Tech

Groovy.

I think it’s prudent to assume that improved technology will eventually make it possible for anybody to read the encrypted documents that you send via email today. Similarly, you should probably assume that any photos in which you appear that are posted on the Web, even without captions, will eventually be searchable. (Being searchable by name is merely a matter of linking your image to one captioned photo.) Depending on the sophistication of the search algorithms and the quality of the images, this should apply to crowd photos, other people’s snapshots where you appear in the background, etc.

Search algorithms are Google’s strong point, and the Company already has a very effective text-based “Image Search” system. Improvements in that system seem certain, and I’m sure will bring widespread benefits that offset at least some of the costs. However, it’s increasingly clear that privacy as it existed before 1995 is a thing of the past.

From a business POV we are still in early days. Google reminds me of Microsoft in the early ’90s, except that I think Google has greater potential. The next few years should be interesting in many ways.

Taking a break from test-writing, I turn on C-span and hear Seymour Hersch say we will never know who killed Rafik Hariri. But I remembered the report named names. Next break, I turn to Instapundit who links this:

The final, edited version quoted a witness as saying that the plot to kill Mr Hariri was hatched by unnamed “senior Lebanese and Syrian officials”. But the undoctored version named those officials as “Maher al-Assad, Assef Shawkat, Hassan Khalil, Bahjat Suleyman and Jamal al-Sayyed”.

(Ah – a certain order and clarity – for these are the President’s brother, brother-in-law & the Commander of Syrian intelligence) Of course, this has been known since Thursday and C-span taped Hersch before. But Hersch would have seemed more prescient if Annan’s editing had stood. (“The confidential changes were revealed by an extraordinary computer gaffe because an electronic version distributed by UN officials on Thursday night allowed recipients to track editing changes.”) Perhaps just such moments make the UN more determined to control the net: It’s chaos when people know too much, isn’t it?

From the port side of the Web comes yet another post telling us why one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world is still not regulated enough.

Why the rapid increase[in the number of people who could benefit from cholesterol-lowering drugs]? Are cholesterol levels in the United States actually getting worse and worse? Are more and more people at risk of a heart attack? Hard to say.

Given our aging demographic, it’s pretty easy to say that the number of people at risk of a heart attack is rising. And, one would also expect that over 13 years, cholesterol-lowering drugs have gotten more effective and with fewer side effects, increasing the number of people for whom the costs are worth the benefits.

But does that account for a three-fold increase in the number of people that the National Institutes of Health guidelines indicate should be taking these drugs? Beats me. Mr. Plumer doesn’t trust those guidelines because most of the experts writing them were paid by the makers of those drugs and thus are biased observers.

Guess what? I don’t trust those guidelines either, and for the same reason. Regulatory capture is a fact of life, and it’s been demonstrated over and over and over and over again, clear back to the days when the government started “regulating” the early railroad industry. Regulation is a way to protect politically connected vendors from competition. It’s happened so many times, over so long a period, that it doesn’t even count as an “unintended consequence” anymore – if you’re paying the least bit of attention, you’re forced to conclude that empowering legislators and regulators to protect their friends from competition is the main purpose of regulation, and the fact that lots of voters think that regulation is good for protecting the so-called “common man” is a fortuitous circumstance enabling them to keep creating and using this power.

The unintended consequence, if there is one, is that the skies are still empty of traffic, the extraterrestrial Solar System is still utterly uninhabited and your life expectancy is still less than a century. In short, protecting current vendors from competition impedes technological advancement. It certainly doesn’t do anything to improve the lives of those who aren’t close personal friends of regulators or legislators – it simply prevents weirdos you never heard of (and now never will) from coming up with an ingenious way to give you what you need better than the lazy slugs that make their living through regulatory capture.

In short – if you’re concerned that the government is too friendly with (currently existing) corporations, and giving them “corporate welfare” including, but not limited to, protection from competition, we’re on your side, and our proposed reforms (deregulation, deregulation, and more deregulation) are the only workable solution. The alternative solutions, which involve giving legislators and regulators even more power to protect their friends from competition and give them other things at taxpayer expense, are about as likely to work as fighting a fire by pouring gasoline on it.

And really, if you can’t trust the National Institutes of Health when they give advice that is at least subject to the marketplace of ideas, why in the world would you ever even consider letting a government agency retain the power to make similar judgements about drugs and forbid ordinary people from ignoring their (regulatorily captured, no doubt) pronouncements about which drugs they shouldn’t buy?

But back to that unintended consequence I picked out… is it really unintended? Are there really people that would be against technological advancement? People that don’t openly subscribe to “humans are a plague on beautiful, pristine, sacred nature” nonsense?

The evidence is not encouraging. Back to the post:

Also, since my brain’s still untarnished by the latest glossy Newsweek article pushing the latest disease dreamed up in GlaxoSmithKline headquarters, I would guess that some of those billions spent on, say, Lipitor might be better spent on public health programs instead. Then again, any scientific study I could dig up on public health is very likely to be funded by the diet and fitness industries—they’ve already got Paul Krugman in their thrall, why not me? And so it goes, with new diseases concocted and commodified every which way we turn.

…

Perhaps the health wonks among us can mull this problem over, while I ponder what it means when two of our nation’s largest industries (health and defense) can essentially manufacture demand out of thin air. Free market, they call it. Baffling, I say.

This is nothing more than a (pejorative) description of technological advancement! Humanity is faced with an endless array of problems; most of them are necessarily ignored most of the time because no solution exists for them. That doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist, though. It’s still a problem, it’s just a problem that’s isn’t going away for the foreseeable future.

When someone actually comes up with a solution for it, though, we stop ignoring it because we can solve it. No one created the problem – we just started noticing it. It’s then up to us common people to decide whether the cost of solving it is less than the cost of continuing to live with it. Sometimes the answer is yes, and we pay a price we never paid before, and we get a benefit we never thought possible. How in the Hell does anyone conclude that this in itself constitutes a problem or a flaw in our system? On what planet does curing a disease count as “concocting” it? How could anyone sane conclude that those who give us relief from afflictions that we thought were eternal, unfixable, and inevitable are the bad guys?

If Burt Rutan or Virgin Galactic or one of those guys gets passenger service going to orbit or to the moon, is this character going to claim that those guys “manufactured demand” for spaceship rides and ponder what it means that they can manufacture all this demand and make money off of it and get away with it? Will the people who cure cancer be manufacturing demand for their cure, and will he ponder what it means that they can get away with it? And that Jonas Salk guy, where did he get off manufacturing demand for polio vaccine? And heart attacks just weren’t a problem for anyone until those statin pushers “concocted” them, right?

So we have a choice. We can conclude that Mr. Plumer and guys like him really don’t understand how technological advancement works. Or we can conclude that he and guys like him oppose technological advancement and want us to keep living with our present “incurable” afflictions for all time, only with more government supervision. (And one wonders why today’s afflictions are so special, and whether he thinks living with the 15th Century’s “incurable” afflictions wouldn’t be better still…)

I was reading the July, 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics when I saw an item about a laptop computer that could be manufactured for $100 USD. The laptop was designed by the brains at MIT, and the idea is to market the ultra cheap computers in the 3rd World in an attempt to narrow the digital divide. The author of the piece was quick to point out that these computers wouldn’t be sold in the United States.

I doubt very many people would want one if they could afford something better. The C-note laptops have a rather flimsy 12” projection screen, 1GB of DRAM and flash memory, and (maybe) a 500-MHz microprocessor. The machine will also feature a hand crank to recharge the batteries, 4 USB ports, and Wi-Fi hardware.

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I started using Google’s Picasa 2 software because 1) I was looking for a way to do easy batch-viewing and -editing of photo image files, 2) it was recommended and 3) it’s free.

Results are mixed, though on balance I find Picasa useful as a supplement to Photoshop Elements 2 (which has limited batch-viewing and no batch-editing capabilities). Picasa makes it easy to select a group of images and apply simple corrections en masse, e.g., to create a virtual contact-sheet for film scans — very helpful. Picasa also makes it simple to categorize and search images, and to export or email them (resized appropriately, and automatically, according to easy-to-set user preferences). Its image-adjustment controls are rudimentary but well designed and effective. There is no way to remove dust spots, but Picasa is clearly intended for the casual digital photographer rather than the hobbyist film aficionado (who can always use Photoshop for specialized editing).

Picasa’s big flaw is that it has no provision for displaying the directory hierarchies on the user’s hard drive. Picasa’s file-library window shows only directories that contain images. The apparent idea is that the user will search for images by date, tag or label, so who needs hierarchy. Or maybe Google expects everyone to keep his images in the Windows-default “My Photos” or “My Pictures” directory. Or perhaps it’s a carryover from some Mac-centric view of things that has contempt for Windows-style directories (Picasa seems designed to compete with Apple’s iPhoto).

The problem is that I already have my own date-based categorization system, in which the images from each roll of film or digital photo session are stored in subdirectories under a higher-level directory that’s named according to the date the photos were made. For example, photos made April 12 are stored in subdirectories named “hi-res scans” and “edited versions”, in the directory “20050412”, which is itself located in the higher-level directory “2005”. I think my categorization system makes a lot of sense, since it’s much easier to manage than if I had to label every photo (there are thousands) or manually import it into an album (as in iPhoto). Dates correspond to events in my life and are usually the easiest points of reference when it comes to finding a particular image. Labeling is a nuisance, and would force me not only to create numerous categories but also to go back and add category labels to older photos every time I added a new category. Too much trouble. Only the lowest common denominator of labeling is going to work for me, and that means dates. But Picasa recognizes only the lowest-level directories in my hierarchy, so instead of displaying a simple hierarchy of directories in the form “\YYYY\YYYYMMDD-X”, which I can very quickly navigate and drill down into, I see a jumble of the identically named low-level subdirectories (“hi-res scans” and “edited versions”) that contain the actual image files. This is silly. There ought to be an option to view image files in conventional, Windows-style directory hierarchies. It’s an easy fix if Google decides to do it, and I hope that they will.

Other than these quibbles, Picasa is really quite good, and that’s partly due to its stickiness. What makes it sticky is its seamless integration with email, particularly Google’s Gmail service, and here Google was extremely clever. It understood how much utility could be gained by making it easier to email photos. Before Picasa, when I wanted to send a photo, I had to first open the photo in Photoshop, then edit it to reduce its size, then I had to save the edited file and remember where on my HD I saved it, then I had to create, address and title a new message using my email program, then I had to find the photo file on my HD and attach it to my email message before I could send it. With Picasa, I select a photo, click “Email”, click “Sign in” (for the first photo sent), specify an address and click “Send” — that’s it. This process works particularly well with Gmail because Gmail gives you a lot of storage space; you don’t have to worry about your email server filling up with bulky jpegs. My threshold for emailing photos is now much lower than it was previously.

When I started using Picasa it seemed like OK software, but then Incognito sent me a Gmail invite. Soon we were exchanging photos (and sending Gmail invitations to third parties), and I was using both Picasa and Gmail a lot more than I had initially intended. This is a winning system. Google stands to make a lot of money from it because of the context-sensitive ads it embeds in the emails, so I suspect they will continue to improve it.