Forensic Linguistics

Jack Hitt:

The story begins with a prominent New Orleanian named Fred Heebe. And naturally, this being the Big Easy, Heebe has a long relationship with his antagonist in the case, a lawyer named Jim Letten. Both were candidates for the U.S. Attorney appointment for the Eastern District of Louisiana in the earliest months of the Bush Administration. Letten got the job, and had been serving in that post until last Tuesday.

So, in 2001, Heebe went off to make his own fortune. After Hurricane Katrina, Heebe and his company, River Birch Landfill, began to win numerous contracts to handle garbage—suddenly a very lucrative enterprise. One contract in particular seemed to attract the office of the U.S. Attorney, Heebe’s old nemesis Jim Letten. In 2009, River Birch won an exclusive contract with Jefferson Parish for the next twenty-five years. The deal involved a hundred and sixty million dollars, and even a pledge that the Parish would close their own public landfill for the duration of the deal, making River Birch the exclusive provider for the next quarter century.
But soon River Birch’s deals began to look rotten. A state official pled guilty to conspiracy for accepting bribes from an unidentified landfill owner, suspected to be a River Birch executive. More federal indictments came in, including charges of mail fraud and money laundering against Dominick Fazzio, River Birch’s C.F.O. (Fazzio pled not guilty; he will go on trial in April.) Though no charges have been filed against Heebe, and he maintains his innocence, Letten’s investigation into River Birch has continued.

Commentary on Asymco’s “How much do maps cost and what are they worth?”

I posted a comment on Horace’s useful post: “@Walt French Yes, goog destroyed the value proposition of many competitors. As a developer, we consider the use of Google Maps, but after reading the TOS and understanding their throughput based terms, we moved elsewhere. Interestingly and for many years, they never enforced the terms. Many websites simply ignored the terms and used Google Maps as much as necessary for display, routing and geocoding. That changed a few years ago when Google began somewhat throttling users. It is doing something similar with “Google Apps” – email and online documents. The free version is gone along with ActiveSync support (this certainly says something about the state of Microsoft).

This is familiar territory for those who keep an eye on the tech behemoths. Microsoft was very effective at killing off competitors, or as Peter Hoddie famously put it “knifing the baby”.

Finally, goog has used their streetview data collection scheme to collect an enormous amount of data, including controversially wifi snooping. Their cars and other data/media/network collection vehicles provide a freedom of movement vis a vis tom-tom and navteq.

Apple’s interesting opportunity, IMHO, is to feed user generated/contributed information (media, reviews, fixes, fun) back to Open Street Map (OSM) and begin to make their enormous iOS data pile available to developers.

A long shot, but a powerful way to change the game yet again.”