Mojave Airport, with its stands of refreshments (orange soda and doughnuts) is the site of Monday Morning’s Spaceship One Launch. This will be the first privately funded initiative into orbit – paving the way for space tourism. Mike Hodgkinson updates us from Mojave. Mike Melvill is the pilot of this Burt Rutan designed craft. Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen has backed the project with $20M.
Certain Equations are Illegal
Cory Doctorow gave a talk this week at Microsoft. He is asking the company to go back to its roots on the issue of Digital “Rights” Management (aka Digital Restrictions Management), or DRM. He posted the talk on his website. Doctorow tried to persuade Microsoft that:
- DRM systems don’t work
- DRM systems are bad for society
- DRM systems are bad for business
- DRM systems are bad for artists
- DRM is a bad business move for msft
via Dan Gillmor
The Guardian Profile: Wisconsin born Steve Jobs
Duncan Campbell profiles Steve Jobs. Some classics:
Jobs on money: “I was worth over $1m when I was 23, and over $10m when I was 24, and over $100m when I was 25, and, erm, it wasn’t that important, erm, because I never did it for the money” From Triumph of the Nerds, 1996 TV documentary
Jobs on Bill Gates: “I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger”
The King of the Alps dies at 103
Zermatt based Ulrich Inderbinen, who made his last Matterhorn ascent at 90, died Monday at the age of 103.
A visit to Thule
Berkeley explorer may have stepped on ancient Thule.
The Cost of Executive Perks
Perk Hoggs on the cost of executive perks.
The problem is not the cost of the perks themselves; at a ten-billion-dollar corporation, they?re hardly even a rounding error. It?s what they are symptomatic of. Perks and rigid management hierarchies tend to go together; perks are designed in part to reinforce status divisions, and rigid hierarchies do not lend themselves to intelligent decision-making, since they isolate executives from the rest of the company. Also, C.E.O.s who indulge in perks are likely to be profligate in general with shareholder money.
There are problems in both the private and public sector. Our senators have incredible health care AND average much better investment returns than us poor taxpayers. There are plenty of examples of corporate excess. Hoggs makes some useful points. Via John Robb.
Journalism vs Advertising at the LA Times
Tribune owned LA Times recently announced layoffs, just after winning a couple of Pulitzer prizes according to this story by Jacques Steinberg.
“Look at USA Today; how many Pulitzers have they won?” Mr. Janedis added, singling out the flagship of the Gannett chain, which has yet to win one. “But they sell a lot of advertising and get good rate increases.”
The article also compares major publisher cashflow margins (from Banc of America Investment Securities):
- Tribune’s publishing division: 25.9%
- Gannett: 31.3%
- Lee: 27.4%
- Journal Register: 27.3%
Lee publishes the local Wisconsin State Journal and co-owns the federally sanctioned monopoly (newspaper joint operating agreement: whereby overhead and advertising are shared among two or more “competitors”): Capitol Newspapers.
Lots of Water in Watertown
Watertown is a very wet place, as these photos show:
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The city has encouraged locals to spear as many carp as possible. Watertown, it’s in the water.
No trip to Watertown would be complete without a visit to Ebert’s Greenhouse Village.
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Introduction to Bioinformatics
Robert Jones provides a very useful introduction to Bioinformatics, or the the intersection of molecular biology and computer science.
Vacation in Orbit?
The idea is to create a new tourist industry: “For the last 30 years, people have thought that space flight is only for a select number of government employees,” said Peter H. Diamandis, chairman and president of the X Prize Foundation, the competition’s organizer. “We want to change that mind-set.”