• Apple 2Q Profits Jump 88 Percent
  Whoah!

Absolutely amazingly brilliant. Make an operating system that sucks at security and then sell the software to fix the problem as a separate product.

Google has a motto, “don’t be evil”. With the acquisition of DoubleClick that they’re trying to pull off, we’d better hope that they’re serious.

The issue here is serious. With DoubleClick in the fold, Google will have an even more comprehensive picture of peoples web surfing habits. The IP address and cookies that will follow individuals around the Net will put into the hands of an essentially unregulated entity an enormous amount of power.

Not that I’m for tons of regulation but let’s understand what we’re dealing with here. Buying habits are only the tip of the iceberg. Medical histories could be correlated to individuals through searches online, financial status inferred as well as numerous other bits of personal information. With web surfing habit logs broken up between several entities the connections are more difficult to make – all that information under one roof places a lot of trust in a corporation whose mandate is to make as much money as possible.

That’s not even considering the consequences when the government taps Google to get access to their database because of the potential value in combating crime.

What could possibly go wrong?

Sometimes The Onion is too crass even for me, but not this time:

Breaking News: Something Happening In Haiti

Brilliant.

This article blames fierce competition from Intel for AMD’s current woes. I think that’s charitable – my view is AMD screwed itself through a number of bad decisions, most prominent being turning their backs on the people who got AMD where it is today.

AMD has been a low-end alternative to Intel products for thirty years. When the home-built PC market exploded it was AMD chips that enthusiasts turned to over Intel for price as well as performance. The market for AMD’s product has, for most of its life, been individuals and not corporations.

Then, in 2003, when AMD began to seriously challenge Intel they did something interesting. AMD focused their efforts into producing high end chips while jacking their prices up to match or even exceed those of Intel. Regardless of whether or not this price jacking was justified, the crowd that had supported AMD through the decades of its existence was left in the cold.

Home users simply had no need for the (admittedly good) processors that AMD was churning out, especially not at the prices that were being charged. Of course businesses, the target market for the new processors, liked the chips but it appears that AMD underestimated the power of institutional momentum. Companies in long-term contracts with Intel were loath to do something to threaten their relationships there. AMD did well in the server space but not nearly well enough to offset the flight of customers they saw in their lower-end market, a market that Intel stole right out from under AMD with the new Core architecture chips.

So yeah, AMD got hit with some tough competition but let’s not give too much credit to Intel – AMD handed Intel their customers on a silver platter.

Doesn’t intolerance of other view points make the hard-core types like Richard Dawkins guilty of the same core set of crimes they accuse people who are going to heaven of?

The Virginia Tech shootings have been pounced upon by some as an opportunity to push gun control. The people who do this are worse than idiots. Idiocy in the sense of mental incapacitation would provide an excuse for dumb behavior. Gun control nuts advocate their cause without a good excuse to justify the stance taken.

You see, the thing that proponents of gun control don’t want to admit is that gun control does nothing to stop those who are committed to doing evil. Despite universal prohibitions on gun ownership in many nations around the world, gun violence persists in those nations. This would seem to indicate that gun control doesn’t really work, no matter the form. European nations serve as a good example of the true costs of gun control – having recently instituted strict bans on gun ownership, England in specific has shown dramatically increasing incidences of gun violence. Brilliant!

The only people that gun control laws are good for are the people who won’t be following the laws anyway.

The LA Times (shockingly enough) published a concise editorial on this topic.

Back to Virginia Tech. Is it reasonable to assume, given what we now know of the killer, that gun control would have dissuaded him from murdering people? I don’t think so.

Gun control is pointed to by political opportunists as the panacea that will end violent crime. The truth is, gun control is the lazy politician’s cause celeb. There are many areas that could benefit from our national attentions, including poverty and education issues which feed into our cultural/generational cycles of violence. Just as gun control didn’t make the people of Southwest DC less desperate or less poor and just as it wouldn’t have stopped the Virginia Tech killer from killing, gun control won’t make the lot of us any safer from people dedicated to evil. We as a nation have to understand that it’s not access to guns that makes our criminals do evil – it’s their criminal hearts that make our criminals do evil. Guns can serve the law abiding as a means to confront evil, just as guns serve to enable evil. Prohibit lawful gun ownership and we’ll be left with guns in the hands of evil doers and nobody else.

• Self-Defense in Switzerland
  (tags: Guns)