House Wiring

All the tech gadgets people have these days all have their unique adapter that plug into the wall and then have a big wall-wart and then some DC power that goes into your gadget. Instead of this myriad of AC->DC converters, houses should have a central DC converter, and then along the normal AC outlets, there should be a common style 12VDC connector that devices can all accept and, if necessary, convert to a different DC voltage.

And while everyone is rewiring, there is another whole-house distribution system they should add. More and more devices (tivo, computers, etc.) have their own active cooling system. A house should be built with a central cooling system, like a reverse central vacuum, that pushes out cold air to sockets that are positioned around the house. The sockets could have an input and output, so the air would flow in a circuit, and the main cooling unit could run as needed. A proper system could be designed to run, or augment, your refrigerator and central air conditioning, as well as eliminate noise in devices in your house.

Reducing Road Traffic

A significant amount of traffic on the roads is due to people going somewhere to get something (as opposed to someone or to get somewhere). The internet has lead to the ability to shop at home, and simply wait for the things to be delivered - even groceries. However, there is still someone who drives out to deliver the items, and thus using the roads, and increasing traffic.

In the show Futurama, people travel around the city in tubes, which is not that crazy, banks use tubes to send canisters to the drive-through all the time. In a large scale tube system, one could use knowledge of internet routing to make efficient routes for packets to travel.

If one were to start a service that replaces FedEx, UPS and the postal service with a network of tubes, capable of near-instantly delivering packages, it could potentially reduce a lot of road traffic. One not need about making the tubes safe for people to travel inside, nor roomy enough for them either.

"Free" Software

In our wonderful world of technology, free software or open source software have pervaded our computers, whether you have linux running as your OS or Firefox as your web browser (which you definitely should have, btw).

It seems that this abundance of free software has lead to a strange phenomenon where all consumer of software no longer consider any software to be of any value.

Cell Phone Disconnects

With the profusion of the wonderfully unstable technology of cell phones, it is all too frequent to have the other party in a phone conversation disappear. This event is promptly followed by a series of reconnect attempts by both parties that continue to both get busy signals, until one gets lucky, or the other gives up. I hereby propose that the standard protocol for this event is for the party who originated the initial call is the one to redial, and the other party should just wait for several minutes before attempting to call so that the line is left open.

The Uselessness of the Web

How come every time I search on google to find the answer to a question that obviously has been asked before the only matches I get are in forums that have someone asking the same question, and never are there any answers posted? Either there are no answers, or some overzealous moderator has come in and removed the answer saying that it belongs in another area on the forum, with no link to help find it. There needs to be a way to rank the results so that web forums with actual responses are before ones with no replies, maybe make a standard <meta> tag that has a reply count that forums can implement.