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Man Tries to Fight Cell Phone Law
A man in Canada recently tried to fight the ban on hand-held phone use while driving
in Newfoundland and Labrador, saying that the word 'use' is too vague. The Canadian
Broadcasting Corp. reported that Craig Aisthorpe was found guilty in provincial
court in October 2003 of illegally using a cell phone...
Congress
Shifts Immigration Focus to Canada
Security along the nation's border with Canada will be the focus of a congressional
panel's hearing Aug. 1 at Selfridge Air National Guard Base. Michigan claims 700
miles of the nation's 4,000-mile northern border, which stretches along 11 states.
The border with Mexico has four states.
Canada:
Automatic Securities Disposition Plans
Staff of the Ontario Securities Commission (the OSC) have provided guidance on
automatic securities disposition plans (ASDPs). On June 2, 2006, OSC staff published
Staff Notice 55-701 (the Notice) responding to questions and issues with respect
to ASDPs pending the development by the Canadian Securities Administrators of
a CSA Staff Notice.
Canada's
Dollar Loses Its Allure for Traders
Currency traders are losing interest in the Canadian dollar. Trading in the currency
fell 1 percent to a daily average of $15.4 billion from October to April, according
to a committee of foreign-exchange traders sponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank
of New York. It was the only one among 10 currencies the group tracks that fell.
The other nine saw turnover surge 36 percent on average.
Images
Canadians to be Screened against Terrorist...
A high-tech system to prevent terrorists and other criminals from obtaining passports
will eventually contain the photos of some 21 million Canadians, new documents
show. Canada's passport office has officially begun looking for a vendor to supply
a computerized tool to screen applicant photos against images of suspects on security
watch lists.
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07.24.06
The
Coming Developer Wars
 By
Robert Scoble
We (Maryam, Patrick, and I) had a wonderful breakfast with Chandu
Thota. He's a developer lead on Microsoft's
Windows Live Local service.
You know, Microsoft's Mapping Service (why can't they name things simply at Microsoft?
If I could figure that one out I'd probably be running marketing). On his nights
and weekends he also does the very cool FeedMap
which lets bloggers find other bloggers near them.
Anyway, at one point while we were munching food at the Brown
Bag Cafe in Redmond (our favorite breakfast place) we got in a creative mood
and we started throwing around ideas of things we'd like.
That's not the important thing I took away from this conversation, but listening
to how a developer thinks when in a creative conversation is very interesting.
One idea he threw out was that he wanted to crawl all the blogs, look for commonalities,
then spit them back to a box that I'd put on my blog. Something like Amazon's
"you
may be interested in these items" feature, but for blogs.
Note the developer's impulse, especially from someone who is adept at building
Web Services. He wants to put a bunch of data into a database in the cloud, analyze
it, add value to that analysis, and spit it back out to bloggers everywhere.
This isn't the first time I've heard this pattern. At BARcamp, MindCamp, FooCamp,
and at Dave Winer's house, I've heard this same pattern over and over again.
Yeah, the details vary. Some developers want to study weather info. Some want
to mash up ticket selling services and find you better ticket prices. Some want
to take real estate data, mash it up with mapping data, and spit it back at you.
Etc. Etc. Etc. Just watch TechCrunch to see daily examples of this.
But, what are the common things these developers all need:
1) They
need a freaking fast distribution platform. Er, a set of server farms around
the world. Why? Well if that little Internet component that Chandu's thinking
of slows down my blog I'm going to get rid of it. And so will every other user
around the world. Delivery speed is job #1 in this new world. It better work in
London, Chennai, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Cape Town, the same way it does in San Francisco.
2) They need a s***load of storage space. Yes, that's a technical term.
: ) You try crawling 100 million blogs and see what kind of index it builds for
you. Let's just round up to "a terabyte." Can you afford to buy a terabyte in
storage space to scratch your developer itch? Chandu can't.
3) They need an API. Something simple to spit data in, and suck
data out. REST seems to be the one of choice lately.
4) It needs to be cheap. Um, free if possible. At least if you
want Chandu to be able to build it, deploy it, and have it survive its first exposure
on DIGG. If Chandu starts making revenue then you can get him to give you a cut,
but the startup costs need to be near zero so that the developer "itch" can be
scratched. Guys like Chandu (and most of the other geeks I know) don't have much
money to buy access to services.
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the Full Article
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