Slashdot Mirror
Al Gore Joins Apple's Board Of Directors
zzxc writes "News.com.com reports that Al Gore has been chosen to be on Apple's board of directors. Apple has a press release with more information. According to the press release, 'Al brings an incredible wealth of knowledge and wisdom to Apple from having helped run the largest organization in the world--the United States government' and 'He has remained an active leader in technology--launching a public/private effort to wire every classroom and library in America to the Internet.' The inventor of the internet should be a valuable asset to Apple."
Well, maybe he didn't invent it, but he actually was one of a few politicians actively promoting the internet.
Therefore we should be thankful instead of always making fun of that one statement he once made.
Fleur de Sel
My guess would be that it has more to do with governmental contacts than expertise about computers - Gore must have a pretty good list of contacts throughout government by now, and if that can help Apple, why shouldn't they tap him to be on their board of directors? Beats another lawyer....
Quack!Quack!.....QUACK!!
Wasn't it the government Al Gore helped run that brought us the DMCA?
It might not be a good thing having him as a director at one of the few big tech companies that is still customer friendly.
Jason
ProfQuotes
Politics aside, (Disclaimer: I voted for him) this may be just what Apple needs. Someone who is capable, knows business, government and academia and is not an Apple insider.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
No you've got that wrong.
He did not say that he invented it, just that he brought it to the masses, he is kind of like the favorite uncle of the internet.
Apple is lucky to have him, that is a lot of top-down influence. The big gears up-top *are* the ones that predominate our lives in the ways of general trend and influence. Now given, there is proactive and reactive influence, but big players will ensure social connectvity, which AL has a great deal of.
I don't get it. Where do people get their perspective these days?
George Bush kills something like 100 people while he is governor of Texas and trashes 50 years worth of international diplomacy to get a two-bit dictator, and Al Gore still gets shit on for that stupid internet remark.
How does Rush do it?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Ask him how it felt to not win the votes of his home state in the last presidential election. if the people who know you don't vote for you...
Ask him about copyright. What does he think the philosophical basis for copyright protection is - in the context of the de facto perpetual copyright regime developing in the US. Are the present copyright conditions and term lengths serving those purposes? Wouldn't a shorter term serve just as well?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Whether you like it or not (I certainly don't) a majority of Americans seem to think executing teenagers and the mentally ill in a revenge kick is just fine and dandy, and don't understand just how much Shrub has managed to piss the rest of the world off in an incredibly short space of time.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
1. Al Gore knows business. I doubt it. His only job since college that wasnt government was as a reporter for a local newspaper. And that was for a brief time.
He has been instrumental in getting business and government to cooperate in wiring classrooms nationwide, and is currently a senior advisor for Google, Inc.
2. Al Gore knows/is academic[a]. I doubt it. He isn't particularly well educated by any standards. He is college educated, which is something for sure. He is presumably very bright, but as somewhat who has meet him and had some conversation with him, he came off as kinda dim. Not GWBush dim, but clearly not razor sharp.
I can't claim to have talked with him personally, but I have read his writings, speeches etc... and he comes off pretty bright to this person with 13 or so years of post high-school education. And from the press release: "He is also a visiting professor at the University of California Los Angeles, Fisk University and Middle Tennessee State University. Mr. Gore received his B.A. in Government with honors from Harvard University in 1969, and attended the Vanderbilt University School of Religion and the Vanderbilt University School of Law." I would say this qualifies.
3. Al Gore is not an Apple insider.
That is good. But on the other hand, he isn't likely to be able to affect much of how Apple operates because of that same reason.
Where is you logic here? This is a totally bogus and biased statement with no evidence to back it up.
4. Al Gore knows government. True, but he knew the last government. That's a problem. He knew a lot of key decisons makers and might have been able to leverage those. Now there is a new government, and many decisions of scale and size are made by political apointee's and their sub-ordinates. This means he in fact has very little leverage for Apple now that GWBush is in office.
Again, from the press release: "He served for a total of eight years as President of the Senate, a member of the cabinet and the National Security Council, and as the leader of a wide range of Administration initiatives including environmental policy, technology, science, communications and government cost reduction."
You can't possibly have this level of experience and not be able to navigate government past and present. In fact, in my personal experience, having even a little degree of connection with government does wonders for ones business. Al Gore has most folks trumped here by a long shot.
But seriously, this is interesting but not really all that good for Apple, in my opinion. He is a controversial, and turns alot of people of (about 49% of voters at last count).
Well, that is an opinion and as for your percentage (matching that of the last election), the majority of folks like him.
That's not a good quality for a company who is very image focused. Even if only 1 in 1000 people hate him enough to not buy Apple products, will it outweigh the number of people who will buy Apple products because they like him? Probably not.
Gee, let's see, Apple is doing quite well with 4-5% of the personal computer market. If they can appeal to at least the majority of the U.S. population, that can only be a good thing for the company.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Oh yeah, that strategy *really* worked for Apple huh?
Please, oh please, push him about the DMCA getting passed under his watch, and his wife's co-founding of the PMRC. Some suggest that the PMRC has lead to de facto government censorship.
/.ers as voters, and us Apple fans as customers.
It might take a little research to get good questions that he won't just brush off, or evade, but those are two technology issues that are totally essential to us
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Too fucking bad that he didn't win, because he sure wouldn't have turned US to the imperealistic dictatorship that the rest of the world doesn't like.
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
Look, as much as I detest the guy's politics, what Apple needs more than anything now is government support.
The Government needs to support Open Source, a cornerstone of Apple's strategy. The Government needs to specify the use of Open Standards. The Government needs to stop running exclusively on Windows. The Governement needs to stop finding Apple's competitors guilty of predatory practices and letting them off with a warning.
I'm sure they get into regular meetings, say pitching a room of XServes, and they have a room full of Engineers all on board, then the bean counter comes in and says, "oh, but it has to run on Windows." End of story. If there's an XServe rack somewhere with a nasty twist in it it's because Steve Jobs threw it out a fourth floor window after one of these meetings.
Apple's biggest barrier to entry is the Microsoft De-facto standard that exists in Corporate America, and they hate being hamstrung by it at every turn when they know they have a better product. When the government starts requiring bids to come in in the OpenOffice XML format, there's at least the chance of Corporate America following, and perhaps the playing field will level.
When Apple wanted to get into Network Computing (remember that?) they got Larry on board. When they wanted to get into Retail they got the guy from the Gap. Etc.
What Apple needs to get into Government is a technically-savvy government insider who has all the contacts, lots of influence, and not much else to do. I don't like the personalities involved, but Gore is not bad on science and this is a brilliant move on Jobs's part.
I expect to see lots of sensible legislation supporting many of the positions regularly espoused around here introduced in the Congress in the next year. We'll know where they came from. Remember, politics is the art of the possible.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
For the same reason that Gore apologists see all the repeated claims that Gore didn't say what so many people heard him say and still post yet another claim that he didn't say what everyone heard him say.
It wasn't a misquote, as one apologist claims. It was said on live television, and the words came out of His Highness' own mouth. "Creating the Internet" took place before Gore was ever elected, which makes it impossible for him to "take the initiative" to create it. Period.
Personally I hope Al Gore will make another run for presidency. Given the way things are looking (wars and tax cuts), 2004 is in the toilet (I think Gore said he wasn't going to run anyway)..
Since we're sort of on the topic, let me ask the Slashdotters this question: wouldn't you rather see Gore running the country than another run-of-the-mill politician who has no appreciation for, and is completely ignorant of, science and technology?
The most important thing to realize is that in such a statistical tie, the general populace didn't care who was President. Yes there were zealots on the right and left who did. But by and large they couldn't really convince enough people to get anything other than a tie.
Anyone who says they were robbed (or for Republicans "could have been robbed") misses this fundamental point.
Once someone starts bringing in conspiracy theories we know it is pointless to keep talking. Republicans claimed conspiracies in the Kennedy - Nixon election. And, given events in Chicago, they were probably right. But once again there wasn't an overwhelming decision. So who cares?
Now if someone can point to a 5% difference and vote rigging then I'll listen. Otherwise it is just sour grapes.
No, and he never said he did either. This is a great example of media paraphrasing blunders.
"You've just recently been added to Apple's board of directors. What are your feelings towards Apple's current stance on Digital Rights Management? Would that stance change now that you are a member of Apple's board of directors?"
Always strip the adjectives out of your questions. You want to find out which way the respondent is leaning without giving away which way the questioner is leaning.
After the 2nd question is answered, then hammer him with further questions depending on if he answered in the affirmative or not.
You can get this quote from the Rush Limbaugh transcript archive from Tuesday, Feb 25, 2003:
Rush: "the one nation on earth to whom this is only and all about oil is France. France imports most of its oil, and gets the vast majority of that from Iraq. They have sweet economic deals that go back to the 70s made between Saddam Hussein and Jacques Strap Chirac, and I'm telling you, their opposition to this is rooted solely in their desire for an uninterrupted, continued supply of oil from Iraq."
Let's see what the Department of Energy has to say about this little bombshell:
"French imports come primarily from Saudi Arabia and Norway, followed by the United Kingdom (UK), Iraq, Iran, Nigeria, and Russia. In July 2001, the Iraqi government stated that it would reconsider oil projects with French companies and no longer give French companies "priority" due to France's support of the U.S.-British "Smart Sanctions" proposal at the United Nations Security Council."
So - no, France does not import "the vast majority" of its oil from Iraq, and any "sweet deals" they had worked out were apparently ended in 2001 because France wanted to continue sanctions against Iraq.
Think of all the "anit-France" bashing going on in the U.S. right now. Don't you think this kind of claim from Rush helps contribute to that? Does it really have the same impact if Rush says, "for France, this is all about oil from their 4th largest supplier that cut their oil companies out in 2001 because of their willingness to continue with sanctions?"
I don't know - maybe you'll say "well, it's just one little misstatement", but it's symptomatic of a pattern. There is more than one of these "little misstatements" that get thrown out there, that nobody bothers to follow up on, and that shape the tone of the debate (for the worse, I'll say - because it's not based on the truth).
Browse his radio transcripts (see the link above). Look for particularly inflammatory claims, or statements of fact. Do some research on your own to see if it's exactly as Rush has proclaimed. Perhaps you'll find out 99% of what he says is true. Perhaps not. But at least then YOU can say with confidence that you trust what he says because YOU have checked up on him.
oh, yea - I did a fair amount of looking, and this was the most recent, least biased source I could come up with. Feel free to find a more recent (than Jan 2002) article from an equally repudiable source to prove me wrong.
Noting that the Equal Protection clause guarantees individuals that their ballots cannot be devalued by "later arbitrary and disparate treatment," the per curiam opinion held 7-2 that the Florida Supreme Court's scheme for recounting ballots was unconstitutional.
The precedent of Baker v. Carr allowed the Supreme Court to frame this case as a LEGAL question (rather than a political question) because they were able to argue that citizens of Florida were having their INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS violated and therefore, the Court argued that this made this case a LEGAL question.
Even if the recount was fair in theory, it was unfair in practice. The record suggested that different standards were applied from ballot to ballot, precinct to precinct, and county to county.
Because of those and other procedural difficulties, the court held that no constitutional recount could be fashioned in the time remaining (which was short because the Florida legislature wanted to take advantage of the "safe harbor" provided by 3 USC Section 5).
The per curiam opinion limited its holding to this present case only.
It was how they were to be recounted that was being questioned by the Supreme Court. So do a little homework first, and I'll finish studying for my test...
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
Let's examine dates, shall we? Ask the tree himself what he did. Well, it's a little dishonest, Gore dropped out of law school, but the dates are hard to refute.
When the internet was "invented" in 1969, Al Gore was acting as a combat reporter in Vietnam. Comendable enough, but the Senator's son had it much better than most. We can imagine his grasp of computing was about as broad as his expressed interst in such things at the time and for years to come, ZERO.
In the next five years he failed as a farmer, priest and lawyer. No biggie, lots of nice people fail at many things and the effort is commendable if not exceptional. Yet, where is the interest in computing while Unix is being created?
In 1976, Gore started his long and unbroken career as a politician. According to this empasioned defense Al Gore made his first concrete contribution to what we know of as the internet with, "High Performance Computing and Communications Act in 1991." Not bad, he beat Bill Gates to caring, but it's hardly the kind of stuff you could call "instrumental".
Clearly, however, he suffered from his associations with one of the most agresivly dishonest administrations in US history. We can give credit to Al Gore for the 1996 Telecomunications Act, which failed, and the DMCA. It's a mixed record by someone who's writing proves a deep ignorance of many important technical matter. It's right to distinguish between people who understand technical details and those who pretend to know. It would be one thing if he stood on his record honestly. His agradizing and pretenses were blatant enough for people who wanted him elected to notice. The New York Times, the Washington Post and other paper called him on this.
I can only imagine that Apple thinks Gore has some influence to wield in shcool and government computer purchases. It's inconcievable they hired him for technical reasons.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
This makes me sick. Think about what ya'll are saying. Just because more people voted for him overall doesn't mean he should be president. If this were so, California would have most of the power of the US. To use an improbable example, if a presidential candidate wanted to have California and a few other large states not pay taxes, and then those states elected him, then only the larger states would have power to elect. A system is in place where a candidate gets a certain number of points for each state. THIS MAKES SURE THAT NO STATE GETS TOO MUCH POWER!!! This part of our law is very ingenious. Maybe if you kept an open mind and read into it, you would understand that there's more than just the majority of the people, and for good reason.
Unfortunately government has corrupted our industry. From prosecuting Microsoft to shutting down Napster, they have to assert their control. Apple is dealing with this the way other big companies are, by paying off one politician / or ex-politician in order to fight off the others. In addition, federal taxation is so high and the federal government controls so much spending that companies need an insider to get a piece of the pie. Apple lost to Microsoft because in the 1980s they tried to get public schools hooked on Apple computers. I.e. they went for the government market. Microsoft focused on the business customer (i.e. the free market) and won. Now the federal government is seen as the big pie, so they will all hire lobbyists, politicians, etc. to help them get a piece. Truly disgusting.
Stuart Eichert