If I were Edward Liddy, I would have quit long before today

From the New York Times:

Mr. Liddy emerged from retirement to take over A.I.G. immediately after the bailout last September and has worked on a voluntary basis during tough times. He has struggled to execute a plan to sell off A.I.G.’s operating units to raise enough money to pay back the Fed, and been grilled by hostile members of Congress who have sometimes seemed to blame him for the company’s near-collapse.

I've talked about this before - on March 19, as a matter of fact. Let me recap what I said at the time of Liddy's testimony before the House:

First, as I've noted previously, the former management at AIG made a decision that it needed to ensure that certain key employees were given incentives to remain with the firm, and therefore entered into contractual agreements with these employees.

Second, both before and during the hearings Barney Frank was doing his best to imitate Joseph McCarthy, demanding that Liddy reveal the names of all of the people who received the bonuses, and following up his demand with the "we have ways of making you talk" threat of a subpoena. This morning, Bill Handel of KFI played the audio of Liddy's response, in which we basically read two of the many death threats against AIG employees and their families, and then stated that he would only release those names to the subcommittee if the names would be kept completely confidential.

Third, various Congresspeople continue to find any way possible to negate the contractual agreement between AIG and its employees. The latest effort comes from Representative Charles Rangel, who has introduced a bill to tax certain compensation (in other words, the AIG retention payments) up the hilt to ensure that the employees get little, if anything. As Mike Dunford notes, Rangel is going against his own previous statements on the matter. Previously, Rangel had said that the tax code is not "a political weapon." Apparently he changed his mind due to public uproar.

Basically, Liddy voluntarily took a job in which his "Board of Directors" was the U.S. Congress. And the U.S. Congress, Democratic and Republican alike (I talked about Charles Grassley in a separate post on March 17), are not the best Board of Directors for a company:

A Congressperson's prime goal in life is not to make AIG financially viable. A Congressperon's goal in life is to get re-elected. And if the only way to get re-elected is to screw the employees of the firm you are managing, then so be it.

In fact, I offered a prediction back in March, and we'll see whether the first part of it comes to pass (the last part won't come to pass now).

Just wait - a few months from now, some piece of small print will be issued by someone in Congress as quietly as possible, and it will say something like this:

"At this point, one of the chief barriers to the recovery of AIG is the lack of accumulated financial expertise at the company. Because of the departures of key employees over the last few months, and the prospect of losing other key employees in the future, AIG's continued viability is not assured."

Should someone catch this piece of fine print, then the Franks, Grassleys, and Rangels of the world will then begin to harrass Edward Liddy, asking him why he didn't do anything to retain key employees.

Well, Liddy must have read my advice to every AIG employee to leave the company before Congress mismanages it into the ground, and he's decided to take off himself. Good for him - he tried to help out and got harrassed by the grandstanders.

Let Frank, Rangel, and Grassley run A.I.G. directly, and we'll see how good THEY do.

Get a netbook for cheap! But there's a catch...

I've been playing around with the idea of getting a netbook at some point, but haven't acted on that idea yet (I just had to buy a new desktop computer, and I can only buy so many goodies at any one time). But BusinessWeek has alerted me to a new way to get a netbook - buy it from a wireless phone service provider!

For the country's two dominant wireless phone carriers, AT&T (T) and Verizon Wireless, the arithmetic is clear. Cell-phone penetration in the U.S. is approaching 90% of the population, and the recession is damping enthusiasm for pricey new phones and services. So to avoid a slowdown in sales growth, both cellular giants are getting into a new game: personal computers.

And sure enough, you can find the HP Mini 1151MR netbook at Verizon Wireless, at a discounted price of $200.

However, BusinessWeek points out that there are strings attached to a cheap netbook offer:

Now the carriers want to sell them—much the way AT&T sells Apple's (AAPL) iPhone—by discounting the device but making up revenue with two-year contracts for expensive data plans.

And the numbers could add up:

[B]uyers may notice that when the service fees are tallied up, the cost could be as much as $1,440 over two years, plus the price of the netbook. And that may be on top of $30 a month or more the customer is already paying for another data plan linked to his cell phone.

And, there's the theoretical danger that your netbook could be shut down:

LM Ericsson AB, the Swedish company that makes many of the modems that go into laptops, announced...that its new modem will deal with this issue by including a feature that's virtually a wireless repo man. If the carrier has the stomach to do so, it can send a signal that completely disables the computer, making it impossible to turn on.

Now just because the technology exists doesn't mean that the wireless carriers would necessarily use it, but it's something to keep in mind...especially if the Ericsson technology is hacked.

The real Harlan Sanders (not Harlan Koch) looked a little blurry

I work in the biometrics industry, and monitor biometric-related items that appear on FriendFeed. I ran across this FriendFeed share that links to this article. We're getting into ridiculous territory here:

Google was given permission to launch Street View in the UK after giving assurances it would obscure people's faces and car registration plates in the images.

So Google did this...a little too well.

The world famous image of Sanders with white hair, beard, suit and glasses is on the front of all its 760 UK stores.

But Google Street View has blurred the face on its unique internet service to 'protect his privacy.'

The company says it took the decision because he is 'a real person' - despite him passing away in December 1980 aged 90.

However, when I checked a randomly-selected KFC in London today, it appears that poor old Harlan's privacy is being violated.

Sharing Google Reader items to specific FriendFeed rooms

Empoprise-BI is one of four blogs that appears under the "Empoprises" banner. Empoprises itself is supposed to consist of a set of different "vertical information services" targeted to specific topics. For example, if you want to know my astoundingly insightful views on business, but don't want to know my equally astoundingly insightful views on music, you would read the Empoprise-BI blog and not read the Empoprise-MU blog.

In some respects, this separation of the vertical information services extends to other Empoprises properties. One pertinent example is on FriendFeed. While I have a main FriendFeed account, http://friendfeed.com/empoprises, I have also set up separate FriendFeed groups that are associated with each of the four topics - for example, http://friendfeed.com/empoprise-bi and http://friendfeed.com/empoprise-mu. While I'm still working on building these groups up, the intent is to establish these as specific areas to talk about the topic at hand.

Until today, there was one problem with this plan. Anything that I shared from Google Reader wasn't directed to the specific rooms, but to my main FriendFeed account.



Now I could certainly manually share things in each group, and each of the groups has feeds that populate them, but if I run across something in Google Reader, I have no way to share it directly to the pertinent group.

I mentioned this issue in a comment to the Rob Diana post I Am Your Filter. Before I get to my comment, however, here's an excerpt of what Rob says about Google Reader:

Basically, I share these items so that you do not have to find them. If you want a summary of what the “major tech blogs” wrote in the past 24 hours, you could look at my shares and see good opinions or who even wrote about it first. If you want to dabble or just learn the terminology in data mining or the semantic web, you could view my shares. You may not see a lot of content in those areas, but I am sharing a lot of information every day.

So you can see that Rob shares tech items. In my case, however, I share items from disparate topics. Here's my comment:

Most of my Google Reader subscriptions are related to the four categories where I am focusing my attentions: business, music, the Inland Empire of California, and NTN Buzztime. All of my Google Reader shares dump into a single FriendFeed account, and perhaps I can improve on that in some way. (I do have four separate FriendFeed rooms, one per topic; perhaps I can figure out a way to automatically redirect the items to the appropriate room.)

Rob provided this helpful reply:

I am not sure if changing your sharing to multiple accounts would help. You may be able to tag your shares in Google Reader, and then create separate feeds for each tag.

So I experimented. Rob's post itself was still in my starred items, so I created a new tag, "shared-business," and applied it to the item. In then went into my Google Reader settings and made my "shared-business" items public. (I have over a dozen folders/tags that I use in Google Reader, and before today, only the "Shared Items" were public.) This not only created a viewable list of the shared business items, but also created an atom feed which I was able to add to the feeds in my Empoprise-BI room. As a result, you can now see this item in the room.



With the creation of this tag, I now have additional destinations for every item that I read in Google Reader.



In essence, I can create any tag that I want, make the tag public, grab the atom feed, and use that feed in any way that I choose. I've already set up "shared-ie" and "shared-music" tags for my Empoprise-IE and Empoprise-MU FriendFeed groups, and I can continue to feed any of my rooms with items that I find via Google Reader.

WITH ONE EXCEPTION. It turns out that mobile Google Reader, which I use on my older smartphone, does not have the "add tags" capability necessary to direct a post to one of my public feeds such as the "shared-business" feed. So in that case, I have to star the item and direct it to a public feed later, when I'm at a computer.

But it's still better than manually sharing stuff.

Copyright and Trademark - Buying a blank CD-R?

If you check my Empoprise-MU music blog, you'll see that I've devoted time to some of the monetization issues affecting the music industry today. But I've never run across anything like this. From NPR:

When the first cryptic bits of news about Dark Night of the Soul began trickling in earlier this year, it all sounded too good to be true. Though the whole project was shrouded in mystery, it appeared that Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse's Mark Linkous, two of the most inspired artists making music today, were collaborating on a new album. That alone was enough to get our geek gears spinning with excitement. But there was an unusual twist that few of us at NPR Music could make sense of: Director David Lynch was somehow involved....

It turns out Dark Night Of The Soul is an album and the songs were written by Danger Mouse and Sparklehorse, though the myriad singers featured on each track also had a big hand in composing and producing the work. The album was initially going to be packaged with a book of photos taken by David Lynch. But now there's word that the music may never be officially released at all.

An unnamed spokesperson for Danger Mouse says that "due to an ongoing dispute with EMI" the book of photographs will "now come with a blank, recordable CD-R. All copies will be clearly labeled: 'For legal reasons, enclosed CD-R contains no music. Use it as you will.'"

Oh, and to top it all off, NPR has the music.

Rolling Stone speculates:

The disagreement between Danger Mouse and EMI likely roots back to the Jay-Z/Beatles mash-up The Grey Album he made in 2004. The brilliant combination of The White Album with The Black Album catapulted DM (real name Brian Burton) from bedroom producer to international star, but it came with a price: it infuriated the massive label group, which controls the rights to the Beatles’ recordings.

Sparklehorse are under contract with EMI, and Danger Mouse produced albums like Gorillaz’s Demon Days and the Good, the Bad and the Queen’s self-titled debut for labels under the EMI umbrella, so it’s unclear why the lawsuit would trouble the release now.

So now we've gotten to a bizarre stage where for some unknown reason, an album release consists of everything except for...the album.

P.S. YouTube video.

This is a test post.

This is h1 text

This is h2 text

This is b text.

Yes, plans are afoot. Come back Sunday night.

A bad case of NIMBY regarding Guantanamo

For the last eight years, conservatives and liberals alike had been opposed to the neoconservatives' Guantanamo Bay policy, in which captured enemies have been held in some type of no-man's land (Cuba) in an effort to skirt both domestic law and international treaty obligations.

With the election of Barack Obama, it initially appeared that Guantanamo imprisonment was on the way out. However, the next roadblock was thrown up by...the Democrats:

President Barack Obama's allies in the Senate will not provide funds to close the Guantanamo Bay prison next January, a top Democratic official said Tuesday.

With debate looming on Obama's spending request to cover military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, the official says Democrats will deny the Pentagon and Justice Department $80 million to relocate Guantanamo's 241 detainees.

The presumed reason for this opposition? While many have demanded that the imprisonment of people at Guantanamo be stopped and that the captured people be treated under U.S. law, apparently some of them are just realizing that if Guantanamo is closed, that whole "treated under U.S. law" thingie means that the prisoners will be brought to...the U.S. And while people are willing to defend the civil rights of the possibly innocent prisoners, they're also afraid of letting these criminals into our own backyard. NIMBY at its finest.

And it's not just the Democrats:

Republicans are poised with an amendment by James Inhofe of Oklahoma that would block any of the 241 Guantanamo detainees from ever coming to U.S. soil to stand trial or serve their sentences.

In essence, there is a bipartisan movement that is claiming that the Guantanamo prisoners are likely to break out of U.S. prisons and terrorize the populace. Alex Knapp isn't buying it:

This is just plain stupidity. The idea that somehow domestic prisons aren’t up to the task of handling these detainees is ludicrous. Get them into the system. Get them hearings. Release the innocent ones. This is a no brainer. The camps in Guantanamo Bay have become a stain on America’s reputation, a betrayal of her principles, and a rallying cry for her enemies. Close them down.

I'm a SERIAL movie star! But why is National CineMedia mailing stuff to me?

Previously, on April 28, I wrote a post entitled I'm a movie star! And you can be too, thanks to National CineMedia. The post detailed an advertisement that I received in the mail, done in the style of a comic book. The book was personalized with my name, but designated me as the superhero "Quantum."

Well, it turns out that the April mailing wasn't the last that I received from National CineMedia.



By this week, I had received a total of three mailings, describing the spectacular, phenomenal, and amazing way in which National CineMedia could host an exciting event at up to 1,200+ theaters nationwide.

But then I got to wondering - why were they sending me these advertisements through the mail?

Why didn't they just arrange to give their presentation once at the previously mentioned 1,200+ theaters? Get their entire mailing list in there, ply us with free popcorn and jumbo soft drinks, and convince us directly about the superiority of the National CineMedia solution? It is perhaps too expensive to host such an event?

Now it turns out that I'm on another mailing list, from the U.S. Postal Service, which emphasizes to me how wonderful postal advertisements can be.

It looks like National CineMedia is proving the U.S. Postal Service's point.

They couldn't have done this in 1770 - or could they?

Sheila Scarborough is, among other things, a family travel blogger. I'm connected to her on LinkedIn, and saw her request for suggestions for family-friendly travel sites in Virginia. Noting that she was accepting Facebook submissions, I friended her on Facebook and then submitted my brief suggestion, which she ended up using.

Although I spent a decade growing up in northern Virginia, my suggestion focused on another part of the state:

I heartily recommend Williamsburg. The historic district keeps cars outside of the perimeter and provides a living view of our country before it was a country.

Suggestions from others, submitted via Facebook and Twitter, included a seafood buffet in Virginia Beach, the various monuments in Arlington National Cemetery, and Busch Gardens (just down the road from Williamsburg). See the entire list.

For this post, Scarborough used a technique called "crowdsourcing" - and what better place to get a definition of the term than crowdsourcing.typepad.com? Here's Jeff Howe's definition - I mean definitions:

I like to use two definitions for crowdsourcing:

The White Paper Version: Crowdsourcing is the act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.

The Soundbyte Version: The application of Open Source principles to fields outside of software.

(Extra points for using the spelling "soundbyte" when said soundbyte includes a computer reference.)

At first glance, when you concentrate on the availability of the tools, it seems that crowdsourcing is a relatively new phenomenon. While tools are just tools, the connectivity allows someone like Scarborough to easily and quickly contact people that she's never met, and assemble contributions from a dozen of us within the span of a few days. I don't think the Committees of Correspondence in Williamsburg and elsewhere could have assembled views that quickly.

But is crowdsourcing a newly-invented technique? No, notes David Rogers. In a February 2009 post that also mentions Jeff Howe, Rogers traces the history of crowdsourcing back to a time when soundbyte, or even soundbite, wouldn't be considered a real word.

William Safire, cited by David Rogers:

“You ought to take some credit,” Jay Holt wrote in an e-mail message, “for being a pioneer of doing crowdsourcing, even if you did not invent the term. Haven’t you been crowdsourcing since the early days of your language column?”

True; the etymologists of the Phrasedick Brigade have been enriching these columns for three decades.

And how about Herodotus, also cited by David Rogers?

The following custom seems to me the wisest of their institutions next to the one lately praised. They have no physicians, but when a man is ill, they lay him in the public square, and the passers-by come up to him, and if they have ever had his disease themselves or have known any one who has suffered from it, they give him advice, recommending him to do whatever they found good in their own case, or in the case known to them; and no one is allowed to pass the sick man in silence without asking him what his ailment is.

All that is needed is some form of proximity. It's just that the tools that have been developed over the centuries, ranging from mail service to telephones to faxes to online communications, have made it progressively easier to assemble larger crowds.

Why lock things up? More ruminations on tool choice

I was in a meeting with a vendor recently, and the vendor referred to a product from another party. I went to the other party's website, found the product in question, and got ready to download the data sheet so that I could share it with other meeting attendees from my company. Only one problem - the data sheet was an .swf file. Not a .pdf file, not a .doc file, but an .swf file. I tried saving it anyway and clicking on the resulting file outside of my browser, but nothing happened. I could go to my browser, choose "Open File..." from the File menu, navigate to the file, and open it, but what's the point?

Of course, the advantage of sharing your sales material in a difficult-to-distribute format is that if anyone wants to see your sales material, they have to come to your website. If that's an advantage.

Now I'm someone who advocates the use of any tool in any way you want - if you want to floss your teeth with a screwdriver, be my guest. (Just don't tell your dentist.) But perhaps it's appropriate to review what Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF) was INTENDED to do:

The Macromedia Flash (SWF) (pronounced 'swiff' ) file format was designed to deliver vector graphics and animation over the Internet. The Macromedia Flash File Format (SWF) was designed as a very efficient delivery format and not as a format for exchanging graphics between graphics editors. It was designed to meet the following goals:

* On-screen Display—The format is primarily intended for on-screen display and so it supports anti-aliasing, fast rendering to a bitmap of any color format, animation and interactive buttons.
* Extensibility—The format is a tagged format, so the format can be evolved with new features while maintaining backward compatibility with older players.
* Network Delivery—The files can be delivered over a network with limited and unpredictable bandwidth. The files are compressed to be small and support incremental rendering through streaming. SWF is a binary format and is not human readable like HTML. Macromedia Flash (SWF) uses techniques such as bit-packing and structures with optional fields, to minimize file size.
* Simplicity—The format is simple so that the player is small and easily ported. Also, the player depends upon only a very limited set of operating system functionality.
* File Independence—Files can be displayed without any dependence on external resources such as fonts.
* Scalability—Different computers have different monitor resolutions and bit depths. Files work well on limited hardware, while taking advantage of more expensive hardware when it is available.
* Speed—The files are designed to be rendered at a high quality very quickly.

So .swf format is not really intended for storage and viewing on my own computer. And presumably it meets the company's needs to present company information to website visitors quickly.

But choosing that format has created its own difficulties, such as the fact that I'm much less inclined to share information on this product.

Copyright and Trademark - Google uses words in a way that some don't like

Another musing on copyright and trademark, this one inspired by this New York Times article:

FPX filed a class-action suit against Google in federal court in Texas, saying that Google had infringed on its trademark and challenging Google’s policies on behalf of all trademark owners in the state. Legal experts said it was the first class-action suit against Google over the issue.

The issue?

This month, [Google] expanded to more than 190 new countries its policy of allowing anyone to buy someone else’s trademark as a trigger for an ad. And ... it announced that it would allow limited use of trademarks in the text of some search ads, even if the trademark owner objects.

While some of the issues in the FPX lawsuit have to do with the class action nature of the suit, another suit, brought by an individual company, has bounced back and forth:

The [2004] suit alleges that Google and Rescuecom competitors buying the ads profit without authorization from the Rescuecom trademark, and that the practice can also confuse potential customers and franchisees, resulting in lost business.

In its defense, Google argued that the selling "Rescuecom" as a keyword to competitors that triggers their ads along with search results isn't a trademark infringement under the Lanham Act. Among other things, Google argued in its motion to dismiss that neither Google nor its advertisers use Rescuecom's name to identify the source of their products.

The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of New York dismissed the case in 2006. But, after a Rescuecom appeal, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit sent the case back (pdf) to the lower court....

Richard C. Balough explains the issues involved:

The Second Circuit reversed a trial court’s dismissal of a case brought by Rescuecom Corp. The appellate court said the trial court misinterpreted the appellate court’s earlier decision in 1-800 Contracts, Inc. v. WhenU.com, Inc. where the court found there was no Lanham Act violation because the plaintiff in the earlier case did not allege that a trademark was being used in commerce....

In distinguishing its earlier opinion from the instant case, the court said: “First, in contrast to 1-800, where we emphasized that the defendant made no use whatsoever of the plaintiff’s trademark, here what Google is recommending and selling to its advertisers is Rescuecom’s trademark. Second, in contrast with the facts of 1-800 where the defendant did not ‘use or display,’ much less sell, trademarks as search terms to its advertisers, here Google displays, offers, and sells Rescuecom’s mark to Google’s advertising customers when selling its advertising services. In addition, Google encourages the purchase of Rescuecom’s mark through its Keyword Suggestion Tool. Google’s utilization of Rescuecom’s mark fits literally within terms specified by 15 U.S.C. § 1127.”

AOL describes the purpose of the Lanham Act, and states the following:

Rights to use a trademark are defined by the class(es) for which the trademark is used. Therefore, it is possible for different parties to use the same trademark in different classes. The Lanham Act defines the scope of a trademark, the process by which a federal registration can be obtained from the Patent and Trademark Office for a trademark, and penalties for trademark infringement.

(An aside: the AOL page states: "**This site is designed to work best with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or Netscape 4.0 or higher. Other browsers may produce varied results.**")

Regarding the Lanham Act's provision against unauthorized use in commerce, this has been through the courts before:

Consider, for example, last October's decision by the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey in Buying for the Home, LLC v. Humble Abode.[2] The parties in this case were competitors in the business of online furniture retailing, with the plaintiff operating totalbedroom.com and the defendant operating humbleabode.com. The plaintiff alleged violations of Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act,[3] claiming the defendant had misappropriated its trademark "TOTAL BEDROOM" by causing an ad and a link for the defendant's Web site to appear on the Google search engine when the search phrase "total bedroom" was entered by a user....

[T]he court found that the plaintiff had satisfied the "use" requirement of the Lanham Act.

First, it stated, the alleged purchase of the keyword was a commercial transaction that occurred "in commerce," trading on the value of the plaintiff's mark. Second, the court continued, the defendant's alleged use was both "in commerce" and "in connection with any goods or services" in that the plaintiff's mark was allegedly used to trigger commercial advertising that included a link to the defendant's furniture retailing site.

Therefore, the court ruled, not only was the alleged use of the plaintiff's mark tied to the promotion of the defendant's goods and retail services, but the mark was used to provide a computer user with direct access (i.e., a link) to the defendant's site through which the user could make furniture purchases. The court found that these allegations "clearly" satisfied the act's use requirement.

But not all of these cases have gone this way. There is at least one case which reached the same conclusion as the initial Rescuecom conclusion:

[I]n Site Pro-1, Inc. v. Better Metal, LLC,[12] the court held that the use of a plaintiff's trademark as a metatag and the purchase of plaintiff's trademark for a Yahoo! search algorithm were not "uses" within the meaning of the Lanham Act and granted defendant's motion to dismiss plaintiff's claims of trademark infringement, unfair competition and dilution under the Lanham Act, and common law unfair competition.

In so holding, the court observed that "courts in other circuits have generally sustained such claims," but recognized that "courts in this [c]ircuit . . . have largely rejected such claims." Persuaded by the reasoning in Merck & Co. and Rescuecom, as well as by the underlying rationale of 1-800 Contacts, the court determined that "[t]he key question is whether the defendant placed plaintiff's trademark on any goods, displays, containers, or advertisements, or used plaintiff's trademark in any way that indicates source or origin." Because the complaint contained no such allegation, the court held that Lanham Act "use" was not alleged.

Well, after the New York Times article came out I tried this search myself, typing the word "FirePond" (re the FPX case) into Google to see what would display.



I don't know what to say...

Trapped in the Plane

Theoretically, fliers get on the plane, the plane pulls away from the gate, heads to the runway, takes off, flies for a while, taxis directly to a gate, and lets the people get off.

This doesn't always happen, and fliers can be stuck on a plane for hours.

Why not let them get off the plane?

Congress is considering three initiatives: requiring the airlines to provide passengers stuck on grounded aircraft with food, water, functioning restrooms and medical treatment (and possibly the option to get off the plane after three hours); establishing a consumer complaints hotline and publishing the phone number on boarding passes; and requiring airlines to disclose a flight’s on-time record at the point of purchase....

The thorniest issue is whether Congress will impose a time limit on keeping passengers on planes stuck on the tarmac. The carriers strongly oppose that prospect, arguing that the logistics involved would make it difficult to give people the option of getting off.

Yet four Canadian airlines recently agreed to let passengers disembark if a ground delay exceeds 90 minutes — if it is safe and practical to do so.

“This is subject to the aircraft commander’s discretion,” said George Petsikas, president of the National Airlines Council of Canada. “But clearly, we understand that when things get long on board we have to look after our passengers’ well-being and comfort.”

Flyersrights.org has published a page of horror stories. Here's a sample:

“I had a woman on my flight that had recently had back/hip surgery. Upon taking her pain medication with no food she vomited. She asks the stewardess to take the bag and dispose of it and her reply was we have no TRASH BAGS you'll have to hold on to it.”

“There was a small lap dog who had DOGGIE POOP on the seat and the owner upon being given napkins for the passenger to clean up the mess she also was told to hold on to the mess as there were no TRASH BAGS.”

Kenneth Nankin presents the opposing view:

The battleground will be the passengers’ right to deplane. The concept of giving passengers the right to deplane looks harmless and plays well with the voting public. The reality of exercising this right, and its unintended adverse consequences, is a different matter.

Under the legislation, a few passengers, or even a lone passenger, could exercise the right to deplane even if other passengers did not wish to do so. Thus, one passenger could force the aircraft to leave its place in line on the taxiway and return to the terminal so he or she could deplane even if all the other passengers wished to remain on the aircraft. Even if the bills were modified to require some form of passenger consensus in order to deplane, what form would that consensus take? Would a majority of passengers be required? If so, how would the passengers vote? Voting might be feasible on a 70-passenger regional jet, but how would voting be conducted on an A380 loaded with 853 passengers? Who would oversee the voting? Would flight attendants serve as poll watchers, with the pilots serving as judges to scrutinize the “hanging chads”?

Trust me - if a couple of people on the plane are holding vomit and dog feces, I think that the vote to deplane will be overwhelmingly positive.

Copyright and Trademark - When Old Becomes Good

I have a couple of musings on copyright and trademark law and business, and this is the first of them. This one involves my love of scrobbling and a king from long ago. (Interpret that as you will.)

For those who aren't familiar with the term, I am using "scrobbling" in its last.fm context - namely, identifying and recording any piece of audio that I listen to over a properly-equipped computing device. If you go to http://www.last.fm/user/ontarioemperor, you can see an exhaustive (and exhausting) list of everything to which I've listened on such devices over the last several years. (And yes, JC Chasez is in this list. The scrobbler knows all.)

Last Friday morning I had a hankering to find some scrobble-friendly audio of the Bible. In my online search, I was looking for audio that was legally free to download. I ended up at Audiotreasure and downloaded a portion of Exodus 20 and the entire book of John. While I went to this particular site, there are a number of other sites that provide audio versions of the Bible for free.

I'd be willing to bet that the vast majority of English-language audio Bible sites provide only one of the myriad of translations of the Bible - namely, the King James Version.

Why? Because it's free.

I have been known to quote text from the Bible in various posts (maybe not much in this blog, but in other blogs I have written), and when I do so I usually go to BibleGateway.com and I usually quote from the New International Version of the Bible. But when I do, I need to include a copyright notice such as the following:

New International Version (NIV)

Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society

Yes, all of the commonly-used English-language Bible translations that have been produced over the last couple of centuries are copyrighted. While one reason for this is to preserve the integrity of the translation, another reason is to receive income. (Considering the work that went into the translation, that's not an unreasonable request.)

But there's one very popular translation that isn't subject to copyright law, because it was translated a long, long time ago - namely, the King James Version, produced by a team assembled by King James I of England (James VI of Scotland, if I remember my history correctly). Now in most of the world, copyright protection for the King James Bible has long since ceased, which means that you or I could produce a King James Bible and not have to pay anyone for the privilege. Interestingly enough, this translation is still under copyright protection in the land of its birth. Wikisource notes that the copyright is "eternal" (while some readers of the Book of Revelation might dispute that). Wikisource further states;

Thou shalt obtain permissions to publish in England and Wales by following the guidance in A Brief Guide to Liturgical Copyright, third edition (RTF file). If thou wish to publish in Scotland, thou shalt contact the Scottish Bible Board for permissions.

The result of this legal mishmash is that the King James Version of the Bible is still the most popular translation today. While some groups and persons adopt this translation for doctrinal reasons, other groups and persons adopt it for economic ones. If you were to phrase it in tech terms, one could claim that KJV is the de facto interoperability standard. While I might use NIV and you might use ESV, we can often agree to use KJV. (There are exceptions to this, but they're beyond the scope of this post.)

To compete, other translations often enter into special deals to allow their works to be shown on a par with the King James Version. I've already shown you Bible Gateway; I don't know the terms of the agreement between the Bible Gateway folks and the International Bible Soceity, but there's a good chance that some money had to change hands before the NIV could be displayed at the website.

However, barring some major event (which could obviously happen in this instance), no single English-language Bible will ever enjoy the near-universal popularity that was enjoyed by the King James Version for several centuries.

Enough about God - I'm planning to write the next post in this series about another universal power, Google.

Harlan Koch Revisited, but is Starbucks' new message believable?

Flickr photo by bitca used under a Creative Commons license

Perhaps you remember Harlan Koch, a character that I created in a January 30 post to represent someone who is, in my words, "an insane person" - insane about the quality of his/her product. The name itself is taken from Harlan Sanders, who repeatedly hawked the quality of his fried chicken, and Jim Koch, who repeatedly hawks the quality of his beer.

In that post, I questioned whether Starbucks' Howard Schultz is as insane as Sanders and Koch. He was in the beginning, but is he now?

Perhaps. Or at least someone in Starbucks is pretending to be insane.

I'll skip over the way in which Starbucks is using social media, and concentrate on the message that they want to convey. From the New York Times:

The outdoor ads boil Starbucks’ message down to headlines, some of them veiled jabs at competitors: “If your coffee isn’t perfect, we’ll make it over. If it’s still not perfect, you must not be in a Starbucks.”...

Starbucks’s text-heavy ads have bold headlines written on a background that looks like a burlap coffee sack, meant to evoke roasted coffee, said David Lubars, chief creative officer of BBDO North America, the agency that created the campaign and part of the Omnicom Group.

The full-page newspaper ads go to some length to describe how Starbucks selects only the best 3 percent of beans and roasts them until they pop twice, and gives its part-time workers health insurance.

Professor Richard Honack, however, doesn't believe that text-intensive quality ads are the way to go.

“Generation Y goes to Starbucks for the Internet, the music, a place to hang out,” he said. “Selling them the coffee and where the coffee comes from? I just don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

Needless to say, I disagree with Professor Honack. This is what I said back in January:

But last I checked, the official name of the company is still Starbucks Coffee Company, and its mission statement is still "To inspire and nurture the human spirit— one person, one cup, and one neighborhood at a time." Somehow it doesn't seem all that inspiring when you cut back on your main product line.

So despite Professor Honack's opinion, I personally think that Starbucks has the right message - but is it believable? If your competition is McDonalds, then perhaps it can be believable, but Starbucks is also competing against the many independent coffee shops that are all over the place. Such as Rancho Cucamonga's Coffee Klatch, who I blogged about in February 2008 and April 2009. Well, Coffee Klatch has a blog, and here's part of a recent post:

My visit to Central America can be summed up with three words: Cupping, Cupping, and Cupping. This was a quick and fast paced visit to three of my favorite origins for the sole purpose of cupping lots with some of our Direct Trade farmers.

I was only in Costa Rica for one day and spent it cupping different lots of Cerro Paldo to choose my favorite. Cerro Paldo was the 2007 COE winner that set a record for the highest price paid for a Costa Rican Coffee. Last year I bought this coffee because of its delicious cup. This year promises to be even better than last year. Several lots were great and one was out of this world. I will cup again in our own lab before bringing in the best from Cerro Paldo but it will be great.

OK, so maybe Coffee Klatch doesn't have an exciting Twitter competition or an award-winning advertising agency, but who are you going to believe when they're talking about coffee?

How defense lawyers aid law enforcement, and how to make your case appeal to multiple audiences

I just read something novel today - well, at least it was novel to me. It was in a PARADE article that discussed difficulties in funding court-appointed lawyers for the indigent. Now this is not a popular cause among certain circles, but David Carroll, of the National Legal Aid & Defender Association, hit on a phrase that could make his cause more appealing to the "law and order" folks.

[E]very wrongfully convicted defendant leaves a real criminal on the street.

Now that's a lesson in presentation - make sure that your sales pitch appeals to someone other than yourself.

The entire article is here.

(H/T Robert McAuley, retired from the Lincoln, Nebraska Police Department.)

Disadvantages of a closed system (MSN Games)

Microsoft is more open than most people think, especially when you compare it with Apple. But there are still some instances in which Microsoft is closed enough to shoot itself in its own foot.

Back in the 20th century, I used to play a lot of Yahoo Poker, especially at some of the more social tables - the ones that believed in chatting while playing, rather than just single-mindedly concentrating on the cards. I haven't played much in the last few years, but I still enjoy the game.

Well, I was poking around in my Microsoft account today (I had just uploaded some free Nine Inch Nails song files to my SkyDrive) when I noticed that MSN had its own games section. I checked the list of games, found Texas Hold'Em, went to the Texas Hold'Em page, and was stopped dead in my tracks.

Important Note: Your browser or operating system does not meet the minimum requirements to play on MSN Games. You may be able to download games for offline play; however, the online games can be played only with Internet Explorer version 6 or later, and Windows 2000 or later.

I met the operating system requirements - I'm on my brand-new computer with Windows Vista - but rather than using Internet Explorer 6, I'm using Mozilla Firefox.

And I'm using Mozilla Firefox on Yahoo Games from here on in, thank you very much. (As with everything else, I'm shifting my Yahoo use from my ontarioemperor account to my john_bredehoft account. I may see you at the poker tables.)

The juice and the cloud

You'll recall my May 8 post "FriendFeed hungry, Twitter pining for the fjords - does this qualify as a perfect storm?", written in response to the same-day outages of FriendFeed and Twitter. The FriendFeed outage was clearly unplanned, as Bret Taylor noted:

Our data center, SVColo (http://svcolo.com/), lost power (and apparently all generators as well) this afternoon, causing our site to be completely unavailable for a couple of hours. We apologize for the extended outage....

This outage impacted our site as well as a number of other web sites hosted at SVColo. We are obviously fairly frustrated by the incident, and we are working hard to get everything else back online now.

The SvColo website does not have a news or a blog section, so they don't have any way to communicate to customers regarding bad (or good) news. And to my knowledge, SVColo has not made a public statement on the May 8 outage. But people certainly said a lot about SVColo, including this Nicholas James joke:

@scobleizer You need to get the #friendfeed guys to host at Rackspace ;)

Of course Robert Scoble, a new Rackspace employee, is well aware that his employer has had outages of its own. An example from November 2007:

First, Rackspace had a “maintenance failure” at its Dallas data center on Sunday. Then a truck driver hit a transformer feeding power to the Rackspace data center on Monday.

There's all sorts of directions in which I can go from here, but for now I'm going to confine myself to the fact that any cloud-based service is dependent upon electrical power, or some other form of power. And no matter how many redundant systems or backup generators you set up, no one can provide 100% uptime.

Speaking of uptime, there was that Uptime Institute/McKinsey report a month ago, which the New York Times covered:

“The industry has assumed the financial benefits of cloud computing and, in our view, that’s a faulty assumption,” said Will Forrest, a principal at McKinsey, who led the study.

Owning the hardware, McKinsey states, is actually cost-effective for most corporations when the depreciation write-offs for tax purposes are included. And the labor savings from moving to the cloud model has been greatly exaggerated, Mr. Forrest says. The care and feeding of a company’s software, regardless of where it’s hosted, and providing help to users both remain labor-intensive endeavors.

Clouds, Mr. Forrest notes, can make a lot of sense for small and medium-sized companies, typically with revenue of $500 million or less.

CIO.com picked at the underlying assumptions:

McKinsey repeats a very common mistake made by people skeptical about cloud computing: confusing the marginal cost of a single server in a company's own data center with the total cost of a server hosted by a cloud provider. In my research, the cost for data center construction runs $600 to $1000 per square foot. Some portion of that amount needs to be assigned to the internal server instance; furthermore, owning a data center is not a one-time expense—there's maintenance as well, which adds to the monthly cost of an internal server. That doesn't even address the capital expense assignment of additional capital assets like network equipment, storage arrays and the like.

But cost is only one aspect of a cloud vs. in-house decision. Regarding the point of this post, what of reliability?

I don't think these periodic failures are endemic to cloud computing as a whole; indeed, I think it should be realized as a solution which is much less susceptible to such outages and requiring fewer user-level redundancies than more conventional hosting practices. This is contrary to conventional wisdom, but I think conventional wisdom has lost its head on this one. Businesses have long since figured out how to solve single-point-of-failure problems in their on internal systems. It's not easy or cheap, but it's possible, and what you are buying when you buy cloud services should be just that solution. The entire point of the model is to defray the costs of doing so to a point where businesses otherwise unable to afford such power and redundancy can cost-effectively share the benefits of such engineering.

Assume for the moment that FriendFeed prized reliability above all else, including cost. (For a startup with no revenue, that's a faulty assumption, but we'll make it anyway.) Could the FriendFeeders have built an in-house system that is more reliable than the service that SVColo offers? Considering FriendFeed's reputation for having very few outages, I doubt it.

Just tell me - what do you do? Some applications can answer, some can't.

If you're an application developer, and you can't capture the essence of your application via a short statement, then you have problems.

For example, if you log out of Twitter, you'll see this:

Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing?

Now this statement has been ridiculed ad nauseum, and it's been pointed out that Twitter can do more, but it clearly encapsulates what Twitter can do for you. Let's see what FriendFeed says:

FriendFeed is a service that makes it easy to share with friends online. It offers a fun and interactive way to discover and discuss information among friends.

Again, in my view, this is an excellent description of what FriendFeed can do for you.

I do not use SharePoint, but I wanted to get a very quick overview of what SharePoint could do for me. I started here:

Office SharePoint Server 2007 is an integrated suite of server capabilities that can help improve organizational effectiveness by providing comprehensive content management and enterprise search, accelerating shared business processes, and facilitating information-sharing across boundaries for better business insight.

Technically this is a wonderful statement, since it states a benefit (improve organizational effectiveness) and talks, on a high level, about features. But it's still a little argh for me - and I like this kind of business process junk.

So I went here.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 is a new server program that is part of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. Your organization can use Office SharePoint Server 2007 to facilitate collaboration, provide content management features, implement business processes, and supply access to information that is essential to organizational goals and processes.

OK, this was a little better for me, but I'm a bit of a process geek. I'm not sure how a normal person would react to it.

An erroneous title, and the profits from selected giveaway strategies (the knights who say "Euro")

After I wrote my Saturday morning post entitled What is your name? Wolfram Alpha. What is your purpose?, I discovered that I had mistitled it.

If you go to sacred-texts.com, you will see that I should have used the word "quest" instead of "purpose."

KEEPER: Heh heh. Stop! What is your name?
ARTHUR: It is Arthur, King of the Britons.
KEEPER: What is your quest?
ARTHUR: To seek the Holy Grail.
KEEPER: What is the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow?
ARTHUR: What do you mean? An African or European swallow?
KEEPER: What? I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!
BEDEMIR: How do know so much about swallows?
ARTHUR: Well, you have to know these things when you're a king you know.

The text is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. And since this is a business blog, I should mention that the members of Monty Python (well, five of them), figuring that if you can't beat them, join them, have uploaded copyright clips from their productions, including this movie. They don't have the bridge scene online, but they do have the killer rabbit scene.



And, of course, the members (well, five of them) did this for completely altruistic purposes. Well, not exactly. Matt Safford:

With a nod to the fact that illegally uploaded Python clips made up a large chunk of the early content uploaded to YouTube, the homepage of the Monty Python YouTube channel asks fans to buy the troupe's DVDs in typical Monty Python manner: "We're letting you see absolutely everything for free. So there! But we want something in return. None of your driveling, mindless comments. Instead, we want you to click on the links, buy our movies and TV shows, and soften our pain and disgust at being ripped off all these years." And with a little help from YouTube click-to-buy ads embedded in the videos, sales of the comedy troupe's DVDs on Amazon.com went through the roof and straight into orbit, climbing to the number two position on Amazon.com's Movies & TV bestsellers list. According to YouTube, that's a sales jump of 23,000 percent. No matter how you count the numbers, they add up to an impressive sum for a 40-year-old TV show whose best bits are already available for free online.

But this success story isn't necessarily universal, as Safford notes:

But it's important to note that both Monty Python and Nine Inch Nails have notoriously loyal fans. A $300 "ultra deluxe" edition of Ghosts I-IV, limited to 2,500 copies, sold out soon after it was offered online. That's the kind of fanatic following most pop stars and upcoming artists just don't have.

What is your name? Wolfram Alpha. What is your purpose?

For my virgin Wolfram|Alpha search, I decided to perform a search that would test its computational qualities.

So I asked:

what is the speed of a european swallow?

As you can see, the question was answered precisely and thoroughly.



Input interpretation:
estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen European swallow

Result:
25 mph (miles per hour)
(asked of a general swallow (but not answered) in Monty Python's Holy Grail)

Then Wolfram|Alpha shows off, restating the term in a variety of measurement formsts, including (not shown above) seconds per meter. (0.091, in case someone ever asks you.)

So naturally, I had to ask about the African swallow.

Input interpretation:
estimated average cruising airspeed of an unladen African swallow

Result:
there is unfortunately insufficient data to estimate the velocity of an African swallow (even if you specified which of the 47 species of swallow found in Africa you meant)
(asked of a general swallow (but not answered) in Monty Python's Holy Grail.)

Smarty pants.

Well, I guess it's supposed to be...

[1:05 PM - MORE ABOUT SWALLOWS.]