A drug that is 100% adictive after a single dose

It is easy to be in favor of legalizing pot. People should be allowed to to make their own choices, even if that means they might make choices that we think are mistakes.

But what if there was a drug that was absolutely 100% permanently physically addictive after the first dose? The drug is cheap and easily available. Once you’ve had your first dose, you are miserable until you get the next one. Repeated use kills quickly and quietly. I’ll call it “Slack”.

Every person who has ever tried Slack now regrets it and wishes they could quit, but they can not. It’s addiction is too strong. Even so, new people continue to try it and get hooked.

Would you be in favor of legalizing Slack?

Invalid answer: “There is no such thing as a 100% addictive drug!” (this is the answer I once got at an otherwise very interesting a drug addiction roundtable.)

Possible valid answer:

“There is no substantive difference between making the single bad decision to try that first dose of Slack and the repeated bad decisions people make to continue to take less addicting drugs. Part of the cost of freedom is that people sometimes make bad choices for themselves – and they suffer the consequences.”

I think that is logical, but contradicts the general human principal of proportional consequences. I think we all intuitively sense that the bigger a mistake, the more severe the consequences can be.  It does not seem right to allow a Slack user to die as punishment for single moment of bad judgement. It seems like we should want to stop them from doing something that we know is a mistake – and something that even they will eventually agree is a mistake.

There is no drug like Slack today, but I’m not sure that it matters. What if a drug was only 99% addictive and deadly rather than 100% – would that change things? How about 98%? Or 90%? At some point we are talking about heroin or crack, and eventually we get down to StarBucks.

How do we define the line between a drug that should be illegal and one that should not?

YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST: LogMeIn.com data breach!

I am now almost certain that LogMeIn.com has suffered a data breach. How do I know? You can read about it here…

A spam more than 13½ years in the making

The actual trigger phishing email is pasted below. If you have ever had an account with LogMeIn.com, you should expect to get this email soon (if you have not gotten it already). Any other information that you’ve ever given to LogMeIn.com is also now potentially compromised.

This is particularly distressing because the LogMeIn.com service allows people to remotely control your computer. Yikes. If you have LogMeIn installed, then the prudent thing to do is to remove it until we get more details to the extent of the problem.

Could there be any connection to the (very recent, very sudden) announcement that LogMeIn.com was immediately stopping their popular free service offerings? We’ll see…

In other disturbing news- it looks like eFax.com does not have an SPF record which could have mitigated this phishing attack. Come on guys, there is no excuse for this and it makes you look really bad.

Subject: eFax message from 16023994730 - 1 page(s), Caller-ID: 602-399-4730
From: eFax.com <messages@inbound.efax.com>

Fax Message [Caller-ID: 602-399-4730]

You have received a 1 page fax at 2014-01-27 05:45:50 CDT.

* The reference number for this fax is min1_did13-1329191075-6023994730-49.

View this fax online, on our website : http://www.efax.com/fax/fax_view.aspx?fax_id=XXXXXXXXXXX
Please visit www.eFax.com/en/efax/twa/page/help if you have any questions regarding this message or your service.

Thank you for using the eFax service!

Read this before you “contribute” to an Indiegogo campaign!

Indiegogo is a site that lets you give money to people. It is not a site that lets you buy things from people. There is a big difference.

According to their Terms Of Service….

All Contributions are non-refundable by Indiegogo and are made in your sole discretion and at your sole risk based on your sole determination and evaluation of the Campaign. You are solely responsible for determining the tax deductibility of any Contribution.

[…]

Indiegogo does not represent, warrant or guarantee:

  • Perks will be delivered;
  • Perks will be satisfactory to you; or
  • The use of any Contributions or the outcome of any Campaign. It is up to you, as the Contributor, to ask such questions and undertake such due diligence as you deem necessary before you make a Contribution. Indiegogo may, in its sole discretion and judgment but is under no obligation to, seek the refund of Contributions.

This means that you should not expect to get your money back from IndieGogo if the campaign takes the money and runs. If you don’t get the perk you were promised, it is up to you to try to sue the Campaign Owner.

This is fine if the campaign is to buy a bus ticket for your best friend’s grandma, and the perk is that she will bake you some cookies. This not fine if you think you are buying an $800 high tech product from someone who lives on the other side of the planet.

I am all for Indiegogo’s “let the people decide who to trust, we just facilitate” strategy. They are like the Criagslist to KickStarter’s curated eBay.  I love both Craigslist and eBay, and there is a role for both models. Criagslist goes out of its way to make it very clear that they are only an open listing service and that you are dealing with whoever posted the listing, so beware. Indeogogo does not.

The Indiegogo site is filled with the language and iconography of a product sale. The various “perks” are listed as products with prices and estimated delivery dates just like you’d see on Amazon.com or Gap.com. They even show a “2 of 10 left” inventory – implying that 10 of the perk actually ever existed in the first place. When the inventory of a perk is gone, it is labeled with the words “SOLD OUT”. What was sold here?

Capture

Come on guys, this is clearly designed to look like you are buying something and not just giving your money to someone.  And the users are clearly fooled. Taking a look at the comments, people say stuff like…

  • How does one change from a purchase of the $99.00 25 watt system to the $239.00 100 watt system?
  • Missed out on the 1kW deal – is there any chance that you will extend it? Would really like to have purchased 4 units.
  • I seperately ordered 2 × 500W panels and one 25W panel. I added the 70 USD shipping for the 2 500W panels to the payment of the 25W panel as I forgot before. Hope that’s ok. Looking forward to the product!
  • So if I buy one of the 500w, all I have to do is “plug n play”?

The comments speak for themselves – these people believe that they are buying a product, and understandably so.

And while IndieGogo does talk about the democratic nature of crowd funding and the need for you to ask questions and make your own decisions, you are not allowed to post a question until after you’ve committed to give your money. That would be ok, except for the fact that once you have committed your money so you can publicly ask your question, there is no way to then cancel your commitment if you don’t like the  answer you get! Kafka! This is not compatible with helping the crowd generate and share information so people make informed decisions, and I can not think of any good business or strategic or legal reason why you would stop people from canceling a contribution any time while the campaign is still running. Can you?

Indiegogo needs to get their act together. At very least make it so people can ask public questions before committing money. And then make it so people can cancel a contribution when they find out something that sours them on it. Then change the user interface so it is clear that you are giving money and not buying something. The only action button on a campaign page should be “I want to give money to this campaign!” rather than a product selection rubric. The next page can show the “perks”, but with plenty of disclaimer language like “These are some things the campaign may be able to send you as a thank you for your contribution, but IndieGogo makes no representations as to the campaign’s ability to actually deliver these goods, and your only recourse if you are unhappy to try to sue [insert campaign lister’s name here] directly.”

Not sexy, but at least honest.

UPDATE 11/29/2018

Indegogo announced a “guaranteed ship” program that sellers can opt into..

https://support.indiegogo.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003370187-Marketplace-Guaranteed-Shipping-Policy-FAQ-for-Buyers

…but note that it is only for “marketplace” orders and not for crowdfunding campaigns. Marketplace is basically a marketing and shopping cart service for existing products.

 

 

Not another fake plug in grid tie solar system…

Update 3/18/2017:

As of last week, the SOLARLIBERATOR.COM website is gone. Considering there has not been a indegogo update in more than a year, I’m calling this one done. :(

 

Every couple of years another plug-in grid tie system is announced with much fanfare (like here and here), and inevitably it ends up being either (best case) overly optimistic vaporware or (worst case) a fraudulent scam.

My friend Augie (who somehow knows about everything new that shows up on the entire Internet) just found the latest one here on Indiegogo…

Capture
Solar Liberator claims to be offering a 500 watt grid-tie solar system that you plug-in into an outlet.

I do not know what you will get if you order this item, but I do know that you will not get a 500 watt grid-tie solar system that plugs into an outlet. No way.

First off, I can almost guarantee that no matter what you get, it will not include a 500 watt solar panel. I’ve bought a lot of solar panels – large and small – and I’ve been tracking the various sizes and types for the past 10 years, and there is no such thing as a 500 watt solar panel. There is a good reason for this – a 500 watt solar panel would be so large (about 50 square feet) that you would have to ship it (extremely carefully!) by freight truck which would probably cost as much as the panel itself. So maybe they meant they would send you two 250 watt panels…

The best case scenario is that you will get a Solar-in-Box clone. This seems very unlikely since I have never heard from the Solar Liberator people, and based on their Indiegogo site they do not seem to have a deep understanding about how this stuff actually works.

Maybe a box with a solar panel, a charge controller, and AC charging adapter, a battery, and an inverter tossed in. There are lots of these system currently available, so if this is what you want then just buy it on Amazon today and do not risk giving your $700 to Solar Liberator.

Most likely you will just wait a very long time to find out that there are all kinds of unforeseen design and production problems and you will end up getting nothing (or at least nothing like what you were promised).

How do I know this? There are lots and lots of signals I can point to looking at the pitch page, but the one I want to highlight here is simple – you can not make a safe residential plug in grid-tie system.

If one of the circuits in your house starts drawing more power than the wires on that circuit can safely handle, the breaker (or fuse) turns off the circuit before anything gets hot enough to start a fire….

overload

If you add a solar system that feeds power into an outlet on that circuit, you prevent the breaker from seeing and sensing the overload and cutting power. Now the wires are carrying more current than they can safely handle so they get hot and can start a fire.

no overload

What if I make sure that I never plug anything into that circuit except for the solar panel?

That could technically work because it would be the electrical equivalent of a dedicated circuit, but do you know which outlets in your house are on the same circuit? Are you sure? Even if you do, can you absolutely guarantee that no one will plug something else into the other outlets? For the next 20 years?

This is  is why the National Electric Code (and every local code I know of) require a dedicated breaker for any back-feed power source. (This means that even if they did make the described product  that it could not be eligible for the Residential Renewable Energy Tax Credit.) I am no lover of codes, but this one does make sense.

That is why the design of Solar-in-a-Box is special. It never back feeds into the house wiring, and so all conductors are always protected from overload.

What if I derate the circuit and install a breaker that is smaller to account for the additional power generated by the solar backfeed?

You could do this, but opening up a service panel and swapping out breakers is not a plug-and-play job. If you are willing to open your panel, you can just install a dedicated circuit for a proper (and legal) solar backfeed.

What is the take away message?

If you ordered the Solar Liberator 500W system on Indegogo, you should try to cancel your order and get your money back.

Is there any good news?

The good news is that success of this campaign proves that there is market demand for a plug-in solar system. Maybe it is finally time for someone to mass produce Solar-in-a-Box?

New Questions:

If Solar in a Box is such a good product, why ISN’T it marketing itself through crowd-funding? (new)

I do not have the time or skills to manufacture, distribute, and market it. I’ve instead done everything I can to make it easy for someone who does have the time and the skills to do it. I’ve explicitly not patented anything about it. If you want to mass produce a Solar-In-The-Box design, the only payment I request is the right to purchase the first one off the line!

Its easy to be cynical, but advances are made all the time, and a 500w panel in is not that farfetched, especially with the stepped up R&D and production from China. (new)

According to the dimensions on the campaign page, the 500W panel would be 102”x52”x2.7”. That is 8.5 feet by 4.3 feet. Think about how big that is. Have you ever tried to carry a full sheet of drywall? Well, this solar panel would be bigger than that.

It is also 102” of length and 109” of girth. It would not be shippable by any standard carrier in the USA (USPS, FedEX, or UPS). Shipping problems aside, you would never want to make one that big anyway because it would be extremely large, fragile, and heavy.

You could easily ship two 250W panels for the same effect, but they make it clear though text and photos that this is not what they are offering. This is a very silly issue. To me, it indicates that, at the very least, they have not thought though the simplest practical details of actually manufacturing and distributing such a system.

I believe the reason the campaign has been so successful is that their answers feel authenticate and verifiable, and the technology seems viable, and the team has that feeling of dedication and fervor we all want to believe in. (new)

I agree – unfortunately there is a big difference between feeling authentic and seeming viable and actually being authentic and being viable. Actually making things like this takes a lot of work and effort and research – good sounding marking is not enough. It is not good enough to seem viable when you are taking $350K $412K worth of peoples’ money for a product that you actually have no idea how you will actually make. Keep in mind that Indiegogo does not do anything to vette these projects or try and give people their money back then the projects do not deliver. Indiegogo’s terms of use explicitly say… “Indiegogo does not represent, warrant or guarantee: (i)Perks will be delivered; (ii)Perks will be satisfactory to you”.  If you are one of the people who contributed towards this project, I’d strongly recommend that you try to cancel your contribution because it is extremely unlikely that you will ever get anything like what you expect and were promised.

If there’s a short, the breaker will still trip. (new)

Depends on the short. Most household fires are not caused by zero ohm busbar shorts. Most fires are caused by stuff like a nicked high gauge wire (closing a door on your x-mas tree light cord) or a loose conductor inside an appliance or junction box. Have you personally ever blown a breaker? If so, I bet it was not a zero ohm short – probably a 20-50 amp overload.

But that is not the problem I’d be most worried about – I think the more likely scenario is that someone plugs in a space heater while someone else is blow-drying their hair.  Have you ever blown a breaker in a situation like this? If you had a Solar Liberator or that breaker might not have blown, and you could have had a fire inside your wall instead.

In your example, I could determine which circuit the panel is plugged into and replace the breaker with one with a lower rating. (new)

First off, this would involve opening the service panel. This is not the plug-and-play solution promised and is probably illegal for many people (or at least requires a permit). Plus, if you are willing and able to crack your service panel, then you mind as well just install a proper and legal direct backfeed circuit and save all this hassle.

More importantly, this is a not real world solution since you would need some way make sure that the plug coming from the solar system could only ever get plugged into a derated circuit. That would mean inventing a brand new kind of plug for the solar system that would be rejected by a normal receptacle. You’d need to get this new plug type listed and manufactured and added to every electrical code in the county. Now you’d need to install this new kind of receptacle on the drated circuit. Essentially you are talking about effectively creating a dedicated circuit- just doing it a harder and impractical way. Again, this is not a plug-and-play solution and ends up being harder than just dropping a proper dedicated backfeed.

Keep in mind that codes and listings are all about making products failsafe in normal use case by people who do not know the codes. A 20A plug is designed so that it physically can not fit into a 15A receptacle because that could cause an overload. A standard prong plug means “the thing that is connected to this plug only draws power”.  You cannot get UL listing for any device that who’s safety depends on people never accidentally plugging a normal plug into a normal socket.

Also, the Solar Liberator says you can daisy chain up to 4 panels of 500 watts each. That’s a peak current of 16 amps. What this means is that you are going to overload a standard household NEMA 1-15 or 5-15 outlet BY DEFAULT just by plugging in on a sunny day. I know that you are then going to say that you could put a NEMA 1-20 plug on the solar thing. This is not what is shown in their pictures or mentioned in the text (“For grid-tie- Just plug into a wall socket!”) – clearly not something they even thought about.

What is your technical expertise/background, if you dont mind my asking? i am not trying to be snarky here (new)

I own a 10 acre, 25kw grid tie solar farm (huge at the time is was commissioned), I was amazed at how hard and expensive the process to install it was. My first thought was to make a plug-in grid-tie system like what Solar Liberator claims to be, but after doing a little research I discovered that it is impossible to make a safe and legal plug-in grid tie system. This means that the Solar Liberator founders either (1) did not do even cursory research or prototyping before listing the product they claim to be able to make, or (2) they know it is not possible and have no intention of ever producing it.  Either way the people who are contributing to them will like likely be disappointed with the outcome.

Still searching for the perfect online backup

Crashplan has been working ok for me for the past year, but it still has some rough spots and flakes. It occasionally just gets stuck and there is no obvious reason why. A reboot sometimes fixes it, but not always. I really want to find a rock solid backup so I never have to think about it again.

The new year is here, so i decided to try BackBlaze. I *loved* their writeup on hard drive reliability. It is nice to see that they think hard about this stuff.  Their pricing model is also very generous at $5/mo for unlimited size.

Unfortunately Backblaze disappointed me.

The user interface is very simple – too simple in fact. There is no way to figure out what is going wrong when something goes wrong. It gives very unhelpful feedback. Does “Backup Paused” mean that I paused the backup – or it paused itself for some reason? Occasionally it would popup a box saying “Subscription expired” and take me to web web page showing my non-expired subscription. There is no way to tell it to not backup my C: drive, which on my machine is a small SSD boot drive with no data. Argh. But I think I could live with these annoyances if I had too.

But the real deal breaker came when I went to restore an older version of my Outlook PST file – which is probably the most important and most frequently updated local file on my system – and found that it was not in the BackBlaze backup at all.

A search for “Outlook” in BackBlaze’s support system brings up a page that assures…

Will Backblaze backup my email?

Yes, Backblaze will backup your email if it is locally stored on your computer. Email applications like Outlook, Outlook Express, Apple Mail, Entourage, Thunderbird, Eudora will all have their email backed up.

Also, Backblaze will only backup the difference to the email database (PST, DBX, Database, etc.) and will NOT re-upload the entire email database.

My email is definitely stored locally on my machine, so i should be good. Maybe the backup was still running? The app window was clear in its message…

img2

Further, the app’s “What is being backed up link?” brings you to a page with the title “BackBlaze backs up all your data”. Yet, clearly all my data was NOT backed up.

An email to BackBlaze support got a swift reply stating…

Backblaze cannot open files that are open, so if you are leaving your PST file open at all times Backblaze will never be able to back it up.

Outlook does keep the PST files open, so they will never be backed up by BackBlaze.

Wow. The failure here is not that BackBlaze can not backup open files (although it really should). The failure is that it told me that it backed up all my files, but in fact did not. There is no way I could have known that my data was not actually being backed up if I had not happened to check.

Silently not backing up data while explicitly stating that all data is backed up is about the biggest failure a backup program can have (short of deleting your local data!).

I am surprised that 10 years later, still no one can apparently get online backup right. This is not that hard of a problem.

Backup coop used to show you a list of files that had not been backed up yet, sorted with oldest first. It didn’t care why the file was not backed up – if the file on the local hard disk was different from the file on the backup – then the file was not backed up and you needed to know this. Fail-safe. You could set an alarm to let you know if the oldest not-backed-up-file was older than a certain amount of time (say, 1 hour or 1 week) so you’d know for certain that if you lost everything at this moment, you would never loose more than the specified amount of work.

Illiterate Intelligentsia?

Learning to read and write is very hard.

It takes years and years of constant practice to train our brains to seamlessly convert a visual pattern of shapes into an internal auditory stream of speech that we can understand. You might not remember how hard it was to learn to read, but if you have kids in elementary school then you know what I am talking about.

Clearly our brains were not designed for this type of task – it is only though force of will that we coerce them to do it.

Teaching reading and writing is similarly difficult. Our societies have developed a class of people dedicated to accomplishing the task. In the USA, we publicly fund an army of 3 million people whose primary function is to teach our kids to be literate members of society. Each one of these teachers has themselves had years of specialized training just to learn how best to teach these skills. We even require them to be licensed like doctors and lawyers.

Compare this to listening and talking – tasks our brains are clearly well suited for.

Verbal auditory creation and comprehension are a built in feature in human brains. We get them for free with no overhead. When we think to ourselves “I need to stop at the store and get milk”, we naturally do it by talking and listening to an internal verbal monologue. We do not create the visual representation of the letters ‘I–N-E-E-D-T-O-….” on an internal screen.

Almost all children learn to talk and listen without any conscious effort at all. Almost all parents are competent at teaching auditory fluency with no formal training.

So why we spend so much time and money and effort learning and teaching and promoting and testing literacy if it is so damn hard and we are so innately bad at it?

For the past 1,000 years, literacy was a fundamental requirement for participation in the intellectual world.

If you wanted to get ahead in this modern world, you needed to learn to read and write good.

The printed (or carved or pressed) word is an amazing technological achievement. I can read a text from 1,000 years ago and/or 10,000 miles away and precisely receive the knowledge the writer embodied. I can even make a copy of the text to take home with me so others can do the same. A single text can reliably disseminate a vast amount of knowledge to millions of people. Compare this to the telephone-game of auditory knowledge passing where you are lucky if you can a full sentence reliably passed on to a dozen friends over the course of a few seconds.

We are great at auditory speech- but it is a horrible medium for information storage and dissemination.

Until very recently literacy was the only reliable way of storing and sharing information. This is why we spend a huge amount of effort teaching people to read and write. It has allowed us to act as a single massive and long-lasting superintelligent Superorganism. No matter how hard it has been to create and master literacy, it was well worth it.

But times are changing…

First there was the invention of the record player that made it possible to store sound and pass it fatefully forward in time. Then came radio which allowed us to widely disseminate sounds across space. Fast forward to today were I have a machine in my pocket that not only can understand my voice and answer back, but simultaneously has instant access to most of humanity’s accumulated knowledge.

It is not hard to imagine a machine in the near future that is a little bit Siri and and a little bit Watson that can instantly answer any question I might have without me needing to read or write at all. Add in a little OrsonEar and it can also be my personal notebook, diary, secretary, and publishing agent.

About half of the books I want to read are already available in Audiobook form. After a few years practice, I can now listen to a book at 2x speed, which is faster than I can read. It is hard work, but I think my comprehension is higher than when I read and I can use my eyes for other things at the same time. I bet if I had started listening to hyper-fast speech when I was a kid and my brain was still pliable, it would be very natural and easy for me to do it now.

There is currently available technology that can automatically convert written text into spoken text so we could potentially listen to *any* written content.This is still a bit rough, but in the near future this will likely produce better output than even having the author read their own work aloud. Audiobooks could become interactive and self-adapting, automatically explaining words and concepts I don’t know, slowing down when they sense that I am having trouble keeping up, and omitting things that I already know. The experience of a good audiobook will grow to resemble a deep yet facile conversation with an expert rather than a passive and effort-full task.

Anyone who has tried the latest versions of Dragon Dictate knows that we have already passed the milestone where speaking is faster and more accurate than writing or typing for the vast majority of people. This trend will continue and accelerate and it seems likely that typing will soon be as useless a skill as cursive penmanship (which, by the way, is still being taught to my kids!).

Looking forward to into our not-so-distant future, will we have any need for literacy?

In 2030, will someone who knows how to read and write be better off than someone who doesn’t?

More importantly, will someone who knows how to read and write be better off than their equivalent selves if they had done something else with the time and brain cells they would have used up learning to read and write?

What else could our kids learn if they had an extra 3,600 hours of learning time during the phase of their lives when their minds are most open and plastic? And what new abilities might we make room for in their minds if we stopped drafting trillions of neurons into service as poorly performing text-to-speech engines?

Personally, I today would not hesitate to forfeit my ability to read and write if I could instead, say, have a deep intuitive understanding of Hilbert Spaces. Or the ability to imagine a polychronon. Or even just be able contemplate the integration of messier primes. These are all visual spacial tasks that my neocortex might well have been able to master if I had not already committed so much of it learning to recognize various series of letter symbols and the complex and arbitrary rules needed to create them.

Maybe it is time to rethink the supremacy of literacy in education and instead look towards creating future generations of thinkers capable of things we (literally) can not imagine…

Goodbye Citibike Fob – Hello Official Citibike Card !

It is official, Citibike is now issuing keys in the convenient card format!

Image

To get one, you need to call customer service at 1-855-BIKE-311 and tell them that you need a replacement key. They will only send you one if your current key is not working, but it is not too much of a stretch to say that the fob does not work for most people. Your current key will be deactivated so sadly you’ll be Citibikeless for the 2-5 days until the new card arrives.

Thanks to Stephen for the photo of the first official card in the wild. Ironically, he was the very first victim of a failed fob brain transplant when they started adding the epoxy blob to the fobs.

Ognite Digital Candle Finally Reaches Beta 2

Image

This new version is wildly more power efficient, so an Ognite should now be able to run continuously for months on a couple of AA batteries. You can read all about the Ognite here…

http://ognite.com

…and about the update progress here…

http://ognite.wordpress.com

Now if I can just find a solution to the battery holder problem, this project can finally go into production. Anyone?