For years – for decades – climate scientists have been telling us that global warming was going to have some seriously bad, seriously expensive effects on the environment. Slowly, the population at large has gone from considering this a “unproved theory” to a “concern”, but it’s never been a real “problem”, at least not in the sense that a ten cent increase in the cost of gas is a problem bordering on a crisis. (more…)
In his article If You Can’t Understand The Difference Between Money And Content, You Have No Business Commenting On Business Models, Mike Masnick takes a shot at some “logic” advanced by Canadian IP lawyer James Gannon, who wrote “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Copy”.
Masnick is justifiably unforgiving in his analysis: “It’s brilliant only if you don’t understand all of the following: money, economics, copyright, business and value. If you understand any of those things, you might recognize that the analogy makes no sense. Misunderstand all of them… well, then I can see how this argument might make sense.”
Then Gannon stopped by to claim that it was rude or discourteous for Masnick to link to his content.
Newsflash: It’s neither. It’s what HTML was designed for! Seriously, welcome to 1990. Personally I think it’s rude to advance obviously illogical arguments in defence of legacy content providers, but that’s just me.
This week I launched Venture Media Canada with the first episode of The Entrepreneurial Life!
This only took about a year longer than expected (there’s a reason why “perseverance” is usually listed as a top trait for entrepreneurs). Next on the list is “execution”. I’m reconnecting with the people who expressed an interest in being on the show, scheduling interviews, and having fun.
Please give the site a visit and tell your friends, associates, and enemies about it!
Microsoft must have finally gotten the upper hand in Windows security.
I just talked with a non-technical friend who got a call from a call centre purporting to be Microsoft. The agent explained, in broken English, that Microsoft had “detected a virus on her computer”. He then attempted to direct her to TeamViewer, a remote desktop access application.
It was at this point that she wisely terminated the call and got in touch with me. (more…)
It’s probably pretty obvious from this blog that my political philosophy most closely aligns with the Liberal Party. What’s less obvious is that it’s hardly a tight fit. Its more of an alignment of averages. Some probably perceive me as radical left (for example I believe in a guaranteed annual income for all Canadians), some as radical right (along with guaranteed income comes the cancellation of many social assistance programs). I believe in competition, but I don’t subscribe to the interpretation that competition requires traditional capitalism. (more…)
About a year ago, I came up with the idea of doing a series of video interviews with Canadian entrepreneurs. Hardly a unique idea, but my take on it was to focus on the experience and process of starting and running your own business instead of just talking about what the business does.
I subsequently put a fair bit of effort into getting everything set up: build a site, bootstrap a platform… all in my “spare” time. Then I stalled. That platform will never be ready because it suffers from the chicken and egg syndrome. There’s no site without content, and there’s no content without a site. Frustrated, I’m solving that problem by redefining it away. This post is the egg. (more…)
The theft of perfectly functional manufactured goods for scrap value has become a serious issue over the past decade. The number of stories of small to medium scale theft, primarily of copper, has gone from rarity to ubiquitous. The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation has declared copper theft a critical threat to infrastructure. The size of the problem has grown because the recovered value of many easily recycled raw materials is exceeds the risk of getting caught.
This can be generalized. If raw materials aren’t cheap relative to wages, civilization collapses by dismantling itself. This is a grave matter, and I find the implications profound. (more…)
I Twittered this but it deserves more permanence. I’ve been using it for years and unfortunately it still summarizes my frustration with browser based Javascript “WYSIWYG” text editors:
WYSIKSWYGBNQ = What You See Is Kinda Sorta What You Get But Not Quite.
I’ve been engaged with social media since forever. Always found it fascinating, even exciting. I really like Twitter. Now Quora seems interesting, but in a semi-social-media sort of way. There’s a bit of a shift happening. A lot of “early adopters” have been doing the Quora thing for a while and now it’s on the upswing of that familiar knee function of exponential growth.
Meanwhile, Twitter seems a little less vibrant. Is it because all the cool kids are playing with Quora? Partially. After all anyone with a real job only has so much time to dicker with this stuff, unless you’re a rare beast: a Professional Social Media Guru that’s a real job. So maybe Twitter is a little less shimmering with excitement because really interesting people are spending less time on it.
But that isn’t all. That only explains part of it. (more…)
One of the great things about maintaining your own domain is the ability to put up a good fight when it comes to spam. It’s a real battle. This domain has been registered since the late 90’s, when an open Internet meant that just about anybody could harvest contact information from domain registration databases. (more…)
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