I was listening to This Week in Tech, 2009 wrap up (a weekly on line podcast), Leo LaPorte was reviewing the year in review. They had a special guest on, professor and author Jerry Pournelle. He not only writes science fiction, but writes his opinions and observations on the world on his personal blog. Interesting was the comments he made, when asked, about his thoughts on global warming. Here is what he had to say:

Jerry Pournelle With Freeman Dyson, I don’t know how you can get CO2 to be useful in heating anything except cold, dry areas. Because the water vapor already overwhelms the CO2 effect everywhere else.

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Jerry Pournelle No, I think there’s global warming because there has been since about 1326 when the Little Ice Age ended and we started warming up. But I think that most of the warming was in between 1800 and 1870. You know this, but you don’t remember it. In 1776, at Harlem heights on Manhattan Island, Colonel Alexander Hamilton brought the guns to capture the Ticonderoga across the frozen Hudson River to General George Washington saving Washington’s Army.

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Jerry Pournelle The Hudson hasn’t frozen solid enough to walk across since about 1826.

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Jerry Pournelle In other words, things have been warming since 1776 and everybody who has been to grade school and had grade school history knows it. In 800 to 1000, the Vikings had dairy farms in Greenland. Dairy farms. You can see them, they’re under about 30 feet of ice. Some of them are finally coming out again. But there’s still plenty of ice over there. The Earth has been a lot warmer and a lot colder in human history. We know for a fact. So the fact that it’s been warming at one degree per century ever since about 1700 should not surprise you.

For more of Jerry’s viewpoints, please check out his blog.

Recently, Amazon announced it will stop selling MacMillan books for their eReader; the Kindle, because MacMillan wants them to lift the price from $9.99 to $15.

In the Whatever blog, maintained and authored by John Scalzi, he (rants?) in line with my thinking that it is a free market and free markets should allow themselves to find the value with consumers.  Yet I disagree with his thinking (and most) that DRM is limiting and prevents a consumer from enjoying the value of an ebook. The same discussion can be held for music and DRM.  It is not only a probable “right of contractual entry” into this legacy market and partnerships, but I find it slightly Socialistic to expect a company, designed around revenue and profit, to not try and control distribution of product through DRM.  (I am talking about contractual line items and agreements, not the theory that a blackhat group in a basement with 200 connected Sony PS3’s can read any book they want.) Yes, I ‘get’ that there are people who actually like to buy books and hold them. and not use eReaders …

The market that Amazon is going after is not necessarily people who like physical books or expect the industry to remove DRM! It is for people who want access to books in a portable manner, and who are not going to be bothered by the technology limitations of physical books.  Personally, as I get older and watch generations of people get old and die, leaving stacks of their precious books behind, it still gives me goosebumps from a romantic point of view, but also makes me realize you can’t take it with you. Amazon is not going to go away in the near future. The DRM will not be lifted now, but COULD eventually release the DRM for a fee, just as Apple negotiated its way through DRM for music.

The entire Kindle product is based on a package deal with Amazon. It is an entire platform; a reader, free wireless service that is always available to buy more books and periodicals and give them more page views on their site.  Amazon has preset contracts with authors and publishing houses for digital distribution. They structured and monetized eBooks in a profitable way. They actually performed something very difficult in a market that was almost controlled and run by big publishing houses who stopped endless lines of authors from getting published. In fact it created a need in the market for Lulu.com . There are endless tales about first time authors and successful writers who were initially taken advantage of by publishers and agents. Apple iTunes, Lulu and Amazon’s ebook store offer a ‘better idea’ in a free market to help these thinkers and musicians to distribute their ideas without the monopolistic-like contracts that gave the recording industry and publishers HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS while giving very small returns to these writers in previous generations.

Pundits complain that platform developers like Amazon or Apple are interested in “controlling the Universe” and will not allow Publishers and iPhone Developers to distribute applications without a long approval process, or allow Adobe to run their flash software on their iPhone because Apple is ‘mean’ and ‘unrealistic’.

There has to be some trust on the part of the consumer that these platform creators are working in favor of a continued market. Amazon is working with older generation groups like MacMillan, and Apple with the RIAA. who are all used to forcing their old and cold hand on the market without care to the consumer or the future of the writer or the platform inventor. Apple threatened to walk away from music companies who wanted them to increase their per song fee 30%. NBC insisted on a 50% increase in fees for iTunes distributed TV shows after a short time, within the market that Apple created. Apple walked away from NBC.

Now, MacMillan is threatening to increase prices on Amazon. Amazon built this platform and market, and is willing to walk away to maintain their platform structure; development agreements, publishing agreements and keep their customers buying.

These follow up comments on the Whatever blog post are mostly without substance; based on opinions of those who have never run successful / profitable corporations, who have never been contractually responsible to partners, board members, share holders and consumers alike.  Building a platform that remains stable and reliable is a HUGE task, especially in a moving industry like technology.  It is not difficult for a company to fall off course as witnessed with Apple while Jobs was ousted from the company, nor expect success when he returned.

The Kindle is a vehicle for distribution.  Apple recognizes this and came up with something that is trying to compete.  Instead of insulting the name iPad, or the lack of Netbook features, it is probably a good idea to consider the market they are going after before claiming that it is so horrible.  The Kindle nor the iPad are not devices for geeks to code on, but an Internet toaster that has access to eBooks or iPhone apps that many have found entertaining and helpful.

Discussions about what Apple or Amazon should or should not do often forget about product market aspects…all of which are unrelated to the crying of those who criticize the product.  MacMillan is trying to force their hand on Amazon, and Amazon does not need to wreck their entire Kindle platform structure to help the gains of a falling publishing house.

I want to mention the comment from Stu Segal responding to the other comments, who said:

…I think this entire conversation misses the not-so-obvious crux of the matter. Who should (or who deserves) to make money from ebooks?
This is NOT the traditional publishing model, where the author basically required a publishing house to invest big bucks to layout and print a real book, to use it’s distribution system and its advertising and marketing dollars.
We ARE NOT cutting down trees or investing big bucks in producing ebooks. I believe authors have been bamboozled into signing away their ebook rights to publishers, when in fact, in todays world, there’s no reason that the authors themselves shouldn’t retain their ebook rights and sell ebook versions direct to consumers over the internet.
Had a model like this emerged 5 years ago we would see the party who has actually invested in an ebook (the author) being rewarded, and all the do-nothing-except-get-themselves-in-the-middlemen get what they deserve. But as the model emerged differently it would, unfortunately, take a revolution to get the publishers and distributors out of the position they now occupy, and feel they deserve.
Stop giving the publishers your erights. They’re being unjustly enriched.

…and comment from Joe who is trained in Economics:

…if you want to make the other argument, do enough research to actually show how publishers could make money at your suggested price point, and at what time your suggestion would become relevant.

Thanks for the great post, John Scalzi!

In a local village paper called the Eagle, on January 27, 2010, under the Crime Watch section published:

Employee caught stealing deli cheese, meat from customers

…A cashier at a market in the 34000 block of Woodward was caught stealing deli cheese and meat from customers. Police said  the cashier somehow managed to remove slices of deli cheese and meat from sealed packages and placed the stolen food between the unused plastic grocery bags at the checkout.

I suppose we have to refer to the employee handbook for this dispute. Thoughts??

According to an article from The Register (a highly respected news source for IT Professionals) China used several means (aka vectors) to attempt attacks at Google email accounts, including one that takes advantage of older Internet Explorer browsers.

This comes as no true surprise, since Internet Explorer was designed as a tool to surf the web and never had considered people using it to infect or wreck a computer, through a lack of security features. These important security features are still found in all other browsers like Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome browser.

Microsoft has both confirmed the exploit and suggested to everyone to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer v8.

An interesting article today about Google uncovering evidence that China is using their great cyberforce of workers to attack and hack GMAIL , Google claims they are trying to read the mail of China’s human rights activists. This clearly breaks the terms of service between China and Google.

The striking thing to me, as a technology person, are the comments after the CNN blog article . Some of those commenting say “Money is Money”, which in this case is a little pathetic. Others, like Jim Cramer, stock market entertainer, claim that Google is failing their profits.  SO I wanted to write a quick mention about China, to speak to these people who just look at China as a vast market for US companies.

First, while China has over 1 billion people, a huge amount of them make $1 a day. SO let’s lo0ok at the numbers for a sense of scale:

China population: ~1,326,000,000

China population that makes more than $4 a day: ~300,000,000

China has no Rule of Law. Their system is very concerned with social stability and order. When populations reach this level, the most important issue is to make sure that no one group is trying to cause social instability.  China is caught between older generations and cultural ideas, and modern capitalistic concepts represented in America. In order to work well with China, they will need to ‘grow up’.  Their actions with Google technology breaks that terms of service. They do not care about fo9llowing agreements.  Sure, there ARE a billion people over there and a fraction of  this population can mean a lot of money and revenue for any US or Western company.  But most of that audience cannot afford what’s advertised on the Google servers, and Google would prefer to be in markets they realize real profits. There is a price performance ratio of the cost to enter a market and the return in profit you get from that market.    From a profit motive on Google’s part, there is possibly a larger audience that truly BUYS through Google advertising penetration in Western countries (in what I am calling their REAL markets), vs China (an unripe market).

Bottom line: China has  broken the Google Terms of Service AND tried to attack their system. Why should Google stay in this market and dedicate endless engineering man hours in defense of their technologies, when you can put those same Google engineers into “forward opportunities” with partners that are not trying to wreck your system?

Go Google!!!

Write a letter to Ze Frank  in follow up to his recent post on the recent history of Afghanistan found here.

Ze -

Things on the side of things.

If we look to the side of each of these topics, there are questions which disrupt the nature of the US answer to WHY?

It would be interesting how other things play into why we started the war and how it grew into what we are doing today.  I am sure that these new things would provide more clues to the nature of our ‘answer’ truth.
The concept playing the British Buffer State is played again, but this time by the US. We are interested in other dominance – not just democracy and freedom, while handing over a true theological apple to the US. (A fruit that Americans prefer to clamp down on – I think Cheney grew that apple). Religion, good and bad, right and wrong, them vs us, etc.

Three topics that have side things:
1. How did the Taliban continue to gain more weapons and ammo and complex devices to kill Americans?  Do they have their own kinds of labs, manufacturing facilities and corporate ownership that drives these things? Clearly gun and ammo supply lines (manufacturing to distribution) have been increasing for the Taliban, but who paid, made and gave these supplies to kill Americans? What was their profit?

2. Poppy agriculture side thing
Drug manufacturing and distribution within the surrounding area were all explained to be bad just after 9/11, and “we were going to go in there and help everyone understand freedom and democracy”. Years after 9-11, poppy production is still taking place.  “Let’s kill all those farmers who grow poppy plants for bad bad drug money!!”

3. Crude Oil side thing
Harvesting and distribution lines could be mapped out over the past 65 years. Who is interested in oil supply harvesting and distribution? What strategic role does the Afghanistan map play for oil supply for the world? What developments have taken place since 9/11? Who has made money doing this?

If each of these issues were reviewed over the same time lines in history (over the past 65 years), we would see things differently from the ‘truth’ and ‘freedom’ things waved to the American public.
Thanks for putting together this catch-up vid.

Thanks for reading..