December 2010
Thursday, 30 December 2010
Top 10 Tech Failures of 2010
Marco Arment: “That should generate some pageviews.”
Wednesday, 29 December 2010
U.S. Internet Users Ready to Limit Online Tracking for Ads
Gallup: “Internet users are overwhelmingly negative about whether it is OK for advertisers to use their online browsing history to target ads to them, suggesting they would largely welcome regulation to limit the use of such tactics.”
Monday, 27 December 2010
The Finite World
NYTimes.com: “And America is, for the most part, just a bystander in this story.”
Banks and WikiLeaks
NYTimes.com: “The fact of the matter is that banks are not like any other business. They run the payments system. That is one of the main reasons that governments protect them from failure with explicit and implicit guarantees. This makes them look not too unlike other public utilities. A telecommunications company, for example, may not refuse phone or broadband service to an organization it dislikes, arguing that it amounts to risky business.”
Thursday, 23 December 2010
This.
Wednesday, 22 December 2010
The ‘Subsidy’: How Merrill Lynch Traders Helped Blow Up Their Own Firm
ProPublica: “The new group that bought the CDO would usually be credited with a profit between $2 million and $3 million – despite the fact that the trade often lost money.”
Obama FCC Caves on Net Neutrality
Tim Karr: “It’s not the FCC chairman’s job to seek consensus among the corporations that he was put into office to regulate.”
Tuesday, 21 December 2010
Tablet Tipping Point Means The End Of Microsoft (As We Know It)
InformationWeek: “With a multitude of operating environments popping up on tablets, Microsoft may not be able to capture a dominant share in this segment of the market.”
Friday, 17 December 2010
Could You Retire Without Social Security?
ROI: “For most people, Social Security is the only inflation-adjusted annuity they know.”
Wall Street Whitewash
NYTimes.com: “It’s hard to overstate how wrongheaded all of this is.”
Tuesday, 14 December 2010
Invaders from Mars
Charlie Stross: “We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.”
Monday, 13 December 2010
The wind is no longer at Voyager’s back
Discover Magazine: “It was launched before personal computers were everywhere, before cell phones, before the internet! But it was given a powerful boost by its rocket, and another by the two largest planets in the solar system as it swung by them. And now, in just a few more years, it will have left our nest forever.”
Tuesday, 7 December 2010
The Men Who Stole the World
TIME: “He didn’t help crack the encryption on DVDs because he wanted to crush Hollywood. He did it because he wanted to watch movies on his computer. His computer ran the Linux operating system, and in 1999 there was no DVD-playing program for Linux. So he and his partners decided to make one, and to do that, they had to figure out how to decrypt DVDs.”