Dana Blankenhorn

The Core of Corruption in “College” Football

Everyone knows college football is corrupt. It always has been.

But as another season kicks off, with more poor kids getting their knees, backs and heads stoved-in for the entertainment of rich alumni, it's a good time to note the source of that corruption.

The NFL.

Football is the only collegiate sport that serves as the sole minor league for its professional game. Yes, there are NBA basketball players on some campuses, but most are just passing through for a year. Seniors are usually second-rounders. Some baseball players go pro, but you can choose to sign right out of high school, and most clubs prefer that you do. Future pros are scattered among the other sports, although you know what they call collegiate womens' gymnastics don't you – the senior tour.

Only in football (American football you dork, not soccer) does the pro sport depend on the college sport to train its employees. A few kids have gone early, but most turn into negative examples. No, the techniques, the training, the coaching, the schemes – the pro game is college dependent. (Thus the league imposed an NCAA penalty on Terrelle Pryor when he left Ohio State, suspending him for five pro games. In poker that is called a tell.)

Google is Not at War

I have always been annoyed by the lazy "great game" tech analysis of reporters who would rather be covering politics than business.

An example is found in a recent TechCrunch piece on Google. Headlined "Google's Six-Front War," it focuses on the areas of business where Google is now concentrating its energy under co-founder (and now CEO) Larry Page.

VC Ben Horowitz started this nonsensical meme, calling Page a "war time CEO" in contrast to the "peace time" leadership of predecessor Eric Schmidt.

There are two things that are true here. First, Page is paring down the company's development focus. Second, he's focusing the company's energy on areas where it is in direct competition with other big companies. Microsoft in browsers, Apple in mobile, Facebook in social networking, etc.

This is natural. This is good. Page is wasting fewer development hours, he's aiming to monetize his infrastructure advantages in various ways, he's working to compete.

Scott Cleland's Game: Turn Google Into AT&T

Scott Cleland is a Bell troll.

He is what he has always been, an apologist and paid advocate for the Bell companies and their causes. He hides his source of funds, and reporters new to every beat keep buying the act. It's crazy. Crazy like a Fox.

This week he's a concern troll, having issued a "book" (the same way Regnery publishes "books") that is nothing but a long hit piece against Google. USA Today gave him an admiring interview without once asking him where his money comes from, which is like treating Glenn Beck as an unbiased journalist.

Cleland's theme is that you can't trust Google, that Google always lies, that Google is not out to serve anyone but its own shareholders, and that it deserves the strict government scrutiny given his clients, the Bells.

The aim is simple. To hobble Google with lawyers and layers of bureaucracy, hordes of people who spend their days focused inward, taking big salaries to prevent innovators from innovating.

Oracle Decides If You Can't Own It, Wreck It

Destroying the village in order to save it is a cliche of war, and Oracle CEO Larry Ellison has always seen business in that context.

With the move of Hudson to Eclipse, he demonstrates his loyalty to the paradigm.

Just as with OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, Ellison waited until developers had forked the project, and gotten comfortable in their new home, before deciding the "community" should control the code base. In this case, the fork is called Jenkins-CI.

In case you're wondering, Hudson and Jenkins provide continuous integration (CI) of Java projects, and monitor execution of jobs created with Java. This makes Java more attractive to large enterprises.

The distinction this time is that Hudson is going to the Eclipse Foundation, but that's a distinction without a difference. The plain fact is, Hudson is going under the thumb of a collection of corporations -- VMWare, Sonatype, Tasktop, as well as Oracle.

Before Accusing Anonymous, Sony, Some Proof Please

Sony's claim that the online advocacy group Anonymous hacked its Playstation 3 network, enabling the theft of personal data from millions of users, has been laughed away by the group.

For once we didn't do it, states a blog post at Anonops, which has in the past been a reliable port into the group's actual aims and claims.The post was linked from the Anonops Twitter feed, which also called Sony incompetent.

The charge by Sony, which is based in Japan but now run by an Australian, former CBS head Howard Stringer, is made under the signature of Kazuo Hirai, Chairman of the Board of Directors of Sony Computer Entertainment America. In support of testimony to a U.S. House subcommittee, it states "We discovered that the intruders had planted a file on one of our Sony Online Entertainment servers named “Anonymous” with the words 'We are Legion.'"

The only other bit of "evidence" Sony offered is that, so far, no credit card transactions have been consummated with any of the compromised data. Anonymous is known for attacks with political rather than financial motives.

Since the data theft on April 26, Sony has revealed that it didn't protect user passwords with encryption, only with a simple hash. 

Here's why I believe Anonymous didn't do it, but why it's in a world of trouble nevertheless:

The Amazon Cloud Crisis

The failure of the Amazon EC2 cloud over the weekend should not have been that big a deal.

It became a big deal primarily due to Amazon's silence.

The lack of transparency made it easy for lazy journalists to do stories about how customers were re-thinking the cloud  as though Amazon and the technology were one.

They're not. Amazon is the best-known commercial cloud in the marketplace, although consumers probably didn't know that until this weekend.

Still, this should have been on Amazon's AWS blog  from the time the outage started. But it wasn't. In fact it still isn't. It's this lack of transparency that's the problem, not the cloud concept itself.

Unemployment and Mexicanization

Here's something no conservative will tell you.

There is no such thing as unemployment. Not in America.

There is, instead, a mismatch among our skills, our expectations, and the political value of work.

Go into a restaurant. Order lunch. Now, if you can, go into the kitchen. Chances are most of the people there will be Mexicans – cooks, dishwashers, everyone behind the scenes. Mexicans probably butchered your meat, picked the vegetables on your plate, packed the fruit. It's likely they, or their Central American brothers and sisters, mowed your lawn today, and wiped the butt of your aging mother in her nursing home. They may be caring for your kids right now.

Mexican labor is everywhere. Wherever there are employers who want to exploit workers in order to increase profits and keep prices down, you'll find Mexican labor. In Europe, it's Turkish and Serbian labor. In Japan, Philippine or Chinese labor.

It's not an immigration problem. It's a market problem. Employers aren't paying wages Americans will accept. If Americans took those wages they'd be living like Mexicans.

But when you drive labor costs down, you degrade the market you're selling to.

Soft on Crime

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 17 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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For decades Republicans have bashed Democrats with the idea that they're “soft on crime.”

It worked. America now has a bigger percentage of its people in jail, or under the direct control of courts, than any other country. We execute more people than China (far more), and our police have many tools that violate the spirit, if not the actual language, of the 4^th, 5^th, 6^th and 8^th amendments.

(NOTE: The execution numbers actually favor China, although our incarceration rates are still highest on an absolute and per-capita basis.)

Despite what anyone in the media may tell you, street crime is down.  Total crimes peaked in 1991. They're now down by nearly a third, even though we have 70 million more people, even despite the terrible economy.

The War on Street Crime has been won.

But there has been a wave of much bigger crimes throughout our society. These are crimes conducted by business, often with just a pen. The economic crash of 2008 was caused by such crimes. Everyone suffered from it – except for the criminals.

The Coming Social Networking Crash Is Good News

Social networking is in its own Internet bubble.

The valuations are insane. Facebook is worth $65 billion? Really? Really. For a company that claims (not made, claims) to be bringing in $2 billion/year? 

Even Google, which we know makes money hand-over-fist, has a valuation to sales ratio closer to 6, based on last year's $29 billion in sales and $8.5 billion in net income. And that's for a company that controls its own infrastructure, that's the low cost provider of Internet everything, and runs the biggest ad networks ever seen.

Twitter's worth $7.7 billion? Groupon's worth $25 billion, when its traffic is down 13%?  And its revenues are off as well? And it can't scale, because people have to sell the deals and write the offers?

I have seen this movie before. I know how it ends. It does not end well.

Why We Must Still Fight Caveman Energy

In renewable energy, as in everything else, we tend to focus on our own problems, and on today's news. We worry about profitability, about competition, and we feel guilty looking to government for any kind of hand-up.

This focus can lead us to ignore alternatives to alternative fuels, even have us sit passively while legislators try to weaken or dismantle policies which favor them, as is now happening in four state legislatures. 

At times like this we need to retrieve what went down the memory hole and remind the legislators, and their voters, what we're working toward.

Take the Macondo oil spill, aka Deepwater Horizon. It was in all the papers. It was less than a year ago.

• You do know that wells just 10 miles from that site have been leaking since 2004. You don't?
• See this week's University of Georgia study showing that 500,000 tons of gas was also released in the spill, resulting in "extensive and persistent depletion of oxygen" which is still continuing. Not ringing a bell?
• How about the fact that two commissioners appointed to study the spill told Congress Friday that an overhaul of federal oversight is still needed.

No, you probably didn't hear any of that.

What you may have noticed instead is that new deep water drilling permits are about to be issued Get the rigs warmed up, writes the Houston Chronicle.

Warmed up for what?