Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
You know how good, how useful TV is when it gives you the chance to see a movie you were not allowed to see in grade seven. It was like a glimpse into the future when the Flea rules the planet and treats us all like pawns on a chessboard. Best of all – it’s Canadian content with Norman Jewison in the director’s chair. Dig the font. Robots will demand the use of that font when they rule us. They will also make us wear tight beige slacks.
I had no idea broad brushes came in this massive gauge:
The UK is steaming towards a “National Information Registry” — one big database of everyone’s personal information, tied to biometric IDs. This system won’t fight terrorism, but it will compromise the privacy of British people. What’s more, the system will be impossible to implement, resulting in widespread harm to people who get screwed by the errors it generates.
Bad. Bad, bad, bad and bad. Boing say BAD!!! So certain yet so disconnected from law and privacy policy…and stuff. Good thing Cory is hitting the beach to recover from whatever tensions a newly aging futurist might need to recover from.
That is the magic formula, the secret to all idle thought and a crushing blow to economic production. Even though this is the shortest weekend of the year, it is still worth anticipation and therefore chattery:
I just noticed this article on click fraud in Wired care of Boing and found a very odd thing – a moral argument for the rights of property holders:
By splitting revenue with the sites that host the ads, search engines have become, in effect, the Internet’s venture capitalists, funding the content that attracts people to the computer screen. Unlike the VCs who backed the boom-era Internet, search engines now provide revenue to thousands of wildly diverse sites at little up-front cost to them – PPC advertising is one of the few income sources available to bloggers, for instance. If rampant click fraud overwhelms the system, it will muffle the Internet’s fabulous cacophony of voices.
I don’t know how click fraud actually qualifies as fraud in the legal sense. I don’t know of a crime being committed or a contracual relationship being breached. The main example given in the story is one of extorsion, the threatening of Google with release of a autobot clickotron unless payment was made. Sadder still is the illustration of slogs – spam blogs – who exists only to generate traffic click throughs for a wee cheque:
Thousands of splogs exist, snarling the blogosphere – and the search engines that index it – in spam. Splogs are too profitable to be readily discouraged. According to RSS to Blog, a Brooklyn-based firm that sells automatic-blog software, sploggers can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month in PPC income, all without any human effort.
Imagine. Vacuous blogs created for alternative purpose. Whoda thunk it? The problem, of course, is the seduction of the technology generally and what it does to one’s thinking and one’s ethics. How much different is the new economic moral thinking compared to, say, actual legal regulations like copyright and the intellectual property of others. Is it because this clicky activity undermines the beloved as opposed to the actual rights of others? It is primarily the violation of the new moral crime against technological advance that is decried by Wired – we have a new plan that demands new thinking, new commerce and new crimes for the old thinkers…and we will tell you what the new thinking is after we get to it, thank you very much.
Isn’t the real problem the false valuation? Isn’t it incumbant on a firm presenting a new mode of advertising to prove its effectiveness in the marketplace as a mechanism for setting the price? Is it that the clicks are invalid or is it the mechanism which clicks which is. Isn’t the real question whether a click ad represents or ever represented value for money. Interesting to note that the one realistic alternative mentioned is micro-payments…about ten years after they were laughed away by the new think.
Paul Lima had a vague feeling he wasn’t getting any mail. When his mother phoned wondering why he hadn’t cashed his birthday cheque, “the penny dropped,” the Toronto freelance writer says.
He called Canada Post, which said he had changed his address in person on Nov. 17.
“Not me,” he said.
I noticed how little the guy must have been getting in the mail. But how long was the person not noticing the daily junk mail and bills? There must be something that would have been noticed if two days went by. What do I get in the mail? Banks statements of sone sort or another. Bills. Magazines. The Child Tax Credit mailbox money. Yet – what a drag to have it happen.
Once again it is the day before Saturday. It has been a good week around
here. No rocking out or anything but spring sprang and, really, that is half the
battle of the entire calendar:
Of course, part of the reason the provinces are so
loose with the coin is the benefactions of Uncle Ottawa, which Ontario and
Quebec in particular have proved adept at squeezing in all the right places. The
McGuinty government, which made the fictional “$23-billion gap” its war cry,
quietly pocketed over $13.2-billion in federal cash last year, a 34% increase
from just two years ago. Quebec, likewise, enjoyed an 8% increase in the last
fiscal year.
It is not surprising, given the fine fiscal
understanding behind Tory-nomics, that he would not get the difference between
gross and net in his stunning analysis of Ontario’s position but equating Saudi
Albertia and Quebec as co-horts in economic solidity it dumbfounding. Compared
to this, David Frum comes across as
lucid.
Ugh, a portal. That is apparently what Google does not want said of itself.
Although Google dislikes being described as a portal, Sullivan and industry analysts said its new finance section leaves little doubt where the company is headed. “They are being fairly careful about it, but they are walking very rapidly toward becoming a portal,” said Forrester Research analyst Charlene Li. “They have a lot of other services gunning for them, so they have become most keen about building user loyalty so the users don’t have a reason to go someplace else.”
Am I loyal to Google? I use the mail, like Picasa and search through it. I map my travel with it. But am I loyal? I don’t look to it for innovations that will improve my web experience and think of this site and my browser as my portal. In the late 90s there was a urge to create portality, that control of the web. The Federal government had people shopping the idea back then holding meetings stakeholderly. One in PEI attracted millions in public money only to become a wasteland of tumblin’ tumbleweeds.
They seem to be a curse. But why? Are we all still a little Soylent Green about the internet? Do we think that anyone who wants to control us as a conduit must not have our interests in mind? I think it is more that the web is not apt for portals, that the whole thing is an annoyingly unindexed and disorganized playground of surf, idleness and interest and anything that thinks it can organize it for me bundle it all tied in a big bow is missing a point.
Last evening I was witness to a dish of wild blueberries, oats butter and sugar: blueberry crisp. But then I thought for a moment that it might have been blueberry crumble when I was a kid. I knew we never called it Blueberry Brown Betty but others in school might have. Brown Better always struck me as the sort of thing New Brunswickers might say. But these are distinct but related to blueberry grunt, more dumplings than crust. There must be more in the matrix of grannie-approved stewed fruit dessert terminology.
Then it was the question of onomatopoeic foods. Do people have grunt after bubble and squeek? And what about my dream meal: mahi-mahi with piri-piri sauce on a bed of cous-cous served with cocoa? Makes you think.
I must say “hell” about 37 times a day. If I stub my toe or realize I failed to lock the car once I’m inside. It is a pretty low level sweary-mary around our house. So odd it is to read this:
If it’s not the bloody, it’s the hell.
When British censors banned a controversial Tourism Australia ad campaign this month, they did so because it used the word “bloody” in the question: “So where the bloody hell are you?” Now the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation says it won’t run the ad during family programming because of the word “hell.”
“It just shows you the different taste levels of audiences in various cultures,” said CBC spokeswoman Ruth Ellen Soles. ” ‘Hell’ is a problem for us in terms of kids and family viewing. It comes under the category of ‘taste’ and in these situations we listen to what our audience tells us.”
Cultural barrier to the hellish? What the hell is that? You want religious cultural sensitivity? This is religious cultural sensitivity. Seeing as the kids see a great Canadian beer called Maudit around from time to time, I think they would have a hell of a time finding fault. Hasn’t Satan largely been neutered in Canada anyway, relegated to the image on a sports team’s jersey? If I were to describe someone as Old Nick, hell, they’d likely think I was referencing Santa, not Satan. Even – with all due respect – the holy rollers have long since moved from the fear of hell to the fantastic welcome at the pearly gates that they (and they alone) deserve and shall receive. It’s all about upside these days.
