systems

There are countless news articles and studies that reiterate the point that electric vehicles “have fewer moving parts” or are “less complex” and therefore pose a threat to autoworkers’ jobs. Many cite a 2017 Ford…

All of which invites the question: Why do these rail barons hate paid leave so much? Why would a company have no problem handing out 24 percent raises, $1,000 bonuses, and caps on health-care premiums but draw the line…

One of the current challenges in the field of Journalism is that there are currently 6 PR staff for every 1 Journalist , and the PR staff are much higher paid. Which means that a lot of reporting on more technical areas…

Interesting video by the Author of "[Learning by Doing: The Real Connection between Innovation, Wages, and Wealth](http://amzn.to/2ocnDIX)", which largely comes down to "it's complicated". Sometimes automation replaces…

WASHINGTON, DC—For years, the government and security experts have warned of the looming threat of "cyberwar" against critical infrastructure in the US and elsewhere. Predictions of cyber attacks wreaking havoc…

With all the talk about autonomous cars in general media this year, we all got a refresher in Ethics 101 and the Trolley Problem. The Trolley Problem is where you as an onlooker see a trolley barreling towards 5 people.…

I'm becoming increasingly frustrated about the reporting around Apple vs. the FBI , which is largely this narrative: FBI: "You have to fly" Apple: "Flying is something we've never done before, and doesn't…

Everyone from Chipotle to the Food Babe rails against genetically modified ingredients, and laws to label GMO foods are making progress in some states. But the laser focus on GMOs is misguided, because most of the…

Several former Home Depot employees said they were not surprised the company had been hacked. They said that over the years, when they sought new software and training, managers came back with the same response: “We sell…

The Wright brothers’ critical insight was the importance of “lateral stability” — that is, wingtip-to-wingtip stability — to flight. And their great innovation was something they called “wing warping,” in which they used…

Chalk one up for the enemies of patent trolls: The Supreme Court on Monday threw out a request for trial from alleged patent troll Soverain Software. The case, called Soverain Software LLC. v. Newegg Inc., is one of…

The National Security Agency’s sophisticated hacking operations go way beyond using software vulnerabilities to gain access to targeted systems. The agency has a catalog of tools available that would make James Bond’s Q…

If you haven't been following along: Planet Money has been making a t-shirt, and working to follow it's creation throughout the global supply chain. This has led to a ton of podcast episodes that trace that path, cradle…

A pretty compelling read in the NY Times Magazine about the efforts to save the Subway system during Sandy last year . The thing I found most interesting was the institutional memory of the system, and how critical that…

From Rafe Colburn's post on Seven signs of dysfunctional engineering teams : Preference for process over tools. As engineering teams grow, there are many approaches to coordinating people’s work. Most of them are some…

There are a couple of reasons why the bubble is sure to burst. The first is just that it’s a bubble, and any chart which looks like the one at the top of this post is bound to end in tears at some point. But there’s a…

Interesting new paper on the cost of Patent Trolls in the US. In the past, “non-practicing entities” (NPEs), popularly known as “patent trolls,” have helped small inventors profit from their inventions. Is this true…

Via Mike Daisey's blog I was led to the following bit by the Economist : Anyway, that's one angle: sweatshops are awful, but working a tiny rice farm is clearly worse, judging by the workers' own preferences. However,…

From This American Life's latest show : In early July, the bankrupt tech company Nortel put its 6,000 patents up for auction as part of a liquidation. A bidding war broke out among Silicon Valley powerhouses. Google said…

Being mad at Netflix for raising their prices back to roughly what they were 4 years ago is now pushing Google+ out of the meme-cycle. At one level, this is really pretty silly. $16 / month is cheaper than any cable…

I knew that Airline pricing was pretty crazy, but I didn't realize it was this crazy: Passengers flying to or from airports that are dominated by a single carrier — like Memphis, Newark or Dallas/Fort Worth — pay fares…

There was a really great piece this week on the freight train that is Android : So here is the kicker. Android, as well as Chrome and Chrome OS for that matter, are not “products” in the classic business sense. They have…

Over at Communication Nation : It’s time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring…

When I went to Japan many years ago, I marveled at the complexity of the Tokyo JR system. There is separate pricing between every two stations, so when you get into the system you may need a different ticket amount to…

This was a lot of places, but here is the Ars story : Viacom joins Fox, ABC, CBS, and NBC in blocking Google TV for fear that users might choose to stream those shows over the Internet on-demand instead of watching them…

I think Seth Godin gets to the heart of things around the TSA and the new scanners : Smart marketers know how to pivot. I think it's time to do that. Start marketing the idea that flying is safe, like driving, but it's…

I'm anti TSA back scatter scanner, but it's not because of the radiation, which is actually quite small. Coming in at a measure of 0.005 mrem , it's about 1/2 of what you get by eating a banana . If you live in a brick…

"We didn't go with them because they didn't support Ubuntu" is something that I wouldn't have expected listening to a cloud service creator talk about selecting cloud vendors. That is exactly what I heard when…

I loved when I found this on Wikipedia on the Waterfall Process for Software Development : The first formal description of the waterfall model is often cited as a 1970 article by Winston W. Royce , [1] though Royce did…

Lemley gives example after example of this trend. Broadcasters opposed those rogue cable operators when they first appeared; now they demand carriage. The VCR, opposed as a "Boston strangler" of the movie…

Via reddit : If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold. posted by blue_beetle It nicely goes to the heart of a lot of web 2.0 economics, including facebook, twitter, google,…

"Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution." -- Clay Shirky This was dubbed the Shirky Principle by Kevin Kelly . The blog post describing it is well worth checking out. This…

"Would you like to play a game?" It looks like the software patent cold war that we were in is over, and we're now moving into a software patent hot war. Ars Technica has a piece on Paul Allen's IP holding…

Oracle was the opening keynote for Linuxcon this year, where they talked about how much they did for Linux and open source. The moment everyone had checked out of their hotel in Boston, they filed a massive patent suit…

Music labels and radio broadcasters can't agree on much, including whether radio should be forced to turn over hundreds of millions of dollars a year to pay for the music it plays . But the two sides can agree on this:…

There is one main reason people in the open source community get so violent over Mono (the open source .NET implementation): the fear that Microsoft could shut everything. There is long standing fear that MS has patents…

This is just brilliant. Click on it to get the full sized version. Originally from flickr .

Via reddit, I came across this truly amazing article in Wired Magazine (from 2008) on the story of trying to save the Cougar Ace . It's a truly amazing story, something that reads like the best disaster films you've ever…

What does an industry with almost no intellectual property protection look like? It looks like fashion, and [this TED video](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zL2FOrx41N0) gives you a lot to think about when it comes to IP…

Ars Technical has a great write up of some of the uncertainty of the 4th amendment (protection against unreasonable search and seizure) when it comes to your data in the cloud. The first test case for the Supreme Court…

Via Bruce Schneier : Air marshals are being arrested faster than air marshals are making arrests. Actually, there have been many more arrests of Federal air marshals than that story reported, quite a few for felony…

From the youtube blog : For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to…

I first heard of Conway's Law last week: Conway's Law is an adage named after computer programmer Melvin Conway , who introduced the idea in 1968: ...organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce…

There is a news story out there today about insurgents in Afganistan being able to use $26 worth of equipment to capture and record predator drone video reconnaissance. At first I was pretty aghast by the following: The…

I really enjoyed Freakonomics, as it provided a much more interesting look at the world. But I'm quite sad that Dubner posted this Chewbacca argument on local foods. Some how, the fact that he can't make sherbert…