There has been a phenomenal amount of information in the newspapers about the US debt ceiling and the concept of a default.  A lot of people don’t realise that the way a currency works is surprisingly straightforward.  You may remember that in 2008 the Lehman Brothers investment bank filed for bankruptcy which caused the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).  The GFC in a nutshell was caused by banks being so afraid that they would have to pay a debt caused by or as a result of the Lehman bankruptcy that they refused to lend their cash to business.

Sitting in the train I was reading through some tweets when one really grabbed my attention.  Basically denigrating someone for putting a “thanks” after a post which has helped them, demanding they do something more meaningful.  Take a step back for a moment and lets look at why someone posts.  You certainly aren’t likely to get rich by blogging or answering forum questions, so why do it?  My favourite website has incorporated game play and achievements into their system to encourage and years those who contribute.  So do people play to win?  Of course they do!

WINNAR

I’ve just purchased my new Samsung Galaxy S (SGS) and I’ve been playing round with it for a few weeks and thought I’d share a few thoughts with you about it.  This is my first ever Android phone, although I have drooled over several of the Android phones that my friends have had.  Purchasing the SGS was an extremely close race between this, the HTC Legend and the HTC Desire.  I would have actually bought the Desire if I actually trusted Telstra and they had a choice between $49 and $79 plans.  When I saw the plan Optus was offering ($0 upfront, $59 a month for $450 of calls, unlimited SMS and 1GB of data) I just couldn’t resist.  Add to that Optus’ awesome deal on insurance, $7.99/month for absolutely any accidental damage.  I love my wife very much but that $7.99 is an excellent investment. I’ll caveat this review with the fact that my previous phone was an iPhone, but I have workmates with N9000s, HTC Desires and HD2s so I do have an objective view.

For those of you that don’t know, I am a professional engineer. I make a living in the technology industry by developing products and utilizing technology. So I think I have earned at least the right to a controversial opinion regarding patent law as my future will be directly affected by any changes in this arena. I’ll start with a quick lesson in law regarding patent. A patent gives the owner the rights to control their innovation in any way they see fit and provides a legal means for enforcing violations of the patent through the courts. Via several international agreements the world intellectual property office (WIPO) has been created which many countries have agreed to honour and enforce, which registers relatively international patents (not all countries honour WIPO patents), with certain member countries being lax in enforcement of these patents.

I ran into an issue regarding encapsulation of one or more threads within an object. Basically I had refactored out a set of cross cutting concern logic into nice clean classes which had good coherency and made sense, storing only state appropriate to the function provided. There were minimal requirements for communication between these classes, with each object having a polling function (talking to non event driven hardware) which was called on a regular basis. Rather than have the code new the object, kick off a thread and manage it by looping and calling a polling function, I decided to encapsulate the functionality into the class itself.

I would be the first person to say that child exploitation is an abhorrent practice which needs to be stopped. The criminals and perverts who peddle child pornography should be locked away where they can be exploited themselves. Unfortunately as technology has evolved, these predators have turned to the Internet to peddle their pedophilia, so we as a society have a responsibility to do something about this.

Enter The Honorable Stephen Conroy Senator, Minister for Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy. Before I continue let me say that I am not a fanatical zealot with regards to Senator Conroy. I fervently disagree with his censorship policy for many reasons but I believe he should be lauded for his efforts to break the vertical integration and monopolisation of Telstra, possibly the worst privatisation in Australian history short of Quantas, the discussion of which I’ll leave for another time. Please read what I am writing with an open mind and take my arguments on their merits.