Low value neighborhood

I have T-Mobile for phone service. I like their service for the most part. Their signal has been good in most of the places that matter. But for some reason, my home doesn't matter that much to T-Mobile. My calls are dropped often and data speeds leave something to be desired.

I called T-Mobile about this and spent several minutes on hold while they researched the problem. The conclusion? T-Mobile has 51 recorded complaints from my neighborhood about the same problem. What is cause of the problem? The closest tower to me is a slower, older, 2G data tower. The solution? Replace it with a new 4G LTE tower. They add that the problem is not expected to be resolved soon, but do not expect resolution any later than the end of 2015.

So I did some shopping and found that Verizon offers what appears to be a pretty reasonably priced plans that are comparable to what I have. My wife's plan won't expire until 2015, but given our poor signal here at home, I think it might be worth the early termination fee to move on. I'm getting really tired of dropped calls from T-Mobile and the move might spur them on to fixing the problem.

Then I have Centurylink. Their internet access plans for this neighborhood are terrible. I can't get anything better than 5mbs here from them. I have to use Comcast if I want faster speeds and most properties that I use on internet don't really function at less than 5mbs. In fact, Centurylink only guarantees 4mbs or better. After spending a month nursing their poor excuse for a modem, I gave up and went back to Comcast. I have a pretty good introductory deal and hope to keep it that way. At least until UTOPIA shows up.

UTOPIA might have been able to run fiber down my street past my house (but stopped a block and a half away) were it not for a ridiculous lawsuit filed by Qwest (now Centurylink) to stymie their efforts to provide broadband at reasonable prices and speeds. Here's how low Qwest was willing to go: Qwest moved for discovery on more than 20,000 telephone poles, one at a time to keep UTOPIA from rolling out fiber to the home.

We have another problem, the "Municipal Cable Television and Public Telecommunications Services Act", an act that protects local incumbent interests from communities that want to run their own cable systems. Why would a community want to do that? Small towns and communities are getting fed up with cable and telco companies when internet access is slow, and the incumbents refuse to upgrade.

The Community Broadband Networks website has documented numerous cases where cable and telcos have reluctantly upgraded their infrastructure when city hall moves to create a public internet service. Cable companies and telcos just love to sit on their networks, providing inferior speeds and customer service while protected by their agreements with local government. But when local governments decide to build their own networks, incumbent interests got all huffy about it.

What did they do? They worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council to craft legislation that would prevent local governments from running their own public networks. 19 states have pass such legislation and Utah was the first state to do so.

So yeah, I live in a low value neighborhood. I have Comcast, but that is only after spending more than a year and half to try and get service from Comcast. I had to beg them to hook me up so that I have a better option than Centurylink. Just writing that last sentence makes me think of the lines in Communist Russia. The irony is that I have a choice of two private monopolies and the government provided option, UTOPIA, actually provides better service than the private options.

Russia proved that pure government isn't the solution. T-Mobile, Comcast and Centurylink are proving that lax or unregulated utilities don't work, either.

Quality of life is a choice

There is another aspect to The Frugal Life that merits discussion. This aspect concerns our buying choices. For example, should we go to Walmart to pay the lowest possible price, or should we go to someplace more upscale to get better quality? There is an old adage that says, "you get what you pay for". Today I'd like to share my personal experience with that concept.

In the summer, I like to wear sandals. It's hot, sometimes muggy and when we go for walks, I want my feet out in the open, enjoying life. For 3 years in a row, I bought these sandals from Oshmans Sporting Goods for $15 a pair. I managed to wear them out in a year each time and found that a hard spot would wear through and caused pain on the balls of my feet.

On the fourth year, we were walking through a mall when my wife Alice suggested that I get a new pair of sandals, something that wouldn't wear out so quick. I relented and agreed to walk into a place that just sells sandals. While there, a salesperson helped me to select a pair on Alice's suggestion. I walked around in them and immediately noticed an improvement in how my feet felt. But they were $70.

Then again, I looked at their construction, liked the way they looked, figured that they weren't going to wear out like the other sandals I had been buying and felt really comfortable. Had I done that years ago, I would not have bought $15 sandals three times. I would have saved myself the effort and time and money, which is more than the cost of the $70 sandals. My feet are happier now. Without knowing what she had done, Alice had reminded me that you get what you pay for. As you'll see below, I get to return the favor to Alice.

From time to time, Alice wanted to go shopping for shoes. We went to places like Payless Shoesource, Shoe Carnival and even K-Mart to find shoes that she want to wear. This seemed to work OK, but a friend's voice rang in my head, telling me that we stand on our feet all day. Let's get something better. I made suggestions to go somewhere else for a better buying experience, but Alice persisted in going after the bottom dollar on shoes.

Then a few weeks ago, Alice began to complain that her heels hurt. After some discussion, she determined that it was her shoes that were causing her pain. She needed some relief so we went shopping for new shoes. But this time, she was willing to go to Dillards on my suggestion. If you don't have Dillards in your town, Dillards is a department store just a notch below Nordstroms to get an idea of what I mean.

When we arrived, Alice browsed for shoes and wanted to try them on herself, taking shoes from the displays to try on. Alice was not really familiar with how these department stores worked. I suggested that we get a salesperson to help answer questions and find a shoe that fits. Once a salesperson was consulted, I just carried our daughter Emily around while Alice worked with the shoe salesperson.

Now I felt confident that eventually Alice was going to find a pair of shoes that she liked. They were going to cost a lot more money, but they would last, they would fit, and ultimately, they would not cause her pain. We settled on a pair of shoes from Ecco and a pair of sandals from Born. I love Ecco shoes myself, so I was really happy to see her get fitted with her new shoes.

Alice loved both of them and enjoyed the experience. I told Alice that this shopping experience was something I wanted to do for her for a long, long time. I explained to her that when I buy shoes, I am making a long term investment in my feet, so I don't go cheap. I also explained to her how it pains me to see her buying cheap shoes when she could have something better and feel better about the purchase. I just wanted to roll my eyes every time she wanted to go to Shoe Carnival. But one stop in Dillards has brought great relief to Alice and relieved me with a sharp decrease in the frequency of our trips to the shoe store.

We live in a throwaway society. When we buy cheap, we buy again, over and over. What I've learned over the years is that the return on investment is better than proportional with the quality of the item we buy. And some of the benefits are intangible.

For example, when we moved into our home, we bought a new refrigerator that cost about $700. It worked and worked well for what we needed to do, but it was noisy and small. This year, we bought a refrigerator for $2000 that is plenty big enough for our growing needs with one growing kid. But it also has a linear compressor that is warrantied for 10 years and is very quiet. We also learned that these days, water filters are pretty standard on high end refrigerators, and we had a water hookup that connects to the cold water line on our sink in the kitchen. We installed the filter and opened the valve to have filtered water for drinking and ice. Very cool. We won't be buying another refrigerator any time soon. That's an intangible benefit.

I don't expect to be seeing a repairman, either. Why? When I went shopping for a refrigerator, the salesperson at Home Depot was only pointing me to the LG refrigerators and I asked why. She said that they weren't being returned by customers, they just run. I liked that and bought one. That refrigerator may be expensive today, but over the years, it will just run and provide plenty of space while keeping our food cool or frozen, with cool filtered water for drinking. The intangible benefit for me is that the sound of the compressor won't wipe out the consonants in the dialogue when I'm watching a movie.

Buying on the cheap leads to a mind of scarcity and leads to buying over and over again. Buying a quality item when you need it leads to a life of abundance because you won't have to buy that item again anytime soon. Paying with cash means that you aren't on the hook every month to pay for someone else's summer home. Abundance is not an action, it's a state of mind that you choose to have.

The Frugal Life

The Great Recession has returned many Americans to frugal living. Many cannot find jobs even during a recovery. Many have lost their homes through predatory lending practices and stagnating wages. Many people who have lost their homes are living with their parents. Many have lost jobs that they've worked at for years only to be staring at the clock or calendar wondering when they will get their next interview.

There is something to be said for the frugal life. Frugal living isn't about self-deprivation. It's about buying only what we really need and use. The days of impulse buying are gone for many Americans, including myself. I don't walk into a store unless I am clear about my intentions to buy something. I'm not a window shopper.

When I go to Costco to buy food for my family, I see the big screen TVs, but I already have one, so I don't think about buying the latest model when mine will do. I don't fantasize about buying that thing that I want. I wait, save some money and then buy it with cash. I don't use credit cards anymore, as credit cards are a giant form of hidden inflation that makes everything more expensive.

When people buy things on time, they are using money they don't have, and driving up demand. That drives up the price. Another way that the cost goes up is interest on the balance on the card. Many people are paying greater than 10% interest on their credit card balances, even though most savings accounts are only paying 1/2 of one percent interest.

I have cut the cord for TV. No satellite, no cable. Just YouTube and Netflix. No more do I have commercials beating on my brain to buy something I don't want. My general rule of thumb is that if it's a product advertised on TV, especially food, I don't need it or want it. With Netflix and YouTube, I can watch videos on any subject matter I want. I can watch movies when I want on Netflix without any trailers or commercials. I don't really care that much about disputes over retransmission rights between cable and a television network. The best part is that I don't feel like I need to sit and watch something on TV just to "use" the cable or satellite service.

I buy clothes when I need clothes, not to appeal to the latest fashion. I keep my meals simple and bag my lunch for work. I don't subscribe to bottled water delivery. I buy my own health insurance so that I can pick and choose employers. Every so often, we have some Indian buffet at a local restaurant where we can choose the portion size and pay a flat fee. And the list goes on.

But the point I want to drive home is this: there is a lot of talk about how the top 1% are abusing everyone else in the country. That abuse is not without consent. When we buy things we don't need or want, buy it on time and subscribe to services that we don't need, or try to buy houses we can't afford, we're directly supporting the 1%. 

My dad used to tell me that I'm cheap and that I'm trying too hard to hold onto money. He said that I have a backwards gene I inherited from my great grandfather. I learned long ago that money doesn't buy friends, money doesn't make me happy and accumulating money isn't the only game in life. I would not describe myself as cheap, rather, I'm frugal. I buy only what I need when I need it, and wait until I have money saved up to buy what I really want.

Every time I buy something with cash, I am denying money to the 1%. Years ago, I worked a sales job in retail as an experiment. What I learned in training is that a retail business makes $8-10 for every $100 you spend on a retailer issued credit card ("Would you like to put that on your Sears Card?"). The same retailer will make $3-4 per $100 spent on a third party credit card. The profit goes down to $1-2 per $100 spent if you just use cash. That's why I don't buy things on time unless it's a house or a car. I save money.

What does all of this have to do with technology? Technology makes all of this work. Credit cards, subscription services, health care, they all run on databases. They all use tech to run. If you're unhappy with the 1%, dialing back your spending is the very first place to start to retake your country back. 

I have no credit card debts. This affords me greater purchasing power than I would have with debt. When I just buy what I need and use, the house remains free of all the junk that could clutter up my house. When I buy with cash, I take comfort knowing that I don't have to answer to a creditor next month. That creditor is a member of the 1%.

China could lock us out of the thorium race

Whenever I have a chance, I watch videos on thorium at home to learn of the many benefits of the thorium molten salt reactor compared to uranium solid fuel reactors. In the videos I've seen, there are two trends that really stand out. First, thorium advocates have noticed that there isn't really a shortage of rare earth metals here in the US. But when we mine thorium, we also get a bunch of rare earth metals with it, and the waste products from thorium energy production include both stable and radioactive rare earth isotopes, some with medical and scientific uses.

The other trend that I've noticed is that China has been demonstrating leadership in thorium energy production. China is also a leader of rare earth metals production and a byproduct of their rare earth mining activity is some thorium. Cell phones, computers and TVs all need these rare earths to function.

If China remains a leader in thorium energy production and research, they will also remain as the world supplier of rare earths. As long as they maintain that lead in rare earth production, even if wages in China come close to US wages, rare earth production in China will tend to keep electronics production in China. I don't hear this problem discussed in political discourse.

There is another problem on the horizon discussed in the videos I've seen. China is a member of the World Trade Organization, that's not a problem in and of itself. But as a WTO member, China has adopted America's aggressive intellectual property regime. There is some discussion of China amassing a patent thicket so broad and wide on thorium energy production, that they could raise the cost of American use of thorium energy production to the point that we cannot compete as a manufacturer with China.

China intends to acquire and maintain a lead in the technologies that will drive manufacturing to their country. Thorium energy production technologies is one arena that China is well positioned to dominate. I don't see any of our politicians doing anything about it. On the economics side, China buys our bonds to keep our dollar strong so that manufacturing work will land there. That's the only reason they buy our bonds, so I doubt very much they are worried about a default on our debt. Now they can combine two points of leverage to keep manufacturing in China.

By maintaining hegemony in thorium and rare earth production, China can eventually lock the US out of the thorium energy market, either by influencing American energy policy to discourage thorium energy production, or by amassing a patent thicket as a barrier to the market. Either action could give China a competitive advantage in energy production, driving energy costs down while labor costs rise to maintain incentive for manufacturers to locate in China.

American mining companies can find plenty of rare earths on American soil and when they do, they find thorium. Unfortunately, there is no demand for thorium, so American companies have to fill out paperwork to meet the regulatory requirements of disposing of thorium when they find it. Wouldn't it be nice if instead of treating thorium as waste, mining companies could just send thorium to a thorium power plant for processing and get paid for it?

There is enough thorium on this planet to power humankind for at least the next 1000 years. Instead of treating it like waste, we could develop leadership in thorium energy production and achieve energy independence. With a ready market for thorium, we can reduce our costs for rare earth mining and processing and once again lead the world as an energy independent nation.

What if intelligence correlates with cooperation among humans?

I had a wild thought yesterday. Well, I was in class today and freezing my butt off in an air conditioned room after having shaved my head the day before. That makes for great heat transfer in moments of deep thought. Yeah, I had a really deep one yesterday.

So here's my thought: what if there is a correlation between the desire to cooperate and intelligence? This thought sort of comes from an idea I had when I was in high school. I got picked on a lot in school and tried to find ways to recover from my defeats by thinking. My idea then? That the jocks and bullies in school were at an intellectual disadvantage. Why? They need to dedicate more brain cells to fire off impulses that moved muscles. The logic is that the more muscles you have, the more you must dedicate to moving all that mass. Get it?

So I'm in class, learning new stuff, and it occurs to me that in my new job, I'm going to be a writer. I'm not just a writer, I'm a technical writer, and I'm a problem solver, too. I guess all that stimulation got me going.

But I think that the logic I am suggesting holds true. Negotiating peacefully takes more brains than beating your adversary senseless with a stick. Cooperation takes more brains, too. A casual survey among the animals seems to suggest that man is one of the most cooperative animals in the world, second only to the ants. I think that there are network effects that contribute to the size of the brain when humans engage in cooperative efforts.

Research published in Nature Communications shows that previous notions about the superiority of selfishness over cooperation are not born out by the evidence. The latest research and experiments show that cooperation is what allows a species to survive and that selfishness will drive a species to extinction, or at least, to smaller brains. Even Darwin noticed cooperation in the habitats he studied, expressed surprise to see it and suggested that animals need and express love.

The initial investment of negotiating a peace and writing laws that everyone can live with is high and requires a lot of patience, thought and planning. These are skills that testy adversaries like the Visigoths portrayed in pop culture don't have. In the long run, taking the time to negotiate peace, form governments and write laws has an interesting side effect: when those big brains are not being used to fight adversaries: they can be used to make life better.

Consider this question: can you think when you're in fear? Can you contemplate the really big questions like, "What is the source of gravity?", or "Why are my hands so big?", or "Why are we using uranium instead of thorium for nuclear power?", when you're worrying about physical threats? With few if any physical threats from adversaries, we can focus long enough to consider these problems and more. We have time to tinker and create inventions and works of art that please people and make life better.

But under constant threat of assailants or predators, we wouldn't have the time to live. We would only have the time to survive.

One look at economic development among the international community bears this out. Those who are constantly engaged in war in their homeland, particularly in the Middle East, and Africa, have to devote more resources to the lower functions of the brain, namely, deciding between fight or flight. In war, you don't get time to contemplate the big questions. Much of the time in war is spent, fighting, grieving and moving to safety. Higher order thought is replaced by the urge for revenge or submitting to defeat.

Charles Darwin expressed surprise in his observations of cooperation in the animal kingdom. Yet what we are conditioned to believe is "the survival of the fittest". That phrase reminds me of how my dad used to talk about putting two humans in a pit to fight over a sandwich. He never talked about the possibility that those two humans could just relax and share the sandwich. Yeah, sharing. What a concept.

Many theories have been put forward to explain the size of the human brain. Some say it's cheap calories from cooking food. Others say its a natural consequence of our ability to dominate the environment. But honestly, we couldn't just sit around and cook food without cooperation from others. That's why I think that when humans cooperate, they make room for bigger brains.

Wait. Why is the NSA eavesdropping on us again?

I just read a fascinating piece in the New York Times about the NSA's long running efforts to weaken or compromise encryption standards and methods, worldwide. The extent of the overreach of the NSA into the private affairs and communications of American citizens is simply astounding. What is this for? Does the NSA value and treasure liberty? Not for the American people it doesn't. Does it value the very Constitution upon which its existence depends? No, it does not. Even one of the original authors of the Patriot Act says that the NSA is completely out of line with their efforts.

Apparently, the NSA has forgotten that they work for us. Oh, wait. Maybe they don't.

The NY Times report shows in significant detail, the challenges the NSA has tried to overcome, to ensure that it has complete access to all communications it can find. They have been working hard to compromise Secure Socket Layer (SSL) encryption to make it easier to decode traffic with SSL websites, just one example among many.

NSA claims regarding their ability to listen to SSL traffic might be believable to the extent that they are able to coerce popular internet properties like Google, Outlook.com and Yahoo to hand over their private keys for SSL encryption. Why would they even bother to ask? They have to ask for the keys because they simply don't have the computing power to brute force attack a 256-bit SSL key. The laws of thermodynamics dictate that to break such a key, the energy output of our sun for decades or a supernova, take your pick, is required.

But there is something else that is almost completely overlooked in the public debate over privacy. Why this massive effort to collect the data? The government plays the terrorist card. Why worry about terrorists? Because US forces are in the Middle East, making trouble for countries that have oil. Why rely upon a source of energy that requires cooperation from the Middle East? I guess they're just looking for something to do.

We could eliminate much of the terrorism problem with a diligent effort to develop alternative sources of energy other than oil or coal. A few years ago, a good friend of mine introduced me to thorium for nuclear power. We came close to using thorium rather than uranium in the 70s, but egos got in the way and we now use uranium.

Thorium power production has many benefits that are explained here in a 5 minute video. There is much more to the story on thorium, but here is the short list of benefits:

• Thorium is very well distributed worldwide. No single country has a lock on supply.
• Thorium is 4 times more abundant than uranium and much less expensive.
• Molten salt thorium reactors are much safer than solid fuel uranium reactors because they don't require high pressure steam systems, they shut down passively during a power interruption and do not require the elaborate safety systems that uranium plants require.
• Thorium leaves 1% of the waste that uranium power production leaves behind.
• Nuclear waste from thorium power production is radioactive for maybe a few hundred years rather than a few hundred thousand years of uranium fuel waste and some of the waste products can be used for medical and space exploration purposes.
• Thorium power plants can be made smaller, more widely distributed and run more efficiently than uranium power plants.
• A golf ball sized ball of thorium will provide a lifetime supply of power for one person.
• The supply of thorium on this planet can power the world for at least the next thousand years at current rates of energy use.

With a change to thorium for nuclear power production, we could provide our country with a deep and wide baseline of power production and become completely independent from oil, coal and gas for the vast majority of our power needs. In the context of the terrorist problem, we could change ourselves rather than try to change everyone else to our liking. If the US were truly energy independent, our extensive military presence around the world would not be necessary. Likewise, our extensive intelligence gathering would no longer be necessary either. We could actually cut back wide swaths of the military industrial complex and still be OK.

If every continent had their own thorium power production systems, fights over oil become irrelevant. Coal becomes obsolete. Imagine what would happen to the world if we could harness thorium to power the world. That kind of power can scrub the atmosphere of CO2 down to pre-industrialization levels. It can power high speed levitating transport systems. Thorium is a stepping stone to fusion power plants. This is not a pipe dream as many countries are working on the problem of bringing thorium power production online including: China, Canada, Norway, Germany and the US. China is considered to be the leader in this effort at the moment.

The only things stopping us from using thorium is apparently a lack of experience, and a conventional nuclear industry that sees no easy transition to using thorium without stepping into some healthy competition. The efforts of incumbent power interests to block the funding of thorium research projects are well documented and suggest that a competitive threat from thorium is real.

To end the war on terror, we need to stop using a power source that requires cooperation from the Middle East and other sources hostile to our interests. They don't have to change their attitude, but we can. How's that for a change in perspective?

Are kids any better than their parents with computers?

I'm noticing that a myth is slowly being pierced and exposed to show an emerging problem. The myth? The myth is that most kids are better at computers than their parents. The fact is, that most kids don't know how to use a general purpose computer any better than their parents. I found two example articles demonstrating the concerns here and here.

For the last few generations, it seems a given that kids will know the tech better than their parents. I know that for my generation, my family, I know the tech better than my parents. I've lived with computers for all of my adult life. But it wasn't until 1997 that I learned to install an operating system myself, and that is one measure competency with computers. If you don't know how to install an operating system, you are at the mercy of someone else who does, if you want to use computers.

Generation Y and Z appear to be the first generations that don't know general purpose computing better than their parents. A large proportion of the Baby Boomers were in adolescence or adults during the personal computer revolution starting in the 80s. We saw computers come into our homes, mature and grow into very useful devices for personal work.

But most kids these days, don't know how to repair an internet connection. They don't know how to avoid viruses. They use easy passwords. They are in a sense, naive about computers in general and remain that way, often, after suffering a few setbacks with their computers. Even if their computer crashes, won't boot, they lose their data or their computer becomes infected with a virus, few if any, will investigate the problem beyond asking for help from someone else to fix it.

I suspect we have come to this point because the parents really don't know enough about computers to help their own kids. Many parents have made no effort to encourage their kids to learn how to use them. Parents are very busy. They have other priorities. If kids want to learn computers, they are pretty much on their own. I know I was, but somehow I figured it out as an adult.

So today's kids go for the low hanging fruit. YouTube, Facebook, Twitter come to mind. But if they run into a virus, they seek assistance from the nearest geek. Geeks are not really that cool until you need their help to restore your computer to running condition now, are they?

There is another trend emerging that doesn't get much press: The war on general purpose computing, particularly for consumers. Apple and Microsoft have been the biggest promoters of this trend. They don't want you installing your own operating system for you might find that there are alternatives. They don't want you peering inside your computer with the command line to see how it works. You might hack it to do something you that is not supported by Apple or Microsoft. Whatever happens to be supported may have more to do with economics and politics than your sense of curiosity.

It's worth noting that Google seems to take a rather dim view of the attitude promoted by Microsoft and Apple. They understand that consumers own their computers and provide ample tools for re-imaging hardware running Android. Android is open source software. Easy to learn, modify and replace if you want to. I know people who have replaced the original operating system in their Android phone with a free (as in freedom) version of Android called CyanogenMod. You could try to do this with Apple or Microsoft hardware, but it will be a struggle not worth the effort.

I feel fortunate that I had the opportunity to take a class where I could learn how to work with computers. Years ago, i learned how to install Windows NT server. That experience opened my eyes to how computers work in a way that most users never see. I began to see computers as commodities rather than delicate devices that must be carefully maintained. The data is delicate. The hardware is pretty tough and can withstand mild to moderate abuse.

We have an amazing legacy to work with here. General purpose computers are a great place to learn how computers work. From programming to installing applications and servers, the current generation needs to know how computers work in order to keep the reigns on the government and the corporations that serve them. If they don't the government and corporations will rule them.

Password, please.

I've been working in IT for 14 years. During my time in IT, I've encountered an interesting array of passwords. I've developed a certain philosophy about passwords through the years that works well for me. As admin, I've reset the password for users many times when they forget their passwords. I've also been given passwords used by owners and other management staff so that I can work on their computers when they're away from work. This experience has given me a sense of choices people make for passwords they want to remember.

I'm on the subject of passwords this morning because someone caught my attention with a link to an article by Bruce Schneier. In the article, Schneier delineates the problems associated with easy passwords. Passwords are getting easier to crack with time. This is because people who crack passwords for fun and profit are also sharing their insights with each other.

For example, there are now huge collections of passwords that have been found on the internet. Using one of these password dictionaries, a black hat can quickly run through a billion possibilities for a password. If you're using an easy password like "fatcat8" or candycrush4163", it's probably already in the dictionary. Words are the first thing to go in it.

As Schneier notes, even character replacements are bountiful in the password dictionaries. "Pa$$word", for example, has already been taken. There are many other examples, but you get the idea.

XKCD has a famous comic (cited Schneier's article) regarding the re-use of passwords and how that is making life easier for black hats. If you're using the same password on multiple sites, it only takes one breach to allow someone to ruin your life. At best, that will cost you an afternoon of replacing your passwords on all of your favorite websites. Whatever you do, don't think about reusing a password for your online banking accounts.

As a system admin, I have been given passwords by other people who trust me to work on their computers. As a general rule, I avoid this and simply change the password of the user I'm going to work on so that I don't need to learn the password. I follow a principle I call"irrefutability". As an example, when other people enter their credentials and they have not shared that information with me, I avert my gaze. In 99% of the cases I work with, I don't want to know someone else's password. So when they enter their password, I look away to make sure that I don't know it.

I like password managers like Keepass and PasswordSafe. I especially like the open source password managers because other programmers can look at the source code to see what the program is doing, make improvements if they have the skill and to alert the community if a bug is found. Bugs are fixed faster, as a general rule, in open source software than in closed source software.

While it is possible to try and crack the files created by password managers such as Keepass, brute force attacks on the encryption are simply not physically possible within a lifetime. There are two reasons for this. One is that as key length increases, so does the time required to run through every possible combination for the key.

Schneier also notes that the energy required to flip through every combination is discrete and definite. For example, a brute force attack on a 256-bit AES key requires the energy of stars. He uses our sun as an example to show that if we captured *all* of the energy of our sun for 32 years, we might be able to flip through 192 bits. If we captured a supernova we could power through 219 bits of a key.

In terms of energy, humans simply don't have the energy required to count through every combination of an encryption key. So while there might be reason to fear letting a password database from Keepass escape, it's going to be awhile, perhaps before the sun goes nova, before the password for that database is cracked. Unless an easy password is used.

While password cracking is a problem, the bigger problem is often the gray matter choosing a password. Choose an easy password and you are just asking for trouble. Using a password manager to generate a password for you is better. A password generator is going to be completely random in choosing characters. With a password manager, you can easily save a different, completely random password for every site you visit.

So be safe with your passwords. Don't use easy passwords. Use a good password manager. Don't share passwords with anyone unless you have complete trust in them. Change your passwords from time to time. Now git along and enjoy the web.

The glorification of competition

I've noticed that we often revere people who are winners, or dominant in their field of work. Bill Gates was for a long time, revered as a business man. George Bush was revered by many as the previous president and Obama is revered by many as our current president. Dominant companies grow rich and are admired. They are often gifted by governments with privileges other companies do not enjoy.

The attitude of many CEOs is that of someone who "did it all by himself", a self-made man (or woman). This idea that a CEO rose to the top by his own efforts is common in American culture.

But nothing could be further from the truth. No one rises to dominance without the cooperation of others. The power of a single man is a function of the power that others are willing to give to that one man. When a single man rises above the rest, our culture holds him up as a model citizen, someone who has vanquished all competitors and owns the market or field of work he is in.

Steve Jobs is one example. He co-founded Apple with Steve Wozniak, was eventually fired from Apple, and returned years later to revitalize the company to the great fortunes that Apple now enjoys. While it is true that Jobs was a leader, he didn't do it alone, and he could not have done it without the cooperation of others in the company he founded. There was also a woman behind Jobs, providing support, comfort and encouragement. Even the government helped Apple. Yet we are quick to make Jobs as an icon in our culture, someone to be admired and adored. Why?

Human history is replete with leaders, some great, some fearsome. Whatever the level of leadership men and women rise to, no leadership is possible without cooperation from others. There is no "self-made man", for if there is or ever was, he has been lost in obscurity, somewhere in the tundra, the Ozarks or Tibet, living alone, eeking out a peaceful existence, never to be heard from again. It is only through cooperation from others that leaders rise and there is no exception. Be it Stalin, Kennedy or Einstein, no one makes it to the top without cooperation from others.

Yet, American culture beats the drum of competition every hour of every day. As if that is the only way to succeed, to get ahead, to enjoy life living large. Not a word is given to cooperation. Competition all the way is what the media shows us.

Recent research published in Nature Communications shows that our previous notions about the superiority of competition over cooperation are not born out by the evidence. The latest research and experiments show that cooperation is what allows a species to survive and that competition will drive a species to extinction. Even Darwin noticed cooperation in the habitats he studied and expressed surprise to see it.

In technology, cooperation is required for success. Standards must be devised to make technology work and talk with other technologies. Even patent owners must cooperate with others so that technology can be used at reasonable costs. Apple and Google both must use free and open standards in order to compete in the marketplace, they must cooperate for all of this wondrous technology to work.

When I look at our leaders, I think of all the handshakes they had to make in order to get to the top, to realize their vision and to hang onto to the riches bestowed upon them. In order to realize their vision, they must share it with others and gain their cooperation. No one can lead alone.

Review: Google Navigation on Jelly Bean, Android 4.3

I have been a fan of Google Maps on my phone for a long, long time - since the original G1 to be exact. I enjoyed finding directions easily and being able to plan my trips to avoid traffic, too. But the G1 had a tiny screen. My HTC one had a tiny screen, too. Even with the larger screen of the Nexus 4, I find that I need a bit more help.

Enter Google Navigation. I didn't find Google Navigation until I got the HTC One with Android 2.3. On that phone, Google Navigation calls out the directions over the phone as I drive. The voice is somewhat feminine, mostly robotic on the HTC One, but on the Nexus 4, the voice is now definitely feminine and easy on the ears.

I've come to appreciate Google Navigation for another reason: missing a turn. When I miss a turn, Google Navigation recalculates the route and gets me back on track. This means I don't have to pull over to the side of the road recreate my route. Google does that for me, on the fly. On the Nexus 4, it's quick, too.

If you have an Android phone and you've never used Google Navigation, that might be because they don't make it easy to find. Its appearance is rather subtle. Once you find your destination in Google Maps, then you are presented with a choice of routes. Select your route and a map appears to show you the route on the map.

With a bit of discernment, you can find a little blue arrow pointing north in the bottom right-hand corner of your phone. That's the Navigation icon. Tap that to get started. To hear the sound, you should be equipped with an audio cable to connect your phone to your car audio system. A 3.5mm audio plug is standard on Android phones and new cars these days, so if you have an older model car, you'll have to use the phone speakers or a headset.

With audio connected and the route started in Navigation, you're ready to roll. Just drive and as you progress on your route to your destination, directions will be promptly called out as you reach each turn. Directions are called out with plenty of time for you to make adjustments to your position so that you can execute a turn or merge to an interchange ramp on time. Google Navigation won't put you in a position where you have to cut across 4 lanes of traffic to make your exit as you drive down the highway.

Directions can be subtle, too. Most directions call for a right or left turn, sometimes a U-turn. But from time to time, especially on the highway or freeway, you will hear something like "keep to the left at the fork". If you come to a fork in the road, Navigation provides early directions to be sure that you are in the correct lane when approaching a fork.

I have used Google Navigation to get to many destinations without even checking the route and did not get lost. It's rare to get lost these days with Google Navigation. In the early days, mistakes were common and I had to use greater care. But I've become confident that even with a time constraint, I don't have to worry about getting lost while driving.

One other feature I like is that I can use Google Navigation while I'm playing music. As directions are called out, the music is partially muted so that I can hear them. Then the music volume resumes to normal during playback. This is nice for long trips where I want to play music but am not familiar with the territory. It works during phone calls, too, but you'll find that the other caller's voice is partially muted when directions are called out, so I don't recommend Navigation during a call. Besides, multitasking on the road is probably not a good idea.

Google Navigation is well worth the minimal effort required to setup. It also works together with Google Now, a new card reminder system in the latest version of Android. With Google Now, I get a card that shows the time to commute to work. If I'm out, Google Now will show the time to get back home. Tap on either card and a map will pop up, showing the route in Google Maps. Once in Google Maps, getting Navigation to run is a tap.

Google Maps has become a great tool for getting around. If you have an Android phone, take some time to get acquainted with Google Maps and Navigation. With a little effort, you'll hear directions being called out while you drive, too.

It's time for a 1% tax for Wall Street

I just read this fascinating article on high speed trading on Wall Street. In the article, we learn that Terrence Hendershott, a professor at the Haas business school at the University of California at Berkeley, has discovered how the biggest Wall Street trading firms can make zero risk trades in the stock market. How could that be?

Some trading firms on Wall Street have figured out how to beat the street by simply having a faster connection to the trading servers that everyone else on Wall Street. This connection gives some traders advance notice of the stock prices thus allowing them to trade on advance information. These very special traders gain advance notice of a stock price due to latency in the network feeds.

If you have your trading server in the same room and connected directly to the servers that manage all trades in the exchange, you learn of the next stock price quote before all others. This is called "latency arbitrage", which means that if you have even a few milliseconds advantage over everyone else, you can trade on that information. With advance information, you can profit on every trade with zero risk.

Does this create jobs? Unless you're a very good programmer, network engineer or lawyer, probably not. But if you are, you're going to make a very good living doing that work for Goldman Sachs and other firms who can weasel in on a good connection to the trading servers.

Does this help the small time investor, you know, the guy who just wants to manage his IRA account? No, it actually drains profits from the people trying to grow their retirement accounts. The money has to go somewhere and it's certainly not going into the value of the stock. All they are doing is taking advantage of a few milliseconds of advance notice of what the stock price will be before they trade a stock. No one else has that kind of information or connections.

This has been going on for years and as computing power increases, so does the frequency of the trades. Traders say that there is no way around this problem, that there will always be someone with an advantage. I'm inclined to agree. The way things are set now, a small, select and privileged class of people can make trades all day long with zero risk. For the rest of us, well, we assume the risk.

There is a suggested solution, to freeze the market at short, regular intervals, so that no one gets advance notice of a change in stock prices. That solution attempts to address the fact that traders who perform latency arbitrage are taking advantage of information that no other traders have and profiting handsomely for it. I can appreciate the suggestion and I think that for awhile, a solution that is tested and shown to be effective could work.

However, I understand a small bit about the hacking world. Let me give you an example. Years ago, when DVDs first came out, they were formatted with an encryption system call CSS. The system would only work in DVD players and on Windows and Mac systems, but not Linux. The encryption system was broken in 3 days by programmers and engineers who wanted to play DVDs on Linux. 3 days. 3 days to break a system that was years in the making.

No matter what system our securities exchanges come up with, the incentives to hack the system to find an unfair advantage are too great. A 1% tax on trades in our exchanges is in order. The United Front Against Austerity has an interesting proposal for such a sales tax. How much money would 1% yield? Well, more than $5 quadrillion passes through Wall Street every year. Hmmm. Our economy is valued at $16 trillion. A qadrillion is one thousand trillions. Do you think we'd have a federal budget deficit anywhere with a small tax on that kind of money? I don't.

A 1% tax on securities trading would hardly be noticed by the small guy, and retirement account trades could be exempted if we wanted - we want that exemption. Such a tax would almost certainly put the kibbosh on high frequency trades and get our economy back to basics. You buy a stock because you believe in what the company does, not to flip it for a few cents profit on thousands of shares every few seconds of every trading day.

A 1% tax on Wall Street trades would most certainly pay for the the federal debt in a year. This is not a pie-in-the-sky dream. Lawmakers are talking about it, but they're doing that talking very quietly. You won't see much about it in the news.

High frequency trading isn't helping anyone except the wealthiest of the wealthy and allows a privileged few to profit on trades with zero risk. It is but one example of how nearly all of the economic benefits of technological innovation are being diverted to the very top. That is behavior that can destroy a democracy and a culture. A 1% tax seems quite reasonable to pay for the messes that kind of behavior can create. Wouldn't you agree?

Duocracy vs Coalition Government

From time to time, the question of whether or not American style democracy is really working comes up in political discourse. Many Americans maintain that we should have a two party system and that it really works because we can actually get things done. Defenders of the two party system will often compare our system to Europe and tell us, "Look at Europe. They have so many political parties, they can't get anything done."

So let's put that to the test with one example. In Japan and Europe, we find that they are far more efficient with their transportation system. Japan and Europe both enjoy very advanced, very efficient public transportation systems. Japan is famous for its high speed rail system, the Bullet Train. The Bullet Train has moved far beyond what I knew it to be as an adolescent both in terms of speed and technology. Both Japan and Europe have had excellent public rail systems for decades.

My mom has been to Europe many times over the last few decades and tells me first hand that the rail system in Europe is convenient, easy to use, and picks you up and drops you off where you need to be. She says it's great to be able to get on a train at the airport and take it to a stop that is within walking distance or a short cab ride to where she wants to go in Germany.

Both Japan and Europe have coalition governments. You know, the kind of government that never gets anything done because there are too many parties? Yeah, that style of government.

The rail systems in Europe and Japan were built with the consent of coalition governments, multiple parties, each vying for their voice to be heard, and they were heard. All of them. In contrast, the United States is plagued by a two-party system in gridlock. This system is backed by enormous sums of money and safe seats in Congress. The gridlock is exacerbated by the infamous Tea Party and other ultraconservatives who don't seem to want government to work. At least not while Obama is in office.

The coalition government has us beat beyond transportation, too. Europe and Japan both have universal health care with a single payer system, despite a coalition government. Europe has a thriving space program that is continually making new discoveries. Europe has the Large Hadron Collider, the largest particle accelerator in the world and Europe beat us to the discovery of the Higgs Boson. Europe has a much higher rate of union membership than we do. Japan and Europe both have excellent worker benefits instituted by law, that treat workers more like humans. All of this was achieved with a coalition government.

Our political system is locked in duocracy, a two party system, claimed to be far more efficient than other political systems. But upon casual inspection of the facts, comparing the differences between the two styles of governments, such a claim cannot be supported. Besides, in a true democracy, two parties would not rule the country to the exclusion of all other parties. A choice of two is not really a choice.

The duocracy enjoyed by the Democrats and Republicans excludes many other political parties who cannot get free air time on any local stations in the US. Third parties have been effectively blacked out of national news reporting. Meanwhile, the duocracy gets free air time any time they want it, from the four major networks, Fox, ABC, CBS and NBC.

If we really want to get things done in this country, we need to break the duocracy, a monopoly on political power. In any country, no two political parties should have a monopoly on power and still be called a democracy. Remove that monopoly and you'll find politicians more accustomed to compromise for all rather than exclusion for the benefit of a mere few.

A note on the causes of obesity

I just read this fascinating blog post about what appears to be the onset of a world-wide obesity pandemic. I think that David Berreby is spot on in his blog post. There is no single, super simple answer to the problem of worldwide obesity.

This trend has been going on for decades. I can attest to this from personal experience. Years ago, I rented "Herbie the Love Bug", you know, with that adorable Volkswagen Beetle with a mind of his own? The movie? Great for the kids. The extras on the DVD? Mind blowing. One of the extras was a documentary on the making of the movie and that documentary included a very interesting segment.

The making of the The Love Bug movie included a segment with a contest for the best decorated VW Bug. The winner would receive a life-sized replica of car #53, Herbie. The documentary was made in 1969 and what was most striking is that the crowds of people shown competing for the prize were all thin. There were only a couple of people who were overweight that I could see and I felt a sadness at having watched my country become overweight over the years.

One factor that is often overlooked when determining the cause of obesity? Capitalism. Capitalism encourages us to eat more and to live in a soup of industrial chemicals that alter our response to hunger and to food. Capitalism also encourages us to sleep in rooms with little blinking lights throughout the night.

Berreby's blog post also notes that this obesity trend is not just with humans. The weights of eight species of lab animals were tracked over decades and all of them consistently gained weight over the last few decades.

While personal responsibility certainly plays a significant role in obesity, world-wide, everywhere we happen to be, there are many other forces at work contributing to our girth. These forces are not easily discerned and once political discussions begin, at least a few people are going to be thinking about how to protect their bottom line before they take an interest in solving the problem.

Hopefully, we can all work peacefully together to solve it.

Review: Nexus 4

I'm an Android fan. I bought the first Android phone, the G1 with a slide-out keyboard, when it came out years ago. Then when upgrade time came, I bought an HTC One and that was miles ahead of the G1. A few weeks ago, I purchased an unlocked Nexus 4 from Google Play. I've been playing with it now for more than a week and compared to my old HTC One phone, this new phone is a blast.

The Nexus 4 is quick and nimble on its feet. It responds quickly to gesture commands and loads programs just as quickly. It's a miser when it comes to battery use and it has some new apps I did not expect to find on the phone.

When I got the phone, I tried to transfer the SIM card from the old phone to the new one, but the old SIM card was much too big. I trudged on down to the local T-Mobile shop and got a new SIM. With the new SIM in place, I was ready to roll.

I ran through the setup on the phone and logged into my Gmail account. Soon enough, my email and my contacts were loading. I headed home from the T-Mobile shop and when I got home, I found that an update was waiting and ready to run. This update would upgrade my phone to Android 4.3, Jelly Bean.

The update was quick and clean. On reboot, I had a slightly newer operating system, so there didn't appear to be much more to see. The boot times were much better than my old phone, too. On the old phone, I waited about 3-4 minutes for everything to load. On the new phone, I was up and running in much less than a minute. This was a very welcome change.

I enjoy playing a little game called Bejeweled Blitz. On the old phone, this took quite some time to load and often, it would hang while loading. On the new phone, it loads quick and is ready to run in a couple of seconds.

The larger screen provides ample real estate to work with. Icons on the home and other screens are easy to customize and locate as I want them to be. There is a bottom row of icons that appear on every screen so that I can get easy access to the programs I want from any screen.

There is the usual assortment of wallpapers, where you can use pictures, animations and the like. The new themes are very pretty, too.

The most significant new feature on the Nexus 4 is Google Now. Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant that uses your searches and email data to find information that is timely and relevant to your day. Just tap the Google search bar at the top of the home screen and Google Now appears. Google Now organizes items as a series of cards that appear on the screen. There's a card for the weather, a card for your appointments, news and other events around town.

With Google Now, I get the weather, my stock quotes to see where I'm at, and a few other things I didn't expect. For example, I ordered an item from Amazon and received a confirmation email. When I opened Google Now, I get the status on the latest package and within that card, I get a link to track the package. This is something that I wasn't expecting at all, but found it to be a very useful feature. When I was done with the card, i could just swipe it to the right to remove it.

My mom came out to visit us last weekend. A couple weeks prior to visiting us, she sent us her itinerary by email. On the day of the flight, Google Now used the information in that email to create a new card that provided me with the flight status, departure and landing times, gate and terminal number and a link to the original source email. This card made it easy for me to track the status of the flight without having to go to a website to look it up. When I was done with the card, I could just swipe it to the right to discard it. On the day that my mom was departing, a new card appeared for the flight home.

There are some minor and major advances with the Nexus 4 over my old phone. The biggest advance to me is the software update schedule. With phones that are sold by a carrier, the updates are often held back by the carrier. That means many phones are vulnerable to security problems that have been fixed in newer releases, but don't get fixed because the phone company refuses to let the updates through.

Not so with the Nexus line of devices, including the Nexus 4. With the Nexus phone, Google handles all updates independent of the carrier's desires. One question in my mind about this setup is whether or not a Nexus phone sold by the carrier has the same freedom as an unlocked phone from Google. I don't know but I will check that out, too.

Here's a little side note about photos on the phone. With the old HTC One phone, I could just plug in the phone and the file system in the phone would be mounted by my computer. I could select three different options for connecting to a computer: Charging Only, Disk Drive and Tethering. I've never tried tethering, but my Ubuntu Linux machine had no problem recognizing the disk in the HTC One.

But with the new phone, things get a bit tricky. I did some research and found that Jelly Bean exposes the photo directory for mounting, but to set that up, the USB cable must be connected to the phone. I found this rather confusing. Upon connecting the phone to the USB cable I had somewhat confusing choices to make regarding the settings.

I could connect to my computer as a media device using the Media Transfer Protocol (MTP), but that is for Windows and Mac. Or I could use Photo Transfer Protocol (PTP) to connect to my computer as a camera, this is for computers that don't support MTP. My Linux computer falls into this category. This option doesn't show up until I connect the phone to the computer with a USB cable.

Once connected though, Shotwell, a Linux photo catalog program, recognizes the camera and will sync the photos to the disk. This was a concern for me before I bought the phone, so I'm glad it worked out.

I'm really enjoying my new phone. It's quick, efficient and fun to use. If you're in the market for a phone, the Nexus 4 is a great option to consider at $300, a price much lower than you'd pay for Samsung, LG or Motorola from the carrier. For me, it was money well spent.

The Takers: Obamacare Opponents

On Facebook, I follow Senator Mike Lee, a man completely obsessed with the goal of defunding and repealing Obamacare. As you may see from his Facebook page, he goes on and on with posts about defunding and repealing Obamacare. But he seems to have a blind spot: protection for the healthcare industry, particularly for doctors.

In a normal economy, when supply gets low, prices rise and the suppliers increase the supply to meet the demand. This dynamic tends to normalize or even drop prices for the resource in demand. We see this with commodities like wheat, coffee, electronics and other items that are mass produced. Demand has often been met with imports.

But that is not happening with healthcare. In the United States, we pay double what many other industrialized countries pay for healthcare as a percentage of GDP. Yet, there is no policy effort underway to increase the supply of doctors. US Doctors make twice as much per year as their counterparts in other industrialized countries, yet, no one seems to mind.

If we were to cut our healthcare costs in half, we'd be seeing federal budget surpluses for years ahead rather than deficits. But Mike Lee won't tell you that. He has an important job: protecting the healthcare constituency.

The New York Times has an interesting piece identifying all the ways that the American healthcare system discriminates against foreign competition. The path to becoming a doctor in the United States is already expensive and confusing. But the barriers to entry to the market for foreign doctors can take far longer than American entrants to the field. The barriers to foreign doctors are not just protectionist beyond what is necessary to ensure quality doctors, they contribute healthcare inequality by raising the costs beyond what many Americans can afford. The high cost of health insurance has suppressed wages and that has dampened the economy.

The most important bottleneck to remove is to increase the number of residency positions available that are subsidized by Medicare. The number of residency positions supported by Medicare has been capped by Congress since 1997. Maybe Mike Lee doesn't understand economic theory, and that healthcare costs are a matter of supply and demand. You know, increase the supply of doctors and the cost of healthcare will drop.

But that's not what we're hearing from Mike Lee. No, what we're hearing is that he wants to defund and repeal Obamacare without offering any concrete or specific alternatives. It is also notable that we don't hear the American Medical Association chiming in about increasing supplies, either.

I think that the AMA is quite a bit like the US Chamber of Commerce. They are loathe to suggest real solutions that would help everyone. Rather, they want to help others so long as the earning power of doctors is not diminished in any way. Introducing foreign competition, increasing the number of slots available for residency at hospitals or harmonizing regulations with other countries in the healthcare industry never even make it to the conversation.

Until Mike Lee and his cohorts are ready to address the doctor shortage with meaningful solutions that include foreign competition for our domestic healthcare industry, we can only assume that they are just posturing for political points. What other logical conclusion is there to draw?

A New Machine

I like to make things last. The last time I bought a computer was in late 2008. I booted my computer one morning to find that the boot drive could not be found. It was an old Dell Dimension machine and the disk controller hosting the boot drive had failed. As soon as a break in work came along, I went to Best Buy to get a new machine.

That machine lasted for 5 years with no electronic or mechanical failures. It is slated to become an entertainment machine in the near future. It was an HP Pavillion machine and it ran Ubuntu just fine, but was getting a bit chunky with Gnome Shell since the machine had only 3GB of RAM. I know, I know, that's an odd number, but it worked pretty well for a long time.

Christmas came a bit early this year as I had the good fortune to be able to buy a new Dell XPS 8700. It had all the goodies. 4th generation Core i7 CPU, 12 GB of memory, 1 TB hard drive, 1 GB Radeon 7570 graphics card (a supercomputer on a card with 624 Gflops of computing power) and, well, Windows 8. This machine has a CPU that is about 8 times faster than the old machine, 4x the memory and almost 3x the disk space and the disk speed is double what it used to be on the old machine.

So that's enough to last at least 5 years of abuse from Ubuntu Linux. I can hear some of you now..."Linux? You're going to install Linux on that rig?" Sorry, bub. I run a Linux home. No Windows will run here again. Ever. Well, maybe I will run a virtual machine with Windows if I need it because some web resource requires Windows. But that's it.

To safely make use of this new computer with Linux, I had to take several precautions. First, I needed to be sure that Linux would run as expected on the machine. I started by disabling the Windows boot environment. I turned off secure boot. I turned off UEFI boot and relied instead on the legacy boot system. I made sure that the setup for Windows would never happen so that I could capture the disk in it's pristine condition.

Once I was sure that I had the BIOS set to run properly, I proceeded to image the hard disk. I started with Clonezilla on CD. But that wouldn't boot. I tried Parted Magic, but that wouldn't work either. I was going to use one of those tools to record an image of the hard disk before installing Ubuntu. This way, if something goes wrong, no problem. I can lay the original factory image back on the disk and ship it back.

For some reason, the live CD imaging tools were not working. Apparently, they were not able to find working space with the Windows 8 file system, an apparently newer version of NTFS. Or maybe it was vFAT. I don't know. Didn't need to know, either.

I used a nearby laptop to turn a USB drive into a Clonezilla boot disk and I was on my way. After about an hour of waiting for the image to complete, I was good to go. Happily, the new machine has more USB 3.0 ports that move data at 5 Gb/s than the USB 2.0 ports that poke along at 480 Mb/s. During the imaging process, I was moving data from the boot disk to the external hard disk I connected to the machine at rates up to 7 GB per minute. That saved a lot of time.

Whew. Once I had a good image of the disk, I was ready for the next step. I booted up Ubuntu Gnome on CD and started installing a new operating system. The option I chose was "Erase disk and install Ubuntu", and that is exactly what happened. Once the install process starts, I just wait about 15 minutes for it to complete. This is much, much faster than Windows.

Once Ubuntu was installed, I ran updates until there were no more. I also added the repository for Gnome 3.8 and installed that, too. I have a script that I run that will install what I want so that every new machine is approximately the same. See, the vast majority of programs in Linux are installed through repositories. I don't go to any websites to download and install them. This system makes scripted installs easy and much more secure.

Finally, I restored my data from backup. I have a few main folders that I need: Documents, Music, Pictures and Videos. I believe in backup, so I backup my data every day to an external USB drive. I do this because hard drives fail. It is not a question of if, but of when.

To restore my backups, I just right-click on the folder, select "Revert to previous version", and point to the latest backup on the external drive. Then I click Next and let the restore begin. Documents went fairly quickly, but the music folder took the longest. Once all of my personal files were restored, I am ready to roll.

Now I have a spiffy new machine that is clean and smooth running Ubuntu Gnome. If you'd like to learn more about Ubuntu Linux and how to migrate from Windows, let me know. I'm happy to point out the way.

What good is an advantage over another?

I see it all the time. People seeking an advantage over others. Every competitor vying for the top spot, edging out the other guy, excluding others from the arena or, in some cases, destroying the competition so that they never return. It is folly to imagine that securing an advantage over others will make your life better, bring happiness or security. it will do the opposite.

I like to drive. I have a style and manner of driving that is fairly consistent. On the freeway, I drive so that I rarely have to use the brakes except for exiting, stop and go traffic, and the occasional slow driver who happens to change lanes without proper notice in front of me. For me, any use of the brakes on the freeway is wasted gas.

So I measure my inputs and distance between me and the next car. I let the friction working against the car to act as a natural brake. When approaching other cars in front of me, I try to estimate when to left off the gas so as to allow friction to slow the car down enough to match the speed of the car in front of me. This way I don't have to use the brakes to match the speed of the car ahead of me. In this manner, I made a set of brake pads last 60,000 miles.

I give trucks a wide berth and let them merge to be polite and to save fuel. I let people change lanes and often, they are off on their merry way. I move in ways that facilitate movement on the freeway because we share the road and there is plenty of room for all. I leave early to give plenty of time for a leisurely drive to my destination. I don't have to race to my destination.

I have had my share of speeding to get ahead of another guy. I know what it's like when someone gets ahead of me. With age, I began to realize that in a minute or two, I will have forgotten the other guy. Proving superiority to another guy on the freeway is about as useless as winning an argument with a drunk man. There is no point. But there is lost time. Time that could have been used to plan for better things.

In technology, I see one company pitting its resources against another to win. Microsoft is a great example. They have a "take no prisoners" philosophy. They structured their company so that even divisions within the company were competing against each other. They structured their review process so that someone was always pegged as the top guy and the bottom guy, with the bottom guy almost certainly dismissed. How are they doing now? Their stock has been going sideways for about ten years now. They have been overwhelmed by competitors because they do not play nice with others.

In politics I see one political faction pitting their resources against other factions, seeking an advantage over the other, with the intention of imposing its will upon the other. When one faction wins, the will of that faction will almost certainly be imposed upon others. Does this make anyone happier?

I don't think so. I've never seen it work. If a man works hard to build a business and finds a way to get employees to work for less money, fewer benefits, and that increases the company profits, does that make anyone happier? Anyone at all?

It is obvious that employees will be no happier. We would think that the employer would be happier. For a time, he may be happier, but only for a short time. His brain may be momentarily satisfied. But now, he has elicited resentments from his employees, so he seeks comfort from other employers to justify what he has done. He seeks comfort from the shareholders to approve what he has done. He insists that he is cutting back to save the jobs.

The painful reality is that his brain just wants more of something and money seems to provide temporary relief from that pain. Never mind that this executive has the force of law, contracts and the political support of his government to assert his advantage over others. That isn't enough. Whatever he's got, he wants more to settle the voice in his brain, to secure an advantage so that it will never be taken away.

This is the "wealth incumbency" that Jon Stewart talks about. People go into business to make their lives better. But for some business owners, it's "a battle", "a war", "a struggle" or some other euphemism to demonstrate a conflict. It is, to them, a contest of wills. If you see running a business as a contest of wills, you're probably not going to be happy running the business.

The Reagan Revolution, on its face, promised prosperity for all. The tax cuts to the wealthiest among us were held out to all as a carrot on a stick to encourage us to grow rich. But not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Not everyone has the desire or inclination to run a business. Most of us just want to work at a job we enjoy and take a middle class paycheck home to the family.

The tax cuts were not used to spread the prosperity around. They were used instead to build, secure and assert an advantage for the business owners over the rest of us. For example, the trend over the last 30 years has seen business investments move from labor to capital. This means that instead of paying employees to do the work, more automation is in use or, labor has been moved offshore. This resulted in exploding profits for the largest corporations. This is a tremendous advantage.

What will employers do with this advantage? They will use it to buy homes in gated communities, private security services, power generators for their homes, private schooling for their kids. They will seek distance from the middle class, both in economic and social terms to ensure that they no longer have to compete directly with the middle class or even have contact with them.

This isn't the culture imagined by the Founders of this country. They saw the problems with the aristocracy in England. They intended not to make the same mistake again, to create a level playing field for all. But their legacy has been subverted into yet another aristocracy.

It is not nice to build a ladder, climb it, and take it with you so that others cannot follow you. This is what the 1% have been doing for the last 30 years. They built an advantage over the 99% and then took the ladder away. Is anyone happy for this? I doubt it.

A new feature I discovered for YouTube

My wife Alice and I like to watch educational YouTube videos with Emily, our daughter. Alice has been checking out videos to find simple educational videos with numbers, letters and nursery rhymes and there are plenty. Among them, I strongly recommend Hoopla Kidz and Super Simple Learning. Navigating YouTube to play them is a snap on our phones and computers. We like to watch YouTube with our DVD player, too.

However, the YouTube app on our Samsung DVD player is incredibly dim-witted. It takes a couple of seconds for the cursor to advance with each press of the direction buttons. This makes for some arduous navigation to find videos we want to watch in YouTube. I've tried connecting a wireless keyboard to the DVD player, but it didn't much like that, preferring instead to make us navigate with a remote control to select characters, one character at a time to search.

While navigating the YouTube menus one day to get videos started for Emily, I went too far, unable to compensate for the speed of the cursor and landed on the Settings menu. Therein, I saw a box that said, "Pair With Device". I was aware that this could be done, but thought that only applied to the latest version of Android. My phone has Android 2.3 and the latest version is 4.3, so I didn't give it another thought until yesterday.

Yesterday, I paused at the Settings menu once more and reflected, "What if this works?" I pressed the right arrow key and selected Pair With Device. The screen presented me with a URL, a numeric code, and a barcode, I just love those barcodes. So I scanned the barcode with my phone and the phone prompted me with a URL. I tap on the URL and a web browser opens presenting me with a form is already populated with the number code entered. I scrolled down and tapped Add.

Then I open YouTube on my phone and notice a new icon at the top of the screen, a little rectangle with a wireless icon next to it, called "Send to TV". Now I can select a video with my phone and tell my DVD player to play it. Of course, the DVD player has to be running YouTube while my phone is running YouTube, but you get the idea.

To direct the DVD player running YouTube to play a video from my phone, I open the YouTube application on my phone. Then I select a video I want to play. This could be from play history, search results or a playlist. When I tap the video I want from my phone, the page for that video loads in the phone and I can tap Send to TV. Then the DVD player loads the selected video and plays it. Cool, huh?

YouTube navigation with my phone is far easier than with the DVD player. I also have a usable keyboard with the phone whereas the DVD player makes me work through a ridiculous onscreen keyboard which is also slow.

After making this discovery, I played around a bit with the new feature. I learned that I can select a video and play it, then send it to the TV in midstream. I can even manage the start point of a video from my phone and tell the TV to play from that start point. I also learned that I can select a playlist from my phone and there is a button called "Play On TV" so that I can send the entire playlist to the TV. Very interesting.

It's not exactly like the recently released Chromecast dongle, which streams from your phone or tablet to the Chromecast dongle, but it seems to work like that. I would think that streaming from your phone or tablet would run down the battery pretty fast. I haven't used Chromecast yet, but if I do, I'll let you know how that works.

The device pairing feature doesn't seem to stream from the phone when playing videos. Instead, it seems to direct the YouTube app on the DVD player to stream the video of choice. This conserves battery power on the phone as the wireless radio on the phone munches on battery power like potato chips. Sending directions to the YouTube app from the phone to play videos makes a lot more sense. With a little experimentation, I might figure out how to play entire playlists without further intervention once the playlist is started.

It's important to note that on the TV side, the device could be a Smart TV, DVD player or streaming device such as a Roku streaming player. On the other side, the device could be your phone, your tablet or even your computer. As long as you can get to the Add Device form from a browser and enter the numeric code, you should be able to direct the action of the target device on the TV side with no problems.

The Pair With Device feature for YouTube is a very cool innovation. It is not really an invention, as it is just an obvious extension of what the YouTube app on the phone and the DVD player can already do. I'm glad to find more freedom from the user interface in the DVD player and be able to use other devices to control YouTube on my TV. You might want to give it a try.

The Waves

I have a certain fascination with gravity. I like to see how things orbit, fall and roll. Waves are one of those things that roll. Today, I'd like to talk about the really big waves. You know, like Mavericks.

After seeing Strapped: The Origins Of Tow-in Surfing, I have a newfound respect for surfers. I am not a surfer, but I have always respected surfers as people who are intimately connected to the Earth. They understand the rhythm of the Earth, much like the farmers do, but in an entirely different context. Strapped raises my respect for surfers in new ways and provides ample eye candy in form of giant waves and the surreal contrast in scale. Imagine a wave that looks normal in every way, but nothing gives it scale until you see this tiny guy on a surfboard, on a gigantic wave. That's what we see in Strapped.

I have known a few surfers throughout my life and have found them to be calm, relaxed, and generally at ease with themselves. The only thing that seems to matter to them is current surf conditions. I know this because years ago, I was working a construction job in Newport Beach. I had to meet with the building engineer who happened to be a surfer. After we exchanged greetings for the morning, he took a deep draw of air through his nose, exhaled and said, "Hmmm. Smells like the wind is offshore today. I think I'll go surfing after work."

Strapped, shows us how the technology of the day has been adapted for use at places where big waves crest. At Mavericks, for example, waves often crest at 25 feet or more and waves as big as 80 feet have been witnessed. Strapped teaches us how they adapted the hydrofoil to the surfboard, creating a nearly frictionless glider that can keep up with the large waves.

The pioneers who figured out how to surf the really big waves learned how to adapt the hydrofoil to the surf board. The foilboard allows a surfer to glide on the wave with much less friction than a typical surf board because at certain speeds, the hydrofoil lifts the surfboard out of the water. With the board out of the water, surface contact between the board and the water is about a tenth of what it would be if the board were in contact with the water while riding.

Strapped also illustrates how jet skis can be used to rescue surfers in peril, quickly. With a 25 foot wave coming, getting in to rescue a downed surfer and getting out quick is not easy swimming by hand. A jet ski makes short work of this effort.

Strapped reminds me of the power of gravity, the weakest force of the four known forces of the universe (the others are the weak, strong and electromagnetic forces). The tidal forces at work to create the waves on the water don't seem like much at waters edge. But two miles out at Mavericks, the waves easily demonstrates how much power is at work as the Earth and the moon do their dance.

So if you're looking for a good surf movie, with some mechanics and science behind the craft, Strapped is a great film to watch.

A patent reversal for Apple

It is interesting to see the patent fight going on between Samsung and Apple. Since about 2010, these two giant companies have been sparring over patent rights in an effort to assert dominance in a very competitive cell phone handset market.

Very simply put, Apple started it. Steve Jobs declared that Android, the operating system running on Samsung phones, steals from Apple. From that point forward, Jobs pointed his legal army at Samsung to stifle competition from Samsung.

Samsung now has a very comfortable lead in handset market share over Apple, worldwide. But at home, Apple is still doing very well. But you wouldn't know it based on the latest news that President Obama stepped in to help Apple.

Samsung has been asserting standard essential patents against Apple at the International Trade Commission. Apple has been unwilling to negotiate fairly, claiming that Samsung is asking for royalties that are too high. Never mind that Apple has been demanding $30 per handset from Samsung to license Apple patents. Apple would surely like to put Samsung out of the cell phone business, but they cannot in a free market. Apple would also prefer to skate on Samsung's patents and if they could, still get $30 per phone from Samsung.

Ultimately, Samsung prevailed at the ITC and was awarded an exclusion order that would prevent some older model iPhones and iPads from being imported into the United States. To prevent the ugly spectacle of an American company being unable to import it's own products into the United States, President Obama has stepped in and vetoed the ITC's decision. Samsung will not get the exclusion order.

While President Obama talks highly of the innovators, he is clearly biased towards *domestic* innovators. It no secret that he would prefer that Apple prevail against foreign companies like Samsung. But to pick winners and losers like this is so unbecoming of him. Or maybe not. Maybe he had a debt to pay to Apple.

Had the exclusion order been upheld, Samsung could negotiate with Apple in good faith as Apple was unwilling to do so. Obama says that the parties can still fight it out in the courts. Maybe so, maybe not. I don't know. But watching what is going on with Microsoft vs Motorola suggests that it's going to be tough sledding for Samsung.

In Microsoft vs. Motorola, we have a similar argument over standards essential patents. Microsoft is asking a court in their backyard of Redmond, to rule against Motorola. Microsoft is asking the court to impose upon Motorola, a very, very low license fee for Microsoft to pay for standard essential patents. This is despite the fact that Microsoft is unwilling to negotiate in good faith. This idea that we can forum shop or assert home rules against a non-local entity is not in the spirit of free trade.

If Obama wants American patents to be honored abroad, he needs to rescind the veto of the ITCs decision and let the exclusion order stand. If not, then this decision could be the start of an entirely different patent war. A war where patents are not honored across borders. Is that what you want, Mr. President?

I want that. That would free up trade. That would prevent the continuation of the war on free software maintained by the patent owners of the software world, namely Microsoft. In some ways, what President Obama did is good. But if he's going to do it for Apple, he needs to do it for foreign companies when he thinks that patent owners are overreaching.

Treat everyone equally, Mr. President. Don't just act in favor of the home team.

Music on a quiet Sunday afternoon

I spent part of this afternoon, listening to one of my all time favorite CDs, Gymnopedies Gnossien, by the Jaques Loussier Trio. It is an amazing adaptation of classical music to jazz. The piano play is precision in music. The drums and the bass simply weave a background of music that literally twirls the ears around in some wild fantasy of simple sounds in a way that brings peace to my brain. It is by far, one of the best compilations of jazz I have ever heard.

I would not have taken an interest in it had I not been listening to public radio years ago and my father had not introduced me to jazz. It was my father who had also introduced me to Herbie Mann's classic album, Turtle Bay.

While these compilations are no doubt fantastic works of art, they leave something to be desired as they are only replicas. With every copy, there is some information lost due to the process of recording and replicating the recording. Like a copy machine with paper, with each succeeding copy, the resulting image or reproduction loses a little something from the original.

It was Neil Young whom I first heard complaining that the 44khz sample rate of CDs was not enough, not even close to what we get on vinyl disks. For a man who has toured the world and played on stage to large audiences, with giant amps behind him, I am surprised that he can hear so well as to find fault with CDs.

I remember my first CD player. I brought it to my friend Jerry's apartment to play Sgt. Pepper and he was astounded at the bright clarity of the playback. I thought CDs were cool because CDs were easy to care for, last for decades (I know, still I have CDs that I bought in 1988). The fact that they were compact, easy to store and wouldn't warp like vinyl had me sold.

Most of us these days, rarely handle CDs, though. I rip CDs soon after I buy them and play them on my computer, my phone or a computer at work if convenient. For the most part, I leave the CDs alone and let them rest for the day that I might need to rip them again in the next digital music format.

I am partially deaf in one ear and profoundly deaf in the other ear, yet I still find joy in music. I am aware of the iPod syndrome - deafness through iPod. The previous generation had Walkmans, but almost all of them have hearing aids now. I wear a hearing aid, too. I have long wondered what the brain does with the slight delay of the amplified sound through the hearing aid and from the hole in the mold that lets sound straight through. I suspect that the brain cannot tell the difference and if it does, well...the brain probably interpolates the sound just fine.

In some quarters, vinyl or analog music is making a comeback. Even vacuum tubes are being used in new electronics to give music that warm fuzzy sound we had with our old audio gear is coming back, too. There is something to be said about analog music, too. It just feels more natural to some.

But nothing can compare with listening to it live. Oh, how I would have loved to have been behind the glass in the control room while Jaques Loussier and his band were recording the Gnossiens. The magic in the room must have been mesmerizing.

For now, I can enjoy a quiet Sunday afternoon with this music playing as the clouds pass between me and the sun, changing the light in the room, and reminding me that this season soon will pass.

The hole in the tech news

Over the years, I've noticed a sort of hole in the tech news. Here's an example: Airports' passport controls SHUT DOWN by 'malware' - report. Reading this report, we only know that the passport control system at the airport in the city of Istanbul was shut down by malware. There is simply no mention of the operating systems used on the servers or the client machines that were used to host and manage the passport control system. Does the reporter assume that we know they're running Windows? Maybe. Maybe not.

What OS were they running? That is the first question I ask myself when I read articles such as these, yet, that is the piece of the story that is almost always missing.

Whenever I read "malware" stories, I think of Microsoft Windows. But reading through this short article, there is no mention of Windows whatsoever. This omission is not an isolated example.

Let's take one of the most interesting examples, the London Stock Exchange the first business day after the Federal Reserve announced that it would rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. That day was September 8th, 2008. On that day, the LSE was down for more than 7 hours while the rest of the world was trading on the news that the Fed was going to save the largest holders of mortgages in the US from certain doom.

Every report I read about this event waxed eloquent about the failure of the stock exchange that day, with one major detail omitted: what operating system was running at the time. As it turns out, the LSE was running their trading system on a .NET application platform on top of Windows servers. I didn't learn which operating system was running the trading floor at the LSE until I found this article more than two years later.

I venture to guess that Microsoft took great pains to keep those details out of the news. I suspect that Microsoft makes a monumental effort with every major failure of Windows Servers to keep that one detail out of the news. It would seem that they have had a great deal of success because it is mentioned in only very rare cases. I can easily see Microsoft threatening reports with the loss of access to key personnel for scoops if they should happen to let that detail get out.

It is sad to see that Microsoft, so eager to stomp on the faults of others, is so shy about monumental failures on their part, failures that cost others millions. Needless to say, the Windows trading system at the LSE was eventually replaced by a more reliable system running on Linux.

Microsoft is no longer dominant in the computing space as Windows is unable to dominate over free Linux and even non-free UNIX. Yes, there are still plenty of shops that run Windows, but the biggest shops are not using Windows Servers. Google, eBay and Amazon to name a few, don't use Windows on their servers. If they tried, Microsoft would simply raise their license fees to squelch a potential competitor out of business.

Microsoft is also no longer dominant in consumer computing devices and has been losing relevance since about 1995. The PC market is shrinking in favor of tablets and smartphones. Android, which also runs on Linux, owns 80% of the smartphone market. As a result of the shifts in the market, it is now estimated that Windows runs on a mere 20% of all network connected devices.

Perhaps reporters will find fewer inhibitions to reporting the failures of Windows in major service interruption events now that Microsoft no longer dominates over everyone else. Honest and complete reporting will allow businesses and consumers to make more informed choices about the software they wish to run on their computers.