by Alan Langford | 2006-11-03 | Observations on Everything
Last night I attended a presentation by Doug Hyatt, Business Economics Professor at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business. Although billed as focusing on the music industry, his comments were actually more broad ranging, even abstract.
I guess that is a telling indication of how early we are in the process of adapting to the digital era. When very smart people who make their careers from studying these problems speak in abstract terms, you know we have a long way to go. (more…)
by Alan Langford | 2006-10-07 | Observations on Everything
Okay so it’s been a long time since I’ve made a post here. There’s lots of reasons for that, but one of them has been that I just couldn’t tolerate Blogger anymore.
After looking at a variety of solutions, I finally stumbled upon Serendipity (www.s9y.org), and it looks like it’s going to do the job very well.
There’s still a few things to take care of, a few broken links and style tweaks to get into place, but it was easy to install, fairly easy to extract data from Blogger, and it generates decent HTML.
We’re back in business!
by Alan Langford | 2006-01-30 | Featured, Observations on Everything
I read a blog post today by Simon Phipps (DRM and the Death of a Culture) which was a well reasoned complaint about the constraints that DRM can place on use of content. Yet no matter how well reasoned, nor argued from which position, these arguments on DRM don’t matter. They don’t matter because DRM will never work on static content. This is so basic, so obvious that I’m not sure why anyone ever thought it would. In fact, let’s make it more general: all copy protection technologies, past, present, and future do not and will not prevent copying of non-interactive media. In fact they’re a colossal waste of time, effort, and money that only serve to inconvenience legitimate users (and as Phipps points out, kill culture).
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by Alan Langford | 2006-01-16 | Featured, Observations on Everything
DNA testing has given sperm banks an interesting challenge. The concept of an “anonymous donor” has gone out the window. Now a simple, affordable DNA test can verify parentage. Perhaps of more concern is that as more people contribute DNA to public databases, it’s becoming easier to identify previously unknown siblings, which leaves just a short step to the father.
With genetic manipulation becoming such an easy thing to do, how long will it be before sperm banks start offering “synthetic” fathers? A few genes from this donor, a few from that, and a few more from over here to finish the job. A baby born from the resulting DNA could theoretically have any number of fathers, none of them traceable to an individual.
Of course it might be a tricky business if there’s more interrelationships between genes than previously expected. Then again, given sufficient care, the outcomes of various combinations could be tracked, selected for deireable traits, and in no time the banks would be out in the market with competing “superbaby sperm”.
Now there’s an ethical mess.
by Alan Langford | 2006-01-08 | Observations on Everything
Every time I see a freeway full of cars, I get angry. Aside from the environmental issues, which should get everyone riled up, I see a great mass of human brain power devoted to nothing. I see lost productivity. By lost productivity I mean not only in the traditional economic sense, but lost time. Time to spend with family and friends; time to play, to create. The "human capital" that we squander in service of our automotive fetish is astronomical. It’s just an extra bonus that we’re doing grave damage to the planet at the same time.
In the Greater Toronto Area alone, I wouldn’t be surprised if we squander a million person-hours per day getting from home to work and back. If we say that this applies to a population base of roughly five million, extrapolate that to a North American population of 300 million, we come up with a cool 60 million hours. Of course, Toronto has legendary problems with traffic congestion, so let’s be conservative. Divide by two and call it 150 million as a ballpark estimate for average. If everyone chose to work those hours, using an eight hour day, that represents a workforce of almost 19 million. Of course given the choice, probably 15 million of those would choose to watch television, but that still leaves four million to do valuable things, like think and create, to contribute to society. Even if my estimates are way out of whack, that’s a lot.
Clearly there’s a huge indirect payoff to building better, faster mass transit systems with comfortable environments that allow people to do something other than play human sardine. Then at least while you’re stuck in motion, you have a chance of getting some work done instead of focusing on not getting in an accident. Is this likely to happen? No. Government policies seem to enshrine — if not deify — car culture. Support of the automotive sector is taken for granted as "the engine of the economy", when it’s really an engine of decay. But trying to change this is tantamount to tilting at windmills, particularly since the capital investment required would probably be in the trillions.
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