These exist already, in some forms. I’ve seen heated sidewalks at a couple different ski resorts, so I would imagine that it wouldn’t be too hard to get one for your driveway.
Peace and happiness and nobody going hungry.
Failing that, I’d like to see motivation in a pill form. I’m always running out in the middle of cleaning the house or losing weight or getting organized.
I’d like to have a “hearing aid” for people with normal hearing that would work like a walkman, with headphones.
Rather than just make things louder, it could compress the range, to tone down loud sounds and boost weak ones.
You could fiddle with the loudness and treble and bass, etc. to cut out traffic noise and hear people talking to you in noisy places. Or hear birds in the woods, etc.
How did you get my number?
I think you can get a heated home driveway. I’m pretty sure it’s part of a geo-thermal heating system that circulates already semi-heated ground water.
I actually had the same idea rinni had for heated windshield wipers . I even submitted the idea to General Motors who promptly said “no thanks, loser”. I still think it’s a good idea. no frozen wipers smearing slush all over your windshileds! Ah! What do I know?
How about a dual-message answering machine that asks for an extension (really just a password)? You give the 4-digit ‘extension’ to friends and business associates.
So when someone calls, the phone doesn’t even ring. The machine immediately picks up with the first message: “Hi, this is 555-1234. If you know the proper extension, please enter it now; otherwise, please leave a message at the beep.”
If the caller enters the proper extension, then the phone actually rings. If you don’t answer, then the second message, probably more personal, kicks in and the caller can leave their message. For good measure, let’s have the machine disallow more than three attempts at the proper extension, to discourage automated attempts to guess the password.
Probably this could be done now using business-level equipment and/or software, but if it could be built into a consumer answering machine, I betcha it’d sell a boatload.
Magnetic repelling bumpers that run completely around each car which would prevent car accidents and tailgating.
Of course, this may cause all sorts of other problems, like having every metal object within a certain distance gravitate towards your car. And I’m not even sure if magnetic forces are strong enough for this kind of thing, but we can cross that bridge when it slams into us. 
I know someone who uses an ad-hoc version of this…she lived in Sweden for serveral years…now in England, she has an answerphone message in Swedish, on the logic that:
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Anyone who knows her, knows she speaks Swedish, and recognises her voice anyway, and so leaves a message.
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Her Swedish friends think nothing of it, and leave a message.
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Anyone else assumes they’ve got a wrong number and hangs up.
Never fails.
*plans to move to Sweden *
12,000miles/hour? Those would be some bodacious crashes.
Let’s say you got paid by the small company you work for, and you deposited your check. You took some cash out, and wrote out a few checks for bills. A few days later you took out some more cash, and two days later took out most of the rest, but you had enough money left to cover the checks you wrote. You’re 19, you can’t maintain a cushion yet. Then your paycheck bounces. They deduct the amount of your check from your account, leaving you seriously overdrawn, and with two checks now about to bounce. A stop-payment costs as much as a bounced check fee, and there are other charges if the check bounces.
There should be a way for you to give the bank cash to cover those two checks so they don’t bounce…funds specially earmarked for those two checks only. We live in a computer age…it should be possible. You shouldn’t have to come up with the entire amount of the overdraft right then and there, if you can get the cash to prevent those checks from being returned. That would be true responsive customer service.
(Fortunately we were able to contact the people who were to receive the checks (if they had been for phone bill we would have been out of luck!) and keep them from being cashed, but it was a stressful New Years weekend.)
I saw this thread when it was new, and my mind, in an effort to save humanity, would not relinquish any of my previous wonderful ideas. So I left, frustrated as always, until now.
I just installed Spammunition which is a free and very accurate spam blocking tool for MS Outlook. Since downloading it, and reading the documentation about how it works (available at the link above), I have become interested in “Bayesian Filtering” (Explained Here)
To sum up, it finds spam by learning from the messaged in your inbox(s) and those in a designated spam folder, what you consider spam and what you don’t. It bases it’s decision on the types and frequency of words that appear in the header, subject, java code and body of the message. So in other words, in the beginning, it misses a lot of spam, but when you move missed spam manually over to the spam folder, and have it re-analyze words, it updates the good word list and the bad, and improves the filtering incrementally. So, after a week of teaching it right from wrong, it is now very adept at spotting my spam and NEVER has it gotten a false positive.
Now for the idea!!
I want to have an application that crawls the web at night, starting from a designated page, and slowly learns the type of sites/pages I like from those I don’t based on content. I would initially enter a slew of sites/pages for the good and bad (interesting and uninteresting?) lists, and have it suggest new reads based on it’s algorithms. So, do I have and coders willing to help? I know VB enough to write a front end, but that would be too slow for any serious statistical crunching which I’m afraid would be required before too long.
The ice-cream doughnut also bears a resemblance to Baked Alaska.
N. Sane, your pot-luck cafe sounds like the Granny’s Cafe (“Recipes from real grannies!”) idea in the “Malls Are Boring!” thread I started quite a while ago.
GMRyujin, I saw a shareware jigsaw puzzle program a few years ago that put completed puzzles up in a Doom-like virtual gallery. It was ugly enough to be the one you’re thinking of.
My own ideas:
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A wrist-mounted voice recorder comfortable enough to wear all night, so I could record all those great ideas (and strange dreams) that I always forget immediately as I get up. I’d put a vibrating voice-snooze alarm right in it so I wouldn’t have to move and dislodge the memory of whatever was happening when it goes off.
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A database of sig lines (I collect quotes, but whatever you like) that will read the mail or SDMB post you’ve just composed, and pick the most appropriate item to put at the bottom. I had thought of just counting matching words, or even putting in a thesaurus, but Bayesian filtering is probably better once you’ve got it trained.
My wife used to have something like this. Overdraft insurance? In any case, ISF where treated like a credit card. She got charged interest (probably a lot) but everyone got paid, and it does not screw up your credit. Good idea if you make an honest mistake. Bad, bad idea if you depend on it.
How about really strong, functional bumpers that have shock absorbers built into them and will absorb low speed jolts without damage. :smack: Oh right, we had those in the 70’s and 80’s, but they added too much cost to the cars.
The next step up from a waterbed: the waterchair, which can come in any number of styles.
My wife thinks this is a stupid idea, but I can’t understand why we don’t have them already.
Also, something like this may already exist, but how about a used card shop? You come in to the store after the holidays with all the cards that can be resold. The store owner pays you, say, a dollar per card and resells them for $2, still under the price of new cards. They could be organized by the addressee or addressor, such as a section of “To John from Grandma” cards. It’s sure a lot better than having all those cards taking up space in your home. This would be a good shop to attach to a bookstore or coffee shop. Again my wife thinks this is a bad idea, but I think it’s my best idea ever. I’m just too busy and poor to implement it.
Of course that was Lobsang’s post. It’s what I get for commenting on too many things at once.
Another idea: Sometimes convicted criminals are sentenced to house arrest (maybe allowed to go to work), or are ordered to avoid certain areas. How about a wrist or ankle cuff with a locator inside working over the cell-phone network? It would periodically call in and report what cell it’s in (quite appropriate, I think), and send the police if the wearer is in the wrong area. It could call 911 if it’s tampered with.
Here’s my idea. Whenever there’s a big snow storm, the snow plows come and push all the snow off to the side of the road. This is a nightmare in a crowded city, where you end up creating enourmous mountains of snow between the sidewalk and the street.
It seems to me that most of the volume of snow is taken up by air between the crystals. I once read that a foot of snow is the same amount of water as an inch of rain. So instead of simply pushing the snow around, have a machine that sucks up the snow, applies just enough heat to melt it, and then freezes it into giant ice cubes, yielding a massive decrease in volume. Then just dump the ice cubes in piles every couple hundred feet.
Heres a few ive been thinking of.
- Drinking glasses with built in coasters.
- An “All-up/all-down” switch for your car windows.
- Contact lenses that darken in sunlight. Great for sports!
- I had flavored mayo but they beat me to it.
- I also had tobasco ketchup but those “theys” beat me again.
I have a few more but I want to see if Im on the right track with these.
A washing machine which can download new spin cycles. Oh, wait
I’ve had good luck with the online used book marketplaces such as half.com. You list the book at or near used market price, half.com takes a small percentage, and you keep the rest. Most importantly, your market is nationwide, rather than limited to students in one class… your books won’t depreciate as quickly when the professor switches to a new edition. 