Of course it is too late. Once the
bureauacracy has expanded, it can not (never, ever, ever) be cut
back.
… The U.S. Department of Homeland
Security was a panicked reaction to the Sept. 11 attacks. It owes
its continued existence to a vastly exaggerated assessment of the
threat of terrorism. The department is also responsible for some of
the least cost-effective spending in the U.S. Government. It’s
time to admit that creating it was a mistake.
A ruling “on second thought?”
Yahoo
wins motion to declassify court documents in PRISM case
… The U.S. Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court ruled Monday that the Justice Department must
unseal documents from a classified 2008 case that Yahoo has said will
demonstrate the Internet company "objected strenuously" to
providing the government with customer data.
… The ruling, first noted by the
Daily
Dot, gives the Justice Department two weeks to provide estimates
on how long it expects the review process to take.
… Monday's order was made by the
same
court that Yahoo originally petitioned five years ago to review
the government's order over concerns it violated its users' Fourth
Amendment rights against unreasonable searches and seizures.
The court responded at the time that
the company's concerns were "overblown" and that
"incidentally collected communications of non-targeted United
States persons do not violate the Fourth Amendment."
Worth reading. I think they understand
what happened to the Music and Book industries, so perhaps their TV
predictions are correct also.
Apple
May Have Found the Chink in TV’s Armor: Pay-for-Ad-Skipping
Apple has been shopping networks and
studios a service that would allow users to skip commercials for a
fee. The negotiations represent a new spearhead from Apple to bring
a premium TV platform to market, with the company seeing
revenue-for-ad-skipping as an opportunity to get its corporate foot
in the door.
The report
comes from Jessica Lessin, a former Wall Street Journal
reporter, who cited unnamed sources that had been "briefed on
the negotiations."
… Most TV Suits—like Suits
everywhere—would rather ride the gravy train until it wrecks than
risk a disruption that could put them ahead of the game or fail.
Contrast that to the music and
publishing industries, which were both in disastrous states when
Apple approached them with its disruptive iTunes Store and iBooks
(respectively). Their need was Apple's opportunity, which is almost
always the case with anything disruptive.
The music industry signed up for
Apple's (then) Mac-only iTunes Store and was subsequently saved from
the folly of its own inept digital strategies. The publishing
industry turned to Apple because Amazon
was rapidly devaluing the publishing world's products (books).
The
DOJ rained on that parade, but the point is that the execs signed
on because they were desperate.
There should be some value for my
students, in particular the database of open source tools
Data
Analytics For Oversight and Law Enforcement
For my Vets.
Which
occupations contribute most to society?
Soldiers -- followed closely by
teachers, physicians, scientists, and engineers -- contribute the
most to society's well-being, according to a new survey by the Pew
Research Center.
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