Love my Moto X

What I love about my new Moto X:

• dynamic notifications - Dynamic notification is a feature that causes notifications like email and chat receptions to show up on the sleep screen. (On other phones, it might light an LED or something.) It's handy knowing what the notification is without having to wake up the phone, and it doesn't appear to hurt battery life at all. My favorite part, however, is being able to wake up the phone without pressing the tiny power button.
• trusted devices - A trusted device is any of your Bluetooth devices - car, Pebble watch, etc. - that you have told the phone you trust. While the phone is nearby to it, you don't have to unlock the phone to wake it up. The idea is, if someone steals the phone and it goes out of range of any trusted devices, the phone will lock.
• better battery life - The phone can go 3 days without charging, vs 2 days for my last phone.
• loud, clear speaker

What I dislike:

• no more native SIP - the native SIP client is gone, (I blame Kitkat), have to install my own :(

The messaging app explosion

I've never been a big Twitter-er, mostly because of the lack of privacy, I guess. Or texter, mostly because of the cost. But recently things have happened which made me take note of a bunch of recently new apps.

A bunch of friends started sending me things through Apple's iPhone's iMessage app. It's weird in that, you can select a bunch of people from your contacts and, if they don't have an iMessage account, it will MMS (?) or email them.

This doesn't work well because it doesn't tell me who belongs to each phone number (do you know all your friends' phone numbers?) and replying didn't work either, through email or SMS'ing by hand.

I also noticed that my daughters were doing the same thing. That is, they were group texting. Fortunately, we now have unlimited text messaging so I won't get sticker shock with the monthly bill.

But it made me wonder, isn't there something out there better for group chat? Is SMS really the lowest common denominator? The lingua franca? Yes, I know that SMS isn't that bad, that it's all the third world countries have and that even many people in the US are limited to what their clamshells can send and receive. But surely there is something between iMessage and SMS ???

It turns out that there's something better, but "no one" uses it. XMPP aka Jabber is what both Google Chat and Facebook chat use. It supports group chats and presence notification. "Presence" is where it tells your friends whether you're "away" or not.

The trouble is that, while XMPP is supposed to be "federated", that is, Google and Facebook users are supposed to be able to talk to each other, instead, both Google and Facebook have shut their doors to the other guys. I guess it turned out that they couldn't monetize an open chat protocol so they closed the gates to each other to create their own little "walled gardens".

Broadening our search further, we find more and more "walled gardens". The most popular chat applications out there, by subscriber base, are:

from here: http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/best-chat-messaging-apps/

Skype - 300 million
iMessage - 250 million
Facebook - >200 million
Viber - >200 million
WhatsApp - <200 million, $1/yr
Google Hangouts - <100 million

With the exception of Skype (and possibly Hangouts at this time), the others will down convert to SMS if necessary. One of the amazing things I notice is that WhatsApp got so many users despite charging for the service and despite not having an existing user base. While the others don't send ads yet, I guess the threat of sending them, or WhatsApp's features, were enough to get them users without having the gargantuan block of users that, for example, Apple and Facebook have. Hats off to WhatsApp and Viber for being able to compete in the same room as the big guys.

But here's my question: Why is SMS the lowest common denominator? When I receive an SMS, it doesn't say who it's from and it's a pain to reply to a group SMS. Some services like GroupMe create "conference rooms" for you to text in, but this is a hack over a primitive service that is, what? 20 years old?

Additionally, having SMS as a back-up hasn't prevented the fractured market that we have. That is, no one is emerging as the leader. If anything, the field is expanding as chat apps pop-up with unique features like splitting a dining bill or erasing a photo as soon as it's viewed.

Couldn't we go back to supporting XMPP? Then we could see who sent a chat message, we'd have presence notifications, we could send large messages and could do group chat without resorting to MMS.

Hey, big guys, what would be the harm? Is SMS supposed to be painful so that we'll all create an account on your service that we don't want to have anything to do with?

Teen steals alcohol and kills 4 people. "Oopsie". Exonerated.

The best defense attorneys money can buy. They claim parents taught him that there are no consequences for rich people.

I would say the judge taught him that.

http://gawker.com/teen-who-killed-four-people-got-off-on-probation-becaus-1480835092

Where are the flip phone app stores?

My daughter's slide-out keyboard phone died and, instead of getting another one right before Santa might bring one, we got a cheap flip phone for her so she could reach us in the meantime. We got a Samsung T139. Only $20.

The first thing that struck me about it (reminded me, more like, since we used to all have flip phones) was that it was so tiny and light. It's only 2.96 oz versus 4.9 for a typical smart phone. Also, it fits into a pocket trivially, and doesn't stick out (and slide out, sometimes) like a smart phone "tablet". The battery lasts 12 days. That's "days", not "hours".

I wonder why we left such phones, and so quickly. To surf the web and read email? Perhaps but those are not easy to do on a phone, especially writing. I'm certain there was a "coolness" factor involved. We can probably lay some blame on "Angry Birds".

[ In all honesty, map apps are a crucial use for smart phones. The built-in GPS, big screen, strong CPU and data connection make a fairly killer combination. ]

One thing that smart phones let us do is write our own apps. Smart phones are general purpose computers so one can put all kinds of little apps onto them, some that even make sense to put onto a phone. A pedometer, for instance, makes perfect sense to put into a small device that you always carry with you. It doesn't require an extensive user interface. It doesn't even need to upload the data anywhere, but it could.

I've heard that flip phones are making a come back as people migrate their heavy viewing to tablets. I wonder if this would only accelerate if flip phones had "app stores". For instance, one tiny app that I like to have is the OTP generator for my email account. I ported it to my Pebble watch; why can't I put anything on a flip phone? *Does* anyone make an open flip phone? Could we convince Samsung to open theirs?

It vaguely appears that these phones can run Java applets. I don't know if the applets have to come from webpages, or if they can also be loaded locally. There may be hope there; Android uses Java almost exclusively.

A killer feature for flip phones would be the ability to run SIP (either over wifi or cellular data). SIP users tend to be fairly frugal. What's better than a cheap phone on a cheap phone network?

BMW likes me!

BMW knows that I like notebooks!

It's full of graph paper with occasional BMW drawings:

The only problem is: Where's the fountain pen that I'm supposed to use? :( I guess they don't know me that well.

On the Distribution of Wealth

I've seen variations of this demonstration before:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM

but I don't think it goes to the heart of the issue. If you ask people how to fix it, they have no clue. They don't realize that the wealth accumulates over a lifetime. By the time someone dies, they've grossed MUCH more than the tax man will take away.

At a growth rate of 5%, it takes 14.4 years (72 / 5) to double your money. Over an 80 year span, you should be able to double your money 5.5 times - a multiplier of 47 times!

Here's the current law (if I'm reading wikipedia correctly): The first $5 million given at time of death is estate tax free. Everything after that is taxed at 40%.

That's right: If you have 2 kids and give them $5 million each, the tax man doesn't get a penny and your kids will never have to work a day in their lives.

The child of the guy who multiplied his money 47 times will only pay 40%. That's still a multiplier of 28!

So how do we fix this? How do you let the farmer bequeath his $10 million farm but prevent the Walton family from owning the world? How much SHOULD the Steinbrenner children have paid on their $1 billion inheritance?

The trouble is, every time you talk about raising the inheritance tax, even poor people freak out. I can't figure this out. It's like they're suddenly going to jump from middle class to having billions and they're poor children are going to have to, God forbid, give some of it back.

So how about this? How about we have a HUGE exemption - like $100 million - and a "huge" tax rate for money over that - like 80%? Mr. Multiplier STILL has a 9.4x multiplier.

Until people see this fact - that estate taxes are paid for a lifetime's gain - we will never have a "fair" rate and the rich will keep getting richer.

Google Voice and ALEC

My interest is mostly because this is in the wake of Facebook, Google and Yelp joining ALEC (back in August.)

(less than 4 minutes)
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/11/18/246001725/have-we-reached-the-end-of-the-landline