Well, at a certain point you have to start addressing the problem. I think we're at that point.
Well put.
The notion that you can just ignore these nutjobs can lead to even bigger problems down the road. It is when average, everyday people fail allow spurious debates to take hold that the majority becomes hostage to a dimwitted but aggressive minority. Hostility to intellectualism has been with America since its founding, but when it becomes so pervasive that the nonsensical hurling of insults becomes a substitute for debate, the reasonable majority loses its ability to influence politics. I think we've already entered a very dangerous era, where style (angry rhetoric, appeals to symbology, character assassination) has far outstripped substance in the arena of public debate.
When is the last time you saw two people on television actually debate an idea for a full 40 minutes? I'm talking about locking intellectual horns and attempting to prove the merits of an idea to an audience through skillfully argued logic. No dodging the question, no shoehorning a question into a pre-generated answer. I think such debates are non-existent now because we have allowed them to become extinct. We allow the issues to be turned into lowest common denominator mudwrestling that shows how little we respect ourselves as citizens. We have not demanded a better process, one that pushes better ideas to the fore. So we wind up with a process that is driven by one liners and photos of politicians going duck hunting.
But once again, if you fear VCs, you should not start a business.
I know several serial entrepreneurs who would take issue with that statement. Before there were VCs, plenty of large, successful businesses were created, and thousands are created every year without VCs. If your business does not need a huge amount of cash early in the game, the primary rationale for using a VC disappears.
It would be far better to find common ground and work from there without resorting to arguing from a position
You're assuming an equal relationship between the parties. Most of the time you are not given the opportunity to seek common ground where the power relationship is disproportionate. I'm not suggesting that as a subordinate you should attempt to have disagreements with your superiors. Of course, you want to seek common ground and find ways to make everyone happy.
But in a situation where it's one OS or another, you do have to advance a set of reasons in favor of your position if you want to do the right thing for the organization. If your argument (that is, the rationale you have articulated) is disregarded, play ball and do your best to help the team, of course. Sniffling in the corner won't help anyone. But seeking common ground at every turn won't necessarily lead your boss to respect you, either.
Unless you really need a lot of capital to start out with (and probably even then) avoid VCs like the plague. They will f*ck you and not even say thanks. Seriously, their job is to let someone else take all the risks, then jump in and make a metric buttload of money off of an idea that has already been proven. They are very seldom risk-takers, and they are generally ruthless. There are somne exceptions, but if you must find a VC, do your homework first. Talk to entrepreneurs who have worked with VCs. Get first-hand info from people who've been through a VC experience and survived to tell the tale.
When writing a business plan, cut through the crap. Read Guy Kawasaki's stuff. He knows what he's talking about. His piece on business plans is brief and to the point, which is how your business plan should be.
When the video-capable iPod was released, Apple was very clear to position it as the latest and greatest iPod music player, with the added ability to play video. It's an excellent iPod. It plays video very well. If you buy a product and it meets or exceeds your expectations, why should you care if a better version comes out six months later? Welcome to the Computer Age.
Besides, the rumor sites and press pushed it as the "video iPod." Apple never represented video as its primary function. Look at the iPod site. It's an iPod first, and a video player second.
If you're Apple, you're gonna get bashed if you sit on your laurels and don't keep coming out with newer, better, less expensive versions of the iPod. It seems Apple also gets bashed for continually improving their product lineup. Which makes sense, I suppose. I mean, Apple should really take a breather, because nobody wants the option of buying improved iPods, and Apple's competitors certainly need somet time to catch up.
Winning the argument depends on first explicitly defining the terms in a way that is advantageous to your position.
Start out with a proposition that everyone can agree on, like, "We depend on our operating system to do the following things: Minimize support costs through superior uptime, minimize hardware costs by providing more computing power per CPU cycle, realize long term cost benefits by providing superior computing resources throughout the company at a lower cost per seat." This is just an off-the-cuff example.
Then use metrics from your own organization (if they're not available, guesstimate), comparing the cost of meeting each of those goals. Historical data presented in a before and after comparison format can be quite valuable in showing people that you're not advocating Linux because you have an ideological attachment to it, but because it does the same job less expensively. Arguments about quality will go right over their heads. Intangibles such as, "It makes us all happier to use Linux because we don't have to run around fighting fires all the time," don't register with most O-level folks. Stay focused on apples to apples comparisons, and always compare costs.
As many others have pointed out, some managers simply won't listen. However, giving up isn't the answer either. At least present your case firmly, without rancor, and in as broad a forum as possible. Don't go behind the manager's back, but try to get other people in on the meeting. That way even if this knucklehead doesn't listen to you, you'll probably convince a few people. When they run off to other companies after the knucklehead brings the company crashing to its knees, you'll have a decent chance of connecting up with one or more of the smart ones who listened to your pitch and understand what you were conveying. The way I look at it, you're playing a long-term game here. It's not just about convincing the knucklehead, or saving your company's IT department from waste and annoyance. It's also about clearly establishing that you know what you're talking about, and you're able to clearly and professionally articulate your knowledge.
Regardless of whose advice you take, I wish you good luck! It's never fun trying to manage up.
I thought Disney was gonna buy Apple. Or was it that Sun was gonna buy Apple? Actually, maybe the new rumor is that Apple is gonna buy Sun. Wasn't Apple gonna buy Pixar? D'oh! Too late. But they can still buy TiVo, right? Maybe if Apple does it quickly enough, by the time Sony buys Apple, Sony will get a twofer.
The sheer mass of Bill Gates's and Steve Jobs's wealth shows how effectivce that strategy has been- and also shows the magnitude of the detriment to ordinary consumers who should probably still have a couple of those billions of dollars in their own pockets.
You seem to be saying that the amassing of capital, which is at the core of capitalism, is fundamentally destructive. Are you saying that in addition to abolishing copyright, we should somehow move away from our economic system, which allows large companies to amass capital? I'm not sure how Gates' wealth is of detriment to ordinary consumers, but I'd love to see some emperical evidence that demonstrates how we'd all be better off if Apple and Microsoft hadn't been so successful. I wonder: would there be a computer in every home? Would we all be hooked up to the 'Net. Somehow I doubt it. I don't agree with the specific actions giant software companies take, but I find it hard to believe that they are intrinsically evil.
The point of copyrights and patents is to strike a balance- to allow a time-limited monopoly to derive monetary gain.
OK, I'm with you there.
The defense of "intellectual property" ultimately hurts everyone.
Don't you really mean "the unreasonable extension of intellectual property ultimately hurts everyone," or do you really think that the balance you mentioned need no longer be sought, and we should go completely the other way, throwing out the balancing scales altogether?
It is uncertain what he intends to do with those groups, but one thing is clear: for the first time in over a thousand years, it is possible for the basic power structures in the middle east to change radically. In the past, the roles always stayed the same, even though the persons occupying those roles, and the geographic areas they controlled changed.
Your thesis seems to be that he may have some larger aim, but in the medium term his goal is to establish a new power structure in the Middle East. That is an interesting notion, and I definitely could imagine bin Laden practicing strategic misdirection. I can see why he would want to induce America to wage war in the Middle East, but the larger question of his end goal remains. If not to take down America, what is his real mission?
I could imagine a scenario in which his intention is to take over Saudi Arabia, to topple the House of Saud. Perhaps the only way he figured he could gather sufficient manpower would be through fighting America first, in order to profit from the obviously forseeable recruiting benefits. So he draws in America, which as predicted, roils the Middle East. The Sauds fall, and bin Laden steps in and takes over Saudi Arabia. Perhaps he establishes a new caliphate, encompassing several Middle Eastern countries. He proceeds to attempt to overwhelm Israel with suicide bombers. Then what?
Your line of reasoning, if I'm interpreting it correctly, is interesting. I don't know that the answers are as obvious as any of us think, though. After all, generals have a difficult enough time getting inside the heads of their counterparts on the battlefield. Here, we're dealing with a man from a vastly different culture, who follows a radical version of a religion most Westerners don't understand very well (having read the Koran, I can say that it doesn't tell you much about Middle Eastern culture or politics), and who is playing a very, very long game.
One more nit: I don't buy the inference that if he wanted to, bin Laden could be doing more harm to American troops in Iraq. Comparing casualty rates between the Civil War, WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq is just too loose. There are so many variables. The South kicked the North all over the battlefield in the first years of a traditional army against army war. World War II was another struggle between giant conventional forces. Vietnam, though a guerilla war, was primarily rural and involved large numbers of NVA units that were formed along relatively conventional lines. Casualty rates in Iraq are influenced by the overwhelming capabilities of American combat forces at the unit level, the availability of rapid surveillance data, access to extraordinary medical care, and so on. Assuming that the Americans in Iraq aren't getting their hats handed to them by the insurgents merely because bin Laden is holding back seems a stretch to me, absent any evidence to that effect.
and I can't type very well right now. I'll do my best, anyway. The Disney chain boss has left for five minutes, so I may have time to bang out a quick response.
Instead of crying about that, or clinging to old ways, what people need to do is learn how to make money from content services and not from content controll.
Nice idea. Let me know when your company goes public. In the mean time, ponder the notion that it takes a long time for human systems to change, and that usually an awful lot of experimentation is required before the solution that history regards as "obvious" manifests itself. While giving everything away seems obvious to you, if you ran a three-person company, or a three-hundred person company, or a three-thousand person company, would you bet the company and the livelihood of your employees on your deeply held conviction?
The Creative Commons approach is anything but clinging to old ways. It's a means of providing more collaboration, more free exchange of culture, and more options. It provides freedom of choice, a way out of the old one-size-fits-all model of traditional copyright. Like the GPL, it does so within the existing copyright regime.
Sure, it's not as black and white an approach as the GPL. It makes it tougher to determine who should be flying X-Wings and who belongs in a TIE Fighter, but it works in the real world. It is showing people that they can control the level of copyright protection of their works. I won't be at all surprised when more and more content businesses see the light and start voluntarily restricting their control over content. In the mean time, all content creators are not malevolent, drool-fanged monsters trying to steal our precious bodily fluids. Sure, the RIAA are scaly reptiles, but most content creators of them are just honest people trying to make a buck, and in my opinion, bashing them over the head with wildly inflated historical analogies doesn't do anything to advance the dialogue.
So a telcom spends enormous sums of cash laying fiber, and you have the gall to imply they don't even own the backbone. What a bunch of socialists.
After the AT&T split, the Baby Bells all "started" with huge existing infrastructures. Imagine starting a business with an existing monopoly in your geographic market, a high barrier to entry for potential competitors, and enormous working capital. Right from the beginning, they were able to reap the rewards of a monopoly that had previously been protected by the federal government. Nice windfall if you can get it.
Sure, they invested in fiber after that. But when you can leverage that head start, you are still benefitting from the initial head start provided by AT&T, which in turn was provided in large part by the taxpayers. The telecom structure has changed quite a bit since the breakup of AT&T, but when they portray themselves as fearless, innovative entrepreneurs, it doesn't ring true, particularly since they're so slow to respond to customer needs, and so incredibly bureaucratic. They'd like themselves to be these nimble, clever players, ushering in the new age of communications, but all they've really proven themselves good at is milking bandwith. Almost everything else they get their hands on turns to crap.
Maybe that's why there's so much eye-rolling when the O-level geniuses at Verizon, et. al. start talking about "their" infrastructure.
it may also be that the American intelligence aparatus has been successful in thwarting al-Qaeda's attempts to do damage. Just because the CIA, FBI, et al aren't broadcasting their successes from the rooftops doesn't mean there haven't been any. Intelligence successes tend to be vastly underreported, while intelligence failures get wide play.
..."It seems obvious that bin Laden wants to do serious damage to the American economy,..." I give up.. why does it seem obvious?
Bin Laden has stated that economic disruption is his goal, and American intelligence analysts haven't argued otherwise. He could be playing a sophisticated game of misdirection, but his propaganda is intended for would-be suicide bombers as much as it is intended for our consumption. It wouldn't suit his cause to misdirect his own followers.
The October video, released just before the U.S. election, offers a glimpse into the jihadist strategy. "We are continuing in the same policy to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy," said bin Laden. His logic is simple: To bring the U.S. to suffer a fate similar to that of the Soviet Union, the terrorists need to drain America's resources and bring it to the point it can no longer afford to preserve its military and economic dominance. As the U.S. loses standing in the Middle East, the jihadists can gain ground and remove from power regimes they view as corrupt and illegitimate while defeating other infidels who inhabit the land of Islam.
According to bin Laden's math, each $1 al Qaeda has spent on strikes has cost the United States $1 million in economic fallout and military spending, including emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.
Al Qaeda has long made a point of hitting economic targets. The World Trade Center was likely targeted on Sept. 11 both because attacking it would kill thousands and because the twin towers were symbols of America's economic power. In a video that surfaced in December 2001, bin Laden said the Sept. 11 attackers struck the American economy "in the heart."
There won't be a serious cyberattack against America for the foreseeable future (outside of normal business competition, that is), it would ruin the value of the stocks owned by just about every organization and influential individual on the planet.
By extension you're saying that no party would want to do serious damage to the American economy, because doing so would damage the value of stocks. It seems obvious that bin Laden wants to do serious damage to the American economy, so I'm not sure I buy the supposition that no enemy would dare attack the American economy. You're assuming a rational actor where there may not be one.
Suppose their attacks allow them to get into various machines and networks, what will they do with the data that is accesible in those machines?
Well, according to TFA, "IT-ISAC has eight members participating in the exercise, the center's Web site states. The participants are Cisco Systems, Citadel Security Software, CA (formerly Computer Associates), Computer Sciences Corp., Intel, Microsoft, Symantec and VeriSign." So those companies seem to have signed up and are ready to have their networks accessed as part of the excercise. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, your supposition is groundless.
Is this just another end run around warrantless search and seizures of data?
If you were going to attempt to grab all sorts of data, would you publicize it and bring in several nongovernment participants? It seems that bringing in so many actors and making it all public would violate several of the tenets of Black Helicopter Ops 101.
What kind of oversite is there on this process and how can we be sure the information is not used, stored, or otherwise desiminated among the various US spook agencies and their foreign lackeys.
And how much do you want to bet Google will be a very well excercised target since they have been fighting the governments abuse of power already.
Google is fighting a subpoena from the Department of Justice. If you think that the Department of Homeland Security automagically does the bidding of the DOJ, you've obviously never worked in government. The people at DHS aren't morons, and though the structure of the organization almost guarantees incompetence, I doubt they would be so stupid as to "target" Google in this exercise.
And while they plan all these, our southern border with Mexico remains wide open to even more dangerous folks from all over the world.
So you're saying that because there is one hole in our defenses, we should not attempt to plug other holes? Are you saying it's a zero-sum game, and that while the DHS is attempting to thwart cyber-attacks, suddenly all of their other efforts have come to a standstill?
When wil these politicians learn?
You mean, when will government cyber-security experts learn. It seems they're trying to do what they can to keep their area of responsibility protected. If they didn't, certainly there would be plenty of people ready to give them a hard time for "not learning" that protection was necessary.
Well if you really want to make money in the stock market you have to have some insight beyond the average investor.
The problem is that even if you do have insight beyond the average investor, that doesn't mean that your investment will act as you expect it will. Attempting to guess at whether an individual stock will do well is akin to guessing at the beginning of the season who will wind up in the Super Bowl. By the way, according to Gambling911, the Steelers' odds of winning the SuperBowl were 12 to 1 at the beginning of the season, and 18 to 1 at the beginning of the playoffs, while the Seahawks had 25 to 1 early odds of winning.
It could be argued that over time, it is practically impossible to beat the market, and that almost everyone who attempts to outsmart the market in the end fails. If that is the case, investing in individual stocks (and not just volatile ones) is in the end akin to playing roulette at Vegas. Tracking an index makes much more sense over the long haul, and if you're not thinking long term with investment, you might as well be buying lottery tickets.
I think you're missing the point. It's obvious that Google is a public corporation, and that they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. However, item 6 in their statement of corporate philosphy is "You can make money without doing evil." That statement in essence says that Google holds itself to a certain standard of behavior. It is part of the way they market themselves to the world. It is a part of their reputation, a part of why so many people prefer Google over other companies, in the way that some people prefer Fair Trade Coffee to coffee produced through other means.
Given that Google has branded itself in that fashion, it is only reasonable to expect people to question whether their actions in China constitute "evil" behavior or not. Personally I think the issue is not black and white, and that Google made the best decision it could under the circumstances. However, I can see why many people are pissed off at Google for doing business with the Chinese government in this fashion. I can even imagine that many of those angry people have never worn a tie-dyed shirt or listened to the Grateful Dead.
Google is the highest-profile player in the game of free access vs. government control, but the larger battle has been going on for years. Unfortunately, governments are winning. What's fascinating to me is just how much the law of unintended consequences comes into play here. The first shot in this war was French government's battle with Yahoo! over Nazi-related materials. Seems like a good idea to keep those nasty Nazis from using the Net to spread their vile beliefs. Unfortunately, once you put down a few barriers, before too long you wind up with the Great Firewall of China.
Yesterday in one of my law classes we had a discussion (related to the discovery process) about the DOJ's subpoena of Google. More than one of my fellow students stated that expecting any sort of privacy on the Internet was absurd. They simply didn't feel that it should be expected, given that they'd grown up with an Internet full of privacy warnings, cookies, GeoIP monitoring, and so on. I mentioned the infamous "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon and they just looked at me blankly, as if I were a 90 year old man whistfully recalling the days when ice cream sodas cost a nickel.
If the corporations 0wn the state, what's the difference? Even Mussolini called fascism corporatism.
There are significant distinctions. For one thing, under fascism in both Germany and Italy the corporate leaders were often at odds with their political masters. Corporatism was the ideal of fascism, but in practice the corporations were used by the fascists to gain power, then used as tools by Hitler and Mussolini. The corporations grew fat under fascist rule, but chafed under fascist control. As for the Mussolini quote about corporatism, the term itself does not mean "control by corporations" which the article you linked to makes clear.
State control under an autocratic socialist regime like the USSR corrals all mechanisms of control under the Party, which both governs and directly controls all production and expendatures. While there are competing power interests within the Party, there is nothing outside the Party influencing events.
Obviously neither method of control is a worthwhile political structure, but conflating autocratic socialism with fascism, then forwarding the notion that the entertainment industry is reaching for political control of America is laying it a bit too thick. Calling the MPAA/RIAA "Big Brother" riles up the troops, but it doesn't help anyone understand the real situation any better.
Employees have had the ability to steal corporate data for years. E-mail, CD-ROM drives, tape backups, iPods - the list of mechanisms that can be used to disseminate secrets is long and just grows longer every year. The problem isn't a particular mechanism for theft, it's that there are so many of them. If you're trying to safeguard your secrets through merely technical means, you're fighting an uphill battle.
While corporations will fight this through technology as much as possible, I think over the long term corporations will push for more vigorous legal punishment for corporate data thieves, and for more capability to actively monitor the employee communications, even when they're outside of the office. Their argument will be that since business is often done outside the office, as employers they should be able to safeguard their data beyond the company's physical boundaries. Whether corporations succeed or fail depends on whether voters think privacy is important or not. I suppose it also depends on how effectively corporations tie their cause to the "War on Terror" bandwagon. Thus far in the US at least, people have proven remarkably willing to give away all kinds of rights whenever someone ties anti-privacy legislation to the struggle against extreme fear.
So they want total control over the next generation?
No. They're trying to protect a dead business model. Not the same thing by a long shot.
They're greedy and stupid, but their motivation is profit, not political control. Their efforts to lobby Congress and sway the courts are designed to keep an industry built around middlemen from imploding. However, they are also trying other approaches as well (striking iTunes distribution deals with Apple, for example).
The RIAA/MPAA know that their lawsuits are unpopular, but at the moment they haven't found an approach that (in their minds) does a better job of protecting their profits. They'd rather not spend all that money on litigation, but they feel compelled to do so at the moment. Once one of the labels gets smart and breaks ranks, then makes gobs of money by treating customers like customers rather than criminals, the rest will follow.
Also, Orwell was referring to state control, not corporate control. If you want to wallow in some good corporate dystopia, check out Ambient by Jack Womack.
I am most certainly against the use of sports ability as a determinitive factor in the admission of students. While interest in sports may lead to a different viewpoint (and thus contribute to diversity of ideas) just as being poor or of an ethnic minority, it is by no means definite. As such, I think it is an extremely poor choice for inclusion in admissions decisions.
And so the pattern of admission to elite institutions was set in the 1920s. It consisted in a limitation of numbers (there was none before the 1920s, when colleges competed for larger numbers); an admissions office that required pictures, interviews, and other means to determine the identities of those to be excluded; a strong preference for athletes and alumni children; and an effective sidelining of the faculty, which, when it made its views known, generally called for higher academic standards. The admissions offices generally looked for the "all-American boys," and a well-rounded class that included a sufficient number of happy academic mediocrities from the upper social strata.
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Bleh. Now they want to come up with a way to more effectively market things that are fun, so as to make them seem more "adult."
I propose a new tagline for games of all sorts (video, board, etc.): "Games: Cognitive Entertainment Will Get You Ahead in Life!"
Well, at a certain point you have to start addressing the problem. I think we're at that point.
Well put.
The notion that you can just ignore these nutjobs can lead to even bigger problems down the road. It is when average, everyday people fail allow spurious debates to take hold that the majority becomes hostage to a dimwitted but aggressive minority. Hostility to intellectualism has been with America since its founding, but when it becomes so pervasive that the nonsensical hurling of insults becomes a substitute for debate, the reasonable majority loses its ability to influence politics. I think we've already entered a very dangerous era, where style (angry rhetoric, appeals to symbology, character assassination) has far outstripped substance in the arena of public debate.
When is the last time you saw two people on television actually debate an idea for a full 40 minutes? I'm talking about locking intellectual horns and attempting to prove the merits of an idea to an audience through skillfully argued logic. No dodging the question, no shoehorning a question into a pre-generated answer. I think such debates are non-existent now because we have allowed them to become extinct. We allow the issues to be turned into lowest common denominator mudwrestling that shows how little we respect ourselves as citizens. We have not demanded a better process, one that pushes better ideas to the fore. So we wind up with a process that is driven by one liners and photos of politicians going duck hunting.
But once again, if you fear VCs, you should not start a business.
I know several serial entrepreneurs who would take issue with that statement. Before there were VCs, plenty of large, successful businesses were created, and thousands are created every year without VCs. If your business does not need a huge amount of cash early in the game, the primary rationale for using a VC disappears.
They say you aren't a real VC until you have lost at least 20 million dollars of your own money.
Except that most VCs don't actually lose their own money, and they get paid even when their investments are not successful. It's quite a racket. Although people tend to write bad things about you.
It would be far better to find common ground and work from there without resorting to arguing from a position
You're assuming an equal relationship between the parties. Most of the time you are not given the opportunity to seek common ground where the power relationship is disproportionate. I'm not suggesting that as a subordinate you should attempt to have disagreements with your superiors. Of course, you want to seek common ground and find ways to make everyone happy.
But in a situation where it's one OS or another, you do have to advance a set of reasons in favor of your position if you want to do the right thing for the organization. If your argument (that is, the rationale you have articulated) is disregarded, play ball and do your best to help the team, of course. Sniffling in the corner won't help anyone. But seeking common ground at every turn won't necessarily lead your boss to respect you, either.
Unless you really need a lot of capital to start out with (and probably even then) avoid VCs like the plague. They will f*ck you and not even say thanks. Seriously, their job is to let someone else take all the risks, then jump in and make a metric buttload of money off of an idea that has already been proven. They are very seldom risk-takers, and they are generally ruthless. There are somne exceptions, but if you must find a VC, do your homework first. Talk to entrepreneurs who have worked with VCs. Get first-hand info from people who've been through a VC experience and survived to tell the tale.
When writing a business plan, cut through the crap. Read Guy Kawasaki's stuff. He knows what he's talking about. His piece on business plans is brief and to the point, which is how your business plan should be.
Good luck to you!
When the video-capable iPod was released, Apple was very clear to position it as the latest and greatest iPod music player, with the added ability to play video. It's an excellent iPod. It plays video very well. If you buy a product and it meets or exceeds your expectations, why should you care if a better version comes out six months later? Welcome to the Computer Age.
Besides, the rumor sites and press pushed it as the "video iPod." Apple never represented video as its primary function. Look at the iPod site. It's an iPod first, and a video player second.
If you're Apple, you're gonna get bashed if you sit on your laurels and don't keep coming out with newer, better, less expensive versions of the iPod. It seems Apple also gets bashed for continually improving their product lineup. Which makes sense, I suppose. I mean, Apple should really take a breather, because nobody wants the option of buying improved iPods, and Apple's competitors certainly need somet time to catch up.
Winning the argument depends on first explicitly defining the terms in a way that is advantageous to your position.
Start out with a proposition that everyone can agree on, like, "We depend on our operating system to do the following things: Minimize support costs through superior uptime, minimize hardware costs by providing more computing power per CPU cycle, realize long term cost benefits by providing superior computing resources throughout the company at a lower cost per seat." This is just an off-the-cuff example.
Then use metrics from your own organization (if they're not available, guesstimate), comparing the cost of meeting each of those goals. Historical data presented in a before and after comparison format can be quite valuable in showing people that you're not advocating Linux because you have an ideological attachment to it, but because it does the same job less expensively. Arguments about quality will go right over their heads. Intangibles such as, "It makes us all happier to use Linux because we don't have to run around fighting fires all the time," don't register with most O-level folks. Stay focused on apples to apples comparisons, and always compare costs.
As many others have pointed out, some managers simply won't listen. However, giving up isn't the answer either. At least present your case firmly, without rancor, and in as broad a forum as possible. Don't go behind the manager's back, but try to get other people in on the meeting. That way even if this knucklehead doesn't listen to you, you'll probably convince a few people. When they run off to other companies after the knucklehead brings the company crashing to its knees, you'll have a decent chance of connecting up with one or more of the smart ones who listened to your pitch and understand what you were conveying. The way I look at it, you're playing a long-term game here. It's not just about convincing the knucklehead, or saving your company's IT department from waste and annoyance. It's also about clearly establishing that you know what you're talking about, and you're able to clearly and professionally articulate your knowledge.
Regardless of whose advice you take, I wish you good luck! It's never fun trying to manage up.
I thought Disney was gonna buy Apple. Or was it that Sun was gonna buy Apple? Actually, maybe the new rumor is that Apple is gonna buy Sun. Wasn't Apple gonna buy Pixar? D'oh! Too late. But they can still buy TiVo, right? Maybe if Apple does it quickly enough, by the time Sony buys Apple, Sony will get a twofer.
Still, the timing is perfect for an Apple buyout of Palm.
The sheer mass of Bill Gates's and Steve Jobs's wealth shows how effectivce that strategy has been- and also shows the magnitude of the detriment to ordinary consumers who should probably still have a couple of those billions of dollars in their own pockets.
You seem to be saying that the amassing of capital, which is at the core of capitalism, is fundamentally destructive. Are you saying that in addition to abolishing copyright, we should somehow move away from our economic system, which allows large companies to amass capital? I'm not sure how Gates' wealth is of detriment to ordinary consumers, but I'd love to see some emperical evidence that demonstrates how we'd all be better off if Apple and Microsoft hadn't been so successful. I wonder: would there be a computer in every home? Would we all be hooked up to the 'Net. Somehow I doubt it. I don't agree with the specific actions giant software companies take, but I find it hard to believe that they are intrinsically evil.
The point of copyrights and patents is to strike a balance- to allow a time-limited monopoly to derive monetary gain.
OK, I'm with you there.
The defense of "intellectual property" ultimately hurts everyone.
Don't you really mean "the unreasonable extension of intellectual property ultimately hurts everyone," or do you really think that the balance you mentioned need no longer be sought, and we should go completely the other way, throwing out the balancing scales altogether?
It is uncertain what he intends to do with those groups, but one thing is clear: for the first time in over a thousand years, it is possible for the basic power structures in the middle east to change radically. In the past, the roles always stayed the same, even though the persons occupying those roles, and the geographic areas they controlled changed.
Your thesis seems to be that he may have some larger aim, but in the medium term his goal is to establish a new power structure in the Middle East. That is an interesting notion, and I definitely could imagine bin Laden practicing strategic misdirection. I can see why he would want to induce America to wage war in the Middle East, but the larger question of his end goal remains. If not to take down America, what is his real mission?
I could imagine a scenario in which his intention is to take over Saudi Arabia, to topple the House of Saud. Perhaps the only way he figured he could gather sufficient manpower would be through fighting America first, in order to profit from the obviously forseeable recruiting benefits. So he draws in America, which as predicted, roils the Middle East. The Sauds fall, and bin Laden steps in and takes over Saudi Arabia. Perhaps he establishes a new caliphate, encompassing several Middle Eastern countries. He proceeds to attempt to overwhelm Israel with suicide bombers. Then what?
Your line of reasoning, if I'm interpreting it correctly, is interesting. I don't know that the answers are as obvious as any of us think, though. After all, generals have a difficult enough time getting inside the heads of their counterparts on the battlefield. Here, we're dealing with a man from a vastly different culture, who follows a radical version of a religion most Westerners don't understand very well (having read the Koran, I can say that it doesn't tell you much about Middle Eastern culture or politics), and who is playing a very, very long game.
One more nit: I don't buy the inference that if he wanted to, bin Laden could be doing more harm to American troops in Iraq. Comparing casualty rates between the Civil War, WWII, Vietnam, and Iraq is just too loose. There are so many variables. The South kicked the North all over the battlefield in the first years of a traditional army against army war. World War II was another struggle between giant conventional forces. Vietnam, though a guerilla war, was primarily rural and involved large numbers of NVA units that were formed along relatively conventional lines. Casualty rates in Iraq are influenced by the overwhelming capabilities of American combat forces at the unit level, the availability of rapid surveillance data, access to extraordinary medical care, and so on. Assuming that the Americans in Iraq aren't getting their hats handed to them by the insurgents merely because bin Laden is holding back seems a stretch to me, absent any evidence to that effect.
and I can't type very well right now. I'll do my best, anyway. The Disney chain boss has left for five minutes, so I may have time to bang out a quick response.
Instead of crying about that, or clinging to old ways, what people need to do is learn how to make money from content services and not from content controll.
Nice idea. Let me know when your company goes public. In the mean time, ponder the notion that it takes a long time for human systems to change, and that usually an awful lot of experimentation is required before the solution that history regards as "obvious" manifests itself. While giving everything away seems obvious to you, if you ran a three-person company, or a three-hundred person company, or a three-thousand person company, would you bet the company and the livelihood of your employees on your deeply held conviction?
The Creative Commons approach is anything but clinging to old ways. It's a means of providing more collaboration, more free exchange of culture, and more options. It provides freedom of choice, a way out of the old one-size-fits-all model of traditional copyright. Like the GPL, it does so within the existing copyright regime.
Sure, it's not as black and white an approach as the GPL. It makes it tougher to determine who should be flying X-Wings and who belongs in a TIE Fighter, but it works in the real world. It is showing people that they can control the level of copyright protection of their works. I won't be at all surprised when more and more content businesses see the light and start voluntarily restricting their control over content. In the mean time, all content creators are not malevolent, drool-fanged monsters trying to steal our precious bodily fluids. Sure, the RIAA are scaly reptiles, but most content creators of them are just honest people trying to make a buck, and in my opinion, bashing them over the head with wildly inflated historical analogies doesn't do anything to advance the dialogue.
Slavery? Come on.
So a telcom spends enormous sums of cash laying fiber, and you have the gall to imply they don't even own the backbone. What a bunch of socialists.
After the AT&T split, the Baby Bells all "started" with huge existing infrastructures. Imagine starting a business with an existing monopoly in your geographic market, a high barrier to entry for potential competitors, and enormous working capital. Right from the beginning, they were able to reap the rewards of a monopoly that had previously been protected by the federal government. Nice windfall if you can get it.
Sure, they invested in fiber after that. But when you can leverage that head start, you are still benefitting from the initial head start provided by AT&T, which in turn was provided in large part by the taxpayers. The telecom structure has changed quite a bit since the breakup of AT&T, but when they portray themselves as fearless, innovative entrepreneurs, it doesn't ring true, particularly since they're so slow to respond to customer needs, and so incredibly bureaucratic. They'd like themselves to be these nimble, clever players, ushering in the new age of communications, but all they've really proven themselves good at is milking bandwith. Almost everything else they get their hands on turns to crap.
Maybe that's why there's so much eye-rolling when the O-level geniuses at Verizon, et. al. start talking about "their" infrastructure.
Bin Laden has stated that economic disruption is his goal, and American intelligence analysts haven't argued otherwise. He could be playing a sophisticated game of misdirection, but his propaganda is intended for would-be suicide bombers as much as it is intended for our consumption. It wouldn't suit his cause to misdirect his own followers.
We "bled Russia for ten years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat," bin Laden boasted in his October 2004 videotape.
The October video, released just before the U.S. election, offers a glimpse into the jihadist strategy. "We are continuing in the same policy to make America bleed profusely to the point of bankruptcy," said bin Laden. His logic is simple: To bring the U.S. to suffer a fate similar to that of the Soviet Union, the terrorists need to drain America's resources and bring it to the point it can no longer afford to preserve its military and economic dominance. As the U.S. loses standing in the Middle East, the jihadists can gain ground and remove from power regimes they view as corrupt and illegitimate while defeating other infidels who inhabit the land of Islam.
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He said the September 11 attacks have "shaken the throne of America and hit hard the American economy at its heart and its core." Bin Laden said that if the U.S. economy suffers enough, Americans will withdraw from those countries mentioned.
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According to bin Laden's math, each $1 al Qaeda has spent on strikes has cost the United States $1 million in economic fallout and military spending, including emergency funding for Iraq and Afghanistan.
"As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers," bin Laden said, estimating the deficit at more than $1 trillion.
Al Qaeda has long made a point of hitting economic targets. The World Trade Center was likely targeted on Sept. 11 both because attacking it would kill thousands and because the twin towers were symbols of America's economic power. In a video that surfaced in December 2001, bin Laden said the Sept. 11 attackers struck the American economy "in the heart."
There won't be a serious cyberattack against America for the foreseeable future (outside of normal business competition, that is), it would ruin the value of the stocks owned by just about every organization and influential individual on the planet.
By extension you're saying that no party would want to do serious damage to the American economy, because doing so would damage the value of stocks. It seems obvious that bin Laden wants to do serious damage to the American economy, so I'm not sure I buy the supposition that no enemy would dare attack the American economy. You're assuming a rational actor where there may not be one.
Suppose their attacks allow them to get into various machines and networks, what will they do with the data that is accesible in those machines?
Well, according to TFA, "IT-ISAC has eight members participating in the exercise, the center's Web site states. The participants are Cisco Systems, Citadel Security Software, CA (formerly Computer Associates), Computer Sciences Corp., Intel, Microsoft, Symantec and VeriSign." So those companies seem to have signed up and are ready to have their networks accessed as part of the excercise. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, your supposition is groundless.
Is this just another end run around warrantless search and seizures of data?
If you were going to attempt to grab all sorts of data, would you publicize it and bring in several nongovernment participants? It seems that bringing in so many actors and making it all public would violate several of the tenets of Black Helicopter Ops 101.
What kind of oversite is there on this process and how can we be sure the information is not used, stored, or otherwise desiminated among the various US spook agencies and their foreign lackeys.
In the House of Representantives, the House Committee on Homeland Security provides oversight. In the Senate, the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs provides oversight.
And how much do you want to bet Google will be a very well excercised target since they have been fighting the governments abuse of power already.
Google is fighting a subpoena from the Department of Justice. If you think that the Department of Homeland Security automagically does the bidding of the DOJ, you've obviously never worked in government. The people at DHS aren't morons, and though the structure of the organization almost guarantees incompetence, I doubt they would be so stupid as to "target" Google in this exercise.
And while they plan all these, our southern border with Mexico remains wide open to even more dangerous folks from all over the world.
So you're saying that because there is one hole in our defenses, we should not attempt to plug other holes? Are you saying it's a zero-sum game, and that while the DHS is attempting to thwart cyber-attacks, suddenly all of their other efforts have come to a standstill?
When wil these politicians learn?
You mean, when will government cyber-security experts learn. It seems they're trying to do what they can to keep their area of responsibility protected. If they didn't, certainly there would be plenty of people ready to give them a hard time for "not learning" that protection was necessary.
Well if you really want to make money in the stock market you have to have some insight beyond the average investor.
The problem is that even if you do have insight beyond the average investor, that doesn't mean that your investment will act as you expect it will. Attempting to guess at whether an individual stock will do well is akin to guessing at the beginning of the season who will wind up in the Super Bowl. By the way, according to Gambling911, the Steelers' odds of winning the SuperBowl were 12 to 1 at the beginning of the season, and 18 to 1 at the beginning of the playoffs, while the Seahawks had 25 to 1 early odds of winning.
It could be argued that over time, it is practically impossible to beat the market, and that almost everyone who attempts to outsmart the market in the end fails. If that is the case, investing in individual stocks (and not just volatile ones) is in the end akin to playing roulette at Vegas. Tracking an index makes much more sense over the long haul, and if you're not thinking long term with investment, you might as well be buying lottery tickets.
Only the first time around, it was called "AOL/TimeWarner."
There was a lot of leveraging of synergies going on back then, and lots of money being spent, but the end result was less than stellar.
Get over it hippies.
I think you're missing the point. It's obvious that Google is a public corporation, and that they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders. However, item 6 in their statement of corporate philosphy is "You can make money without doing evil." That statement in essence says that Google holds itself to a certain standard of behavior. It is part of the way they market themselves to the world. It is a part of their reputation, a part of why so many people prefer Google over other companies, in the way that some people prefer Fair Trade Coffee to coffee produced through other means.
Given that Google has branded itself in that fashion, it is only reasonable to expect people to question whether their actions in China constitute "evil" behavior or not. Personally I think the issue is not black and white, and that Google made the best decision it could under the circumstances. However, I can see why many people are pissed off at Google for doing business with the Chinese government in this fashion. I can even imagine that many of those angry people have never worn a tie-dyed shirt or listened to the Grateful Dead.
Google is the highest-profile player in the game of free access vs. government control, but the larger battle has been going on for years. Unfortunately, governments are winning. What's fascinating to me is just how much the law of unintended consequences comes into play here. The first shot in this war was French government's battle with Yahoo! over Nazi-related materials. Seems like a good idea to keep those nasty Nazis from using the Net to spread their vile beliefs. Unfortunately, once you put down a few barriers, before too long you wind up with the Great Firewall of China.
Yesterday in one of my law classes we had a discussion (related to the discovery process) about the DOJ's subpoena of Google. More than one of my fellow students stated that expecting any sort of privacy on the Internet was absurd. They simply didn't feel that it should be expected, given that they'd grown up with an Internet full of privacy warnings, cookies, GeoIP monitoring, and so on. I mentioned the infamous "On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon and they just looked at me blankly, as if I were a 90 year old man whistfully recalling the days when ice cream sodas cost a nickel.
If the corporations 0wn the state, what's the difference? Even Mussolini called fascism corporatism.
There are significant distinctions. For one thing, under fascism in both Germany and Italy the corporate leaders were often at odds with their political masters. Corporatism was the ideal of fascism, but in practice the corporations were used by the fascists to gain power, then used as tools by Hitler and Mussolini. The corporations grew fat under fascist rule, but chafed under fascist control. As for the Mussolini quote about corporatism, the term itself does not mean "control by corporations" which the article you linked to makes clear.
State control under an autocratic socialist regime like the USSR corrals all mechanisms of control under the Party, which both governs and directly controls all production and expendatures. While there are competing power interests within the Party, there is nothing outside the Party influencing events.
Obviously neither method of control is a worthwhile political structure, but conflating autocratic socialism with fascism, then forwarding the notion that the entertainment industry is reaching for political control of America is laying it a bit too thick. Calling the MPAA/RIAA "Big Brother" riles up the troops, but it doesn't help anyone understand the real situation any better.
Employees have had the ability to steal corporate data for years. E-mail, CD-ROM drives, tape backups, iPods - the list of mechanisms that can be used to disseminate secrets is long and just grows longer every year. The problem isn't a particular mechanism for theft, it's that there are so many of them. If you're trying to safeguard your secrets through merely technical means, you're fighting an uphill battle.
While corporations will fight this through technology as much as possible, I think over the long term corporations will push for more vigorous legal punishment for corporate data thieves, and for more capability to actively monitor the employee communications, even when they're outside of the office. Their argument will be that since business is often done outside the office, as employers they should be able to safeguard their data beyond the company's physical boundaries. Whether corporations succeed or fail depends on whether voters think privacy is important or not. I suppose it also depends on how effectively corporations tie their cause to the "War on Terror" bandwagon. Thus far in the US at least, people have proven remarkably willing to give away all kinds of rights whenever someone ties anti-privacy legislation to the struggle against extreme fear.
So they want total control over the next generation?
No. They're trying to protect a dead business model. Not the same thing by a long shot.
They're greedy and stupid, but their motivation is profit, not political control. Their efforts to lobby Congress and sway the courts are designed to keep an industry built around middlemen from imploding. However, they are also trying other approaches as well (striking iTunes distribution deals with Apple, for example).
The RIAA/MPAA know that their lawsuits are unpopular, but at the moment they haven't found an approach that (in their minds) does a better job of protecting their profits. They'd rather not spend all that money on litigation, but they feel compelled to do so at the moment. Once one of the labels gets smart and breaks ranks, then makes gobs of money by treating customers like customers rather than criminals, the rest will follow.
Also, Orwell was referring to state control, not corporate control. If you want to wallow in some good corporate dystopia, check out Ambient by Jack Womack.
I am most certainly against the use of sports ability as a determinitive factor in the admission of students. While interest in sports may lead to a different viewpoint (and thus contribute to diversity of ideas) just as being poor or of an ethnic minority, it is by no means definite. As such, I think it is an extremely poor choice for inclusion in admissions decisions.
Involvement in high school sports was originally used as a tool to keep Jews from getting into American universities. Funny how the law of unintended consequences works, isn't it?