One of the best technology reads last week was a New York Times’ big Sunday article on the outsourcing of high-technology manufacturing The iPhone Economy. The piece is a really thorough examination of how high-technology product manufacturing in East Asia has not only resulted in jobs going there that would otherwise be here, but...
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In a perfect world, this talk by noted author and electronic liberty activist, Cory Doctorow, would be a viral video that would reach millions of people instead of the just a bit over 110,000 it has so far. Because in it he explains in relatively plain English what is going on in the copyright...
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The irrepressible, outspoken Barry Ritholtz has a quick post today regarding whether or not Microsoft is even worth holding as a stock any more. The highlight from his take: During the past decade, MSFT returned exactly zero to investors, including dividends. They are a bloated, bureaucracy run by bloated, bureaucratic CEO. The paradigm has...
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He also makes what I think is a critical point about how 9/11 changed our perception of threats and our reaction to "security warnings." There are numerous academic studies that show that people react to repeated security warnings that come to nothing by basically tuning them out. And by warning people about...
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Certainly the first three months of 2011 make it seem like all the subtle changes in our economies and societies that have been slowly happening underfoot have suddenly let go, just like the pressure along a fault line can release decades of pressure in a few minutes. But despite all of this, I'm...
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I guess this means we've survived another winter. At times like this it is good to muse on the wonderful turning of the seasons that make life in our part of the world so interesting. The rebirth of life in the Spring prompts us to begin to make future plans again, to...
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William Gibson, the seminal SF author who coined the term, "cyberspace," now "writes science fiction in the present tense."
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Forget all the fooferaw about whether Julian Assange is a traitor, (He isn’t even American, so if words actually have meanings, he’s not.) or whether the latest WikiLeaks dump of diplomatic cables will seriously damage the U.S. (It won’t. The people to whom this would actually matter — other world leaders and diplomats —...
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Some very bright people are talking about how one might put together business ventures and a local currency that are completely network dependent. Such ventures can be categorized as Economy as a Service (Eaas) and the currency as a meta-currency. The wife was recently hit by the Facebook Deactivation Bug. Long backstory short, she...
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Tim Berners-Lee is the person who actually invented the World Wide Web. This week in Scientific American, he writes why it is important to understand why the Web is important and why it needs our help to stay that way. Why should you care? Because the Web is yours. It is a public resource...
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