Critical Brain Candy

A new study says BitTorrent piracy found by study to boost music sales.  Right.  BGR even points out the obvious way this study seems suspicious.

Look, everyone “pirates” stuff to some degree or another.  It’s become marginally acceptable in society, and I do believe there’s a spectrum on the morality of it.

But, at the end of the day, it is theft.  It’s a subtly different kind of theft than stealing a car, but something is still being taken against the wishes of the owner.  We all have our reasons for why we think it’s acceptable or not, but come on, I’ve grown tired of these weak attempts to justify it by saying it actually helps the person who’s being stolen from.  That’s a total douchebag argument.  ”I don’t respect you or your rights enough to pay you for the content you created, but here, I’ll do you a favour and take it for free, which is really helping you!”

Let’s all just be honest with ourselves and go back to business as usual.

I can’t believe it’s finally happened, but Obama’s declaration of support for same-sex marriage is huge. I read an interesting comment somewhere describing how this is a very good political move. The reasoning was that he won’t lose too many votes over this but will energize his base.

I agree that it’s a good move. I think he’s had a good first term, but the cold reality of US politics always deadens people’s hopes and expectations. With this one statement, even if he does nothing to change federal policy, I feel much better about him.

Apparently, Toronto’s esteemed Mayor Rob Ford got into a tussle with a reporter: Daniel Dale on what happened near the mayor’s home:

“At some point, perhaps 10 or 15 seconds into the encounter, he cocked his fist near his head and began charging at me at a full run. I began pleading with him, as loud as I could, with my hands up, for him to stop. I yelled, at the top of my lungs, something like, “Mayor Ford, I’m writing about the land! I’m just looking at the land! You’re trying to buy the TRCA land!” Instinctually, I also reached into my pocket to grab my dead phone. I then fiddled with my voice recorder, trying fruitlessly to turn it on so that I would have a recording of any physical violence.”

Now here’s a bit of commentary from Ford on the incident: Mayor Rob Ford won’t release video of incident with Toronto Star reporter.  What’s interesting is that this part doesn’t quite add up:

“I never laid a hand on the guy,” Ford said on 640AM radio Thursday morning. “I said ‘buddy, I am giving you two seconds to get out of here.’

“He said ‘Don’t hit me, don’t hit me, here’s my cell phone, here’s my tape recorder.’”

Hm.  You think someone, especially a reporter, would just offer up their phone and recorder if they weren’t being threatened?  Doesn’t sound too likely.

I’ve been listening to Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History podcasts for a while now and they’re fantastic. I look forward to episodes of his show more than any other media I consume.

The most recent episode is especially thought-provoking as it covers the morality of dropping the atomic bombs on Japan. He covers the escalation of air warfare and how things progressed to the point where it was considered acceptable to knowingly kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in a single attack.

The series on the fall of the Roman empire was also fantastic, and very long.

Windfarms do not cause long-term damage to bird populations, study finds.  Maybe this will put that part of the debate to rest, although climate-change deniers don’t tend to listen to facts I guess.

Last night’s earnings report from RIM brought more bad news, even prompting BGR into a sensationalist headline of Research In Motion is dead.

The comments in response to the BGR article are interesting to read, most tending towards a sentiment of “Why are you saying this, don’t you know you’re affecting real peoples lives?”  I think those commenters are missing an important part of this whole situation: the media isn’t what’s causing problems for RIM, it’s the company.  Sure, media can affect public sentiment, which could make some people less likely to purchase that brand, but I’m sure that’s the smaller of RIMs problems at this point.

Build a product that people want to buy, and they’ll buy it.  Period.

The media is reporting, and opining, on what they see going on.  I think their reporting has shown frustration with how long RIMs problems have been obvious, and little was done to fix them, just like the average person is frustrated.  The fact that RIM is declining fast is indisputable, look at any corporate metric you like: profit, revenue, sales, customer satisfaction, etc.

But, I think calling RIM dead is inaccurate.  The RIM we know today is almost certainly dead, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t other opportunities for them.

Over the last few years, after it became abundantly clear the current BlackBerry OS was obsolete, I came to the opinion that RIM should take Android, layer all their enterprise security stuff on top of it, and move on.  That would get RIM a modern OS, access to a modern selection of Apps (the most important part of a platform, in my opinion), and still maintain their value-add proposition.  They went with QNX instead, and I do have to say I enjoy using it on the Playbook.  It’s definitely slicker than Android, although not iOS.  The killer is still the weaker app store, but time will tell how it grows.

One of the articles today did interestingly point out that a switch to Windows Phone could be the best bet for RIM.  What if RIM became the premier back-end integration service for Windows Phone with better Exchange integration, BBM, enterprise management, etc, while at the same time producing hardware for it.  This might be attractive enough for Microsoft to consider an acquisition or partnership, and a win for RIM because they get an automatic user base and a powerhouse like Microsoft marketing the OS.

Food for thought.

There’s a new list of  Top 10 Easy Ideas For A Sustainable 2012 over at YouSustain.  This years list seems extra informative because of the ability to show what the CO2 amounts discussed actually mean, via links to the new tool How Much CO2 Is That?

Let me know of any comments or ideas for other things to add to future lists.  Plus, if you like it, please share it with your friends!

The last few weeks have seemed eerily similar to the build-up towards war with Iraq.  First you have the pundits flooding the media with talk of how war is inevitable, then eventually the political leaders follow.  At least it sounds like there’s a reasonable adult at the helm: ‘This is not a game’: Obama blasts ‘casual’ talk of war with Iran.

Last week, in the build up towards the Israeli Prime Ministers visit to Washington, a lot of media focused on how Netanyahu had the upper hand and was going to be able to force Obama into action.  I find this particularly disturbing; a country that relies heavily on the US for its defense wants to strong-arm them into war?

I agree it’s not good for anyone if Iran builds nuclear weapons, but then again it’s not good if anyone has them.  A conventional war with Iran definitely wouldn’t be good either.

Our defense minister claims the sub fleet we bought from the British 14 years ago, which has been in dry-dock for most of that time, and won’t hope to be fully operational until at least 2016, is a capable force.  That may well be true.  However, it takes less than 18 years (1998 to 2016) to build a submarine, so I’m curious why we’re continuing down this path without (seemingly) properly investing in it.

If we really want these subs mostly for patrolling the arctic waters, maybe it would be better to invest in unmanned subs working with a surface fleet.  Do we really expect that 4 old subs would actually be useful in real combat situations?  I’m not saying there’s no value in these subs, but it’s definitely true that we’ve extracted almost zero value from them so far, 14 years in, so let’s start getting value or cut our losses.

I’ve just put up a tool at YouSustain called How Much CO2 Is That?, which I think is pretty neat.  You can enter (or pick) an amount of CO2 emissions and it will show you how much of lots of other activities/things would generate that much.

One of my favourites, that’s still blowing my mind, is that a typical single trans-Atlantic flight for a 747 could emit 220 tons of CO2!  That’s about 76 tons of fuel.  Wow.  That fuel alone would weigh about as much as 36 average cars.

I’ve struggled with how best to convey the information on the page, so please give any feedback you have, and if you like it, share with friends to show them something cool!