Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

The other day I said that telecom companies weren't going away anytime soon. And here to corroborate my point of view is CNET with an item about Verizon and Qwest letting customers drop local phone service without losing DSL service. Qwest has seen the number of DSL subscribers rise as a result. While local phone service is extremely profitable, increasing in usage of things like cell phone service means that other services are becoming larger parts of the total revenue.

The Boston Globe has an article about how illegal downloading actually increased sales for a Boston-based band. Jim Infantino of Jim's Big Ego says that giving music away under a Creative Commons license hasn't hurt their sales. According to the article, their latest release "They're Everywhere" has already dramatically outsold any of their previous releases. Their license allows the public to copy, distribute, perform, and sample from the songs as long as it isn't for commercial purposes, the author is given credit, and any derivative works are distributed under an identical license.

Courtesy of Marginal Revolution comes a pointer to the fact that Minnesota's Commerce Department is fining gas stations for selling gas too cheaply. According to state law, gas stations cannot sell gas without taking a minimum profit, about eight cents per gallon at this time. Murphy Oil apparently broke the law at its ten stations, all of which are located in Wal-Mart stores.

It isn't clear from the article why the magic number is eight cents, but it seems unreasonable to treat gasoline any different than any other product in this situation. Stores use products like milk, bread, and eggs as loss leaders to bring people into the store. Why not gasoline?

Slashdot refers to a piece by Robert X. Cringely about how Linux and cheap wireless access points combine to form a disruptive technology that wil eventually eliminate telecom companies' control of the market by making everyone an ISP, capable of providing Voice over IP (VoIP) service.

Now VoIP is certainly a disruptive technology for its ability to potentially eliminate long distance toll charges. However, we are all accustomed to instant dialtone, stable service, and general capacity of the phone network. Local and long distance are called "Regulated Services" because they are regulated by the FCC, with penalties if the service levels are not met. I've been an internet user for far too many years, yet none of my providers have ever guaranteed my service. Those services are called "Unregulated Services" meaning that there is no guaranteed quality of service. I don't know about you, but if someone I know is having a heart attack and I call 911, I'd hate to have my service provider tell me their network is down.

Also, you still need that broadband connection, which isn't available everywhere, but if you have one then there is a good chance you're paying that same telecom company $40+ dollars every month for that service, still unregulated. Telecom companies aren't stupid either, and companies like BellSouth have diversified so that a good deal of their revenue comes for things like entertaiment. They will certainly be offering VoIP as well.

It's great that technologies like VoIP and even Skype can save me some money, but I wouldn't count the telecoms out yet. And I would certainly be pushing somebody to think about ensuring some quality of service requirements on these technologies that my life may soon depend on.

Frontline on PBS is airing a show called The Way the Music Died online on May 29, 2004. In it David Crosby talks bluntly about how the music industry has changed. He says:

"When it all started, record companies -- and there were many of them, and this was a good thing -- were run by people who loved records, people like Ahmet Ertegun, who ran Atlantic Records, who were record collectors. They got in it because they loved music. …

Now record companies are run by lawyers and accountants. The shift from the one to the other was definitely related to when the takes started to get big. Somebody [in] a forensic accounting job could probably establish the exact moment at which it reached the level that brought in the sharks. …"

He makes a point about the current concern with style over substance in music and how, if you don't look good on MTV, then you just don't get played. He also expresses disdain for record companies than care more about moving units than the music, and seem more concerned with making a buck than worrying about the artists. This seems so different from the regular story the record companies tell when they are suing average people for downloading music.

Search engines today search primarily text, and ignore rich media like audio and video. So National Public Radio (NPR) has a plan to convert their broadcasts into text so that it can be searched. Unfortunately the current language detection technology is only about 80% accurate, but this will still allow a functional search of the audio content. NPR also labels their audio file with a great deal of relevant metadata.

I wouder if it would be possible to index phonemes in audio in the same way that words are indexed in text. A text to speech engine could render the search text as a string of phonemes and the search engine could compare the strings. This should also work for multiple languages. This is similar to the concept of Latent Semantic Indexing where the relationships between different words is mathematically developed to allow searching later. That technology is essentially language independent. Could audio indexing work the same way, with phonemes being grouped into words?

Yahoo! has added a Spyware button to its new Yahoo! Toolbar for Internet Explorer. It will search for adware as well. I've tried the IE version and it works quite nicely, but unfortunately there is no version for those like myself who prefer Firefox.

A California senator is pushing a bill to ban Gmail, a free mail service of Google that is not yet available, because they have the stated intention of providing targeted ads based on reading the content of your email. Yes it has taken some time move forward a bill that forces employers to tell employees that their email is being monitored.

Slashdot has an item about a Microsoft executive who sas that Linux is a waste of money and that governments adopting open-source software will damage their own economies.

Chris Sharp, who used to work for Red Hat, also said of companies such as Red Hat and IBM, "They are not for the greater good of the community; they are also after the money." He didn't specify Microsoft's goals.

Since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) can't really afford to sue all of the people it would like to, Senators Lamar Alexander (TN) Orrin Hatch (KY), and Charles Schumer (NY) are co-sponsoring a bill to authorize the Attorney General to spend your tax dollars to sue citizens to protect civil copyright.

Better still is the fact that, as Jessica Litman, a law professor at Wayne State University, points out in this article, the principle of double jeopardy does not apply. This means that an individual sued by the Justice Department can also be sued by the RIAA for the same offence.

Basically this amounts to the Attorney General using tax dollars to act as the legal arm of the RIAA, and there isn't a lot you can do about it. Now that really sounds like piracy.

The current Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin, today promised billions (with a "B") of dollars of additional funding for socialized healthcare without increasing taxes, as part of his current campaign to re-elect the Liberal party. Interestingly enough a week ago to the day his provincial counterpart , Premier Dalton McGuinty, presided over the largest tax increase in the history of Ontario. He made a great show of making the same promise during his campaign, even signing a pledge to the Canadian Taxpayers Federation. A week ago today, he lied.

So just how much do you trust this new promise?

There is an election going on in Canada; the fourth one in eleven years. The incumbent Liberal goverment under Paul Martin is campaigning hard against the Conservatives, saying that they will impose U.S.-style values on Canada. The Conservatives want to lower taxes, something Mr. Martin had promised to do when he was finance minister a few years ago. Battered by scandals about questionable spending, and even though Canada has a surplus of over $11 billion, Mr. Martin now says that lowering taxes is un-Canadian. Apparently overtaxing citizens is Canadian though.

Unfortunately for Mr. Martin, his provincial counterparts just this week announced the largest tax increase in Ontario's history. This after they had campaigned and won an election based on their sworn promise NOT to raise taxes, and to balance the budget. They even signed a pledge. Now of course they say that they had not choice and of course "we must do it for the children", the current most over-used line in politics.

Eric Idle has written a song about the FCC. As he says:

"Here’s a little song I wrote the other day while I was out duck hunting with a judge… It’s a new song, it’s dedicated to the FCC and if they broadcast it, it will cost a quarter of a million dollars."

It seems the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is considering adding a broadcast flag to digital radio. The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is concerned that people may copy music from the radio. Years ago everyone copied music from the radio, and that was perfectly acceptable - but no longer. I'm not sure if this was considered "fair use", but why have things changed?

Is the FCC now run by the RIAA? Why is there no debate before these issues come to pass? Who exactly defines when the broadcast flag can be used? Is the FCC now in the business of limiting the rights of citizens? Why are we creating solutions to problems that don't exist?

A while ago I suggested that for the purposes of Voice Over IP it might be a good idea to use domain names to replace phone numbers. I guess that wasn't such a silly idea after all. It seems that someone has taken a first step by storing telephone numbers within the DNS. E164.org provides phone number mapping to any VoIP address you like, and it's free.

The Federal Trade Commission now requires that sexually oriented spam must have the words "SEXUALLY EXPLICIT" in the subject line. Perhaps they could force all spam to be tagged this way. I imagine there could be "PARTNER SATISFACTION" for Viagra, or perhaps "GET RICH QUICK" for money making suggestions. At least I would know which spam to open first.

Bill Gates promotes blogging as a way for companies to empower their users and get them excited about their products at Microsoft's annual CEO summit.

Colby Cosh, a writer for the National Post, has something to say about the Canadian Supreme Court decision to shut down free speech by citizens during elections, effectively limiting speech to only that of registered political parties, who are actually funded by taxpayer dollars.

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3:

”While the right to political expression lies at the core of the guarantee of free expression and warrants a high degree of constitutional protection, there is nevertheless a danger that political advertising may manipulate or oppress the voter.”

Apparently Canadians can't be trusted with free speech, and advertising by political parties won't manipulate the voter at all. It's good to know that the Supreme Court is looking out for the rights of Canadians.

My oldest son Neil has suggested the the abbreviated spelling and grammar so prevalent in cellphone text messaging and instant messaging a la Messenger should be referred to as Postmodern English.

We will also graciously decline to patent this concept, and instead provide it under the same Creative Commons license as this blog. Yes, we are quite magnanimous, and humble.

Google plans to introduce a tool to search your computer beating Microsoft to the punch on the desktop. The software will be available as a free download from Google's Web site, and has been running internally at the company for about a year.

According to the Washington Post the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) says compact disc sales have dropped from a high of $13.2 billion in 2000 to $11.2 billion in 2003 and attributes this to piracy. So their sales are down about 15% from the absolute mass consumption frenzy at that time. Why is no part of that attributed to the economy? Doesn't the economy affect sales of CDs? Did they sincerely expect it to stay the same as the economy sank?

The same article indicates that the Business Software Alliance (BSA) says piracy costs its members at least $13 billion a year. The BSA also uses somewhat odd logic by assuming that every downloaded copy of software represents a lost sale of the same software. There are certainly some percentage of users who download software, but would never consider acquiring it if they had to pay for it. And by the way, it doesn't "cost" the members anything. It only fails to increase their revenue. Cost implies an outflow of cash, not a lack of inflow.

The word Piracy itself is frequently misused. Piracy in the entertainment world is traditionally thought of as mass copying of a product (CD, DVD, etc.) for mass distribution and profit. Illegally downloading (or providing for download) a song for personal use may be theft, depending on the interpretation of laws in your country. However, it isn't piracy.

So what is the real effect of piracy? Have CD or software sales actually dropped as a result of piracy? As I've mentioned before, a Harvard/UNC study indicates that the effect of music downloading on sales is "statistically indistinguishable from zero". The true - not self preservationist - answer here would certainly be interesting.

Deloitte provides an excellent free tool called Bullfighter on their site. Once installed it acts like a spelling or grammar checker in Word and Powerpoint, finding such ubiquitous terms as "out of the box", "empowerment", and "enterprise", and suggests alternatives. It will also calculate the Bull Index of your document or presentation. Now this should definitely be added to the functionality of Microsoft Office, if only to save marketing departments from themselves.

Police in Italy are now waiting for speeders in a Lamborghini Gallardo. Apparently the car will also be used to transport human organs for emergency operations. I would have loved to see the justification for that purchase.

Microsoft is making sweeping changes in the area of search. They are building their own search technology to compete with Google, and adding a lot more. My favorite items are "Stuff I've Seen" which helps me find things I have looked at, and "Stuff I Should See which guesses at what might interest me.

Years ago when I worked at Open Text, we built a tool called "Bread Crumbs". It provided a searchable history of everything I had looked at online, and everything on my hard drive, allowing me to search for stuff I had seen. It was great then and it is nice to see someone reviving the concept. Bookmarks are really a lousy way of tracking what I've seen. It would be ideal if Microsoft could combine "Stuff I've Seen" and "Stuff I Should See" into RSS feeds so that I could view them in my aggregator. After all, that is how I see stuff I should see right now.

Consumer advocates are asking Congress to amend the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act to allow the making of personal copies of DVDs and other digital content for limited purposes. As a frequent DVD purchaser whose discs are beginning to crack after only a couple of years of infrequent use I can certainly support this. And it seems that some members agree. In referring to the proposed consumers' rights bill for digital media, Rep. John Doolittle, R-Calif., one of the authors of the consumer rights bill, commented:

"We went way overboard as a Congress in enacting that (1998) legislation. This bill represents the first tangible opportunity to redress those wrongs."

Larry Lessig called the bill "an extraordinarily important first step in restoring the balance in copyright law." Predictably executives of entertainment companies suggested that this would lead to increased piracy. It seems that if someone was intent on piracy, then simple breakable encryption wouldn't stop them. However, I have no desire to pirate anything. I would merely like to ensure that the product I paid for is available for my use in the future. I am forced into this situation to deal with inferior product from those entertainment companies.

A story last week talked about "CD rot" - the deterioration of CDs as a result of poor manufacturing quality. The quality of DVDs may be suspect as well. I don't want to steal anything. I just want to protect my investment.

Brad Templeton makes an interesting point about how letters have persisted on phone keypads even as we move to the future and IP Telephony. In fact, courtesy of text messaging their use is growing, even though it necessitates a dumbing down of vocabulary. "See you later" has been reduced to "c u l8r" in a grammatic aberation.

We have become accustomed to years of dialing phone numbers. As Brad points out, there have been mnemonic reminders such as Pennsylvania-6-5000 and 1-800-FLOWERS, to help people remember the numbers. So it seems it may be difficult to give it up. However, without thinking about it we all essentially dial 12 digit numbers all day - IP addresses. They are merely masked by domain names which refer to those IP addresses, in the same way that we think of 1-800-CALL-ATT. Perhaps everyone could have a domain address for their phone. As number portability becomes more common, we could all have one phone number, or domain name, for life, and that number could be automatically forwarded to the nearest handset. Or we could all carry a personal cell/smart phone.

As for remembering those doman names, is there anyone left who doesn't have some sort of name/number storage or address book functionality on their phone ? Certainly cell phones have a wide array of address books, meaning that storing ever more complex information like domain names won't be a problem. In fact, if you've called me, I probably have your number. The biggest issue I can see is that as a result of the disposable nature of cell phones we will need to be able to move that address book information from phone to phone easily. Current phones don' t seem to integrate well with any of the software I use to manage contacts. Hopefully someone is working on that problem.

So the phone company would just become a voice network service provider equivalent to your internet service provider. Maybe they're the same company, or maybe they aren't. And when everything is VoIP, maybe it will be a whole new kind of provider.

The previous entry about crime would have benefited from a link to the story about parking in the local newspaper. Unfortunately The Record, proudly serving Waterloo Region, Ontario, Canada requires you to be a paid subscriber to read the paper online. The cost is actually the same - $14.59 per month - for online or online and paper. So even if I put a link in the entry, you couldn't read it unless you were willing to pay $2.95.

I read several papers online including the Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, the New York Times, and even my former local paper, the Westford Eagle of Westford, Massachusetts. These typically require me to register for free, but do not require a paid subscription. The Wall Street Journal does require a paid subscription, but then again it is the Wall Street Journal, and contains much more focused content.

The Record consists of some local articles, and a lot of wire service content, most of which is available elsewhere through and other paper or web service. So what exactly is so valuable that I must pay for The Record, but none of the other more well known papers that I read online every day? I do of course subscribe to the paper version because it is the local newpaper, but certainly wouldn't pay to read it if I move.

Now I could have provided a link to the City of Waterloo website but frankly I couldn't find it on this website given its incredibly poor design and usability. Perhaps the website is useful to the city staff, but it certainly isn't helpful for residents of the city. My comments regarding the site have been ignored, so perhaps the city isn't concerned about the taxpaying residents.

I currently reside in Canada, where taxes are very high at all levels of government, but this is apparently not enough. The provincial goverment has recently mentioned that they would like to institute photo radar, taking pictures of the license plates of speeding cars and then sending tickets and bills to the vehicle owners regardless of who was actually driving. This would be an excellent idea at dangerous intersections or school zones where safety might be compromised. However, the government actually intends to put the cameras along major freeways, where the flow of traffic is generally 10-30 kilometers per hour above the posted limits. The goverment has stated that they look at photo radar as a revenue generator, and not an answer to safety concerns.

Not to be outdone, the city I live in has decided that the revenue from parking tickets is not high enough, and they need to find some way to increase it. One particular subdivision where roads are quite narrow has had a perennial parking problem, generating many complaints and many tickets as a result. Now that residents have finally stopped parking on the road the city has voted to issue parking tickets to residents parked in their own driveways if they impede the sidewalk in any way, intent on increasing parking ticket revenue. The city approved the subdivision when it was built, so why should residents have to pay for the changing whims of the city?

When did governments start promoting crime as a revenue generator? After speeding and parking, what will be next?

This week I has the opportunity to fly on WestJet, another Canadian airline. They model themselves on Southwest, and it was an excellent travelling experience. The flight was not completely full, so there was a little room to stretch out. The preflight checkin and boarding service was great, with games and jokes in the lounge. During the flight, the flight attendants were spectacular, offering drinks and snacks several times. They were quite friendly and entertaining as well. Once again, these are very subtle things which, taken together, provided a superb travel experience that I would recommend highly.

I recently saw a quote (fallacious I'm sure) that said that a typical executive has an average of 5 meetings per day, with an average of 47.9 Powerpoint slides per meeting. As I sat through roughly that quantity of slides this morning, I realized that Powerpoint is actually killing brain cells every day. It must be affecting productivity as well, as I can occasionally feel my brain shutting down during a presentation.

Many Powerpoint users also feel the need to include complete paragraphs of text on their slides, rather than just cover the salient points they wish to share. As a result I feel the need to fight this trend. Sometimes I even include a slide with an upside down and backwards image of an existing slide, a throwback to the days when people actually carried decks of real photographic slides.

Perhaps if everyone uses a little creativity these presentations won't be so incredibly dull. We could be responsible for a measurable increase in global productivity. It's just that simple.

I had the misfortune to fly the other day on jetsgo, a Canadian discount airline. It had been a long day for me and the experience started off badly as I attempted to find the correct line to check in. The plane was crowded and cramped, and the service less than spectacular. The peak of the five and a half hour flight came for me when I had the privilege of paying $5 for a turkey sandwich. Actually they gave me a ham sandwich that was labelled turkey. When I pointed this out the flight attendants discussed this with each other in French, and then told me that I was wrong and refused to exchange it. Then, when the gentleman beside me ordered turkey, the flight attendant commented on the different color of the meat, but still did nothing. Now I'm a pretty reasonable person, but that did it for me. When I got to my hotel that night, I went to their website, and eventually found an email address to contact them. I emailed a short description my experience. I received the following email back (in French first, and then English):

We acknowledge receipt of your email and thank you for sharing your comments. We will answer your letter once we have carefully read your correspondance and conducted the necessary research.

We thank you for your patience and understanding.

The lesson here is that even little things can make a big difference. Companies ignore this at their own peril.

Steven Levy of Newsweek contrasts some good and bad news in the digital music world. Good is the relative success of iTunes on its first anniversary. Bad is that the RIAA is still suing people, most recently college students. Threats do not seem to diminish the downloading issue, and there doesn't seem to be any desire on the part of the RIAA to provide a decent alternative for their customers.

In fact in some situations it is actually more expensive to download a digital version of a CD than it is to buy the physical product (with booklet and nice pictures). This is ridiculous. The digital version has no cost to physically manufacture, ship, or warehouse. The only cost is that of bandwidth for distribution. It is simply unreasonable to expect to charge the same price. Also, downloaders are expressing a clear preference for downloading the hit songs, and not the album filler. Record companies do not seem interested in addressing this issue at all. Also, in some cases, the legally downloaded songs will only play on certain devices.

Mr. Levy makes an excellent point:

When a super popular artist like Norah Jones emerges, forget about convincing a hundred thousand people to download it at $13-get a million people to make the mouse-buy for five bucks. It's nice to sell 100,000 Norah Jones albums online at $13, but even better to sell 2 million at five bucks a pop.

Doesn't this seem obvious? As for the view that downloading means people won't buy physical CDs anymore, a recent Wired article talks about a Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) program for middle schools that tries to teach kids that downloading is wrong and immoral. In it, one student pointed out:

"Look, you preview what's on the CD, and if you like it, you go out and buy the CD because you get a booklet and, like, extra stuff with it."

Paul Saffo, director of the Institute for the Future in Menlo Park, Calif., talks about how in the future everything may be a service. He uses cars as an example, but record companies would probably like this model as well. Instead of selling you music you could listen to anywhere forever (a la CD), they would like to provide you the music for a short time, more like a service. The more you want to listen, the more you'll have to pay. To make this easier, Microsoft announced technology today that gives content a digital expiration date, even when data is transferred from a PC.

Gmail beta testers are auctioning off accounts on eBay.