Unpredictable. Unfocused. Just like life.

Seth Godin comments on his belief in the success of the iPhone:

My take is quite different. I think the iPhone is going to sell 2 million units in 2007 and more in 2008. There, I said it.

I'll basically agree though with a June shipment I'm not sure that they will make 2 million in the first six months. But I agree that they will grow, and I expect that they have the potential to capture between 1-5% of the market in five years. Keep in mind - about one billion (yes billion) mobile phones are sold every year. And I don't expect Apple to have only one iPhone. I expect an entire family to handle every need. And handle them very well. Because Apple knows how to make customers happy.

Of course it's easy to slam the iPhone, as Steve Ballmer did:

Steve Ballmer says, "There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance."

You could have probably said the same thing five years ago about a $500 music player called the iPod. Yet Apple sells about 40 million of them annually, and they pretty much are the market.

The New York Times talks about a new movie download box about to be released called Vudu:

Vudu, if all goes as planned, hopes to turn America’s televisions into limitless multiplexes, providing instant gratification for movie buffs. It has built a small Internet-ready movie box that connects to the television and allows couch potatoes to rent or buy any of the 5,000 films now in Vudu’s growing collection. The box’s biggest asset is raw speed: the company says the films will begin playing immediately after a customer makes a selection.

If Vudu succeeds, it may mean goodbye to laborious computer downloads, sticky-floored movie theaters and cable companies’ much narrower video-on-demand offerings. It may even mean a fond farewell to the DVD itself — the profit engine of the film industry for the last decade. “Other forms of movie distribution are going to look silly and uncompetitive by comparison,” Mr. Miranz asserts.

Yet I can safely say that Vudu will be useless to me.It could be because Blockbuster is only a couple of blocks away and their movies are just as cheap. Of course there are never any in stock either. But that isn't it.

The problem is with the last mile - my internet service provider. The fact that my internet provider, Rogers, throttles peer to peer traffic, which is exactly what Vudu uses.Oops, I meant to say that they employ bandwidth management. Either way, Vudu won't work for Rogers customers. And if providers like AT&T get their way where network neutrality is concerned and start prioritizing traffic, it won't work for them either.

There are other problems too:

Despite such high praise, Vudu faces hurdles. It is wading into a field dominated by heavyweights whose own aggressive efforts to kindle movie downloading over the Internet have largely failed. There is also little proof that consumers care much about the wide selection or instant availability of movies downloaded from the Web, especially if a movie isn’t cheaper than buying a DVD.

Vudu also needs to persuade regular folks to drag another whirring, electricity-guzzling gizmo into their already-crowded living rooms. “Three hundred dollars for the privilege of paying another 6 or 10 for a movie is a high hurdle,” said Nicholas Donatiello Jr., chief executive of the market research firm Odyssey. “Americans do not want more boxes under their TV if they can avoid it.”

Besides that, have you looked at movies today? They are barely worth the trip to the Blockbuster, let alone the cost of a trip to the theater, and they are out on DVD and pay-per-view pretty soon anyway. Anything I really enjoy I purchase on DVD. And TiVo records anything worthwhile on TV.

If Vudu is going to be successful they are going to have to overcome the attitude of the carriers that giving you any bandwidth at all is doing you a favor, and find some decent movies.

To paraphrase the New York Times:

...a place that attracts people by encouraging them to create the content — thereby drawing even more people in to create even more stuff. The poster child of this Sawyeresque business model is the photo-sharing site called Flickr.

The article compares this to Tom Sawyer's ability to convince his friends to whitewash a fence so he doesn't have to.

Of course the definition of Web 2.0 success would be to find a way to profit from that content without paying the people who created it.Though even unpaid, they do derive benefits from the ability to share that content that they wouldn't have had previously.

Well maybe not the crime, but if the crime is minor enough you can at least choose to pay to upgrade your accomodations while you do the time:

For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few.

Many of the self-pay jails operate like secret velvet-roped nightclubs of the corrections world. You have to be in the know to even apply for entry, and even if the court approves your sentence there, jail administrators can operate like bouncers, rejecting anyone they wish.

“I am aware that this is considered to be a five-star Hilton,” said Nicole Brockett, 22, who was recently booked into one of the jails, here in Orange County about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles, and paid $82 a day to complete a 21-day sentence for a drunken driving conviction.

Jails as a profit center. What a novel idea. In some cases you can even bring a laptop so you can get some work done while you're there. And if you turn off your email then committing a minor crime could actually lead to an increase in your productivity.

In today's National Post, columnist George Jonas says what I'm sure many of us are thinking:

But for nuts we don't need to go all the way to Iran. The Green Gestapo of the environment seems ready to launch nuts right here at home. Eco-fascists share the self-righteous arrogance of Islamo-fascists, safety-Nazis and other control freaks. They're like the multicultural censors excising "Merry Christmas!" or the feminist ones neutering the word "fisherman" and substituting "fisher" as the mot juste. They're the anti-gun crusaders obliging us to register Grandpa's squirrel-plonker; they're the Victorian don't-step-on-the-grass crowd; they're our version of the Persian dress police. They're prepared to enforce a government- regulated climate in Canada, indoors and outdoors, literally and figuratively, itching to counter global warming with an economic ice age.

What will it be like? Dark and grim. Hot showers on alternate days. Cars carrying fewer than three passengers impounded. Failure to use the politically correct amount of toilet paper bringing down the full wrath of the eco-fascist state.

Read the whole article.

Striking union workers have the "right" to set up information pickets and slow all traffic down. What about the rights of the drivers to get where they are going?

Anti-smoking crusaders self-righteously denouce the rights of smokers to smoke, making more and more places into no smoking areas. I don't smoke, but the last time I looked smoking was legal. What about the rights of smokers?

Increasingly people use the arbitrary "good of society" as a justification to remove more and more rights from others. If we don't start to fight to preserve our rights pretty soon we won't have any at all.

Guys, when I specifically type www.nationalpost.ca into the browser address bar, I probably want to go to the National Post newspaper web site. But you take me to canada.com, which might be great for your advertising revenue, but very ignorant of your customers. Then I have to select the National Post from a dropdown menu to get to where I wanted to be in the first place.

Add that to the fact that your search is useless and you often make it very difficult to find a particular article, especially commentary on the front page, and your frustrate your customers even further.

I'm sitting here reading the print copy of the paper. I shouldn't have to work that hard to find the electronic version.

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore doesn't like Canada's new green plan:

Former U.S. vice-president Al Gore, now one of the world's most famous climate-change activists, has called the federal government's new green plan "a fraud."

Gore criticized the plan while in Toronto on Saturday to attend the Green Living Show and screen his documentary on the environment, An Inconvenient Truth.

David Suzuki isn't pleased either:

"It's a disappointment, John," Suzuki said as he beat a path to the minister.

"You know what you promised was a long way from what you delivered."

Baird countered that "this is more action than any government in Canadian history has ever taken."

But Suzuki was not impressed, saying that it's not enough.

For these folks, nothing less than complete capitulation to their demands is enough.Of course neither Mr. Gore nor Mr. Suzuki plan to limit their emissions at all - they are far too important for that. They just buy carbon offsets to make up for it. In Mr. Gore's case, he actually buys they from himself.

But let a government do any less than these gentlemen demand and their plan is labelled a fraud, regardless of the fact that it actually may reduce carbon dioxide emissions. Isn't some reduction better than none at all?Given that the previous government did nothing at all given years of chances, at least this provides some progress without destroying the economy.

Apparently though, Canada is letting the world down:

Gore said the rest of the world looks to Canada for moral leadership, and that's why news of the plan was so "shocking."

Hmmm. The Prime Minister of Canada, Jean Chretien, never planned to meet Kyoto deadlines for reducing emissions, and picked the 6% reduction number just to look better that the United States, even though he knew it likely couldn't be met.

That doesn't sound like moral leadership to me.

When I was a kid it was teachers that got respect and kids who got punished. Appparently that isn't the case today:

MIRAMICHI, N.B. - A New Brunswick teacher has been suspended after sending a student to the principal's office for refusing to stand during the Canadian anthem.

Eric Cameron, a Grade 9 teacher at Miramichi Valley High School, was disciplined following the incident last Thursday.

The superintendent of District 16 school board has declined comment, citing privacy issues.

Tip of the hat to small dead animals.

Farhan Mujahid Chak, the federal Liberals candidate in Edmonton, doesn't seem too fond of Israel:

"As time goes on, you develop your views," explains Mr. Chak about his opinions. For instance, while he referred in a 2000 online article to then Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon as a "butcher," he admits he wouldn't use that term any more -- because it "makes people guarded."

"Rather than blaming, I believe at this point, blaming drives people away. We have to bring the sides together."

Note that he doesn't say that Sharon is no longer a "butcher". He just says that he wouldn't use that term any more.Perhaps because when you share views that appear to be racist people might not vote for you.

He doesn't feel competent to make the same judgements about suicide bombers though:

Does he still consider terrorist attacks against Israel as "erratic act[s] of frustration," as he once wrote? "Taking life is never acceptable," he says. "At the same time, you look at it and say, 'Am I in a position to morally judge them [the suicide bombers]? Am I in a position to even talk about them?' In some ways, yes, we are. In some ways, no, we're not."

Oddly, Mr. Chak thinks the conservatives racist, though he gives no examples:

Mr. Chak admits he overstated things. "The Conservative government's aim is not, intentionally, to destabilize Poland," he says. Asked about his charge the Tories' have a philosophy of "racial superiority," he says, "Believe it or not, the Conservatives I've met in Edmonton are very racist."

But he is really just trying to bring people together:

Mr. Chak says he realizes he must be more careful with his words. There is a difference, he says, between "how you write something and how other people might take it." Nevertheless, he insists, "for me, most importantly, I want to bring people together. People might think I'm naive for that."

Which he apparently plans to do by insulting everyone with his comments.

Please note: Credit for this goes to Steve Janke of Angry in the Great White North, who is quoted in the story, and without whom you probably wouldn't know about stuff like this.

The philosophical question "If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it, does it make a sound?" may not be so philosophical after all. Quantum physicists seem to have proven that reality doesn't exist if you aren't observing it:

Markus Aspelmeyer, Anton Zeilinger and colleagues from the University of Vienna, however, have now shown that realism is more of a problem than locality in the quantum world. They devised an experiment that violates a different inequality proposed by physicist Anthony Leggett in 2003 that relies only on realism, and relaxes the reliance on locality. To do this, rather than taking measurements along just one plane of polarization, the Austrian team took measurements in additional, perpendicular planes to check for elliptical polarization.

They found that, just as in the realizations of Bell's thought experiment, Leggett's inequality is violated – thus stressing the quantum-mechanical assertion that reality does not exist when we're not observing it. "Our study shows that 'just' giving up the concept of locality would not be enough to obtain a more complete description of quantum mechanics," Aspelmeyer told Physics Web. "You would also have to give up certain intuitive features of realism."

So if a tree falls in the forestand nobody is there to hear it, then perhaps the tree doesn't actually exist.

Nicholas Carr comments on the invention of virtual drugs:

Here's a snippet: "Up to now, avatars have led fairly narrow lives. Their main pursuits have been limited to fighting ogres and dragons and having simulated sex using artificial genitalia. Virtual reality has been like a pornographic version of Middle Earth. Now, avatars have a third and more modern alternative: abusing substances. Fighting, screwing, and getting wasted: Virtual life is becoming more like real life every day."

In the movie The Matrix it is explained to Neo that the machines first created a simulation of a perfect world but the humans couldn't deal with it. So the machines created a second simulation of an imperfect world which humans were much better able to deal with. If you are creating a virtual world from scratch, why not eliminate all of the problems with the real world? Why emulate them?

I remember reading Snow Crash for the first time almost a decade ago.And now it seems to have almost come true.

Tim Ferriss, author of The 4-Hour Workweek, points to a study that suggests that found that being stoned on marijuana still makes you more productive than if you are constantly checking your email:

In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third was stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hands, did worse than the stoners by an average of 6 points.

In a digital world of infinite distraction, it is “single-tasking” — shutting out interruption instead of facilitating it — that will save us. What’s the alternative? Checking e-mail once every five minutes, then every minute, then every second? It’s not a scalable coping mechanism.

The world doesn’t hiccup, let alone end, if you check e-mail twice a day instead of twice an hour. If it does, it usually means that your work culture rewards overwork to counter its own ineffectiveness. This is predicated on burnout and not a game worth winning. The next time you get the Crackberry urge, consider the option of being productive instead of being busy. Or, if that’s too abstract, consider grabbing a joint instead — you’ll probably get more done.

Years ago I worked with a CEO who said that any email that wasn't sent directly to him was automatically deleted. He didn't read "cover your ass" emails that copied everyone in the place. That alone more than doubled his productivity.

Yesterday, on a sunny Sunday afternoon, the Rogers Wireless Customer Retention department called me. They told me that I was a valued customer, and they wanted to know how satisfied I was with my service. Frankly I wasn't too happy being bothered on a Sunday.

Now the other day I commented on the fact that the Rogers Wireless self-service website doesn't work, so the first thing I asked was what services my son had on his phone. And to my surprise, having just added them myself, that there were no services on the phone. Once again, for the fifth time, I had been unable to get the account corrected.

So my answer was that I was a very, very, very, very dissatisfied customer which they didn't have a checkbox for, so I just said dissatisfied.

I should also point out that the likely reason that the customer retention department called is that we use our cell phones a lot, and that we are not on any contract. And with local number portability it is suddenly very likely that we might change providers. That little tidbit will come up later.

So this woman fixed my son's account, adding a service pack that was not available on the website, and that included unlimited text messaging.Of course she then pointed out that there was a limit of 2500 sent messages. When I pointed out that 2500 is not the same as unlimited, she said that 2500 was more than most people said. I again pointed out that this was still not unlimited.

Once we got past that she started to tell me that she would like to do whatever it took to make me a satisfied customer. She mentioned incoming calls free. She mentioned new phones. She said that she would evaluate each phone and suggest the best plan for each.

When I said that I hoped this didn't require me signing up for a fixed term she told that of course that would be required.

Ah, so now it becomes clear. Rogers isn't really interesting in a satisfied customer. Satisfying me wouldn't require a contract. They are interesting in locking me in as a customer again, at which point they will again cease to be concerned about the service that I receive.

So let's call a spade a spade. Rogers doesn't really care if their customers are satisfied. They just want to offer enough stuff to lock them into a contract.

Of course I told the woman that I was going to need this in writing, and if I don't see the promised benefits then I expect to be able to revert to my old plan. We'll see what happens, but I don't think the benefits will be worth anywhere near enough for me to sign up.

I like having the ability to switch anytime I want to. And frankly, I'm not even looking at the other Canadian cell operators. I'm looking at Cingular, Verizon, and Sprint, and their North American coverage.

I'm at a city council meeting in Waterloo, Canada, and they are discussing the issue of building a public square. The discussion started with possibly the most bring, monotonic Powerpoint presentation I've ever seen. I felt myself nodding off as the presenter progressed blandly through an endless series of nearly identical slides depicting the various design possibilities of the public square.

I'm numbed by the presentation as I assume the rest of the audience is as well. But I haven't been informed at all. Lots of slides, lots of pictures, but I can't make sense of what is what. The final slide that is still showing doesn't make it clear what I am looking at.Also, there is no justification - just pictures.

I suggest that if you can't use Powerpoint to effectively convey information then you shouldn't use it at all. Otherwise it is just a sleep aid. And I feel tired.

One man pulled the trigger, killer many people at Virginia Tech. One man is to blame for the killings.

So why are people rushing to blame everything and everyone else? This seems to be yet another example of the complete lack of personal responsibility. People are no longer held responsible for their choices.

In Canada the predictable answer is more gun control, even though that has done nothing to stop gun violence.

Daimnation provides a nice roundup of everything that seems to be at fault.

A friend of mine, Jan Purvis, is running a drop-in program exploring Digital Media. If you are in or around Waterloo, Canada, the program runs from 3:30-5:30 PM on Fridays (starting tomorrow) at the Waterloo Community Art Centre (the Button Factory for locals).

Jan brings experience as a scriptwriter, video editor, producer and director. She will be giving people a chance to explorer digital media and will be bringing in guest speakers and experts in the field each week.

Definitely worth a look, and convenient to drop by on the way home from work or school before heading out for dinner.

The provincial government of Ontario, Canada, has a great energy saving idea. They will ban the sale of standard household light bulbs, forcing consumers to but the new energy saving models.

Of course they aren't the first government to do so. Australia, California, New Jersey, Europe, Venezuela, and others have as well. But they clearly haven't thought this through.

While I have replaced most of incandescent light bulbs with the energy saving versions, I have noticed that they do not last as long as claimed. I have had a bulb burn out in as little as one year, instead of the 10 year life they claim.

Also, the light is brighter, but not as warn and pleasant. I can tolerate it, but many can't. I still use a halogen light when I work because I find it easier to use for lnog periods.

And what of my outdoor lights? In Canada the weather dips below zero degrees Fahrenheit. Incandescent bulbs work just fine but fluorescent bulbs don't always come on at such low temperatures. It is rare to find an energy efficient bulb for outdoor use at such low temperatures.

These ideas look great on paper and sound wonderful on the nightly news. But they rarely take into account the real world situations people must deal with.

The music industry depends on radio stations to get their product - music - out to potential customers. The fledgling business of internet radio gets that music out to people who may not actually listen to the radio. Internet radio is nowhere near as profitable as broadcast radio.

Yet internet radio stations are facing dramatic increases in copyright costs to the same level as broadcast stations, in some cases more that the revenue they generate.

I can never understand the logic of getting your pound of flash while at the same time killing off a marketing channel and the revenue that current comes from it. Isn't it better to have some listeners and some money, than no listeners and no money? These folks aren't going to run out to buy radios.

Some online broadcasters have launched SaveNetRadio to try to fight the decision,but it seems that at this point only Congress can intervene.

Microsoft used to make simple development tools that just worked. But lately their software is bloated and unpredictable.

I've been using Visual Studio 2005. I zipped up a completed solution and sent it off to somebody also using the same version of Visual Studio 2005. A build produced completely different results. Yet he was using only the zip file I sent him.

How exactly can that happen?

From the Canadian Taxpayers Foundation:

Turns out Canadians spend more on taxes than they do on food, clothing and shelter.

Andrew at Bound By Gravity relates a story of a friend who injured herself but will have to wait 12-18 months to get her free health care in Canada:

So how long is my friend expected to live with the chronic pain of an ACL injury, the inconvenience of a brace, and no chance of playing the sport she loves dearly?

12-18 months.

The Government of Canada will force her to wait between twelve and eighteen months to receive the treatment she needs in order to resume the life that she wants to live. The only saving grace for my friend is that her injury was so severe that it did not require an MRI to diagnose. (Had that been the case she would have been forced to suffer through an additional 6 months of pain).

Health care in Canada is free.Though in order to keep costs down the government limits the procedures that are covered and limits the number of medical school admissions and foreign-trained doctors, as noted in today's National Post:

Rather than being seen as income- generators, as they are in U.S. hospitals and clinics -- the more patients doctors can attract, the more money they bring in -- Canada's health bureaucrats began treating doctors as cost centres. Fewer doctors meant fewer tests would be ordered, fewer beds in hospitals filled, fewer surgeries performed and fewer billings to medicare. Control the number of physicians and governments believed they could control their health expenditures.

There was even a conscious decision made in the early 1990s by federal and provincial health ministers to cap enrolments in medical schools in an effort to reduce the amounts their governments were spending on health. Between 1991 and 2000, the number of medical-school admissions was reduced by nearly 14% and foreign-trained doctors found it increasingly difficult to earn Canadian licences.

So Canadians really pay for their health care through punishing taxes, long waits, and pain - really not all that different from much-loathed HMOs. In fact it is probably more correct to say that in Canada, the health care that the government allows you to have is free.

Of course if you wanted to pay for your own health care that would make you a criminal.

...you can't even play the DVD.

From Smalltalk Tidbits, Industry Rants comes this story about Sony DVDs that don't play on Sony DVD players:

In their zeal to make their DVD movies copyproof (yeah right) they have in fact made their latest releases unplayable on some DVD players, including my Sony DVP-CX995V DVD player. I recently rented “Stranger than Fiction” (2 copies) and “The Holiday” ( please no comments on my choice of movies) both by Sony Pictures. Both load up to the splash title screen and then load no further, then after about 60 secs the player turns itself off!

Sony's answer?

We know about this problem. Its our new copy protection that’s making these discs unplayable in some players including our own, we do not intend to change the copy protection. The only correction to this problem is a firmware update to your player. The electronics division know about this and should have given you this information.

Yeah that's it. The customers who actually paid for the DVD can't play it and that's their problem.And Sony doesn't intend to change the copy protection.

Sony used to be a great consumer electronics company, but apparently is now run by idiots. I used to buy Sony products, but I don't any more. And I do not intend to change that.

Just when I was seeing a slight improvement in service from Rogers, my wireless company, it seems that their online management tool for my wireless services doesn't work at all. I've tried several times to make changes to my services and have failed every time.

A while ago I tried to add a $10 text messaging plan (2500 sent messages) to my son's phone. Rogers provides no confirmation of changes. It wasn't until I received a bill for $132 for text messaging that I realized that the change hadn't happened. A customer service rep reversed the charge and said that he put my son on the $10 text messaging plan.

Little did I know that Rogershas two $10 text messaging plans. One plan offers 2500 sent text messages. The other offers 1000 sent text messages and 2500 received messages - not that impressive because received messages are free. So I was now paying $10 a month for 1000 messages, when Rogers could clearly see from my account that my son sends almost 2000 messages a month.

So tonight I changed it, as well as added back the voice mail/call display plan that was lost when my son switched to GSM and was told he wouldn't lose any of his services. Again I received no confirmation, but this time I copied the order for future reference.

One would think that a company in the internet/communication business might have a better grasp of the internet and communications. Yet so far my every interaction with their website has involved at least one very bad billing surprise and one very frustrated call to the phone operators. And virtually every instance has given me a worse impression of the company.

You may be protecting yourself against Parkinson's disease.

Every day I read different scientific studies. More often that not the result of one study contradicts the previous days' study, making me think that we reall don't have a clue about how anything actually works in life.

Coffee is good.Coffee is bad. Red wine is good. Red wine is bad. Everything good is bad for you. Or vice versa.

Perhaps Einstein was right when he said this:

We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.

If you have trouble getting lid off of jars you might want this new gadget, the LidsOff, from Black & Decker.

I have a simpler solution myself. A couple of years ago at the 4H Fair somebody was handing out little disc-shaped pieces of thick rubber emblazoned with the words "Smokey says only you can prevent forest fires." Wrap that thing around a jar lid and off it comes. Cost: free.

I have lots of gadgets, especially for the kitchen, but I try to limit my purchases to what I will actually use. I do own a Ginsu, but in my defense I bought it when I was much younger and dumber. I may be no smarter now, but I am older. Ok, I do own six different cheese graters. But I need them all, really.

Today's Times has a great article about gadgets. Though I have no idea why anybody would want a brownie pan that makes every brownie with edges. I like the ones from the middle.

In a full page ad on page 17 of today's New York Times, Chase Bank offers Free Security Alerts to notify you when something unusual is happening with your accounts.

No offense intended to Chase, but I get several emails a week informing me that my account has irregular activity. And sometimes these emails even come from banks where I have accounts. This is known as phishing.

The problem for Chase, where I am a customer by the way, is how to convince me that their email is the legitimate one.

A year ago I received an email from American Express that my card showed unusual activity. The email looked legitimate enough, but when I called the number in the email it occurred to me that it could be a very organized crime. I asked the female operator how I could know I was speaking to American Express. She told me to hand up and dial the number on the back of my card. I did, and was connected to the same person, so I was pretty sure. And then she asked me the requisite twenty questions to prove I was me.

The problem here is one of identity. How can I securely identify an email as actually having come from the purported sender? How can they prove that I am me?

At the very minimum it would be nice if email software validated that all of the links in the message came from the actual domain of the apparent sender.

Perhaps the time has come for everybody to have their own Verisign key. At the very minimum we need some way to prove who we are. And it isn't just email. Asking me for the last four digits of my social security number, as ATT used to do, or for my mother's maiden name, isn't all that secure either.

There are some funny folks at Google. They've come up with ideas like Google's base on the moon. And they infuse some fun into Google's products.

I saw this one the other day. If you go to Google Maps and get directions from Boston to London you get this route:

• Turn right at Long Wharf (0.1 mi)
• Swim across the Atlantic Ocean (3,462 mi)
• Slight right at E05 (0.5 mi)

I thought about titling this post "We don't need to stinking badges." as an answer to Tim O'Reilly's post about a Blogging Code of Conduct, complete with badges. You won't see any of those badges on my site, thus the "Enter at your own risk" title.

Seriously, if you don't like what you read here, stop reading. Change the channel. Turn it off. Whatever.

Jeneane Sessum, whose blog I continue to enjoy even as she was tarred by a broad brush on the whole mess that led up to Tim's post, has captured some excellent points, with this favorite from Ronni Bennett:

And if that badge idea takes hold, then are those who, like me, stand as First Amendment absolutists against imposed standards of speech to have their blogs labeled – as Tim O’Reilly suggests - “dangerous territory”? One person’s insult is another’s satire. What constitutes foul language is highly individual, as is what is nasty.

Censorship is a trecherous undertaking. Once imposed, it doesn’t take much to go from banning individual words to opinion, books and soon, ideas. And then it has arrived at groupthink.

It was amazing how quickly a mob of vigilante bloggers formed after the events that occurred, based merely on a few written words. I understand that they all wanted to do the right thing, but sometimes the right think is to be patient and think things through.

I wonder how quickly and loudly that vigilante mob would act if someone broke the blogging code of conduct?

My code of conduct is pretty simple. I try to exercise common sense - to the extent that I have it anyway. But everything is offensive to someone, and we only say things the offend nobody then we would never say anything.

We would never allow discrimination on the basis of race. So why is it alright to discriminate on the basis of bits?

After all, that is what net neutrality is - all bits are created equal.

Not everybody agrees with this though. Digital Copyright Canada points to a post by MarkGoldberg suggesting that net neutrality is an extremist view:

There are extremist views that keep percolating from some elements in the discussion that threaten the nationalization of telecommunications infrastructure unless carriers embrace net neutrality. Whoa!

He says that innovation has happened without net neutrality regulations:

The rapid pace of internet innovation we have witnessed to date has taken place without specialized net neutrality legislation. It seems to me that network neutrality is overly broad regulation that will serve stifle innovation.

Yes innovation happened at a rapid pace precisely because the net was neutral. Telecoms are fond of saying that they are afraid of growth being stifled by new net neutrality regulations but they certainly wouldn't have any problem with new regulations in their favor. What exactly would they lose if the net stayed neutral? Oh yeah, lots and lots of new revenue for the same service that they already provide.

Mr. Goldberg says net neutrality isn't realistic:

Later in the week, I'll look at some examples of why I think the objectives of net neutrality just aren't realistic for customers who want advanced services.

Just out of curiousity, what are these advanced services that customers want? More digital television channels? There are already hundreds and there's never anything on. Do users want companies like Google to pay more for bandwidth? Does that mean the my bandwidth cost will decrease? Didn't think so.

When has a telecom company ever been the first to introduce any kind of advanced service? Any answer will do. Voice mail and call display are not exactly advanced services by the way.

The anti-net neutrality fight by telecoms is all about generating more revenue without providing any additional services. There won't be one drop more bandwidth than there is now - it will just cost more. And there won't be innovation like Google or Joost because those startup companies won't be able to pay for the bandwidth.

Bit discrimination kills innovation. Funny thing though. All that innovation drove internet adoption. When the innovation stops, the customers don't come and the revenue stops too.

This image from Thomas Purves compares the cost of mobile data access in Canada to that of other countries, including third-world countries - and shows it very much lacking:

The motto of the CRTC, Canada’s telcom regulator is “Communications in the Public Interest”. Right.

If you live in Canada, write to your MP. The CRTC, as an institution, needs to be taken out and shot.*

Now the CRTC has always been useless when it comes to protecting the interests of citizens, but I'm pretty sure they don't regulate wireless data rates.But it is embarrassing to hear Canada claim to be at the forefront of mobile technology when they are actually at the forefront of mobile billing.

One has to wonder though just how stupid these telecom companies are. Sure they're raking in the cash from a few subscribers but that will plateau if they don't start generating some growth. And at those rates unless your employer is paying the bill you probably aren't rushing to sign up for a data plan.

So Canada will just languish at the back of the pack in terms of wireless adoption. But the carriers will still be getting paid so they won't care. But if companies can't convince users to sign up for data plans then we also won't see any mobile innovation.

This is a great list of things computers can only do in movies.

And while I'm on the subject, I'm always amazed when the folks on CSI can take a security camera image of a face and enhance the reflection of a license plate in someone's eye, and then make the license plate perfectly readable. That just doesn't happen folks.

Via digg

It's almost biblical in proportion. Fire. Floods. Disease. Death. Only it isn't four horsemen that are bringing these plagues. It is three atoms - one carbon and two oxygen - CO2:

In a report released by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) , scientists for the first time linked changes being observed in nature on every continent and in most oceans to rising temperatures from greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide, emitted by power plants, factories, and cars.

If emissions are not reduced, the panel warned, 20 percent to 30 percent of plant and animal species could face increased risk of extinction, and rising temperatures could cause widespread human suffering from more frequent droughts, floods, and outbreaks of disease.

People apparently aren't getting the message, so the second report on climate change by the IPCC applies a few more scare tactics and screams a little louder. And we are told that this is the watered-down version. Meaning that the news is actually much, much worse.

It's ok though, because we can fix it. It will just cost a little bit really:

Without action to curb carbon emissions, man's livable habitat will shrink starkly, said Stephen Schneider, a Stanford scientist who was one of the authors. "Don't be poor in a hot country, don't live in hurricane alley, watch out about being on the coasts or in the Arctic, and it's a bad idea to be on high mountains with glaciers melting.

"We can fix this" by investing a small part of the world's economic growth rate, Schneider said. "It's trillions of dollars, but it's a very trivial thing."

Just trillions of dollars.Trivial really. No point in arguing with these conclusions. And maybe, just maybe, in a few decades we'll know if we have solved the problem. Or if there really ever was one. Of course these folks won't be around then.

Now if you'll excuse me I have to put on my coat on this fine spring morning in April and go outside to shovel the snow off of my driveway.

Hey, I'm just repeating what Paul Graham said:

A few days ago I suddenly realized Microsoft was dead. I was talking to a young startup founder about how Google was different from Yahoo. I said that Yahoo had been warped from the start by their fear of Microsoft. That was why they'd positioned themselves as a "media company" instead of a technology company. Then I looked at his face and realized he didn't understand. It was as if I'd told him how much girls liked Barry Manilow in the mid 80s. Barry who?

Microsoft? He didn't say anything, but I could tell he didn't quite believe anyone would be frightened of them.

Microsoft used to be a great company. They were successful by focusing on a couple of products, and by crushing anyone they considered to be a competititor, often using questionable methods. Remember Stac Electronics? How about Netscape?

But as more perceived competitors came along they started to create more and more tangential products, often with either unclear value, or no value at all. Where their products had once been best of breed, they now seem to be creating "me too" products. Windows Live anyone?As for their original successful products they have merely added more bloat, with little added value. In order to recover they will need to focus on what customers actually need and want.

I'm of the opinion that it is too late for Windows though. While many corporations may continue to buy Windows PCs as they always have, Apple is making significant inroads at least in terms of mindshare. Given the ability to run the same software on the Mac, the fewer security issues, and the improved ease of use, some companies will now switch. And the Mac has a cachet that Windows will never have.

Rob Hyndman says Windows is for grandmas. Or to use an old General Motors tagline:

Windows IS your father's Oldsmobile.

And really, when is the last time you thought about buying an Oldsmobile? Or any GM car for that matter.

Television advertising rates are set based on two "sweeps" months - November and Fe