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The Possibilities of a Driverless Car

In movies and television shows depicting the future, there are flying cars and cars that drive themselves — and sometimes a combination of the two. In the movie Total Recall, for example, there are taxi services that are entirely driven by robots. The promise of the future is that people will no longer have to drive if they don’t wish to do so, and that driving can be a more passive activity to be watched as though it were a form of entertainment of its own.

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The Jack of All Ills: How the Internet Democratized Medicine

I’m old enough and just craggy enough to remember the pure disdain medical doctors had  for the internets in the early 1990’s when the web was growing by bounds and grabbing the brains of any and every eager mind.  The reason doctors hated the internet was because open access to information diluted their expertise by egalitarian dissemination of research and the democratic propagation of information; and they resented it when patients knew more about a drug or a condition than they did.  Eager patients are hungry for information and becoming the master of a single pill or a defined diagnosis is much easier than having to worry about every single chemical condition and biological solution studied at medical school.  Patients are the masters of their ailments; doctors are the jack of all ills.

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David vs. the Google Goliath

We all love fighting a good moral brawl.  When Slide stole 3,000 fake money coins from me in April of 2009, I was livid and I wrote about it in the early morning hours of the 23rd:

I enjoy playing Slide.com’s SuperPoke Pets and I’ve raved about SuperPoke Pets and ranted about SuperPoke Pets. Today, I am enraged — not by the game I have come to love — but rather by the lack of an artful and loving Slide.com technical response to what should have been a simple problem to solve.  This is the story of a false accusation — an unfair incarceration of character if you will — and its ultimate unraveling in the light of indisputable, human, facts.

After I wrote my article, Google bought Slide for $200 million and recently decided to close down all the Slide games.  There is now no more SuperPoke Pets.  The game is over. People are furious.  I was intrigued that I was mentioned last week in a Facebook comments stream where people are trying to save the game:

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From 2400 Baud to OpenDNS

I’m going to date myself but bear with me. When I was a kid, long before the age of always on internet service providers, I would get up extra early before going to school to use my 2400 baud modem to connect to Bulletin Board Systems. Two important things to bear in mind here — one of them being that only one person could be using the system at once — hence why I would get up so early. The other thing was that everything was incredibly slow.

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The Greplin Review

In March 2011, I read a story online about the debut of Greplin, a new way of indexing the online nuggets of your life into a fast and easy to sift-through search interface.  I immediately signed up for the service on the first payment tier because I believe in paying to support what you love, and I really loved Greplin — for the first day or so — until I began to realize I had a lot of stuff to index and I was already running out of space on the service even thought I just got started.

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Uptick in Facebook Friend Requests in the Wake of Google+

I have a lot of Facebook friends, but I could have so many more if Facebook would allow me to “friend” more than 5,000 people and if others could “friend” me without getting a message that “this user has too many friends.”

The Facebook friends count is volatile as it jumps by a count of ten and then drops by ten throughout the day. One moment, you have 4,900 friends and the next time you update the page moments later, you’ve dropped down to 4,890 friends — that makes adding new friends a bit perilous and hard to predict because Facebook is sensitive if you try to add too many friends too fast, or if you accept too many new friendships too quickly.

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Bumping Your Head Against Comcast Data Caps

On September 5, 2008 I wrote an article — Comcast Kills the Internets – explaining, in detail, why Comcast’s broadband data cap of 250 gigs a month was a terrible idea set to freeze us all in their time and space for what we can and cannot do on the internet in the future.  Today, less than three years later, that prediction has horrifically come true.  When I read in Ozymandias that a user had been cut off from Comcast broadband and given a one year death penalty, I was alarmed, because I knew my concern had come true.  I checked “Users & Settings” on the Comcast website to check my account and broadband usage.

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