Andrew Pollack 's Techdirt Comments

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  • On the post: Homeland Security Doesn't Extend To Telemarketing Calls

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 19 Jun, 2006 @ 01:06pm

    Shall we play a game?

    War dialing is surely nothing new. Random autodialing telemarketing is insanely simple.

    As the 2008 elections get close, consider the election calls you'll get.

    If I were pushing for say, the DNC, I'd set up a cheap linux box at serverbeach running asterisk. Then, I'd sign up as many home users as were willing -- anywhere in the country -- and send them a little IAXY device. Each device would cost about $75 -- much less I assume if bought in bulk.

    Each user willing to plug this device into his or her cable modem and phone line for a few hours a day -- perhaps while they were at work -- would give me the ability to auto-dial from their phone number to any local numbers all day long at virtually no further cost.

    Talk about grass roots! figure about $100 worth of server for each 200 or so outbound concurrent calls, plus about $75 for the devices each. In terms of cost, this would be almost as low as spam rates when you figure how many thousands of calls per day could be autodialed with these little devices. The recording can easily be tailored to the area being called, no telemarketing people need be paid, and the devices are a tax deduction.

    Oh, and the devices are reusable for campaign after campaign, year after year. Once owned, the only costs are shipping them to volunteers and the cost of the server. I'm willing to bet I'm low on the number of concurrent calls per server as well.

    Hell, I could set the thing up in a matter of a day or two.

  • On the post: For Those Who Absolutely, Positively Need Their Phone To Work In A Hurricane

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 08 Jun, 2006 @ 07:30pm

    Its not that HAM isn't a good thing...

    ..I respect greatly what the "Amateur" radio operators can do., and in fact I realize that most are more professional about their work than most professionals and that there is a great deal of overlap between EMS people and ham operators.

    That said, keep in mind that 40% of the US population is protected by all volunteer fire departments. There are 800,000 volunteer firefighters and about 300,000 full time paid firefighters in the US.

    Getting the same people on the same truck at each incident rarely happens on the best of days. In a dissaster, its likely you'll have an excellent turnout, but still you'll be dealing with chaos.

    Am I to give you, the ham operator, who is not insurred, trained, or otherwise "blessed" one of the six seats on a new custom cab class A pumper, or one of the 3 on many of the less expensive "commercial cab" trucks in use in smaller communities?

    Can I quickly and reliably have a force of say, 5 healthy, fit, available, and well trained ham operators for every 10,000 people a town might have (which is roughly 1 ham operator per apparatus on average) each of whom is equiped with a compatible portable radio?

    Assuming (and I don't believe it) that you could get enough fit, qualified, operators to voluneer to respond as EMS personel for a training program frequently enough to be ready for these kinds of incidents (firefighters in most towns training on average 4 hours a month) do you seriously think a training program and expansion of the 53,000 small departments in the US would cost less than buying sat phone for a few thousand dollars a truck?

    Just getting bunker gear for that guy would break $2500 and we haven't even started talking about insuring him or her, costs of training and paperwork, etc.

    Do you imagine you'd be able to take him or her untrained, uninsured, or without safety gear on the trucks?

    Remember, you're going into an inherently hazzardous area. Just riding on the truck into that kind of situation requires training on a regular basis in how to handle down power lines, traffic issues, unsafe water, hazmat, biohazard, unsafe elevation or declination, and a host of other things.

    Think I'm kidding here? If you don't take that kind of thing seriously, you'll quickly be adding to the problem, not solving it.

    No, I think just training costs, paperwork costs, insurrance costs, and a set of safety gear would immediately overtop the cost of that $5,000 dollar phone the first year, and that phone will last several years.

  • On the post: For Those Who Absolutely, Positively Need Their Phone To Work In A Hurricane

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 08 Jun, 2006 @ 05:20am

    Gi JoeBob... Ham doesn't really meet this need.

    Ham radio is well and good but just having a channel doesn't meet the need. You'd need a ham radio operator with a portable radio coordinating with a command station for each concurrent incident. The operator would need to be well versed in the incident management system (ICS 700 and ICS 100) at the very least.

    Radio communication isn't just about having a walkie-talkie. Too much or the wrong kind of traffic is as bad as no radios at all.

  • On the post: For Those Who Absolutely, Positively Need Their Phone To Work In A Hurricane

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 08 Jun, 2006 @ 04:48am

    To emergency services, that's not a bad deal.

    I'm a lieutenant on a fire department. As such, I'm aware of (though not responsible directly for) the purchase of all kinds of emergency services equipment. If you consider the costs of the kind of equipment it takes to keep connectivity during a long term power loss situation over a wide area (ice storm in Northern New England a few years ago, Katrina in the south last year) when hundreds of square miles are without cell service or radio repeaters these kinds of solutions don't look expensive.

    Consider - To use radios to communicate, which is critical for fire, ems, and police to do more than drive around aimlessly - you must have repeaters every "N" miles. "N" is determined by the terrian and power limits of course. In rural parts where there are many towns with their own frequencies you need more. In urban areas or areas which use expensive "trunking" radios to put more people on the same frequencies you need fewer. An ice storm or hurricane like Katrina can take down the towers over a VERY wide area.

    If you lose the repeaters and cell towers over even a 10 mile by 10 mile area, that's 100 square miles without coverage. What are your alternatives?

    You could keep spare repeater towers, generators, and equipment at the ready in key locations. You'll need people trained to put them up of course, and until they get up you have no service. Its not easy putting up new towers. You either have very very large ones which are very difficult, or a great many small ones.

    You could deploy a military style "battlefield radio network". I think that's being looked at, but training everyone to start using it is not a simple matter. The most effective way would probably be to add a trained national guard member to each crew to handle communications using their protocols and practices.

    Or you could put one or two $5000 sat. phones at each fire station and police station. A fire truck is a $100,000 purchase at minimum, and more like $250,000 for an average class A pumper. A ladder truck or heavy rescue can run well past $750,000. That's before you add equipment. Not every truck would have to have one, as radios can work in "local" or "talk around" mode on a given scene. Having one sat phone at each scene to talk to the command center would go a long way to solving the problem.

    From that perspective, $5,000 seems cheap.


    I'm not sure

  • On the post: Segway's Brilliant New Strategy? Leasing!

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 01 Jun, 2006 @ 04:45am

    How to get into the house?

    Well, I seem to recall another machine interfaced technology assistance unit where the speculation for years was that it would be stopped by a simple staircase. It had a secret....

    EL-E-VATE.....El-E-VATE.....

    Oh wait, that was TV. Never mind.

  • On the post: Time Warner Says If We Can't Do A Networked DVR, No One Can

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 31 May, 2006 @ 07:50pm

    Its all temporary.

    The market is moving quickly toward the time when the idea of a personal dvr isn't really that necessary. It may be useful, but when I can watch what I want, when I'm ready to watch it, free with commercials or a buck and hour without -- at that point I won't care where the content lives.

  • On the post: Segway's Brilliant New Strategy? Leasing!

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 31 May, 2006 @ 06:52pm

    These guys thought they were going to change the w

    The thought these were the next best thing to the flying car. There was talk of having to remodel city transportation centers to accomodate all of them.

    Nobody told them that standing for long periods with your feet together isn't comfortable, and that the human body was BUILT for long walks.

    Trading the flexibility of walking ad-hoc where you want, for even a fairly efficient 5000 dollar machine isn't idea for most people.

    At some point, they realized what they really had was a great PLATFORM for building stuff onto. Robots, medical aid equipment, moving tools, whatever.

    Strange though, they don't seem to have sold many for that either. I guess they're just too proud of the their toys to actually sell any.

  • On the post: My Phone Is Too Complicated, But I Love It

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 30 May, 2006 @ 07:14pm

    A phone must be a phone.

    I'm a true alpha geek. I build my own electronics, write my own software, have my own phone system via asterisk on linux. An alpha geek.

    I'm also a firefighter.

    The combination makes for a problem. All the "cool" phones with PDA's and so on don't fare well at all when you skitter them across the concrete floor of the bay where my Engine sits as I swap street shoes for boots and bunker pants.

    I've learned to pick a good phone by picking one that is a good PHONE. The Motorola E815 gets great reception and sounds good to people you talk to and they to you. I can do email with a pop3 client add on, and it even does bluetooth (esp. once you hack the firmware and uncripple it).

    I paid $50 for it, and someone shoot me if I ever PAY for wallpaper or a f'**** ring tone!

    btw: taking pictures or playing mp3's doesn't use airtime because it has a transflash card. 1/2 gig of data on a card the size of my thumbnail and it works like a usb drive. Sweet.

  • On the post: Court Invalidates Infamous E-commerce Patent

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 20 May, 2006 @ 06:08pm

    From the "inventor" perspective.

    I am in the middle of this now. Today.

    I have a business model I'm moving forward and preparing for market. It is innovative in the way a few technologies are pulled together to make an overall process.

    The process is profitable. Its innovative. Is it patentable? I wish it were not. Personally, I hate the idea of patenting processes like this. I hate it for all the reasons everyone else reading this hates it.

    Still, if I opt not to patent it -- according to some very good lawyers -- I put myself at great risk for being stopped in the future from having this business. Ugly, isn't it?

    So morally, I would prefer not to patent. Legally, it appears I almost have to.

  • On the post: 93% Of Domain Reigistrations For Scam Sites?

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 18 May, 2006 @ 03:50pm

    A solution, which of course won't gain support....

    ...would be to include an extension dns field which indicates from the registrar the date when the domain was registered. Personally, I would deny mail from domains less than 14 days old. This would resolve 99% of the spam that comes through with valid SPF records and would make SPF a much more powerful tool.

  • On the post: Vigilante Do Not Spam Email List Discovers Spammers Aren't Trustworthy

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 09 May, 2006 @ 05:59pm

    I just signed up with a new filter service, and it

    I just outsourced my mx servers to EmeraldSpamShield as a service. They were cheap, effective, and the home made software I was runing to defend my mail system worked but was killing the processing performance on my systems. Offloaded for a few bucks a month and it was worth it.

    FCK those guys. I'd love to do real physical harm to some of them.

  • On the post: Email Embarrassment Hits Execs As Well

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 09 May, 2006 @ 05:53pm

    The guy should quit or be fired.

    Nothing is a surer sign of someone that should be fired than when that someone plays the childish amature hour game of copying a bunch of unrelated people (or managers) when chewing someone out or demanding something as a play for more pressure.

    Its amature hour politics, only works short term, and is a sure sign of someone in over their head without the confidence to handle a challenge without feeling threatened.

    Loosers.

  • On the post: How Every Mobile Operator Claims Its Network Is The Best

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 03 May, 2006 @ 06:10am

    Good related points from Freakanomics

    Levitt and Dubner point out in their book "Freakanomics" using purely rational statistical methods, that these tactics have the opposite effect -- at least when applied to real estate. The use of nonspecific positive adjectives, capital letters, exclamation points, and similar tactics not only tend to drive a price lower, but are a kind of code used when there isn't anything specifically good to say but you don't want to piss off your customer by having a short boring ad.

    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/006073132X/bookstorenow57-20/103-4609496-0639862

    (If you haven't read this, you shoud, its a fun read, and fascinating.)

  • On the post: Microsoft Patents Multi-Domain User Tracking With Cookies

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 03 May, 2006 @ 06:01am

    will never hold up to a suit

    There is clearly plenty of prior art here, this will never be sustained in any suit. To some extent, this is the kind of patent that does nothing but increment a counter on investor sheets as an I.P. assett in the "Number of patents held" column.

  • On the post: Big Words Make You Look Dumb?

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 20 Apr, 2006 @ 05:21am

    words are powerful and specificity is a good thing

    I'm someone with a very large vocabulary (and pathetic spelling skills). It annoys me when editors suggest more common and less specific words in places where the word I've chosen conveys exactly the meaning I want. I've been known to send editors dictionary pages.

  • On the post: Philips Patents Pissing Off TV Viewers

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 19 Apr, 2006 @ 12:30am

    They have a right to include their commercials and enforce viewing as "payment" for their otherwise free product. We have the right not to accept that contract by not watching.

    Forget the patent -- which I agree is moronic --

    IMO, this is actually an important step forward in something I personally can't have soon enough. That is, shows which are freely available from broadcaster's sites immediately following their airtime. iTunes is charging $2.00 for shows from some broadcast outlets w/o commercials. IMO this is about $1.00 too much. This "new" functionality would allow a $1/show non-commercial version and a free commercial version to easily coexist.

    The choice of which of them to "purchase" -- or not to purchase either -- remains mine.

  • On the post: Intuit Freaks Out Last Minute Tax Filers By Rebooting Machines

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 17 Apr, 2006 @ 10:26pm

    Intuit pisses me off more each day

    I've had it with their piece of garbage. I've documented problems where it has lost record of reconciled transactions, suddenly throwing cleared balances totally off base. They advertise their add-ons in software I've purchased, and charge fees for services other packages don't need to do at all because they've abandoned support for non-fee based imports.

    I cannot WAIT to dump their formerly great software and -- FSM help me -- switch from Quickbooks to Microsoft's Small Business Accounting.

  • On the post: It Takes A Lot Of People To Filter The Internet In China

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 03 Apr, 2006 @ 03:40am

    oh sure, but its not as expensive as it could be..

    I hear they can outsource it.

  • On the post: What Are The Long Term Effects For A Generation Of Multitaskers?

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 20 Mar, 2006 @ 04:51am

    Actually, it makes for a more balanced society

    The way people pay attention and the things each person brain is most suited to focus on are different. For about the last fifty to eighty years there has been a decided advantage to those most able to focus on a single task and tune out other things -- classroom based work, office work in a large open office area, etc. Those less inclined to this kind of work were labeled with ADHD, which is actually just a difference in the kinds of things they are best able to handle. ADHD types are very much favored by the kinds of work multitaskers make more common. The home office with a dozen ongoing projects, lots of experimentation and self study, new concepts and innovations -- these technologies provide a means to involve more people in jobs they are best suited for.

    Its a good thing.

  • On the post: Self-Destructing DVDs Again?!?

    Andrew Pollack ( profile ), 27 Feb, 2006 @ 07:37pm

    Well, it worked out well for 3M

    The were some really bright folks working on what they hoped would be a new kind of glue that was super strong and reusable at the same time. It would bond, but could also be left open. Magic stuff.

    Problem with it was that it was tacky but not really able to form a real bond of any kind. Basically, it would come apart at a slight pull without even damaging paper.

    Most companies would call that failure. 3M called it "Post-It Notes" -- the rest is history.

    :-)

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