Children Addicted to Cell Phones in Japan

Japanese children love their cell phones. These sixth graders are addicted to using the Internet and exchanging emails all day to all wee hours of the night. And get this: the ones that don't reply to their email within the first 30 minutes will get ridiculed by other classmates. About one-third of sixth graders and more than half of ninth graders have them. Wow, I didn't even get my first cell phone until I entered college and I thought I was lucky, but I guess these kids hit the jackpot!

The Japanese government is now concerned about child safety and is starting a program to inform parents to limit their children's cell phone usage. In addition, they are asking Japanese developers to make cell phones with only the talking function along with a GPS device for child safety reasons.

There's the good and the bad about young children having cell phones. You can definitely keep in touch and reach your children at all times, that is if they don't ignore your calls. On the other hand, children can easily become victims of Internet crimes, not to mention phones can be a great distraction in school and out.

So what's next? Will 7th-graders all have credit cards soon too? I wouldn't be surprised.

Net Neutrality: This Week's Hot Debate

Many companies, like Comcast, want to manage traffic into sites. Net Firms and Broadband companies like Comcast can control traffic into websites, so that they can allow high-speed access to some sites, while other sites would suffer slower access speed. Website owners would have to pay Comcast for faster speeds, while the rest of us would just have to suffer with slower speeds.

Net Neutrality, for all of you who don't already know, is the concept that all sites should be allowed to have high-speeds and that companies should not have the right to control that.

In the future, I think that this is going to be a huuuuge issue. The internet is popular for being a completely ungovernable media, with the exception of censorship (like in China, though there are way of getting around that). Now that companies and governments have the technology to monitor and manage internet traffic, the internet is entering a new era of laws and restrictions. And because the internet is global and laws are domestic, countries and the companies within them are going to have a very interesting future figuring out how to deal with all these internet issues.

The Federal Communications Committee held a meeting yesterday to discuss Net Neutrality and the fact that Comcast has "been exposed as managing traffic by stopping some of its 13m customers uploading files to BitTorrent and other peer-to-peer networks."

A formal investigation is underway to decide whether or not Comcast should be punished for this. The debate is as to whether or not it's wrong. Some people think that allowing net firms to manage traffic is fine, but they must keep their customers fully informed about their practices. However this turns out, this debate sure is an interesting one and it definitely applies to you and me.

Myspace TV Goes Global

Myspace is going to distribute its original internet content internationally in conjunction with ShineReveille. Apparently, it will be Myspace's way of testing out new content and then eventually, they're going to sell their entertainment.

It's going to be a way for the Internet giant to test out ideas and see if their content will sink or float. If you've seen their original content, like "Quarterlife," "Prom Queen," and "Roommates," you'll understand why I think this is the dumbest business idea I've heard in 2008...that I can remember.

Tom made one big mistake this time.

I gotta hand it to Myspace, they're still super huge, inspite of the fact that Facebook is slowly but surely gaining on them. If you have either a myspace or a facebook, you'll appreciate that myspace is definitely stealing a bunch of ideas from facebook. You can have your own status now, you can view the status of your friend's recently updated pages, you can see who's changed what on their pages--all ideas that Facebook had up first. But I digress...

I understand the idea behind shipping entertainment overseas to see whether it will sink or swim. The music industry has been doing that for decades -- they ship unsuccessful artists overseas, mainly Europe or Asia, gain exposure and experience and re-release them here in the States, often times with incredible success. So I'm guessing, that based on that idea, Myspace went for this low-cost way of testing their entertainment.

I'm no fan of the Myspace original series'. I watched half of one and felt like shooting myself. This may or may not work, and I'd say the scales are tipped more towards may not. It's worked with the music industry but music is much more universal. You don't need to understand the words to appreciate a song. Shipping movies internationally is also a bit different. To the best of my knowledge, the most successful movies shipped overseas are the big action flicks...again, not hard to understand. Things blow up. People get shot. Simple.

US TV shows have been enjoying a resurgence in Germany. Apparently, on one station, there's an all American TV night every Tuesday. But American TV shows in other places haven't been exceptionally popular since the 80's. And the shows that do get big across the pond are ones that are INSANELY popular here already, and again, they have a good amount of action and gore, like CSI, Lost, 24. Friends is the only comedy that I know of that's been popular abroad. In the end, the trend is that awesome TV shows here sometimes make it moderately big abroad. Also, buying rights to American shows is much cheaper than producing a show yourself abroad.

Still, this article says that American shows are having a resurgence abroad. True or not, the trend is that successful American shows come from the US and then go abroad. They haven't yet been made abroad, and then been launched at home. It sounds backwards to me. Plus, those Myspace shows are ABSOLUTE crap. I'm predicting this to be a huge flop on the part of myspace...

I'd be happily surprised if I'm proved wrong...

The Grid: Will the Internet Soon Be Obsolete?

The Internet may soon be a thing of the past. The scientists who created the internet have now come up with something even better, called "The Grid." Apparently, it's 10,000 times faster than your typical internet broadband connection. As a result, you'd be able to download movies in seconds. And that's not all.

The Grid could also be used to "allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players...offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call." and transmit holographic images. Badass.

This summer, scientists are going to test it out. You can read all the geeky mumbo jumbo about how they'll do that here.

Unlike the internet which needs cables and routing equipment to operate, the Grid would use fibre optic cables and routing centers. There are 12 routing centres all over the world with 55,000 servers in total. It is estimated that the number of servers will increase to 200,000 servers in the next 2 years. The 12 routing centres are scattered throughout the world and are connected via fibre optic cables running from Cern (in Switzerland), to the US, Canada, Asia, and Europe.

The reason the Grid was created however, is not just so we can download whole seasons of our favorite TV show in seconds. The real goal that scientists had in mind when creating the Grid was to have it work with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a "new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe." yup..

Anyway, by working together, scientists are hoping to track down the Higgs boson--the particle that "is supposed to be what gives matter mass."

The Grid isn't going to be released to domestic users as of yet, but there are plenty of companies and telecom providers that are introducing technologies based on the Grid. The biggest technology to take from the Grid that everyday users will probably get their hands on soon is something called "dynamic switching" which allows internet users to switch into a dedicated "channel" that would allow then to download large files. So we'd be able to download a movie in about 5 seconds.

The only people who are allowed access to the Grid are scientists, researchers, and academia for now. But can you imagine sending and receiving holographic messages? Last Star Wars reference...I promise

Literature has tried to predict the future in books like 1984 and the Brave New World. I find it ironic that, instead, the future is starting to sound more and more like a sci-fi movie.