My lastest column (in my nom-de-gaming guise as Raphia Naon) on news from the Guild Wars 2 world is now up at GuildMag.com.
January 6, 2012
This week in Guild Wars 2
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Weird local story gets a bit weirder
In Pickering, about 20 kilometres west of here, the regional police found that an abandoned home had been modified to add a “confinement room”. It’s in a fairly secluded area, so there were no immediate leads to who had made the modifications or who (if anyone) had been confined in it. Today, the National Post reported that the “dungeon house” has burned to the ground:
An abandoned Pickering farmhouse that was found to have padlocked dungeon in its basement burned to the ground early Friday morning, adding an unexpected twist to an already bizarre police investigation.
A fire broke out at 140 Concession Rd. 7 outside of Pickering shortly after midnight and soon consumed the desolate building where police had been carrying out an investigation.
[. . .]
Before the blaze, police were trying to determine who built the “confinement-style” room with padlocks affixed to the very thick door, discovered in late November when crews went in to assess the building that had been scheduled for demolition.
Police said the house was last occupied in 2006, but the room was new — believed to have been built within the last year or two.
“I can’t get into what was in the room, but the way it was constructed — the time and effort put into it and the materials used — clearly indicated it was a room designed to hold somebody in,” Durham Regional Police Detective Darren Short said last month.
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Michael Geist: help save Canada’s liberal public domain rules
Canada’s standards for when works enter the public domain are more liberal than those in the US and Europe (that is, we provide shorter — but still generous — periods of copyright protection). Michael Geist says that these standards may be at risk soon:
Canada celebrated New Year’s Day this year by welcoming the likes of Ernest Hemingway and Carl Jung into the public domain just as European countries were celebrating the arrival of James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, 20 years after both entered the Canadian public domain. Canada’s term of copyright meets the international standard of life of the author plus 50 years, which has now become a competitive advantage when compared to the United States, Australia, and Europe, which have copyright terms that extend an additional 20 years (without any evidence of additional public benefits).
In an interesting coincidence, the Canadian government filed notice of a public consultation on December 31, 2011 on the possible Canadian entry into the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations, trade talks that could result in an extension in the term of copyright that would mean nothing new would enter the Canadian public domain until 2032 or beyond. The TPP covers a wide range of issues, but its intellectual property rules as contemplated by leaked U.S. drafts would extend the term of copyright, require even stricter digital lock rules, restrict trade in parallel imports, and increase various infringement penalties. As I noted last month, if Canada were to ratify the TPP, it would require another copyright bill to undo much of what the government is about to enact with Bill C-11.
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Paul Wells: Harper has big plans for 2012 … maybe
Yes, it’s the constantly threatening hidden agenda!
What does Stephen Harper want to do with his parliamentary majority? “I want to make sure that we use it,” he told CTV’s Lisa LaFlamme in a year-end interview. “You know, I’ve seen too many majority governments, the bureaucracy talks them into going to sleep for three years, and then they all of a sudden realize they’re close to an election.”
[. . .]
You don’t have to like this list. I’m not saying Harper’s predecessors were heroes. I am saying they were not sleeping. If the Prime Minister’s comments have any meaning, he must have something up his sleeve at least as big as those accomplishments. If he doesn’t, he won’t be the first politician to congratulate himself for his achievements before he fails to achieve them.
His interviews suggest Harper plans something big. Four times during his CTV interview, and once with the Chinese-language Fairchild network, he used the adjective “major” to describe his plans for 2012.
[. . .]
It’s striking how rarely Harper sounds bold when any discussion descends from slogans to details. Take foreign policy. On Syria, he pleads the lack of a Security Council resolution. On Egypt: “We’ll try and do what we can do to encourage stability and encourage the forces of democracy, but we don’t go into these things blind. There are some very real risks.”
A policy of bold action only where success is assured is a policy of offering help where none is needed. It is a bold decision to join others’ victory parades. There is nothing major about it.
Incidentally, the bureaucrats I talk to aren’t plotting to put Harper to sleep. On the contrary. Many wonder whether this government will wake up. One of Ottawa’s most experienced civil servants tells me the widespread belief is that Harper’s government is so obsessed with each morning’s headlines that it cannot plan. This official predicts a year of high-level early retirements from the civil service if Harper does not start using his majority.
Ten years later: Ron Paul’s 2002 predictions
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A dinosaur mating ritual: Microsoft rumoured to be buying Nokia’s smartphone division
ESR has the scoop:
Just when you thought the smartphone industry couldn’t get any more soap-operatic, everybody’s favorite pair of aging drama queens — Microsoft and Nokia — may be at it again. There’s a rumor, from a gossip with a good track record, that Microsoft intends to buy Nokia’s Smartphone division.
Inexplicably, there are even some people writing about the rumor who think this might even be a good idea. I mean, a good idea for Microsoft. It probably really would be a good idea for Nokia — they’d get shut of their idiotic alliance with Redmond and unload a crappy, chronically underperforming division for a pile of cash (the rumormonger says $19 billion).
But for Microsoft? Nokia’s brand strength was probably the only thing keeping Windows-phone share as high as 5.2%. It hasn’t been Microsoft’s software doing it, that’s for sure. Botched upgrades and a pathetically weak app ecosystem have only been the most obvious problems.
If Microsoft bought Nokia’s smartphone division, they’d mismanage it into smoking rubble within two years. “But wait, Eric…” I hear you cry, “they haven’t done too badly with the X-Box!” Quite right they haven’t — but that’s because Microsoft runs that division as a cash generator, mostly hands off.
Smartphones, on the other hand, are strategic. That means that if Microsoft buys itself a smartphone division, Steve Ballmer’s going to poke his prong into it. Repeatedly. To, um, what’s the B-school jargon? “Maximize the synergies”. They might even be treated to more demented-monkey ranting. Two years. Smoking rubble.
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