Ask HN: If you could 'reinvent' anything what would it be?
I was discussing looking into reinventing the 'umbrella' making it something less clunky, more compact, and certainly something lighter (maybe a string type of mechanism)?
I hate that I cannot lock/unlock my credit card (online wire transfers, checks or other payment methods) at will, with a simple click of my mouse.
I'd really like being able to choose when my credit card can be used, maybe using rules like: "only on weekends, between 11am and 7pm. never online.". Then if these rules are not met, no payment should be authorized. Alternatively, I should be able to have more lax rules like: (all the above) "And only with automatic phone confirmation on weekdays between 12pm and 2pm". Then if I needed to pay for lunch, I could do so with my credit card, but authorization would be granted only after I got an automatic call with a recording asking me to confirm payment and maybe enter a pin number.
I'm not sure about US or European banking, but in Australia we have three methods that work like this - BPay, direct deposit and cash/cheque. BPay is a company that sits in the middle and is, I gather, not financially viable for smaller companies, a direct deposit can take days to appear, and cash is not that great for online transactions.
Here's an idea: a card with a magnetic strip on each of its 4 (or 6 or 8) edges. Now instead of carrying multiple cards you carry just one. If you use both sides of the card, you could fit 16 mag strips on an octagonal card.
Here in my country, banks make a large profit out of fraud, albeit indirectly. They offer fraud insurance. They purchase the insurance from someone else for about USD 1/month, and sell it to you for USD 6/month. Of course most people never get to claim anything. Each time there's anything related to credit card fraud on the news, banks get more people buying their insurance (here banks are the only credit card-issuing institutions). If banks offered a cheaper/free way to reduce or eliminate fraud, they would also kill their insurance business.
About the multiple strips cards: In Japan they're already using NFC cards with internal chips that can store several different cards information. The info is encrypted so that only certain authorized card readers may read corresponding card info. Checkout: http://www.sony.net/Products/felica/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeliCa
Fine, lets say your address is constant no matter where you move... then how does the post office know where you are? You'd need... yup, a secondary Address. Addresses would still exist, you'd just have a consistent 'alias' for yours.
And sure, the post office could update your new 'address' when you move. But they already have that service. It is called a change of address form.
You know those moving walkways (Trav O lators?) that they have in airports to speed up travelers?
I'd place those everywhere.
Want to go to the grocery store? Walk there in 5 minutes. Living in LA and need to visit SF for the weekend? Get off your ass and walk there.
The thing that bugs me most about cars, in addition to wasting gas, is that they're isolating devices. They prevent me from admiring scenery, meeting interesting people, and walking more often.
(This idea is more a revolution than a reinvention.)
Umm...what? Are these moving sidewalks going to travel at 50mph?
The thing that bugs me most about cars, in addition to wasting gas, is that they're isolating devices. They prevent me from admiring scenery, meeting interesting people, and walking more often.
Suggestion: ride the train. You can talk to people, admire the scenery, and walk around.
It's called a bicycle.
(It also makes it significantly easier to bring 50 pounds of groceries home; saving you from having walk there before every meal.)
No, it's called elimination of zoning laws.
(They're some kind of walk-escalators that stretch all around towns, cross towns, cross land. Which you move onto the slower one, escalate your speed for the next strip, jump over to the next strip, etc. )
For example:
1. The law of noncontradiction - something can't be A and not A
2. Treat like things the same and different things differently
Those principles inform the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments.
Some of the practices and licensing processes date back to before recorded music existed. Publishing, mechanical, and performance rights, as well as royalty organizations like ASCAP/BMI/etc., are all more than a little strange in a world with the Internet. And, I don't think I even need to explain why the major labels should go to hell.
But, yes, the worst pieces of the puzzle are busy destroying themselves as we speak, and better solutions are bound to spring up.
The reason why books are not yet as much subject to copying as music and movies is because they're still distributed in a format that makes it reasonably hard to copy them. It actually takes some effort.
As soon as books become available widely in electronic formats (not just the select few that you can get for your kindle today, Amazon claims to have 300,000 titles available but there are substantially more books than that) and without DRM the publishers will be right up there on the barricades.
I don't think there has ever been a technology as disruptive to established businesses in terms of jobs and dollars as the internet has been to the media corporations.
May be in the future, when a country have all power over the others; or all the countries have the same power.
To put a proper criticism of the current system together would take me pointing out premises and assumptions that people do not even know they have. I'd have to start by sharing some history going from the Peace of Westphalia to the end of WWII to talk about how the current notion of nations and borders developed.
Then I'd put my case together that I think there's some fundamental human rights that I reckon everyone should have, that no local government should have any jurisdiction over. One of those, of course, is full mobility like I put above, but also free speech, free assembly, and so on. Then I'd mention that localities could make local laws to handle things a bit different and specific to the particular place.
Finally, I'd take some guesses about how this would happen, where some set of armed group(s) or allied nations would declare a global constitution that all people had a right to, and a slow change would take place. Or perhaps decentralization of information makes enforcing borders effectively pointless. Or maybe warfare evolves even further away from conventional warfare as seems to be happening now.
Who knows? It's a complicated mess of a topic. I just think it'd be a really nice thing :)
There is nothing that pisses me off more than one human standing in front of another saying they can't go somewhere.
This planet belongs to none of us.
As long as somebody does no actual harm to it they should be free to go anywhere. Borders are one of the worst inventions ever and there ought to be a universal human right associated with your idea.
-- Albert Einstein
Now it has quietened a bit, I suppose who wanted to go went in that first wave.
Now, suppose we opened the borders to India, Brazil, Mexico, Russia, Pakistan, etc. The Mexican and Brazilians will probably go to the US rather than UK, the Indians and Russians will probably want to come to the UK rather than US. India is 1 billion however, Russia 300 million. If a fraction of these people came to the UK the country would be flooded and go into a period of complete transformation and utter confusion and most probably civil unrest as the primitive territorial instincts take hold. The Indians will then demand that their culture is respected and therefore push for laws rather than integrate and do what they do in Rome.
In principle it is a noble idea. That is why although the EU project has its downsides, most people think it unthinkable to leave the EU. We like being able to travel freely in this continent, to allow trade to be completely unrestricted, but we did not sit one day and say, hey let us open our borders to all the EU. It has instead taken about 60 years for this project to evolve to what it has and still not all of the geographical europe is within the EU. So perhaps we should gradually have an EU style project in a world scale. That is, I suppose, what the UN was meant to be, but it has effectively failed. Maybe now we should try and set up institutions and a judiciary for a United Western World, whereby people are able to move freely within Europe, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and then gradually incorporate Russia, India, Brazil, etc.
ESPECIALLY in the developing world, so that people in countries like, say, Kenya can have access to education, microbanking and the mobile startup ecosystem on their phones and leapfrog our asses.
In the same vein, the OLPC project is a clusterfuck and is a prime example of never missing an opportunity to screw up. Someone needs to turn it into a project that is viable and actually gets laptops and modern education software into the hands of kids everywhere.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ternary_computer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Setun