The light of day

Think you're smarter than me?

One of the little-noted provisions in that legislation floating around Washington -- it has to do with payroll tax cuts and an oil pipeline -- is a suspension of the ban on 100-watt lightbulbs.

I've been stocking up on these babies, because I hate these new CFL bulbs. It's like we're back in pioneer days living by candlelight.

Well, here's an inside look at who gets what in all this mess. Just read it all.

When Republicans suspended the 100-watt-light-bulb ban, they said they were trying to protect consumer choice. But they also managed to show how regulations help big business at the expense of the little guy. 

The light-bulb ban was part of an energy bill pushed by Democrats in 2007 that set efficiency standards that traditional incandescent bulbs could never meet. The first to go was supposed to be the 100 watt bulb in 2012, followed by 75 watt bulbs the next year and the ubiquitous 60-watt bulb in 2014. 

The argument is that forcing consumers to buy more efficient — and far more expensive — bulbs will greatly reduce energy consumption, and in turn, air pollution and global warming.

Earlier this month, Republicans suspended the law until October by denying funds for its implementation as part of a massive spending bill. For Democrats, this move was another sign of how out of touch the GOP is. 

But look who else is complaining. As Politico reported, "big companies like General Electric, Philips and Osram Sylvania (are) fuming." Allegedly these companies are mad because they invested lots of money getting ready for the new rules.

Fact is, they were pushing for the ban all along. 

In 2007, Philips urged an incandescent ban as a way to force the market toward high-efficiency bulbs, complaining that without such laws, "purchase price and functional performance often take precedence over environmental concern." 

That same year, the National Electrical Manufacturers Association, which represents companies making 95% of bulbs sold in the U.S., told a Senate panel that a ban was needed "to further educate consumers on the benefits of energy-efficient products."

You can believe if you want these companies only had Mother Earth in mind with this ban. But more likely they saw it as a chance to fatten their bottom lines. Who wouldn't jump at the chance to outlaw a low-margin, 60-cent product when you're trying to hawk a high-margin $3 alternative? 

This would hardly be the first time big business teamed up with big government to enhance profits through competition-crushing regulations. Timothy Carney's book, "The Big Ripoff," detailed many cases where businesses "profit from big government policies that rip off consumers." 

Thanks to the GOP, consumers now can see this seedy process at work, clear as day.

Journalism -- we bring good things to light.

So is talking and driving unsafe or what?

Don't do this, either.

A federal agency is calling for a nationwide ban on all cellphone use while driving, Investor's Business Daily reports. The National Transportation Safety Board recommended that all cellphone use by drivers, including texting, be outlawed. The ban would include hands-free calls.

There are a few problems here. 

There's no compelling reason for it. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says that 3,092 traffic deaths last year involved distracted drivers. But using a cell phone is only one of many driver distractions. Eating and drinking while behind the wheel are two others, and they are far more dangerous than yapping on a phone. 

In fact, a 2009 NHTSA study found that 80% of all car wrecks are caused by drivers eating or drinking — not cellphone use — with coffee-guzzling the top offender. 

Then there's this. According to federal data, traffic deaths have fallen from 2.1 per 100 million vehicle miles in 1990, when virtually no one had a cellphone, to 1.1 in 2009, when almost everyone does.

The newspaper asks: Banning cellphone use? Why aren't the Potomac nannies going after Starbucks sippers and Big Mac munchers instead? Why not prosecute women who put on their makeup while on the road and men who shave? Shouldn't combing while driving be outlawed as well?

Righto. Flossing, too. Nose-picking. Reading Proust.

One way to control the cost of healthcare

More than 3,000 people in England with diabetes, heart failure or COPD (a serious lung disease called chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) took part in a recent two-year trial of telehealth technology for monitoring people who are chronically ill.

According to the results of the trial, published by the Department of Health, telehealth can reduce mortality, reduce the need for admissions to hospital, lower the number of days spent in a hospital bed and cut the time spent in A&E.

Here's how it works.

First thing in the morning, Terry Munro always puts the kettle on. "Then I take my blood sugar, take my blood pressure and my weight and in that time the kettle's boiled.

"And I've got a record of it on my TV. It's marvellous, it really is." 

Terry, who is 67 years old and has diabetes, has been keeping tabs on his own health using nothing more than his television. The testing equipment uses Bluetooth so when Terry has taken his daily measurements they are automatically uploaded to the TV. 

A trained nurse can access and monitor the readings from a central location and make decisions about potential changes in treatments. "I like walking, but I used to go out and go hypo. Now I know I can't go out if my blood sugar is too low, so I am more aware now. 

"It's like having a doctor there all the time."

Patients like Terry are constantly being watched by nurses, albeit at a distance. Any unusual readings entered onto the TV are picked up straight away and will prompt a visit by a nurse or an alert to the patient's doctor.

12345!

Imperva, a security company, has made some suggestions to NASA about passwords to they can protect their secrets about alien space invaders.

Here's what they recommend:

• It should contain at least eight characters
• It should contain a mix of four different types of characters - upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters such as !@#$%^&*,;" 
• If there is only one letter or special character, it should not be either the first or last character in the password.
• It should not be a name, a slang word, or any word in the dictionary. It should not include any part of your name or your e-mail address.

Following that advice, of course, means you'll create a password that will be impossible, unless you try a trick credited to security guru Bruce Schneir: Turn a sentence into a password.

For example, "Now I lay me down to sleep" might become nilmDOWN2s, a 10-character password that won't be found in any dictionary. 

Can't remember that password? Schneir says it's OK to write it down and put it in your wallet, or better yet keep a hint in your wallet. Just don't also include a list of the sites and services that password works with. Try to use a different password on every service, but if you can't do that, at least develop a set of passwords that you use at different sites.

Last year, Imperva looked at 32 million passwords stolen from RockYou, a hacked website, and released its own Top 10 "worst" list:

1. 123456

2. 12345

3. 123456789

4. Password

5. iloveyou

6. princess

7. rockyou

8. 1234567

9. 12345678

10. abc123

Tech company Splashdata also compiled a list of the worst:

1. password

2. 123456

3.12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

11. baseball

12. 111111

13. iloveyou

14. master

15. sunshine

16. ashley

17. bailey

18. passw0rd

19. shadow

20. 123123

21. 654321

22. superman

23. qazwsx

24. michael

25. football

My recommendation, on advice from the Gumbo Blog High Tech Security Division, is that you create one giant password out of those lists. This will also help you develop your memory.

Facebook is really, really big

Facebook now has as many users as the entire Internet did back in 2004, the year Facebook was founded.

Facebook’s active user base is…

• 2.5x the population of the United States
• 3.9x the population of Brazil
• 5.8x the population of Russia
• 6.3x the population of Japan

Another fact: Facebook is bigger than a bread box.

Make your own stuff

Designer shoes.

Rick Chin, director of product innovation at SolidWorks, where he develops new products, says two technologies will transform they way we get new stuff.

Computer-aided design (CAD) products are popular among engineers, designers and students for creating 3D product designs. But the software is often too advanced for the average consumer to design his or her own products.

In the future, however, CAD will allow the average consumer to design his own custom products that are both manufacturable and affordable. Consumers will be able to use simple software to combine predefined, configured product features. They’ll be able to personalize further by adding their own color palate, pictures, shapes and even personalized sizing.

Add another technology, and things really get fun.

3D Printing (3DP) is another amazing technology that will take a 3D CAD model and “print” layers of material, one on top of the previous, to produce a real physical model. It can create almost any shape, even those that can’t be made by traditional manufacturing. The downside today is that the process is slow, costly, and often doesn’t produce parts strong enough for real world use. The technology in this industry is always advancing, and in the future, it will be able to produce robust parts quickly and cheaply.

3D Printing in an industrial setting is often referred to as “additive manufacturing.” As products are ordered online, versatile manufacturing stations controlled by robots will quickly and affordably crank out custom-manufactured products. The robots will be controlled by process software that will be integrated with future CAD.

Online custom products are slowly gaining popularity.

You can go to NIKEiD and design your own customized Nike shoes. The downside is that they are pricey and will take several weeks to get to you. Other websites such as ShapeWays and Ponoko are useful for many DIYers. The mass market appeal of sites like these will grow in the future (when combined with the simpler CAD described above) with fast, flexible and inexpensive manufacturing.

Think I'll design me a nap.

Coming soon to a shoe and dishwasher near you

Just printed these suckers out.

Here's a big change in the way we make and buy things that could creep up on us much as the Internet did: 3D printing. We can understand it intellectually, but it's hard to imagine how it will change our everyday lives. Consider:

Soon it will be possible to print out products at home ranging from appliance parts to shoes. You will be able to have that dishwasher part made just for you instantly. This promises to empower a new wave of design and customization fueled by our personal taste and imagination.

It's here already.

Nike with its Nike iD services lets customers personalize and design their own Nike merchandise, down to their favorite colors and materials. Amsterdam-based Freedom of Creation, renowned for its lighting designs, has 3D-printed fixtures gracing the interiors of luxury hotels around the world. Canada-based Weatherhaven, which supplies portable shelters, digitally explores and validates its custom designs without having to build physical prototypes. This saves the company up to $100,000 per shelter. 

As a result, yesterday’s factory is evolving into a global community of custom design and personal fabrication services. And manufacturers are creatively embracing the changes.

Myriad industries – from automotive (which already created the first 3D printed car) and aerospace to footwear and jewelry – have embraced 3D printing that creates objects by laying down successive layers of materials.It is estimated that 3D printing will grow to become a $5.2 billion industry by 2020, up from $1.3 billion last year.

I'm going to print me out the perfect napping couch.

They're watching you

Major websites such as MSN.com and Hulu.com have been tracking people's online activities using powerful new methods that are almost impossible for computer users to detect, the Wall Street Journal reports.

The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional "cookie," a small file that websites routinely install on users' computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as "supercookies," which are capable of re-creating users' profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.

As consumers become savvier about protecting their privacy online, the new techniques appear to be gaining ground.

Stanford researcher Jonathan Mayer, a Stanford Ph.D. candidate, identified what is known as a "history stealing" tracking service on Flixster.com, a social-networking service for movie fans recently acquired by Time Warner Inc., and on Charter Communications Inc.'s Charter.net.

Such tracking peers into people's Web-browsing histories to see if they previously had visited any of more than 1,500 websites, including ones dealing with fertility problems, menopause and credit repair, the researchers said. History stealing has been identified on other sites in recent years, but rarely at that scale.

Gathering information about Web-browsing history can offer valuable clues about people's interests, concerns or household finances, the Journal says. Someone researching a disease online, for example, might be thought to have the illness, or at least to be worried about it.

Creepy.

The new face of work

Use it to sell buggy whips.

Some years ago I met a fellow who sold fine art prints out of a store here in my town. Buyers either stumbled upon him or heard of him by word of mouth. Why don't you put your business on the Internet? I asked.

He hadn't heard of the thing -- this was awhile ago. But he got someone to do a website, and soon he was connecting with buyers all over the world.

How will we solve our very serious problem of unemployment -- more than 16 percent of our population is out of work or working less than they want? My friend pointed the way.

The answer won't be propping up the industrial dinosaurs like the Detroit automakers. The era of a gold watch at 65 and a pension and healthcare forever is gone. So what comes next?

You've heard of Skype, right? It's a new kind of enterprise, what Hal Varian calls a micromultinational.

Just as the mechanical innovations of the 19th century led to dramatic changes in our way of life, the still-evolving computing and communication innovations of the early 21st century will have a profound impact on the world's economy and culture. For example, even the smallest company can now afford a communications and computational infrastructure that would have been the envy of a large corporation 15 years ago. If the late 20th century was the age of the multinational company, the early 21st will be the age of the micromultinational: small companies that operate globally.

Silicon Valley today seems to be overflowing with these enterprises, Varian writes.

They can already draw on email, chat, social networks, wikis, voice-over-Internet protocol, and cloud computing -- all available for free on the web -- to provide their communications and computational infrastructure. They can exploit comparative advantage due to global variation in knowledge, skills, and wage rates. They can work around the world and around the clock to develop software, applications, and web services by using standardized components. Innovation has always been stimulated by international trade, and now trade in knowledge and skills can take place far more easily than ever before.

Think of all the information technology you use for free. The browser you're reading this on, for example. To go geek on you for a moment, here's the technology of the micromultinational.

Today, a substantial amount of software development on the web involves connecting standardized components in novel ways. The Linux operating system, the Apache web server, the MySQL database, and the Python programming language are prominent examples: the LAMP components that serve as basic building blocks for much of the web. Once your application is developed, the cloud computing model offered by Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and others changes fixed costs for data centers into variable costs for data services, lowering barriers to entry and increasing the pace of innovation.

Change is scary, but there has always been change, and it's always been scary. If you've got a nice little buggy whip business going there in Detroit, you can always form a union to protect your healthcare benefits. That'll stop the change.

Tat tech: skin-deep electronics

This is just weird.

It may soon be possible to wear your computer or mobile phone under your sleeve, with the invention of an ultra-thin and flexible electronic circuit that can be stuck to the skin like a temporary tattoo, The Independent reports.

The devices, which are almost invisible, can perform just as well as more conventional electronic machines but without the need for wires or bulky power supplies, scientists said. The circuit is about the size of a postage stamp, is thinner than a human hair and sticks to the skin by natural electrostatic forces rather than glue.

Try not to scratch.

What can you do with this thing?

A simple stick-on circuit can monitor a person's heart rate and muscle movements as well as conventional medical monitors, but with the benefit of being weightless and almost completely undetectable. Scientists said it may also be possible to build a circuit for detecting throat movements around the larynx in order to transmit the information wirelessly as a way of recording a person's speech, even if they are not making any discernible sounds.

Tests have already shown that such a system can be used to control a voice-activated computer game, and one suggestion is that a stick-on voicebox circuit could be used in covert police operations where it might be too dangerous to speak into a radio transmitter.

This could give a whole new meaning to a hickey