All of us were reminded over and over and over during the last few days that Apple has more cash on hand than does the U.S. government. This coincidence means precisely nothing to either outfit. We won’t see President Obama asking Steve Jobs for a loan, nor will we see Steve Jobs offering one. Yes, the government is broke and yes, Apple has a lot of cash. But GE has almost $50 billion more than Apple, so where are all the GE stories?
There’s a mystery about Apple’s cash and that mystery has to do with Steve’s strategy for holding all that money. What’s it for? The predominant theory seems to be that Apple intends to make a huge acquisition and […]
The world is in turmoil with the Middle East experiencing something like a social revolution, so what’s the last remaining superpower to do? I’m serious. Colonel Qaddafi is bringing heavy armor and air power to bear against the rebels opposing him in Eastern Libya and inflicting some serious casualties. The rebels are calling for U. S. air strikes or maybe a U. S.-enforced no-fly zone. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates, sitting already on two regional wars he can’t win, doesn’t want to get involved in yet another. Anything discussed so far that Obama might do will only make new enemies or long-term problems for America, but then so will doing nothing. So while the big […]
Last week the Obama Administration announced that it would be shortly submitting legislation intended to force providers of all kinds of digital communication services (mail, voice, chat, Twitter, etc.) to install back doors in their services to allow government monitoring of all encrypted digital communication. No explicit details were given of how this is going to work, nor has the actual legislation yet been introduced. Hopefully it never will, because it simply won’t work.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 
Today is the Labor Day holiday in the USA, so to honor the more vulnerable parts of our society and economy I’m engaging in this fantasy rethinking of our current economic crisis. If only……
This is the first of probably three columns on health care. The Obama Administration right now has in Congress legislation for reforming the U.S. health system so that sets my agenda. But the point of these columns isn’t to comment, per se, on the current proposals, but instead to look at what I believe to be my two areas of some strength — Information Technology and understanding complex systems — and see how they can be applied to this problem.
There was lots of good discussion last time about cyber warfare, cyber security, and U.S. policy, but what most respondents seemed to miss was the international nature of the IT business — all the outsourcing and offshoring that we were told was so great — and its implications for U.S. security. The upshot is that any U.S. cyber warfare czar will have to effectively function as a WORLD cyber warfare czar, a fact that neither Republican nor Democratic Administrations have yet been willing to embrace, at least in public.
