The nearly total question mark surrounding Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome is starting to get more than a little alarming. The world’s top medical people have a scary mystery on their hands. May they solve it, fast.
UPDATE: The Washington Post reports here in quite a bit of detail, and offers some reasons to hope the outbreak will fade of its own accord.
Bruce Chizen, the chief executive of Adobe, and several of his top folks stopped by the Mercury News last week for a lunch with the publisher and some editors and reporters. He gave a good account of Adobe’s marketplace and financial situations, including the interesting news, reported here by Jon Fortt, that the company is turning Acrobat into several different products.
Chizen made the typical Silicon Valley CEO statement that treating stock options as expenses is a terrible idea. Why? Because it will force companies to create a new way of describing earnings — the number mandated by the financial standards bodies, and another number that reflects something more realistic.
Odd. Tech companies never seemed to mind doing precisely the same thing when they were misleading investors in other ways that pumped up “earnings” in outrageous ways.
Of course, then he said it was no big deal in any event. Why? Because investors would figure out what was actually going on.
What will happen to employee options, he was asked? Well, there will be fewer, and the bulk will go to the folks at the top of the corporate ladder. Why? Because they’re the ones who really make a difference in the direction of a company.
More weird logic. The problem with options has never been the grants to rank-and-file employees; in fact, companies that give the bulk of options to those folks tend to do better, and shareholders tend to do better, too. Many of the worse outrages have been, in general, from companies that gave huge options grants to those very people who can steer the company: the executives who then made short-term (and sometimes outright corrupt) moves designed to pump up the stock price.
This perverse thinking is why investors have absolutely no faith in corporate leaders.
Steve Kirsch: The five lessons of 911. The terrorists have won. They have successfully convinced America to attack itself.
I didn’t blog the event yesterday, but Derek Slater did in “A Copyfighter’s Musings: Harvard JOLT Copyright and Fair Use Symposium”.
I’m in Cambridge, Mass., today to visit various folks at MIT’s Media Lab. More on this later…
Tomorrow I’m speaking on a panel at Harvard Law School, at a symposium on Copyright and Fair Use sponsored by the Harvard Journal of Law & Technology.As a result, postings may be somewhat light during the next two days.
New York Observer: Bush Eats the Press. The press corps seemed mainly to serve as a prop, providing Mr. Bush with an opportunity to deliver another pro-war speech while appearing to bravely face the music. The White House sprung it on them at the last minute: The press conference was announced that very day, giving reporters little time to prepare.
New York Times: Software Pioneer Quits Board of Groove. Mitchell D. Kapor, a personal computer industry software pioneer and a civil liberties activist, has resigned from the board of Groove Networks after learning that the company’s software was being used by the Pentagon as part of its development of a domestic surveillance system.
As the technology industry turns more and more into a tool of the surveillance state and other control freaks, it’s good to know that honor and liberty still matter to some people.
UPDATE: On reflection, I think I’m being somewhat unfair to the people at Groove. Ray and Jack Ozzie (and the others I’ve met from the company) are not bad people; far from it. And the toolmaker can’t choose who buys his tools.
Yet I’m troubled by Groove’s increasingly government-oriented business thrust, and deeply unhappy that the company is acting as a willing accomplice in the formation of the surveillance state. Maybe that’s where the money is, but it’s not socially responsible in my book.
Dave Winer: Like MacArthur. And today I’m heading east, and in many ways it feels like a return to home.
We have had our agreements, differences and everything in between. Through it all, my respect for Dave’s achievements and intellectual fire has grown. Even if temporary, his departure is a milestone for Silicon Valley — and not a positive one.
Dave’s unhappiness with the state of technology and the valley reflects a wider angst. I don’t fully agree with his comparison of the valley to Japan, where political and economic paralysis prevail, but it’s not entirely unfair. Civic and industry leaders should reflect on this.
Now he’s off to Cambridge, where I expect Dave and Harvard to shake each other up and teach each other new tricks. It’ll be fun to watch, from afar.
Godspeed.
Economist: Terrorism and civil liberties. Far from establishing new checks and balances, the government has moved repeatedly to quash those that exist.
Is there a more arrogant corporate chief in American than SBC Communication’s Ed Whitacre? Not if this interview in today’s San Francisco Chronicle is any indication.
Example: Whitacre says SBC’s shareholders paid for the copper-line infrastructure. Bull. The customers paid for it. And they had no choice but to buy from the government-granted monopolies controlled by SBC and its predecessors.
Give the man credit for sheer gall.