Forms of Communication Kids now prefer to communicate through Social Networking sites like Facebook and Myspace. Only after they have become familiar with another person through these methods and maybe even meeting them in RL will they begin Texting with them. Texting can either be via IM or SMS/MMS. It is then a big deal for the person to then go to a voice call with another person. This is typically reserved only for family, best friends or boy/girl friends.

So in the new generation of communications, how does a carrier fit into this formula? How does it tie the social networks, texting, and voice communications together in a seamless mix? How do we integrate all forms of communications into multiple devices?

Mobility:
First off it is typically the Carriers that own the mobile networks as well as the handsets that work on those networks. So, even though the carriers may not own all the server side of the communications network it can still integrate these forms of communication by enabling the mobile handsets to easily work with Social Networking sites as well as texting and voice calling.
  ¶ 2:03 PM 1 comments

  What are the Goals of our Civilization? I always sit down and have these debates about what is right, what is wrong, liberal vs conservative, republican vs democrat, where is our world headed, should we be in Iraq, etc. Many times I lose my way in these arguements. If I had a roadmap or a context in which these debates took place I feel like I would have a much better handle on things. Not only would I feel more secure myself in the view I was proposing, but I would feel like I could support the view much stronger.

It may just be my architecture/strategy background but I think in order to provide a context we must start very big. What is it that we are here for? Over the years I have figured out that we are here for our kids. The need to procreate is so strong in us. It becomes an obligation for us to sustain our species. As an evolutionary arguement, this makes total sense. The species that is best able to reproduce itself is the one that will have the most success. I can't say that humans will win the evolutionary war but I can say we are a contender.

So step one of our goals is that we need to reproduce. This goal we seem to have accomplished rather specatularly. So well in fact that many countries and organizations try to limit the number of childern a family has. (There is another story in here about what these controls do to our society). However, in order to achieve this goal we had to go through a lot of other steps. As our mothers taught us, there are 5 needs we have to have to survive: Food, Shelter, Water, Clothing and Air. The more we have of each of these items the more secure we are. When we feel secure in our basic needs our population can flourish.

What has been the path for Western Civilization though to get us to this point where, in general, we no longer worry about our basic needs? We have built a global society, gone through an Industrial age and on into an amorphous information age. We have become addicted to energy and our prime sources of energy are fossil fuels.

So we no longer have to worry about immediate needs for us to carry on our species. We need to look at things that are much further out there, while at the same time keeping check to ensure that we as a society don't do something terribly stupid to kill us all off. We are in the enviable position of not only having the intelligence to plan strategically, but having the time, food, and money necessary for us to get our heads above water long enough to look around and figure out the best direction for us to swim.

So where should humanity be heading now? One of the things we have done on our way to getting us into this great position we find ourselves in now, is create a nearly global society. Western Civilization is rapidly encompassing the world. As it does so we will see much of our diversity wiped out. Many civilizations that have adapted themselves to different enviroments will be folded in to our single society. Over the course of a few generations they will almost cease to exist.

Many people in our society worry about us extinguishing different species in our environment. We need to be careful about what we do with our own species, and how we plan for it. There are still quite a few societies in the world but rapidly they are forming a single race. Are we putting ourselves at risk by going to a single society? If so how do we fix it?

We have just watch New Orleans get destroyed by a Hurricane. Our whole society, in fact, our whole planet is every bit as fragile. The entire nation is saying that New Orleans should have been protected long ago from this threat. What are we doing to protect us from even larger threats?

I believe that Protection and Diversity are two goals that we need to have as a species. I'm sure there are others. Please add comments or posts to say what you think they may be.

Once we have a few goals defined we can start looking at what it takes to achieve these goals and how those actions need to dictate our everyday decisions.  ¶ 2:29 PM 1 comments

  First Real Post (pretty lame) I figure one of the ways to create ideas is to just read through the paper and see what some of the latest news is. I was doing this today and came across an article that I immediately questioned. The headline was: U.S. Health-care costs per person highest in the world.

My immediate thought was "so what?". Of course we have the highest per capita health-care. We also have the best heath care. You get what you pay for.

The article said we pay 50% more than the next highest country. This sounds like a lot more, but I was still skeptical.

The article then goes on to say that things most people might think about such as malpractice insurance to completely explain the gap. In fact, malpractice premiums can only explain about 1% of the gap. They also said that physicians tend to order more tests than they need to just to protect themselves against malpractice suits, but this only accounts for another 9%.

I still contend that you get what you pay for and that we get better healthcare than any other country. I've talked with other people in other countries and most of them have complaints about the quality of their healthcare. I believe that in the US, our only real complaint is about the cost of our healthcare. To me that seems like a better problem to have.

I get tired of all the socialized medicine pressures. When I talk to people in the UK, Canada, or Australia, they all complain that they cannot get the help they need when they need it. The fact that it is free helps them a little bit, but what they really need is the healthcare and its not there for them. I have also heard from these people that when they do get their operations that it is not what they were hoping for. The quality does not seem to be as great as it is here.

Anyway... I'll through this out as a first post. Hopefully, I'll get some more time and some more ideas later, so we can have some more thought provoking discussions.  ¶ 4:23 PM 2 comments