Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Robert Scoble has a friend who is looking for a blogging tool. It think that I've tried them all and I've found w.bloggar to be the best and most flexible, providing what seems to be the best collection of features. I'm using v4.00 but it's Windows-only.

Steve Rubel comments on Jeff Jarvis's problems with Dell:

Dell meanwhile has not rushed to help Jarvis. If I worked in Round Rock I would have my best tech on a plane to Jeff's house New Jersey tomorrow. This is inexcusable behavior given that Jeff Jarvis is an A-lister. [emphasis added]

It's hard to believe, but there is actually a country that taxes its citizens more than Canada does. Chris Petrie wrote to Mark Steyn, detailing various taxes in Norway:

So come on over and do a piece on Norway. Basically the richest (real) government in the world where the citizens none the less:
1. pay an extra 25% tax on everything they buy and all the services they require,
2. pay a fee to the government to own a TV,
3. pay a fee to the government to own a car,
4. pay 50% income tax, (what good is 5 weeks of paid holiday a year when you have no disposable income to do anything?),
5. pay tolls on the highways for the worst roads in Northern Europe
6. send their kids to schools ranked the second worst education system in Europe, just above Greece,
7. pay upwards of 100% tax on new cars because they are considered luxury items,
8. pay USD 1.70 per liter for gas at the pump (that's USD 6.45 per US gallon for your American readers), despite the fact that Norway is the third largest exporter of oil in the world after Saudi and Russia,
9. pay USD 10.00 for a pint of beer at the pub,
10. pay USD 5.00 for a box of Kellogg's Corn Flakes,
11. pay a tax for traveling abroad (on work or on holiday) because it is considered a benefit to not live on your own house for a period of time,
12. pay a tax on "air-miles" earned while flying (work or holiday),
13. pay an enormous estate when you die (despite the fact that whatever assets you have managed to acquire while alive were paid for in after-tax "dollars"),

And my favourite:
14. pay a VAT tax (25%) on the tax we pay for municipal services (garbage collection, etc)

Jeff Jarvis has come to the same conclusion that I have - it's time to switch to a Macintosh.

In Jeff's case it was problems with Dell hardware that pushed him over the edge. It my case it was the operating system.

It's a pretty big deal to switch operating systems. That says a lot about how far people will go to find something that works. It also shows just how may chances to fix these problems that were squandered by the vendors.

Joe Kraus posts his thoughts on why this is a great time to start a new company:

Excite.com took $3,000,000 to get from idea to launch. JotSpot took $100,000.

Why on earth is there a 30X difference? Theres probably a lot of reasons, but here are my top four. Im interested in hearing about what other people think are factors as well.

Hardware is 100X cheaper
In the 10 years between Excite and JotSpot, hardware has literally become 100X cheaper. Its two factors Moores law and the rise of Linux as an operating system designed to run on generic hardware. Back in the Excite days, we had to buy proprietary Sun hardware and Sun hard drive arrays. Believe me, none of it was cheap.

Today, we buy generic Intel boxes provided by one of a million different suppliers.

Infrastructure software is free
Back in 1993 we had to buy and continue to pay for maintenance on everything we needed just to build our service -- operating systems, compilers, web servers, application servers, databases. You name it. If it was infrastructure, we paid for it. And, not only was it costly, the need to negotiate licenses took time and energy. I remember having a deadline at Excite that required me to buy a Sun compiler through their Japanese office because it was the only office open at the time (probably midnight) and we needed that compiler NOW.

Compare that to today. Free, open source infrastructure is the norm. Get it anytime and anywhere. At JotSpot, and startups everywhere you see Linux, Tomcat, Apache, MySQL, etc. No license cost, no maintenance.

Access to Global Labor Markets
Startups today have unprecedented access to global labor markets. Back in 1993, IBM had access to technical people in India, but little Excite.com did not. Today, with rent-a-coder, elance.com and just plain email, we have access to a world-wide talent pool of experts on a temporary or permanent basis.

SEM changes everything
Ten years ago to reach the market, we had to do expensive distribution deals. We advertised on television and radio and print. We spent a crap-load of money. Theres an old adage in television advertising I know half my money is wasted. Trouble is, I dont know what half. That was us.

Its an obvious statement to say that search engine marketing changes everything. But the real revolution is the ability to affordably reach small markets. You can know what works and what doesnt. And, search not only allows niche marketing, its global popularity allows mass marketing as well (if you can buy enough keywords).

According to New Scientist, two New Zealand companies have developed a wave machine that can emulate the best surf waves around the globe:

Wave machines, which make small, regularly shaped waves, already make pool games more fun. But until now, creating waves big enough for people to learn to surf on has been out of the question. The Versareef, developed by New Zealand companies ASR and Surf Pools, looks set to change all that.

Company directors Shaw Mead of ASR and Kerry Black of Surf Pools spent five years surveying the best reefs in the Pacific to find out which seabed characteristics generate the best surf. "Then we created computer-controlled, movable pool bottoms to mimic those characteristics and generate really powerful waves," says Black.

Their secret? Computer-controlled pneumatic jacks beneath a tough rubber mat control its shape to within centimetres. By altering the gradient of the slope and the alignment of ridges on the pool bottom, the "reef" can produce breaking waves with different characteristics.

The Versareef will generate four types of wave, named after the places in which they are typically found: Hawaii, Indonesia, California and Australia. The Hawaiian has a steep take-off leading straight into a wall of water, while the Californian is a slower, easier wave, which is better for beginners, says Black.

Jason Dunn has an experience with a Backstreet Boys CD where the DRM installs even of you decline the license. I won't comment on his choice of music, but shouldn't the user have control of their own computer?

Jason explains how to defeat the DRM so that you can make a copy of the music that you have legally purchased.

Of course as I've noted before, this would be illegal under proposed changes to copyright law in Canada, meaning that you would no longer have the right to use music that you purchased.

David at Marketing Begins At Home answers Robert's question:

I want the devices I own now to still work with the files and filesystems of five, ten, even twenty years from now. I know people listening to the radio on 50 year old boat anchors, I dont see why that principle shouldnt apply to consumer technology.

I dont want DRM - I bought the file, I own it and if I want to burn a CD for my wife, thats my business.

I want Word files that I created on my PowerBook to work on a Windows machine - guess what, every now and then it doesnt.

I want simple tools to put every picture and video I make of my kids in my parents and in-laws hands within minutes. I dont want to have to worry if the file is in .mov or .avi or whatever format - I just want it up there and done with.

Just like you said, I want to put EVERYTHING on the Internet but I want an easy, painless way - a way that I could explain to my mother in a phone call - to do it. APIs and OPML files are fine for us geek folks to talk about but in the end, the folks out there dont need to know what they are, they just need to know what they can do with them.

Blogging, podcasting, and vblogging aren't fads. People have things they want to say, and they will do so in the way they feel most comfortable, either through the written or spoken word, or through images both still and moving. Life should be as simple as "Save to website", or drag and drop.

I don't want to worry about filetypes either. I tried to watch the Nortel AGM today and found out that though I have several media players on my PC, I didn't have the one I needed so I had to install it.

But I also want flexible interoperability. If OPML and RSS achieve that, then that's great, though the average person probably doesn't care. I just don't want to be locked into one tool in case something better comes along.

I'd like flexible interfaces to my data. Perhaps text-based like a search engine. Or perhaps geospatially, like Google Earth or BlogMap.

It would be ideal if the products were platform independant too, but that really isn't as critical.

But I absolutely refuse to pay over and over for the same product while the vendor works the bugs out. Been there. Done that.

Robert Scoble is starting to sound a little desperate:

33,000 of you watched the RSS video on Channel 9 over the past few days. But, we've only heard from about 100 of you. That means there's a HUGE number of people who just are staying quiet and not becoming part of the conversation. Why? You think you have nothing to say? I tell you, if 1,000 of you wrote "I listen to podcasts" over on Channel 9 product planners around the world would pay attention. It takes a very small number of people to move companies. But they MUST show up, otherwise those of us who think we are hearing a new customer base get ignored.

I'm not sure why Robert brings up iTunes:

Let's say you're an iTunes user. Will Steve Jobs make sure that he keeps iTunes ahead of Microsoft's stuff? So far he has. He added podcasting support yesterday. Why? Cause he wants to make sure customers are given best-of-breed capabilities. He knows that the minute a better player or podcasting service comes along that the word-of-mouth network will bring that new service or player huge numbers of new customers.

So, let's go at it another way. What do you want in future versions of iTunes? Do you want to be able to take your feeds out of iTunes and put them into iPodder, for instance? Or Doppler? Or vice versa?

Robert wants an internet content sharing suite, recalling how the Office Suite improved life for users:

Think back to 1989. Back then you needed to buy a word processing program from one vendor. A spreadsheet from another. A presentation program from another. And a database from yet another. Then Microsoft came out with the Office Suite that did it all. Why was that important? Cause the four apps in the suite worked together (yeah, I know it's not perfect, but it's a lot better than it used to be). They all came for one price. One support system. In one box.

At the time people bought applications from different vendors because they bought best of breed. And few people used presentation tools, Harvard Graphics being the most common. When the Office Suite came out it included Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. It was marginally cheaper than the separate applications, but PowerPoint was bonus that you were forced to pay for even if you didn't want it. The database - Access - didn't come along until around 1992. And those applications didn' t work together at all. They just shared a single installation program.

To Microsoft's credit, that suite of tools has improved drastically. But those improvements came at a cost to me, I've been forced to purchase at least six (6) different versions of the Office Suite for a total of about $3000, sometimes just because it was needed to support a new operating system which I was also forced to buy. And the key result of the Office Suite was to kill off all competition, not to work with it.

It comes as no surprise then that people have no interest in contributing to the demise of competition. After all, Internet Explorer as a free component of the operating system contributed to the demise of Netscape.

iTunes happened without Microsoft, and so far they haven't offered anything better. Lots of great tools happen every day, and if there's a market for an internet content/sharing creation tool, one will happen. Microsoft is certainly welcome to compete in that market.

Robert is doing a great job getting Microsoft to open up. But personally I look around and see lots of first generation tools - free tools - that I know will get better and I think that if getting better tools from Microsoft means the death of competition, it just isn't worth it.

There's more on this over at Channel 9.

Update: Somebody whose opinion I respect called this post a "Scoble smack". It really wasn't intended that way. In my opinion Robert has done more to raise my opinion of Microsoft than anyone else. This post was just my thoughts on why people are not rushing to join a conversation with Microsoft.

Being conveniently close, I stopped in to Nortel's AGM, with the intent of blogging a bit of it like Mark Evans is here and here.

Unfortunately there was no WiFi available for the poor downtrodden shareholders. You'd think that for a once a year event (and much less frequently lately), a company that likes to promote its wireless products could throw a couple routers around the room and provide a simple connection.

Seth Godin passes along the Retail Alphabet Game, in which you are presented with an alphabet of letters from corporate logos. Your job? Name that logo for each of the 26 letters.

I consider myself exceptionally logo-aware, and I found it extremely difficult.

Senator Rick Santorum blames the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandal on Liberalism:

It is startling that those in the media and academia appear most disturbed by this aberrant behavior, since they have zealously promoted moral relativism by sanctioning "private" moral matters such as alternative lifestyles. Priests, like all of us, are affected by culture. When the culture is sick, every element in it becomes infected. While it is no excuse for this scandal, it is no surprise that Boston, a seat of academic, political and cultural liberalism in America, lies at the center of the storm.

Yet just because a culture is diverse, open, and tolerant, this should not be enough by itself to drive a good person to aberrant behavior. To suggest such a thing ignores the concept of free will. People are free to make their own decisions; to make choices as those priests did.

These scandals were not limited to Boston, or even to liberal cities. But a common factor was the decision by senior personnel within the church to overlook, even to hide these events. That is the most egregious part of this entire story. Is Senator Santorum suggesting that this liberalism pervasively affected every member of the diocese, even Cardinal Bernard Law? Doesn't that imply that nobody was capable of thinking for themselves? That seems to be a pretty strong indictment of the Catholic church in general.

Tip of the hat to blogcritics.org.

Steve Ballmer says that Microsoft is gaining on Google:

In the next six months, we'll catch Google in terms of relevancy," he said.

Microsoft has forgotten that relevance is based entirely on what customers think of you, and Google is the clear winner in mind share. It must be frustrating for Microsoft to fight against an enemy that doesn't seem to play by any rules - because they don't have to.

Ballmer wants to be able to search corporate databases for information:

Take for instance the Siebel database. Now I've never used that interface. But I'd love to go to it and say 'who is the account manager for the Commonwealth Bank of Australia?'," Ballmer told the partners.

Canada is about to pass new copyright legislation that gives new rights to foreign-owned content companies, yet takes rights away from individuals.

www.KillBillC60.ca is a site that aims to fight that.

As the site notes, the government's own FAQs on the bill employ Digital Rights Management (DRM) to ensure that you cannot copy and repost the content:

English FAQ
French FAQ

*note that these files are encumbered with a form of Digital Rights Management. This was put in place by our own government to restrict YOUR legitimate access to the content. This is a prime example of how DRM can be abused. If our own government is abusing this technology (the one department which should know better, no less), you can bet that private corporations will be also.

Q7. Is there a risk that protection of technological measures (TMs) will adversely affect users?

A. ... Circumvention for the purposes of making private copies of sound recordings will not be permitted, however. ...

I occasionally do the laundry at our house, and to check the load I have to get up out of my chair and walk around the corner to the laundry room. So you can certainly understand how excited I was to see the LG Remote Monitoring Laundry System.

Now if only they could get the information sent to my computer or my television.

Tip of the hat to Engadget.

Something new from the folks at Google - Google Earth.

JD Lasica at Darknet asks "What does it take to 'induce' infringement?"

That's easy. A "record" button. As soon as Sony put a record button on the Betamax VCR, they were clearly inducing infringement.

Aren't makers of blank tapes, CDs, DVDs, or media of any kind inducing infringement? What about products like the Archos portable media player? They have no store from which to but videos, so the user is forced to copy them from somewhere else. What about TiVo?

In Canada, Shaw Cable advertises their service as a way to download that one good song from an album.

I'm sure that the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) thinks just like the Business Software Alliance (BSA) - eliminate piracy and people will replace every illegal copy with a licensed copy. Sorry guys. Ain't gonna happen. Microsoft admitted that when they licensed their software for $1 per computer in Indonesia.

Meanwhile you've pissed off customers who already buy CDs and because of DRM can't use them on their iPods - even though they paid for them. Where is the incentive to buy a CD when it is useless to you?

Some smart company is going to start helping artists to publish direct to the web and you can say goodbye to the ridiculous markup on physical items. I'm sure artists wouldn't mind being paid directly. In fact, iTunes probably has the wherewithal to do marketing for new album releases if they want to, which would probably be a much preferred way of spending the 65 cents they currently pay the record companies for each song. They could give the artist 10 cents per song and spend the rest on marketing. It's pretty clear that the RIAA is concerned about the gravy train going away.

As for the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), DVD sales are spectacular, and growing. You're even selling old TV shows on DVD. shows that were paid for long ago, with no royalties to pay - all profit. Just how greedy are you?

I'm trying to install the Google Video Viewer and this is as far as I get.

It seems that the Committee on Energy and Commerce is interested in global warming, specifically asking Mann et. al. [1998] about the data and methodology between their "hockey stick" curve. Among other things they want to know this:

According to The Wall Street Journal, you have declined to release the exact computer code you used to generate your results. (a) Is this correct? (b) What policy on sharing research and methods do you follow? (c) What is the source of that policy? (d) Provide this exact computer code used to generate your results.

Tip of the hat to Kate McMillan at the Western Standard.

Confessions of a Brand Evangelist has a pretty good idea:

Let me suggest a new paradigm. Charge me for postage. Build it into your business model. Sneek a few extra pennies into that cover price. Squeeze a buck out of me with a higher interest fee. I won't notice. I promise. But here's what I will notice: when I turn your envelope over and it says "No postage necessary in the United States." Oh that will be sweet. Not because I didn't have to pay the 37 cents. But because I didn't have to pay with my time and attention.

The Head Lemur doesn't exactly think that Microsoft's support for RSS is a good thing:

In yet another late to the party announcement, Microsoft says that it will support RSS in the next version of Windows. Segments of the tech community are abuzz with this news.
Codenamed Longhorn, which basically means that Microsoft will have another opportunity to shove another operating system farther up your computers rectum, and deeper into your wallet.

[...]

Anybody who views this as a positive development, needs to step away from the keyboard. Microsoft is the last company in the world to do anything for the people. This is about Microsoft maintaining market share for it's software.

In the past, you wouldn't have seen support for "pure" RSS. Not on my watch, boyz. Nope, what you would have seen is yours truly hawking something along the lines of SIR (Surround Isolate and Replace) Technology or RSS+.

You would have seen an announcement about RSS+ which will work with the standard stuff, but, puhlezz, why do that when you can kick butt with RSS+ on the Windows platform. I'd then have deployed about a million CDs, had jump start sessions all over the globe, and let developers around the world ship the RSS+ modules ahead of a pending release of Windows. Or, heck, we'll take a shot with something like Active Desktop. Need I say more?

[...]

That process is impossible today. The nature of the Internet as a delivery platform simply makes this strategy impossible. Today's world of blogging, mass (really mass) adoption of a technique or strategy by virtually "everybody", gives things like RSS enhancements a rapid thumbs up or thumbs down before Microsoft or any other big player can dictate the game.

Suddenly this browser is free with the operating system. It's pretty difficult to compete with free. So the people that created the ideas, the innovation, the technology, are driven out of business or into obscurity.

The result? The browser stagnates, and IE becomes the biggest tool for security breaches and virus infection known to mankind. Microsoft does nothing about that, except for a few simple patches.

Then comes Firefox which rapidly begins to steal press and market share, given better features and more security, as well as built in tools like popup-blocking. Suddenly Microsoft is concerned about their customers again, and promises a new browser version to fix everything. They latch on to RSS, today's hot technology (already supported by Firefox), and announce that they are building their tools around it.

They announce Microsoft support for RSS. Standards-based of course, with a few extensions. The extensions are documented so that anyone can use them.

Suddenly this RSS support is free with the operating system, embedded into every Microsoft application It's pretty difficult to compete with free. So the people that created the ideas, the innovation, the technology, are driven out of business or into obscurity. Only this time it isn't Netscape. It's NewsGator, or PubSub, or Bloglines, or Feedster.

And then RSS stagnates. Sound familiar?

This doesn't necessarily have to be the outcome. But it sure sounds eerily familiar.

The Head Lemur doesn't exactly think that Microsoft's support for RSS is a good thing:

In yet another late to the party announcement, Microsoft says that it will support RSS in the next version of Windows. Segments of the tech community are abuzz with this news.
Codenamed Longhorn, which basically means that Microsoft will have another opportunity to shove another operating system farther up your computers rectum, and deeper into your wallet.

[...]

Anybody who views this as a positive development, needs to step away from the keyboard. Microsoft is the last company in the world to do anything for the people. This is about Microsoft maintaining market share for it's software.

The Supreme Court of the United States has unanimously decided in MGM v. Grokster that internet file-sharing services may be held responsible if their software is primarily intended to illegally share music and movies:

"We hold that one who distributes a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by the clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement, is liable for the resulting acts of infringement by third parties," Justice David H. Souter wrote for the court.

These are people who don't want you to be able to share files:

In the closely watched case, supporting the effort to sue the companies were dozens of entertainment industry companies, including musicians Don Henley, Sheryl Crow and the Dixie Chicks, as well as attorneys general in 40 states.

About 20 independent recording artists, including musician and producer Brian Eno, rockers Heart and rapper-activist Chuck D, supported the file-sharing technology to allow for greater distribution of their works.

More can be found at Forbes, MarketWatch, Red Herring, and PC World.

The New York Times has an article entitled Florida County Ending Support of Gay Events:

The Hillsborough County Commission approved by a vote of 5 to 1, with one abstention, a policy that directs the county government to "abstain from acknowledging, promoting or participating" in gay pride recognition or events. The measure was passed on June 15, after a Gay and Lesbian Pride Month display at the West Gate Regional Library here upset some library patrons.

The county's policy has angered gay rights advocates across the country.

"From a national perspective we haven't seen anything like this," said Paul Cates, the American Civil Liberties Union's director of public education for lesbian and gay rights.

Community leaders here said the policy damaged recent efforts to promote the Tampa region as being multicultural and diverse. Addressing an arts group the day after the commission's vote, Mayor Pam Iorio of Tampa said: "Gays and lesbians are part of our diversity and deserve our respect. That is a value that I hold dear. We should build on tolerance, not intolerance."

Gays and lesbians may be part of diversity, and they certainly deserve as much respect as anyone else. But perhaps gay pride events are not the best way to do that. If they want to be treated like everyone else, then perhaps they could act like everyone else. How many straight pride events have you heard of? And how politically incorrect would that be?

Be gay, be straight, be whatever you want to be. But do so in the course of everyday life. There's no need to make a big fuss about it. This reminds me of an episode of the Simpsons in which a gay pride parade is going past their house. One of the gay people on a float yells out "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it!" Lisa yells back "It's been 10 years. We're used to it!"

After 13 months and $4 million, Toronto, Canada has a new brand - Toronto Unlimited:

What makes Toronto such a uniquely interesting place is answered by a constantly growing list: its innovative architecture, its theatre district, the hundreds of ethnic restaurants, the character of its neighborhoods, its accepting legislation, a multi-talented workforce, museums that are themselves works of art, the stories of its street corners, its cleanliness, the International Film Festival, the parks, the lake, the celebration of humanity. . . In short, Toronto is a city built with and for the limitless imaginations of the people that come here. And it is these people that make Toronto the city of imagination.

When one of my friends in Boston came back from a hockey tournament in Toronto, he described it as a town with horrible traffic, poorly marked freeways with signs in French, high priced hotels and restaurants, and a 15% tax on everything. Obviously he wasn't in any of the 14 focus groups.

Union Energy, the company I rent my hot water heater from, came to replace said hot water heater the other day. Later that night, the company called to tell me about their rent-a-furnace program. I explained that my furnace was less that five years old, and they thanked me for my time.

The hot water heater had a little problem, so they sent a repair person today. After checking the heater he looked at the furnace and asked if I had heard about the rent-a-furnace program.

Obviously this company takes care to ensure that its customer service folks make their customers aware of their services, If I had needed a new furnace I probably would have signed up.

The instant gratification that digital cameras bring have displaced the usefulness of the former champion of instant photography - the Polaroid camera. Future generations will grow up without knowing the joy of paying a fortune for special film so that you can take a picture, lay it aside and wait for it to develop, and have an ugly photo that most people would be embarrassed to put in their photo albums.

Never fear! Technology has come to the rescue in the form of Polaroid-o-nizer. You can now take any photo and turn it into a Polaroid facsimile. Just make sure that you aren't violating any photographer's copyrights.

My oldest son is currently enrolling in second year classes at the University of Waterloo, using possibly the worst class scheduling system ever designed in the history of the universe. Ok, skipping the hyperbole, it is incredibly bad and horribly non-intuitive.

A totally text form-based web application, it requires you to select the course by discipline and number, and then search for it. That search returns a text list of four digit class sections numbers, four digit labs and tutorials if applicable, time slots, and current enrollments.

You have to write down the choices that are not full, along with the time slots, then go to a separate screen and enter the information. If you have a course conflict you can't change the class. You must delete the class and re-enter it.

It takes up about an hour of painful manual work to schedule five classes. This kind of application making you do all of the work with no automation - gives the web a bad name. For a university that claims to produce excellent engineers and computer scientists, it's pretty embarassing. Perhaps they might consider having this redesigned as a term project.

About 20 years ago I had my own company that designed class scheduling systems. The user could select a number of classes and they would automatically scheduled. The user could then reschedule them if they so desired. Surely twenty years later the university can do better.

Microsoft plans to extend its support for Really Simple Syndication (RSS):

Microsoft on Friday will announce it plans to deepen its support of Really Simple Syndication (RSS) Web publishing standard, which is commonly used by bloggers and news organizations. Specifically the company is proposing an extension to RSS that will provide support for ordered lists of information.

In his posting yesterday well known blogger Dave Winer said Microsoft now has a team in place specifically focused on the syndication standard and that RSS will likely be taking on a central role in the company's strategy.

Google seems to be the only major company choosing Atom over RSS.

As for Microsoft, I assume that the browser will now attempt to generate an RSS feed from any web page it sees. That's a but presumptuous though. Perhaps not everyone wants an RSS feed.

The Business 2.0 Blog noted that RIM is getting some vindication from the U.S. Patent Office:

After agreeing to a $450 million settlement with tiny patent-holding company NTP, Blackberry-maker Research in Motion is finally getting some vindication from the U.S. Patent Office, which in a highly unusual move agreed to re-examine the patents in question and has invalidated four out of five of them.

I'm certain the story would be a lot different if someone infringed on the BlackBerry's patented keyboard.

My kids tell me thatt I watch far too many Friends reruns, but it turns out that there is a scientific explanation for this. I have at least one “Jennifer Aniston cell” in my brain:

“For things that you see over and over again, your family, your boyfriend, or celebrities, your brain wires up and fires very specifically to them. These neurons are very, very specific, much more than people think,” says Christof Koch at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, US, one of the researchers.

In the 1960s, neuroscientist Jerry Lettvin suggested that people have neurons that respond to a single concept such as, for example, their grandmother. The notion of these hyper-specific neurons, coined “grandmother cells” was quickly rejected by psychologists as laughably simplistic.

But Rodrigo Quiroga, at the University of Leicester, UK, who led the new study, and his colleagues have found some very grandmother-like cells. Previous unpublished findings from the team showed tantalising results: a neuron that fired only in response to pictures of former US president Bill Clinton, or another to images of the Beatles. But for such “grandmother cells” to exist, they must invariably respond to the “concept” of Bill Clinton, not just similar pictures.

A Canadian parliamentary panel believe that tax breaks are needed to increase productivity in Canada:

The report of the Senate committee on banking said that Canada, which almost matched the United States in productivity about 10 years ago, has now fallen 15 percent behind it in terms of productivity per worker.

"That's not just that Canadian workers aren't working hard, the real issue is that there is not enough capital investment per worker in our economy compared to the United States. That all goes to the question of tax incentives," said Liberal Senator Jerry Grafstein, the committee chairman.

Canada has sunk to 18th in productivity growth among countries in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. In the 1950s, it was fifth.

On the downside, Canada's labour productivity has been substantially below that of France, Japan and the United States.

The agency says, however, that Canada is keeping up with, and in many cases surpassing, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the U.S.

As Prime Minister Paul Martin is fond of pointing out, Canada led the G8 in economic growth between 2000 and 2004.

Canada's growth, which amounted to 2.8% last year as measured by gross domestic product (GDP), was below the global average of 5.1% as determined by the International Monetary Fund. However, the global average was the best in 27 years, powered by continued strength in the United States and China.

The United States easily led the acceleration common to all the G7 nations, as its real gross domestic product rose 4.4%. The gain defied widely held concerns about the sustainability of US growth in the face of record high oil prices and a record trade deficit.

The United Kingdom was in second place with 3% growth, just ahead of Canada and Japan. Continental Europe continued to lag with gains of less than 2%, although this was an improvement on negligible growth in 2003.

Bob Geldof has been pretty harsh to Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin when talking about Live 8:

In a videotaped message yesterday, the Boomtown Rats frontman warned Prime Minister Paul Martin to stay away from the G-8 summit if he is not prepared to sign on to a deal to increase aid to Africa.

"There's no use your prime minister coming to Scotland unless he's prepared to do this deal. If he's not prepared, stay at home, just stay at home, don't come," said Geldof.

"You're not welcome unless you're prepared to do something finally and irrevocably on behalf of the poor of this world."

"In other words, Canada is the only country making a profit for the last few years. You have a special responsibility, almost." [emphasis mine}

If the only way a government can generate revenue is through taxes and they are making a profit (i.e. taking in more than they spend), then doesn't that mean that citizens are paying too much tax? I guess it just makes sense to give that extra away rather than back to the poor citizens.

According to The Independent, Tim Shaw, a British DJ, told listeners that he fantasised about his wife's sister while he was having sex. When his pregnant wife called to complain, he put their conversation on the air.

She got even though, putting his £25,000 Lotus Esprit Turbo up for sale on eBay:

In one of the great acts of marital revenge she offered the black sports car for a price of 50p. "I need to get rid of this car immediately - ideally in the next 3-4 hours before my cheating arsehole husband gets home to find it gone and all his belongings in the street," read the posting on the internet auction site.

From Mark Steyn in The Daily Telegraph, regarding the recent "no" votes on the European constitution:

...A couple of years ago, Chris Patten made some remarks to the effect that he thought we'd seen the forging of a European identity in the enthusiastic support for the Ryder Cup team and the objections to Bush's steel tariffs. You couldn't help noticing that this "European identity" expressed itself mainly as opposition to America.

It all rang a very weary bell for me: for decades, the definition of "Canadian identity" has boiled down to a list of ways in which we're not American, most of them counter-productive. But, given we have privileged access to the US market, Canadian anti-Americanism is about the nearest you can get to having your cake and eating it. All European anti-Americanism does is redefine defects as virtues.

Jeff Jarvis has just discovered what many Dell owners already know:

: I just got a new Dell laptop and paid a fortune for the four-year, in-home service.

The machine is a lemon and the service is a lie.

I'm having all kinds of trouble with the hardware: overheats, network doesn't work, maxes out on CPU usage. It's a lemon.

I've had a multitude of problems with the Dells I've had over the years, some of which are probably also the result of the interaction between Dell hardware and Microsoft software. My favorite problem is the one where, while I'm typing, the cursor repositions itself so I'm now typing in a different area. The overheating and maxed CPU usage are always fun.

My latest problem is having the machine just "go away" for about 30 seconds to a minute, then suddenly everything is back to normal. And rarely does it come back from standby properly.

Yes companies continue to purchase Dells, even though the price savings are mediocre at best. But I can personally attest to the fact that the cost in lost productivity with Dell products far exceeds any possible savings on the hardware.

I got this email from LaSalle Bank today, even though I don't have an account there:

We are glad to inform you, that our bank has a new security system. The new updated technology will ensure the security of your payments through our bank.

Hoping you understand that we are doing this for your own safety we suggest you to update your account , this update will maintain the safety of your account . All you have to do is to complete our online secured form . Thank You.

Seeing that telemarketers are now targeting cell phones, I just wanted to let them know that I have call display on both of my cell phones. I don't answer blocked, private, or unknown calls, or numbers I don't recognize. You'll get my voice mail. You probably won't leave a message, but if you do I won't be returning it. I also do a reverse directory check on the number, and I will complain to your telecom carrier.

You won't get me to answer your call, so don't waste your time calling in the first place.

From Wireless Wonders:

According to the IMS product guy in the group, it's an "enabling technology". According to the IP guys who were present, it's a "applications router". According to the software people, it's really "a network operating system". According to the marketing guy, it doesn't really matter, "as long as we can brand it".

Samsung has been granted a patent for a phone that can delete SMS messages that have already been sent from the receiver's phone.

Link from textually.org.

Ronald at Technology Futurist made a comment that got me thinking:

But the Starbucks Wi-Fi hotspot got me thinking about the lack of availability of public WLAN access here in Toronto. After all, we live in one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world (supposedly), and yet, I can get better access in downtown São Paulo than I can in Toronto (and down in Brazil, it is even free of charge!).

In Santa Clara, California I could get easily get broadband. In Westford, Massachusetts, a suburb or Boston, it was more difficult, though it has improved now. Both have pretty good cellular networks. Toronto, Canada has broadband access, but Canadian cellular providers are somewhat behind their American counterparts.

On the other hand, Asia and Europe are far more advanced in terms of wireless voice and data networks. North America looks archaic by comparison.

So how exactly do you measure "technologically advanced"?