Technology Futures

Skeptics of the Energy Economy tend to hang their hat (with some justification) on the fact that hydrogen is hard to transport and hard to store. But even while there are emerging technologies that may address those twin problems, there are increasing signs that it may not be important.

I wrote recently about the add-on device being used by truckers to generate hydrogen on the fly from water; the hydrogen is injected into the engine cylinders to increase fuel mileage and as a side benefit, create drastic reductions in pollution.

A Florida engineer has developed a similar system that also uses electrolysis to split water atoms, but instead of throwing the oxygen away, he combines the hydrogen atoms and the oxygen atom to create a new gas with a chemical composition of HHO (instead of H2O).

The new kind of gas has some remarkable properties, including more efficient metalcutting. The gas is presently undergoing certification for use in welding and metalworking shops and factories.

But if you bolt the device onto the side of a car engine and use some electricity from the alternator to power it, you can apparently get a 30% increase in fuel mileage at a cost of about 70 cents an hour. Since an hour of driving is going to consume somewhere between two and three gallons of gas at a cost of $4-$8, this system is a real winner if it works the way it is claimed.

Geeks playing with a prerelease version of OS X for Intel report that they have been able to easily install an open source Windows emulation library that then allows them to run common Windows applications--without having Windows installed.

Could this have been Apple's game plan from the beginning?

Imagine you could buy a Mac Mini for $499 that not only runs a virtually virus-proof, easy to use operating system (OS X) but also runs all your favorite Windows applications that are not available for the Mac.

Wouldn't that be the best of all possible worlds? Freedom from viruses, an end to DLL conflicts, no more reformatting your hard drive to solve minor problems, and the ability to run virtually any program you like.

Sounds good to me. Happy Thanksgiving. Turn off the computer tomorrow, skip the Internet, and spend time with family and friends. In the long term, it is our relationships with other people that really matters. The technology will always be around. Our friends and family are far more precious and far more transient. Tomorrow, let's all take care of each other, and make time to care of someone who may need, for a day, some extra "family."

All my best,
Andrew

I have Adelphia cable modem service at home, and had to call customer service the other day when the system was out for nearly a day. The service technician said something very revealing. The person could not determine why the service was out, and said they would have to roll a truck to make a service call. She informed me it would take a week and a half to do so. I asked if they thought it was acceptable to have a customer be without Internet access for ten days or more, and added that I sometimes work from home. Here is what she said:

We are only providing an entertainment service.

This statement is stunning. "Only an entertainment service" indicates that Adelphia, which is now owned, in different parts, by Comcast, TimeWarner, and Cox, really has no clue about how important the Internet is to their customers.

It also means they will never be successful selling Voice over IP services over their cable networks, because no one wants to risk being without phone service for ten days, which is apparently okay with Adelphia/Cox/Comcast/TimeWarner.

This is not isolated to bankrupt Adelphia. A buddy of mine just quit his job as a network manager at Cox because of relentless cutbacks in customer service that made his job unbearable. The cable companies each have massive debt loads. They can't raise rates on broadband service because the phone companies have decided to fight via a price war. So the only way they can make any headway on debt is to cut customer service. Two years ago, Adelphia's Internet service was as flaky as it is today, but customer service was terrific; they could roll a truck the next day in most cases. And the phone tech support was much more responsive then that it is now.

For the first time, I am thinking seriously of switching to Verizon DSL, even though Verizon has awful customer service. But they understand (at least better than the phone companies, I think) that broadband is not just an "entertainment" service. I sure hope so. If they both think that, it is even more urgent that communities make investments that ensure an independent local broadband infrastructure.

Oh, and my service problem? It turned out the culprit, which I diagnosed myself, was the inline power surge supressor I installed just before the cable modem. If lightning strikes nearby and a power spike jumps onto the copper cable out in the yard, it will come straight into the house and can jump right through the cable modem to my computer and fry the thing. I have had the surge suppressor attached for a long time, but all of a sudden, the cable modem could not get a signal. The suppressor introduces a very small amount of signal attenuation, but the sudden and inexplicable failure highlights just what a fragile and antiquated system the Hybrid Fiber Coax (HFC) cable modem system is. My Internet is working at home, but without any lightning protection. I don't like that one bit.

The system should not be that sensitive to small amounts of attentuation in the first place, and in the second place, I should not be forced to use a copper-based system that lacks that kind of power surge protection. But hey! It's just an "entertainment" system! Why should the cable company care if a customer's televisions and computer are fried in a thunderstorm? It's just "entertainment."

And fiber? It's immune to lightning and power surges, making it really excellent for residential use.

SlashDot has a long discussion thread about an opinion issued by the Federal Election Commission that "bloggers are journalists." The ruling exempts bloggers from having to file lenghty reports and paperwork to meet the McCain-Feingold campaign laws. As Slashdot points out, the ruling indicates that bias in reporting does not automatically mean a blogger is NOT a journalist.

If this seems like hairsplitting or stating the obvious, it is nonetheless important because those that argued bloggers should be regulated based their argument in part on the notion that they were biased towards one position or another. What the FEC is saying is that the mere fact of having an opinion that leans politically left or politically right does not mean you immediately fall under campaign finance laws.

The FEC seems to be trying to do the right thing. What is disturbing is that the issue came up at all. Trying to regulate the right of individuals to express an opinion on the Internet is just wrong, and dreadfully so.