for a donation.

Dang, I really thought he was dead

Google News: The Bin Laden stuff

Honestly, I figured he was dead. For an egomaniac he was awfully quiet.

Does this guy take longevity lessons from Castro? If all the atheists of America claim to convert to Islam would that make him happy?

No, I didn't think so.

Virginia moves to eliminate the father

On the one hand, I'm comfortable with the idea of eliminating males, though it is a bit of a slippery slope. As bad as human males are, human females are not necessarily qualitatively better.

On the other hand, I do hold my children's hands when we walk, and since they're all adopted, Rebecca Odor would be very suspicious ...

Moving On - WSJ.com

... This summer, Virginia's Department of Health mounted an ad campaign for its sex-abuse hotline. Billboards featured photos of a man holding a child's hand. The caption: 'It doesn't feel right when I see them together.' More than 200 men emailed complaints about the campaign to the health department...

Virginia's campaign was designed to encourage people to trust their instincts about possible abuse, says Rebecca Odor, director of sexual and domestic violence prevention for the state health department. She stands by the ads, pointing out that 89% of child sex-abuse perpetrators in Virginia are male...

Really, Rebecca, let's just eliminate fathers altogether. These half-way measures will never suffice.

Are all smartphones bad?

A journalists had a bad Treo experience, and decided to turn his investigative talents on an interesting question -- is there such a thing as a good smartphone? Despite his avowed non-geek credentials, he has some interesting comments ...

The Case of the Subpar Smartphone - New York Times
September 8, 2007
By JOE NOCERA

My Treo died.

It happened about three weeks ago, and I can’t say I didn’t see it coming. I bought a Treo 700p in early January and have had buyer’s remorse pretty much ever since.

The 700p, of course, is a member of the Palm smartphone family; it’s the one that uses the Palm operating system (the 700w uses Windows). I chose it because I was a longtime user of the Palm Pilot, and had all my data already stored on the Palm application on my computer. In other words, it was the kind of completely rational technology decision we nongeeks tend to make — and then, sadly, come to regret.

Practically out of the box, my Treo froze on a regular basis. I could never get my Gmail account to sync with the Treo, and had to use the Web to retrieve e-mail — which required the patience of Job. It had all sorts of weird glitches: sometimes it raced around the menu while I watched helplessly; at other times, it would switch from one application to another for no reason. It would ring randomly. By June, it was shutting down completely two or three times a week, even in the middle of phone calls, and then powering back up again.

Maybe, I thought, I’m just unlucky. Maybe I’ve bought a lemon, in which case I should try to get my carrier, Verizon Wireless, to replace it. You know how it is, though: life kept getting in the way, and I never got around to it.

But I also think my avoidance was due to a darker, more painful thought: maybe Treos were simply lousy devices. ... Maybe I was a fool to assume, as I clearly had, that just because Palm had once made great products, it was still making great products.

Then my Treo died, and that gave me my answer. What killed it was, of all things, a software upgrade from Palm...

... Then came the hours of working with the valiant Verizon technical support guy, as he struggled to get my [new[ Treo up and running. There was the software that refused to work. The continued difficulty of synching with Gmail. The “soft resets.” The frustration. The constant refrain of “Let’s try that again.” And finally, after everything was more or less up and running, the painful realization that the new phone was almost as problematic as the old one had been...

... It’s hard to make a good smartphone — so hard, in fact, that no one really has it right yet [jf: almost right, but wrong. See below]. BlackBerrys are great at e-mail, but the phone is barely adequate and its Internet abilities are not very good at all. The Motorola Q crashes almost as often as the Treo. The Apple iPhone is terrific for music and media, but lousy for e-mail and phoning.

Part of the reason has to do with what’s called the “form factor.” For marketing reasons, everybody is trying to cram all these complicated features into ever-sleeker, ever-thinner boxes, while also adding longer battery life, and so on. Invariably, smart phone designers have to make compromises that mean some functions don’t work especially well...

... On the one hand, believe it or not, the company is still using the same operating system it used when it was churning out Palm Pilot, which, please recall, had no Internet, no e-mail and no telephone. [jf: wrong. It's the same name, but the old apps are running in emulation - they're slower now than they were ten years ago!] ...

I'm chopped out most of the article where he's definitely wrong, though I left in a few of his goofs. Really, he needs to talk to some old geeks with (some) memory. Even so, he's exposing a market problem that deserves attention.

He's right that today's smartphones fall short (though I suspect he's exaggerating the iPhone's flaws), but he's quite wrong that it's not possible to build a great smartphone. The Samsung i500 appeared to be a very good phone when I had it, but in retrospect it was a fantastic phone. There's never been anything like it since it was discontinued about 3 years ago; those who have working i500s coddle them. I gave mine to my wife when her old phone died, and I've suffered ever since.

Since the Samsung was a great phone, and it ran the Palm OS, why is the Treo so unreliable? Ahh, well, the Samsung ran the original PalmOS, the one with Graffiti One. That OS was written by cyborg infiltrators from the 32nd century. Shortly after the i500 came out Palm was essentially destroyed from within (Microsoft gave a push or two) and it's never recovered. The Treo runs a botched descendant of the original PalmOS that's held together by bailing wire.

That eliminates the Treo, but it's also true that every non-Palm smartphone OS, to date, has been unreliable or has placed disabling demands on the phone, or both. The old PalmOS was designed to run fast on a hamster-powered CPU, so the i500 was positively capacious. All of today's OS's ask much more of the host phone.

We'll see if Apple can break this trap, but I wouldn't look for anything from Palm. Their secret genius took his stock options and ran ...

Blah, blah, quantum entanglement, yawn, hacking reality, zzzzz

I'm almost caught up with modern physics, but it's taken a toll.

It's started my reading a few months ago when I realized I'd fallen hopelessly out of date, but I'm now only a few chapters from finishing Greenes latest tome. Alas, between Gribbin and Greenes, I'm a broken man. Modern physics is so consistently and cumulatively weird that a steady diet has eliminated my critical capacity. No wonder science fiction writers feel beaten down -- no work of fiction can be as mind-bending as today's physics. It's enough to make the idea that we're all living in a simulation seem comforting by comparison.

Which is to say that latest proof that the universe is every bit as weird as predicted is a bit of a yawner ...

'Spooky' science points to quantum internet - Internet - www.itnews.com.au

Physicists at the University of Michigan have demonstrated how two separate atoms can communicate with a sort of 'quantum intuition' ...

The scientists used light to establish an "entanglement" between two atoms, which were trapped one metre apart in separate enclosures...

... David Moehring, the lead author of the paper who performed the research as a University of Michigan graduate student, explained that the most important aspect of the experiment is the distance between the two atoms.

"The separation of the quantum bits [qubits] in our entangled state is the most important feature," he said.

"Localised entanglement has been performed in ion trap qubits in the past, but to build a scalable quantum computer network (or a quantum internet) the creation of entanglement schemes between remotely entangled qubit memories is necessary."

The researchers used two atoms to function as qubits storing a piece of information in their electron configuration. They then excited each atom, inducing electrons to fall into a lower energy state and emit one photon, or one particle of light, in the process.

The atoms, which were actually ions of the rare-earth element ytterbium, are capable of emitting two different types of photons of different wavelengths.

The type of photon released by each atom indicates the particular state of the atom. Because of this, each photon was entangled with its atom.

By manipulating the photons emitted from each of the two atoms and guiding them to interact along a fibre-optic thread, the researchers were able to detect the resulting photon clicks and entangle the atoms.

Professor Monroe explained that the fibre-optic thread was necessary to establish entanglement of the atoms. But the fibre could be severed and the two atoms would remain entangled, even if one were "carefully taken to Jupiter"...

I wasn't being entirely supercilious. My reading suggests this is a perfectly prosaic result, indeed anything different would have been shocking. The reason the paper was published is because of the experimental genius required, and perhaps because it suggests new ways to build a quantum computer.

The real reasons airplanes tell us to turn off our iPods ...

While suffering through another flight (45 min on the runway, air conditioning broken) I wondered again why we can use our cell phones, but not our iPods, on landing. The "interference" explanation, of course, is nonsensical. Salon's pilot in residence tells us it's all about the egress ...

Ask the pilot | Salon Technology

... Part of that pre-planning is knowing exactly where the doors are -- all of them, as smoke, fire or debris could render one or more exits unusable. You must also understand that should an evacuation be necessary, you will not be taking your carry-on luggage with you. Doing so could put yourself and others in considerable danger...

... This is the reason, by the way, for the litany of prohibitions during taxi, takeoff and landing: Tray tables need to be up, window shades open, laptops and iPods put away. It's not about electronic interference, it's about the need for a speedy egress and situational awareness should anything happen...

Passengers are prone to try to take their gear. One wonders how many lives that has cost. If the items are stowed it's easier to leave them behind. Makes sense, surprisingly.

I'm going to pay more attention to the exits in future (though often I'm sitting in the exit -- noticing that there's usually some undocumented plastic shield in the way of the door release handle ...).

We don't know what life is ... (Zimmer)

I thought biologists had a working definition of "life", albeit with a bit of fuzziness. Ok, so that's what I'm remembering from my high school biology, but that was less than 237 years ago.

Carl Zimmer tells me I'm quite mistaken ...

Zimmer: The Meaning of Life

...There is no one definition that we agree upon," says Radu Popa, geobiologist and the author of Between Probability and Necessity: Searching for the Definition and Origin of Life. In the course of researching his book, Popa started collecting definitions that have appeared in the scientific literature. He eventually lost count. "I've found at least three hundred, maybe four hundred definitions," he says.

It's a peculiar state of affairs—biologists have learned more in the past decade about how living things work than we've learned collectively over the past several centuries—and an intense debate has arisen over what to do about it. Some are skeptical of science's ability to come up with a definition of life that's accurate enough to be meaningful, while others believe a definition is not just possible but essential for the future of biology.

"A science in which the most important object has no definition—that's absolutely unacceptable," says Popa. "How are we going to discuss it if you believe the definition of life has something to do with DNA and I think it has something to do with dynamic systems? We cannot have a conversation on any level. We cannot make artificial life because we cannot agree on what life is. We cannot find life on Mars because we cannot agree on what life represents."

Recently, a new voice has entered the debate. Carol Cleland, who teaches philosophy at the University of Colorado and works with NASA's National Astrobiology Institute—essentially as their philosopher-in-residence—is making a more radical argument: Scientists should simply give up looking for a definition of life. They can't even begin to understand what life really is, she claims, until they find forms of life profoundly different from those we know here on Earth. Only when we can compare alien life with life on our planet will we understand the true nature of this ubiquitous, ephemeral thing.

Cleland believes biologists need to build a theory of life, just as chemists built a theory of the elements and physicists built a theory of electromagnetism. Definitions, she argues, are concerned only with language and concepts, not true understanding. By taking the semantics seriously, Cleland is calling for nothing less than a scientific revolution. Only when we change the way we think about life, she argues, will the true study of it begin...

Once again, familiar territory to readers of the past twenty years of science fiction. I've really got to learn to trust mscience fiction writers more ...

Jobs reads customer emails?!

Apple's Steve Jobs is going to compensate early iPhone buyers for the recent price drop. That seems to be a smart business move, but it didn't surprise me. This is what surprised me:

Machinist: Tech Blog, Tech News, Technology Articles - Salon:

.... I have received hundreds of emails from iPhone customers who are upset about Apple dropping the price of iPhone by $200 two months after it went on sale. After reading every one of these emails, I have some observations and conclusions....

There was no reason for him to lie about reading the emails, it's not something we expect CEOs to do. This fits with some other stories I've read about him. He actually reads some customer emails (there's no way he could read all of them -- he wouldn't get any work done!).

Weird. There really is nobody like Steve Jobs, for better and for worse he takes his products personally. Given Apple's success over the past five years perhaps reading customer emails is going to catch on ...

Update 9/7/07: Cringely has a wickedly delightful essay on the man he calls "The Puppet Master". A bit of sado-masochism is probably helpful for Apple customers.

Nuclear canary dies: flying the warheads

It's one thing to fly a few nukes around the US, it's another thing to demonstrate that the complex network of protocols governing nuclear weapons aren't working:

Nation & World | Air Force fires commander in nuke error | Seattle Times Newspaper

...For the six warheads to make it onto the B-52, each one would have had to be signed out of its storage bunker and transported to the bomber. Diligent safety protocols would have to have been ignored to load the warheads onto the plane, he said.

"I just can't imagine how all of this happened," said Philip Coyle, a senior adviser on nuclear weapons at the Center for Defense Information. "The procedures are so rigid; this is the last thing that's supposed to happen...

If this is broken, then what else isn't working? There ought to be some very serious media pressure to dig into this story. NYT, your nation is depending on you...

iTouch, iPhone: more sad news

Apple geeks heads hang low today. Ok. One of them.

Yes, the new devices will probably eliminate the Zune, give NBC a bad case of bluffer's remorse and sell very well.

But, sniff, they don't do nothin' for me.

Sure the iPhone is cheaper, but it was never the price tag that stopped me buying it. It doesn't meet my needs. Even the dying Treo has more of what I need (which ain't saying much). The iTouch is probably going to zap the ever dwindling sales of non-phone PDAs (Palm, Dell, whoever sells those things), but it doesn't replace my dying Tungsten E2 (battery life now at about 2 hours of use, and it's only about 1.5 yrs old).

If Apple had left prices where they were and opened the iPhone/iTouch to 3rd party developers I'd be a happy man today. If all they did was make the non-network software competitive with the original US Robotics PalmPilot I I'd be smiling.

Instead, I'll just go into my lonely corner and cry for a while ...

Boingo Wireless adds another iPhone requirement

Boingo Wireless is responsible for another entry to my iPhone Mandatory Demand List. I've elevated "bridge PC to WLAN" from "desirable" to "essential" -- because Boingo has taken over the airport HotSpot business.

I very much dislike Boingo. I want to be able to use my iPhone to bridge a laptop to the Net so I never have to deal with Boingo again. Why do I detest Boingo? I'll list 4 quickies:

1. This morning my registration failed -- until I checked the "spam me" box that Boingo had originally checked and I'd unchecked. A convenient bug, no doubt.
   
2. Boingo insists on installing their software on my machine. I'm reasonably confident it's ugly stuff, but even if it were the purest product I don't want Boingo forcing it on me. In fact their connectivity service works fine if you donwload the file but skip the installation step.
   
3. You can't simply enter your billing information and start using Boingo, you have to "register". I'm running out of pseudonyms and fake email addresses.
   
4. Did I mention they've eliminated all the other airport HotSpot vendors?
   

The Voyager records - they were almost blank

I think, on occasion, of the Voyager probes. The universe is almost completely empty -- and becoming emptier as dark energy inflates our universe. The probes will likely sail, alone, for as ever as ever is. For uncountable years they will have attached to them a vestige of the most unusual LP ever pressed.

What I didn't know, until I read the account of the man who made the record, was that a NASA bureaucrat almost mounted a blank disc on the side of the probes....

The Mix Tape of the Gods - New York Times

... the astronomers Carl Sagan and Frank Drake persuaded NASA to attach a gold-plated phonograph record to each of the Voyager spacecraft.

Containing photographs, natural sounds of Earth and 90 minutes of music from all over our world, the record was intended to preserve something of human culture beyond what an intelligent extraterrestrial, encountering the craft at some far-distant time and place, might infer from the spacecraft itself.

The information etched into the grooves of the Voyager record is expected to last at least one billion years. ..

... after the record was completed, NASA rejected it on technical grounds. Late one night in a New York sound studio, when we’d finished cutting the master, I inscribed the words, “To the makers of music — all worlds, all times,” in the “takeout grooves” next to the label. (The Voyager record is a metal version of the 33 1/3 vinyl records of the day, recorded at half-speed to double its data content. Etching an inscription between the takeout grooves was a trope I’d picked up from John Lennon.) A NASA quality-control officer checked the record against specifications and found that while the record’s size, weight, composition and magnetic properties were all in order, its blueprints made no provision for an inscription.

So the record was rejected as a nonstandard part, and the space agency prepared to replace it with a blank disc. Sagan had to persuade the NASA administrator to sign a waiver before the record could fly...

It is astonishingly unlikely that any sentient being will ever touch those records. As far as we know we are alone, and even if another technologic society develops somewhere it's hard to imagine a technology that could detect one of the long-silent Voyager probes passing through a star system (ok, nanites infesting the entire peri-solar region?). It is very likely, however, that those records will endure long after every remnant of humanity has passed on.

NBC plugs the family loophole in Digital Rights Management

Daring Fireball points out where NBC is going with its DRM:

Daring Fireball

This just shows how moronic these NBC clowns are. You don’t have to be a nerd or obsessive to see how these restrictions suck — they’re obvious. No mixing means you and your spouse can’t both buy material for each other’s use.

All of our music is on one server, regardless of whether my wife bought it or a I bought it. Some predates our marriage, most does not. NBC doesn't like this. They want only one person to have rights to any media.

DF doesn't mention, however, that while iTunes does not forbid mixing, neither does Apple encourage it. Many iTunes related features don't work if two people sync to one repository. Most people don't notice this when they use an iPod, but wait until both use an iPhone. They'll discover that they need to be in their own user account when they sync, and that means they won't have easy access to a shared music library any more. Apple is not so much virtuous as subtle. NBC is merely stupid. From my post of November 2005 ...

... How best to understand this? Think of the secret and forbidden lust of the media companies -- the (patent pending 2040) BrainLock™ (Palladium Inside!™). The BrainLock™ prevents any access to DRMd material by control of visual, auditory, tactile, and olfactory inputs. BrainLock Enhanced™ (mandatory upgrade 2045) makes it impossible to consider any action that would circumvent the workings of the BrainLock™ (thereby ending the trickle of death sentences related to violations of the DMCA amendment of 2043).

Really, the idea of "shared property" is a legacy of ancient law related to the fading practice of marriage. The media companies abhore this idea. Each person should own their own BrainLocked™ media (ok, just biometric locked until the advantages of BrainLock™ associated enhancements become irresistible). If you and your multiple spouses and myriad children want to listen to music, you each need your own music stream. Joint access is discouraged, though it will not be effectively blocked for some time.

The bottom line is that Apple's media partners really don't want multiple users accessing a single iTunes repository. They can't do anything about multiple iPods for now (after all, a single user might have an iPod and a Nano!), but they accept that grudgingly. They won't allow anything to encourage multiple iPods with multiple users, and that means this "design problem" isn't going to get fixed -- because it's working as designed.

Crummy results on Google searches? Their defenses have failed

I've been reading Matt Cutts for over a year. If you read him, you think Google has strong defenses against vendors who game their rankings. On the other hand, some searches persistently produce large numbers of garbage results. This doesn't add up. 

That's why I believe this post is credible (read the entire post for the full context):

Gaming Google - It Really Is That Easy...

... I was one of those people who looked down on buying links for a long time. It just seemed wrong – and surely the brain trust at Google would clamp down at some point. I just couldn’t believe that buying your way to the top of the organic results could A) be SO easy, or B) yield sustainable results. That was three years ago.

This scheme of embedding links in free stat counters in order to juice link pop has been around for at least that long – and should be among the easiest for Google to detect. It should be a big yellow flag when a site gets lots of inbound links from totally unrelated sites over a short time period. And it should be really easy to detect the code pattern like the one shown above for those inbound links (it even says “invisible" for God’s sake!). Finally, it is pretty irregular to have a UK page show up at the top of the results for a competitive term like this on Google.com. It seems like that might have thrown a flag somewhere along the line as well. The patterns are easy to spot. But Google is either oblivious to all of these issues or they’ve decided not to do anything about it. I’m not sure which is worse...

Google's defenses aren't working. I know they're having problems delivering almost across the board (Gmail still works well at least!) but this has got to be their number one problem.

An insider geek comes clean on the chaotic nature of emergent financial instruments

I've not yet read the entire first chapter Big Picture has excerpted, but this is quite remarkable. A geek insider (MIT? Geek.) is telling tales about the complex and recursive financial instruments that have emerged over the past decade...

The Big Picture | A Demon of Our Own Design (Richard Bookstaber)

While it is not strictly true that I caused the two great financial crises of the late twentieth century—the 1987 stock market crash and the Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) hedge fund debacle 11 years later—let’s just say I was in the vicinity. If Wall Street is the economy’s powerhouse, I was definitely one of the guys fiddling with the controls. My actions seemed insignificant at the time, and certainly the consequences were unintended. You don’t deliberately obliterate hundreds of billions of dollars of investor money. And that is at the heart of this book—it is going to happen again. The financial markets that we have constructed are now so complex, and the speed of transactions so fast, that apparently isolated actions and even minor events can have catastrophic consequences.

My path to these disasters was more or less happenstance. Shortly after I completed my doctorate in economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and quietly nestled into the academic world, my area of interest—option theory—became the center of a Wall Street revolution. The Street became enamored of quants, people who can build financial products and trading models by combining brainiac-level mathematics with massive computing power. In 1984 I was persuaded to join what would turn out to be an unending stream of academics who headed to New York City to quench the thirst for quantitative talent. On Wall Street, too, my initial focus was research, but with the emergence of derivatives, a financial construct of infinite variations, I got my nose out of the data and started developing and trading these new products, which are designed to offset risk. Later, I managed firmwide risk at Morgan Stanley and then at Salomon Brothers. It was at Morgan that I participated in knocking the legs out from under the market in October 1987 and at Solly that I helped to start things rolling in the LTCM crisis in 1998.

One of my blog posts in waiting is about the vast array of memes arising in the science fiction of the past decade. I can't sort out who contributed what (sorry, I didn't have that kind of memory even when my brain worked), but I recall one author recently tossing off the meme of "Finance 2.0"[1], a tongue-in-cheek portrayal of cyber super-intelligences emerging from the wellspring of financial instruments. I think they attempt to convert the protagonists into cash flow.

I suspect the author is going to tell us that these instruments have evolved beyond our ability to understand them, much less predict their behavior under stress, and that given the extremely rapid pace of their evolution they are likely to have chaotic behaviors. Should be a best seller!

[1] Update 11/20/2010: Charles Stross, Accelerando -- and it was "Economics 2.0", not "Finance 2.0"