My Own Pirate Radio

At $11/day this is much cheaper than taking a cab to and from the airport, or parking in the main airport garage at $24/day. And it’s fast, because the parking lot is on the Link train route, which means 5 minutes and you’re inside the terminal. Useful option for short trips out of Toronto.

Here’s the web page, and a map. You do need to print out and bring the coupon with you, otherwise its $14/day.

Last May I bought a new laptop, an Asus W3V. About a month later it started behaving badly: occasionally refusing to enter or return from standby, randomly changing the display resolution when changing power management state, and, once in a while, blue-screening with a complaint about the video driver ati2dvag.dll toodling off into an infinite loop. Not want you want from a brand new laptop.

In the bad old days — 1993, to be specific — I would have walked down the hall, found “Andre the device driver guy from Quebec”, and handed him my laptop to debug. An hour later, he would have handed it back, fixed. Such were the benefits of working on the Windows NT team. (That and once-a-week “Weekly Integration Meetings”, i.e. “free party with heaps of great food and beer”. Intern heaven.) This being the Internet era I am sadly no longer in touch with Andre or anyone else who regularly debugs at the kernel level. So I searched around online for a fix, including an abortive attempt at communicating with Asus (their support is, shall we say, lacking in chi), and eventually gave up. My fix was to keep the laptop plugged in and avoid standby. How embarrassing.

Thankfully, the story has a happy ending: I just searched again and finally found this fix, which recommended removing the Power4Gear power management software. So far, so good: my laptop is working again, and standby works just fine now.

Internet: 1, Power4Gear: 0. Thank you, Mavtop. You are wise.

P.S. Other Asus W3V flaws and foibles:
- the speaker is tinny and too quiet. strange for a multimedia-oriented machine.
- flashing blue light when in standby will eventually drive you insane. low-tech fix: color it black with a marker
- “fast launch” keys on either side of keyboard inevitably launch something, turn off the mousepad, or turn off wireless when you hand the laptop to someone else.
- nifty mousepad scrolling gestures don’t work with Firefox

Ze Frank did a nice piece on waves.

It reminds me of this New York Times article about Friendster, and why it failed to capitalize on its early lead in social networking.

For best effect, read the NYT article first.

One of the pet projects I’ve wanted to work on for a while is a site that would guide political policy by directly polling all citizens — rather than just elected representatives — on how a government ought to spend its resources. Let’s call it Citizens in Charge… CiC.

Here’s how it would work:
1. Upon registration you are given 100 “policy dollars” to spend.
2. You get to tell government what issues you want government resources spent on. For instance, “I want $15 on health care, $3 on the military, and $20 on public transportation.” You can also nominate new issues if they aren’t already on the ballot, e.g. “Spend all the rest on skateboard parks”.
3. You can change your allocation of policy dollars at any time.
3. The service continually aggregates participants’ responses and calculates averages and other useful statistics. So we might discover, for instance, that the average spend across all participants on skateboard parks is $22.
4. The service continually communicates the results to the public and to government officials.
5. Optionally, you could also use the service to do simple one-off polls, e.g. opinion on participation in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars.

With a few thousand citizens participating I think you would get, at minimum, a public opinion poll that demands attention.

I got to thinking about CiC again after stumbling across a site called ConvinceMe.Net. ConvinceMe bills itself as, “A new way to argue. Debate online, vote online.” In a nutshell it’s a service that hosts online community debates on issues proposed by anyone. ConvinceMe seems more geared at entertainment than serious policy-making, but it is nevertheless the sort of building block you’d need to make the CiC vision come true.

CiC implementation challenges:

• Who gets to frame the issues, and how many issues should there be? For instance, should the issues be worded as “spend $X on issue ABC”, or “spend $X on issue ABC by taking actions X, Y and Z”? I prefer the former, at least as a start, because it’s simple. You could begin with the list of top-level budget headings from the existing government budget, plus an option to propose new issues at the grass roots level.
• How can issues be framed in a relatively unbiased way, with actionable results? This is always a problem in a referendum, where much wrangling occurs over how to word an issue before it is put to a public vote. ConvinceMe suffers from abuse in this regard.
• How to encourage broad and representative participation? (Lots of people dislike polls, or feel they are a waste of time. And would this be a service that only the computer-savvy make use of?)
• How to discourage anti-social behavior such as multiple voting, false impersonation, hacking, and so on? And how to protect participants’ security and privacy in case the service does get hacked?
• How to ensure only people who are allowed to vote can vote (e.g. only citizens of country X can vote on issue Y), and that their vote counts only once.

It seems inevitable to me that at some point such a service will exist, at least as a research tool if not a tool to inform public policy. Any computer science and politics experts out there willing to partner up and take a crack at it?