Barack Obama Works For Me

The other day I finally re-opened my favorite web browser and I noticed that some prankster had changed my home page to JoshJonesIsYourNewBicycle.com!

I was of course outraged, and since nobody spoke up, I had no choice but to have the entire admin staff TERMINATED!

Just a few days later, as the issues mounted, I re-started my browser again and, I assume due to the perspective lent by time, realized it was nothing more than a jest in good fun!

In fact, I was touched. And so, I immediately re-hired everybody (but at only 60% of their previous salaries so they knew not to pull that crap again)… only to find out that what I thought was such a kind and creative tribute to their illustrious leader was nothing more than a crude knock-off of BarackObamaIsYourNewBicycle.com!

Once again ENRAGED, I had no choice but to fire EVERYBODY. This time I got the entire support team, marketing, HR.. not even our gourmet chefs, fighter jet pilots, or doggie masseuses were safe. I even may have killed a few of the weaker employees.

I’ve finally got some solitude, and it got me to thinking about this whole Barack Obama thing.

To tell you the truth, I can’t get behind Obama. Let me tell you why.

Why?

You see that picture at the top? That’s Senator Obama’s actual name plaque from the actual Senate. Back in 2005 my dad had to testify before some senators about something or other, and I went along for fun. And before you ask, yes, that is how I roll.

One of the four Senators in the room was Mr. Obama, who was already semi-famous after his speech at the DNC in 2004. And, to be truthful, he actually seemed the most intelligent and educated on the issues of the four… but I still can’t get behind him.

Why Not?

Well, after the hearing was over, I took that picture with his name plate, and was THIS (yes, THIS) close to stealing it! Wouldn’t that have been 100% SWEET to put on my desk? But at the last moment, I wussed out.

I knew that thing was already worth a couple of bucks on eBay, or at least would make a cool momento to pass down to my grandchildren or bury on a deserted island… but man, if he becomes PRESIDENT? The first BLACK PRESIDENT?

It would just kill me.

So, that is why I hope he doesn’t win.

But the truth is, as I alluded to in the last newsletter, I can’t understand anybody voting for any politician they don’t personally know.

It is so hard to judge the true character of anybody, even people you’ve been friends or colleagues with for years… HOW could anybody feel comfortable voting for any politician whose entire career is based on projecting an “electable” persona? And that is any politician.

That is why I truly do like propositions. Unlike people, a proposition can’t back-pedal, change its mind, break campaign promises, cheat on its wife, pander to special interests or give in to the freaking UN. A proposition is simply a self-contained law, and before you cast your vote on it, you can do all the real research on it you want!

After a new proposition has been approved, nobody’s allowed to say “I know the law says 5,500 new slots, but now we need an extra 10,000 to stay the course.” (Not without putting it up to another direct public vote at least.)

Not to mention, even if your vote on a proposition ends up “losing”, at least you know that greater than 50% of your fellow voters “won.” Whereas a politician might often do things that are in nobody’s interest but their own.

Proposition Paradise!

So, what if every government decision were, like California’s propositions, put up to a direct public vote? Back in 1789, this would have been technically impossible, and a representitive democracy was the only feasible solution.

But the same is not the case in 2008. We’ve got the Internets now!

What if we kept everything the same about the current government, except that instead of the congressmen doing the final voting on laws, it was always put to the public directly in the form of propositions? Sort of a Government 2.0.

Or, as wikipedia puts it, a direct democracy!

Reading that article, the arguments against direct democracy are pretty weak. Let me debunk them now:

* Scale: The Internet make it easy.
* Practicality and efficiency: Again, thanks Internet! Plus, there should still be just one election per year. Everything would be voted on at once, making it more efficient and less of a burden on the voting populace. The fact that laws can’t be changed more than once a year is just gravy!
* Demagoguery: Please… if we can’t trust our public to vote intelligently, perhaps we’d all be better off in the Irans?
* Complexity: Haven’t you read The Wisdom of Crowds? The masses in aggregate are not fools and they do understand the issues when they affect them.
* Voter apathy: Again, people are apathetic only when the issues do not affect them; and if they feel the issues do not affect them, why does it matter whether they vote? If they did, they’d just vote randomly and cancel each other out anyways.
* Self-interest: I believe a thing it’s been proved time and again that the best way to make rational decisions is by acting in your own self-interest. I mean, that’s why we’re voting, right? To see if a proposed law would be in the majority’s best self-interest. Nobody should ever, ever, ever vote for something that would hurt them just because they think it will help society “as a whole”! Don’t worry, if it’s going to help more people that it hurts, it will win regardless of your measly vote.
* Suboptimality: Well gee, it’s also “sub-optimal” to have a competitive marketplace. It’s “sub-optimal” to have random mutations. It’s “sub-optimal” to buy an index mutual fund. There will be a lot of fumbling in the dark to be sure, but like natural selection, the “optimal” laws will bubble to the top eventually, and the “sub-optimal” ones will be voted the way of the dodo. And with a direct democracy, that will only happen faster.
* Manipulation by timing and framing: Again, all the voting would just be done on the first Tuesday in November each year!

Our founding fathers were also against the idea mostly due to the “Tyranny of the majority”… but as long as we still have the bill of rights and the Judicial branch everybody’s personal freedoms would stay intact.

Especially Interesting

Another bonus of a true direct democracy would be the end of special interests. Special interests exist whenever there is something that benefits a few people a lot while hurting everybody else a tiny bit. Those who stand to gain fight nooth and tail to keep the advantage, whereas there’s no single individual who feels enough pain to bother standing up to them. It’s thanks to this that industry subsidies, trade barriers, and real estate agents exist.

If every law was put to a vote of every citizen, say goodbye to subsidies, tariffs, and monopolies! I know I don’t give a damn if corn farmers have to compete harder as long as it means cheaper food for me. Now, I’m not going to go writing my congressman about it, but if it ever came up on a ballot that’d be a big fat NO vote.

And you’d vote against the law that’d show up every year requiring the state provide each DreamHost CEO a new SUPERCAR every month (so they could get to the data center quicker in the case of a power outage). Unfortunately, I think it’d be tough for me to get greater than 50% of you behind such a measure, no matter how much I plaster this blog with posts extolling the many virtues of such a proposed legislation.

Could It Work?

Yes. And how do I know? Because it has. And I’m not just talking about the DreamHost suggestions system either.

Switzerland has had the most direct democracy on the planet for over 160 years, and it’s the most competitive economy in the world, has a 3.1% unemployment rate, and hasn’t been in a war since 1815! Things are different when the people deciding whether to fight are the same people who would be fighting.

To Barack

So, Mr. Obama, if you really want to “bring real change to Washington,” why not (if/once elected) put every decision you ever come across up on whitehouse.gov, along with what you see the pros and cons to be. Send login info out to every single US citizen (you can include them in those mailed social security updates), and allow We, The People to at least be your guide. You know, radical transparency and all that.

Think of the clout you’d have with congress if every one of your decisions, proposals, and policies was backed by a direct “mandate from the people”! Not to mention, it seems like you should never have less than a 50% popular approval rating!

People say you don’t have much experience. So why not ask for advice? It’s worked out decent for us.

Remember Barack, you are not running for King of America. You are simply interviewing for a job. And that job is to provide guidance and support to us taxpayers, your direct supervisor.

Of course in the end, who knows if all this would make for a better presidency.

But at least it wouldn’t be any worse.

Zero C!

I have been to the future.

It’s a very well known future, one everybody knows is coming, and yet, it is still, frustratingly, not here.

It’s not the future of nano-bots, flying cars, and hamburger toothpaste that some predict. Nor is it the future of sex-bots, self-driving cars, and hamburger frosties that others believe in. As pleasing as those two possible futures are, they are not the universally accepted inevitability that this future is.

No, this is the future of ubiquitous wireless high-speed INTERNET! Everybody knows that day will eventually arrive, it’s just a matter of when, and through what vessel.

Whether it be an 802.11 mesh, cell phone technology, sattelites, wi-max, that new spectrum Google was bidding on, or some as-yet unknown future technology, I think it’s a pretty much a forgotten conclusion that by the Year 2000, everywhere you go will have wireless high-speed connectivity, and nobody’s going to pay for it.

And of course, everybody knows that’ll be pretty cool. I mean, everybody who’s already got EVDO service (*cough cough*) knows how great it is to have a fast usable Internet connection with you at all times. It’s great because it’s fast, portable, and reliable… but for most people it’s just not $80 a month great.

But, just as cell phones have supplanted landline phones, so will “cellular” Internet replace the “landline” Internet. Once it gets price-competitve (and FREE is very competitive) no long-term contracts or cancellation fees on the planet will be able to hold back the tsunami of people rushing to escape their local telco and cable company.

You see, apart from the reliability, portability, and convenience advantages that wide-area wireless internet provides, there’s one other pro… a little something I like to call “ZERO C”

I’m not talking about the temperature in Boston right now, either. I’m talking about Zero Configuration!

Currently, to get the Internet set up at your home or office, you’ve got to have a service man come and set things up.

Then, to share that internet throughout your multitude of computers, video game systems, slingboxes, iPhones, and refrigerators, you’ve got to set up a not-exactly-something-your-mom-can-do home network.

Then, whenever a friend comes over with their laptop, they never seem to be able to get on the net without your help.

Then, whenever the cable modem drops out in the middle of the final game of a Bomberman Live match, all Time Warner has to say is “everything looks okay on our side“.

Then, whenever you’ve been using your Airport Express for too long, the music cuts out and you’ve got to unplug it, wait fifteen seconds, and plug it back in.

Then, your wireless never seems to reach to the guest bedroom reliably.

Then, you’ve got ugly cat-5 ethernet everywhere.

Then, once every two months you’ve got to do a firmware upgrade on everything for “stability” and re-do the whole thing..

But now think… what if every device you ever bought was always reliably connected to the Internet at high-speed, no matter what, for free?

You’d never have to deal with Time Warner Cable or Verizon DSL again.

You wouldn’t have to set up or manage or worry about a home network.

Visitors would already be on the Internet everywhere they went, just like you are.

Your Xbox 360 would always be able to connect to Xbox Live.

Your airport express would always stream your music reliably, and you could control it from anywhere in the world.

Everything would still work in the guest bedroom.

You would have no cat-5 cables, anywhere.

Devices could automatically get firmware upgrades because the manufacturer would always know they’d be reliably on the net, since it was free and just automatically worked.

However, as I was saying in the beginning… I’ve already been to this future. And my vessle was..

The Amazon Kindle

That’s right, this humble, $400, sold-out e-reader, is our first baby-step to technology nirvana!

Because I wanted to check it out, I got my wife a Kindle for her birthday in January, and the coolest thing about it is its barely-mentioned “whisper net”.

Shhhhh… this “whisper net” is just Amazon hiding the fact that the Kindle comes with Sprint’s 3G EVDO service for free. I’m not sure what kind of deal Amazon made with Sprint, but …. THIS …. IS …. AWESOME.

Because it’s just ALWAYS on the Internet, everywhere, the thing is like magic… and super-easy for moms and (I assume) grandmoms to use. There’s no settings, no account to create, no monthly bill, no passwords, no nothing. Just a physical switch on the back to “turn the internet on” and you’re buying e-books and browsing the full Internet at a perfectly usable speed.

Once the Kindle costs $99 instead of $399 (and there’s no waiting list), it (or something like it) is going to mop the floor as a super-cheap “internet appliance” that “just works” for “people that are old”.

My hats off to Amazon for truly making the first device that is truly always on of the Internet. By making it free, they’ve guaranteed that as long as a Kindle is working, it’s on the net.

Just imagine the other ZERO C possibilities ubiquitous, free, high-speed Internet would bring!

How sweet would it be for your next digital camera to have? No more worrying about sd cards, usb cables, or emailing your pics… the moment you take a pic, it’s backed up to some picture hosting site, shared with the world and freed from your camera’s internal memory. As a bonus, all pics you’ve ever taken would be able to be called up and previewed right from your camera’s (not-so) little LCD screen.

How awesome would it be to have a free-EVDO skype handset? That’s it for paying for cell phone calls.. and it’d be so easy to get everybody to switch from the archaic POTS system to voip when there was finally a no-monthly-fee cell phone that worked everywhere their existing cell did.

How cowabunga would it be to have a Nintendo DS with this? Anytime you’re sitting around, riding on the bus, like I am now, but uninspired from writing any meandering blog posts, you could whip it out, do a couple Mario Kart races, and then when you realize you forgot your Dr. Mario cartridge at home, shortly thereafter remember that there are no cartridges anymore, every game is just streamed directly from your account on Nintendo’s servers!

Anyway, yep, that’d all be very awesomely cowabungifiededly sweet.. but it’s still a ways off. In the meantime, I hope this little ZERO C fix will hold you.

We’ve finally made a true one-click install process, which is the way I always envisioned our one-clicks would work from the beginning, several long years ago.

Just go to our panel’s one-click installer area, and click the new “easy” mode.

From there, you just choose the domain or sub-domain you want to use and give your new site a name, click the submit button, and in literally under five minutes, you’ll get an email when everything’s done.

Previously, you’d have to already have set-up the domain or sub-domain you wanted, and you’d have create or pick a database you wanted to use, and then when you got the email there’d be some more software package-specific installation steps for you to complete.

NO MORE!

This time, one click really means ONE CLICK!

When you get that email, you are done.

It is only available for WordPress now, but believe it or not, this new one-click process we have is actually easier to implement for future software packages than the old way, so it shouldn’t be long at all before we fill in the portfolio with lots of other yummy goodies.

The only downside is, the easy mode actually hosts all the software on a centralized, load-balanced service we’ve set up, rather than in your normal webspace. This means that any customizing that requires changing files won’t be doable. Fortunately, most software packages keep all the customization you’d want to do in the database these days, so this isn’t really that big of a restraint.

The upside is no maintenance (we handle all upgrades), hopefully better reliability and performance (as it’s now effectively a “hosted” service as opposed to a local install), and of course…

ZERO C!

A Strike on Strikes!

Ha, did you think you’d gotten through those stupid strike-themed posts?

Well, apparently you are!

The writer’s strike seems to be finally coming to an end, and I don’t know whether to be happy or sad. On the one hand, it means I can finally get back to writing awesome blog posts. On the other hand, it means I can no longer get away with writing these blog posts… which is bad news because this well of creativity is tapped, my friends.

The sad truth is, I did that entire “billing mistake” thing just so I’d have easy blog fodder for another week.

A Last Hurrah

I guess I’ll just quickly wrap up a bunch of stupid things I was planning on “striking” against but never got around to. I never expected this thing to end and was pacing myself.

Hopefully this strike really is settled or you ain’t going to be seeing any new posts here until at least the first Sunday after the Ecclesiastical Full Moon date after March 20th!

A Strike on Fax Machines!

How in the hell is it 2008 and everybody still uses fax machines?

Give me some widespread e-signature standard already, world!

A Strike on Social Networks

Is it just me, or do social networks only appeal to people who 1. are single 2. have no job or 3. care about what their friends are doing?

Because I, for one, am none of those things.

A Strike on Cell Phones

Why do cell phones still keep any data locally?

When you get a new cell phone, you should just have to log into it, like you do, say, a new email client, and whammo, all your contacts/pictures/text messages/themes/preferences/ETC.. are syncronized with a (non-proprietary) server.

We need IMAP for Phones.

(I lose my cell phone once a month.)

A Strike on Global Warming

Dallas warned me not to post this, but he’s in Thailand (trying to enjoy it while it’s still above the ocean.)

There’s just three things that bother me about global warming.

1. There’s literally no way we can be even reasonably sure about what will happen. There’s just no experiment we can run on our entire planet that we can set up an adequate control for!

2. Even if the earth does get warmer, we can’t really know (again, what would the control be?) all the effects that will have on us until it actually happens. The earth’s climate has changed a lot over the billions of years it’s been around, and yet here we are, over 6 billion strong and fatter than ever!

3. Even if the Earth does warm, and even if it is bad for us, there’s again no way we can possibly verify what actually caused it, nor if there was anything we could have done to prevent it.

I mean, I’m all for clean air and water and not wasting electricity and saving the whales, but isn’t just having clean air and water and more money and whales to ride reason enough?!

And if we want to focus on literally saving the human race as we know it, maybe we should be spending more R+D on stopping near Earth objects!

We know they’re out there, we know they’ve hit Earth before, and we know it’s very bad when they do!

A Strike on Getting Old

I broke my left foot playing basketball when I was 27.

It took about a year to heal, but it’s pretty much been fine since.

Now all of the sudden, 3 years later, everytime I get up after being inactive for a half hour or more my left foot kills!

And that’s the real reason why I don’t worry about global warming in the future … I refuse to get older.

Now, please feel free to hold your own stikes in the comments, before the writers settle!

DreamHost PS : Now with more Mongrel

Starting today, every DreamHost PS and DreamHost dedicated server comes equipped with the Mongrel ruby application server. Mongrel is the preferred method of deploying Ruby on Rails applications and is typically more robust than FastCGI-based deployments. Now we’re giving you both options to choose from so you can use the one that works best for your application!

We recently posted a rant about how Ruby on Rails is not easy enough for people to use, and this is one way we’re working to fix that situation. Now anyone can use Mongrel with very little server know-how. It only takes a few minutes!

Mongrel sits behind an Apache running as a proxy server, and our web control panel now streamlines that process and handles all the details for you. You just upload your application anywhere under your web-enabled user and set up the Mongrel application server, and in a few minutes your site will be up and running. For more information, check out our Mongrel wiki article.

Note that this feature is only available for DreamHost PS or DreamHost dedicated due to its resource requirements. Due to extremely high demand our inventory of DreamHost PS servers is low but we expect to get more in soon. If you would like to get on the waiting list, you can do so on our DreamHost PS provisioning page.

Two Troubling Techniques This Time

Welcome back to this week’s (and the final) edition of Friday illiterative lists!

Two business practices of pretty big-name companies came to my attention this week that I thought were too underhanded/sleazy not to be shared/copied.

#1. Sending something via FedEx Express Saver:

On Tuesday I had to FedEx some stuff from downtown Los Angeles to Chino. It’s only 36.5 miles so I figured, why not save a buck (or twenty?) and choose “Express Saver” .. it must be cheaper and it must get there in the same amount of time when we’re this close!

Wrongo! I guess FedEx really doesn’t want to cannibalize their overnight delivery sales for packages that aren’t going so far. So much so that they will actually ship an envelope from LA to MEMPHIS on its way back to Chino!

#2. Checking a domain’s availability via Network Solutions:

Now I didn’t do this. But a fair number of our customers must still remember way back when Network Solutions was the only registrar, and for some reason go to their site to check the availability of domains before attempting to register them with us.

BIG MISTAKE!

Since at least January 8th, any (non-gibberish) domain you decide to just CHECK availability for via their site, Network Solutions GOES AHEAD AND REGISTERS!

Although undoubtably sleazy, this maybe wouldn’t be sooo terrible if NetSol wasn’t still charging $35/year!

I’d actually thought about this a while ago. I thought, “If *I* were a good-for-nothing cyber-squatter, I’d set up a registrar, advertise insanely cheap rates, and then whenever anybody went to check or register a domain with me, I’d just register it for myself and then offer it to them for much more!”

But then I thought, “What about when people caught on? They’d come and check completely fake domains they never wanted, and then I’d be out the $7 a year for all these worthless domains!”

Of course, all this was way before ICANN’s Add Drop Grace Period (AGP) came into effect. The AGP provides registrars with a five-day grace period to delete a domain they’ve “mistakenly” registered and to get all their money back. The original purpose was to help people out when they make typos or when a registrar is the victim of fraud; noble enough goals.

In practice, the AGP has resulted in “Domain Tasting,” the numerous ill side-effects including:

Allowing Net S.O.L. to actually implement this practice at no financial risk.

Allowing the “Drop-Catching” business to thrive… currently 100% of expired .com/net domains are re-registered immediately by cyber-squaters and AdSense fiends.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to register hundreds of thousands of domains a day, testing their typo-traffic-potential, and then deleting hundreds of thousands that don’t make at least $7 a year.

Allowing these skuz-buckets to actually only require a domain to make 42 cents a year to be profitable… even the domains they intend to keep, they go ahead and delete every five days. And then immediately re-register. That way, they’re never out the $7/year.. they’re only out the interest they could be earning on the money they have to keep with Verisign in order to keep their zillions of domains in perpetual register/delete/re-register limbo!

In practice, the noble goals that the AGP hoped to solve are just not very big problems. If you’re a “legit” domain-registering entity and you typo a domain: you’re out a few bucks. It’s your fault, c’est la vie. If you’re a registrar and you’re being massively frauded every day (as we are), you quickly develop techniques to find and fight fraud and you prevent suspicious domains from even getting registered in the first place.

The AGP as it is now hardly ever saves us any money from fraud, because the vast majority of bunk registrations we catch before we even submit them, and the rest we don’t catch until long after the five days have already passed!

There is a bright side to all of this! Thanks primarily to Network Solutions’ ballsy new policy, ICANN decided last week to finally end Domain Tasting!

Hooray! This is good news for the Internet, bad news for Google!

Good thing I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!

Good thing I wish I sold all my Google yesterday and bought Yahoo!