Distractions and Dice

When I was making my way through the distraction addiction earlier in the semester, I kept getting distracted by my own thoughts. I'd stop randomly to consider how things would be relevant to my life, and there was one thing that I kept going back to, how this applies to my gaming sessions with my friends.

Whenever I'm home, I'll try to get some tabletop gaming in with some of my friends, and for a long time distractions have been a problem. Some of the games we play have the rules online so occasionally, “I'm looking up my spells” is a valid excuse, if not still equally annoying.

For me, tabletop gaming is about escaping my technology for a few hours and just focusing on the people at the table with you, be they elves, dwarves, twi'leks or early 20^th century businessmen. Even hiking can't provide that same level of limited technology use for me, as I always end up tracking my hike with GPS and taking pictures along the way.

In role playing games especially phones are just the outside world's way of leaking into a shared face to face experience. Homework, drunk siblings looking for a ride home, girlfriends and a multitude of other things could all start being an issue at any moment or throughout the entire gaming session.

In a better world my friends and I could all strive to achieve what the author of “The Distraction Addiction” accomplished when they started turning of their internet connection and using simpler more focused tools. Phones have modes to make sure only important notifications appear, and some even come with an off button for some extreme situations. Just like training people to not expect you to respond to email the second you get it, you also have to train people to understand that you need time to yourself so that you can let yourself turn your phone off.

 If I were a cruel person I would start to turn off my router whenever I host, and let the Faraday cage that is my house do the rest of the work for me, but just like technological distractions as a whole each person has to learn how to deal with this problem for themselves.  

Phone Envy

At the tail end of my freshman year of college, I finally made the switch from an old slider phone with a tiny qwerty keyboard to the iPhone 4.  For a while, I was ecstatic,  My phone could now hold all of my music, send and receive pictures that were larger than thumbnails, and gave me access to the internet in all of its glory.  I enjoyed the luxuries of my phone for about 8 months until one day I dropped it and shattered the screen, rendering it almost useless.  The phone still worked but the broken glass was sharp and I was desperate for a replacement.  So I found myself in the valley of the shadow of phone-death, looking for a replacement smartphone for less than 200 dollars.  Eventually I found a fellow student who was selling a used iPhone 4 so I jumped on the opportunity to buy it.

    This phone suited me well until I was ready for my next upgrade at which point I bought the HTC One M7.  I loved this phone to death.  It had front facing stereo speakers and it was fast as hell compared to the old pre-siri-iPhone I was using.  But one day, more than a year before my next upgrade, I somehow managed to drop my phone in the toilet, so that was the end of that phone.  I managed to borrow a phone from a friend for a while but that one was pretty slow and aggravating and eventually it just died on its own.  At which point I was forced to return to the at this point 4 year old iPhone 4.  The only problem is that apps and mobile computing have advanced so far that the iPhone 4 is incapable of running most apps at their full potential and most things take so long to load that there's almost no point in running them on my phone.

    Now i'm not complaining about having a smartphone, It's still a better phone than I started out with as a kid, and most of the features I am missing out on are luxuries, not necessities, but it seems obvious to me now that the Fear of Missing Out, rather than just being a side effect of our fast paced consumerist culture, is a marketing strategy used by phone companies and others to scare consumers into buying the newest versions of products.  I don't need a better phone but when I see people using their phones to play interesting games and browse Reddit, I can't help but get jealous that they've got a nicer phone than I do. 

    At this point I'm used to walking to class in silence, headphones in, because my music app loads so slowly that music doesn't start playing before i make it to my destination, and I can't say that my life has been ruined by a slow phone, that would be far too dramatic, but I can say that being priced out of a nice phone does cause a bit of social anxiety.  I'm kind of embarrassed to admit that I'm jealous of people's smartphones; it seems a bit childish. The worst part of it though is I can tell that's what Verizon wants me to feel, they don't want anyone using the iPhone 4 anymore because it's not making them much money.  They want me to think that an iPhone 6S Plus is what will make me happy, but I have a feeling there might be a way to be happy with less than an iPhone 4, it's just hard to think like that in the jungle of contemporary advertising, especially around the Holidays.

   In the end, I still have a bit of Phone Envy, but I'm more envious of a much smaller subset of Phone users.  I wish I could be more like the people who still use flip phones and don't find themselves concerned about replacing it with something fancy.  It's important to aspire to be rational and smart, and the smartest phone users aren't the ones with smartphones, they're the ones who aren't vulnerable to the advertisements and who still just use their phones to make calls and send the occasional text.  In the end who care's if you can snaps, or check twitter every 5 minutes as long as you have a phone and you can use it to meet up with people in real life.

More and more smartphones are released every year but they are becoming more and more intrusive into our daily routines.  Maybe we need fewer Smartphones and more smart people.

The Knowledge Gap

The modern vision of a dystopian society is dumb. People aren’t afraid anymore of being watched by ‘the Man’ a la 1984. People are afraid of becoming the content, uneducated masses that we’ve had inside ourselves all along. It’s the internalized fear of a generation raised on television at the same time they were told it would rot their brains. Who hasn’t seen little bit too much of themselves, or their friends, in the movie Idiocracy? Who hasn’t seen news report decrying the failure of modern education? We’re paranoid, more worried than ever, that maybe society really could become an idiotic dystopia, culture controlled not by a hostile government or revolution but a casual slide towards ineptitude.

It’s a ridiculous vision of the future. In reality, the education system is working better than ever. Education standards are getting higher and people are getting smarter, all over the world.

Right?

Well, not quite. We’re actually a bit worse off than we have ever been before, and we’re getting worse. Over the last five years, education has become more concentrated on the upper class; many people who aren’t just have to do without. This is creating, right along with the income gap, a knowledge gap.

            The theory is that, like money, education is more prevalent in the upper class than in the middle or lower class. We don’t have a socialist education system.

            There are many factors contributing to the knowledge gap. One of them is failing public school systems. While the wealthy can afford to send their children to expensive private schools, the cost of which averages out at around thirty-nine thousand dollars, most people have to be content with public schooling. Private schools are provably more effective than public schools, and the consequence is that people who attend public schools get a worse education. Only those who can afford the expensive tuition, or who have earned a rare scholarship, can attend private schools.

            Another factor contributing to the knowledge gap is the lack of infrastructure in underdeveloped countries. Electricity and internet access both play important roles in education. Because of the increasing importance of I.T. skills in skilled labor, people without access to appropriate facilities are at a distinct disadvantage.

            Finally, financially it’s becoming more and more difficult for people to afford college. At the same time as tuition increases, the total amount of financial aid has decreased. This difference has to be paid out of pocket by students, or covered by loans. Only people with full-ride scholarships and the extremely wealthy can afford to pay for college straight.

            There is no real, global solution to the knowledge gap. Like income inequality, it’s a complex problem that can’t be solved with any single measure.

Patent Trolls

The concept of a patent is quite simple -- it is a 20-year monopoly on a revolutionary, useful, and nonobvious invention, granting ownership rights to the inventor and thus criminalizing the invention’s theft in forms such as production or usage without the inventor’s permission, as if it were any other sort of privately owned property. Internet trolls are provocative antagonists who intend to wreak havoc on internet communities by starting arguments, posting unrelated messages, or generating spam. Patent trolls are not very dissimilar to the internet trolls with whom we have become familiar, except that they, in a sense, “troll” the patent office instead of online forums.

Software has been notoriously difficult to label when trying to claim intellectual property. The differences and similarities between object code, source code, and functionality result in a good deal of confusion as to what a patent of this nature refers to exactly. Some existing software patents claim ownership to common or broad techniques, such as scanning documents to email, offering an umbrella wide enough for patent trolls to at least threaten businesses which utilize these common technologies, if not file infringement suits. The act of accusing businesses with intellectual property infringement and threatening a lawsuit in pursuit of private settlement or licensing fees is called extortion. Extortion is illegal.

If what these patent trolling companies are doing is illegal, how are they getting away with it? For many small businesses, the cost of a lawsuit would be extremely difficult to bankroll, leaving these companies with no other option but to pay the accuser whatever licensing fee or settlement they demand. As explained by John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, 25% of infringement lawsuits are filed in Marshall, TX because juries selected from the mid-sized texas town are more likely to side with patent holders.

The inefficacy of the patent system to prohibit this abuse has allowed parasitic patent trolls to feed off of small businesses, a pivotal component of our economy, and has cost investors hundreds of billions of dollars. The more frightening, lasting effect that this has had is the formation of a hostile environment for new ideas, creativity, and small businesses, especially those which pertain to software. The theme of hostility and danger to startups due to intellectual property claims is quite palpable in the Emmy-nominated series, Silicon Valley. The television series portrays a grave truth about the hardships that many startups face, including threats of intellectual property infringement.

Patent trolling is a pure manifestation of greed, achieved through exploitation of the system which supports it. The ramifications of this greed include the suppression of creative ideas, and the failure of small businesses due to fear. This is not capitalism, it is evil. To repair the system, legislature reforming the patent office to be more rigid and structured in its patent granting decisions would need to pass through congress. However, trial attorneys lobbying the senate have successfully prevented and are likely to continue preventing such legislature from passing, as John Oliver also notes. All of this points to a larger issue in our legal system, but I will leave that for another discussion in a separate venue. For now, the most important thing to understand is that patent trolls are extorting money from many companies using incredibly vague patents, claiming ownership on most others’ inventions or operations while producing no novel ideas, inventions, or anything else themselves.

How Our Predictions Inspire Us

For a few weeks now I have been pondering the question: why do we bother predicting the future of technology? History holds a pattern of humans expressing predictions for future technologies or events, many of which never come to fruition. The lesson to be gained from this is that we are terrible at prediction, yet we love to predict. Perhaps our fear of the unknown affords a desire to know about the future so that we may rest peacefully knowing what lies ahead. Whatever the cause may be, I am more interested in examining the effects of our incessant prognostication.

Our predictions for future technologies have not been wholly inaccurate; in fact many foreseen inventions have been realized. Certain prescient technologies that appear in Back to the Future, once unobtainable and seemingly ludicrous, now exist and are commercially available to ordinary consumers. Perhaps one of the most astonishing prophecies of the late 20th century, Moore’s Law, has quite accurately predicted that the number of transistors which can fit into a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. Since its inception in 1970, Moore’s Law has held surprisingly true, which has experts wondering when, if ever, the rule will falter.

In the last century we have observed many similar prophecies which have been fulfilled, but also some which have not. Are some predictions simply lucky, or do certain individuals possess a sort of precognitive power? A more likely alternative is that these predictions are the conceptual models which inspire technological advancement. The creative ideas drawn by filmmakers, science fiction writers, and other technology enthusiasts offer pictures that scientists and engineers can use to realize these concepts. It may be naive to credit far-fetched ideas of the past with some of the inventions we use today, but the idea that our speculations subtly influence the future of technology is not entirely dismissible.

Our excitement for exploration and discovery is a powerful force for creativity which should never be mellowed. Discussing the future is a seemingly worthwhile and entertaining part of our culture with the potential to direct research efforts. So, why do we bother predicting the future of technology? As Abraham Lincoln once said, “the best way to predict the future is to create it.” Whether done as a wager or for entertainment, our fantastic speculations serve to foster the creativity and inspiration which drives invention.

Bitcoin's Viability

Bitcoin’s popularity has been steadily growing since its publication in 2009 and has been adopted by various markets, not limited to those which are internet-based. Its decentralized and community-oriented nature provides a dynamic that is arguably more fair than current nationalized fiat currencies. With Bitcoin standing as a contender for recognition by national bodies, how can we be sure that the system is stable enough to support our vast economic landscape?

Bitcoin’s innerworkings are relatively complex and at first seem to be cloaked in gramarye. This may be intimidating to some, but the complexity of the Bitcoin system is trivial compared to that of the dollar. We are predisposed to the dollar, a currency which is regulated and controlled by large entities, because it is standard, it is normal, it is what most people use to transfer value and settle debt. One of the beauties of Bitcoin is that one need not know how it works in order to use it, a characteristic common to the dollar. The technical details are available for those who are curious, but most users are content with understanding the basic functions of Bitcoin. At a minimum, Bitcoin requires its users to understand how to use a computer or mobile application, which may pose an issue for less tech-savvy individuals but is otherwise a very reasonable requirement in order to use the system.

Another issue with the system is the potential for starvation, or the pooling of total available bitcoins into the hands of wealthy individuals. When, for instance, one individual owns roughly one percent of Bitcoin’s total value, the rest of the system must react in order to balance that deficit. The potential for individuals to corrupt Bitcoin by causing deflation within the system does exist. If one entity manages to control at least 50% of the Bitcoin network, they have the ability to “double spend”, or make multiple transactions with the same bitcoins. There are a number of other weaknesses within the system, most of which derive from the rules governing it.

Perhaps the greatest issue, one which many overlook as it is not immediately apparent, is the enormous amount of computation required to ensure the system’s security. Bitcoin mining, in a nutshell, can be described as a race, consisting of a computationally expensive puzzle, among the network’s fastest and most powerful computers in pursuit of winning the next “block” along with a handsome reward of bitcoins. Many individuals and groups have spent large sums of real-world value to construct hardware designed specifically for solving these puzzles. During an age in which supercomputers allow us to analyze protein folding, simulate the big bang, and model the swine flu for the benefit of humanity, it is slightly unsettling to realize that our fascination falls into solving meaningless puzzles for a virtual reward.

Despite these issues, Bitcoin has made its way into many various markets, inching towards widespread acceptance with Germany at the forefront of this revolution. Clearly, there are many things to consider before declaring Bitcoin a currency, including whether or not it should be at all. It would not surprise me though to find the virtual network stronger and more intertwined with our current economic system in the near future.

Why Windows 10?

            If you have a Windows installation on your computer, you’ve seen the advertisements. Windows 10, the new, free installment of the Windows operating system. It seems like a good deal; a free software upgrade to a newer version of Windows.

            We don’t live in a world where companies provide free upgrades out of the goodness of their heart. It’s not good business sense. So the question arises; why does Microsoft want to give us Windows 10?

            Well, there’s a saying; if you’re not paying for it, you’re the product. That’s the axiom that’s driving the ‘free’ upgrade to Windows 10. The new operating system features new data collection capabilities that are enabled by default. Microsoft is making a play towards Facebook’s business model of collecting and selling data as a commodity.

            It’s not a bad way to do business. The collection side is a little underhanded, but the economics are solid. According to a Financial News Report, an active user’s data is worth around $4.50 to Facebook. That’s not including the wealth of personal user data that an always-on operating system can gather. Apply that number to the 110 million people who have upgraded to Windows 10, and Microsoft has made roughly $500 million on the new upgrade. That’s not accounting for the fact that the new users are a captive market; there’s no way to downgrade without buying a new copy of Windows.

            However, there’s a discrepancy between the projected value of a consumer and the retail value of Windows 10. The software sells for $120 on Microsoft’s online store. A single consumer is worth less than $5. So where does the extra money come from?

            Another way that Microsoft makes money off of Windows 10 is the reduced cost of maintenance. Maintaining software is expensive, and is a stage that can last years. By offering the free upgrade, Microsoft can guarantee that the majority of their users will switch over to the new operating system immediately. They can reduce legacy support for old operating systems and, in doing so, save money.