This video salutes Bill Gates.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_o9isZY5h0&mode=related&search=
Is this one for the ethics seminar or what?
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5456.html
Enron Jury Sent the Right Message
Published: July 21, 2006 Author: Malcolm S. Salter
... Executive Summary:
Although the actions of Enron's executives were in many areas neither clearly legal nor illegal, jurors sent an unambiguous message that all executives should heed: Truth telling and ethical discipline are the cornerstone values in corporate governance. Key concepts include:
* Executives can be convicted in a court of law for a pattern of deception, even when it is not illegal.
* Firms that focus on exploiting the rules rather than building a sound business often lose their way.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/21/1626229&from=rss
The MySpace Ecosystem
Posted by Zonk on Friday July 21, @02:25PM from the wretched-hive-of-scum-and-villainy dept. Businesses The Internet
conq writes "BusinessWeek has an article on how MySpace is developing its own ecosystem in the same way that Microsoft did it with Windows, and Apple with the iPod. From the article: 'Now, MySpace is beginning to create its own ecosystem of third-party companies that are developing features and applications for the giant digital community. The idea is to encourage other companies to use their creativity and expertise to come up with things for MySpace users that MySpace itself hasn't. That could be anything from letting people add to their MySpace home pages from a mobile phone or creating a slide show of their favorite MySpace photos."
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/07/22/0317250&from=rss
Howard Rheingold On Our Mobile World
Posted by Zonk on Saturday July 22, @03:39AM from the interconnectedness dept. The Internet Communications Technology
Roland Piquepaille writes "Howard Rheingold is the well-known author of "Smart Mobs" and many other books describing the evolution of our societies. His last book predicted the transformation of our society into a mobile one. Four years later, his forecast is more than confirmed. As one of the futurologists who can detect the emerging technology trends behind our daily lives, I wanted to know what Howard was thinking in 2006. He was kind enough to agree for an interview which was conducted by e-mail in mid-June. We discuss the importance of mobile technology, blogs, the changing climate, and the future of surveillance" From the article: "The power of the technologies packed into mobile devices continues to multiply, the diffusion of devices to all parts of the world and socioeconomic strata broadens, the spread of knowledge about how to use technologies to organize political, economic, social, cultural collective action quickens. It is in the convergence of the technical, cognitive, and social forces generates that the real power of smart mobs -- for both constructive and destructive."
Potential speaker?
Homeland Security hires new privacy chief
By Anne Broache Story last modified Fri Jul 21 19:06:53 PDT 2006
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Friday tapped one of its own lawyers to become its next privacy chief.
Hugo Teufel III had been serving as an associate general counsel for the department. Before that, he was an associate solicitor at the Department of the Interior, the deputy solicitor general for the state of Colorado, and an attorney in private practice.
"Hugo is highly regarded throughout the department and the legal community for his expertise on privacy, employee relations and civil rights issues," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a statement, adding that the appointee has earned his "complete confidence and support."
Congress created the chief privacy officer position in 2002 with the intent of making it a watchdog over the intersection of new technologies and federal security activities.
Teufel will become the third person--and second permanent appointee--to fill those shoes. He replaces acting Chief Privacy Officer Maureen Cooney, who plans in September to start as a senior policy adviser for global privacy strategies at Hunton & Williams, a New York City law firm.
If you treat it as a free job ad, it might fly.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1992897,00.asp?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594
Programmers Guild Pushes for H-1B Transparency
July 21, 2006 By Deborah Rothberg
A request for the public release of data containing the names of the companies requesting H-1B temporary workers and the positions they are being hired for was filed in a public letter to the Department of Labor July 18 by the Programmers Guild, an IT advocacy group.
In the open letter to William Carlson, chief of the Division of Foreign Labor Certification, Programmers Guild President Kim Berry requested on behalf of the "displaced, unemployed, and underemployed U.S. tech workers" that the FY 2007 LCA (Labor Conditions Applications) database be made publicly viewable, so that U.S. tech workers can apply for these positions while they are still open.
Berry reminded Carlson in the letter that "although LCAs are public records, U.S. workers do not have access to these records," and likened the records' lack of public availability to "choosing to reserve 65,000 U.S. jobs exclusively for foreign workers."
Imagine what it can do with inconvenient photographic evidence!
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/#1525484
Tourist Remover
You probably took home some fantastic memories from your last vacation. That trip to Bangkok or London or Paris was the perfect opportunity to relax and experience another culture. You shot scores of photos at every major landmark, temple, church, beach, museum and public square. But when you got home and started looking through all of your pictures, something about them felt a little... off. Not quite perfect. What's the problem, you asked yourself. Then you realized it: In each carefully framed photo of Notre Dame, the building is obscured by some huckster selling newspapers or chewing gum. In an otherwise brilliantly composed shot of Koh Samui, there's a shirtless, sunburned retiree in gym shorts sucking down a melting gelato.
Never again, I tell you. Never again will your beautiful holiday photos be mucked up by those unphotogenic rubes. Now, there's Tourist Remover.
The new web service from futureLAB is part of their online photo management tool, Snapmania. It's pretty simple to use -- just take multiple photos (4 or 5 usually does the trick, according to their how-to) of the same scene using a tripod, then feed the photos into your Snapmania account. Tourist Remover will take information from all of your photos and eliminate the differences, leaving you with a clean, obstruction-free view of the subject in the background.
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060721/0844232.shtml
Waiting For A Digital Disaster
from the no-silver-lining dept
There's no question that the current model of law enforcement isn't adequate to deal with cyber-crime, with all its complexity. While there are occasionally high-profile cases, it's a lot harder to patrol an area and prevent day-to-day crimes. At least one FBI agent believes the government won't make the sweeping changes necessary to fight cyber-crime until there's a "digital Enron", an event severe and shocking enough to force the government's hand. It's true that the government tends to react to major events (Enron, 9/11, Katrina) to make changes instead of doing so proactively, and it's disturbing that such critical legislation tends to be made in a time of panic. Rushing Sarbanes-Oxley through, at a time when people were outraged over Enron, clearly had major unseen consequences. It's scary to think what the equivalent of a digital Sarbanes-Oxley would look like, should we ever have a digital Enron.
Now do you see why top executives earn the big bucks?
http://techdirt.com/articles/20060721/1413212.shtml
Since When Did Phone Service Cost $13,000 Per Year?
from the cha-ching dept
The Universal Service Fund is a rather mysterious thing, its only visible effect for most people being the 10% or so tax on their phone bills that funds it. The idea behind the fund is that it's supposed to subsidize phone service in rural areas or to people who couldn't otherwise afford it, but unsurprisingly, taxpayers don't look to be getting much value for the $7 billion they pay into the fund each year. A new study says that the government is paying up to $13,345 per telephone line for subsidized USF service -- meaning it would be far cheaper to simply buy people cell phones to use and pay for the service. The study further underlines what others have said about the USF: it encourages inefficiency, acts as a barrier to competition and, ultimately, harms those it's supposed to help by stifling newer, better technologies that can provide better service, much more cheaply.
http://www.forbes.com/technology/2006/07/20/sco-ibm-evidence_cz_dl_0720sco.html
SCO Claims IBM Destroyed Crucial Evidence
Daniel Lyons, 07.20.06, 6:10 PM ET
The SCO Group versus IBM lawsuit is growing ever more desperate--and ever more weird.
The latest twist: Buried in a new filing from SCO is a claim that International Business Machines destroyed evidence by ordering its programmers to delete copies of software code that could have helped SCO prove its case.
SCO alleges this happened in 2003, yet the company has never talked about it in public before.
However, an attorney for SCO says the code deletion is one reason why the Lindon, Utah, software maker has been unable to comply with a demand that it produce examples of allegedly stolen code. [So the code was never published? Bob]
"It's kind of hard for us to do that," says Brent Hatch, an attorney with Hatch, James & Dodge in Salt Lake City, "because we don't have it. It was destroyed before it could be given to us."
SCO sued IBM in March 2003, claiming IBM took code from Unix, for which SCO holds some copyrights, and put it into Linux, [“ but we can't find it because they deleted it before they released it.” Huh? Bob which is distributed at no cost.
The case is scheduled for trial in 2007 and could have huge implications for the popular Linux operating system, which is promoted by Red Hat, Novell, Hewlett-Packard and others.
Last month, SCO suffered a setback when Magistrate Judge Brooke C. Wells of the U.S. District Court in Utah tossed out two-thirds of SCO's claims against IBM, because SCO had refused, after repeated requests, to provide specific details about which lines of code were stolen.
http://digg.com/tech_news/The_100_science_fiction_books_you_just_have_to_read
The 100 science fiction books you just have to read!
iSlayer submitted by iSlayer 6 hours 58 minutes ago (via http://www.phobosweb.com/features/100books/ )
"Take my word for it; all science fiction books are not created equal. Many of these novels are award winners, and most have inspired profound trends in science fiction."
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