Apparently, my #2 related blog is from the summer, and I see nothing extraordinary about it. For the life of me, I can't figure out why that particular blog gets consistent hits - all the time - and others don't. At first I thought that maybe there was a link to it from some other website, but that's not it, there's no referring site.
Go figure - how mysterious!
Friday, February 4, 2011
Pedestrian Dangers?
I'll admit that there are many times when I'll be walking and texting at the same time. However, when doing so, I do try to remain aware of surroundings at least. A 10 year old Italian boy fell onto the subway tracks while totally absorbed by his PSP. Thankfully, he's okay.
Recently, there has been a viral video on YouTube where some poor chick was texting as she was walking through the mall. Totally oblivious to the fact that there was a raised edge around the water fountain. Dunk city.
Although to an extent these may be seen as things to derive a good laugh out of, it's a dangerous combination and I'm sure that we'll get more and more reports of this sort of thing happening, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Recently, there has been a viral video on YouTube where some poor chick was texting as she was walking through the mall. Totally oblivious to the fact that there was a raised edge around the water fountain. Dunk city.
Although to an extent these may be seen as things to derive a good laugh out of, it's a dangerous combination and I'm sure that we'll get more and more reports of this sort of thing happening, sometimes with tragic consequences.
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Hotmail - New Disposable Addresses
Newest thing is new disposable email addresses via Hotmail. Just a few years late on that one, but I'll give Microsoft a "gimme" on that one.
Hotmail - useless email - no real point - no value...yep - pretty much sums up it up nicely :)
- Signed, a loyal Yahoo email user since 1990-whenever
Hotmail - useless email - no real point - no value...yep - pretty much sums up it up nicely :)
- Signed, a loyal Yahoo email user since 1990-whenever
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Cash is King - Unfortunately, the King is Dead!
For a significant period of time, this adage of “cash is king” held true. The basic premise of this saying is that having available cash gives one a huge advantage, especially in terms of negotiating and purchasing large ticket items.
Now, there may be argument with the premise of this article that the term “cash” is meant as liquid assets and as such electronic payments of any sort could be considered cash-like. There is merit for this argument, but for the purposes of this article, I am considering “cash” to be paper money.
One of the bigger impacts of technology within our society has been in terms of currency – specifically as it relates to paying for items or otherwise transferring money between two parties.
Gosh – I really hate this saying, but “back in the day”, one pretty much just had the option of paying cash or paying by cheque. Of course, there was and still is credit card availability, but that’s a different beast.
Debit cards made their debut in Canada in 1994 and quickly revolutionized not only how we pay, but also how we shop. No longer did we have to worry about if the vendor took cheques, nor did we have to take a quick peek in our wallet to see if we had sufficient cash.
Over the past few years, electronic fund transfers have been a boon to those of us who need to send money to a friend or relative. No longer do we need to go to a specific bank and deposit funds into an account. All major banks now offer electronic funds transfer. Again, technology has clearly made our lives much more convenient.
The next stage of storing and allocating cash will be to integrate our electronic devices to become electronic wallets. It will be possible to store our liquid assets on our electronic device and have it scanned at a POS terminal to initiate funds transfer.
The potential uses of technology in the area of funds transfer are unlimited.
The question that I do have though is this – what practical purpose does cold, hard cash have in our society? How much does this infrastructure to support paper money cost us? The inherent cost of producing cash and everything that is required for a cash-based society has to be staggering.
There are a few things about a cashless society though and this needs to be considered as this certainly appears to be the direction that we’re heading towards.
First and foremost, I think that having electronic funds is a true double-edged sword as it relates to counterfeiting. The advantage to having an electronic commerce system is that it will allow the government to continue to refine their security to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters. As it stands right now, introducing any new security features on a bank note but be a tremendously complicated task, in addition to being a very time consuming one. By having digital wallets, not only can the algorithms be update quickly and easily, but the repositories for our cash can be protected with sophisticated security – a feature that’s not available with bank notes.
The real downside to having our dollars stored in electronic form is that we’d likely see a significant proliferation in counterfeiting attempts. Actually, the fraud will probably not be so much as counterfeiting as it will be attempts to access and transfer out our funds. If the undesirable elements did manage to find ways to access our digital wallets, then the potential amount of money that would be pilfered would be staggering. Currently a counterfeiter can only counterfeit a certain amount of money, and as he creates the counterfeit money, he is faced with hard production costs for machinery, paper and ink.
From an economy standpoint – I would have to defer to someone who understand economics much more than I do, but I think that another factor in the double edged sword category is that the more that our funds are accessible digitally, the more likely we are to spend it. It’s commonly accepted that when someone is making a purchase, they are much more likely to rationalize the purchase if they have to pay cold, hard cash. Many times, when paying by Interac or by credit card, one tends to be a little – how shall we say – less diligent about forking over our electronic funds. What I’m curious though, is if I’m correct that spending would increase, and if so, what would be the net impact on our economy? Would it benefit the economy as goods are sold = vendors make profits = jobs are created, etc... or would we be likely to see an increase in the number of people that can’t make ends meet each month as their spending has increased.
We’re probably a few years away from the day where cash has effectively been rendered obsolete. Maybe I’m wrong, perhaps there will always be a need for cash, but then again, maybe this is just an eventuality and that our economy is almost ready for that leap in evolution, just as it did when cash first replaced the barter and trade of goods and services.
Now, there may be argument with the premise of this article that the term “cash” is meant as liquid assets and as such electronic payments of any sort could be considered cash-like. There is merit for this argument, but for the purposes of this article, I am considering “cash” to be paper money.
One of the bigger impacts of technology within our society has been in terms of currency – specifically as it relates to paying for items or otherwise transferring money between two parties.
Gosh – I really hate this saying, but “back in the day”, one pretty much just had the option of paying cash or paying by cheque. Of course, there was and still is credit card availability, but that’s a different beast.
Debit cards made their debut in Canada in 1994 and quickly revolutionized not only how we pay, but also how we shop. No longer did we have to worry about if the vendor took cheques, nor did we have to take a quick peek in our wallet to see if we had sufficient cash.
Over the past few years, electronic fund transfers have been a boon to those of us who need to send money to a friend or relative. No longer do we need to go to a specific bank and deposit funds into an account. All major banks now offer electronic funds transfer. Again, technology has clearly made our lives much more convenient.
The next stage of storing and allocating cash will be to integrate our electronic devices to become electronic wallets. It will be possible to store our liquid assets on our electronic device and have it scanned at a POS terminal to initiate funds transfer.
The potential uses of technology in the area of funds transfer are unlimited.
The question that I do have though is this – what practical purpose does cold, hard cash have in our society? How much does this infrastructure to support paper money cost us? The inherent cost of producing cash and everything that is required for a cash-based society has to be staggering.
There are a few things about a cashless society though and this needs to be considered as this certainly appears to be the direction that we’re heading towards.
First and foremost, I think that having electronic funds is a true double-edged sword as it relates to counterfeiting. The advantage to having an electronic commerce system is that it will allow the government to continue to refine their security to stay one step ahead of the counterfeiters. As it stands right now, introducing any new security features on a bank note but be a tremendously complicated task, in addition to being a very time consuming one. By having digital wallets, not only can the algorithms be update quickly and easily, but the repositories for our cash can be protected with sophisticated security – a feature that’s not available with bank notes.
The real downside to having our dollars stored in electronic form is that we’d likely see a significant proliferation in counterfeiting attempts. Actually, the fraud will probably not be so much as counterfeiting as it will be attempts to access and transfer out our funds. If the undesirable elements did manage to find ways to access our digital wallets, then the potential amount of money that would be pilfered would be staggering. Currently a counterfeiter can only counterfeit a certain amount of money, and as he creates the counterfeit money, he is faced with hard production costs for machinery, paper and ink.
From an economy standpoint – I would have to defer to someone who understand economics much more than I do, but I think that another factor in the double edged sword category is that the more that our funds are accessible digitally, the more likely we are to spend it. It’s commonly accepted that when someone is making a purchase, they are much more likely to rationalize the purchase if they have to pay cold, hard cash. Many times, when paying by Interac or by credit card, one tends to be a little – how shall we say – less diligent about forking over our electronic funds. What I’m curious though, is if I’m correct that spending would increase, and if so, what would be the net impact on our economy? Would it benefit the economy as goods are sold = vendors make profits = jobs are created, etc... or would we be likely to see an increase in the number of people that can’t make ends meet each month as their spending has increased.
We’re probably a few years away from the day where cash has effectively been rendered obsolete. Maybe I’m wrong, perhaps there will always be a need for cash, but then again, maybe this is just an eventuality and that our economy is almost ready for that leap in evolution, just as it did when cash first replaced the barter and trade of goods and services.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
Unwired - A Case Study
Recent events in Egypt have really made me question some issues as it relates to technology. It's pretty common knowledge by now (for anyone who has read my blogs) that I have a fundamental concern with technology is that that we're overly dependant on it.
With the recent political crisis in Egypt, the government has decided to unplug the whole country from the world. Yep - that's right. They have pulled the proverbial plug on the Egypt that is wired. The rationale is that it by doing this, they are preventing the dissemination of reports and images coming out as a result of the mass riots. I am very hardly a political person, so I cannot comment on how legitimate this is.
However, there's a couple of things here that caught my attention.
First of all, when the plan was initially put in place, the government decided that the everything would be shut down, with the exception of the stock markets. Ironically, after the markets lost 10% because of the instability, they put a freeze on them too. This makes me wonder - what other aspects of the Egyptian infrastructure were not considered to be exempt from this unpluggage? It's mind-bogging, unfathomable.
I don't think that it would be possible here in Canada to unplug the country in the same way. Well - I guess anything is possible, but the number of Internet entry points must be magnitudes greater than in Egypt. What I wonder is if this were done here, how can that be? I can't imagine our society having the magic carpet of the Internet yanked out from under our feet. What would the hospitals do if they needed to communicate with a colleague or to look in medical journals? How would transportation agencies manage. Banking - let's not even get into the impact of the banking sector if there were no Internet access.
As I alluded in a recent post, should something "happen" to our technology, it would clearly be catastrophic in all areas of our society, but we would adapt, that's what we do.
I'd be totally fascinated to see how the populace of Egypt has managed to adapt.
With the recent political crisis in Egypt, the government has decided to unplug the whole country from the world. Yep - that's right. They have pulled the proverbial plug on the Egypt that is wired. The rationale is that it by doing this, they are preventing the dissemination of reports and images coming out as a result of the mass riots. I am very hardly a political person, so I cannot comment on how legitimate this is.
However, there's a couple of things here that caught my attention.
First of all, when the plan was initially put in place, the government decided that the everything would be shut down, with the exception of the stock markets. Ironically, after the markets lost 10% because of the instability, they put a freeze on them too. This makes me wonder - what other aspects of the Egyptian infrastructure were not considered to be exempt from this unpluggage? It's mind-bogging, unfathomable.
I don't think that it would be possible here in Canada to unplug the country in the same way. Well - I guess anything is possible, but the number of Internet entry points must be magnitudes greater than in Egypt. What I wonder is if this were done here, how can that be? I can't imagine our society having the magic carpet of the Internet yanked out from under our feet. What would the hospitals do if they needed to communicate with a colleague or to look in medical journals? How would transportation agencies manage. Banking - let's not even get into the impact of the banking sector if there were no Internet access.
As I alluded in a recent post, should something "happen" to our technology, it would clearly be catastrophic in all areas of our society, but we would adapt, that's what we do.
I'd be totally fascinated to see how the populace of Egypt has managed to adapt.
And Now For Something Completely Obvious...
There's a new warning out there of a scam. Apparently, said scammers are cold calling people and saying that they're from Microsoft and that Microsoft has determined that there is a virus on the machine, so they are calling to 'help' them clean their virus up by either (a) getting access to their comptuer or (b) to redirect the poor sap of a victim to a phishing site or one that delivers malware.
Okay - maybe I'm not giving people the benefit of the doubt, I'm sure that there would be many people that would so be so naive to think that there's a chance in hell that Microsoft goes around offering to help people. But still...really?
Okay - maybe I'm not giving people the benefit of the doubt, I'm sure that there would be many people that would so be so naive to think that there's a chance in hell that Microsoft goes around offering to help people. But still...really?
Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Technology Schmechnology - Talk About a Love/Hate Relationship
Probably no surprise to my millions of faithful readers but I am decidely Jekyll and Hyde when it comes to technology. As evidenced by my many posts, it concerns me greatly and pisses me off to no extent sometimes, but Jiminy Cricket, I have to be careful not to bite the hand that feeds me. As much as I'm critical of it from time to time (okay - more than just "time to time"), our lives have been hopelessly enriched by it.
Quite honestly, I can't imagine where I would be professionally and personally without technology.
--- Signing off
Quite honestly, I can't imagine where I would be professionally and personally without technology.
--- Signing off
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)