September 8, 2016: I was pleased to receive this announcement from Informa today: “Informa and Channel Partners value and celebrate diversity in all its forms within our workforce and among sponsors and attendees. With that in mind, Channel Partners finds North Carolina’s recently passed law, known as HB2, incompatible with its values and cannot therefore move forward with plans to hold the Channel Partners Evolution event in Charlotte in September 2017.” Read more »
Excellent article about a “unicorn” startup: “Zenefits Was the Perfect Startup. Then It Self-Disrupted: What happened when an HR firm had some epic HR problems” (http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-zenefits/) in Bloomberg, by Claire Suddath and Eric Newcomer.
Like some other “unicorns” in recent years, Zenefits decided that the rules didn’t apply to its company: in this case, state-by-state licensing requirements when selling insurance, and the training and compliance requirements for such sales. Read more »
A prospective customer asked one of our agents,
“Why can’t I just connect to the internet using free peering? … I see that Hurricane Electric peers on [a particular Internet Exchange Point] and it is ‘Open BGP,’ meaning they take all peers… Theoretically that implies we can get to the internet via that path… right? Something seems wrong here… right?”
Correct: something is wrong with this theory.
Peering is for traffic directed to another peer’s own network and that peer’s paid customers. Read more »
Read this column!
Ross Douthat wrote in his column, “The Blasphemy We Need,” in The New York Times:
The kind of blasphemy that Charlie Hebdo engaged in had deadly consequences, as everyone knew it could … and that kind of blasphemy is precisely the kind that needs to be defended, because it’s the kind that clearly serves a free society’s greater good.
If a large enough group of someones is willing to kill you for saying something, then it’s something that almost certainly needs to be said….
When offenses are policed by murder, that’s when we need more of them, not less, because the murderers cannot be allowed for a single moment to think that their strategy can succeed.
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we-need/
#JeSuisCharlie
My low expectations for Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You (2011) were met and exceeded. Although the discussion was somewhat repetitive, it was generally entertaining and engaging.
The author clearly explains the danger posed by the combination of our desire for personalization, plus advertisers’ desire for precision targeting.
“You live in an equilibrium between your own desires and what the market will bear.” (p.215)
That danger is the risk that we will lose “serendipity,” Read more »
Am I really the only liberal pro-choice atheist who respects and even applauds Richard Mourdock’s heartfelt statement about his belief that abortion is wrong even in the case of rape? Read more »
I was surprised at several things about voting this morning. First, since I’ve moved, I have a new polling place, at an elementary school. There was very little signage Read more »
I just had a fascinating conversation with Tara Flanagan, who is a candidate for Superior Court Judge in Alameda County. After I informed her that her campaign signs were posted illegally on public property, she demurred and dissembled.
Read more »
Count me among the Democrats in U.S. Representative Pete Stark’s district who believe he should retire, and that if he doesn’t, we should vote him out of office to avoid further embarrassment. Unfortunately, his current challengers don’t appear very attractive.
Read more »
What’s an apology? Today, I was baffled by Rick Santorum’s comments this morning on Meet the Press: Read more »
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