In response to the contention that incandescent light bulbs aren’t inefficient in the winter, when you’re heating your house anyway, commenter David over at Yglesias’s blog asks:
Have you done the cost benefit analysis on that? My hunch is that your heater is far more efficient at heating your place and that the ratio of electricity to heat that your bulb is producing is highly inefficient. Do you have studies that say differently?
It’s been a while since I took physics, but I’m pretty sure that the conservation of energy suggests this is a non-sensical question. If all the energy is being converted into either heat or light, and both heat and light are desired, then it’s incoherent to talk about the heat-producing efficiency of the bulb, since there’s nowhere else for the energy to go.
On the broader point, Matt gets it exactly right: it’s absurd for Congress to decide no one has a legitimate reason to use a less efficient light bulb. There are 300 million people in the country, surely at least a few of us have legitimate uses for incandescents. The right way to deal with the problem is to ensure that the electricity is being priced appropriately (perhaps increasing taxes on generators if there’s evidence that they’re imposing uncompensated environmental harms) and then let consumers decide for themselves how much energy they want to “waste.” Surely in a country where people are allowed to set their thermostats to 80 in the winter and 60 in the summer, they should have the option to spend their hard-earned money on slightly more-expensive but aesthetically more pleasing light if they want to.
From Mr. Deity, on ideology:
It’s the worst. Are you kidding me? Look at all the great evils. They’re all ideologically drive. You’ve got the crusades, the Holocaust, Communism, no third-party apps on the iPhone. Never, never surrender yourself to an idea, my friend, never.
The iPod is a marvelously well-designed product. But one of the things about it that really irritates me is the way it handles podcasts. If I’m halfway through listening to one, and I plug the iPod in to download new ones, it will remove the half-listened-to podcast from the iPod. This is so obviously the wrong behavior, and should be so easy to fix, that I find it amazing that no one at Apple has done so. It’s a shame that iTunes isn’t an open source project, because this seems like the sort of thing a competent hacker could find and fix in a weekend if she had access to the source code.
Relatedly, if iTunes finds and downloads a new podcast while an iPod is plugged in, why does it require me to manually push the “sync” button in order to get the podcast onto the iPod. It appears that I could leave the iPod plugged in for hours and it wouldn’t perform the appropriate sync until I either manually tell it to or unplug the iPod and plug it back in. This is another thing that really should be trivial to add.
The Washington Post has a story today on the slow pace of progress in airport security technology. We would see faster development of better, more consumer-friendly security technology if the airlines were entirely responsible for it. Here’s a glimpse of what I said about this in an written debate hosted by Reason magazine a few years ago:
Airlines should be given clear responsibility for their own security and clear liability should they fail. Under these conditions, airlines would provide security, along with the best mix of privacy, savings, and convenience, in the best possible way. Because of federal involvement, air transportation is likely less safe today than it would be if responsibility were unequivocally with the airlines.
When I’ve seen “Free Public Wi-Fi” ad-hoc networks, I always assumed that it was some kind of honey pot. But it turns out that Occam’s Razor applies: it’s just Windows being retarded:
It appears to be a manifestation of a feature of Windows that I wrote about earlier this year. When Windows connects to a network, it retains that network’s name, or SSID, then broadcasts its as an ad hoc network, essentially inviting a connection. You can find more details here. Microsoft has said it will fix this in the next XP service pack; it’s unclear if Windows Vista behaves this way.
So why do you see so many of these? My theory: It’s viral, but not a virus!
What’s the thing almost everyone wants to find when they open a WiFi-enabled notebook and search for a connection? Why, free public WiFi! If you see that — and you don’t know any better — you connect to it.
Wonderful. I’ll refrain from making any smug Mac fanboy comments.
Today the Cato Daily Digest is pointing people to an essay by David Boaz titled “Parasite Economy Latches onto New Host.” Thus we celebrate the opening of Google’s new policy office here in Washington, D.C.
I celebrated the traditional way also, by attending last night’s party. It was typically Googley, with good food, drinks in glowing glasses with curly straws, etc.
Happily, late in the evening, I got a chance to talk to a Googler very high in the food chain, and delivered (eloquently, I’m sure) the same message I delivered at Wednesday’s AFF forum: If Google wants not to be evil, it should openly and strongly oppose the government’s claimed authority to issue “National Security Letters.”
NSLs are alien to our constitution, of course, but Google has a business interest in ending them as well. Its office strategy is not viable while the government can credibly claim a right to unilaterally access data.
Its interesting, the faraway look people get in their eyes when you tell them what they should do, they know you’re right, and they’re not going to do it.
Valley rumormonger Valleywag mongs the rumor that PayPal founder and VC/hedge fund manager Peter Thiel is moving to New York to be closer to his current beau. Now read carefully:
An acquaintance of Thiel scoffs at the idea that Thiel would do anything for romantic reasons. Thiel, he says, is an utterly rational thinker. But the heart is capable of its own rationalizations. The mere possibilty that Thiel might maximize happiness, rather than profit, is a comforting thought.
You see thinking of this type again and again in our culture and society – doing things for love is irrational; self-interest is greed – as if there is some wall separating the things we do for ourselves and the things we do for others.
A rational thinker has to fool himself into doing something for love. You really have to be altruistic – irrationally disinterested in yourself – to be a good person. Au contraire. Doing things for love is part of the rational pursuit of self-interest, and it’s good.
Go ahead, Adam. Say something homophobic. Or lovophobic.
Musings on Nick Carr’s latest book, from Jim Delong. Pertinent to various Google controversies.
Yesterday at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, General Motors chief executive Rick Wagoner delivered an address on the future of automobiles and technology and hyped the concept of “autonomous driving.” “Autonomous driving means that someday you could do your e-mail, eat breakfast, do your makeup, and watch a video while commuting to work,” Wagoner said. “In other words, you could do all the things you do now while commuting to work but do them safely.”
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m no Luddite. Matter of fact, I’m obsessed with technology and A/V gadgets, and I have covered tech policy issues for a living a 3 different think tanks over the past 16 years. I love all things tech. But I love driving more. A lot more. I have been fanatical about my sports cars ever since I was a kid. From my first car–a 1979 “Smokey & the Bandit” Pontiac TransAm–to my 86 Mustang GT, to my 90 Nissan 300ZX Twin Turbo, my BMWs (two M3s and an 850i) all the way to my current 2005 Lotus Elise–I have been completely obsessed with cars and the joys of motoring throughout my life. And the idea that we’ll all one day soon be driving to work in the equivalent of personal subway cars makes me a little sad because it means the joy of driving might me lost in coming generations.
I wonder if my son will grow up with the same passion for motoring that I have, and that my dad had before me. (I’m certainly going to have something to say about it!) And I wonder if, a generation from now, “driver’s education” classes will consist of little more than downloading a user name and password for your computer-car.
On the upside, I suppose I could see the advantage of making the driving experience fully automated for all those idiots on the road who really do engage in risky behaviors in their cars, like “e-mail, eat[ing] breakfast, do[ing] your makeup, and watch[ing] a video while commuting to work,” as Wagoner suggests. I hate those SOBs. They give me nightmares because, at a minimum, I fear what they might do to my car when they are not looking at the road. Worse yet, I think of the danger they pose to pedestrians (like my kids). So, perhaps a Jetsons-mobile for these morons will be an effective way to reduce accidents and traffic fatalities.
But as for myself, I will pass on “autonomous driving,” thank you very much. I want to be fully in control of my motoring experience forever more. Especially behind the wheel of my beloved Lotus Elise!
If you get your technology advice from the Orlando Sentinel, I’m pretty sure you shouldn’t be deleting random files from your hard drive:
Photos, videos, music and unneeded applications — and the files that you download to install them — can also slow down and clutter up your computer.
Go to the place where you store these items on your computer, and choose the view them by “details.” or “list,” if you are on a Mac.
Then click on “Size” to sort your items by how big they are. Try to delete as many large files as you can. If you are unsure about deleting a file, looking at the “Date Modified” field to see the last time you used that file may help you decide.
The same thing goes for .exe files, which are the files you download to install a program. Once you have a program installed, there’s no need to hang on to the .exe file that you used to install it. The equivalents on a Mac are .dmg files.
Wow. That doesn’t seem like a very good idea to me.
Update: The story seems to have been modified with some less-terrible advice:
An earlier version of this column may have given the wrong impression about deleting .exe files as a way to clean up your computer. This may have been misinterpreted as an instruction to delete ‘all’ .exe files which was not my intention. You should be very careful when deleting these files and only delete ones that you are sure were used to install a program. A good way to identify these files is if the filename contains the word ‘install’ or ‘installer.’ These installer .exe files are typically downloaded from the Internet, often saved to your desktop and should not be confused with the .exe files used to run programs on your computer. If you have any doubt as to whether an .exe file should be deleted or not, don’t delete it. Deleting the wrong .exe files can seriously harm your PC.
Better late than never, I suppose.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.