Society
It has been said that politics makes for strange bedfellows, but a more current turn of phrase would be that standards wars make for strange alliances, orphan code, and gouged customers. For this story to be relevant to you, we need to recap: • Apple hit it big with iPod – REALLY big. • Apple [...]
Finally, somebody I can relate to in the whole work-life balance discussion. Keith Hammonds has written an article in this months Fast Company magazine on the myth of work-life balance. I agree with Keith wholeheartedly that balance may be a false god or idol – something people aspire to and then fail, causing only more [...]
The whole Martha Stewart débacle fiasco pisses me off. That’s the most eloquent way I can put it. The larger macro-trend is that the government has been under pressure to “do something” about corporate malfeasance. So do they do something about people who are really committing heinous crimes and defrauding people of millions of dollars? [...]
Fast Company has a brief article on the rise of social entrepreneurship and how that is being reflected in the courses that are being designed at the various MBA programs. QUOTE: More young people “want to make money and produce profits, but they want their work to have meaning and a social mission.” As awareness [...]
On Tuesday, September 28th, 2004 at Science World, the Vancouver Enterprise Forum held its first session of the new school-year. The first session is always about early stage capital and this year was no exception. While the general topic was the same as usual, there were some interesting highlights which I have noted here: Aileen [...]
What a nightmare this year’s election is going to be in Florida. For any of you who are interested, I HIGHLY recommend reading this very long article at the Independent.co.uk website on the state of the Florida election systems. It’s absurd.
I love this article from the Age news in Australia that discusses the unilateral nature of the Bush administration and the global impact that his Presidency has had over these past four years. The author raises a great question — if the world is going to have to pay the consequences of an all powerful [...]
Thanks to Fred Wilson for pointing out this NYT article that documents the direct mail campaign that the Republicans used in Arkansas and West Virginia – traditionally religious states. QUOTE mailings include images of the Bible labeled “banned” and of a gay marriage proposal labeled “allowed.” A mailing to Arkansas residents warns: “This will be [...]
I believe that Vancouver can become a global center for technology excellence. Because of that, my goal is to do everything I can to contribute to that community, including learning how to build technology companies, developing our technology community, and working with the greater non-tech community to ensure that the entire fabric of the community [...]
Thanks Jon for pointing out this incredible article by Juan Cole, Professor of History at the University of Michigan.
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Bruce Schneier comments on the new “Trusted Traveller” program. Also, who’s creating all of the Orwellian program names in the U.S. government?
Ouch. This article from Wired Magazine confirms that the 50 year old barrel lock design used in all Krypto bike locks and in many other applications, can be opened with a Bic Pen. The funny part is that this has been known for at least twelve years. This story illustrates so many things. • It [...]
Heath Row takes a look at a few different examples of free-agent clubhouses here. His question is a good one: Why hasn’t somebody succeeded in a franchise model here? My answer: They have. It’s called Kinko’s but unfortunately it’s staid, boring, white, featureless, and soulless but hey, they have great copiers.
I highly recommend reading this open letter from Curt Goering, Senior Deputy Executive Director of Amnesty International, on the results of their first ever racial profiling report on the U.S. Mr. Goering powerfully states that the results of racial profiling are not helping and indeed are hindering the war on terrorism, and that like so [...]
Cheney is trying to weasel out of his comments the other day where he said that if Americans vote for Bush, they will be safe, but if they vote for Kerry, they will likely get attacked again. Now he is saying that what he meant to say was the Bush and Kerry would RESPOND differently [...]
I am thrilled to see Steve Jurvetson of Draper Fisher Jurvetson, one of the premier Valley VC firms, has launched his own blog. One of his recent posts discusses the very ideas that I mentioned in my blog-defining first post – namely that the next 20 years (2005-2025) will bring the same amount of change [...]
The American government’s penchance for secrecy above all continues unabated. Defense Tech news reports that a bill has now passed, which puts all remote sensing data into the hands solely of the U.S. Government and its allies, where allies is defined in the law itself. So, the data is not classified and it is not [...]
VCs are frequently compared to lemmings or sheep, both metaphors describing their tendency to operate in herds and to all run towards one type of business or another relatively in sync. SiliconValley.com is covering this season’s popular fundees – social software companies. More here. For those who don’t know, we have our very own home-grown [...]
It is utterly incomprehensible how the U.S. Justice department can have a secret law that people are supposed to adhere to when they don’t know what it is, and that when challenged in court, that they would claim that the court case itself must also be kept secret, because knowledge of the case would inhibit [...]
This article and many other articles like it point out the coming demographic bubble. What I always notice is that the responses are always very pro-active. They assume that the seniors will enter their golden age with problems and then degrade from there when that does not have to be the case at all. I [...]
Wired wrote this great article on the MoveOnPAC, which was started by two founders, Joan Blades and Wes Boyd, only six years ago and which has become “one of the most revered activist groups in America, supporting Democratic political candidates with tens of millions of dollars in advertising, as well as countless hours of telephone [...]
Life imitates art. Art imitates life. “Godsend“, a movie opening August 17th, starring Robert de Niro as a doctor who clones children for parents who have lost a child due to early accidents or other loss, has a real-life equivalent. Or so says the man in question – Doctor Panos Zavos. Quoting from a news.scotsman.com [...]
This article at Newsday.com talks about the release of the findings of a major study being presented at the Annual Meeting of the European Society of Cardiology. The research [...] followed 29,000 people in 52 countries. It took a decade and 262 scientists to complete the work, which, according to the editor of The Lancet [...]
I don’t even have the energy to write much about this much-maligned system that was CAPPS and then CAPPS 2 and now SecureFlight. It is essentially a passenger screening system (like the flawed one I wrote about here and here) that has cost $100M to date and that is being relaunched with a new, friendly [...]
I have been reading about online communities since the days of the WELL (one of the first electronic communities to ever exist.) Of course, humans have always formed communities as part of their biological imperative – communities for living, for art, for trades, for commerce, for sex, for war, and for peace. And the internet [...]
Fast Company linked over to this Tufts University transcript of Pierre and Pam Omidyar’s commencement speeches to the Class of 2002. Some key lessons from Pierre and Pam’s speeches: • Prepare for the unexpected – prepare lots and learn lots but don’t feel that you have to connect all the dots at the same time; [...]
Erroll Morris, the brains behind the much parodied, often copied “Switch” ads for Apple’s Macintosh computers, has found a new way to use his powerful interviewing technique. He contacted and interviewed 500 Republicans who have decided to vote for Kerry and had them tell why they were switching. Many of them are still Republican but [...]
If this is true, it’s hilarious and definitely a sign of the times. From the Times of India article: QUOTE Says a programmer on Slashdot.org who outsourced his job: “About a year ago I hired a developer in India to do my job. I pay him $12,000 out of the $67,000 I get. He’s happy [...]
Here are a couple of articles on the new report from the Inspector General of the EPA where he states that the White House directly changed the language in the press releases before they were releaased to the public around the time of 9/11. Now there is still a huge amount of pollution, possibly including [...]
There is a great article here in Wired about a clubhouse in Amsterdam called Baby. It contains a massive open-plan room, meeting rooms, and a nightclub/dance floor. It is home to 5,500 free agents of all descriptions who come here to work, think, plan, write, shmooze, collaborate, and yes, go to the lounge for a [...]
