Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Now you can get a laptop that gets extremely bad mileage. General Motors will announce a new $3000 Hummer-branded laptop next week:

The carmaker has signed an exclusive three-year licensing agreement with Spokane, Wash.-based Itronix to make a portable computer designed for people who work outdoors: police officers, firefighters, claims adjusters and construction workers, for example, as well as people who own a Hummer and are fascinated by anything related to the oversize vehicles.

Itronix, which makes laptops and tablet PCs for the U.S. military, said it wanted to style a new category of "semi-ruggedized" laptop. Priced at $2,988, the laptops come with enough padding to survive six separate drops from a height of 30 inches onto two 3/4-inch sheets of plywood placed on top of concrete.

I was recently doing some work with a company that was evaluating internal processes to see what was working and what wasn't. The research had been done, and the report was being prepared.

At this point one of the people in the company laid down a key guideline for the report and presentation. There couldn't be any criticism of any kind of the company - nothing negative of any kind - regardless of what the research revealed.

Imagine paying a consultant to determine how effective your processes were, but telling them they weren't able reveal the results unless they would make the company happy. Just how much would they learn from that?

I think if there was any bad news I'd want to know about it so that I could do something about it. Fortunately it was a lower level person who provided that comment, so I assumed it was not indicative or the company. Yet that person must have gotten that idea from somewhere.

From the Washington Post:

Did PowerPoint make the space shuttle crash? Could it doom another mission? Preposterous as this may sound, the ubiquitous Microsoft "presentation software" has twice been singled out for special criticism by task forces reviewing the space shuttle disaster.

Perhaps I've sat through too many PowerPoint presentations lately, but I think the trouble with these critics is that they don't go far enough: The software may be as much of a mind-numbing menace to those of us who intend to remain earthbound as it is to astronauts.

PowerPoint's failings have been outlined most vividly by Yale political scientist Edward Tufte, a specialist in the visual display of information. In a 2003 Wired magazine article headlined "PowerPoint Is Evil" and a less dramatically titled pamphlet, "The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint," Tufte argued that the program encourages "faux-analytical" thinking that favors the slickly produced "sales pitch" over the sober exchange of information.

On Sunday night my son ordered a new iPod from Apple.com using his student educational discount. It arrived this morning, not even 48 hours from the time of order.

My family has officially decided to purchase Apple products from now on.

I'm trying a new social photo sharing application called Slide that scrolls photo channels down your screen. You can see channels shared by other people, or choose to share your own channels. It's kind of a neat idea, and it finds your photos on your disk and allows you to share them directly if you are running the client application. So there's nothing to upload or download.

Of course it lends a very voyeuristic element to my screen, because I never know just what is going to show up on any given channel.

According to the American Pet Products Manufacturers Association (APPMA), Americans are expected to spend an estimated $35.9 billion on per products this year. The statistics on our pets and how we treat them are quite interesting, including the fact that 43.5 US households have a dog.

RentMyDaughter.com:

RentMyDaughter provides safe and trustworthy child-rental services in multiple metropolitan areas. Our service area is growing every year and we are on target to provide services in 50 cities by the end of 2006.

Then you should go to SoYouWanna.com where you can find out just how to do lots of things in a nice folksy tone. Wanna write a business plan?

Om Malik:

Over past three years, Apple and its iTunes have saved their music industry from falling into the dark abyss that is peer-to-peer sharing. Now the same record industry wants to kill the golden goose, by raising prices of the songs. Why? Because the record executives are thinking to themselves: That damn Steve, he is so smart that he makes money by selling iPods and by selling music. How can this geek be a better businessman than us, they say? I mean they have been screwing the talent for so long, and now this computer guy, pulled a fast one on them! The nerve! (I am channeling their inner thoughts here, in case you were wondering.)

[...]

Thankfully, they record business is split into two camps - one that wants price of downloads to stay at 99 cents, and the boneheads.

The Business 2.0 Blog posits on Google's Master Plan:

He's right that the value of the operating system is under threat. But thinking about Google as the new operating system is using yesterday's metaphors to explain tomorrow's technologies. It's not the operating system. The operating system does not matter anymore (or, rather, will matter less and less). That is because increasingly the information you want to get to is not on your PC, it's on the Web. This allows Google (or Yahoo or anyone else) to build critical applications beyond the browser that sit on top of the operating system to go and fetch data from the Web and bring it back to the desktop. This certainly fits with Google's mission to "organize the world's information." They want to organize it on your desktop.

We've got multi-purpose PCs, TiVos for recording video, XM satellite radios, and more, all of which are potential appliances. Google gets this, and their plan seems to be acting as the conduit for the information. Helping to share it, locate and get you to it. And they're doing it without having to create or own the content in any way.

So as the book Blown to Bits suggested, they are disintermediating - removing the middleman and connecting customers directly to the information that they want. Oddly, Jeff Jarvis might be thinking along the same lines, asking "who wants to own content?"

The operating system is going to be as irrelevant as the maker of the disk drive in the PC, because it just makes the appliance go.

Mini-Microsoft has an excellent post about stack ranking in staff reviews and the effect they have on employees:

I am just tired of our busted review model. Stack ranking is just plain wrong. Yes, you need to have a yearly review system. I absolutely believe that. You need to reward the super contributors well. But the amount of angst and anger that goes into the getting the review model done poisons all of us. If my report decides, ">Dang it, I'm getting a 4.0 by any means necessary," well, they are going to find some very easy ways to get that 4.0, and most of those easy ways are going to be self-centric and focused around decreasing / inhibiting the performance of their peers so that they can have better results:

There is also the problem with team members competing with each other on teams. By making team members compete with each other, we weaken teams. On my last team, team members would withhold information from other team members in order to slow them down in their work and make it easier to beat in the stack rankings (as I said, there was a lot of work and any delay in getting things done could impact the deadline).

By all means reward exceptional employees, but also make some provision for cost of living increases for employees who are doing their jobs. You may not want to reward average employees for being average, but if your company is growing, then they are the ones who are helping it to do so - it can't be just the few heroes. When they figure out that the company is reaping a windfall on their backs, they'll leave, taking their valuable knowledge with them. Sometimes they'll even got to work for your customers and competitors. And they'll tell everyone they meet about how the company mistreated them.

You really don't want to be that company. Because reputations are very expensive - to create, and to rebuild.

I've been thinking a lot about recruiting lately. I've worked in high tech since I was a kid, and I've often noticed a tendency toward a kind of ageism.

We never want to hire anybody who is too old. They are assumed to be either too expensive, or they just won't fit in with the young company culture. Yet we also insist on hiring gray haired senior management, because investors expect it.

And we assume that you don't know anything until you graduate from college. Of course we also want to hire younger employees or new graduates because they are cheaper.

But I often think to myself that Bill Gates was a college dropout, Sam Walton only had a grade school education, and Jim Clark has created a few great companies.

It seems that we're far more concerned about age and education than we are about the drive to succeed.

I find it a bit ridiculous that people feel the need to attack Google just because it has become big and successful. Even from the New York Times, no less:

But instead of embracing Google as one of their own, many in Silicon Valley are skittish about its size and power. They fret that the very strengths that made Google a search-engine phenomenon are distancing it from the entrepreneurial culture that produced it - and even transforming it into a threat.

[...]

"I've definitely been picking up on the resentment," said Max Levchin, a founder of PayPal, the online payment service now owned by eBay. "They're a big company now, doing things people didn't expect them to do."

If you hadn't noticed, Google is no longer just an Internet search tool; it's now a full-blown software company. It develops elegant, efficient software programs - and then gives them away. In today's culture of cynicism, such generosity and software excellence seems highly suspicious; surely it's all a smokescreen for a darker, larger plot to suck us all in. What, exactly, is Google up to?

[...]

In a single week, then, Google, the software company, addressed deficiencies in Windows, tried to create a grand unified chat and voice network, and opened its clean, capable, capacious e-mail system to all comers. All of this software is beautifully done, quick to download and fun to use - not to mention free and (apart from the Gmail service) entirely free of ads and come-ons.

Wish they'd cut it out. Trying to figure out what this company's really up to is enough to drive you crazy.

The Canadian government bought off the province of Sasketchewan with $147 million in gas tax money:

Saskatchewan municipalities will benefit from more than $147 million, over five years, in federal gas tax funding to be used for environmentally sustainable municipal infrastructure and to fund increased municipal planning capacity. Funding totalling $17.7 million will flow in the first year, ramping up to $59.1 million in year five, continuing at that level thereafter.

"Today's agreement marks a new partnership," stated Prime Minister Martin, "one that will help ensure Saskatchewan's municipalities have the tools they need to grow stronger, more sustainable and to ensure a higher quality of life for their residents. Saskatchewan's cities and communities have stressed the need for new sources of funding, and for a voice in how those investments are made. We've listened."

Interestingly enough, assuming that one quarter of residents drive (244,733 people), using about 2500 litres annually at $1 per litre, a rebate of the GST alone would come to about $214 million over five years. The government got off cheap.

Chris Pirillo has an excellent rant about the stupidity of multiple incompatible IM clients:

Remember how you couldn't send emails to your friends who used Eudora, because you were using Pine? That's because it never happened. That shortcoming would never fly, yet we put up with these exact bugaboos on a regular basis. I'm getting real close to dropping all IM activity altogether until the brands get their acts together.

And personally I wonder why after all of these years we have yet to agree on one common way of sharing address book and identity information. Outlook, Thunderbird, PDAs, and phones - all of them use a different format, making it extremely painful to share that information.

The University of Texas is going bookless:

When students wander into the former undergraduate library at the University of Texas this fall, gone will be the "Quiet Please" signs, the ban on cheeseburgers or sodas, the sight of solemn librarians restocking books.

The fact is, there will be no more books to restock. The UT library is undergoing a radical change, becoming more of a social gathering place more akin to a coffeehouse than a dusty, whisper-filled hall of records. And to make that happen, the undergraduate collection of books had to go.

This summer, 90,000 volumes were transferred to other collections in the campus's massive library system - leaving some to wonder how a library can really be a library if it has no tomes.

So to ease some of the apprehension, administrators took the word "library" out of their vocabulary when referring to the Flawn Academic Center. When classes start Aug. 31, it will be filled with colorful overstuffed chairs for lounging, barstools for people watching, and booths for group work. In addition to almost 250 desktop computers, there will be 75 laptops available for checkout, wireless Internet access, computer labs, software suites, a multimedia studio, a computer help desk and repair shop, and a cafe.

It turns out that Elisa Camahort was also looking for someone to talk to late last night.

It's just no fun trying out a cool new social interaction tool when there's nobody to interact socially with.

I'm running Google Talk, Google's new IM client. Currently it doesn't seem to work with anything but other Gmail users, so I can't do a lot with it.

It might have been a bit more effective initially if it supported users of other services.

Hey, it supports voice as well, but who can I really call at this time of the night. I see that they've carefully noted that they are not a telephony service:

Google Talk is not a telephony service and cannot be used for emergency dialing.

It seems that Dell has changed their tune about Jeff Jarvis' complaint regarding his problems with their computers. Jeff makes this comment:

Email works.

I somehow doubt that an email from me would have had the same effect on a company that just doesn't seem interested in listening to their customers.

Bob Tarantino shoots some holes in Ben Carniol's comments that the underlying cause of violence is budget cuts to social services:

Couple of things to note: one, "budget cut-backs" have not been occurring for "twenty years". Significant cuts to spending (i.e., actual reductions in aggregate dollar amounts, as opposed to marginal reductions in the annual increase of spending) really only materialized starting in 1995 (with the Chretien Liberal downloading of around $40 billion in spending, the Mike Harris cuts and the Ralph Klein cuts). But more importantly, look at the StatsCan charts provided here. Notice something? Violent crime, measured per capita, skyrockted from the early 1960s until the early 1990s - precisely the time during which the Canadian welfare state was being erected and funded with so much money that people started talking about Canada's debt load approaching Third World levels. Which was well before "tax cuts" were enacted. The salient point is that Carniol's description of the world is precisely backwards: crime hasn't increased in the wake of lower levels of social spending - it has decreased. And crime didn't fall during the decades that social spending increased - it nearly quadrupled. Which isn't to say that social spending and crime levels are causally related - rather, if they are related it is in precisely the opposite way which Carniol wants us to believe.

Robert Moog, the creator of the Moog synthesizer, died Sunday.

The work of Robert Moog influenced not only my musical tastes but the progression of music in general, and was certainly a factor in my decision to become an engineer.

Edgar Bronfman Jr., Warner Music's chairman and CEO, and the man who can turn any successful company into a failure, had this to say today:

He said he didn't support government interference in "what should be normal fair-market mechanisms," but praised mandatory requirements designed to filter pirated material from peer-to-peer networks and levies such as Canada's proposal, currently on hold, to tax iPods.

"We like government levies when they benefit us," Bronfman said. "I would like none of the legislators in France, for instance, to say they should no longer pay us a levy for all the blank CDs that are being sold, (though) it doesn't make up for the revenue that we're losing...If the government mandated filtering technologies, we'd be delighted."

Tip of the hat to Boing Boing.

How much of your favorite caffeinated drink would it take to kill you? Take this quick test and find out.

Tip of the hat to BL Ochman.

Get yours here.

Link from digg.

Michael Geist comments in this article on the proposed lawful access plan in Canada, and how much power it gives to law enforcement over the electronic communications of every citizen - without judicial oversight:

Among the most troubling aspects of the lawful access proposals are a series of new powers that are not accompanied by any judicial oversight. Law enforcement authorities, including the police, CSIS agents, and even Competition Bureau authorities, will have the right to obtain ISP subscriber information simply upon request without a warrant. In fact, the proposals even envision ISPs responding to such requests in certain situations within 30 minutes based solely on a phone call.

1. Are all these new powers necessary?
2. Do the new powers contain sufficient judicial oversight?
3. Are the lawful access provisions constitutional?
4. Is lawful access strictly designed to address the threat of terrorism?
5. Will lawful access actually prove successful in battling Canadian terror?

Jessica Alba says she loves older men:

FANTASTIC FOUR star Jessica Alba has admitted she has a crush on Hollywood veterans Morgan Freeman and Sir Sean Connery.

The stunning actress, 24, says she thinks older men have great sex appeal.

Angry in the Great White North provides a detailed analysis of the litany of taxes charged on a liter of gasoline in Canada:

First, there is the federal excise tax. It is 10 cents on the liter. Note that it is not a function of the cost of gasoline. If I buy 50 liters at fifty cents or a buck-fifty, I still pay five dollars off the top. It's not so much of a tax as a cover charge to get into the gas station.

Now you'd think you're not getting much for paying the excise tax. The government disagrees. Apparently the government is doing you some kind of favour. Why else would they charge 7% GST on the excise tax? That's right, a tax on a tax. So now I'm paying $5.35 extra for my 50 liters of gas, regardless of the actual price of gas.

Then calculate the GST on the gas you buy. For if I buy 50 liters at $1.00/liter, I pay an extra $3.50.

Then calculate the provincial gas tax. This is not the general sales tax, but a special tax on gasoline. In Ontario, it is calculated like the federal excise tax, charged on each liter. That amount is 14.7 cents on the liter, or another $7.35 for my 50 liter purchase.

And yes, the 7% GST is charged on that too. So add 51 cents to the total.

If you're really lucky, you live in Vancouver or Montreal, where a mass transit tax is charged on each liter -- 1.5 cents in Montreal and 6 cents in Vancouverstan.

So my $50 dollar purchase now costs an additional $16.71, or an effective tax rate of 33%. That's if gas is $1 a liter. If you buy 50 liters of gas at $0.50 a liter, it's actually worse. The $25 for gas has $14.96 added to it (because the excise tax and the provincial sales tax are calculated per liter), or an effective tax rate of 60%!

Courtesy of digg, this is a hilarious list of 40 things that only happen in the movies. My favorite (and probably James Bond's least favorite) was this one:

32. Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their enemies with complicated devices incorporating fuses, pulleys, deadly gases, lasers and man-eating sharks.

Robert Scoble quotes Rory Blythe, Microsoft employee, talking about Windows Vista's virtual folders feature:

"I've decided that its been a little too long since I've nearly gotten myself fired, so here goes."

Reverend Jen Miller decides to become a stripper as a science experiment. She concludes:

Initially, I thought that taking my clothes off for the approval of others would be difficult. I imagined hecklers shouting, "Put it on!" and covering their eyes. But the customers I encountered were decent. They even applauded, which was unexpected. Of course, I got lucky: no one tried to inappropriately touch my vagina.

While the customers were an important variable, where I chose to strip was even more important. I know plenty of women who've worked as strippers, and they described atmospheres in which their coworkers were friendly and easygoing. But the atmosphere I encountered at Wiggles was oppressive. Being confined and ignored brought me to an existential crisis. Given what I experienced, I don't know why more strippers don't go postal. The slow, glowing dream deep inside my mind never came to fruition. I hadn't the patience, the time or the thick skin needed for such a demanding endeavor.

Digg points to a guy who was actually dumb enough to put a scan of his Social Security card on his website.

When I was a kid my dad used to build cupboards in every possible unused space to be able to store stuff. I seem to have inherited the storage gene, as I've spent my Saturday building efficient storage in my garage. I may actually be able to fit a second car in my two car garage.

This will come in handy now that we have suddenly become a five car family, which is quite strange considering that only two of us drive.

Jeff Jarvis is still trying to get some reaction from his letter to the Chief Marketing Officer at Dell.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday night I ordered a new Apple 12" Powerbook online from www.apple.com. I decided not to pay the extra $19 for express shipping, figuring I could wait.

It arrived first thing this morning, fully charged and ready to go, and less than 48 hours from order to my hot little hands. And they were constantly updating me on the status of the order via email.

The best part? To get close to the equivalent in a Dell would have cost me 25% more from what I could see.

Apple rocks!

From Wired:

Privacy advocates have expressed concern about RFID technology because the tags can tie products to individuals, potentially without their knowledge.

Seth Schoen, staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said it's unlikely this DRM plan will be any more effective than others preceding it.

"It only requires one person to break it," Schoen said.

Schoen said this is the "smart cow problem": Once one of the cows opens the gate, the others will follow.

David Isenberg caught a news story filed by Sue Braiden of the CBC, writing about her colleague Adrienne Arsenault:

Apparently Arsenault was covering the Gaza situation yesterday while a labor dispute between CBC and its reporters raged back home. She filed this report (server trouble? See Google Cache of story here) only to find her credit card cancelled and her cell phone shut off . . . in a war zone. Apparently nobody from the CBC even bothered to check on her safety.

He quotes Ms. Braiden:

This not only flies in the face of everything I've believed about the basic decency of Canadians, but makes me sick to my stomach when I think about being part of this particular media machine.

Rick and I keep trying to schedule lunch in Toronto, Canada, but he travels excessively and he's never there. So I read today that he is at LAX, doing his own laundry at the Embassy Suites next door to his hotel.

I used to work in an office around the corner from there. If I happen to be back, given Rick's recommendation, I know where I'll be staying.

As a result of labor troubles, the CBC is airing the best of past programs.

If the fifty essential hits of the forties is their best, do we really need the CBC?

Seth Godin describes so many companies I've worked with:

How can you tell if you're too obsessed with urgent?

Do senior people at your company refuse to involve themselves in decisions until the last minute?

Do meetings regularly get canceled because something else came up?

Is waiting until the last minute the easiest way to get a final decision from your peers?

Smart organizations ignore the urgent. Smart organizations understand that important issues are the ones to deal with. If you focus on the important stuff, the urgent will take care of itself.

Heather at Microsoft comments on companies (she mentions HP) that don't help employees that are affected by RIFs or layoffs:

I get it, the folks managing this kind of messaging are thinking mostly about customers and shareholders. I'm thinking about affected workers and the people that want to hire them. Note to PR departments: your employees are your customers (literally, of your products, but also of your employment brand which DOES affect your corporate brand) and your customers could become employees (consumer focused companies, enterprise software/hardware companies: this means you!). I guess I like to think a little more holistically about the audience for that kind of communication or for marketing messaging in general. Also, I am being selfish (in the most benevolent way possible) because I want to scoop so I can do my job better (and trust me, the fact that I get satisfaction out of helping people is selfish too..it makes me feel good)

Protecting the company at the expense of all these people seems a bit inconsiderate. I've been there. You certainly remember the companies that did that little extra bit to help you.

The local police force has been awarded retention bonuses as part of their new contract. Oh they're calling it experience pay, but it's basically they're getting paid extra not to quit.

Don't they get paid to work? If they want to quit then they should quit. Why are we paying extra to make sure they don't? And is there any guarantee? Do they have to promise to stay in order to get the pay?

Of course it now turns out that this wasn't budgeted for, so the force is now going to have to cut back somewhere to pay for it.

Boing Boing notes that porn magazines rot more slowly than other magazines:

An investigation into the rate of degredation of wood-pulp products in an Australian landfill has determined that porn magazines -- with their coated, glossy pages -- outlast other types of printed matter and will be the last printed items in the landfills to rot away. Fark concludes that this means that "porn will be this civilization's gift to the next civilization."

The Sunday New York Times Fashion & Style section contained an article on the resurgence of proper etiquette:

The upsurge, they say, is being driven not just by parents who want their children to eat without repulsing dinner guests. More adults are also signing up for etiquette instruction. It is even a subject of higher education; colleges are increasingly offering etiquette seminars.

Motivations vary. Some clients believe that sharpening their social skills - how they hold a fork, enter a room, make conversation - will make them feel more confident. Others hope that a bit of social grace will give them an edge in the competition for jobs and dates, help them stand out among the barbarians.

A couple of years ago, I was at a customer site touring their facilites with a couple of my company's sales folks. After a couple of hours, one saleswoman pulled me aside and said that she had never met anybody as polite as me, and she just had to mention it.

Obviously people notice what might be considered such a small detail.

Jeff Jarvis has posted a real barnburner of a letter to Dell, telling them that average people are starting to think twice about doing business with the company. Does anybody think they'll listen?

Seth Godin remarks on how clueless some companies are:

Then, this morning, I head to the bank. Poor guy is arguing with the "customer service manager". The problem? He had $4 in his checking account as he was waiting to close it. The bank charged him a monthly $5 service fee. The fee bounced. Then they charged him $30 for bouncing the fee on an inactive account.

The manager was trying to explain the policy, but the bottom line is that all the real estate, all the ads, all the marble, all the computers... all wasted... because they were enraging the guy. Over $4.

How does posting pictures of the furniture you made from FedEx boxes on your blog violate the Digital Millenium Copyright Act? It doesn't:

Lawyers at the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, who are representing Avila, argued the company's claims don't relate to copyright and therefore the DMCA doesn't apply. Rather, the claims refer to trademark infringement and conversion. After talking with his lawyers, Avila put the site back up.

"DMCA only applies to copyrighted works, and they were basically making trademark-related claims, so it was completely outrageous," said Lauren Gelman, associate director of the Stanford center. "This is just an example of how lawyers take advantage of copyright laws to use protecting provisions like those in the DMCA to take down stuff they just don't like."

From Business 2.0:

A school district in Virginia didn't know what it was getting into when it decided to sell off 1,000 old Apple iBooks:

A rush to purchase $50 used laptops turned into a violent stampede Tuesday, with people getting thrown to the pavement, beaten with a folding chair and nearly driven over. One woman went so far as to wet herself rather than surrender her place in line.

I knew Elisa Camahort before she was famous. But I just know she'll be the same wholesome person she always was. At least she's still returning my mail. For now, anyway.

Gas in Canada is now over $1 per liter ($4 per gallon).

I paid 105.9 cents per liter, or roughly $4.24 per gallon. Or course about 40% of that goes to various levels of governments as taxes, including a 7% GST on the full price including taxes. Yes, only in Canada would people be forced to pay tax on a tax.

Would you sue a public library because they had in circulation an old copy of Forbes that had an unflattering story about your company? What if it just had some old information that was no longer accurate? Probably not.

Yet at least one company is suing the Internet Archive for exactly the same thing. The Internet Archive has an old copy of their website - publicly available information. Is it reasonably to try to control access to what the company once made public, just because it now happens to be possible?

Could a company sue the SEC for publishing old financial information? What's the difference?

Apparently you can fool almost all of the people, all of the time:

After dominating Canadians' political concerns in the spring, the sponsorship scandal has virtually receded from the public agenda, with traditional social-issue concerns once again top of mind, according to a new poll conducted by The Strategic Counsel for The Globe and Mail and CTV.

"What you are seeing is a normalization of the public-opinion agenda," said Allan Gregg, chairman of The Strategic Counsel. "And to some extent that was predictable. Event-driven issues can't sustain the public-opinion agenda for any length of time. And that's exactly what the Liberals were counting on, and that's exactly what's transpired."

Only 2 per cent of Canadians picked the sponsorship scandal as the most important issue facing the country -- a steep decline since May, when 23 per cent rated the scandal as most important. Now, health care tops the list, with 16 per cent viewing it as most important, with other social issues also seen as a major concern.

From Business 2.0:

What if Google wanted to give Wi-Fi access to everyone in America?

Russell McOrmond at Digital Copyright Canada quotes a study that suggests that "almost half of university students fail to pay for software". How exactly does one "fail to pay" for software? If you walked out of Best Buy and failed to pay then you might earn a quick trip to court.

Russell notes this and suggests that the study may be flawed, lumping in free downloads as software that was not paid for.