compareyourparents.com

new social network idea for kids - forget bebo; forget upyourstreet; forget freindsreunited; this is for kids to find out whether they ar e being shortchanged in the chores/pocketmoney stakes compared with their peers - fully anonymous, but culture/location are all taken into account - i think this'd be a must have for all 10 year olds:)

One Laptop Per Soul, proposal

we propose that there should be one laptop per soul - persons not carrying a laptop
shall be deemed to have no soul, and therefore can be terminated at anytime.

personas with more than one laptop may operate as terminators

persons termianting persons with laptops will have there laptops shutdown, and maybe subject to
a kill -9 at any time.

persons with non-sugar GUI laptops will be sent to bootcamp to learn better ways.

persons with laptops running any variant of Mac OSX or Windows shall be subject to
15 years kernel hacking in Siberia.

[* any similarity to an idea by Philip K. Dick, the UnPersons, is entirely intentional]

social net/recommendations, and turning tests

here's an idea

a turing test (like a capcha) should be based on whether someone can recognize a joke that a particular other person would find funny

oldcastle....in southwest crete - well networked...

i've been going to various parts of greece since 1967 - most recently, though, a frequenter of crete - way back when, we had a number of network projects and the Institute of Computer Science in the University of Crete (Heraklion and Chania but also a lab called Forth - chap called Stelios) as they had a technical clue - this shows up today as internet access on Crete is extremely good and seems to survive even power outages (the commercial ISP they started is forthnet:) - coz of this, people find time to have web sites and blogs about all sorts of news and views
and foods in a fave summer spot we are heading for in just 1 week - only worry this year is being blown away by the
current reported high winds - on the other hand, maybe we can go to some different drinking, swimming, walking and eating (not necessarily in that order) places because of this...

pointless networks

so i just upgraded my mac and now I have a bluetooth wireless mouse and keyboard on my desk - great - 2 less wires:-)

but then I have to reboot the mac whenever the batteries go flat and i replace them, coz it can't auto-rediscover the devices:(

so the uni just upagraded the entire phone net to cisco VOIP kit - and now instead of 1 wire on my desk fro mthe phone, I have 3 wires - what is worse is the phone is now inline in the ethernet between my mac and the department's switch, which means if it fails, my net access breaks.
what is worse still is I cannot "login" to the phone and upload/download my address book (or synch the address book between my cell phone, my email and the voip phone.

progress? I think not.

reasoning about intentions, in communications protocols

so we've seen a lot of work on trading packet headers for protocol state. indeed, we've also seen predictive state (for compression or estimating retransmit timers etc) based on past data.

and in mobile systems, we have seen work on predicting mobility based on past location or proximity or even mobility patterns of a set of nodes (related or otherwise by organisation or by transportation/geography)

but what about the next level, intention? nodes can publish their intentions easily (say in a tuple space or even in the mobile tracking service) - hence a car or phone with GPS/satnav, can publish its intended route - this means we can do not only geo-routing, but we could pre-plan handovers, retransmit timers and even radio power.

it would be interesting to generalise the idea of intention-based communication over other domains too -

webcam, webmike, and webprivacy?

so dominic and i were shoooting the breeze in burham overy staith, and
thoght to ask why are there so many webcams but almost no webmikes?
why do people regard being seen as less of an invasion of privacy than being
over (or under) heard?

eh?