Unlimited WiFi Access at Starbucks?

Starbucks has announced is now they're offering unlimited WiFi.  But...but...but...now, you get free WiFi for 2 hours.  Is that not sufficient?  Are there people who go to Starbucks and hang there all day.  To answer my own question - yeah - I'm sure there are, but this cowboy ain't one of them.  Probably the most that I've ever used up of my 2h allotment is perhaps 30min or so.

It would be nice I suppose, but certainly can't imagine that this is something that the vast majority of their customers will find useful.

Pier Pressure

Remember the "good old days" when we were kids.  We did something because someone told us too.  Our parents responded with "if they told you to jump off a pier - would you"?

Lady down in the US is suing Google Maps.  Apparently she has a smart phone and used it to access Google Maps to get walking instructions from Point A to Point B.  The map told her to...walk right across a busy multi lane road without proper sidewalks or pedestrian controls.  The lemming that she is, she blithely and obliviously crosses the road and...yes...gets hit by a car.  Somehow, this is Google's fault?  Goodness gracious, how did she ever make it to adulthood if she was not capable of formulating a logical thought such as "it is REALLY a good idea to cross the street"?

The Hidden Cost of Technology

There’s no denying that there are numerous benefits to technology. However, by the same token, any new innovation in society has an inherent cost.

For the past week or so, I’ve been struggling with a topic for this month. This morning, I was talking to someone on the phone and the topic got around to a cordless phone set that I was looking at using at home. The only problem with it is that the battery doesn’t hold a charge. My first thought was that I could just buy a new rechargeable battery. However, seeing that it’s a two handset combo and that both batteries were in question, I thought to myself that it would probably be cheaper to toss both of the handsets and the base – that the cost of a new phone would probably be not much more than buying 2 new batteries.

As soon as these words came out of my mouth, I realized the whole fundamental problem with technology; it is based to be thrown out. It is clearly designed to be obsolete, leading us to buy the newest and greatest every few years.

For those of us that have purchased computers, stop and think about how many “old and slow” computers you have at home – that are collecting dust because they don’t meet the needs of technology anymore. I know that for myself (in a three person household!), I have 1 notebook and 2 desktops that are currently being used. However, I also have 1 other “older” notebook and two other desktops that no longer meet my needs.

This follows in quite closely to my previous article on chasing the carrot of technology and that’s what we do.

The advances in technology encourage us to dispose of our hardware and software.

The true hidden cost of technology that is not considered nearly enough is what do we do with all of this hardware that we no longer use?

Here at work, our property managers had a “used electronics drive” to encourage their tenants to dispose of old hardware in special containers so that they could be recycled properly during the month of April.

I noticed a memo up in the kitchen the other day from the property managers saying that they had acquired 13,000 pounds of hardware in one month! That is 6.5 tons of hardware that thankfully is being diverted from landfill areas and being recycled.

The real question that begs to be answered is if there are 13,000 pounds in the GTA that is being recycled, then how much hardware is NOT being recycled – and that’s a scary answer.

What components are sitting in landfills and as they rust and corrode? What is being released into our environment?

I recall back in the…mid 90’s…I think. America Online was famous for sending out unsolicited CDs to encourage people to sign up with AOL. Without any exaggeration, I’d say that I had received at least a couple of dozen CDs in the mail or in magazines. Did they all get recycled? Based on this being in the 90’s – probably not, I’m afraid. I would think that it is probably a very conservative estimate to suggest that there are perhaps 1,000,000 AOL CDs in landfills. According to many ecological assessments, it will take approximately 500 years for a CD to fully decompose!

Another case in point is ink-jet printers. I am of the opinion that ink-jet printers are a prime contributor to this problem. They are so cheap and the ink itself is so expensive that should one have any difficulties at all with the hardware, the sad thing is that it’s probably economically better to just throw out said inkjet printer and purchase a new one instead of getting it fixed.

Same problem with cell-phones. My concern with cell-phones is that marketing plans actively encourage us to buy new cell phones when we “fall out of love with our old phone”. How do companies justify encouraging us to throw out something just because it isn’t new and shiny anymore?

The “theory” is that this is something that our government is concerned with, but the reality is that I’m just not sure. The Ontario government does charge an environmental disposal fee when new hardware is purchased. However, according to their legislations, they charge a grand total of $7.80 when a new computer is purchased. Is this really sufficient when it comes to the point in time when the hardware is recycled? Perhaps it is, maybe I just haven’t done enough research (I haven’t) to be able to offer an opinion on the efficacy of the program, but something just smells to me.

Let’s not even talk about the impact on the environment to physically do this recycling. How much gas is used to transport 11,000 pounds of hardware to a recycling depot? How much smoke is generated in the recycling plant? What chemicals do they use? How much of the hardware is actually recycled?

This whole issue of recycling our hardware and software, very clearly a significant hidden cost of the technology.

B&B Marketing

Good old Internet marketing - aka - SPAM. Was somewhat amused yesterday when I received two disaparate emails. The first was for Bras and the second...the second...was for..forklifts! Talk about two totally different products.

In both cases (but especially the latter), I like to refer to this as B&B marketing. Bullhorn and buckshot. The bullhorn is self-evident. The buckshot - well - you shoot off enough pellets and sooner or later one will hit a target.

The email for bras - okay - so I see their plan that with a mass market, they have a 50/50 chance at reaching their target audience. But forklifts? Seriously - I am very curious as to what the click-through on that email was. What's next? Spam for swimming pools? Nuclear reactors? A rocket-launcher perhaps?

B&B Marketing - it just has to be the lazy man's way of doing this.

Artificial Intelligence – Possible? Yes. Probable? Yes. In our Lifetime? Probably Not.

It has been a number of months since I’ve started off one of my articles with a quote. Today – I go back to my roots with the following quote:
“I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.”

I’m curious as to which of my audience recognizes this quote. I’m not sure if the most recognition would be from those of a certain generation – or perhaps those who appreciate particular genres of entertainment.

Regardless, this quote is from a movie – too be specific “2001 – A Space Odyssey” and it is muttered by “no-one” other than HAL-9000 – the onboard computer.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been pondering what to write this month. I knew that I wanted to write about “Artificial Intelligence” for lack of a better word. Once I read this quote, one thing immediately came to mind.

I think that there is a grandiose notion that eventually technology will evolve to the extent where it will become a form of a sentient being. Perhaps one day, technology will evolve (evolve?) to such an extent, but I don’t think that this will be in our lifetime, perhaps not even in the lifetime of our children, either.
This may be heresy to suggest, and there’s a good chance that I could be totally wrong. As much as technology has evolved over the last 20 years, I certainly don’t see any semblance of it pushing the envelope in terms of this level of sophistication.

Getting back to the quote from Hal – I’m most interested in the term “conscious entity”. I think that most people would consider that to be a relatively decent definition of “life”. Merriam-Webster gives a couple of interesting definitions:
1 : perceiving, apprehending, or noticing with a degree of controlled thought or observation
2: capable of or marked by thought, will, design, or perception
Can technology – in any form be considered of being self-aware? I don’t think so – not through any evidence that I have ever heard of or seen. I think of another movie from many years ago, “Demon Seed”. In this movie, Proteus (the computer) is clearly self-aware and does whatever is in its power to prevent being shut down.
If this is indeed one example of how a computer could be considered to be self-aware (and therefore be considered “conscious”), then I think that it’s quite apparent that we are many decades away from developing this type of sophistication.

If it is theoretically possible to build a machine that is self-aware, then I think that the first fundamental problem is that the technology as we know it is nowhere near sophisticated enough, quick enough or has sufficient capacity to host and run a series of programs that would define the computers “soul”.

Let’s take the last problem – that of capacity. How much data could the human mind hold. The answer itself is actually the whole root of the problem. The answer is that no-one really knows how much information the human brain can hold. One researcher from Syracuse University has speculated that the human mind can hold perhaps in the range of 500-1000 terabytes. One terabyte is 1,000 gigabytes, so if I consider that this notebook that I’m using has a 500gb hard disk, then the mind holds more than 1,000 times the capacity that I am working with now.

However, this leads to an interesting point, this memory requirement is what is required to store as much data as is in my mind. This does not take into consideration the extraordinarily complex program code that would need to be in the computer to process and analyze this data. Let’s say for the sake of argument that we’d need an addition 500-1000tb for the program itself.

The biggest argument against the possibility of there being sentient beings in anything but the distant future is that there is so much that we don’t understand about the human mind. There are numerous mysteries as it involves how data is processed, how decisions are made, how judgements are evaluated and how to analyze goals.

It doesn’t matter how good of a software designer or developer I am, if I don’t have a thorough and intimate knowledge of exactly how the mind works, then I can’t be expected to be able to write software that contains these skills.

3D & James Cameron - What a Guy!

James Cameron is becoming "instrumental" at building a 3D camera for a future Mars land-rover. Why - methinks - do they need to engage the famous James Cameron for this? Is he some expert? Perhaps. Not meaning to bash a fellow Canadian, but aren't there probably a bunch of other scientists in this area that would have more to contribute to this technlogy than James Cameron? More than likely, I'd think.

The one really odd thing about this article - and something just seems quite odd. The articles briefly mentions that they were going to scrap the concept of a 3D camera due to budgetary concerns. Huh? Budgetary concerns? Come on, they have to be kidding me! The current NASA budget is somewhere around $18 billion. How much would this camera really eat up of this budget? $1m? Perhaps? Yeah yeah - budget cuts across the board. I know the song and dance, but I also know that "budget cuts" can be one of the handiest excuses out there for killing projects, so call a spade a spade and just be truthful.

My Favourite Windows 7 WTF Moment

I haven't been using Windows 7 all that long - maybe only a couple of months on my new notebook. One day I'm at home - working away and I am typing away and presto-chango, my display rotates 90 degrees to the right :)

I'm thinking WTF did I just do. Tried to reconstruct my keystrokes and eventually determined the hotkey sequence that rotates the display 90 degrees (useful for monitors that also do so, not very useful when the monitor doesn't rotate as well!)