Interesting Links for 10-01-2012

[andrewducker]

• Hacked memo leaked: Apple, Nokia, RIM supplying backdoors for government interception?
  (tags: Apple blackberry nokia mobilephones India security )
• Carbon emissions will defer Ice Age
  (tags: globalwarming climate )
• UK Government Betrayal of Open Standards Confirmed
  (tags: uk government standards opensource software )
• National Geographic Photography

Comments

[bart_calendar]

The only one of those tweets that really made me laugh was the NASA one.

[spacelem]

I liked the one that said "Stop saying that 11/11/11 only happens once in a lifetime. EVERY date happens only once in a lifetime. That's how time works."

However, reading jokes rarely makes me laugh out loud, particularly when I'm by myself. No snorting milk out my nose here.

[del_c]

The authors of that climate paper, in response to "hooray for fossil fuels!", point out that if the goal was to hold off the next ice age, then it's Mission more than Accomplished: we can stop now. They're not pleased about being misrepresented as putting a happy face on global warming.

[simont]

What an honest statement from a CEO would look like

Well, perhaps. The part at the end about "we will ignore the share-price expectations game and focus on running the company sensibly" seems rather optimistic in that case, in that most CEOs do not in fact do that! Perhaps an honest statement from a typical CEO would go more along the lines of "we will manage by fad and make showy operational changes at every opportunity for the sake of a temporary share price boost via the financial press, especially at the time of year when employees' share options are coming up to vesting"...

Re:

[anton_p_nym]

Hence my title, "Why I'll never be a CEO." I'd say those things, but no CEO ever will because the "torches and pitchforks" gag would probably come true if they did.

-- Steve never understood how tying a company's interests to those of people who never gave them a red cent ever made sense to anybody.

Re:

[drainboy]

If you buy a new car with a three year warranty and then sell it, the new buyers get the deal that their car is maintained for those three years even though they personally didn't give the car manufacturer a penny.

I agree that companies should not base future plans on short term, quick-buck, trader sentiment, but plenty of long term investors buy and hold shares for years despite not being part of an IPO. They still own that piece of the company even if they didn't buy it immediately. The interest of share holders shouldn't be more or less served because of when they bought the shares.

[spacelem]

Nice article about mortality rates, except it's not actually true thanks to the "late life-mortality plateau".

Mortality rate stops increasing when you reach around 90, and stays constant -- you essentially become ageless at that point, and you're said to be biologically immortal. Numbers will still decline, but you're just as likely to survive being 95 as you are to survive being 105.

For a statement like this, I really need to provide a decent reference, but I can't find one (although there's a few references in a Wikipedia article), but I've definitely read a paper on it before (there was one recently in New Scientist). It is a known phenomenon in some species like birds and fruit flies.