Cox Crow

Tom Evslin opines on the attempt by AOL and Yahoo! to charge postage to bulk-mailers: It’s my mailbox; pay me! Paul Hoffman suggests that Any sane ISP will wait to see how badly their competitors fail in introducing this new anti-service before trying it themselves.

There are technical hurdles here, such as positively identifying the sender, which if it could be done reliably today would, and accurately billing him, unless Goodmail is planning that senders would anonymously transfer funds from their off-shore accounts before deluging the recipients with fraudulent messages. I agree that increasing the cost of spam is what will decrease its frequency, but I still get paper junk mail. There will be some who will profit despite the high cost of delivery.

And as far as “adding trust” to e-mail goes, I know who to trust. The Computer doesn’t.

Let me add a historical tidbit to Paul’s observation.

[W]hen customer usage of email accelerated in 1991 [Prodigy] imposed a 25 cents charge for each email above the 30-email limit each month. Customer reaction was swift – complaints surfaced on Prodigy bulletin boards and 18,000 customers joined the “Cooperative Defense Committee” to protest the user fees. [link added]

I suspect that improving the quality of mails received is something that recipients do value. This scheme may, if only by providing someone to execute for sending unsolicited commercial e-mail.

You know those stickers the grocers put on the fruits and other produce because the cashiers are ignorant of the prices and names of the fruit, and have to type a number into the register? I think it’s a bit excessive to put three of them on one peach.

Mark Cuban notes that the National Association of Theatre Owners has issues with the simultaneous release of Bubble in multiple distribution channels, and discussion on Fresh Air with Terry Gross mentioned that attendance at movie theaters is down. The drop in attendance is easily explained, even without recourse to quality-of-life costs such as incompetent staff, dirty floors, dirty washrooms, and peeling wallpaper. I need to graph the supporting data, but the graph should be obvious to Econ101 students: prices go up; demand goes down.

Graphs: Attendance as a percentage of the United States population graphed against average prices, in 2004 dollars (calculated using this inflation calculator), the same but unadjusted for inflation, and the un-normalized graph. I have included a curve for the screens available.

According to the author of this headline, Hamas election victory shocks world. It may be that the victory was unexpected by some observers. It may be that some are disappointed in the election results. But I would not say that the world, all of it, was shocked. If all the rest of the world was shocked, one must ask if they have been paying much attention.

There are things that a government, particularly an elected government, must do if it is to stay in power. Foremost is to bring home the bacon.

• Is it misspelled?
• Does it violate the rules of grammar?
• Does it offend my sense of style?
• Is. It. Punctuated. Idiosyncratically?
• Does it violate IETF RFCs 2047 and 2231 by placing un-encoded non-ASCII characters in any of the message headers?

If any of the above are true, the recipient SHOULD send a delivery status notification stating the reason for the delivery failure. The recipient MAY prefer to discard the message.

What Outlook does instead is ask one to select those countries, languages, and encodings which you find unacceptable. I can’t do that. It’s a small world after all. But I can be pedantic and insist that mail be well-formed.

Sorry, Mr. Postel.

Since we moved we’ve been without television.

There’s a home-owner’s association, and winter, and we’re unsure of where to put the dish, and the CATV MSO is more expensive, and we’d need to get a new TiVo, so we’ll wait.

This does not mean that we’ve been without video on a cathode-ray tube. We did not hook up the TV for a couple of weeks, but I did finally get around to looking for the cables and found them — and there are still things on the TiVo that we haven’t seen. But perhaps more interestingly my laptop has S-video output, and the television has S-video input, and the videos sold at the Apple iTunes Music Store look just fine at NTSC resolution.

Which brings me to my point, such as it is. People do not care about channels of television; they care about their shows. That is why they say, “my soaps.” It is why popular shows have continuity, plots which continue from episode to episode. If you can miss an episode, and not care that you missed the episode, then that show was just filling time. But if you care, then you’ll pay $1.99 for the episode so that you do not miss it.

I was just browsing through Regional Landscapes of the United States and Canada at Amazon. Notice how the regions defined in this map span the border of the United States and Canada, but mysteriously end at the border with Mexico. Given the title of the book Mexico is out-of-scope, and is shown on the map for position only. But the region extends past this imaginary border, despite the fence.

It’s just the way the procedures are designed. The procedure assumes that the only one wanting to know the lat,long would be law enforcement. Law enforcement needs a warrant.

Sprint Refuses To Reveal Location Of Cell Phone In Carjacked SUV

POSTED: 9:14 am PST January 11, 2006
UPDATED: 9:46 am PST January 11, 2006

EASTVALE, Calif. — A stolen car that had a kidnapped baby and a cell phone inside has become the center of a new controversy.

The parents of the kidnapped baby are outraged that the phone that could have been used to find the baby was not.

Video

NBC4 reported that a lot of cell phones come with GPS locator technology and privacy assurances that your location will not be divulged to anyone, even to law enforcement without a subpoena.

“I guess I just assumed they had these GPS things. Let’s use it for some good rather than tracking where I’m hanging out at the mall,” said mother Stephanie Cochran.

The Cochran family of Eastvale was loading their baby into their SUV in the home’s driveway. The father, Jason, belted in their 10-month-old baby and came back inside for their 3-year-old.

“Stephanie was finishing brushing his teeth. I went and got him and walked out the door and the car was gone with Wade in it,” said father Jason Cochran.

When the parents called 911 they also realized that the father’s Sprint cell phone with GPS locator technology was also in the car.

NBC4 reported that Sprint wouldn’t provide a location to the parents or to the deputies.

“The deputies were told that Sprint had the location of the vehicle but that they could not disclose it to them because they needed to pay the $25 fee for a subpoena or fill out some forms,” said Stephanie.

Almost 2 ½ hours later a passer-by spotted the SUV abandoned a mile away.

Responding deputies found the boy safe in his car seat.

Riverside sheriff’s authorities were outraged that Sprint could have directed the deputies to the boy an hour earlier and did not.

Supervisors were told Sprint already has an emergency protocol that the employee in this situation did not follow.

NBC reported that the Riverside supervisors were considering prodding Sprint with a regulatory stick but they discovered they don’t have authority.

I was reading the news about the vapor release of Verizon’s V CAST Music store. The labels open yet another retail outlet; Verizon maximizes usage of their infrastructure; and Microsoft gets another distributor of its DRM software. But I fail to see the benefit for the customer. Similiarly, Microsoft and MTV‘s vapor URGE is so thrilling that I might call 1-800-OK-CABLE.

But apparently there were some clues passed around at CES, even in the press releases, that flew right over the heads of the media attending.

“Customers are endlessly creative in imagining ways for broadband and mobility to transform their lives and change the way our society works,” [Verizon CEO Ivan] Seidenberg said. “Verizon’s job is to make sure that – whatever great communications idea anyone can come up with – our networks can help make it happen.”

On Marketplace this morning, they talked about what’s buzzing about the Consumer Electronics Show this week. Apparently it’s the same buzzword that’s been around for the past twenty-odd years: convergence. Who knew?

And “another thing everybody’s talking about is high-definition DVD.” It is?

I must be lounging next to the wrong water-coolers, because nobody who is anybody is talking about either.

One of the things that attracted me to the Town of Beekman is the opportunity to become involved in local government. Over the past few days I have been considering to which committees I might reasonably devote time and effort: already I merely expressed an interest and was accepted on the architectural review board of the home-owners association. One which piques my interest is the conservation advisory committee. To familiarize myself with the issues, I am reading the Town of Beekman Open Space Plan (PDF), adopted in April 2005, and the proposed wetlands protection law.

Since we’ve just moved here, most of what we see is unfamiliar. I expect that to change soon enough, but for now I am looking at this environment with new eyes. After ten years in Mahopac, I had become accustomed to the warm glow on overcast nights from, I supposed, the City to our South. On clear nights, the additional light was not obvious — I could see so many stars. But over Christmas I was reminded how many more you can see from Highland County, Virginia.

Today’s Poughkeepsie Journal reports that the lights from Union Vale Middle School bother its neighbors. The lights, seen in this photograph, have been left burning all night long. As the Journal puts it, Arnold and Andrea Ruf don’t have a night light in their bedroom.

If you drive up Roosevelt Drive to the top of the hill, you can look South to the Green Haven Correctional Facility. The lights from the prison, and from the farm across the road, turn our overcast nights orange.

How many more stars would we see if these lights lit the ground instead of the sky?

I can’t help but think of that spunky little fellow who kept trying to eat Foghorn Leghorn.

Do not be mistaken. Two and one-half baths is nothing less than three toilets to be plunged.

In discussing a Slate article on the Advisory Panel‘s proposed changes to the tax code, Zimran concludes

From a federal standpoint there are no middle class families living in $500K houses. If you live in a $500K home and are surrounded by people who live in a $500K home and think you are middle class you are wrong — you are, in fact, rich and you live in a rich neighbourhood and you will be taxed.

That’s funny; I don’t feel rich. I’ll feel even less rich when the first mortgage payment comes due. But, Zimran, the proposed change would cap the deduction on mortgages in excess of $300,000. The relative weight of a mortgage may not be in proportion to the value of the house. To use an example from recent history, the mortgage on one property is $280,000. The property sold for $520,000 on the open market. The mortgage on another property is $360,000. That property sold for $390,000 on the open market. Which of these buyers is wealthier?

Computers have no sense of style. When a number is less than ten, it is commonly written out rather than being presented in figures, except when speaking of a set of numbers where the higher number is greater than ten.

For example, when giving a street address one would write Three Main Street rather than 3 Main Street, or 142 Model Road rather than One Hundred Forty-Two Model Road. But if we were to give a set of addresses, such as 3 Main Street, 142 Model Road, and 1600 Example Avenue, one would use numerals for each, as the higher numbers are greater than ten.

But computers have no sense of style, and so you can confuse them by providing the word rather than the numeral.

Have you noticed that on-line contracts are an all-or-nothing proposition? You can’t strike through specific objectionable clauses.

Driving back from Virginia after Christmas, I had to choose a route. Should I take I-81 to I-84 and thence home, or I-81 to I-78 to I-287 to I-87 to I-84 and thence home? I-81 in the former route runs along the ridgeline of the Appalachians after leaving Pennsylvania’s Great Valley. There’s a greater chance of inclement weather, and the grades are somewhat steeper. The latter route runs through the Great Valley and the Lehigh Valley, but traverses some hills in New Jersey and New York. There’s a greater chance of heavy traffic because the route passes through or near several large cities.

So, I was wondering, which route would cost the least in time? Which would cost the least in dollars spent on fuel? And which would cost the least in mileage? Would each route be the same? Which would be the least cost overall?

And now I have a feature request for on-line maps in addition to allowing placement of arbitrary turning points in driving directions: least-cost routing options.

Oh, and the next incremental improvement for Google Maps should be topographical.

We closed on our new home on Thursday, December 22nd. The purchase was much easier than the sale. Once we have things sorted out, I’ll find some time to take a few pictures, but let me note for the record that this place is huge. It is also big.

I am reminded of Douglas Adams’s description of the Universe.

To my surprise, the local exchange carrier is not Verizon but Frontier Communications. And I can get DSL! So now I have an additional broadband option, don’t have to switch to CATV, and can keep my DirecTiVo subscription until News Corporation comes out with a “better” video recorder. But then, we haven’t even plugged in the TV yet.

Yesterday we closed the sale of our house in Carmel, New York. Tomorrow, we will close the purchase of our house in Poughquag, New York.

This was a lot more difficult than it sounds.

Yes! Bow down in awe of my l33t k1dz t0yz packing sk1llz! One room. One box. (Stuffed animals and books not included.)