Month: May 2006

  • Sunk Costs

    Only the U.S. Navy can spend $20 million to sink one of its own ships: The Navy spent more than three years and $20 million preparing [the aircraft carrier] Oriskany to become an artificial reef. The project was repeatedly delayed to meet Environmental Protection Agency concerns about removal of hazardous substances including oil, fuel, asbestos…

  • Sign Pollution

    This is what happens when you accept government funds to build a park: this intersection of two trails in a Ft Worth park has no less than seven caution signs. That peaceful-looking path must be some death trap. Some good samaritan has torn down two of the signs, but it’s still an eyesore. The whole…

  • Learning from failure with the Xbox 360

    Learning from failure is a hallmark of the technology business. Nick Baker, a 37-year-old system architect at Microsoft, knows that well. A British transplant at the software giant’s Silicon Valley campus, he went from failed project to failed project in his career. He worked on such dogs as Apple Computer’s defunct video card business, 3DO’s…

  • A new low for terrorist's appeasers

    We should ban violent video games that show our military hunting down terrorists because… terrorists use them to prove that our military wants to kill them. (God, sorry, Allah forbid!) Or at least that’s the unstated message of this Reuters article.

  • When Good Companies Go Bad

    I love Google, but this is just pathetic: Google has informally complained to U.S. and European antitrust regulators about what it says are biased settings on Microsoft’s latest Web browser, marking the latest spat between two companies whose business models are increasingly bumping up against one another. Google’s charge, isn’t true, as you can see…