Science & Technology

‘Online’ and ‘privacy’ are mutually exclusive

February 19, 2012 Politics

Wherever I look these days, there’s talk about Bill C-30, the Protecting Children from Internet Predators Act. This bill, in fact, picks up where a previous Liberal government left off (which makes the Liberals look positively ridiculous now that they’re railing against the bill as if they were perfectly innocent in all this). The bill, [...]

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Can RIM be saved?

January 24, 2012 Business

No matter how successful and rich Steve Jobs was, he never rested on his laurels. There was always the next innovation, the next new great consumer product to be developed. The same can’t be said of Bill Gates or the two now-ex CEOs of RIM, Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie.

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Kobo pulling a RIM

January 10, 2012 Business

It seems to be the typical Canadian story: a company creates a product that becomes fairly popular, but then starts making mistake after mistake, until people lose interest and go with a different product. This is what’s been happening with RIM, the maker of the Blackberry, and now the same virus of incompetence has struck [...]

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Weather/climate science … no predictive value at all

January 6, 2012 Science & Technology

This is just delicious beyond belief. Several months ago, the newspapers were filled with dire warnings about Western Canada being hit by the harshest, most brutal and coldest winter ever. The scientists who made that prediction based it on the effects of the well-established El Niño effect. By now, Albertans should have been killed off [...]

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Unnecessary harassment of Netflix

January 5, 2012 Business

For weeks, it has been impossible to open any US news publication and not see a disparaging article or comment about Netflix. One gripe among US subscribers has been the separate, and increased, fee Netflix charges for DVDs delivered in the mail for those who don’t want to stream the content. Another criticism concerns the [...]

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Climate change – oil sands aren’t the ‘bad guy’

December 13, 2011 Science & Technology

Since we’re all human beings (well, most of us, except for the odd Romulan or Vulcan, perhaps), we need air and water to live. We also enjoy looking at pristine nature and observing animals in their natural habitats. But for a number of years now, environmentalists have lost their focus on what really matters. Instead, [...]

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Only thing bombing faster than the Playbook is the Amazon Fire

December 12, 2011 Science & Technology

I have to admit that I feel some schadenfreude. Amazon has demonstrated again and again that it doesn’t much like doing business with Canadian consumers, and when the company decided to withhold its new tablet, the Amazon Fire, from Canadians, that was just the icing on Amazon’s anti-Canadian cake.

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EU’s idiocy preventing e-books from taking off

December 4, 2011 Business

Not long ago, I was musing about what appears to be the failure of e-books and e-readers outside of North America. Now, I know why e-books, particularly those in languages other than English, aren’t taking off: the EU forces – and thus interferes with the sovereignty of nation states, a gross violation of international law [...]

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Christmas is all about tablets and e-readers

December 3, 2011 Science & Technology

Everywhere you look these days, you see ads and reviews for the various tablets and e-readers available in the marketplace today. Several companies, such as Telus and Rogers, have even begun offering free tablets (Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1) with their services.

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Global warming is a religious cult, not science

December 2, 2011 Science & Technology

Kyoto is dead, and we can all thank our lucky stars. Thankfully, too, Canada’s government won’t sign on to the follow-up treaty, which is currently being hammered out at the “church mass” celebrated in Durban.

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