Monday, February 27, 2012

Blackberry singing in the dead of night

Smartphones as they are called are pretty nifty. I prefer to call them pocket computers as making phone calls is only one of the things they can do.  A comic had a joke that ten years ago he had a joke about a cellphone, and MP3 player and a digital camera, but now he has to cover all that in one joke. My prediction is that for many users, the docking station will mean that a smartphone can be hooked up to a large monitor and a full keyboard and pretty much be their computer and tv as well.

For me, this is what my device has replaced, or could replace:

Friends (ok a wee bit of a joke, lol. But on the truthier side, you can check wikipedia to see who was in "from here to eternity, rather than having to phone someone).

A watch
An alarm clock.
A calculator
A stand-alone phone
A radio, if you want to pay extra.
Some TV shows, again you pay extra, but it does have a satellite receiver 
An MP3 player. Hook up some speakers and it is a home stereo as well.
A camera - turns out it even has zoom!
A GPS
A contact list

 ..but I wrote this on a netbook as I do not have a tablet.....lol...

TWF






Wednesday, February 22, 2012

New Big

Back in France a few centuries ago, the powers of society were called "estates". Since the early part of the last century, we labelled such things as "big" - big business, big government and so on.

Three new bigs have taken over in this century: big greed, big bully and the glue the binds it all, big stupid.

New politics is about bullying - anything Harper does, or Rob Ford does or what Tim Hudak would do if he had the chance. You are for this bill, or you rape children in hell.  Don't agree with the mayor over transit? You're fired. Big bully is easy to understand.

Big greed is also easy to understand. When you have four billion dollars you need to protect every last penny and make sure some homeless family doesn't get any of it. Big greed is the idea that the rich need to be as rich as possible. I


But it's big stupid that drives everything. I am  not saying the people who run things are stupid: they are not. They simply count on stupidity to move everything. And this is what we are supposed to believe:

Left-wingers are all book-readin' don't live in the real-worlders. The true champion of the lower and middle classes are the right-wingers. Left wingers would do stupid things like institute daycare or make it so if you work and pay into unemployment insurance, that you will get it when you are not working. For some reason people who purchase billions in fighter planes we don't need are going to help you.

Movies should be judged by how much money they make.

Musicians should be judged by how much money they make

You should be judged by how much money you make, especially if you are male.

Drugs are bad if you decide to take them, but not if a person in a coat says to take them.

A "balanced" opinion is this, say about climate change: On one side you have a person who works in the field, went to school to study it, and knows what they are talking about. On the other side: someone who doesn't know what they are talking about.

Women's reproductive rights should be debated by men, many of which wear funny hates and have never had sex.

Bigotry is ok, but only if it's in fashion: it's ok to bash gays because of the "choice" they made.You have to be stupid enough to see this as a "choice" in order for that to work.

You think this is how science works: One, yes one, one study shows a link between autism and vaccinations. With this you launch a campaign. You don't know this is how science works: there were hundreds of studies done to show ASA in low doses helps you in many cases.

More to maybe follow

TF