We Americans like to think highly of our supposed freedoms, yet we have allowed privacy and civil rights to be eroded in the name of security and convenience (and yes, I mean you, how many times have you given your personal coordinates to a website?) The EU is taking the view that Google is keeping […]
Read more...A study at the University of Melbourne found that “intelligent” cars, meaning ones outfitted with telematics which enabled them to sense the cars around them and make more gradual adjustments to driving speeds than humans would make, yielded the same 15-20% fuel savings that hybrid cars offer, at considerably lower cost. The study did not […]
Read more...According Robert Cringely at PBS, IBM is cutting at least 150,000 US jobs in its Global Services Division, and each US worker is to be replaced by a new overseas hire. This headcount cut, called Project Lean, bears out the populist view that corporate executives are greedy and outsourcing damages the American economy. As we […]
Read more...In an important, and unanimous decision, the Supreme Court ruled in KSR International vs Teleflex that patent protection was valid for bona fide inventions, not the mere landgrabbing of the “obvious.” While this may not have been the basis for the Supreme Court’s ruling, the decision has the effect of at least partially correcting a […]
Read more...Microsoft’s bad behavior may finally catch up with it. The EU is now threatening new sorts of punishment for Microsoft’s intransigence and bad faith dealings in what in the US would be called the remedy phase of its antitrust case. To recap the story: in December 2004, Microsoft lost its final appeal on an EU […]
Read more...It seems China is becoming the pivotal player on many fronts. Apologies for being a day late on this story, but we could not access it on the Financial Times website and had to have the text e-mailed. As we have noted before, the proliferation of fuel technologies is slowing widespread adoption of cleaner cars. […]
Read more...In a seminal 1993 paper in American Scholar, “Defining Deviancy Down,” Daniel Patrick Moynihan reexamined an observation of Emile Durkheim, who helped establish sociology as a discipline, that crime was a “normal” function. By that he meant that the concept of crime helped define and reinforce social standards (“a punishment ceremony creates social solidarity”) and […]
Read more...Full disclosure: I am a longstanding and happy customer of Vonage, and would hate to seem them fail, particularly at the instigation of a Luddite and blantantly anti-competitive force like Verizon. I have also been suspicious of Verizon’s patent claims (the Patent and Trademark Office has had a recent bad habit of granting far reaching […]
Read more...The author of this essay, Paul Graham, has serious geek credentials. He co-created the first web-based application and also conceptualized a spam filter that is the foundation of most spam filters today. Graham’s point isn’t that Microsoft’s demise is imminent, but that members of the computer/development community are no longer afraid of it. And that […]
Read more...I have long wondered why business executives making serious decisions accept, even demand, such an imprecise and incomplete means of communication as a PowerPoint presentation. And I am not alone in that view. In fact visual information guru Edwin Tufte is even more critical: Imagine a widely used and expensive prescription drug that promised to […]
Read more...Sorry for the number of posts from the Financial Times today, but it happens to have stories no one else is carrying (yet). The FT tells us today that the EU has ordered Microsoft to hand over what the company calls “sensitive and valuable technical information about its Windows operating system for next to no […]
Read more...A story on the BBC website described the results of the latest Greenpeace assessment of the “eco-friendliness” of 14 electronics firms. What is interesting is that this sort of report, which used to be a media blip at best, now appears to motivate behavior, at least among some companies. Lenovo, which came out on top […]
Read more...Warning: It won’t be full featured, but the sound quality is apparently good. The question is who the target market is. People who worry about forgetting their phone? Those who like the James Bond (or perhaps Get Smart) factor? People who hate carrying things? That part remains to be seen: Once implanted in a person’s […]
Read more...This week’s Economist discusses “Plan B for global warming,” which is to implement measures directed at cooling the earth’s temperature. It’s an idea which is pragmatic (it acknowledges that collectively we aren’t likely to take concerted enough action to stop, let alone reverse, the rising levels of greenhouse gases that are producing higher temperatures). But […]
Read more...Not to worry, I have not become a creationist. But each era has had firmly held beliefs about how the world works that have been displaced by later theories. The article below is a mundane but nevertheless important example. Some Danish scientists have questioned the long-held belief that nerve signals are electrical, since electrical impulses […]
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