Wednesday, July 29, witnessed the virtual browbeating (via video conference) of the CEOs of four of America’s top companies, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, by members of the House Judiciary Committee, most of whom never have produced anything other than intrusive statutes and convoluted regulations from which Congress often exempts itself.
Can free market think tanks do a better job of persuading people?
Tech Insider created a four-minute video on the history of Silicon Valley. It’s fun to watch and informative, especially for younger people who weren’t alive when “the Valley” went from groves and orchards to Apples and Googles. The video doesn’t address one key question: How long will Silicon Valley survive? I discuss this in...
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News reports on Tax Day suggest that the European Commission wants to nail Google Inc.’s scalp to the wall as punishment for committing alleged antitrust (competition) law violations. At issue is the way in which the company assigns priorities to the links consumers see when they “google” generic search terms like “booksellers”, “cameras”, and...
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As tech CEOs gather with President Obama and other government officials at today’s White House Cyber Summit at Stanford University, it is important for entrepreneurs to keep in mind who they are breaking bread with. A case in point: Charlie Beck, chief of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), wrote a letter recently to...
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President Obama has repeatedly attempted to obfuscate the issue of NSA’s actively spying on Americans by repeatedly referring to “metadata”: information about where, when and to whom people make phone calls, but not the actual phone conversations. Most recently, he garnered wide press coverage by promising to limit the collection of phone metadata. But...
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The New York Times reports in “A Gold Rush of Subsidies in Clean Energy Search” that NRG Energy is receiving nearly $1.6 billion in government subsidies for its new compound in California of almost one million solar panels. The Times further notes that: Similar subsidy packages have been given to 15 other solar- and...
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This Thursday, the District of Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals will hear oral arguments in a case brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) use of body scanners. The case asserts “that the federal agency’s controversial program violates the Administrative Procedures Act, the Privacy Act, the...
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Jeff Tucker points out how truly astounding internet language translation technology is. This is how truly unbelievable our world is: we can get automatic translations via the Google Labs “translate this message” command, and people barely notice. In her ongoing series of books on the Bourgeois Era, Deirdre McCloskey argues that one of the...
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In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Google co-founder Sergey Brin elaborated on what was apparently primarily his decision for Google to withdraw from mainland China. Mr. Brin immigrated with his family to the U.S. at the age of 6: The 36-year-old co-founder said he was moved by growing evidence in China of...
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