I stumbled across Desktone, and I think it’s a brilliant service. I’d really like to try out a Desktop As A Service to see what it’s like… and how laggy it might be. This service would basically make being the “go-to IT guy for parents” a thing of the past. I could set my Dad up with a DAAS computer.. and rest easy knowing that he can’t “destroy” his operating system or do anything too bad because it’ll be backed up in the cloud and maintained by real IT admins. DAAS computers would also be great for kids to play with (depending on that laggy factor) — cuz there would be no worries about kids installing nasty viruses on my laptop. Thick clients are the wave of the future, methinks….
One of the drawbacks of hybrid cars is that there’s the extra weight of having both an internal combustion engine AND an electric motor. Why not try to combine the two devices so that they share more parts and save weight? I imagine there could be an engine where half (quarter?) of the cylinders are replaced by an “electric” cylinder — so when the car doesn’t need to be run on combustion, an electrically-powered cylinder runs the car. So the other cylinders stop igniting, and the “electric” cylinder(s) are driven by a small motor… If it’s possible to make an electrically-driven cylinder small and powerful enough to fit inside an engine, then maybe older cars could be retro-fitted with a hybrid engine — keeping the old transmission and all the other existing parts.
California has started to encourage the development of electronic textbooks, and it seems like educational materials are becoming more widely available in digital formats since the costs of distribution are declining as the internet is more accessible. I saw an ad for online K-3 homeschooling lessons on Facebook, and I figured there must be more open organizations who are developing lesson plans and courses. The Peer-to-Peer University (P2PU) seems to be just such an organization. I think it is incredibly awesome that education is being crowdsourced and made freely available online. I just wonder how folks will try to profit from these efforts. I assume the “accreditation” is the tricky part for any online education, but I’d think the GED test should handle the K-12 accreditation. It’s the university-level accreditation that might always cost students money. But maybe not?
Unmanned aircraft are the future of aviation, so creating more and more F-22’s didn’t make that much sense to me — especially when we have almost 200 of them already. And it’s not like we’ll never know how to make them again — in case we ever change our minds and think we need more F-22’s. So I’m not exactly heart-broken that the Senate voted to end the production of these fighters. I’m sorta wondering why the airforce isn’t trying to augment pilots with unmanned aircraft that autonomously follow their leader and carry extra weapons… but I’m probably over-estimating the capabilities of current autonomous planes.
Ok, here’s another crazy idea. Back in the day, countries used to ship off their prisoners and undesirables to undeveloped places… like the US and Australia. We could still do that.. except we’d have to ship prisoners to Antarctica — and the legal questions could be a bit tricky for that (see Cuba?). So instead of shipping off inmates to legal limbo, how about house them where the law is clear (ie. not international waters) but in self-contained environments? I don’t think it’s inhumane to house prisoners in a bio-dome (unless the air runs out or something).. Obviously, we’d want to keep them alive and treat them humanely, but why not learn about self-contained environmental systems while we’re at it? And escape would be impossible because the self-contained system would have “air-locks” for visitors or guards… Um. I’m sure this has been some kind of science fiction story… but isn’t all science fiction slowly becoming reality…
A bunch of economists are saying that “the worst is over” with regard to the economy — but the justifications for this sentiment are somewhat rare (or debatable). NPR ends an article on the topic with an interesting data point, though.
“Manufacturing overtime hours is one of the best leading indicators to monitor if you want to understand where the economy stands in the business cycle…”
I saw this new website gdgt.com which aims to one-up sites like Engadget and Gizmodo… but that got me to thinking… something similar would be a LOT more valuable to the eBay community. I’d think that a wiki-like resource that documented all the “hacks” (and other user-generated instruction manuals for gadgets on eBay) would be a great way to promote second-hand gadgets and other consumer goods. Anything that would help the resale value to eBay items helps eBay, right? So eBay should probably try to develop a database of second-hand hacks — or buy it from a community of folks who generate such a resource.
Apparently, if you run a bunch of calculations, you can determine that there’s enough wind energy to cover the world’s energy need 100 times over. I really like the idea of airborne wind generators, but I assume there’s a catch. There’s also enough solar energy to power the world, too, but we haven’t figured out how to capture it economically without blanketing the world in solar panels or algae vats. There’s probably enough energy in global lightning events to power all human eletricity needs as well. And there’s definitely enough nuclear fission material to power the world indefinitely. But there’s always a problem like: where do you store the nuclear waste? How do you economically grow biofuels? For wind, it’s where do you set up the high-flying generators… and how will these generators affect weather patterns…? I wonder if anyone has calculated the possible effects on climate from generating vast amounts of energy from high-altitude wind? hmmm.
