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.