Editorials

The business world in the US is a funny thing especially when it comes to legal matters. There is an unwritten rule that seems to be in use when companies break the law. This rule is all about making sure not to hurt the business regardless of the damage a company does to consumers or anything else really. We are seeing a great example of this with the Apple eBook price fixing trial. Although Apple was found to have conspired to fix prices at a much higher point that the market standard (by forcing an agency model) they still feel they should not have any consequences for this action.

“I will speak slow so that those of you with PhDs in the room can understand.” – Doug Carlin, “Deja Vu,” Touchstone Pictures, 2006

Having been around the software industry from the earliest PC days (and before) it is interesting to see the companies come full circle and the uproar that is surrounding the latest announcements that software would be on a subscription basis.

Much of the furor comes out of a very basic misconception … that you pay once and you “own” the software.

Unfortunately, that tells me that few people really read their license agreements.

Every now and then someone makes statements that are so extreme that we really have to wonder what they were thinking and if they really believe the things they are saying. The latest statement of this type comes from former NSA head General (retired) Michael Hayden. Hayden recently spoke to the Bipartisan Policy Center about future cyber security threats. It seems that Hayden wants to put cyberactivists, groups that call for government transparency, hackers and, from the sound of it, anyone that disagrees with being spied on into the same category as al-Qaida.

My statistical analysis instructor once told me that numbers have their own magic and rules as soon as they enter the world of statistics. A 5 is no longer a 5 there as it becomes defined, qualified and categorized. His meaning is that you can use numbers in very different ways in statistics and these might not always measure up with reality. This magic goes far beyond the fact that there are three different ways to find an “average”. The distortion is so great that using actual numbers you can prove almost anything with them.