In a combined statement the FBI, DEA, and Homeland Security announce a startling discovery: terrorists and criminals use cash. As a result, law enforcement agencies are seizing cash and "near cash" equivalents such as bank accounts from all US residents. Quoting law enforcement officials, "We have only just learned that cash can be used for criminal and terrorist activities. We hope the public understands the eminent danger of these systems and cooperates with these seizures. Our goal is always to prevent harm to the public and once we learned that cash was used by nearly 100% of all terrorist and criminal activities in some form or another we knew we needed to act."
It seems bad ideas never die; they just get recycled. The US Government fighting encryption in the 1990's offered "key escrow" (where the Government had a backdoor into the encryption "just in case") as a way to allow citizens and business to protect their data and secure their privacy while allowing law enforcement a chance to use these transactions should it become necessary. It was wildly unpopular and eventually the idea was shelved. Now the government just comes and demands your keys.
Total Information Awareness, championed by Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, a one time felon over Iran-Contra (overturned on appeal), wanted to do much of what the NSA is doing today. When the details of TIA became public there was an outrage and the plans for it had to be scrapped. Or were they?
The point is this: the public (voters) say "no" to these things... and they just sneak around our backs and do it anyway. Saying "no" once is not sufficient. If, as a citizen, voter, and patriot you believe that these ideas are bad you need to say "no" repeatedly, early, and often. Once whole bureaucracies are constructed to serve a bad aim it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to stop them.
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." With all due respect to Justice Brandeis, if some of these bad ideas do survive, though, it might be more because of public exhaustion than of public acceptance. Or, more simply, perhaps once a secret bureaucracy gets big enough in the darkness there is no way to kill it once it comes into the light. Even sunlight has its limits.
One of the concerns I had as a hiring manager was the narrow overspecialization of the candidates I interviewed. I cannot guarantee that the work assignments six months from now will match the criteria on a candidate's resume today. Hiring them solely on the needs I have today would be a mistake.
I disagree with the conclusion of the article that we need yet more specialization. That said, I do agree with an issue hinted in the text: hiring managers can be lazy and cowardly. Instead of seeking candidates that are smart, versatile, and industrious, they are looking for buzzword matches between the rec and the resume. They are lazy because it is very hard work pouring through big piles of resumes looking for such versatility and intelligence, and they are cowardly because hiring a buzzword match is more defensible to their managers should the candidate wash out. The "he looked good on paper" defense is the last retort of a manager forced to admit they made a hiring mistake.
Computer science as a field of study has grow too large for any four year program to prepare a student for everything. But, that should not be the aim. The degree should not be a "union card" that says the candidate should be effective in this narrow toolset or that. The degree should be an indication that the candidate can move, perhaps with effort, from niche to niche as necessary. Work history on the resume should confirm this.
Students/candidates/programmers must be willing to do the drudgery as well as the exciting. They must continue to learn technologies that are key to their employers success--or search for a new employer. Understanding software testing methodology, requirements capture, configuration control and release engineering objectives, and everything else that would make dull party conversations should be a requirement for all engineering resources, not just those few who test, release, or specify software.
Overspecialization and compartmentalization is crippling the industry. Building intuition and skills across the board for all engineering resources is the better answer. Recognizing those skill during candidate searches by hiring managers, even if the buzzwords don't completely line up, completes the circle.
... I would like to hear about how some brilliant hacker took control of 3 million computers and used to all that computing power to, say, find a cure for cancer instead of just pissing everybody off.
Hi! I'm Clippy! Microsoft Bob is not available. You could leave him a message if you like. Just hold down the #, *, 7, and 3 keys.
It looks like you are trying to make a call. Would you like me to help with that? I see you've dialed a 9. There is an area code "978", can I finish dialing that for you?
Oh, I see you've now dialed a "1". You might be trying to make an emergency call. I could...
** REBOOT **
Hi! I'm Clippy! Microsoft Bob is not available right now...
"You mean like a cult?"
No. Like a start-up. There are engineers who thirst to make a very cool thing, something they can look back upon with pride and the knowledge that "I did that." It isn't about the money (though thinking about the potentially big payday helps keep you going when things get tough or weird); it is about the chance for that sense of accomplishment.
I never had an opportunity to work on something as cool as the iPad. I wish I had. Most of us will work 40+ years and never have the sense of triumph that the iPad team now enjoys.
One lament heard repeatedly is, "Why doesn't America BUILD anything anymore?" Americans used to be known for Yankee ingenuity, innovation, and know-how. There seems precious little of that anymore except, perhaps, in software and aircraft. We still write code and build airplanes. It is difficult to thing of much else.
The love of building things is best acquired young, I believe. I have it. I learning how things work. I also like to build things. Ham radio is an outlet for me on all these fronts.
In an era where so many electronic components are, by necessity, nearly microscopic or monolithic, fully-formed, and impenetrable, you can still build radios from discrete parts, understand each of their functions, and have the joy of using something you made. I cringed when I first heard that freshly graduated EEs may have never picked up a soldering iron! How can one gain that intuition about the physical world without experiencing it?!
Ham radio in the 21st century isn't a replacement for the internet, cell phones, video games, or anything else. It is a really fun way to learn about electronics, wave propagation, digital signal processing, and a bunch of other stuff in a hands-on, practical, inexpensive way. Perhaps if fewer were embarrassed about their desire to learn and do things (you won't be one of the COOL kids if you do!) we would have more engineers, more things designed and maybe even built here, and a brighter future.
If this posting looks familiar, it is. With a minimum of effort I found these three (including the latest).
"The worst Apple products of all time", Feb 15, 2010 [posted by timothy].
"Apple's first flops", May 17, 2005 [posted by timothy].
"Top 10 Apple Flops", Jan 31, 2005 [posted by timothy].
Um, "timothy", can we stop rehashing stuff that happened 25 years ago?
So we're OK with major newspapers having absolutely no standards at all these days?
I believe I said the opposite; I said a failure to have standards will cause problems.
What do you suppose people did back in the days before you could get ads via RSS feed?
They reviewed the advertisements with their clients directly. There were a few hundred per day and it was a manageable problem. Now, advertisements may be served by proxies and selected from among tens of thousands of potential ads, designed to be targeted to readers in specific geographic regions, income levels, purchasing habits, interests, age categories, gender, education level, or other factors.
The point of my post was that the combinatorial explosion of possible advertisement choices to be served-up on my specific page load may not be easily reviewable by NYT staff a priori.
The concern I have over the long term is that sites like the NYT may not know what advertisements will appear because they are placed by bulk-buying proxies that dispense them at page-load time, probably based on evil-cookie trails or other demographic markers. So, the question becomes: how should a presumably high-integrity site such as a major news outlet ensure quality when they've outsourced advertisement delivery?
Review of each possible advertisement would be onerous, but failure to have some standards in place will eventually lead to malware (or worse) injected into unsuspecting reader's machines. I just chuckled when it popped up. I run Macs at home. But, when things like this happen to family members running PCs (and we get the phone call) it stops being funny pretty quickly.
Is there a business case for reviewing advertisements (and the associated mobile code whether it be FLASH, etc.) for a 21st century "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval"? After all, the NYT and others are just one virus (or porn advertisement) away from a PR nightmare.
The problem with this story is that it isn't clear where the sale has taken place. I click a button in Massachusetts, paid for the object with money from a Connecticut bank, the company hosting the web site is in New York, the headquarters of the company is in Arkansas, the shipment is made from New Hampshire, my mom receive the materials in Illinois (I dropped shipped her a gift). Where was the sale?
I don't know what the right answer is... but I'm certain that state legislatures rushing to get something passed will end up making a mess bigger than the one they find themselves in now. I don't blame Amazon for pushing back. If I were Amazon management I'd be doing the same thing.
Debates over the "feel of paper" or "convenience of electronic delivery" aside, and assuming you could live with either, the economics are interesting. If you're committed to getting the paper, even the very expensive Kindle DX pays for itself in about a year (plus or minus). The difference, of course, is the paper delivery bleeds you a little week-by-week so you don't notice it. The Kindle DX is a big purchase outlay of nearly $500 to get started. But, again, after about a year things are close to break-even, depending on your usage. (Note this assumes home delivery prices won't go up!)
Here are the numbers for delivery in my area:
New York Times Home Delivery (paper)
14.80 (per week) Daily (769.60 yearly)
10.40 (per week) "Weekender" Fri-Sun (540.80 yearly)
7.50 (per week) Sunday only (390.00 yearly)
7.40 (per week) Weekdays Mon-Fri (384.80 yearly)
Kindle Daily Edition $13.99/mo (167.88 yearly)
Year of NYT + 489.00 Kindle DX = $656.88 (vs $769.60 for paper)
Sunday single issue NYT ($0.75/wk) $39
Year of Sunday NYT + 489.00 Kindle DX = $528 (vs $390 for paper)
Two years of Sunday NYT + Kindle DX = $567 (vs $780 for paper)
Boston Globe Home Delivery (paper)
9.00 (per week) Daily (468.00 yearly)
9.99 (per month) Boston Globe Kindle Edition ($119.88 yearly)
Year of the Globe + 468.00 Kindle DX = $608.88 (vs $468.00 for paper)
Two years of the Globe + Kindle DX = $728.76 (vs $936.00 for paper)
The funny thing is the Boston Globe probably loses money on the $9.00/week paper subscription but makes good profits on the 33-cents
per day Kindle edition. If true, electronic delivery of the paper might be the only thing that could save it. Imagine that...
I have carefully read all 1587 posts on this topic before posting something that would be a duplicate of a previous post--just like all of you.
Right?:-)
The Internet--the first global Write Only Memory.
Quoting: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence."
I would like to point out that incompetent people can (and should) go to jail if they break the law. Perhaps if people started going to jail, some of this "incompetence" would evaporate--and we would all be better off.
I find this move by Amazon to be disturbing. Are they a distributor or manufacturer? Until recently, Amazon was simply a retail hub for nearly any product I might be looking for and they were happy to sell it to me. I could search for the best product and know that Amazon was a reasonable place to look for a good price with quick delivery and great service. I was so confident that I would be spending money with them that I gladly paid the Amazon Prime pre-paid shipping and have saved money each year since that program began because of it.
Now there appears to be a shift: Amazon has produced the Kindle and now are, in essence, the publisher of at least 100K titles. They also produce the reader, the Kindle itself. They now have a competitive stake where they were previously just "honest brokers." What happens when two years from now an electronic book system comes out that blows the Kindle away? Does Amazon shun it? Do they do more? Must we now expect Microsoft-like tactics for any technology competitor to the products that Amazon develops or acquires? It isn't just that something might not appear in the Amazon store; I now worry that more active anticompetitive actions may be in the offing now that Amazon has begun down this path.
We recognize when Walmart, the nation's largest retailer, throws their weight around. That makes the evening news occasionally. Our view of Amazon to this point has been only through their web site, stock price, and that little box that arrives occasionally. I fear we may be seeing more of Amazon than that--and it isn't a good thing.
The White House claimed that the erasures were part of a tape rotation that represented "Best IT Practices". Last time I checked, Best IT Practices didn't call for breaking Federal law. This is especially galling in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley, where the government (in 2002, under Republican control) placed significant burdens on businesses and their record-keeping. Seems like it is time for somebody to go to jail.
I had no idea that Anderson's career was going so well that she should skip this. I guess Bleak House and that one appearance on Fraiser really put her over the top. {sigh}
At the risk of enticing you to make your tenth posting on this subject, let me try to clarify: Storytelling is the thing. Having a compelling story about people, hopes, dreams, obsticles, heros, antiheros, and the like are what makes good fiction, and good cinema. Bladerunner had great special effects, but it was also a compelling story. Serenity (and Firefly) was a fabulous vehicle combining the Wild West and the lonely ship's captain. If the characterization and storytelling were weak, we wouldn't love it as we do.
My point was simply this: the best examples of science fiction (in print or screen) emphasize good fiction. When the elements of fiction are good, the science part is just a backdrop, part of the scenery. There are plenty of examples where the science (gizmos, ray guns, space ships, and time machines) came first with plots and characterization akin to "It was a dark and stormy night..." that leave us embarrassed for the work's creators. (Millennium [1989] with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd comes to mind.) Interesting stories, like the ones I listed, have something to say and the science doesn't get in the way. The very best have people suspending their disbelief easily and comfortably, as with Firefly and its horses and space ships mixed up in the same scenes.
Give me the good story, then we'll work on the backdrop. My two-cents.
The best science fiction movies are the ones not immediately identified as such by the general public. The movies that show how people behave under stress using a science fiction premise as a backdrop allow us to enjoy the work even if they get some (OK, perhaps even most) of the science wrong. Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow both centered on people, not gizmos, and can rightfully be filed under DRAMA as well as SCI FI. Works like Outbreak should also be given a nod by simply showing something about our world in an entertaining way to those who, in more case than not, had no stinking idea that such horrors existed. Sure, there have been plenty of "shoot-em-ups" masquerading as movie versions of beloved SCIFI books and short stories, but there have also been some reasonably clever works recently that treat me like I might have a brain. As Hollywood realizes we (who have a brain) also have money, I think we'll be seeing more stuff that celebrates the genre rather than just "raiding" it.
Your question evokes emotion where none is needed. There is evidence that Microsoft has, from time-to-time, done things that has set the industry back in order to protect their interests. I believe there is also ample evidence that Microsoft used illegal means to stifle competition and limit consumer choice.
One case, and this is not an isolated case, simply a splendid example, is the story of Go Computer, a company frozen out of the market by Microsoft's heavy-handed, and likely illegal tactics. You can read the book "Start Up" (strongly recommended), or pick up the story here for a flavor:
What happened there was a crime, figuratively and literally. I don't "hate" Microsoft, but as a corporate citizen, they have been shown to be untrustworthy in the past.
I have just finished watching the video on the Princeton site and I must say it is very well done. Any reasonably motivated alert person who watches this video will see the problem we're trying to highlight.
It isn't enough for computer software professionals to discover problems like this; we need to be able to communicate our results effectively to the non-technical public. Too often we find something disturbing and decend into technical jargon and lose our audience. The Princeton team has done an excellent job avoiding that pitfall and communicating this threat.
Now, if only we could find a reasonably motivated and alert politician to actually act on this.
We have seen an explosion of telecommunication technology and consumer options since AT&T was broken up and the telephone industry was transformed from a monopoly into a set of carrriers that could each compete on level ground. Many here might be too young to remember how the phone company used to argue that the integrity of their network would be compromised by even adding a diifferent (not AT&T) handset to a line in your house. At that time, AT&T's network ended (barely) at your ear.
There were plenty of jokes about the break-up at the time and it was impossible back then to see what the full effect of this might be. But today, we have a recent and relevant history to help guide our decision-making. Level ground, competition for services and not territoriality of infrastructure is what gives consumers choices while driving up profits. I believe Net Neutrality is ultimately better for service providers, too, though they appear to be too greedy to see it.
I've not been hearing comparisions by the media or analysts of Net Neutrality to the phone system break-up but the parallels seem compelling to me. To the extent we can bring the argument to "people who matter", perhaps this is a way to get past that disengenuousness that is the hallmark of today's politics.
Slashdot Mirror
In a combined statement the FBI, DEA, and Homeland Security announce a startling discovery: terrorists and criminals use cash. As a result, law enforcement agencies are seizing cash and "near cash" equivalents such as bank accounts from all US residents. Quoting law enforcement officials, "We have only just learned that cash can be used for criminal and terrorist activities. We hope the public understands the eminent danger of these systems and cooperates with these seizures. Our goal is always to prevent harm to the public and once we learned that cash was used by nearly 100% of all terrorist and criminal activities in some form or another we knew we needed to act."
Total Information Awareness, championed by Admiral John Poindexter, former United States National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, a one time felon over Iran-Contra (overturned on appeal), wanted to do much of what the NSA is doing today. When the details of TIA became public there was an outrage and the plans for it had to be scrapped. Or were they?
The point is this: the public (voters) say "no" to these things... and they just sneak around our backs and do it anyway. Saying "no" once is not sufficient. If, as a citizen, voter, and patriot you believe that these ideas are bad you need to say "no" repeatedly, early, and often. Once whole bureaucracies are constructed to serve a bad aim it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to stop them.
As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once said, "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." With all due respect to Justice Brandeis, if some of these bad ideas do survive, though, it might be more because of public exhaustion than of public acceptance. Or, more simply, perhaps once a secret bureaucracy gets big enough in the darkness there is no way to kill it once it comes into the light. Even sunlight has its limits.
Everybody knows that the four food groups are salt, sugar, cholesterol, and preservatives.
I disagree with the conclusion of the article that we need yet more specialization. That said, I do agree with an issue hinted in the text: hiring managers can be lazy and cowardly. Instead of seeking candidates that are smart, versatile, and industrious, they are looking for buzzword matches between the rec and the resume. They are lazy because it is very hard work pouring through big piles of resumes looking for such versatility and intelligence, and they are cowardly because hiring a buzzword match is more defensible to their managers should the candidate wash out. The "he looked good on paper" defense is the last retort of a manager forced to admit they made a hiring mistake.
Computer science as a field of study has grow too large for any four year program to prepare a student for everything. But, that should not be the aim. The degree should not be a "union card" that says the candidate should be effective in this narrow toolset or that. The degree should be an indication that the candidate can move, perhaps with effort, from niche to niche as necessary. Work history on the resume should confirm this.
Students/candidates/programmers must be willing to do the drudgery as well as the exciting. They must continue to learn technologies that are key to their employers success--or search for a new employer. Understanding software testing methodology, requirements capture, configuration control and release engineering objectives, and everything else that would make dull party conversations should be a requirement for all engineering resources, not just those few who test, release, or specify software.
Overspecialization and compartmentalization is crippling the industry. Building intuition and skills across the board for all engineering resources is the better answer. Recognizing those skill during candidate searches by hiring managers, even if the buzzwords don't completely line up, completes the circle.
There should be a way to mod this up to Score: 6; Insightful. Well said.
... I would like to hear about how some brilliant hacker took control of 3 million computers and used to all that computing power to, say, find a cure for cancer instead of just pissing everybody off.
Hi! I'm Clippy! Microsoft Bob is not available. You could leave him a message if you like. Just hold down the #, *, 7, and 3 keys. It looks like you are trying to make a call. Would you like me to help with that? I see you've dialed a 9. There is an area code "978", can I finish dialing that for you? Oh, I see you've now dialed a "1". You might be trying to make an emergency call. I could... ** REBOOT ** Hi! I'm Clippy! Microsoft Bob is not available right now...
"You mean like a cult?" No. Like a start-up. There are engineers who thirst to make a very cool thing, something they can look back upon with pride and the knowledge that "I did that." It isn't about the money (though thinking about the potentially big payday helps keep you going when things get tough or weird); it is about the chance for that sense of accomplishment. I never had an opportunity to work on something as cool as the iPad. I wish I had. Most of us will work 40+ years and never have the sense of triumph that the iPad team now enjoys.
One lament heard repeatedly is, "Why doesn't America BUILD anything anymore?" Americans used to be known for Yankee ingenuity, innovation, and know-how. There seems precious little of that anymore except, perhaps, in software and aircraft. We still write code and build airplanes. It is difficult to thing of much else. The love of building things is best acquired young, I believe. I have it. I learning how things work. I also like to build things. Ham radio is an outlet for me on all these fronts. In an era where so many electronic components are, by necessity, nearly microscopic or monolithic, fully-formed, and impenetrable, you can still build radios from discrete parts, understand each of their functions, and have the joy of using something you made. I cringed when I first heard that freshly graduated EEs may have never picked up a soldering iron! How can one gain that intuition about the physical world without experiencing it?! Ham radio in the 21st century isn't a replacement for the internet, cell phones, video games, or anything else. It is a really fun way to learn about electronics, wave propagation, digital signal processing, and a bunch of other stuff in a hands-on, practical, inexpensive way. Perhaps if fewer were embarrassed about their desire to learn and do things (you won't be one of the COOL kids if you do!) we would have more engineers, more things designed and maybe even built here, and a brighter future.
... is it?
If this posting looks familiar, it is. With a minimum of effort I found these three (including the latest). "The worst Apple products of all time", Feb 15, 2010 [posted by timothy]. "Apple's first flops", May 17, 2005 [posted by timothy]. "Top 10 Apple Flops", Jan 31, 2005 [posted by timothy]. Um, "timothy", can we stop rehashing stuff that happened 25 years ago?
So we're OK with major newspapers having absolutely no standards at all these days?
I believe I said the opposite; I said a failure to have standards will cause problems.
What do you suppose people did back in the days before you could get ads via RSS feed?
They reviewed the advertisements with their clients directly. There were a few hundred per day and it was a manageable problem. Now, advertisements may be served by proxies and selected from among tens of thousands of potential ads, designed to be targeted to readers in specific geographic regions, income levels, purchasing habits, interests, age categories, gender, education level, or other factors.
The point of my post was that the combinatorial explosion of possible advertisement choices to be served-up on my specific page load may not be easily reviewable by NYT staff a priori.
The concern I have over the long term is that sites like the NYT may not know what advertisements will appear because they are placed by bulk-buying proxies that dispense them at page-load time, probably based on evil-cookie trails or other demographic markers. So, the question becomes: how should a presumably high-integrity site such as a major news outlet ensure quality when they've outsourced advertisement delivery?
Review of each possible advertisement would be onerous, but failure to have some standards in place will eventually lead to malware (or worse) injected into unsuspecting reader's machines. I just chuckled when it popped up. I run Macs at home. But, when things like this happen to family members running PCs (and we get the phone call) it stops being funny pretty quickly.
Is there a business case for reviewing advertisements (and the associated mobile code whether it be FLASH, etc.) for a 21st century "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval"? After all, the NYT and others are just one virus (or porn advertisement) away from a PR nightmare.
The problem with this story is that it isn't clear where the sale has taken place. I click a button in Massachusetts, paid for the object with money from a Connecticut bank, the company hosting the web site is in New York, the headquarters of the company is in Arkansas, the shipment is made from New Hampshire, my mom receive the materials in Illinois (I dropped shipped her a gift). Where was the sale? I don't know what the right answer is... but I'm certain that state legislatures rushing to get something passed will end up making a mess bigger than the one they find themselves in now. I don't blame Amazon for pushing back. If I were Amazon management I'd be doing the same thing.
Debates over the "feel of paper" or "convenience of electronic delivery" aside, and assuming you could live with either, the economics are interesting. If you're committed to getting the paper, even the very expensive Kindle DX pays for itself in about a year (plus or minus). The difference, of course, is the paper delivery bleeds you a little week-by-week so you don't notice it. The Kindle DX is a big purchase outlay of nearly $500 to get started. But, again, after about a year things are close to break-even, depending on your usage. (Note this assumes home delivery prices won't go up!)
Here are the numbers for delivery in my area:
New York Times Home Delivery (paper)
14.80 (per week) Daily (769.60 yearly)
10.40 (per week) "Weekender" Fri-Sun (540.80 yearly)
7.50 (per week) Sunday only (390.00 yearly)
7.40 (per week) Weekdays Mon-Fri (384.80 yearly)
Kindle Daily Edition $13.99/mo (167.88 yearly)
Year of NYT + 489.00 Kindle DX = $656.88 (vs $769.60 for paper)
Sunday single issue NYT ($0.75/wk) $39
Year of Sunday NYT + 489.00 Kindle DX = $528 (vs $390 for paper)
Two years of Sunday NYT + Kindle DX = $567 (vs $780 for paper)
Boston Globe Home Delivery (paper)
9.00 (per week) Daily (468.00 yearly)
9.99 (per month) Boston Globe Kindle Edition ($119.88 yearly)
Year of the Globe + 468.00 Kindle DX = $608.88 (vs $468.00 for paper)
Two years of the Globe + Kindle DX = $728.76 (vs $936.00 for paper)
The funny thing is the Boston Globe probably loses money on the $9.00/week paper subscription but makes good profits on the 33-cents per day Kindle edition. If true, electronic delivery of the paper might be the only thing that could save it. Imagine that...
I have carefully read all 1587 posts on this topic before posting something that would be a duplicate of a previous post--just like all of you. Right? :-)
The Internet--the first global Write Only Memory.
Quoting: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." I would like to point out that incompetent people can (and should) go to jail if they break the law. Perhaps if people started going to jail, some of this "incompetence" would evaporate--and we would all be better off.
I find this move by Amazon to be disturbing. Are they a distributor or manufacturer? Until recently, Amazon was simply a retail hub for nearly any product I might be looking for and they were happy to sell it to me. I could search for the best product and know that Amazon was a reasonable place to look for a good price with quick delivery and great service. I was so confident that I would be spending money with them that I gladly paid the Amazon Prime pre-paid shipping and have saved money each year since that program began because of it.
Now there appears to be a shift: Amazon has produced the Kindle and now are, in essence, the publisher of at least 100K titles. They also produce the reader, the Kindle itself. They now have a competitive stake where they were previously just "honest brokers." What happens when two years from now an electronic book system comes out that blows the Kindle away? Does Amazon shun it? Do they do more? Must we now expect Microsoft-like tactics for any technology competitor to the products that Amazon develops or acquires? It isn't just that something might not appear in the Amazon store; I now worry that more active anticompetitive actions may be in the offing now that Amazon has begun down this path.
We recognize when Walmart, the nation's largest retailer, throws their weight around. That makes the evening news occasionally. Our view of Amazon to this point has been only through their web site, stock price, and that little box that arrives occasionally. I fear we may be seeing more of Amazon than that--and it isn't a good thing.
The White House claimed that the erasures were part of a tape rotation that represented "Best IT Practices". Last time I checked, Best IT Practices didn't call for breaking Federal law. This is especially galling in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley, where the government (in 2002, under Republican control) placed significant burdens on businesses and their record-keeping. Seems like it is time for somebody to go to jail.
I had no idea that Anderson's career was going so well that she should skip this. I guess Bleak House and that one appearance on Fraiser really put her over the top. {sigh}
At the risk of enticing you to make your tenth posting on this subject, let me try to clarify: Storytelling is the thing. Having a compelling story about people, hopes, dreams, obsticles, heros, antiheros, and the like are what makes good fiction, and good cinema. Bladerunner had great special effects, but it was also a compelling story. Serenity (and Firefly) was a fabulous vehicle combining the Wild West and the lonely ship's captain. If the characterization and storytelling were weak, we wouldn't love it as we do. My point was simply this: the best examples of science fiction (in print or screen) emphasize good fiction. When the elements of fiction are good, the science part is just a backdrop, part of the scenery. There are plenty of examples where the science (gizmos, ray guns, space ships, and time machines) came first with plots and characterization akin to "It was a dark and stormy night..." that leave us embarrassed for the work's creators. (Millennium [1989] with Kris Kristofferson and Cheryl Ladd comes to mind.) Interesting stories, like the ones I listed, have something to say and the science doesn't get in the way. The very best have people suspending their disbelief easily and comfortably, as with Firefly and its horses and space ships mixed up in the same scenes. Give me the good story, then we'll work on the backdrop. My two-cents.
The best science fiction movies are the ones not immediately identified as such by the general public. The movies that show how people behave under stress using a science fiction premise as a backdrop allow us to enjoy the work even if they get some (OK, perhaps even most) of the science wrong. Deep Impact and The Day After Tomorrow both centered on people, not gizmos, and can rightfully be filed under DRAMA as well as SCI FI. Works like Outbreak should also be given a nod by simply showing something about our world in an entertaining way to those who, in more case than not, had no stinking idea that such horrors existed. Sure, there have been plenty of "shoot-em-ups" masquerading as movie versions of beloved SCIFI books and short stories, but there have also been some reasonably clever works recently that treat me like I might have a brain. As Hollywood realizes we (who have a brain) also have money, I think we'll be seeing more stuff that celebrates the genre rather than just "raiding" it.
Your question evokes emotion where none is needed. There is
t icleID=46913
evidence that Microsoft has, from time-to-time, done things
that has set the industry back in order to protect their interests.
I believe there is also ample evidence that Microsoft used
illegal means to stifle competition and limit consumer choice.
One case, and this is not an isolated case, simply a splendid
example, is the story of Go Computer, a company frozen out
of the market by Microsoft's heavy-handed, and likely illegal
tactics. You can read the book "Start Up" (strongly recommended),
or pick up the story here for a flavor:
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?Ar
What happened there was a crime, figuratively and literally. I don't
"hate" Microsoft, but as a corporate citizen, they have been shown
to be untrustworthy in the past.
It isn't enough for computer software professionals to discover problems like this; we need to be able to communicate our results effectively to the non-technical public. Too often we find something disturbing and decend into technical jargon and lose our audience. The Princeton team has done an excellent job avoiding that pitfall and communicating this threat.
Now, if only we could find a reasonably motivated and alert politician to actually act on this.
We have seen an explosion of telecommunication technology and consumer options since AT&T was broken up and the telephone industry was transformed from a monopoly into a set of carrriers that could each compete on level ground. Many here might be too young to remember how the phone company used to argue that the integrity of their network would be compromised by even adding a diifferent (not AT&T) handset to a line in your house. At that time, AT&T's network ended (barely) at your ear.
There were plenty of jokes about the break-up at the time and it was impossible back then to see what the full effect of this might be. But today, we have a recent and relevant history to help guide our decision-making. Level ground, competition for services and not territoriality of infrastructure is what gives consumers choices while driving up profits. I believe Net Neutrality is ultimately better for service providers, too, though they appear to be too greedy to see it.
I've not been hearing comparisions by the media or analysts of Net Neutrality to the phone system break-up but the parallels seem compelling to me. To the extent we can bring the argument to "people who matter", perhaps this is a way to get past that disengenuousness that is the hallmark of today's politics.