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Venezuela Inc.’s Hostile Takeover
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President Hugo Chávez of Venezuela — the very portrait of a modern Latin American strongman — is not content to exercise near-total political and military control of his country. Now he is tightening his grip on the Venezuelan economy. That’s bad news for foreign investors, but even more so for the Venezuelan people who will have to pay the price for an economy plagued by increasing inefficiency and corruption.
Mr. Chávez announced this week that he would nationalize electricity and telecommunications companies. Venezuela’s biggest telecommunications company is partly owned by Verizon Communications. Its largest publicly traded electricity company is controlled by another American company, the AES Corporation. Mr. Chávez also declared his intention to take control of four multibillion- dollar oil projects with significant investments from foreign companies.
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Mr. Chávez’s latest moves serve as yet another reminder of why America needs to curb its insatiable appetite for oil. The United States is the biggest buyer of Venezuelan petroleum products. If a powerful Hugo Chávez is against U.S. interests, we should stop paying for his Russian fighter jets and helicopters — and his nationalizations — with our gas-guzzling cars and trucks.
Taking the Vietnam out of Iraq
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President Bush’s new plan for Iraq - expected to include reinforcements of 20,000 US troops and to be announced on Wednesday night - has echoes of Vietnam in the belief that another push will get the job done.
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History does not repeat itself exactly, so what happened in Vietnam might not happen in Iraq, but there are parallels that are interesting to note
* First there is the realisation in Washington that it is not winning. Mr Bush has admitted this himself
* Second, there is a policy of trying to hand over responsibility to the local government in the midst of battle, not after it - this happened in Vietnam with the policy of Vietnamisation
* Third, there is the belief by the US administration that more troops are an important part of the answer
* Fourth, there is an opposite belief by others that the enterprise cannot work and that disengagement must be sought - US public doubt is a theme common to both conflicts
* Fifth, in Vietnam too the president consulted an outside group - they were called the Wise Men and, like the Iraq Study group, they too urged a policy designed to lead to withdrawal
Wiki ordered to remove link to drug documents
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A wiki about a controversial prescription drug has been ordered by a US court to remove a link to documents which originated with Eli Lilly, the drug’s manufacturer.
The drug, Zyprexa, has been the subject of payouts by Eli Lilly in cases over its alleged side effects. The pharmaceutical company still faces a large number of product liability lawsuits which claim that the schizophrenia and bipolar disorder treatment has caused patients to gain weight or to contract diabetes. Eli Lilly has already paid out $1.2bn to settle suits before they reached court, including $500m just last week.
A wiki about the controversy, zyprexa.pbwiki.com, published a link to internal Eli Lilly documents which the New York Times said showed that the company deliberately downplayed the side effects of the drug, which are alleged to include weight gain, high blood sugar levels and diabetes.
The judge in one of the product liability cases, federal district Judge Jack Weinstein, ordered the site and a number of named individuals to refrain from distributing the documents or causing them to be distributed.
Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) defended the free speech rights of one anonymous poster in front of Weinstein but the judge has reiterated his earlier decision. He will hear further arguments on 16th January.
The iPhone
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Then Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head of design, the man who shaped the iMac and the iPod, squashed the case to less than half an inch thick, and widened it to what looks like a bar of expensive chocolate wrapped in aluminum and stainless steel. The iPhone is a typical piece of Ive design: an austere, abstract, platonic-looking form that somehow also manages to feel warm and organic and ergonomic. Unlike my phone. He picks it up and points out four little nubbins on the back. “Your phone’s got feet on,” he says, not unkindly. “Why would anybody put feet on a phone?” Ive has the answer, of course: “It raises the speaker on the back off the table. But the right solution is to put the speaker in the right place in the first place. That’s why our speaker isn’t on the bottom, so you can have it on the table, and you don’t need feet.” Sure enough, no feet toe the iPhone’s smooth lines.
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It sweats the cosmetic details that don’t seem very important until you really sweat them. “I actually have a photographer’s loupe that I use to look to make sure every pixel is right,” says Scott Forstall, Apple’s vice-president of Platform Experience (whatever that is). “We will argue over literally a single pixel.”
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It’s not quite right to call the iPhone revolutionary. It won’t create a new market, or change the entertainment industry, the way the iPod did. When you get right down to it, the device doesn’t even have that many new features—it’s not like Jobs invented voicemail, or text messaging, or conference calling, or mobile Web browsing. He just noticed that they were broken, and he fixed them.
But that’s important. When our tools don’t work, we tend to blame ourselves, for being too stupid or not reading the manual or having too-fat fingers. “I think there’s almost a belligerence—people are frustrated with their manufactured environment,” says Ive. “We tend to assume the problem is with us, and not with the products we’re trying to use.”
An Apple phone? Palm CEO says, `What, me worry?’
Less than 2 months ago:
Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
Guess what, they just walked in.
He, Once a She, Offers Own View On Science Spat
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Ben Barres had just finished giving a seminar at the prestigious Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research 10 years ago, describing to scientists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and other top institutions his discoveries about nerve cells called glia. As the applause died down, a friend later told him, one scientist turned to another and remarked what a great seminar it had been, adding, “Ben Barres’s work is much better than his sister’s.”
There was only one problem. Prof. Barres, then as now a professor of neurobiology at Stanford University, doesn’t have a sister in science. The Barbara Barres the man remembered was Ben.
Prof. Barres is transgendered, having completed the treatments that made him fully male 10 years ago. The Whitehead talk was his first as a man, so the research he was presenting was done as Barbara.
Being first a female scientist and then a male scientist has given Prof. Barres a unique perspective on the debate over why women are so rare at the highest levels of academic science and math: He has experienced personally how each is treated by colleagues, mentors and rivals.
Apple iPhone at the Microsoft CES stand
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Where better to check out the news of the newly announced Apple iPhone than at the Microsoft stand at CES!
Sony did NOT win an award for SIXAXIS
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Wait, what? But everyone said they did! Yes, everyone said they did because apparently Sony told them all they did. But they didn’t. Confused? Gather around ladies and gentlemen … this is a hell of a story. Probably the best publicity Sony’s gotten yet.
Seamus Byrne of Hydrapinion decided to do a looking into the matter. The SIXAXIS won an award but the Wiimote didn’t? Something seemed fishy. After managing to get in touch with the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, this is what he found out:
A follow up message from Christine Chin from NATAS tells us Sony has it all wrong. The award was for the original dual shock controller. Here is her message in full:
I understand you had contacted Cheryl Daly, Director of Communications at NATAS to confirm if Sony won for their PS3 controller. This is incorrect, Sony won for their dual shock analog controller. The award is from the Video Game Technology Group. It was nominated by our internal group and considered along with the Nintendo D-Pad both of which were considered Emmy worthy for the development of the generation of controllers that followed the classic joysticks.
I would like to confirm that Sony did not win for their PS3 controller, they won for their Dual Shock Analog controller.
So there you have it. This makes a lot more sense, and Sony’s press release was flat out incorrect. Best case, an error. Worst case…
Chrstine also said she will clarify this with Sony.
Keynotes
First, watch this. If you’re still awake after that, watch this. Tell me about the difference…
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Tony Snow: Democrats Can Cut Off Funds, But Can’t Stop President’s ‘Surge’
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Q Do the Democrats or any of the opponents have the executive authority to stop anything that the President is going to present? In other words, is he going to need to ask Congress to approve something?
MR. SNOW: Well, ultimately, anything you do has budgetary implications. I think there was a question earlier today, are we seeking resolutions, and that sort of thing — and I want to wave you off of that. What you do have, though, is basically budget is policy. So Congress is going to be engaged in the appropriations and authorization process and, you know, through those, they’re going to be debating a lot of things. And so that’s sort of par for the course.
Q But in terms of anything out of the Pentagon — the troops, deployment, any of the programs we initiate - the President, alone, has the authority to –
MR. SNOW: You know what, I don’t want to play junior constitutional lawyer on this, so let’s wait until we see what happens, if you have specific questions about constitutional authority. But, you know, Congress has the power of the purse. The President has the ability to exercise his own authority if he thinks Congress has voted the wrong way.
The president can veto laws he thinks Congress voted the wrong way on. But if they override his veto, it is not within his authority to ignore that law. This is so fundamental that it’s unbelievable that it has to be spelled out. If Nixon felt Congress would have voted the wrong way on impeachment, could he just stay in office? Even he wasn’t brazen enough to make this claim.
And in other news…
Just announced, Microsoft confirms the Plume. It’s a phone that’s 3 ½ inches thick, runs the full- blown windows vista, plays the new we-promise-it-will-always-play DRM’d music and has 9600 baud dial up modem, and has the ability to take and print pictures with optional ink and paper tray attachment. Welcome to the social, now where is everyone.
iPhone
Next introduction will be the iPhone shuffle — just hit a button and it calls one of your friends at random!
8.31%
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Hehe, I’m guessing that Mr. Colligan hasn’t seen the iPhone. Steve and Apple has made a phone that is as easy to use as an iPod. *ALL* other phone venders should be really worried.
Note the date on the article
Opps, sorry, missed that.