281–290 of 355 posts
Things to do - I find it really hard to find things to go out and do in my spare time, events listings never seem to have something that interests me, same with tourist guides although they can be better. Asking friends is always an order of magnitude better.
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Or even just physical addresses in general. I wish there was an official registry a-la-dns, people would mail things to me, and the post office would route it to me based on what that registry said. Yes, you'd have to update it, but it beats having to update my address in a half-dozen places every time I move. There are actually a few places that deal with this - http://earthclassmail.com/ being one of them.
There's a similar service, myus.com , which accomplishes this for non-US residents.
The absolute disgusting nature of standardization of data sets in the world, and this insane notion that we should maintain legacy data as the status-quo of doing things. Just look at the airline industry. IATA, ICAO, ISO, all competing and separate, all with insane and bat-shit psychotic rules and conventions (eg, IATA lets multiple airlines have the same "two letter designator" [by the way, it's sometimes three, bu…
Medical information standards are similarly convoluted, but getting better.
What REALLY bothers me is things like credit cards.
http://www.merriampark.com/anatomycc.htm
There's encoded data on something that's supposed to be a UUID thing: Industry, Issuer (card company), Lender (banking institution), Account number, and Checksum
This is a good way to prevent fraud? Or have they just given me the keys to generate "valid" credit cards?
http://www.darkcoding.net/credit-card-numbers/
Slap a name from the phonebook on there and see what you can purchase. Now we have PCI compliance trying to tell people to somehow lock this crap down? So they invent the CV2 codes, a 1 in 1000 hit-or-miss, I don't think my odds are too bad when I can generate any creditcard. Dates will also only fall into a specific range of time anyway. Yeah, we keep putting up bandages to creditcard security processing, but why do we need to? Honestly, the world of standards sucks.
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IMHO the only problem with Google Wave's implementation was that it didn't integrate with normal email, limiting its network to Google Wave users. This seems very obvious, but I rarely hear people mention this when Google Wave comes up. Did you have something else in mind when you said it had terrible implementation?
Oh man where to start. It's just a noisy mess, poorly designed, with a lot of weird design decisions and exotic patterns that only added to the noise. It starts with a way to complex proposition. Google basically created the entire vision instead of the basic core functionality and then expanded on that, optimizing in the detail rather than for the big shows. Etherpad started the right way. It started very lean with…
Another problem with Google Wave is that it's inherently centralized. They transform the insert/delete operations so they can be applied out of order and still converge on the same document state. Unfortunately, the method they use for this requires a central server to maintain causal ordering of the operations. There are ways of doing this that don't require a central server, which could be handy.
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Oh man where to start. It's just a noisy mess, poorly designed, with a lot of weird design decisions and exotic patterns that only added to the noise. It starts with a way to complex proposition. Google basically created the entire vision instead of the basic core functionality and then expanded on that, optimizing in the detail rather than for the big shows. Etherpad started the right way. It started very lean with…
I think there's room for a lot more innovation in this area. I'm working on some open source code for doing Wave-like stuff in a way that will be easy for people to integrate with other projects. Have you ever tried to edit a wiki page, only to discover that somebody else was editing it and had acquired a lock on the whole page? There's no reason why you shouldn't be able to both edit it, Etherpad-style. Or rather, t…
I'd love to see a text editor that let you select text blocks by drawing a box. (ie, you could draw the box selection style and select the last 5 characters of each line)
Emacs can do this!
Airlines - They are nearly all just a pain in the ass to deal with. When was the last time you heard someone tell you how they had a great experience with an airline?
I'm pretty sure it was a good experience, because I keep reading books about how my trip usually takes months in transit living in your own filth, if you didn't bring your family you'd never see them again, and sometimes you'd die on the way. I had to pay $8 for a sandwich though.
The fact that most people seem to think that it's okay to get sick from the diseases of aging, get frail, suffer, and die, and that we shouldn't try to do something to fix that problem (really fix it, not just prolong suffering a bit). I think it's probably partly rationalization because they think it's inevitable (but it is not inevitable, and I'd like that to become a more mainstream view so we can hurry up and wor…
I come from a family history of physicians. My father is an MD and professor at Johns Hopkins. It's difficult to conceive how little we know about the human body and biology in general. People are working on things related to it, but we're really nowhere near even understanding the problem. Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't being worked on.
The problem is, almost nobody is working on that approach. It's all gerontology or geriatry, trying to squeeze out a year or two out of someone already frail and sick, or to mess with metabolism, something that will take way too long and might never be completely successful.
The third approach - aka the engineering approach - has a chance to work in our lifetimes IF we do the hard work and stop looking the other way. And few things are more worthwhile to support; if we bring forward these therapies by even 1 week, that's over a million lives saved.
If you want to know more about the biology of this, I recommend that you read this (and the papers cited): http://www.amazon.com/Ending-Aging-Rejuvenation-Breakthrough...
If you need more details, you can easily contact the SENS foundation or the authors of this book directly (they usually answer emails really quickly). This info should be enough to help you make up your mind about the feasibility of this kind of project. And if you need the latest science, there's a scientific journal called Rejuvenation Research that contains the most recent studies.