Upgrade from white to wheat? FreeToastHost 1.0 and 2.0 software for Toastmasters

A recent post on my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog attracted an email from an "ambassador" for the Fontana (California) Chamber of Commerce. No, he and the other ambassadors don't take their marching orders from Secretary of State Clinton. No, they are "a friendly group of business professionals that donate their time to support our membership and our chamber events."

I noticed that the ambassador who emailed me, Jerry Weitzman, is also connected with the Fontana Communicators and Leaders Toastmasters Club. I've known a couple of Toastmasters over the years, so I went to Fontana's website. At the bottom of the website, among the legalese, I found this statement:

Site Hosting and Technical support provided by FreeToastHost, a free service of Toastmasters International.

Now this caught my attention. The Toastmasters aren't just advising their members on restaurant meeting room reservations and throat lozenges. (They talk a lot, you know.) They're also providing technical services to allow their clubs and districts to contact existing members and attract new ones.

And they've been doing this since 2004:

In January of 2004, we introduced FreeToastHost to the Toastmasters community. Since that time, FreeToastHost has been helping clubs attract new members, operate more efficiently, and keep current members informed and interested. Over 10,000 Toastmasters clubs around the world benefit from the no-cost websites and on-line tools provided by FreeToastHost such as the duty roster, member directory, e-mail lists, club calendars, and much more.

But they have not become stagnant:

In August of 2011, we introduced FreeToastHost 2.0 -- the next generation of Toastmaster Club and District website hosting platform.

However, at least one FreeToastHost 1.0 user, Beth MacNeil Stinson, believes that an important feature was left out:

As I started to explore FTH 2.0, my excitement quickly turned to dismay when I discovered that there was no upgrade path or strategy from FTH 1.0 to FTH 2.0. Our site will have to be recreated from the ground up, manually. Years of data will have to be downloaded one discussion post at a time just to preserve the files and our club history. Adding them to a new site will be a huge time suck.

Additional comments from Stinson are here. Incidentally, she recommended using WordPress instead, although it appears that she continued on the FreeToastHost 2.0 upgrade path. (But she'll certainly voice her concerns well before FreeToastHost 3.0 comes out.)

I guess sometimes it pays to be a late adopter - eight years late.

No, Google+ is not popular - and neither is Facebook

If you want to get a fanatic mad, just tell him or her that the object of his/her fanaticism doesn't matter.

Google+ is blowing up over Amir Efrati's Wall Street Journal article that used comScore data to describe Google+ as a "virtual ghost town."

In a predictable way, Efrati has been condemned by the Google+ community - I even saw the dreaded phrase "You're doing it wrong" in the thread of dozens of condemnations. Conspiracy theories about Rupert Murdoch abound right now.

Yes, dozens. About three dozen when I last checked.

All of this reminds me of something that happened back in February 2010, when MG Siegler wrote a TechCrunch piece entitled FriendFeed Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed. This resulted in angry condemnations - again, dozens of them. And also conspiracy theories.

"But this is different," you say. "Google+ has 90 million users."

I don't care. Google+ is still inconsequential. Let's face it, when a post about Google+ in a national publication results in less than 1,000 replies to the author on Google+, THAT'S inconsequential.

"Aha!" you cry. "You must be in the pay of Zuckerberg."

Uh, not really.

You see, Facebook with its 800 million or 900 million or whatever users doesn't matter either.

We get all caught up in things based upon micro, anecdotal evidence. Because I have a vibrant Google+ experience, I assume that everyone has a vibrant Google+ experience - and if I don't, "they're doing it wrong."

Because I work in a U.S. subsidiary of a French company, I encounter a good amount of French speakers. Therefore, I can extrapolate and assume that there is a significant portion of French speaking people in Orange County, California. Never mind that the facts don't fit my perception. If I don't hear French when walking down the street in Irvine, the people in Irvine are doing it wrong.

Which brings us to Facebook. Everybody's on Facebook (except for one or two Google+ people who have loudly deleted their Facebook accounts). High school friends, college friends, former co-workers, church friends, you name it. And if you're not on Facebook...you're doing it wrong.

Well, I hate to break everyone's collective bubbles, but even Facebook is pretty unpopular.

How can I say this when Facebook usage is climbing up to 900 million people?

Because that means that over SIX BILLION people are not on Facebook.

Eighty-seven percent of the people in the world don't care about your Facebook wall.

Ninety-eight percent of the people in the world don't care about your Google+ hangouts.

And well over ninety-nine percent of the people in the world can't participate in a "Moment of Win" on FriendFeed.

When you look at it from that perspective, the difference in usage between Google+ and Facebook really doesn't matter.

Or, as comScore would put it, the average person spends zero hours on Facebook, zero minutes on Google+, and zero seconds on FriendFeed.

Drinking water? Now THAT'S popular.

Atheists and bureaucracy (thoughts on proposal costs)

Companies often keep track of various projects. Since I am employed in a pre-sales capacity, I am interested in the cost of pre-sales projects. I was doing some outside research on this when I ran across this Government Express piece by Russell Smith. Someone like me who was looking for an easy answer would be disappointed:

Usually, the people asking [about proposal costs] want a cut-and-dried answer. They want to be told, “a proposal should cost you X percent of the contract value”, or “Y dollars per page” or something like that. A meaningful answer is more complicated.

In essence, some multi-million dollar proposals can be completed with just a few hours of work. And even within a certain range of more complex proposals, the amount of work can vary:

The cost to prepare a complex proposal requiring a significant system / product design to be submitted for a program valued in the tens of millions of dollars or more, is frequently in the range of 1 – 2% of contract value. When field conditions are challenging, these costs can rise to 3% or more. For example, several years ago, TRW (now Northrop Grumman) was bidding a multi-hundred-million dollar contract to provide a large system to the Air Force. The Air Force kept withdrawing and resubmitting the RFP over a 4-year period. TRW ended up winning the contract, but the cost of the proposal was 10% of contract value. In this case, TRW suffered from an act of God (otherwise known as Government inefficiency).

My question - if Government inefficiency can be categorized as an "act of God," does that mean that people who want to reduce Government inefficiency should be atheists?

(empo-tuulwey) Tools aren't easy. Why use them?

The New CRM blog recently posted something about tools. Since I (still) talk about tools on this blog, it defintely interested me.

The post talked about several things - tools needs vs. tool "nice to haves," why CRM should instead be called "Customer Experience," and how cool cell phones can be. But I want to concentrate on one point that was raised - shoes.

Here's a bit about what was said about shoes:

Think about your closet. You have thirty pairs of shoes tossed in haphazardly. It is faster getting them in there then if you were to neatly organize them. What about when you want your black boots? You start digging, pushing shoes out of your way, and you’ve found one! It’s a start. So you go back to digging out the second. By the time you have both boots in your hand (or on your feet) all of your shoes have made their way out of your closet and you have to get them back in. The time you save by tossing them in instead of organizing is lost by digging through sixty shoes and re-shoving them every which way but where they belong.

The moral of the story is: it’s a lot easy to find things when they are put away. It might be harder but in the end, it’s worth it.

And the post concludes by saying:

There is a difference between what is easy and what is going to make your life easy.

A tool is often not easy to use. If you have some type of shoe sorter, you have to organize it and remember to put your shoes in the right place every time - and that's BOTH of your shoes. If you have a hammer, you have to make sure that you don't smash your fingers. If you have Twitter, you have to login every once in a while, and you have to restrain yourself from tweeting every little thing that pops into your head. (Well, you SHOULD restrain yourself.) If you have a Capability Maturity Model-based process, you have to read the process and follow it.

The benefit, as The New CRM notes, occurs AFTER you've invested time in using the tool. That's when you see the payoff.

Are you thirsty? Desalination in southern California

I live in southern California, which is for all practical intents and purposes a desert. Yes, I know that portions of the area may not technically fit the term, but the truth is that the local water supply is vastly exceeded by the number of thirsty people out here. Therefore, we are engaged in water wars with northern California, and Arizona, and everyone else in the area.

However, if you go down to one of our local beaches, you'll see all sorts of water. Salt water.

Desalination plants have been around for a while, and now one is being proposed for Huntington Beach, California.

The Santa Ana Regional Water Quality Control Board voted to push forward plans for a plant that will convert about 50 million gallons of ocean water into drinking water every day.

That’s enough to supply at least a quarter of a million people in Orange County with fresh water.

The cost is $350 million, and it's claimed that taxpayers won't have to pay for it. We'll see about that.

And it should be noted that there are environmental concerns which could potentially derail the project.

We'll see what happens.

Testing my @networkedblogs link to Twitter

Back in the Dark Ages, I would use FriendFeed to automatically tweet notifications of my posts via my @empoprises Twitter account.

Then, a couple of years after Facebook bought FriendFeed, the FriendFeed-to-Twitter interface quit working.

For a while, I left it like that. If I really wanted to share a post with my Twitter followers, I'd manually share it (usually via AddThis, which is on all of my Blogger blogs).

But tonight, I just turned on Twitter sharing for the four blogs (out of five) that are registered with NetworkedBlogs.

This is a test. This is (mostly) only a test.

(empo-tuulwey) A BC/BCE example of rapid communication (Twitter by foot)

The term "sneakernet" has been used to describe the act of carrying a floppy disk from one computer to another in order to transmit data between the two computers.

Nowadays, no one has floppy disks any more.

But the original "sneakernet" predates the existence of floppy disks, or even computers. In a recent post in my tymshft blog, I referenced an episode that appears in 2 Samuel 18:19-33. Even secularists can appreciate the nature of the story.

In summary, Joab was an army commander who defeated Absalom in battle. Joab was under the employ of David. Two messengers were sent to bring David the news of the battle. Because Twitter did not exist at the time, and because floppy disks (or sneakers) did not exist at the time, the messengers ran with the news.

Ordinarily this would be a routine task, except for one complicating factor - Absalom happened to be the son of David, and Absalom was killed in the battle (by Joab and men under his command).

One of the messengers, Ahimaaz, was an Israeli who understood the sensitivity of the news. The other messenger was an unidentified foreigner (a Cushite) who may or may not have understood the implications. Even if you ignore the fact that Absalom was intentionally killed by the army, there remains the possibility that David might be sensitive to news that his son was killed (despite the fact that the son rebelled against him).

Despite the fact that the Cushite messenger left first, Ahimaaz overtook him and reached David before the Cushite did. Ahimaaz immediately announces the victory in the battle, and then is asked by David, "Is it well with the young man Absalom?" Ahimaaz dodged the question:

When Joab sent the king's servant, your servant, I saw a great commotion, but I do not know what it was.

Then the Cushite arrived, also announcing victory in battle. David asked about Absalom, and the Cushite answered:

May the enemies of my lord the king and all who rise up against you for evil be like that young man.

I don't know if the Cushite was simply telling the unvarnished truth, or if he was delivering the message that he thought King David wanted to hear. But regardless of the Cushite's intent, the outcome was painful for all. David mourned the death of his son, and the victorious people "stole into the city that day as people steal in who are ashamed when they flee in battle." Joab ended up rebuking David. The record does not record whether David ever learned that Joab had killed Absalom, but David told his successor Solomon to deal with Joab because of other faults.

QUESTION: Who was the better messenger - the faster messenger who withheld distressing information, or the slower messenger who revealed everything?

The downside of popularity - Burning Man scalpers?

When one begins a social movement, things look really idealistic. A few committed souls set out to change the world, and for a brief time the world actually changes.

But the world wins in the end.

Burning Man has been around for a while. The temporary community in the Nevada desert has survived and created its micro-ecosystem which is wonderful and far out.

But something happened to Burning Man 2011. The event sold out for the first time in its history.

And now, in 2012, the demand for tickets has exceeded the supply. With predictable consequences.

While it is not clear exactly who bought up the bulk of the tickets, judging by the multitude of outraged Twitter messages, Facebook posts, blog entries and comments on online news stories, many longtime attendees did not and some scalpers did.

Tickets bought for between $240 and $390 are already beginning to show up for sale on sites like StubHub and Craigslist for as much as $5,000 apiece.

And now some, including some organizers of various Burning Man events who were shut out, are complaining. Loudly.

Well, maybe they'll move the whole thing to Las Vegas. There are plenty of hotel rooms there.

Sympathy for the Nigerian scam artists who were ripped off? Perhaps.

Sarah Jane Cochrane-Ramsey is an Australian woman who was employed as an agent in March 2010. Her job? To provide an Australian bank account for some businessmen. She would receive eight percent of the bank deposits as her fee, and would forward the remaining 92% to the businessmen.

An interesting business, and Cochrane-Ramsey didn't ask any questions.

However, she seems to have made a mistake in her calculations. Instead of taking 8% of the deposits as her fee, she took 100% of the deposits, never forwarding the rest to the businessmen.

There's only one problem. You see, the people who were dealing with the businessmen had some problems with them, and so they ended up finding the person who had the bank account.

Oh, did I forget to mention that the businessmen were from Nigeria?

A BRISBANE woman fleeced Nigerian scam artists by stealing more than $30,000 from their internet car sales racket, a court has been told.

Sarah Jane Cochrane-Ramsey, 23, was employed by the Nigerians as an "agent" in March 2010 but was unaware they were scam artists....

Now some believe that Cochrane-Ramsey should be complimented for what she did. Instead, she ended up pleading guilty and will be sentenced soon.

Despite the fact that Cochrane-Ramsey was defrauding dishonest people, that doesn't remove the fact that she was dishonest herself. And let's face it - how many people would open an Australian bank account and forward 92% of the proceeds, no questions asked?

I'm sorry, but Sarah Jane Cochrane-Ramsey is not a hero.

tymshft - time, business, and everything else

A few days ago I was kinda cryptic:

I had a wonderful post that I wrote, and was preparing to post in the Empoprise-BI business blog on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 5:00 am Pacific time.

But I changed my mind, and will be posting it somewhere else at 7:00 am Pacific time.

More later.

So what did I do? I posted the item (Tech age discrimination, or something else? Reverse trends in the US and Japan) on my new blog, tymshft.

You see, while I've been posting a lot of "empo-tymshft" stuff here in my business blog, I found that I've been posting it in some of my other blogs also. So I finally set up a single blog for all of my time-related posts, regardless of whether they're business-related, music-related, or whatever.

So what is tymshft? This is what I said:

[P]eople talk about new things and assume that they are new. Take the cloud. For some people, it’s a wondrous new thing, this ability to store data in the cloud and access it from anywhere. Some misguided souls probably even think that Steve Jobs invented the cloud. But some of the features of the cloud were present decades ago, in old time-sharing systems. iCloud is a CompuServe that begins with a vowel....

At the same time, there are things that have changed significantly over the years. For example, I remember when a “phone” was something that was attached to the wall, and came from “the phone company.”

If you're interested in such ruminations on time, and how things change or don't change over time, I strongly encourage you to go to tymshft.

If you're on Google+, be sure to include https://plus.google.com/b/110538760339914860505/# in your favorite circle.

If you're on Facebook, be sure to go to the https://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Tymshft/390937200923679?sk=wall page.

And I look forward to your comments and contributions.

A non-sexy, and profitable, I.P.O.

Normally when we think about initial public offerings (I.P.O.s), we think about newer firms that are engaging in new technologies - Facebook being a wonderful example.

But you can have an I.P.O. for something as boring as real estate.

Through the offering, shareholders will be able to own a piece of 12 office buildings in New York and Connecticut that together comprise 7.7 million square feet of rentable office space.

But the crown jewel of the portfolio is clearly the 102-story Empire State Building.

Yup, the Empire State Building, which has been around for almost a century. And unless you're a giant ape, you can purchase a piece of the building.

And what's more, this business actually makes money:

The company disclosed in its prospectus that the skyscraper generated $156.7 million in revenue for the nine months ended Sept. 30. Overall, Empire State Realty earned $71 million in net income on a pro forma basis for the first nine months of 2011 on revenue of $382.2 million.

Granted, it's not trendy - but making actual money usually isn't.

Believe it or not, February 22nd edition

I learned two interesting things on the Internet today.

BJ Lownie shared a surprising observation in The Proposal Guys blog. Lownie is a leading proposal consultant, and thus is a trusted authority.

...I was quite surprised when I recently learned that a term I’ve always thought to be a proper English word in fact is not....

To see the word in question, read the post.

(But why did BJ entitle the post "Defining words"?)

The other interesting item was shared by Lewis Cunningham. As an Oracle ACE Director, he is clearly an authority on programming and coding.

I have been coding for a long time and have pretty much seen it all. Today I present 9 tips for becoming a master programmer. If you follow these tips, people will stare at you as you walk by. They will talk about you around water coolers. Your code will be used as an example in code reviews. Of this I promise!

Be sure to read each of his 9 tips.

(But why does this helpful post have a "humor" tag?)

Oh, and be sure to read through all the comments on Lownie's and Cunningham's posts.

Women in the boardroom

Recently, Sheila Scarborough of Tourism Currents shared a TechCrunch post with her Facebook friends. The post, written by Aileen Lee, was entitled "Why Your Next Board Member Should Be A Woman." According to Lee:

While women comprise 51% of the population, they make up only 15.7% of Fortune 500 boards of directors, less than 10% of California tech company boards, and 9.1% of Silicon Valley boards.

Inasmuch as I work for a subsidiary of a French company, I was curious about the situation in Europe. According to the European Professional Women's Network, the percentage is similarly low:

Women make up 11.7% of boards at the top 3001 European companies up from 9.7% in 2008 and 8.5% in 2006, the best progress since first BoardMonitor. Of a total 4,875 board seats, women occupy 571. As a result of quota legislation2 Norway remains at the top of the table in having 37.9% women on boards. Portugal, Italy, Greece, Spain, Belgium and France have more than doubled the number of women on boards; the introduction of Corporate Governance Codes together with equal access legislations currently under discussion in a few countries is having a significant impact, as well as increased shareholder and media scrutiny of board membership.

But what happened in Norway? The Glass Hammer looked at the results, and then analyzed them:

Dittmar and her colleague Kenneth Ahern studied what happened after Norway required public-limited firms to have at least 40% of board seats filled by women in 2003. Voluntary compliance in the country failed, so the law made it compulsory in 2006, with a two year transition period. “Boards are chosen in order to increase shareholder wealth,” says Dittmar. “Placing restrictions on the composition of a board will reduce value.”

Dittmar and Ahern’s study found that when a board had a 10% increase in the number of women, the value of the company dropped. The bigger the change to the structure of the board, the bigger the fall in returns.

Why? One possibility was that the women recruited pre-quota were more experienced than the women who were recruited post-quota.

When firms were free to choose directors before the rule, they tended to choose women that were similar to men directors. This is consistent with the idea that the large demand and small supply for women directors after the adoption of the 40-percent quota forced firms to choose directors that they would not have chosen otherwise.

This, of course, assumes that companies are choosing qualified people for their boards of directors. Remember Michael Eisner?

Eisner is the prototypical candidate for CEO disease. He is notorious for filling Disney's board of directors with cronies and others who would be unlikely to be very critical of his decision-making and performance.

The Economist recently provided examples:

Back then, Disney’s board might easily have been mistaken for a pair of Snow White’s dwarf pals (specifically, Sleepy and Dopey). At one point, its directors included an architect friend of Mr Eisner and a local schoolteacher. This made it a target of shareholder activists who, after a series of corporate scandals at other firms with insufficiently accountable bosses, campaigned for big changes in how all American firms were governed.

Eisner defended his choices in 1997:

"I would not suggest this board for a U.S. Steel, but if you are building theme parks, creating Broadway shows, and educating children, wouldn't you want a priest, a teacher, an architect, and an actor on your board?"

No, because this sounds like a cast of characters that you'd see walking into a bar, and Disneyland doesn't serve alcohol.

As for the schoolteacher, Reveta Bowers, she doesn't even list her tenure on Disney's board on her LinkedIn public profile. It does not appear that any other Fortune 500 company has been demanding that she serve on THEIR board.

Obviously there have been qualified women on company Boards of Directors, and the TechCrunch post suggests that there are others who are equally qualified to serve. The less-than-qualified women (and men) can turn up in any era, quotas or no.

If your friend joined a LinkedIn group, would you join it too?

Because of the primitive nature of our social tools, many social services assume that just because your friends like something, you'd like it too.

Take LinkedIn. I recently received an email from them which included the following statement:

Joining a LinkedIn group makes it easy to stay up-to-date with classmates, colleagues, and other professionals.

Here are some groups your connections have joined.

LinkedIn them listed four groups, recommending that I join them.

As it turns out, one of the groups - "Biometrics - Fingerprint" - is one that would interest me. But the other three suggestions (75% of all suggestions, if you want me to drop stats) are failures.

One of the suggested groups is the "3M Cogent Networking Group." This actually sounds like an interesting group, but I know that they wouldn't have me as a member. You see, I work for a competitor of 3M Cogent, and while some of my LinkedIn connections work for 3M Cogent, I don't think they'd necessarily want me joining their company group.

As for the other two suggestions, "Alpha Epsilon Pi Alumni" and "Kadena High School Alumni," those are complete failures. Perhaps one or more of my LinkedIn connections have joined these groups - I'm not sure who - but inasmuch as I have never been a member of any fraternity (or sorority), and my high school was Wakefield High School, it would be inappropriate for me to join either group.

At least LinkedIn gets points for trying.

Now let's see if it asks me to join an NEC networking group (NEC is another competitor of my employer), or perhaps even a sorority.

A change to ESRI educational site licenses

Pricing is a balancing act. You want to price your goods as high as possible to get as much money as possible, but you don't want to price them too high or else people will seek alternatives. And you want to offer different prices to different people when possible - for example, you want to offer low prices to new customers, get them hooked, and then have them pay higher prices later on.

In some businesses, this means that you offer lower prices to the educational market. Back in the 1980s, Apple Computer was well-known for this. The idea was that college kids would buy Macintoshes at a discounted price, and then after they graduated they'd pay the full price for later models.

Presumably this is the tactic that ESRI is using in its modifications to its Educational Site License program.

This year, Esri is rolling out a number of significant, free upgrades to its popular Educational Site License Program. The additional software applications and data enhance an already comprehensive GIS suite and provide new solutions for educators who wish to share the power of spatial thinking across their curricula.

Already added to the site license program this year are the mapping and charting solutions that improve cartographic production including Esri Nautical Solution, Esri Aeronautical Solution, Esri Defense Solution, and Esri Production Mapping. Also added are the ArcGIS Data Interoperability extension, which facilitates data sharing, and Esri Community Analyst, a web-based solution for planning and policy analysis (U.S. only).

Future additions will include subscriptions to ArcGIS Online, a cloud-based system for creating and sharing geospatial content; new workflow-oriented Virtual Campus courses; Esri CityEngine, used for advanced 3D modeling and urban planning; and Esri demographic and Tapestry data for the United States.

Another benefit is that the schools will be turning out ESRI-trained students who can then be hired by companies that use ESRI software.

(empo-tymshft) A change in plan

I had a wonderful post that I wrote, and was preparing to post in the Empoprise-BI business blog on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 5:00 am Pacific time.

But I changed my mind, and will be posting it somewhere else at 7:00 am Pacific time.

More later.

(empo-tuulwey) Chris Brogan, "Never Fall In Love With the Medium"

If you've read my previous "empo-tuulwey" posts, then you've probably run across my saying: "A tool is not a way of life."

Chris Brogan puts it another way: Never Fall In Love With the Medium. Excerpt:

We seek to connect with people. We want to reach them for whatever our goal might be. It’s our effort to connect with them in a meaningful way that benefits our mutual needs that should be the goal. It’s never about the delivery mechanism.

Read the rest here.

And while you're at it, read Jesse Stay's My Official (and Obligatory) "Traditional Blogging is Dead" Post - and be sure to read his conclusions.

You might say that these posts were...um...timely. (More later.)

2.4 cents for your thoughts, even if they aren't worth a wooden 11.2 cents

The Obama Administration wants to save money.

Literally.

As part of its budget, the administration has asked for flexibility in the metals that are used to create coins. As Outside the Beltway noted, the administration has stated that it currently costs 2.4 cents to make a penny, and 11.2 cents to make a nickel.

However, one question - which was also raised when Canada was considering a similar measure - is to consider the costs required to redo the American vending machines so that they will support the new coins.

The Buyer's Lament

Several years ago, Jill Konrath wrote a poem that begins like this:

Don't waste my time, please go away.
I will not talk with you today.
You call me up, you want to sell.
But all you do is tell, tell, tell.

Read the rest - including Konrath's suggestions of how to engage customers - here.

(H/T Sales & Marketing Management.)

Still more evidence against the Illuminati conspiracy - Google fights Google

I have long maintained that we don't need to worry about the FBI, the CIA, the BBC, B.B. King, Doris Day, Matt Busby, and everyone else entering all of your personal information into a secret Freemason-controlled computer in Brussels. The truth is that organizations don't want to cooperate with each other, because people in the FBI think that people in the CIA are bozos, and vice versa.

In fact, people in the FBI think that people in the other departments in the FBI are bozos.

Consider Google. If you believe some people, everyone in Google is intent on world domination, and they are all working together to expose all your data and enslave you.

Incidentally, if any of the text in the preceding three paragraphs seems familiar, it's because I copied it all verbatim from a post that I wrote on January 4, More evidence against the Illuminati conspiracy - Google punishes Google. My January 4 post described how Google reduced the PageRank value of its own Google Chrome home page. Then it descended into wild conspiracy theories (yes, Dick Cheney's old bunker was mentioned).

Which brings us to Apple. I haven't really had any observations about the latest tempest in a teapot, in which Google was bypassing the security settings of Apple's Safari browser. But then something in CNET caught my eye. (H/T Shawn Rossi.)

While one Google team was taking advantage of a little-known backdoor that could change the default Safari setting, the Google Chrome team was working to get Apple to close the backdoor--apparently with neither team having knowledge of the other's actions. Engineers for Chrome notified Apple about seven months ago that the loophole was there, although it remains open.

Yes, at the same time the Google Chrome team was being evil by using questionable methods to increase its PageRank, that same Google Chrome team was not being evil by warning Apple about the backdoor in Safari.

Not only is Google being inconsistent in its "don't be evil" policy, individual Google units are being inconsistent - sometimes being evil, sometimes not being evil.

Oh well. Even Darth Vader demonstrated a lack of consistency. Hmmm...what exactly DID Cheney do after Gerald Ford lost his re-election bid? Was he writing a screenplay?