What is Wrong with Electronics Manufacturers?

I currently have a clock radio and an answering machine that are driving me crazy. We've just started thunderstorm season, so I've had a few opportunities to lose power for extended periods of time. Neither of these gadgets performs what I'd consider well during these events.

The worse is the clock radio. It doesn't have a battery backup, just a capacitor. When I lose power for more than, say, thirty seconds, I lose the time, the alarm settings, and all of the station presets. I have another clock radio that does have a battery backup, but it has an analog tuner and no presets, and the clock tends to run fast on the battery.

The answering machine has battery backup, which lasts for a few hours. If the outage is too long, however, it too loses the time, but it also loses the outgoing and incoming messages. Yes, any messages that were stored on the machine are now gone.

Now, I've had both of these for awhile. The answering machine is from the mid-90s, and the clock is from 2001 or 2002. So I've been considering replacing them.

The thing that I find maddening is that, in 2009, clock radios still don't use non-volatile solid state memory to record their settings. The closest I've been able to find, in a form factor appropriate for my nightstand, is an Oregon Scientific weather radio. It uses non-volatile storage for settings, and even gets the time signal from the atomic clock in Colorado. It doesn't have a normal AM/FM tuner, though, only the weather stations.

Answering machines are no better. There's one model from AT&T that seems to have non-volatile settings. If you have caller ID an incoming call will even reset the time after an outage.

How much memory do you need to store settings and messages? Settings take almost nothing, the cheapest thumb drive would serve adequately. For a clock, it's 3 bytes per alarm setting, 4 if you want to specify on which days of the week the alarm should be active. A radio station is 1 byte. Voice recording takes substantially more, but still not ridiculous amounts. Yes, there are devices out there that have non-volatile storage, but seriously, one of each type?

One thing I've noticed, looking at clock radios online, is that they're either bare-bones pieces of garbage, or they can dock an iPod and produce concert-hall-like sound. Really? For an alarm clock? An alarm clock has a pretty simple function: to keep track of the time, wake you up when you've told it to, and do all of this with as small a footprint as possible. You would never know it from what's on the market today.

Answering machines almost seem to have been written off completely by their manufacturers. I don't get it. Voice mail is under someone else's control. (No, the irony of posting this on a blog controlled by Google isn't lost on me.) Voice mail can't tell you if your power's still out. Most answering machines these days are remotely controllable, and you don't have to remember a special number to call. You can walk through your door, look right at your answering machine, and know immediately if you have any messages. (Well, unless your power went out and your machine dumped all of them.) Mine has a number: "Hey, here's how many messages are waiting for you!" though I know some just have a little blinking light.

I guess what I'm really trying to say here is, can anyone recommend a good clock radio or answering machine with non-volatile storage?

Quite Possibly the Funniest Spam I've Received

From: FBI Director Robert S.Mueller <kelvin.williams@info.net>
Reply-to: kelvinwilliams24@gmail.com
To: undisclosed-recipients
Date: Fri, Jan 16, 2009 at 4:41 PM
Subject: FBI Director Robert S.Mueller

Attn: Beneficiary,

This is to Officially inform you that it has come to our notice and we have thoroughly Investigated with the help of our Intelligence Monitoring Network System that you are having an illegal Transaction with Impostors claiming to be Prof. Charles C. Soludo of the Central Bank Of Nigeria, Mr. Patrick Aziza, Mr Frank Nweke, none officials of Oceanic Bank, Zenith Banks, kelvin Young of HSBC,Ben of Fedex,Ibrahim Sule,Larry Christopher, Puppy Scammers are impostors claiming to be the Federal Bureau Of Investigation. During our Investigation, we noticed that the reason why you have not received your payment is because you have not fulfilled your Financial Obligation given to you in respect of your Contract/Inheritance Payment.

Therefore, we have contacted the Federal Ministry Of Finance on your behalf and they have brought a solution to your problem by cordinating your payment in total USD$11,000.000.00 in an ATM CARD which you can use to withdraw money from any ATM MACHINE CENTER anywhere in the world with a maximum of $4000 to $5000 United States Dollars daily. You now have the lawful right to claim your fund in an ATM CARD.

Since the Federal Bureau of Investigation is involved in this transaction, you have to be rest assured for this is 100% risk free it is our duty to protect the American Citizens. All I want you to do is to contact the ATM CARD CENTER via email for their requirements to proceed and procure your Approval Slip on your behalf which will cost you $110.00 only and note that your Approval Slip which contains details of the agent who will process your transaction.

CONTACT INFORMATION
NAME: Kelvin Williams
EMAIL: kelvinwilliams24@gmail.com

Do contact Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTRE with your details:

FULL NAME:
HOME ADDRESS:
TELL:
CELL:
CURRENT OCCUPATION:
BANK NAME:

So your files would be updated after which he will send the payment informations which you'll use in making payment of $110.00 via Western Union Money Transfer or Money Gram Transfer for the procurement of your Approval Slip after which the delivery of your ATM CARD will be effected to your designated home address without any further delay.

We order you get back to this office after you have contacted the ATM SWIFT CARD CENTER and we do await your response so we can move on with our Investigation and make sure your ATM SWIFT CARD gets to you.

Thanks and hope to read from you soon.

FBI Director Robert S.Mueller III.

Note: Do disregard any email you get from any impostors or offices claiming to be in possesion of your ATM CARD, you are hereby adviced only to be in contact with Mr. Kelvin Williams of the ATM CARD CENTRE who is the rightful person to deal with in regards to your ATM CARD PAYMENT and forward any emails you get from impostors to this office so we could act upon and commence investigation.

So Close...

British Culture Secretary Andy Burnham wants to apply movie-style ratings to websites. His plan is to have major ISPs provide child-friendly services based on these ratings. He's getting close to a good idea, but he's not quite there.

He also begins with a false premise:

“It worries me - like anybody with children,” he says. “Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you can do."

Leaving your child for two hours completely unregulated on the internet is not something you should do. You shouldn't leave your child for two hours to watch television unsupervised, either.

Here's the problem. You're going to try to separate out websites that are child-friendly, or age-range friendly, from other sites. Trying to do this via government regulation is doomed to failure. What if the content of a site changes? What about sites where comments are allowed? Take a site like Bad Astronomy, run by Dr. Phil Plait. Phil generally keeps it PG, if not G, but very occassionally he'll slip in some saltier language. The commenters do, too, but are generally good. What rating do you give this site? Who is going to validate the ratings that sites are given?

Another problem is that you're pushing the enforcement (at least partially) onto the ISPs. If they have to provide different levels of service, that involves either redundant networking or filters that run on all traffic, based on the subscriber. The redundant networking might be the cheaper option, since it doesn't require a lookup over a possibly-sparse set of subscribers for every packet or session. Plus, at the ISP level, you're probably going to be stuck with a pared-down internet or no filtering. That means keeping your children "safe" locks you out of quite a number of useful sites, even if the kids aren't even in the house.

There's a market solution here, and it could be implemented fairly easily without any government regulation or intervention. I call it .ratedg, or for the more network-geeky of you out there, RATEDG-DOM. The idea is that a new top-level domain (TLD) is created, where the sites are vetted initially and periodically for standards of content. On end-user computers, optional filtering software would be installed that only allows connections to sites in the .ratedg TLD. Traffic to other TLDs, or to numeric IP addresses, would be blocked. This isn't completely trivial, since all connections have to be addressed numerically, but a local DNS cache could handle this.

The TLD would be maintained by a nonprofit organization, which is funded by the fees paid by sites wishing to be listed. Some accommodation would need to be made for sites of nonprofits, hobbyists, and other cash-short groups. The fees could, for instance, be determined site-by-site based on the website's circumstances. This adds complexity, of course, but is not insurmountable.

The filtering could be provided by free software (funded by governments, the nonprofits, or volunteers), and disabled by password so that adults can have less-fettered access. One drawback of this is that software-based filters are notoriously susceptible to circumvention by clever youngsters. Of course, you're not letting your kids surf unsupervised, are you? The filter provides you with a no-accidental-bad-stuff net. You see the "Rated G" certification immediately, and if you click on a .com, .edu, .org, or whatever link by mistake, the filter blocks it for you with a friendly warning.

Another option, perhaps better for parents who insist on letting their children use the internet unsupervised, is a hardware filter. This would be inserted into your computer either between the network interface card and the wire, or between the card and the rest of the system (the latter is probably better). Filtering is now physically enforced by a key, which the parents can carry along with them. The case would have to be locked, as well, to keep the filter card from being removed.

This system also has extensibility. A RATEDPG-DOM could be created as well, or TLDs corresponding to other countries' standards. A hierarchy of allowed TLDs would arise naturally: a filter set for PG websites would allow both .ratedpg and .ratedg.

Note also that this would not force sites out of other TLDs that are otherwise descriptive. We already have websites that are in both, say .com and .co.uk. Having disney.ratedg would not preclude the same site being available via disney.com, though Disney would probably maintain pieces of its website other-than the G-rated portion.

Enforcement places some burden, but again the registration fees help fund this. It isn't feasible to completely verify a site's content, certainly not with any great frequency, but a combination of random compliance checks and public problem reporting can have great impact. If, say, Goggle contributes some of its resources to compliance monitoring, a much more complete picture could be obtained.

There are potential problems with this solution, as there are with any solutions. Filtering based on TLD punishes sites that do not or cannot register, and students who need access to information on non-registered sites. The Smithsonian Institution comes to mind, since there's likely to be photos of art that some would consider inappropriate for children. As the popularity of .ratedg grows, non-registered but compliant sites would feel pressure to register. Other sites might re-structure their content into G-rated and non-G-rated components, on separate IP addresses (though not necessarily different hosts). Still, other volunteer-run educational but not specifically child-oriented would likely be excluded. I'm sure there are other potential problems as well.

So that's my suggestion. It's an opt-in filtering system, both on the user and content provider ends. ISPs don't need to add or modify infrastructure. Governments don't need to add regulation or oversight. At-home implementation could be done by either hardware or software. The system is extensible. Implementation can be phased in, and some of the technical design could precede full implementation (such as prototype software that filters on .org or .edu). Since it doesn't require a strong-arm approach or extensive new infrastructure, the whole system could probably be implemented and deployed in under a year.

Happy Newtonmas!

For someone who's 366, he's holding up pretty well. Sure, he doesn't do so well with very heavy objects and can't move too quickly, but he still puts in a fairly reliable showing.

The Natural

There's currently a lawsuit filed that claims President-Elect Barack Obama is not eligble to be President because his father being Kenyan means Obama isn't a natural born citizen, as required by the Constitution. The case (on appeal to the Supreme Court, which is not likely to be hear it) hinges on the fact that "natural born citizen" never seems to have been defined. It would, in a way, be nice for the Supreme Court to weigh in on this, for the sake of precedent.

Here's what I'd consider a reasonable set of criteria to be eligible for the Presidency:

• Either:
  1. at least one parent was a U.S. citizen at time of birth; or
  2. the person was born in the United States of America (yes, I'm excluding territories, but not embassies).
• The person does not currently hold citizenship for any country other than the United States of America.
• If the person has the right to citizenship of any other country by birth or circumstance, that right must be alienated.

What I find particularly interesting is that all of these criteria could be established by a Supreme Court ruling in regards to President-Elect Obama's eligibility.

Feel free to weigh in. Abusive comments will be deleted. Links to informative sites are welcome, but comments linking to propaganda (on whatever side) will be deleted. Yes, I get to decide where the line is between "informative" and "propaganda", but then it's my blog. Blogger hands them out for free, so go ahead and start your own if you disagree. I'll keep deleted comments available for re-posting if you want to try to convince me that something shouldn't have been deleted.

A Metaphor for Our Times

I've been watching Mayor Booker (of "luxuriating in our deliciousness" fame) (and Newark) on the Colbert Report. Oh, and drinking homebrew. OK, the "Newark" part isn't fame so much as, well, that's where he's Mayor.

That's not my point, though. He was comparing America to a somehow-delicious symphony, among other things. It struck me that this isn't the "deliciousness" metaphor. Nor is the currently popular "tossed salad" metaphor of modern America. Face it, when is the last time you luxuriated in the deliciousness of a tossed salad? And how many of you chuckled when you read "tossed salad"?

No, my fellow Americans, I have a new metaphor for America. And it's one that we can all agree practically epitomizes deliciousness.

America is a banana split.

We've got chocolate and vanilla ice cream. We already understand that part of it. We've got bananas, which are yellow, or at least yellow-ish. Close enough, say I. Maraschino cherries are red (Hey, I didn't come up with the label. I'm a uniter, here.), as is strawberry ice cream, if that's your thing.

Now, I know what you're saying. "All that's left are whipped cream (whiter than vanilla) and hot fudge (which is more chocolate). Isn't that rather glaringly omissive?"

To that I reply, caramel sauce is just as delicious. Just make the chocolate ice cream double-chocolate or chocolate fudge, and you'll never miss the hot fudge. Trust me. Butterscotch is pretty delicious on a banana split, too.

Where am I going with this? I could really go for a banana split, and I'd wager manyboth of you could, too. And when you're eating that banana split, luxuriating in its deliciousness, give a thought to the deliciousness that is our National Banana Split.

On a final note, which is eerily synchronicitous, Thomas Friedman is currently on the Report re-broadcast, and he kind-of looks like a dollop of whipped cream.

The Policy Here is to Aim the Cointreau at the Peach

This popped into my head for no good reason today, and I thought I'd share.