Etiquette questions:

Are non-technical questions appropriate? I asked one, and am now not sure if I should have.

Is it bad manners to reply to replies to ones own question, clarifying the question or other type of discussion?

I suspect these will come out over time, but it is always interesting seeing how a community reacts to new discussion forums.

I haven't read the background yet, but I'm curious about the whole area of trust.

There are some tasks we can work on collectively when we are anonymous, or where there is a web of trust (I trust you, you trust Sam, so I can for the purposes of this project trust Sam).

There are other tasks where anonymity is a major problem -- any online discussion about politics that doesn't enforce authenticity tends towards utter uselessness. I disagree that anonymous speech is legitimate political speech, and believe we should never make decisions in that type of environment.

The difference between the wisdom or stupidity of a crowd seems to depend on the nature of the question, and how transparent/accountable the members of the community are to each other.

I like the overall format, and hope you don't change to much. I liked both the half-hour and full-hour versions.

I like that it's not a gadget show (I go to TWIT.tv for that), and focuses on how technology affects our lives. Please don't get into "new technology" for its own sake (one person suggested that above).

On the social-sciences side of technology I would love to see more law, politics, and global issues.

Law is obvious: both how the law regulates technology and how people using technology is impacting how laws are created and enforced (should twitter be illegal in the courtroom?) Law may not seem sexy, but this more than any natural sciences may impact the roll technology will play in our future. There are many cool folks at the Technology Law program at University of Ottawa to interview on a variety of hot topics (Michael Geist, but not only Michael Geist).

There are also many impacts outside of western countries that would be interesting to look at, putting the things Canadians think about into a broader perspective.

I love the long-form interviews, and listen to both the unedited versions and how they are then fit into the weekly show. Feel free to just chat with cool people for as long as you want, even if only a few minutes make it to the show. I often feel like I missed out on something amazing when you have an interview clip in the show but didn't post the unedited version.

Panels would also be interesting -- to interview people with different perspectives on a single issue, and introduce audiences to some of these differences.

Rather than hosting events it may be interesting to attend and then report the Spark perspective on what was discussed. That may be a budget thing, and cool conversations will cool people is more interesting than going places.

Some mixtures of corporate policies don't make sense. I've been on client sites that had filtered Internet, but also mandated that everyone use Microsoft Office, Outlook and Internet Explorer on the desktop. Due to ongoing incompatibilities with some cheap desktop applications they didn't keep security patches for these exposed applications up-to-date and often had versions that were 6 or higher months out of date. It's not wise to run unpatched Microsoft software too many days past a patch-Tuesday.

Filtering Web traffic at the firewall seems silly when you allow PDF files to be attached in email, and not only allow but mandate people use the Adobe Acrobat reader to read them. With recent versions of Windows finally having some security built in, and people moving away from IE and Outlook, Adobe is becoming the larger attack surface.

A quick note to say there are mockups of Google's vision for an Android tablet.

While Google doesn't themselves lock their OS, some of the third party companies shipping Android based devices do (See SlashDot story about Rogers infected phones). While you get a similar simplified/fast touch interface as you would with an iPad, you have better opportunities for people who want to actually purchase and control their own devices.

Seems like something too much in the early days, and I suspect early adopters will get burned.

When listening to people talking about email being read by the company owners, I smiled. I'm currently on contract with Agriculture Canada and all my work emails are available under ATIP request.

"Yes, Mac OS-X can only be installed on iMacs."

Just remember that this is not a technological limitation, but a legal limitation lobbied for by Apple. They abuse anti-circumvention and other aspects of "Copyright" to disallow people from installing legally purchased copies of this OS on hardware of their choice.

While it should be their right to waive any warranty if installed on unsupported hardware, it is wrong for the law to be changes to protect this level of excessive control by (in this case) a software vendor.

Not sure who you were responding to, but if it was me then you misunderstood my critique.

Apple's abstracting the details and giving people clean software and content options isn't an issue, and for many people is a very good thing. See the earlier discussion on cloud computing, and how for many people outsourcing IT decisions is a good (and often necessary) thing. If not clear, I think iTunes is a great idea (ignoring the DRM aspects for the moment).

The point is that the customer/citizen needs to understand that they are outsourcing IT and other decisions, and need to know that they must trust the vendor they are granting all the control to. People intrinsically understand this relationship with Google because of the physical location of the computer and hard disk (apps run on Google's premises), but they misunderstand the relationship with Apple because the computing resources appear to be in their possession.

My discussions with relevant policy and legal people has lead me to believe that in the case of Apple this relationship obfuscation is deliberate. It is this obfuscation and their lobbying for specific anti-property-rights government policy which is why I suggest they are acting like an "Evil Empire or anti-freedom".

Your car analogy is telling: The issue here is a vendor that is actively working with the government to make it illegal for you to drive your own car, or even hold the keys and get into it without their permission. This isn't at all about seatbelts or nitro, or even speed limits.

*smiles*

I'm not paranoid, just possibly a little older than some of the Apple fans here. I remember when Apple copied the WIMP (Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointer) interface from Xerox and made it more mainstream commercially successful. I remember when Microsoft came around and copied it again, but was a far more open platform so developers moved from Apple to Microsoft.

At that time (and this is only the 1980's) few gave Microsoft much attention, and would never have predicted the influence this company would have on the industry. The rest was, as they say, history.

(Back then I was an Amiga fan, and thus never really got emotionally invested in any of the tech companies that survived into the 1990's)

I agree with you that what Apple is doing is potentially a game changer. Where we might disagree about is whether this is for the better or for the worse.

I don't need to use (or be used by) the gadget to contemplate its impact, as I don't think the most relevant impact has anything to do with what you can see or touch on its surface.

I have spent a lot of time in the last decade discussing these issues with other citizens, authors, lawyers, politicians and government bureaucrats. The conversations I have participated in over that decade would give anyone reason to be concerned. I realise many are looking only at the shiny surface of this device (most only having seen pictures) and haven't been in these policy meetings, which is why I'm trying to let people know about what is going on behind the scenes.

Re: Competition.

While Apple is one of the worst offenders, and exists in a distortion field where its fans get angry at you if you mention the emperor has no cloths, they are not alone. This is why gradual changes in what people are willing to accept trouble me.

A few days ago I was pointed to an article on SlashDot talking about Rogers imposing a Rogers-manipulated/infected firmware change on Android users -- including those with unsubsidised phones.

It is disturbing to me that I didn't hear much about this elsewhere the media. This wouldn't be the case if the same thing were happening outside of digital technology.

Say the phone company said that as a condition of providing phone service you needed to give them a copy of the key to your home. That way they could come in any time without your permission to "fix" any problems with the phone service (and anything else they felt like doing in your home while they are there).

People would be rightly upset and if the policy was pushed it would end up in the courts and parliaments with laws clarified and/or passed against the practise pretty quickly.

But if you do this with digital technology you get piles of apologists claiming that there is no problem -- or to just switch vendors. They remain unconcerned about the gradual social and legal trend towards accepting the unacceptable.

I suspect it has something to do with the immaturity in societies thinking about digital technology. The problem is that some pretty nasty social behaviour might become commonplace before people have a chance to understand the repercussions.