The new anti-spam Act joins the ranks of "something must be done, something has been done" cosmetic legislation that intimidates the innocent and does little to protect victims, like the spanking and dog chipping Acts.

The Department of Internal Affairs gains another content control role to join their censorship enforcement duties, and one wonders if they'll be the home of the election speech suppression.

But what will be the benefit of the anti-spam bill?

At best, compliance by NZ senders of email. That's worth the trouble?

What does it mean to the receiver? Nothing, spam will continue to be sent from other jurisdictions.

In any case, the reason none of this has been on my radar is that I don't suffer from spam. GMail effectively solves the problem for me without the need of Nanny State to stop all those bad senders. It is the only way.

Among the benefits of the current plummet of the NZ US dollar exchange rate is its proximity to the wailings, gnashing and rending of garments during its rise. So close one can almost hear the echo of the outcry at the intolerable climb of the NZ dollar against the greenback as the same stories of gloom are rolled out with the words "export" replaced by "import."

Even the shortest of short term memories must be struck by the media (and others) behaviour:

Exchange Rate Climbs: WOE!

Exchange Rate Falls: WOE!

The search for bad news to attract the eye and ear sometimes needs to be moderated by the risk of appearing stupid as you bewail first one thing, then its opposite.

Perhaps its the volatility. In any case, expect that exchange rates will be news what ever they do, and the "victims" will find a willing ear on the wailing wall of the media.

Kevin Kelly talks about the Technium and William Paley finds proof of God in a watch.

If you find a watch, it implies the existence of a watchmaker. Quite, because watches don't make themselves. Life does, and this is also why at this point I think Kelly's Technium is an illusion. Sure, we'll all go out if the sun died, but machines stop much sooner than that. He argues, via the continued existence of flint arrowheads, that technological "species" never die. True, they don't, nor do they live.

At this stage technology is so far from any kind of self-sustainability it barely meets the Movement; Respiration; Sensitivity; Growth; Reproduction; Excretion; Nutrition (MRS GREN) criteria.

Yes, at this stage.

I suppose there are enough reasons to think this is possible. And it is possible, like the gPC and gTelco when the news got out that they'd leased a bit of fibre, and goodness knows anyone with dark fibre wants to be a Telco. Wake up, not even Telcos want to be telcos any more. They want to be TV stations, or Video hire outlets or Malls. I suppose a gBrowser and the oft bet gOS are also possible.

But its my firm conviction that Google is both too clever and too wise to invade the Russias of all those markets any time, not soon, ever.

Dark fibre is a customer option, not the first step to Telco-hood. Google contributes financially to Mozilla Firefox for search engine placement. Google is using its weight in the 700MHz auction in the US to get a better deal for its customers, which indirectly, unlike Apple, will benefit Google. The phones its shopping around, AFAIK, are not the result of "hundreds of millions of dollars into developing mobile phone designs," instead they are demo applications on the OpenMoko platform. As for "leaked images," puh-leeze. The alignment with Sprint is I suspect both a pose/feint and one of those non-exclusive things Google does.

If a big beneficiary wants to contribute to some 3rd party open standards for handsets, good for them 3GPP seems obsessed with reinventing in a proprietary way stuff that works just fine already. Products to features, as Doc Searls and others assert, its not about making money with X, but making money because of X.

Google is already suffering staff and product bloat, acknowledged by Eric Schmidt (perhaps its his presence on the Apple board that gives impetus to all this "me too" gNonsense) and if it goes any further down that rat hole, it'll turn the same pear shape all the greedy eventually assume.

(The difference between the clever and the wise:
The clever know how to get out of situations which
the wise wouldn't have gotten into in the first place.)