Why a Google self-driving car worries me

Ford With Google and Ford announcing they will team up to make self-driving cars, I have some concerns.    I’m not in Luddite position on the idea of self-driving cars. Potentially, they can be far safer than what we have today. I see so many godawful drivers out there—New Zealand has a very high road […]

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Autocade reaches 7,000,000 page views, growing at its quickest rate

I was surprised to see that Autocade managed its 7,000,000th viewer some time this month, five months after the 6,000,000th. Considering it took three years to get to the first million, this means people are willing to use Autocade more regularly as a resource on the web. As something that started on the side, this […]

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Five or ten years, your Kiwi passport is not a valid government-issued ID, says Facebook

Sometimes you wonder if the big players on Silicon Valley exist in a parallel universe.    Google, of course, is a firm that makes little sense to me: one that usually says one thing and does another, in almost every encounter I have had with it. And you know they can’t be that smart if, […]

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The political caricatures of old have taken human form, but they’re still nothing like us

That’s another British General Election done and dusted. I haven’t followed one this closely since the 1997 campaign, where I was backing John Major.    Shock, horror! Hang on, Jack. Haven’t the media all said you are a leftie? Didn’t you stand for a left-wing party?    Therein lies a fallacy about left- and right […]

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How a car accident makes you grateful

The trouble with all the yellow-peril reporting that’s far more prevalent than it should be in Aotearoa is when something happens to you that may get people thinking about a stereotype.    Back in March, of course, we had one writer justifying racism toward (east) Asian tourist drivers in the Fairfax Press, when the facts […]

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It’s full circle for style.com: back to its origins in fashion retail

Originally published in the online edition of Lucire, May 1, 2015   Top Earlier today, attempting to get into Style.com meant a virus warning—the only trace of this curiosity is in the web history. Above Style.com is back, with a note that it will be transforming into an e-tail site.   If there’s one constant […]

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Slides and a podcast: my MMBA 505 lecture and Access Granted, episode 45

As promised to the MMBA 505 class at Victoria University of Wellington last night, here are my slides. My thanks to Dr Kala Retna for inviting me along as the guest speaker. To the students: thank you for attending at such a late hour. MBAs are hard work.    I just realized I used to […]

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It’s taken me a long time to blog about sheep

Living in New Zealand, of course PETA’s latest graphic (on the right) is going to get a few of us commenting. (The above comparison graphic was found on a US Facebook user’s page.)    A friend of mine, in the US, rightly questioned whether he could believe New Zealanders on this, because we have an […]

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Farewell, Manhattan: switching to the Cooler Master Storm Quick Fire TK Cherry MX Brown

The Cooler Master Storm Quick Fire TK, with white case.   On Tuesday, my Manhattan keyboard, for which I gave a glowing review on Amazon, gave up the ghost. I’m not entirely sure why but through its lifetime, there were two things wrong with it: the first was that regular typing wore off the keys’ […]

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Read the report: Deloitte actually doesn’t blame migrants for increased corruption

Deloitte has published a report on the increasing corruption in Australia and New Zealand, which Fairfax’s Stuff website reported on today.    Its opening paragraph: ‘An increase in bribery and corruption tarnishing New Zealand’s ethical image may be due to an influx of migrants from countries where such practices are normal.’    The problem: I’m […]

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