Bob Frankston’s Post

This demonstrates why building a special-purpose network is such a dumb boondoggle idea. We already have connected cards! Albeit via cell phones. Crowd-sourcing the info is a neat hack but the question is whether people will understand the larger lesson of using generic infrastructure and moving towards a public packet infrastructure rather than continuing with the idea of a separate network for each purpose. We see lessons unlearned in efforts to bring back AM radios just to get one message type brute force style by broadcasting to everyone. This limits which messages can be sent -- no targeting and annoys everyone. Imagine if we could assume IP connectivity in cars. We already see this in cars as a premium offering so you can stream while driving. Who needs even an FM radio, which is lucky if it picks up local signals as you drive. IP connectivity taps into a world (literally) of content? The idea of confining emergency works to a small band is another boondoggle that costs lives when we could get access to the entire capacity and assume video and resilience. So, back to calling the crowd-sourcing a hack. Yeah, but it's one that is implemented as software and can rapidly improve as we learn rather than waiting for a perfect solution, After all life is a beta test to the end. Getting amber alerts on all my devices is a good example of the problem of well-designed systems that can't evolve. Give me a working hack so we can learn by doing.

The Smart, Cheap Fix for Slow, Dumb Traffic Lights

The Smart, Cheap Fix for Slow, Dumb Traffic Lights

wsj.com

Dave Mathews

Advising CTO - Technology Roadmap | First Customers & Investors | Patent & IP Strategy

4mo

Until people realize that Google has all of their data to sell shopping ads to. Waze did it which was cute. Google will weaponise it.

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