RM Auctions.

Tim Rogers:

As a kid in San Francisco, Ladar had used a bulletin-board system called Nerdshack. In fact, his first email address was a Nerdshack account. The service folded, and a lawyer bought the URL. Ladar knew this fact because, feeling nostalgic about his childhood email address, he would check every six months or so to see who owned Nerdshack.com. In the summer of 2002, the URL became available, and he snapped it up. He sat on it for almost two years before he figured out how to use it. Here was his thinking:

If you wanted to attract an audience and then charge advertisers to reach that audience, you could either spend a lot of money to create content for the audience, or, far more cheaply, you could build a platform and let the audience generate its own content. That’s email. Seeing it as a medium around which to wrap ads might not sound groundbreaking today, but at the time, no one had heard of “user-generated content.” Wikipedia was in its infancy. Gmail didn’t exist until the same year Nerdshack did.

Ladar launched his free email service in April 2004. There were no ads initially, and revenue was nonexistent. Really, it was an expensive hobby. Rodenberg was working at the time for a startup based in downtown Dallas. He let his buddy Ladar use the company’s T1 internet connection for Nerdshack, but it quickly sucked up so much bandwidth that it had to be moved to a separate data center and pay its own way.

Ladar thinks there might be 1,000 people on the planet who share his combination of skill sets. (This assessment does not take into account his proficiency in volleyball or wilderness survival.) There is writing software for an email service, and then there’s running the hardware and the databases that make the service hum. Without venture capital or employees, Ladar did it all himself. And then, a year and a half after he started Nerdshack, he revamped the entire operation.

In 2006, he rolled out a major reconfiguration of his email service (adding IMAP to his POP service, if you must know). And as long as he was doing that, he figured, he should come up with a snappier name, something with less “nerd” in it. Too, he’d been reading about the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001. Better known by its abbreviated acronym, the Patriot Act had become law in a legislative paroxysm triggered by the 9/11 attacks, greatly expanding the government’s surveillance operations on several fronts. In high school, Ladar had debated the legality of random locker searches as a member of the Junior State of America. He now saw parallels between that situation and this one, where the liberties of the many innocent would be curtailed in pursuit of the guilty few. He also saw a business opportunity. Thus was born Nerdshack’s offspring, Lavabit, an email service for the privacy-minded.

Russell Brandom:

In 2011, IBM’s Watson supercomputer got an unusually public proof-of-concept, competing on Jeopardy! and beating its human competitors hands-down. It was a powerful public win for IBM, and for artificial intelligence at large, but the computer at the center of all that publicity was still basically a prototype. If Watson can do this, IBM wanted to say, imagine what it can do in the real world.

Now, Watson is getting its chance. For the past year, the Watson team has been building up the supercomputer’s medical skills, scanning through exam books to learn the basic principles of diagnosis and learning to parse the often-confusing mess of data in electronic health records. Watson has already served on the business side of Sloan-Kettering hospital, where there are fewer malpractice concerns, but a new three-year program will usher the supercomputer into the examination rooms of the Cleveland Clinic. The goal is to create a digital assistant that can point doctors to crucial data and likely diagnoses based on a patient’s medical history. If IBM can get the system working, it could be a lifeline to overworked doctors and overcrowded hospitals — but first, the company will have to navigate an unusually tangled web of data, and an industry that’s proven particularly resistant to digitization.

Ed Wallace:

When the original Ford Mustang was introduced it came with seatbelts, but dealers could delete that feature for a $14 factory credit and many, if not most, did just that. Of course, the dealers’ point was this; their customers didn’t want these safety features, therefore they were simply providing the market with the products that were selling.

The great irony of the marketplace is that, after the government mandated these safety improvements be made to every car, then suddenly the public started demanding even more “safer vehicles.” Here’s the real scorecard on lives saved because federal mandates made this generation of new cars the safest ever.

Rene Wisely:

The number of American households that do not own an automobile has increased in the United States for the first time in 50 years, according to a new study.

An aging population, challenging economic times, improved communication technology and increased availability of other travel options are contributing to this trend.

The share of American homes without a car rose to 9.3 percent in 2011.

Via Steven Sinofsky.

God’s handiwork on brilliant display.

University of Wisconsin Arboretum.

Damon Lavrinc:

Nearly every automaker is working on some form of autonomous vehicle technology, but according to a new study, consumers are more interested in a self-driving car from Google than General Motors.

The study, conducted by U.S. audit and advisory firm KPMG, polled a diverse group of drivers from both coasts and in between, pulling samples from Los Angeles, California; Chicago, Illinois; and Iselin, New Jersey.

The focus groups were asked about their willingness to use an autonomous vehicle every day, and rank their trust in the company producing the car on a scale of one to 10. While high-end automakers like Mercedes-Benz received a median score of 7.75, tech companies like Google and Apple scored an eight, and mass-market brands (Chevrolet and Nissan) came in at five.

“We believe that self-driving cars will be profoundly disruptive to the traditional automotive ecosystem,” said Gary Silberg, KPMG auto expert and author of the report. The company’s polling bears that out, although KPMG is quick to add the caveat that while “focus group discussions are valuable for the qualitative, directional insights they provide; they are not statistically valid.”

Still, the study bore some interesting — if not entirely surprising — results.

Related: Google to Sell Users Endorsements.

Kopin Tan:

Can’t such policies go on for a while? After all, we still don’t have inflation…

According to the U.S. government! But you must buy some things: insurance, food, even paper. The price of nearly everything is going up. We have inflation in India, China, Norway, Australia—everywhere but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

I’m telling you they’re lying. Go to a restaurant in New York, or a grocery store, and tell me that there’s no inflation. [Rogers starts tapping on his laptop]. Look here: In 2001, it cost $9 to go to the top of the Empire State Building. Now it’s $27 to go to the 86th floor, $44 to go to the top, and $67 to go express. The Museum of Modern Art in 2001 was $10, now it’s $25. A cab from Kennedy airport to Manhattan in 2001 was $30 plus tolls. Now it starts at $52.

Frances Coppolla:

The London property market is booming. Property prices have risen by 9.7% in the last year and there is no sign of any decline. Such large price rises are, of course, only happening in London, not the rest of the UK, where property price rises are lower the further you are from London (in Scotland prices are actually falling). But the same is happening in other large cities such as New York. Prime real estate in big cities has never been so expensive – and so desirable.

Yet people are leaving London. Both the FT and the NY Times carry opinion columns by disgruntled journalists who have decided the cost of property in London is way too high and are moving elsewhere. And they report that others are doing so too. Here’s Michael Goldfarb in the NYT:

“Matt, who had been looking for a house for more than three years, summed up the reason for leaving best: “I don’t want to be a slave to a mortgage for the next 25 years.” Given the astronomic rise in house prices here, he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

So if people are leaving London, how do we explain such enormous price rises? Ordinarily we would expect what the NYT calls “London’s great exodus” to cause prices to fall, not rise. But there is a simple reason, and it is due to the new role of property in the global economy. London’s prices are rising at the same time as its residents are leaving for one simple reason. Property in these city centres no longer exists to provide homes for ordinary people. It exists to provide safe, high-yielding assets for the rich. As Michael Goldfarb points out:

Byron Acohido:

Markey reacted to a story in last Saturday’s New York Times examining how the online advertising industry is now able to track consumers across the various platforms and devices they use, often without the user’s knowledge or consent.

That Times’ scoop followed an Oct. 2 report about how the National Security Agency conducted a secret pilot program in 2010 and 2011 to test the collection of bulk data about the location of Americans’ cell phones. That pilot program was never carried out.

Even so, Markey said in a statement issued late Thursday to reporters that he is “concerned about the increasing practice of marketers scooping up digital traces from our phones, tablets and computers that are then stitched together into detailed dossiers without consumers’ knowledge or permission.”

In a separate — but very much related development on Thursday — data management firm Identity Finder disclosed how the caching mechanism in Google’s popular Chrome browser stores unencrypted personal data in a way that makes it trivial for hackers to steal.