The Big(ish) Apple

A recent report from the New York Planning Department finds that New York is 17 square miles smaller than previously believed. It seems that erosion and global warming have nothing to do with it, the area of the five boroughs was simply overestimated due to their complex shape. Incidentally, if that 17 square miles was tacked onto Manhattan, the land would be worth more than a trillion dollars and be home to around 1.1 million people.

Last week saw another hearing in the US Senate in which the top executives from the five largest oil companies where taken to task for crying poor (aka 'market forces') while reaping record profits. Although it is unlikely to bring any real change, it does set the backdrop for a great analysis piece about the politics of the oil business.

Bell Canada, in the middle of a regulatory fight over it's bandwidth throttling, has opened its own web video store. This is brutally bad timing and shows, I think, a complete disrespect for paying customers. It also makes their claims of a bandwidth crunch a flat, bald-faced lie. Good job.

The future will be broadcast, which is good, because you won't be able to go anywhere.

The New York Times recently reported that oil refinery profits are down as they are unable to pass all of their increased crude costs on to customers. My heart bleeds. Oil refinery operators need to wake up and realize that profits are not guaranteed. Gas is $1.29/L in New Brunswick right now and we actually have it better than neighboring provinces. How can you squeeze consumers before they just can't afford it anymore? Refineries should, in the short term, look at greedy investors who are artificially inflating the price of oil. In the long term, find another business to be in, one that does not depend on a limited natural resource that has perhaps 50 years left and will become economically impossible long before that.

Microsoft has another scary prediction of the future: every flat surface in your home will be a computer. Which sounds great if its a 4' x 6' TV that's part of your wall. But can you imagine if someone hacked your bathroom mirror?

For those of you wishing for a simpler time, but find that most of the technology from your childhood doesn't work with anything anymore, you can bridge the gap in creative ways, such as a bluetooth adapter for your tape deck.

In a response to a filing brought by a number of small ISPs about Bell Canada's throttling practices, the Canadian Radio and Telecommunication Commission (CRTC) agreed that there were serious issues but refused to do anything about it pending further investigation. As Bell owns pretty much all the main data lines in Canada, the CRTC would be unwise to do its usual foot-dragging, but in my experience that probably will be the case.

A suprising result from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety: the tiny Smart ForTwo super-compact car actually does a good job protecting passengers in crashes. Despite looking like a phone booth on wheels, the car earned 5-star rating in both front and side impact tests. The manufacturer says that the reinfornces steel cage in the ForTwo causes the crumple zones in other cars to start crumpling sooner and absorb more energy. The one slight hitch might arise when two Smart cars crash into each other and there is hardly any crumple zones to be had.

An analyst at CitiGroup Financial says that Amazon's Kindle could make $750 million dollars by 2010. Crave says that there are several problems with the methodology, but curiously does not mention one factor I would say is important: you can't get one outside the US. That alone might limit the available market to the point that they're arent enough early adopters out there to ring up that amount.

Things I would not want to explain to my boss...

An officer of the Cape Breton Regional Police reportedly shot himself in the leg during a drug bust. The force calls it an "accidental discharge", I call it one extraordinarily unfortunate cop. Just try explaining to your boss that you managed to shoot yourself during a bust. That's what I call effective law enforcement.

Another person who has some explaining to do is the IT guy who put a reference to the new iPhone on AT&T's website. The reference to 'iPhone Black' appeared on a customer service page AT&T uses to do self-service and tech support. Not a big leak at this point when most media outlets are treating a June release for a new, 3G-equipped iPhone as a virtual certainty, but a reasonably skilled IT guy should now how to make a feature go live only at a prescribed date and time. I'll bet his boss is less than thrilled.

This last item is not related to my theme, but I was surprised to find out that there is a major chain that NYC does not have, namely IKEA. In a city with a three-story Victoria's Secret flagship store, one would think that funky Swedish furniture and housewares would not be a catalogue order given the ubiquity of IKEA. That situation will be corrected June 18 when a location in Brooklyn's Red Hook nieghborhood.

Gmail as a spam machine?

A flaw in Gmail can be used to make it spew spam, according to Ars Technica. The flaw allows an attacker to send a message via Gmail's outgoing mail (SMTP) service and have it sent far and wide complete with an apparently legitimate @gmail.com address. Generally I've found Gmail's control of spam to be excellent, I've also used the SMTP service as part of Evolution (the Linux answer to Outlook). Perhaps since most people use web-based email rather than a dedicated client (corporate email being the exception) it's simply a case of low-hanging fruit; i.e., the comparitively old-school SMTP service was built with less attention to security than the online version.

In other geek-boy software news, I've got Ubuntu 8.04 ('hardy heron') running on my machine and am generally pleased with it. I've had an issue with the OS freezing if my computer is idle for any length of time, which I haven't heard about in the reviews I've read. It may just be my hardware, but I didn't have that problem with 'gutsy'. I must say I was expecting more new features, but with releases only six months apart it is understandable. Focusing on improvements under the hood will probably lead to a better product over the next couple of years.

Microsoft plays bad cop, the RCMP have to prove they are worse.

Microsoft reportedly is reportedly considering putting anti-piracy software into future versions of the Zune, according to the New York Times. The software would scan your hard drive for unauthorized content and report it. Which rules out me ever buying a Zune. I refuse to let any third-party peripheral scan my hard drive and use that information for any purpose I do not specifically authorize. It is bad enough that so much software calls out to a server on start-up and you have to pull teeth to stop it. I know that many corporations don't value my privacy, but I do.

The British Columbia RCMP are in the news again for being way too trigger happy with the tasers. This time it was an 82 year old, hospitalized man who it seems had a small jack knife. He was tasered three times in the chest and is lucky to be alive considering the condition his heart is probably in at this point in his life. I'm still waiting to see some discipline meted out to the RCMP, but I'm probably fooling myself that the powers that be at HQ in Ottawa even care.

A wrong was set right after a cashier at a Tim Horton's in London, Ontario got her job back. She was fired for giving a timbit (or donut hole as you call them in the States) to a customer's fussy child. The value of this item? Sixteen cent. I can not fathom firing anybody over sixteen cents. The hassle of getting a replacement hired on would make it a losing proposition. I also seem to remember that if you go through a Tim Horton's drive through with a dog, they'll usually give the dog a timbit as a treat, thereby making this whole situation ridiculous.

Myanmar got a little smaller in the wake of last week's typhoon. Images taken by NASA's Terra Earth sciences satellite show that enough land was washed away or severly flooded to the point of being visible from space. Yikes.

Fashion Crisis?

I was rather surprised recently to see an article in the New York Times feed about a tailor that specializes in suits for police detectives. It seems the difference is in the jacket, it is made just a bit roomier around the waist such that there are no unsightly bulges resulting from the gun. It's what all the well-dressed NYPD detectives are wearing, I just struggle with how in the hell it is newsworthy.

One thing that is newsworthy (and fashionable) is the sheer number of countries now in line to get the iPhone. Vodaphone (second largest mobile carrier in the world) has signed a deal to bring out the iPhone later in the year for ten countries including Egypt, Greece, South Africa, India (2nd largest country in the world by population!), Austrailia, New Zealand, Potrugal, Turkey, and the Czech Republic. Do you suppose Steve Jobs just woke up one morning and thought "well, I gave it to the Canadians, perhaps now I should give it to everybody else"? Just a thought.

In other news, Microsoft withdrew its bid for Yahoo. I rarely pay attention to such celebrity couples, but I do so enjoy watching the tear-streaked meltdown at the end of it all.

And finally, explosions. It seems that an electrical fault in a local power distribution line under a Winnipeg side street somehow managed to trigger an explosion that sent a number of manhole covers flying into the air. No one was hurt, which is even better news when you consider that your health insurance probably doesn't allow for claims resulting from ballistic manhole covers.