In the wake of successful prosecutions of three British men who conspired to bring down trans-Atlantic aircraft, the former Director of Public Prosecutions in the UK, Ken Macdonald, said that intercepted emails and phone calls were critical.
According to the AP article, Britain is one of the few countries in the world to bar the use of evidence from intercepted personal phone calls, e-mails, letters and faxes.
the best evidence you can have, people convicting themselves out of their own mouths.
Yesterday, Mobile Syrup had a write-up about Industry Canada’s aborted launch of a mobile rate calculator.
Mobile Syrup is pretty clear about the lack of utility from the rate calculator:
Bernard Lord was correct – no data plans. This would have been a nightmare if it actually launched. More Canadians are transitioning towards Smartphones and this, if actually launched, would have been shelved within the first month as it was poorly thought out.
The Mobile Syrup review appears to be based on the same set of slides that Roberto Rochon at The Montreal Gazette referenced in his blog last Thursday. Roberto credits PIAC for the slide show.
Reading both of these posts, it is apparent that the tool would have been useless as for shoppers. There is no interactivity and as Mobile Syrup points out, the caveats in the proposed terms and conditions leave users with the feeling that the tool would have been saying: take your valuable time and enter your info here but it may not be right… check back later.
After reading these pieces, I understand why scrapping the tool was front page news. But it seems to me that the story should have focussed on why any government funds expended on this project in the first place?
While you are at it, look at the April 30 CWTA letter that The Gazette provides [pdf, 87KB] – why was there no consultation with the wireless industry in the design phase of such a tool? What consumer problem was supposed to be solved? How would updates to rate plans be added?
PIAC’s April 22 letter to the Minister [pdf, 2.53MB] is also available on the Gazette site.
Not sure what the past two months have been like for weather in your part of the world, but in central Ontario, the weather has been conducive to improved office productivity. There were too few opportunities to play hooky.
On July 1, I suggested that I was going to switch to summer schedule for this blog and then I wrote two weeks later that the network management proceeding kept things active. Add to that the release of a series of disappointingly flawed OECD reports, DNCL prosecutions, broadband policy, and more. It has been a busy couple of months.
No golf clubs were swung, no pike were harmed in the making of this summer.
Well, it is the last long weekend of the summer, the sky is clear and the forecast is for more of the same. I’m going to pause for a couple days.
Three years ago, I wrote about the sale of the Holmdel Bell Labs facility that was my workplace in the mid-1980s. That was mourning the loss of the building.
The Business Week article talks about the loss of the basic research capabilities with ever shrinking budgets. As recently as 2001, Bell Labs had 30,000 employees; today there are 1000.
The effects of the massive scaling back of American science and engineering research in the 1990s and 2000s may just be beginning. Unless reversed, it is likely to have its greatest impact a decade from now, when the missing discoveries of a generation earlier would have been expected to come to commercial fruition. It’s time to identify—and fix—the root of the problem.
The article suggests an aggressive tax credit system to finance $20B in new fundamental research, to enable a new innovation ecosystem to begin to build critical mass.
From the government’s perspective, the money put toward innovation today is the highest-return investment it can make.
According to the article, only 20% of American jobs pay better than $60,000. The remaining 80% pay an average of $33,000 raising concerns about the foundations of a strong middle class.
I commend the article to you and thank Alec for the pointer.
So much industrial R&D is focused on development rather than research. What steps will Canada take to ensure its a place in a next generation economy?
On Rogers Rocket Stick (5 to 7M M down, 1.5 to to 2 up) AT&T; delivers 1M down and 200K up. BRUTAL!
I wrote a couple weeks ago about a recent Merrill Lynch report which said Canada is beating the US with our mobile broadband networks. Alec is providing some empirical evidence.
