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This remarkably brazen assault on core American workplace values originated at Booz & Co., one of the nation’s most prestigious corporate consulting firms. America’s corporations, Booz analysts advised earlier this year, need to start attacking the "exorbitant" paychecks now going to their most prized, "steady and reliable" veteran workers.

The Booz analysts offer an example of the "significantly overpaid" worker they have in mind. They call him Joe the Machinist, "a stellar employee who knows the ins and outs of the organization, the result of his many years on the job."

Joe’s "wealth of institutional knowledge" has become a valued corporate asset. But Joe, after over two decades on the job, is making a lot more than he used to make, especially "compared with co-workers who have been doing the same job for just two years."

Corporate America, the Booz & Co. advice continues, now needs to "address these kinds of wage disparities." Companies need to start "retooling labor costs" to narrow "the gap between high wages and market value."

[..]

CEOs at companies with over $10 billion in annual revenue, The Wall Street Journal reported back in 2008, make twice as much in the United States as they do in Europe — and nine times more in the United States than they do in Japan.

Corporate America, in other words, needs some serious “labor cost retooling” at the top — before gutting pay for its most experienced and skilled workers at the bottom.

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Jobs: What I do all day is meet with teams of people and work on ideas and solve problems to make new products, to make new marketing programs, whatever it is. 

Mossberg: And are people willing to tell you you’re wrong? 

Jobs: (laughs) Yeah.

Mossberg: I mean, other than snarky journalists, I mean people that work for…

Jobs: Oh, yeah, no we have wonderful arguments.

Mossberg: And do you win them all? 

Jobs: Oh no I wish I did. No, you see you can’t. If you want to hire great people and have them stay working for you, you have to let them make a lot of decisions and you have to, you have to be run by ideas, not hierarchy. The best ideas have to win, otherwise good people don’t stay. 

Mossberg: But you must be more than a facilitator who runs meetings. You obviously contribute your own ideas. 

Jobs: I contribute ideas, sure. Why would I be there if I didn’t? 

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The Central Intelligence Agency has demanded a publisher make extensive cuts to a book critical of its performance before and after the September 11 attacks, officials said Friday.

“The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda,” a memoir by former FBI agent Ali Soufan due out next month, recounts his experiences at the heart of high-profile terror investigations.

Soufan has accused the CIA of insisting on scores of redactions he says are not justified on security grounds but are aimed at undermining an account that reflects badly on the agency, the New York Times reported.

A spokesman for the CIA rejected the accusation and said the changes were meant to safeguard national security.

“The suggestion that the Central Intelligence Agency has requested redactions on this publication because it doesn’t like the content is ridiculous,” CIA spokesman Preston Golson said in an email.

CIA says ridiculous, so it must be true then.

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Over the last two weeks, two interesting copyright-related stories have appeared in online news reports. Both involve big media companies and small users, but not in the way we usually expect. In both instances, the large media companies “pirated” content instead of the users, and they seem to get away with it. This begs the question; is copyright only for the Big Guys?

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The Vancouver Canucks Fan Zone along Georgia St. for Game 7 of the 2011 Stanley Cup Final was captured at 5:46 pm on June 15, 2011. It is made up of 216 photos (12 across by 18 down) stitched together, taken over a 15-minute span, and is not supposed to represent a single moment in time. The final hi-res file is 69,394 X 30,420 pixels or 2,110 megapixels. Special thanks to Bonita Howard and CBC Real Estate.

Zoom in – there’s enough detail to do face recognition on everybody. The site has a facebook-based tagging system – lots of people are already identified.

So, next time you’re going to riot, make sure you do major plastic surgery afterwards…

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It’s not a real American disaster until some drunk idiot pranks a live TV news shot.

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It was the greatest comeback since Lazarus. Because only an obsessive, authoritarian, visionary genius could have achieved such a transformation, it’s easy to see why Wall Street has had difficulty imagining Apple without Jobs. He was, after all, the only CEO in the world with rock star status. And Apple is a corporate extension of his remarkable personality, much as Microsoft was of Bill Gates’s. But Jobs has something Gates never had – a reputation so powerful as to create a reality distortion field around him.

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Students don’t need more classes in how to use Microsoft Word or how to search on Google – they can figure that stuff out for themselves. What’s important is that every student with an interest in technology should be encouraged to study the science, the mathematics, the engineering that lies behind it.

[..]

We also have look at the wider picture; the legal and regulatory framework that people grow up in. The moment a young person begins to explore the creative opportunities that technology gives them, they find out that the most basic of mashups, remixes or samples are illegal and could get them ridiculous fines.

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Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann said Friday she wouldn’t rule out changes to the federal minimum wage as a way to lower the cost of doing business and lure corporations back to the United States.

Couldn’t costs be reduced by allowing businesses to own their workers?

That led to great expansion of the Cotton industry in the 1830s and a surge in employment on plantations.

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Remember last week when BP was like, “Oil leaking in the Gulf? What oil? Oh, that. We didn’t do it.”? Well, apparently the new leak off the coast of Louisiana really does belong to BP, and appears to be coming from the same well that unleashed 4.9 million barrels of crude on the Gulf last year.

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An international team of astronomers, led by Australia’s Swinburne University of Technology professor Matthew Bailes, has discovered a planet made of diamond crystals, in our own Milky Way galaxy.

The planet is relatively small at around 60,000 km in diameter (still, it’s five times the size of Earth). But despite its diminutive stature, this crystal space rock has more mass than the solar system’s gas giant Jupiter.

Radio telescope data shows that it orbits its star at a distance of 600,000 km, making years on planet diamond just two hours long. Any closer and it would be ripped to shreds by the star’s gravitational tug. Putting together its immense mass and close orbit, researchers can reveal the planet’s unique makeup.

It’s “likely to be largely carbon and oxygen,” said Michael Keith, one of the research team members, in a press release. Lighter elements, “like hydrogen and helium would be too big to fit the measured orbiting times”. The object’s density means that the material is certain to be crystalline, meaning a large part of the planet may be similar to a diamond.

Diamonds?  Lets bomb it and bring democracy over there.

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“If it hadn’t been for you guys, I might not be here…” On November 14, 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges walked by a mob surrounding William Frantz Elementary School in New Orleans, becoming the first African-American child to integrate a white elementary school in the South.

Her walk that morning was commemorated by Norman Rockwell, in his painting The Problem We All Live With, which was published on the cover of Look magazine on January 14, 1964. Fifty years later, Ruby Bridges got a chance to visit the building where the painting now hangs and met with the guy who has the office next door.

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During Jon Stewart’s and Stephen Colbert’s tenure spoofing news and politics from Comedy Central (for 12 and six years, respectively), they’ve evolved into two of the most truthful, if sarcastic, journalists on television. But in recent months, they’ve graduated from their media posts and started doing what we want our lawmakers to do—speak honestly, directly and straightforwardly about the most important issues of the day without any vested (or monetary) interests.

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A federal judge’s decision requiring the government to get a court warrant before obtaining mobile-phone location data is one of a string of conflicting opinions on the topic. It comes as lawmakers and the Supreme Court weigh in on the hot-button issue of locational privacy.

U.S. District Judge Nicholas Garaufis ruled on Tuesday that the government can only acquire cellphone location data on a surveillance target with a full-blown “probable cause” warrant from a judge. The government had argued that it’s entitled to the data whenever it’s “relevant” to a criminal investigation — a lower standard. The feds were seeking 113 days worth of cell-site data, or “recorded information identifying the base-station towers and sectors that received transmissions” from the target’s cellphone.

“While the government’s monitoring of our thoughts may be the archetypical Orwellian intrusion, the government’s surveillance of our movements over a considerable time period through new technologies, such as the collection of cell-site-location records, without the protections of the Fourth Amendment, puts our country far closer to Oceania than our Constitution permits,” (.pdf) the judge wrote.

“It is time that the courts begin to address whether revolutionary changes in technology require changes to existing Fourth Amendment doctrine,” Judge Garaufis wrote. “Here, the court concludes only that existing Fourth Amendment doctrine must be interpreted so as to afford constitutional protection to the cumulative cell-site-location records requested here.”

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From 230 miles above the Earth, cameras on the International Space Station captured new views of powerful Hurricane Irene as it churned over the Bahamas at 3:10 p.m. EDT on August 24, 2011. Irene is moving to the northwest as a Category 3 hurricane, packing winds of 120 miles an hour. Irene is expected to strengthen to a Category 4 storm as it heads toward the Outer Banks of North Carolina, the Eastern Seaboard and the middle Atlantic and New England states.

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Following the resignation of Apple founder Steve Jobs, incoming CEO Tim Cook called a meeting of shareholders and members of the press Thursday morning to announce that he envisioned printers as the company’s future. “Laser, ink-jet, double-sided, color, black-and-white—the future of technology is in printers. I am absolutely convinced of that,” Cook explained to a packed auditorium as a montage of printers and people using printers played on a screen behind him. “What is the one thing people will always need? It’s obvious: printers. Printers with fax machines attached, printers that collate and staple, perhaps a printer that makes photocopies. Anything’s possible. It’s called innovation.” Cook concluded his remarks by assuring investors the release of upcoming Apple products such as the iPhone 5 would be postponed for at least four years so the company could throw all its time and resources into the creation of high-quality printers for the home and office

Tempest Milky Way from Randy Halverson on Vimeo.

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Time-lapse photographer Randy Halverson spent three months hunting thunderstorms at night in central South Dakota using a Canon 5D Mark II, Canon 60D, and Canon T2i. Capturing both the storms and the Milky Way in the same shots proved to be a difficult task:

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Apple was my childhood.

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Team:

I am looking forward to the amazing opportunity of serving as CEO of the most innovative company in the world. Joining Apple was the best decision I’ve ever made and it’s been the privilege of a lifetime to work for Apple and Steve for over 13 years. I share Steve’s optimism for Apple’s bright future.

Steve has been an incredible leader and mentor to me, as well as to the entire executive team and our amazing employees. We are really looking forward to Steve’s ongoing guidance and inspiration as our Chairman.

I want you to be confident that Apple is not going to change. I cherish and celebrate Apple’s unique principles and values. Steve built a company and culture that is unlike any other in the world and we are going to stay true to that—it is in our DNA. We are going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.

I love Apple and I am looking forward to diving into my new role. All of the incredible support from the Board, the executive team and many of you has been inspiring. I am confident our best years lie ahead of us and that together we will continue to make Apple the magical place that it is.

Tim

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CEOs should care about details. Even shades of yellow. On a Sunday

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“ In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating. It’s the fabric of the curtains of the sofa. But to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a human-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.

– Steve Jobs

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To the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community:

I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.

I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.

As far as my successor goes, I strongly recommend that we execute our succession plan and name Tim Cook as CEO of Apple.

I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role.

I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.

Steve

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Eran Amir created this “stop-motion within a stop-motion” using 1,500 separate photographs and 500 volunteers. The massive amounts of work, creativity, and planning that this project must have required is mind-boggling.

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The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis.