Archive

Politics

I will coin a new term for IT, Information Technology – Money Making Technology.

So IT becomes MMT.

The whole of IT jumped from information, to cowboys trying to make the most money in the less time possible, it basically became the synthesis of ultra-capitalism; because the ultra-capitalists took over it is not Information Technology anymore, it is Money Making Technology. A vital and integral part of any Corporatocrat system.

corporatocracy is a situation in which corporate bodies interact with sovereign power in an unhealthy alignment between business and political power. In a corporatocracy an elite upper-class, maintains ties between business and government, sometimes by lobbying efforts or funding political advertising campaigns, or providing bailouts when corporations are seen as too big to fail, for the purpose of controlling government and dictating policy to serve its financial interests.

Most FOSS/FLOSS projects are trying to push in the wrong direction anyway, a copy of an ultra-capitalist venture is just that really, a copy of an ultra-capitalist venture.

  1. Free and open-source software (F/OSSFOSS) or free/libre/open-source software (FLOSS) is software that is both free software and open source. It is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, copy, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code. This approach has gained both momentum and acceptance as the potential benefits have been increasingly recognized by both individuals and corporations.

If IT is ever to become what it originally stands for, Information, it will need to think outside the box, and think about flow of information with no money involved, while prioritizing quality over time to deliver.

In commercetime to market (TTM) is the length of time it takes from a product being conceived until its being available for sale. TTM is important in industries where products are outmoded quickly. A common assumption is that TTM matters most for first-of-a-kind products, but actually the leader often has the luxury of time, while the clock is clearly running for the followers.

The excuse that capital, vast amounts of money, is what made IT‘s evolution is far from valid.

Visual is primarily marketing, and marketing is nothing more than people trying to convince other people to depart with their money.

If it was not for the visual, there would be no need for the expensive hardware we are forced to use today. Maybe for a server, but not for the personal hardware millions of people in private, public and personal spaces buy and upgrade as often as a “superior” version is released to the market.

And the quality would be improved as result, as software developers would have to use skill to fit the more in the less space, as they did back in the 70s, 80s and 90s, before the venture capitalists took the technology over and imposed the practice of throwing anything together in the shortest of the time,  make it look good and/or like it does or could do something, in order to collect the most money in the shortest time (ie. while they still can, while the word is not out that it is nothing but marketed crap), and then depart to the next venture, no  bother who is still having to (in most cases, daily) use that half put together buggy piece of software; or the damages incurring from the same.

The new version or new product will “always be better”, creating a false sense of evolution, a sense that simply shadows the fact that, in the end of the day, all they are doing is their best at selling marketed crap to get the biggest volume of people as possible to depart from their hard owned money.

Executive tricked associates of Vanguard nonprofit group into giving him approximately $31 million in investments.

SAN FRANCISCO – American- Israeli hi-tech executive Samuel “Mouli” Cohen received one of the harshest sentences ever meted out in a white-collar crime case on Monday, for having defrauded victims of approximately $31 million.

Found guilty on 29 of 35 counts of wire fraud, money laundering and tax evasion in November 2011, Cohen was sentenced in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California to 22 years in prison.

The fraud he perpetrated led to the collapse of the Vanguard Public Foundation, a privately funded non-profit civil rights and social justice organization with ties to actor Danny Glover and singer Harry Belafonte. Cohen was convicted of soliciting investments between 2002 and 2008 from 50 individuals, most of them associated with Vanguard, and falsely claiming that Microsoft was poised to acquire Ecast, the electronic jukebox company of which he was co-founder and CEO.

Cohen lied to investors, telling them that once Ecast was acquired, its shares would be exchanged on a 1-for-1 basis with Microsoft shares.

Click here to read the full article in the Jerusalem Post: http://www.jpost.com/JewishWorld/JewishFeatures/Article.aspx?ID=268340&R=R1

Court document: http://onward.justia.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/mouli-cohen-superseding-indictment_Redacted.pdf

Have you ever wondered what an FBI terrorism search warrant application for Facebook user data looks like ?

Property to Be Searched

This warrant applies to information associated with the Facebook user IDs and/or account address: (…) that are stored at premises owned, maintained, controlled, or operated by Facebook, a company headquartered at 151 University Avenue, Palo Alto, California, 94301.

I. Information to be disclosed by Facebook

(…)

(a) (…) group identification number, a list of users currently registered to the group, and Group Contact Info, including all contact information for the creator and/or administrator of the group and a PDF of the current status of the group profile page.

(d) All other communications and messages made or received by the user, including all private messages (…)

Click here to read a full search warrant application for Facebook user data in PDF format, first made public by the www.uscourts.gov website, and subsequently publicly archived by the us.archive.org website at http://ia601201.us.archive.org/26/items/gov.uscourts.cod.131197/gov.uscourts.cod.131197.1.0.pdf.

Israel doesn’t know when to stop, and it could pay dearly as a result.

An elephant and an ant will meet in Washington on Monday for a critical summit. But wait, who here is the elephant and who the ant? Who is the superpower and who the patronage state?

A new chapter is being written in the history of nations. Never before has a small country dictated to a superpower; never before has the chirp of the cricket sounded like a roar; never has the elephant resembled the ant – and vice versa. No Roman province dared tell Julius Caesar what to do, no tribe ever dreamed of forcing Genghis Khan to act in accordance with its own tribal interests. Only Israel does this. On Monday, when Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu meet at the White House, it will be hard to tell which one is the real leader of the world.

For the past few years the Israeli cricket has been chirping “Iran,” and the world responds with a muffled echo. It isn’t that Iran is only an Israeli problem, but North Korea could endanger Japan just as much as Iran endangers Israel – and the world has not come running to Japan’s side. Netanyahu’s Israel has dictated the global agenda as no small state has ever done before, just as its international standing is at its nadir and its dependence on the United States at a zenith.

To the miracles of the rebirth of the Hebrew language after two millennia, the establishment of a thriving country of immigrants in the Land of Israel in such a short span of time and the invention of the kibbutz, we must now add another, much more deserving of a place on the list of the seven wonders of the world than the statue of Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, than the Roman Colosseum or the Great Wall of China: Israel’s wondrous power in the face of the United States. There is no rational explanation.

Israel features in the American presidential campaign as no other foreign country does, with the candidates vying for the sobriquet of “biggest Israel-lover” to the point where it often seems to be the main issue. Rich Jews like Sheldon Adelson donate enormous war chests to candidates for the sole purpose of buying their support for Israel, while the president of the United States, who won with a message of change, was forced to fold up, at lightning speed, the flag of planting peace in the Middle East simply because Israel said “No.” If last week a British member of the House of Lords was forced to resign from Parliament after daring to criticize Israel, in the United States she would never have even considered making her views known.

Click here to read the full article at haaretz.com

Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.