Need for constitutional change

So here it is, the day after parliament has been prorogued until the end of January...

Of course, here in Alberta, home of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), there has been nothing but anger at the other three parties, with the vast majority supporting Harper and his party. I'd like to think that with my Political Science background that I have a more objective viewpoint than the average citizen, especially as I'm more centre left, despite having gone to the University of Calgary, where the modern ideology of the CPC was determined.

What is the most striking element is the increased regionalism because of this whole thing - mostly due to the methods that Harper used to maintain his hold on power. In invoking the words "separtists", he has isolated Quebec and alienated western Canada from the east in general and Quebec and Ontario specifically.

Personally, I view myself as Canadian. Period. I do not identify myself as a Calgarian, or an Alberta. They are places where I live, but if the right job came to me, I would move to several different regions in this country. And guess what - when I was living in Asia, Canadians identify themselves as Canadians, not "Albertans" or "Torontonians" or "Quebecois".

The fundamental failure of the current first-past-the-post system of government in Canada is that it creates regional differences due to the way power is distrubuted. Seats are distributed by attempting to evenly divide the popluation by a set number of seats. So of course Ontario and Quebec get the lion's share. It is unlikely that Alberta, B.C. or any other province will ever catch up to them and even out the distrubution. As a result, regional grievences have arisen due to unequal sharing of power (I'm ignoring the distrubution of wealth through transfer payments). Parties, such as the Bloc Quebecois and the Alliance Party rose up precisly because of the poor distrubtion of power. In the Bloc's case, it was because the Francaphone population felt isolated from English speaking Canada. The Alliance Party, on the other hand, was an attempt to push policies that a significant number of western Canadian's wanted.

With the current crisis, it seems that the calls for separation, either by Quebec, or by people in the west (despite the fact that they are being hypocritical for calling the Bloc as "traitors" because they want to separate) will be a major issue over the holidays. Maybe the next couple of months will calm people down, but I think that the system as it is is breaking.

I personally don't believe that Canada will be able to have a fully functioning government until these issues are addressed. The Canadian public has become to diverse in it opinions and regional interests are trumping national ones. People who have different opinions than the majority in specific regions (say Liberal or Green supporters in Alberta) are totally marginallized by the current system, and my feelings are that the poor showing for voting in elections is precisily because many people feel that their vote has zero influence on who forms the government or which policies are enacted (the $1.95 for the party voted on notwithstanding).

As such I am personally wanting to see Canada move towards a system of proportional representation (PR). While the Liberal Party and the CPC are against PR, because they both dream of regaining majority governments, both the NDP and Green parties support this system. More info about PR can be found at Fair Vote Canada.

If Canadians can push towards this system, I fully believe that a more cooperative and functional government in Canada can be achieved, with all people in Canada being better represented.

Why bother voting again?

Here is a thought for all the people who are arguing that the coalition by the Liberal, NDP and Bloc parties should be voted on (or conversely, that Harper should still be allowed to govern): why bother?

If you take the results from the last election several weeks ago, only 60% of Canadians bothered to vote. Even with the situation as it is, do people really expect the results of the last vote to significantly change? If anything I'd argue that the vote will remain pretty close to what it was.

So, parliament resumes - and it reaches the same point as it currently is at (plus or minus a few seats from each party). It is unlikely that the CPC would gain enough seats to change anything, so again an attempt to form a coalition would occur. All we would've done in this case is wasted another $350 million, and another four to six weeks that could've been used to forumlate plans to manuever the country out financial troubles.

Cellular breakdown

Bell and Telus both announced today that they will be charging their cell phone clients a fee of $0.15 per incoming text message starting in August, which of course, and rightly, created a massive outpouring of complaints on both CBC's and Globe and Mail's online forum.

I'm not going to bother complaining about it here - enough have done so already.

The interesting thing was another story listed on both CBC and CNET about the fact that Apple has essentially turned its back on Roger's days before the release of the IPhone in Canada, apparently in disgust over the pricing of packages that are to be offered to customers.

To me, this indicates that the pricing structures for cellular phones is becoming so out of touch with consumers that the whole system is breaking down. Essentially, all three of the major firms providing nationwide coverage are becoming so hated by consumers in this country, it wouldn't surprise me to see major backlashes in the next few months against the companies. I don't know how it will happen, as mobile communications has become so intrinsicly a part of everyday living that people feel tied to their phones (especially teens), but I think the day of reckoning is coming. Both the federal government and CRTC (those "gaurdians of Canadian cuture") will feel increasing pressure over the fee structures in Canada in the coming months.

While the feds believe that the recent wireless bandwidth auction will allow new entrants into the mobile communications industry, the reality is that many of them are regional networks, and most will take years to fully start up, especially if they must build their own infrastructure.

So, I see two options to resolve this crisis. The first is the separation of infrastructure from service to allow many new entrants in without the crippling cost and time of building a new infrastructure. Better yet, CRTC should dismantle the outdated barriers to that Canada has set up and allow foreign carriers to freely enter the Canadian market.

The next revolution in data

I came across a CNET article today discussing Google's challenges in determing what the user actually wants when searching. We have data. We have search engines that can go through vast amounts of data now and return millions of possibilities. The problem of course is that we are drowning in data and it is getting progressively harder for a user to find things that he/she actually wants while at the same time more problematic for companies and individuals to promote their material/products/services within this morass of information.

One of my main interests in the theoretical side of software and computers for the past few years is trying to figure out how to contextualize a user's search so that relevant information is returned. Then, the user can go through a manageable amount of data to find what is needed. This, I think is the next frontier of data and whoever can pull it off will become incredibly wealthy. Hence why I try and think about it...

My own thoughts is that it will take a number of factors, but it will primarily be a combination of the browser that the user is working with, the search service that it is calling upon and the hardware that the browser relies on:

• The Browser - this will play a key role I think. My guess is that the browser will have to learn what the user is looking for through common search behaviour. For example, in my work I'm often looking for sites & blogs that will solve programming issues that I'm having problems with. Over time, the browser would figure that if I put something like "C#" or "SQL Server" that I'm not looking for training, or wanting to buy products but information specific to programming.
• The Service - the search engine (Google, MSN, Yahoo, or whoever) would need to communicate with the browser to determine what parameters to search from. As such, this would take cooperation from both the search engines and browser manufactures to create a standard API that would not deviate (hello Microsoft - how close to W3C standards is IE?)
• Hardware - I threw this in because location is important in searches, and mobile technology is developing at such a fast pace. Really, unless I specifically state otherwise, searches for things such as restaurants, shopping or tourist areas should be within the context of the current physical location that the device is at. If I want to look up fish, either in a buying for pets or for a seafood market, the search should be looking reasonably close to where I am located - say 100km. This also ties back to the browser learning through past behaviour - if I have been in this location before and looking for restaurant it should default to seafood restaurants.

Finally, meta data will need to be much more strictly controlled, especially for websites. As it is easy to overload/fake meta tags for a website, it is very difficult to really organize data in that way (i.e. the reason behind Google's mysterious search algorithms).

Losing out on the hipster factor

I was reading one of CNET's blogger's posts, which was about the going to a store to buy CDs. As the author noted, this is more and more something which is fading into the past. She then went on to list a number of sites , such as Muxtape, Last FM and The Hype Machine, all of which were new to me, finally destroying my fading claim that was still in the know about new and emerging music trends and fashions (although, as I go through some of these mix tapes on Mux, I've got to say that I have heard the music of most of the artists, even the more obscure ones - a good thing I still listen to CJSW).

I think part of the reason though is just the fact that I've been using the internet for so long - since Netscape 2 in 1994. When a person first starts using the internet, there is a period where one is constantly exploring the vast number of different topics that exist. Nevertheless, after 14 years of using the internet, I've become complacent, only really exploring when need arises (like how does one replace the battery for the key to a Passat?) Being online a lot and dealing with searching for solutions to obscure programming and sys-admin issues, I tend to stick with web pages that I use a lot for information. This of course means that I end of up seeing only a tiny portion of the internet.

Anyway, got to back to exploring these new music sites.

Virtual Server 2005 note

Note to self - VS2005 R2 admin page only works in IE, not FireFox...

The future of democracy?

Another aspect that is becoming clearer as the days go on is the use of networking sites as a quick and to the point method of registering your opinion on a wide range of social, economic and political issues that can arise from obscurity to a big deal with a number of hours. I mentioned the Canadian government backing down against introducing stronger copyright laws yesterday. I've also found a group on Facebook that is protesting the lack of rental controls for the province of Alberta (Alberta now has some of the highest rental rates in Canada).

Will this protest group be noticed by the Alberta government and will it be enough to influence policy? Maybe. But it may be that the federal government's backing down of the copyright laws were coincidental with the creation of the Facebook group - it was after all at the end of the fall sitting for parliament.

Democracy as it is known today is generally through a representative of some type. Direct democracy, although the most pure form is considered impossible and ill-advised. Ill advised because of "tyranny of the majority", but also because of the number of issues which are of low importance to an average citizen and often require the knowledge or experience of a dedicated professional to make an informed choice. And until recently, simultaneous or near simultaneous voting for anything larger than a village or small town was not technically possible.

However, with the modern telecommunications and virtual places that a person can casually drop in on, we have shifted substantially closer to a more pure form of democracy - but only if the politicians are listening...

"It's the end of the world as we know it..."

2008 is shaping up to be an interesting year in terms how society uses industries that rely on Intellectual Property (IP). So far, in just a couple of weeks into the new year, the traditional music recording industry is pretty much dead, the strike by television writers in the U.S. is still going three months later and already causing havoc with tv habits, and Facebook is again causing waves with Hasbro demanding that Facebook remove the Scrabulous application. Further, yesterday Apple's Steve Jobs announced that Apple was going to attempt to move into online download-able movies through its ITunes store.

To me this is interesting - what we have here is the degradation of IP. Essentially, with the digitization of information and the means to rapidly obtain (legally or otherwise) free or nearly free copies of this information, the value of the information has plummeted.

What does this mean for the future? Hard to say. In some ways it is hard to feel sympethetic to many of the effected industries - I mean, what really is the "value" of a recording of music that has millions of copies around the world and can be listened to on the radio, in stores, or in someone's home? Value traditionally is derived from scarcity - but how is mass produced media scarce?

Likewise, Hasbro is making a stink about Scrabulous. Is it directly copied from Scrabble? Without a doubt. However, after more than 40 years on the market, sold around the world, is there really justification for holding the protection on a product that is really very basic - marked tiles and a board with squares on it. (Monopoly is worse in my mind - come on - after 70 odd years, shouldn't it be in the public domain?!).

I suspect there is going to be a revolution in the near future for IP - either courts are going to lock it so tight that use for individuals is tightly restricted, or IP will disappear on items that are meant for mass consumption (this doesn't include patents, although I think that will also need to be modified in the near future if patents are to remain relevant). This is pretty much in evidence after the Canadian government backed down from introducing stricter controls over IP in December after a massive protest group sprung up overnight on Facebook.

I think one result out of all of this will be the hardening of protection of information from being released to the public from government and corporate sources. As such, science fiction writers, in particular William Gibson, was prescient about this - information secrecy will be of utmost importance in the near future for things that are to be kept away from the public's eyes.