2.1.2K8: Food for fuel? What a double-mistake

While the world reacts to the issue of global warming, the U.S. continues to fight for oil. As the rest of the world seeks more efficient, less polluting power sources, the U.S. is working fervently to convert more and more of its farmland to the production of ethanol. Ethanol is simply another form of hydrocarbon fuel, like oil, so it is intended to be "cut" into our present oil-based fuel system and extend our fuel resources.

The U.S. hopes that other countries will appreciate the fact that ethanol does not pollute quite as much as oil, and that as it is derived from vegatable matter, it is in effect a renewable resource. However, in its fervor to supplement its oil, the country's officials are making two major mistakes. First, by supplementing our oil-based fuel system, the plan is delaying the need to switch to more efficient and less polluting fuel systems, essentially delaying the inevitable. Considering the fact that America needs to reverse its carbon footprint yesterday, and bring us down to 1990 levels (and preferably below), allowing our fuel systems to continue to function as-is, is simply not helping.

The other mistake concerns the little matter of: What is everybody gonna eat?

The U.S. is still known as The World's Breadbasket, and for good reason: We produce a significant amount of the grain and grain-fed meat for the world to eat, on a daily basis, year-round. But as we convert our farmland to subsidy-based ethanol production, we are already reducing the amount of food that will be available to other countries, including agri-poor countries like Africa that desperately need every bit of grain they can get.

Food prices are already rising steeply, as grain is converted to ethanol production and eating grain becomes less abundant. This will cause shortages, as well as the diversion of available food to the richer countries, speeding up the slow starvation of countries like Africa. As early into the ethanol boom as we are, we are already impacting world food availability. The U.S. is quite literally taking food out of the mouths of babes, in order to keep its cars running.

This is the 800-pound gorilla in the room... or, to be more apt, the grizzly bear in the room, and we ignore it at our peril. Sooner or later, that grizzly is going to figure out that we're denying it food to maintain our own luxury lifestyles, and I predict it won't take it well. Once it decides that it needs our food, and enough is enough, there won't be much to stop it from biting us. Hard.

Expending our money and efforts on converting as much of our country's systems away from oil-based fuels, and more towards solar, wind, geothermal and hydropower, would be much more sensible in the long run than extending our oil-based fuel economy with ethanol. In the short-term, the effort to move past oil will be difficult. But it will be made a bit more workable if the rest of the world is convinced that we are actually doing our part, and not using the situation as an excuse to burn their food in our gas tanks.

2.5.2K8: Aerial deja-vu

This just in: American automakers have decided to faze-out the good old car radio antenna. Newer model cars will in the future be equipped with thin wire aerials built into the car's windshield. Why? Because old-fashioned antennas sticking off of a car's body affect its drag co-efficient, causing the vehicle to burn more gas to get around.

You heard right: Automakers are ditching car antennas to cut back on the drag they cause, to save gas mileage. The oil industry is in deep s**t now.

Now, if you're not already laughing, there's more: This has actually already been tried... in the 1970's, during that last gas crisis you may have heard about. My family owned an Oldsmobile station wagon equipped with one of those in-the-windshield aerials, and at the time, we thought it was the coolest thing (because that's how we talked back then).

So, the question is, if this has been done before, over 25 years ago... why aren't we already all driving with them now? For the simple reason that in-windshield aerials don't work as well as stick antennas. And once everybody realized it back then, they went back to putting stick antennas on people's cars (and added the ability to telescope down, so you didn't have to see it if you didn't want to).

Welcome to the 21st century, where no stupid idea is left un-recycled.

2.12.2K8: Random act of foolishness?

Venerable publisher Random House has decided to try an experiment: They plan to sell individual chapters of a popular book, online, to gauge reader interest.

This might sound reasonable at first, but of course, the devil is in the details: Random House will be selling chapters of an already-popular (and available in one piece) book, "Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die." They plan to sell all 6 chapters, plus the epilogue, separately. And each chapter will sell for $3 (I refuse to acknowledge the whole $2.99 thing. It's so incredibly juvenile and transparent as to be insulting). The Reuters article does not specify the electronic filetype, but most are assuming that it will be limited to being read on a computer (as opposed to being able to download it to an e-book reader, PDA, or other mobile device), and will probably include DRM restrictions.

Do the math, and you come up with $21 for an e-book, which most e-book consumers consider to be a ridiculously high price. You are also being offered a limited product that does not compete with existing products: E-books can generally be downloaded to any mobile device for reading, and DRM is already in the process of being phased out by most e-book publishers.

Maybe Random House believes consumers won't want the entire book, but are only interested in one or two of the individual chapters, which they will be willing to pay for and forego the rest of the book. It seems an odd theory to me, but RH may know better than I about such things. Still, even buying one chapter, at $3 per chapter, seems like a stretch, and two or more like a clear ripoff. Altogether, there doesn't seem to be much of a reason to go for this offer.

Perhaps RH is trying to make a different point here? Maybe they are trying to demonstrate to a stockholder, or an author pressuring them to join the rest of us in the 21st century, that e-books aren't what they're cracked up to be? Maybe they want everyone to see that they are so far out-of-the-loop on digital documents that everyone will stop bothering them about e-books? (They do sell them, though you have to do a bit of searching to find them on their website.)

Well, I suppose time will tell. I can make one prediction: I believe their "experiment" will reveal that consumers don't like the idea of being ripped off with overly-expensive digital documents.

2.19.2K8: An online voting proposal

I recently sat through an online presentation that demonstrated how the vendor's software could handle, among other things, online voting. Voters would be able to vote online during the polling period, and the system would tally the votes once the voting period was over. Quite a few of my fellow participants, including myself, perked up at what we saw as a very logical and effective online voting system, and had a good discussion about it afterward.

Our conclusion was that the online voting system, expanded to a local, state or national level, could be very workable, if only two things were worked out first: The robust-ness of the system; and its ability to positively ID voters. Although some people might disagree, I think the former issue is much more critical to solve than the latter. The last thing a major vote needs is unreliable equipment, and this issue must be solved first and foremost. The ideal system would, of course, never go down... but this is highly unlikely to be possible. Instead, you build into it a way of dealing with the inevitable problems that do occur, making system crashes as much a non-issue as possible.

To deal with system glitches, I'd propose a locally-operated parallel-storage voting system. As the voter records their choices, the processor would register the vote with both systems, which would then poll each other to make sure both results match, then poll the voter to make sure their result was what was intended. Once the voter confirms, both storage systems will record the vote, and send back a confirmation of what they recorded, which can be printed out or stored locally for later recall.

Once the vote was confirmed, both of the parallel-storage system processors would send the vote tally, in an encrypted form, to a centralized or master parallel storage system, which would also confirm the vote against both systems before recording it. If the incoming vote comparison did not match from both systems, the printout at the local system would be checked to provide confirmation and select an accurate vote, or kick both votes out. Final tallying of votes would compare votes registered with the master parallel-processor against each local parallel-processor, again providing back-up confirmation of final results.

This double-double-confirmation system would prevent the chance of crashes, signal glitches or direct hacking corrupting data. It would also protect against loss of data, since votes will be less likely to be lost in transmission without the voter being immediately aware of it (they won't get confirmation), and later tallying can be checked against the confirmation printout. This system would also allow voters to vote at a voting station, or they could vote from wherever they were online... an advantage because, if one system (say, the one at your house) goes down, you can still get to a voting station and vote.

So, if that works... what about the other problem, verifying the voter? To do that, the voter's identity needs to be verifiable, at any voting location, including at home; and this depends on having the proper tools to do the verification. This is actually not as difficult as it sounds, but it involves having a secure ID system in-place to do it.

Enter the National ID Card, the object pushed by the Federal government, and dreaded by most everyone else. Americans are leery of a national ID system and mandatory card, which would theoretically allow their every move to be tracked coast-to-coast. In fact, this capability is already in-place thanks to most state driver's licences, so most of those fears are unwarranted. But for the sake of online voting, a standardized form of identification would be absolutely required. Further, it would need to be combined with a non-counterfeit-able form of personal ID confirmation, such as biometric data—a fingerprint, for instance—to compare to the national ID data and confirm your identity.

The process would work like this: The voter would go to any computer and identify themselves, using the ID card. Then they would verify their identity against the card (because ID cards can be stolen), with a biometric ID check that must match the card's data. Then they would be able to vote, and a unique number would be generated from their ID card to be encrypted with the vote. Any vote without such an encrypted number would be invalid. And a voter's identity could be confirmed afterward by using the same ID data to re-generate the encrypted number and match it against the vote.

For this system to work, a voting computer would have to be able to read the ID card, and take the biometric data. Today, fingerprint sensors are cheaply available for all computers, and can be installed at home, allowing anyone to apply fingerprint scans to daily use. However, there is no standardized card reader system in use, so a standardized card-reading system, possibly similar to a credit card swipe-reader or a UPC code scanner, would need to be devised and disseminated. This has not yet been done, but technologically there is no reason why it cannot be done.

Again, if a voter did not have this equipment at home, they could go to a voting station to vote. But the added convenience of being able to vote securely at home may be enough reason for most citizens to willingly purchase the equipment for themselves (it could even be made tax-deductible, considering the savings that could be gotten from fewer and smaller voting stations). This could even be considered incentive to obtain a National ID card, something that is presently lacking in promotion of the card, and which could take some of the perceived sting out of it.

The system described above does not require any technologies that are not already in existence, so I believe it could be done practically and efficiently, providing private- or public-location use, ID confirmation, voter confirmation, and multiple-point vote confirmation in one system. But will it be done? Or, for that matter, will any electronic voting system ever be adopted in the U.S.? I believe it will, the only question will be how soon.