Steve Hannah: This week

I have an iPhone with a pretty good data plan through Rogers (6 gigs/mo for $30). No complaints. I generally use under 100 megs per month. I recently bought an iPad but didn’t want to spring for the 3G version because they are trying to make us spend an additional $35/mo for a separate data plan for that unit. My original hope was that I could tether from my iPhone to my iPad so that I could make use of my existing data plan. Well…. they thought of that and disabled tethering intentionally on the iPad. They want to squeeze that additional $35/mo out of us.

No worries, though. For now I’m happy to just use the iPad at home on WiFi.

A second scenario came up this past weekend. I was traveling in the states with friends and I need to have internet access at all times due to my online businesses so I looked into the options that Rogers has for me to be able to use my 3G in the US. For $30 you can get 10 megs!! That means that if I used 100 megs in 5 days (which is entirely likely) it would cost me $300 for 5 days. Get real!

My next idea was to see about getting a sim card from AT&T to use my iPhone on AT&T’s network while I was in the states. AT&T seems to be drinking the same cool-aid as Rogers, however because in order to get 3G with tethering support I needed to sign a 2 year contract at $60/mo with them. Not really worth it for 5 days.

So I walked into Best Buy to see if there were any other solutions available to me. There I discovered the flourishing pay-as-you-go market in the states (that is non-existent in Canada). I was able to buy a Virgin Mobile Hotspot for $150 that generates a WiFi network wherever I am that I can use to access the internet on all of my devices (my 3 friends and I were all able to work online while we travelled down the I5). All I had to do was buy a $20 access card for Virgin which gave me 300 megs of 3G data (more than we needed). And if I ran out I could have just paid another $20 for another 300 megs. If I’m ever traveling in the US now I can just throw $20 on my account and have full internet access wherever I go.

This was an awesome solution so I decided to see if we have anything comparable in Canada.

Lucky me! Rogers sells a MiFi device that is very similar to the Virgin one for only $249. The only thing is that they don’t have any form of pay-as-you go packages. Their cheapest package is $35/mo for 500 megs. Remember that I’m already getting 6 gigs on my iPhone for $30/mo. So for more around twice as much money, I can get less than 10% more usage (when I’m currently only using under 10% of my existing 6 gigs per month).

This is just greed. They offer no solution for me.

So I guess we’re out of luck in Canada. Guess again. A quick search on Google brings up an iPhone app called MyWi which will transform your iPhone in to a wifi hotspot. That way you can run your computer, your iPad, your iPhone, and whatever else you want off of your iPhone’s data package.

Of course Apple doesn’t want you to use this (so it’s not in the App store), and Rogers doesn’t want you to use this. They to milk you for everything you have. No thanks.

I just finished reading “You are not a Gadget - A manifesto” by Jaron Lanier, and I do recommend it for anyone who is interested in the future of our society and how it will include technology. The real meat of this book lies in its middle section where Lanier discusses the challenges that the new Web 2.0 culture (aka the “hive mind”) is imposing on us. Lanier believes that our shift toward aggregation of creative content is destroying the personal creative aspect of our culture which is central to our personhood. In certain sections of this book it almost seems like Lanier is just a Luddite who is afraid of technological change, but the first and last sections of the book are there to remind us that he is far from it - as he is one of the pioneers of virtual reality and still working on the bleeding edge of computational research and development. He is not a luddite - just a creative person who is concerned by the direction that our world is taking - one that marginalizes individual creativity in favor of a hive-mind utopia.

I tend to agree with many of Lanier’s concerns. I am greatly concerned with the culture of “free”, where people believe that they should be able to get everything (digital at least) for free. This is a road to little or no creative development and, ultimately, to the socialization of all creative endeavors (which I believe is a bad thing …. let me know if you need me to connect the dots).

Anyways… I strongly recommend this book. It’s a good read - and a relatively easy one.

I had a recent discussion with a friend who holds some radical views on certain topics. I address 3 specific claims that he made during our discussion.

Claim 1: Roads are completely funded by gas taxes

This claim is really neither here nor there. I believe claims such as this one are made as part of the larger claim that we shouldn’t have to pay income tax.

Now often this claim is not made in reference to any particular country, state, or province, so it it hard to address (because different countries will have different policies on things like this).

Based on the following links it appears that in the United States most of the Fuel tax is applied to the development of roads, but it is not clear whether or not this covers *all* road infrastructure. I have also included 2 links to the BC government website which show that the PST does contribute to the fund to pay for roads in addition to the motor fuel tax.

Since roads are built out of the general budget, it is very hard to track down exactly which monies have been applied to building roads. I consider the point moot as it doesn’t really matter whether the money for our roads come from income tax or gas taxes or both. They come from taxes one way or the other. Of course conservatives who are philosophically opposed to income tax might (certainly would) take a different position on the importance of this point.

http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Provincial_Sales_Tax/about.htm
“… an important source of funding which is used to support British Columbia’s roads, schools, hospitals and other community services.”

http://www.sbr.gov.bc.ca/business/Consumer_Taxes/Motor_Fuel_Tax/mft.htm
“British Columbia’s Motor Fuel Tax is made up of two components: provincial and dedicated taxes. The provincial portion goes to general revenue and helps pay for a wide range of government programs, such as health care and education. The dedicated portion goes to the BC Transportation and Financing Authority, Greater Vancouver Transportation Authority and the BC Transportation Authority
to help finance transportation projects in various parts of the province.”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_tax
“In the United States, the fuel tax receipts are often dedicated or hypothecated to transportation projects so that the fuel tax is considered by many a user fee. In other countries, the fuel tax is a source of general revenue.”

http://www.austincontrarian.com/austincontrarian/2009/05/do-roads-pay-for-themselves.html
“State motor fuel tax is collected from all over the state and goes into a single pool of revenue—about one quarter of which goes to fund education, and about three-quarters of which goes to the state’s highway fund, where it is spent on transportation uses and some non-transportation functions of government.

Then the state receives federal funds as the state’s share of the federal fuel tax; about 70 cents of every gas tax dollar Texans send to Washington comes back for road use.”

Claim 2: Income Tax Unconstitutional

I’ve heard this one a few different times from a few different people so I thought it might actually have legs. If you do a search on Google you’ll surely run across this short essay by a man who is convinced of the unconstitutionality of income tax:

http://www.prolognet.qc.ca/clyde/tax.htm
This author argues that income tax is unconstitutional and thus is illegal in Canada. He cites sections of the BNA (British North America Act) which he claims prohibits the fedreal government from imposing direct taxation on its individuals. He also cites the case of a deceased Manitoba resident named Gerry Hart, who allegedly avoided paying income tax for 50 years and won all of his 22 court cases against revenue Canada when they attempted to retrieve the money.

When I decided to look into the case of Gerry Hart, I found this page:

http://www.ownlife.com/tax/cases.htm

This page lists a number of court cases in Canadian history where individuals have attempted to fight income tax. In all cases, the courts upheld that the federal government CAN indeed charge income tax. In addition this page addressed the claims about Gerry Hart:

“the legend appeared in the Michael Journal, a somewhat religious newspaper produced in Quebec and distributed, for free, throughout Canada.

No case has been published which involved the making, by Gerry Hart or his company (Hart Electronics Limited), of a successful argument that the federal Income Tax Act is unconstitutional.”

So this claim appears to be a myth.

Claim 3: You don’t need a driver’s license or insurance to drive a car.

When the claim was made, the claimant did not know whether this was limited to a particular jurisdiction or if it was for any jurisdiction in the British Commonwealth. A little bit of Google searching has answered the question:

1. This is a debatable issue in the United States.
2. In Canada there is no debate.

In Canada it is clear that there no such “right to travel”. Driving is a privilege, NOT a right (http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/): “Section 31. Driving a privilege:”

The United States situation is far more convoluted and it owes to its tumultuous history.

If you do a search on Google for “Right to travel” you’ll discover a slough of websites that are run by “patiots” and “freedom fighters”. You’ll almost always find that these sites are linked to, or contain information about, conspiracy theories such as the NWO or FEMA death camps. All of these sites are showing the same information and citing the same sources to argue that Driving is a right that is protected under the constitution of the United states (under the section of life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness) as a right and not a privilege. They all cite a number of court cases to support their point, but the main court case that gives this position legs is the supreme court case Thompson vs. Smith, 154 SE 579 where they quote:
“The Right of the Citizen to travel upon the public highways and to transport his property thereon, either by horse drawn carriage or by automobile, is not a mere privilege which a city can prohibit or permit at will, but a common Right which he has under the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

If you dig you can even find a pre-filled afidavit on which you can fill in your name and state to present to the court to declare that you don’t need to have a driver’s license in order to drive. (http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf)

Now this has not been tested in court recently (as far as I can tell in the past 60 years) so I would suspect that these arguments would hold any water in a court these days. There was a case in 1986 where someone tried to argue similarly and lost (http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html - 03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port), but the ameteur commentators insist that she simply made mistakes in her arguments.

I could not find any reputable sources that even commented on the issue. This yahoo answers thread (http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH) contained a decent response:

“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.

You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road - like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.

As you present in Boggs - “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”

Any reasonable person must realize that licenses are important for public safety. This is one major reason for the disagreements between the left and the right in the states. Many from the south are fixated on individual rights to the exclusion of consideration to how those rights affect others. That is where these types of bogus arguments come from. I mean, really!

Refernces:
http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/39244

http://www.landrights.com/The%20Charles%20Sprinkler%20File.htm

http://www.scribd.com/doc/7547746/27D10Notice-to-Travel-Without-License-Notary-Letter

http://wgns.net/LegalResearch/PDF/AFFIDAVITS/Aff-RighttoTravel.pdf
This one is particularly entertaining:

http://www.stormfront.org/forum/sitemap/index.php/t-18216.html
(03/27/86 The City of Spokane, v. Julie Anne Port)

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080825104610AA0HxeH
“This question gets asked and asked and asked here. There are also many many many court opionions that have addressed what you have asked. The Constitution does not address flying planes without a license or hacking into someone’s computer. Doesn’t mean you can though. The Constitution is a guideline that is continually interpreted by the Supreme Court.

You have a legal right to drive. On the cases you list, you gloss over statements the court makes like may not prohibit AT WILL or WITHOUT DUE PROCESS. State and federal government cannot deprive you of the right to drive “just becase”. They can, however, enact laws that protect the rights of every driver on the road - like making sure a 5 year old isn’t behind the wheel, or that someone who is legally blind is not behind the wheel, or requiring licenses and registrations so that if you are in an accident there is a way for you to seek reimbursement, to put up toll booths to pay for road construction, to ensure that cars being driven have passed inspection so that wheels don’t come flying off cars, to put up traffic signals so there is order to traffic flow, etc.

As you present in Boggs - “statutes that violate…..common right and common reason are null and void”. It is obviously common right and common reason to set up a system to regulate traffic and drivers. It is not a violation of this right to require that you stop at stop signs, drive at reasonable speeds, lose your license for driving while intoxicated, etc. If states did not require this, other people on the road would be deprived of “life liberty and the pursuit of happiness”.”

http://www.uslawbooks.com/travel/travelcites.htm

http://www.bcrevolution.ca/bc_court_of_appeal.htm
http://fightyourtickets.ca/law/right-to-drive/

I recently purchased the latest Indiana Jones DVD. As expected it contains a couple of documentaries about the making of the movie containing interviews with the cast and crew.

In watching the interviews I spotted two red flags that indicate where the cancer began to eat away at this movies chances to reach its potential.

1. George Lucas said that he wanted to change the genre from the 1930’s serials to the 1950’s alien sci-fi’s. He thought that this would be a nice parallel since the originals took place in the 30’s and this one takes place in the 50’s.

Perhaps the next movie can be a 1960’s musical a la Mary Poppins. This would be the perfect parallel since it will take place in the 1960’s.

2. Stephen Spielberg said that he didn’t want to do anything new with this film as it should be a blood relative of the original trilogy. He just wanted to make a nice movie for the fans to relive the originals.

This apparently flies in the face of what George Lucas was trying to do with the genre switch (and the friction was evident in the interviews), but more importantly it makes it sound like Spielberg handcuffed himself going into the flick. The thing that made the originals great were that they captivated the imagination of the viewer, and this is due, in large part, to the creative genius of Stephen Spielberg. So if he goes into the movie with the mindset that he doesn’t want to do anything new, he is necessarily leaving the creative genius that made the first films great in the storage locker.

I just finished watching the special features for the latest Indiana Jones movie. Apparently George Lucas wanted to call the movie “Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men”

This man is a marketing and literary genius!

I watched Rocky III for the first time in 1983. I was 4 years old. I watched Rocky III for the one hundredth time in 1983. I was 4 years old.

The Rocky series captured the drama potential that exists in the sport of boxing in a way that even a 4-year-old can appreciate. When you transition from the Hollywood into the real-world sport of boxing, however, the drama becomes much more subtle, and scarce. One has to be selective about the fights that he watches, lest he become engulfed in oceans of boring bouts between mediocre fighters. I generally only watch the fights that are broadcast on HBO. This is a form of personal quality control and it raises the likelihood of a fight being exciting from 1% up to about 35%. Still, it is seldom in real boxing to see the level of drama that the Rocky series conveyed.

Despite these low odds, I am still drawn to boxing for the potential of drama. I enjoy the thrill of seeing two undefeated champions go head to head (e.g. Oscar De La Hoya vs Felix Trinidad). I hope for my aging heroes to be able to turn back the clock, if only for a night, and reclaim their former form to defeat a younger rising star. Muhammad Ali’s defeat of a younger, stronger favorite George Foreman is one example of drama that exceeded the manufactured drama of Hollywood.

On Saturday night, Bernard Hopkins brought some more genuine drama to the Ring. At 43 years old it looked like he didn’t have much left to offer, based on his previous couple of fights in which he made his opponents look awkward but didn’t offer much offense himself. On Saturday, against middleweight champion Kelly Pavlik, however, he looked like a finely tuned and youthful boxing master. He completely schooled and dismantled Pavlik, leaving him in bewilderment of what had happened.

Prior to the fight Pavlik was undefeated, and was (and still is) a rising star in the sport. He had recorded two decisive victories over Jermain Taylor, who had defeated Hopkins twice a couple of years ago to take the middleweight title which Hopkins had held for a record ten years. Pavlik was a 4-to-1 favorite to beat Hopkins. The only question was whether he could knock Hopkins out. What actually happened was very different. Hopkins owned every round and, by about the fourth round, the question became whether Hopkins could knock Pavlik out.

Watching this fight reminded me of why I enjoy the sport of boxing. It can be seen as an allegory for life. You can watch a young prospect come of age, gain skill, face challenges and climb to the top of the proverbial mountain. Within a few short years, however, you are forced to watch this same prospect begin to diminish with age and be overtaken by the shadow of what he once was. But once in a while you get to witness a blazingly beautiful sunset to cap a great career and peel away the shadows that must ultimately prevail. I believe I watched such a sunset on Saturday with Hopkins’ brilliant performance.

I hope the sun never completely sets on Hopkins, but knowing that it must, I hope that it lasts at least a few more years.

I have been living in pain for the past 5 years or so. Recently it has gotten so bad that I can’t sleep, sit, or watch TV without feeling like there is a vice tightening around my rib cage.

Thankfully the last X-ray has allowed the Doctor to give me a tentative diagnosis. Apparently I have arthritis. Specifically, Ankylosing spondylitis. Read more about the condition on wikipedia.

The really good news is that the good doctor has prescribed some anti-inflammatory pills to get help stop the inflammation of my spine.

Wow! What a difference. When I’m on these meds, I’m like a new man. No back pain … for the first time in 5 years. No more limping, and crying out in agony whenever I need to roll over in bed.

Bring on the roller hockey. Bring on the football. Bring on .. whatever. I’m back!

Hi had the pleasure to behold two boxing greats go toe to toe on Saturday night: Roy Jones Jr. and Felix (Tito) Trinidad. Jones, in his prime was arguably the greatest boxer of all-time, with a brilliantly unorthodox style, lightning fast punches, and absolute control over his opponents. A few years ago he decided to challenge John Ruiz for the Heavyweight championship, for which he gained about 30 lbs.

He, of course, defeated Ruiz and captured the crown, however, it spelled the end of the greatness that we had come to expect from Jones. The problem, apparently was that he had to lose the 30 lbs he had gained in order to defend his Light-heavyweight crown. This took a toll on Jones’ body and left him a mere shadow of his former self. Going into the Trinidad fight on Saturday, he had lost 3 of his last 5 fights, with 2 of those losses by devastating knock-outs.

Saturday gave us glimpses of Jones’ former self as he demonstrated good speed and ring generalship, especially for his 39 years. He handily defeated the 35 year old Trinidad, who himself is a great boxer and former champion. One thing that stuck out to me during the fight was how Jones’ stamina is not what it used to be. He would fight for 45 seconds to 1 minute per round, and rest for the remaining 2 minutes. This may be acceptable for an aging and rusty opponent like Trinidad, but it would spell disaster against the current top contenders such as Joe Calzaghe, whose youth and energy would result in a sustained onslaught that Jones surely would not survive.

Don’t get me wrong. Jones still appears to have the tools to beat the best in the game. He just doesn’t have the stamina. In watching his actions in and out of the ring it almost looks like he has mono. In any case, I would love to see Jones rise to greatness one last time and face the best in the division - but only if I can solve his stamina problem. I don’t think I can bear to watch another Holmes-Ali fight where a hero gets dismantled.

This was just posted on my fun wall. I wonder how many people they had to interview to get this footage. It is solid gold!

I picked up the latest James Blunt CD last night at HMV. His first album took me by surprise and held the top spot in my collection for a while. There is no jinx for this sophomore as his second album is just as moving as the first. Somehow he finds a way to sing directly from his soul and grip me with the melodies. Unlike a lot of modern songwriters, he doesn’t write to merely rhyme. He is a true poet. I recommend this one if you have the opportunity to take a look. 10 solid tracks.