As in life, bluster and threat are commonplace in business – especially the technology business. So that interaction was good preparation for a later meeting with Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. They’d flown in over a weekend to meet with Scott McNealy, Sun’s then CEO – who asked me and Greg Papadopoulos (Sun’s CTO) to accompany him. As we sat down in our Menlo Park conference room, Bill skipped the small talk, and went straight to the point, …

… Bill was delivering a slightly more sophisticated variant of the threat Steve had made, but he had a different solution in mind. “We’re happy to get you under license.” That was code for “We’ll go away if you pay us a royalty for every download” – the digital version of a protection racket.

from “Good Artists Copy, Great Artists Steal” (a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso*. Referenced by Jonathan Schwartz former CEO of Sun Microsystems (It’s worth reading the whole blog post.)

I’m aware that this kind of intimidation has its proponents. Threatening legal action is common and the threat can unsettle people who know they are in the right. It takes guts to resist. Sometimes even brave, intelligent, honest people don’t have the stomach for the fight, and cave in, rewarding the bully.

It happens.

*Picasso, it should be noted was making a distinction between inspiration and copying — good artists making a duplicate, great artists using it for inspiration.

If you want peace, work for justice

— Pope Paul VI

I don’t quote many popes. But he had a point.

First raised in a comment here, this story of a fabricated Enola Gay memoir, an imaginary PhD supposedly issued and withdrawn by Victoria University of Wellington (my Alma Mater) complete with “baseless and defamatory” allegations of a hot debate about evolutionary theory (!) … well, the whole thing just gets more and more interesting …

Read all about it in the New York Times

Last week Henry Holt & Company stopped printing and selling “The Last Train From Hiroshima,” about the atomic bombing of Japan, because its author had relied on a fraudulent source for a portion of the book and possibly fabricated others.

A police investigation into ’stolen’ or ‘leaked’ emails from the Leader of the Opposition’s office reveals just how slack so-called computer security can be… until we have reason to beef it up. I bet they’re more security-conscious now!

“While it is accepted by the experts interviewed that external hacking can never be fully eliminated, ‘hacking’ of the Parliamentary Services computer is not considered to be how the offence was committed,” the investigation report stated.

It suggested two ways in which the emails might have been obtained – Dr Brash may have been using an “auto forward” function on his email accounts, or someone else had used computers or laptops that had access to them.

The investigation found gaps in security access to Parliament’s third floor, meaning there were opportunities to grab sensitive documents in electronic or hard copy form.
It noted that Dr Brash printed documents at night to collect in the morning and left documents in his out-tray for shredding, which was not attended to regularly.
He and an associate, whose identity is protected in the report, left their laptops unattended while logged on.

The report quoted computer company Axon’s service delivery manager, Deborah Clarke, as suggesting attitudes towards security in Parliament were too relaxed. “They want all the security in the world but they’re not prepared to live through the fundamentals of doing what you have to do to make sure you maintain security,” she said. “So they don’t let us implement complex passwords.”

From the NZ Herald

Footnote: Of course, Dr Brash wouldn’t have had to resign if the contents of the leaked/stolen emails wasn’t so politically damaging. Crikey dick, it wasn’t Nicky Hager’s book The Hollow Men that destroyed Brash’s political career. It was just the truth about those communications (or a version of it) coming out!

I’m not all aquiver like some of the media, but this DOES look like a new doorway to me…

Cool.

(Premiered during TV coverage of the 2010 Academy Awards today.)

Sometimes a zealot can go ‘too far’ …. even for his/her own supporters.
I’ve seen it in political debate. I’ve seen it in business.
The ‘object’ of the exercise — the debate, the contest of ideas — becomes somehow personal, and the ‘campaign’ can start to lose focus.

It can be like a blood lust in combat or what Robert McNamara (Kennedy/Johnson Secretary of Defence) called “The Fog of War“.

I don’t know Liz Cheney but, judging from this, it looks like she may have wandered into this undergrowth … (it can happen to any of us if we feel strongly enough about something).

First, watch this propaganda:

As we discussed last time we talked about Joseph McCarthy, put yourself in the shoes of the ‘targets’ of this stuff. Are they being treated fairly? How ‘decent’ is the behaviour of the critic?*

Conservatives Turn Against Liz Cheney – As Bad As McCarthy

The backlash is growing against Liz Cheney after she demonized Department of Justice attorneys as terrorist sympathizers for their past legal work defending Gitmo detainees — and now it’s coming from within deeply conservative legal circles.

On Friday, the conservative blog Power Line put up a post titled, “An Attack That Goes Too Far.” Author Paul Mirengoff, called Cheney’s effort to brand DoJ officials the “Al Qaeda 7,” “vicious” and “unfounded” even if it was right to criticize defense lawyers for voluntarily doing work on behalf of Gitmo detainees.

Reached on the phone, Mirengoff offered an even sharper rebuke, contrasting what Cheney is doing to the anti-communist crusades launched by Sen. Joseph McCarthy and, in some respects, finding it worse.

“It could be worse than some of the assertions made by McCarthy, depending on some of the validity of those assertions,” Mirengoff said, explaining that at least McCarthy was correct in pinpointing individuals as communist sympathizers. “It is just baseless to suggest that [these DoJ officials] share al Qaeda values… they didn’t actually say it but I think it was a fair implication of what they were saying.”

from Huffington Post

Targeting individuals is always tricky. Motivations are near-impossible to divine. ‘Sympathies’ even more so. There’s usually a whole lot of hallucination going on.

I hope Ms Cheney and her cohorts take the opportunity to re-calibrate, and question their approach. What harm can that do?

* The other side of this is that sometimes one feels called to be the universe’s feedback mechanism to people who are acting wrongly (however you define that). As I said here: (more…)

The profession “blogger” is still not considered “journalism”,
depending on whom you ask and the time of day.

Comment 42 from ‘Gus2000′ on Roughly Drafted Magazine blog re Daniel attending and asking questions at the recent Apple shareholder meeting but not being ‘allowed’ to report them.

Gus has it right. (But for how long?)

From the support FAQ page of Instapaper (following the normal software-specific support Q’s):

Why does my iced coffee taste so bland?

It’s probably diluted with too much melted ice. Brew it more strongly and chill it before serving — never pour hot coffee over ice.

The ice should only be used to keep it cold, not to make it cold.

You can also try cold-brewing, although mine didn’t work out.

Nice one Marco.

Michael Lewis takes an unexpected corner in this excellent book extract about the bursting of the (US) subprime bubble.

From his new book The Big Short (they’re ALL very good, from Liar’s Poker onwards), this chapter Betting on the Blind Side is about a gutsy, insightful fund manager called Michael Burry. This extract at Vanity Fair. Worth reading.

“

Not long before, his wife had dragged him to the office of a Stanford psychologist. A pre-school teacher had noted certain worrying behaviors in their four-year-old son, Nicholas, and suggested he needed testing. Nicholas didn’t sleep when the other kids slept. He drifted off when the teacher talked at any length. His mind seemed “very active.” Michael Burry had to resist his urge to take offense. He was, after all, a doctor, and he suspected that the teacher was trying to tell them that he had failed to diagnose attention-deficit disorder in his own son. “I had worked in an A.D.H.D. clinic during my residency and had strong feelings that this was overdiagnosed,” he said. “That it was a ‘savior’ diagnosis for too many kids whose parents wanted a medical reason to drug their children, or to explain their kids’ bad behavior.” He suspected his son was a bit different from the other kids, but different in a good way. “He asked a ton of questions,” said Burry. “I had encouraged that, because I always had a ton of questions as a kid, and I was frustrated when I was told to be quiet.” Now he watched his son more carefully and noted that the little boy, while smart, had problems with other people. “When he did try to interact, even though he didn’t do anything mean to the other kids, he’d somehow tick them off.” He came home and told his wife, “Don’t worry about it! He’s fine!”

His wife stared at him and asked, “How would you know?”

To which Dr. Michael Burry replied, “Because he’s just like me! That’s how I was.”

(more…)

“We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours”

— Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs announcing IP/patent lawsuit against HTC.

It’ll be interesting to see how this works out.