This makes no sense to me - from IHT: "As the American tax law gets more and more complicated, lawyers have come up with one more way to make life difficult for taxpayers: Now you may face a patent infringement suit if you use a tax strategy that someone else thought of first.
Best Movie Recommendation of the Month
Pirates of Silicon Valley, 1999 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/
Ridiculous acting, horrible production values, probably 50% untrue and over-dramatized, but still remarkable story about how two "young people" built colossal competitors in the course of a decade. Only in America.
Also:
1. a reminder of how intertwined Apple and Microsoft have been over the years
2. Gates and Jobs are both, um, forceful personalities
Thank you Larry L. for this one.
Global Guerillas
It is rare that I find a whole blog worth recommending, but Global Guerillas is one. The author has a conceptual framework of what the future of warfare and security will be and, while no framework is complete, it seems to have some explanatory power. In particular:
- He believes we are entering a generation of “open-source†distributed insurgencies that can a) cause asymmetrical damage and b) prevent failed or weak states from ever getting on their feet (Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon) through systems disruption. The insurgencies are enabled by better information and communication tools.
- Due to #1 above, believes that events in the Middle East, that to some degree we have set in motion, might evolve in highly unpredictable directions
- Thinks security in the West into evolve into differentiated levels for rich, middle-class and poor, and ultimately go to an open-source, distributed model as well – as opposed to a centralized Federal model
His bio is impressive:
John Robb was a mission commander for a “black†counterterrorism unit that worked with Delta Force and Seal Team 6 before becoming the first Internet analyst at Forrester Research and a key architect in the rise of Web logs and RSS. He is writing a book on the logic of terrorism.
Note: At this stage he is writing for an audience that understands his concepts so you probably have to invest some time reading back into the blog before it starts to make a lot of sense. Over the next few weeks, I will pull out some of his greatest hits.
Set The People Free...
Many of you know that I am an obsessive reader and, if you are a good friend, you have had the questionable benefit of a steady barrage of emails about business, international politics, robots, the towering achievements of Greek and Cypriot sports and a lot more burdening your inbox. Today is your day of liberation. My comments, article links, etc will be posted here instead. It seems like the best of all worlds - I can blather away to my heart's content and you can be here if you want to or not.
If you are particularly inspired, please subscribe and post a comment. Feel free to pass the link on to anyone, but at the end of the day, I think we are talking about a pretty, umm, exclusive audience around here...
If you do even a modest amount of reading online, I recommend you look at http://www.netvibes.com as an excellent way to organize your reading.
Netvibes is an aggregator of RSS feeds. Almost every major publication now publishes RSS feeds and Netvibes gives you a very easy way to organize and read any RSS feed in the world, including the ones they preloaded and feeds that you find on your own.
I now can scan several dozen feeds daily, from major publications to obscure blogs, and it takes me no more than 10% to 20% of the time that it took me before. There are other tools (Google Reader, client applications) that do the same thing but I like Netvibes because it is not client-based (so I can see my news from any browser) and I found it before I found Google Reader, so I got stuck.
The RSS feed for this blog is: http://www.polemitis.com/?feed=rss2 and it can be found at the bottom of this page