The word “radiation” conjures up images of the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima or the Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster. Our society has a strong, and not unreasonable, fear of nuclear radiation, that has been built up over years of stories. Starting with...
We have not reached the technological point where we can expect to see driverless vehicles plying our roadways, yet. However, as a recent incident on the QE2 highway in Alberta has demonstrated, we might be edging closer than some of us might have thought. How close...
Recently we have heard a lot of discussion about whether various social media companies should be broken up or regulated, due to antitrust violations and whether they have the right, or responsibility, to monitor and censor the content of their user’s posts and...
Since the early days of the internet, it has been a digital environment of communication across wide distances, a repository of shared files, and a place of shadowy exchanges of digital media of dubious ownership. The internet has exploded in use and user base since...
For the past 14 years, Vancouver surgeon Dr. Brian Day has led the charge for health-care reform, pushing for the right of patients to pay for private care if their health and well-being are threatened as a result of waiting in a stagnant and overburdened public...
The path to net zero, based on the much disputed belief that carbon dioxide is a pollution, is more steep and impractical than most people realize. Replacing fossil fuels with clean electricity will require much more power generation and a greatly upgraded grid to...
Back in my early days of plying the dark recesses of the Internet (early 1990s for me) I came across a story of a Coke machine that you could query from anywhere on the Internet and it would give you a status on the temperature of the drinks, the last time it was...
In the business of mobile communication, 3G, 4G, and 5G mean different things to different people. There are 2 different regulating bodies that publish standards for mobile communications, the ITU (International Telecommunication Union) and the 3GPP (3rd Generation...
Cabs or taxis, have been a commonplace sight in our cities for many years. The first documented coach for hire was in 1621, in London, England. It only took 33 years (1654) for there to be enough issues with irregularities and numbers of them that the English...
The pressing need to create an existential crisis on every topic has gripped both our media outlets and our social media sites. It has come to the point where serious words have been stripped of all meaning. Godwin’s Law appears to be the de facto method of debate. It...
In Part 1, I discussed some issues around these Social Media companies and whether they are considered monopolies. Because of the nature of their actual business (digital advertising) they aren’t monopolies, they are each other’s competitors in a larger marketplace....
“There’s a sucker born every minute”, a phrase often attributed to the 19th century showman, P.T. Barnum, has existed in some form for many years. It predates modern technology and it even predates Mr. Barnum. Con men are people who take advantage of our default...
There are three main methods that con men use to trick their mark. They might try to gain his sympathy, take advantage of greed, or threaten or extort. When presented with these sorts of situations, if you are in the wrong frame of mind, your critical thinking skills...
The question has been asked, “Are the big tech companies, such as Google, Facebook, and Twitter, a monopoly?”. People have asked this question because we see more and more that they have come to control the dialogue and discussion of ideas on the public stage. And the...
The US government is pressuring Canada to block telecommunications companies from using equipment provided by Huawei, a Chinese company, when building our 5G cellular network for smartphones. Their logic is along the lines of “we don’t have actual evidence that China...