’Pong’s photos of the urban decay in Bangkok are much better than mine.
Even better commentary on Microsoft/Yahoo! merger
My commentary on a Microsoft/Yahoo! merger was sarcastic, but Fake Steve Jobs has even better visual imagery. “The Borg-Yahoo merger won’t work. Here’s why. It’s like taking the two guys who finished second and third in a 100-yard dash and tying their legs together and asking for a rematch, believing that now they’ll run faster.” And “Imagine a circus act in which two enormous, clumsy, awkward elephants that don’t really like each other are supposed to mate while riding on skateboards.” Hat-tip to Mark Pesce.
So, who’s for Chairman Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit?
Chairman Rudd’s got a clever strategy going, unless it’s just a coincidence. The usually-secret Red Book warns of approaching “challenges” like climate change, an aging population and the economic growth of India and China. Then we announce the Australia 2020 Summit.
As any management consultant will tell you, develop a shared vision and folks will endure short-term pain — like interest rate rises and having to change the light bulbs.
Actually I’m not that cynical about it. I’m quietly enthused. After a decade of Howard’s backward-looking short-term thinking we seriously need to look to the future. Fast. Of course, back when Barry Jones was science minister we had a permanent organisation to keep watch, the Commission for the Future. Maybe I’ll read Lessons from the Australian Commission for the Future: 1986-1998 [PDF file] when I get the time. But I digress…
If Chairman Rudd wants 1000 of our “best and brightest” in Canberra on 19-20 April, who should they be?
It’s flattering that Nick Hodge and Peter Black nominated me, bless their sycophantic little hearts. And I’ve already gained four votes at Bloggerati. I’d love to be part of this Summit, sure, because I’d be Fighting the Hallucinating Goldfish hands on. However I have a few more modest suggestions…
Continue reading “So, who’s for Chairman Rudd’s Australia 2020 Summit?”
“Recreational outrage” is annoying
Maybe it was the phase of the Moon yesterday, but two different people were unhappy with discussions here and launched personal attacks. Google says I’m not the first to coin the term recreational outrage, but it’s certainly a perfect description.
If you read my every word — and I know you do, Gentle Reader — you’ll remember that my compulsory 9/11 post from 2006 mentioned “recreational grief”, a term I picked up from Encyclopaedia of Death and Dying:
The degree of public mourning following the deaths of Lady Diana and John F Kennedy Jr led social observers to wonder if grief is an ever-present latent feeling just waiting to be exploited by the political elite, if people’s lives are so empty that they engage in recreational grief… Perhaps individuals are emotive puppets manipulated by the mass media and/or political elite, and people cry because they are shown other people crying for a celebrity.
Perhaps outrage is also an ever-present latent feeling. If people’s lives are so comfortable that there’s nothing serious to get angry about, they’ll find somewhere to vent their outrage — going to considerable effort to find it.
Yesterday’s incidents could well illustrate this.
Fourth Middle Eastern comms cable cut
As a complete aside, it seems that a fourth communications cable has been cut, further degrading access to and from the Middle East. And the story linked to reckons it ain’t about ships’ anchors. Something’s up, it seems.
Live video streaming — from your phone!
I just saw a very cool thing: a demo of a new service called Qik which lets you stream video from your phone and “broadcast” it on the Internet. Here’s what it looked like as Lachlan Hardy chatted with us on his Nokia N95 while walking through Leichhardt.
Qik automatically records what happens, so you can watch the replay. We could type in questions, he’d see them on-screen and reply. The lag was only a few seconds.
OK, it’s still in alpha mode, so dunno when this will be ready for real life. But it’s certainly going to be one of those things which changes everything. Again.
[Update 22 March 2014: Technologies come, and technologies go. Qik is no more. Its video messaging functions have been absorbed into Skype, and Qik will cease to exist on 30 April 2014 — although videos embedded in websites are replaced with the message “video unavailable”.]