There is one small problem though, Richard keeps on opening my eyes to new concepts and ideas. The two that I have heard in the past couple of days are “One good thing about being wrong is the joy that it brings others”, and the law of unintended consequences.

The law of unintended consequences is loosely defined to say that the actions of people always have effects that are unanticipated or unintended. Wikipedia gives some good examples of beneficial and detrimental unintended consequences from the real-world. Consequences can also includes perverse effects – where the action delivers the opposite result to the one desired. The most well-known perverse effect is the Streisand Effect; where trying to block personal information online results in even more publicity!

The law of unintended consequences is a realisation we cannot hope to predict all of the possible outcomes from complex, and indeed not so complex systems. Powerful stuff – thanks Richard.

Hyland’s Bookshop in the City was a place that I hunted down – a little oasis of British Railway Books in Melbourne.  It was hidden away in a upstairs dark building  in Flinders Lane. I can’t remember how I found out about it, but I used to visit there as often as I could browsing books. We more reading than browsing – but that never seemed to be an issue.

Then they moved to an even more out of the way premises on Flinders Street, but I was visiting enough to to find the sign on the door of the old shop and be pointed to the right place. But I didn’t pay enough attention – because the next time I went to visit I couldn’t find it. I just thought that I wasn’t looking in the right place, and looked a few more times on visits to the City, then gave up.

Of course I could have always looked in the Yellow Pages – but where’s the fun in that! And this was back in the days before wide-spread internet use – the mid to late 1990s. For some reason today the memory of Hyland’s popped-up. A little Googling later I found it – on the other side of the CBD with a website, and a good stock of railways books according to the catalogue. Bonus – now I just need an opportunity to go there; Hyland’s Bookshop [^] - Level 1, 29-31 Heffernan Lane, Melbourne, Victoria 3000.

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We exist in the minds of other people, in thousands of memory clusters, and one by one those clusters fade and disappear. Some years from now, at a funeral with a slide show, only one person will be able to say who we were.

In the meantime I have trudged around the major electronic retailers, in no particular order. And I found that they are all the same; JB Hifi, Harvey Norman, OfficeWorks, The Good Guys … . They all have one thing in common. Their 3G tablets, especially iPads and usually Galaxy Tab 10.1s all connect to the ‘net, either through their WiFi network or a Mobile network (3G). That is if the screen saver isn’t password locked!

But the WiFi models are different. Hitting the browser icon doesn’t bring up a nice white Google page, it gives you a blank screen with a little green android “Web Page Not Available” . Is this so that everyone realises that these models don’t have “the internet” on them? Come on guys, people don’t just buy a tablet to play Angry Birds, or do they? Will the staff connect them to the network for ‘serious‘ buyers I wonder – and would they know how?

I hope that this isn’t a cynical attempt to sell more of the 3G models. After all they do cost $200 more than the base WiFi version. After all a wireless 3G Hotspot cost a darn sight less than $200.

There are plenty more maps on the website – including Germany, France and the US – so go check them out.

As Nat Torkington points out perhaps the problem isn’t one of fighting the challenges to intellectual property rights [^]. It’s a case of rights-holders – large film studios, record labels, and publishers - failing to adapt to a changing technological world. Every other industry has had to move with the times – why not publishers? It’s time to stop praying for a sign and start living in the here and now.

Your customers are demanding changing, they want electronic copies of your goods and for the most part they are willing to pay for them. As Jonathan Coulton says “Make good stuff, then make it easy for people to buy it [^]“ should be your anti-piracy plan. Sure there will always be pirates, but they will be there no matter how hard you make if for them; some just enjoy the challenge!

But the thing is I have questions, and I haven’t been able to find answers. None of the Australian mobile phone comparison sites cover tablets. Surely the concept is no different to mobile phones, just without the phone bit and anyway almost no-one uses a smart phone as a phone!

Is there anywhere that can tell me what is the best tablet plan in Australia?
Is it better to get a tablet (a GalaxyTab 10.1, an iPad or a Xoom) on plan from one of the mobile phone companies?
Does it work out cheaper to buy a 3G tablet outright and get a data plan / sim from your preferred company?
What about getting a WiFi tablet and using the saving to buy a wireless 3G hotspot?

Does anyone know? Or have I found a hole in the mobile phone comparison sites?