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2 Great Tales of "Out of the Box Thinking"
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Found
- Hits: 1502
Not exactly what you'd expect to find in the "Treasure" category, 2 tales of master criminals and their "successful" operations. The Antwerp Diamond Heist and a local boy from Winnipeg, both done very well. Inspiring, if only as a reminder that not everyone lives in the same box that I do. And - regarding the bank thief Gerald Blanchard - the difference between bank robbers and bank officials is only one of hours and clothing. The official does less, on a better schedule and in a suit - than does the thief.
Courtesy of Wired.com:
Link: The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist
Link: Art of the Steal: On the Trail of World’s Most Ingenious Thief
Usage Based Billing
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2887
Having had this argument with a right winged customer, who states that usage-based internet billing is a good thing - after all, why should he subsidize his neighbors downloading of porn/playing games, etc.?
Which makes sense. Except that it's not a subsidy. If, for example, your ISP sets a bandwidth cap of, say, 350 GigaBytes, above which you'll pay a penalty or fine or simply an additional charge - what of all those people who barely use the internet - say, visiting websites and downloading 350 MB per month - will they be then billed 4.5 Cents per month as opposed to the $45.00 everyone else pays?
Or say they block all images from their browser - text-only based internet - why, it wouldn't be unreasonable to then lower your bill to 2 or 3 cents a year - will the ISP's be doing that?
Shaw? Not bloody likely.
And consider the rise of technology over the past 10 years - 10 years ago 350 MegaBytes would have been "heavy Internet Usage". Now it's 350 GigaBytes. In 10 years what will it be? 350 Terabytes? And what will the bills look like, locked in with a 350 GigaByte limit....
The Cable Companies are kicking themselves over lost revenue.
Part of it is simply greed - get as much as you can and hope people stew in their ignorance and just pay. And some of it is to try and recoup the losses they're taking by such providers as Netflix, who offer a flat monthly fee to watch as many of their films as you want - a great business model, but one that puts the cable monopoly of $5.00 Pay Per View movies to shame. That is, if you consider $10 million dollar salaries "Losses", which, next to American Banks, only the cable companies would have the audacity to argue.
Cemetary in London
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Dreams
- Hits: 1694
(Woke up at 7:00 AM, weird dreams, jotted some notes. Going to read them this is what I find: London, Open Graves, Cars, Chop, Cemetery, bare knuckle fighting, hands, tented...almost all meaningless now.... What I remember is...)
It's dusk and I'm in an old car with (??) and 2 dogs in a Cemetery. The graves are fallen into ruin and sunken into the earth, you can get glimpses of the underworld through them, we're driving around and we have to hurry, there's a skeletal nun above one of the graves, a gatekeeper of sort, when the sun sets all the dead will have risen and we understand that they have to protect their graveyard and so we hurry. We find what we're looking for: a dead grey squirrel, pick it up and throw it towards a cleft in some rocks where it slips out of sight, into the underworld...and then we leave....
Waste Land - Vik Muniz
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Film
- Hits: 1879
A charming documentary about Vic Muniz and his time in Brazil creating portraits of the "pickers" out of trash. On for a limited engagement at the Plaza Theatre in Kensington. Delightful.
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