Not a good time to be making death threats

Commodities Trader Arrested for Threatening to Kill Federal Regulators
[Via Big Think]

Former New York commodities trader Vincent McCrudden was charged in federal court this week with threatening to kill 47 current and former federal regulators from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), and other agencies. McCrudden …

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Putting up an execution list of 47 government officials on a website does not seem like a good idea. He asked others to buy a gun and help him because he could not do it all by himself. He offered a reward of $100,000 for personal information on the officials and proof that they had been punished.

I hope they do some tests on his mental state since this does not seem like the work of a sane mind. But it does show that threatening government officials with violent death is already a crime.

It’s the advertising

Regarding the Necessity of Flash
[Via Daring Fireball]

Haavard, of Opera Software, on the question of whether Chrome’s removal of H.264 support for HTML5 video is a step backward for “openness”:

One important thing to keep in mind is that Flash is already ubiquitous. If you want to do any kind of video on the web, you don’t have a choice. Flash is needed. However, the “battle” over HTML5 video is still raging. There is no clear winner, but with Google dropping the closed H.264, it is much more likely that an open format will prevail in the end.

So the question of Google’s bundling of Flash is a red herring which takes away the focus from the real issue: Whether native video support in browsers is based on open or closed technologies.

Regarding the “red herring” bit, MG Siegler responds:

The problem is that it isn’t a red herring. It’s just another, actually larger, issue which he’s sidestepping.

What I see as the glaring flaw in Haavard’s argument is this: “If you want to do any kind of video on the web, you don’t have a choice. Flash is needed.” iOS is existence proof that this is not true. It has no Flash, but plays plenty of video on the web. The reason it doesn’t need Flash, though, is because it supports H.264 in HTML5 video.

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I do not think this would be a problem is ads were all done in H.264. But since so many ads need Flash, there is going to be a push from those that make their living by ads.

Apple has been demonstrating how Flash is not really needed on the Web. Now Google has pretty much stopped the progress of H.264 in favor of Flash.

How much money could Google continue to make if Flash disappeared? I think they will continue to make business decisions in order to keep Flash alive.

Just as Apple will keep making business decisions to kill Flash.

WHich will win?

Denialism as a money-making business model

by vramak

Andrew Wakefield: In it for the money all along?
[Via Respectful Insolence]

One of the favorite attacks favored by advocates of pseudoscience, particularly advocates of the sort of pseudoscience favored by proponents of “alternative” medicine, particularly the more militant ones who really, really detest conventional, science-based medicine, is to poison the well with a pre-emptive ad hominem attack that implies that defenders of science-based medicine are somehow interested in nothing but money. The first favored attack is to point out that the pharmaceutical industry is interested in nothing but money. That’s partially true (they are, after all, for profit companies), but it doesn’t change the fact that most pharmaceutical company products are extensively tested and have to be shown to be efficacious and safe before they can merit FDA approval.

Those of us who criticize pseudoscience, particularly that favored by quacks and the anti-vaccine movement, frequently encounter a special variety of ad hominem attack. So common is this tactic that I even coined a term for it–yes, as far as I can tell, I coined it–namely, the pharma shill gambit. Defend vaccines? Well, obviously you must be a minion of big pharma, hopelessly in its thrall, accepting big checks for sitting there in your underwear and doing battle with anti-vaccine trolls. Either that, or your very connection with a medical school, some of whose researchers accept pharma money to perform clinical trials, must also mean that you are hopelessly in the thrall of big pharma. Yes, I personally have been subject to that sort of attack. For the anti-vaccine movement in general, and the anti-vaccine crank blog Age of Autism in particular (particularly a particularly dim young man named Jake Crosby), no connection to the hated pharma is too tenuous or filtered through too many degrees of separation to permanently taint your reputation.

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Anti-vaccine supporters have recently seen what appears to drive some of their biggest proponents – scientific fraud in order to get very large amounts of money.

The evidence really seems to indicate that Wakefield hoped to make quite a bit of money – not just ‘fund my research’ levels but ‘retire to the South Pacific’ levels.

His undisclosed conflicts of interest were so large as to beggar imagination – £70 million if his views on viruses and vaccines were  shown to be ‘true.’

And since he was the only one doing the proving, it should have been a done deal. If only the science had cooperated.

And the quest for money seems to have infected others including hospitals. It was not until years later than serious questions of conflict of interests arose and mainly because a new head of medicine had arrived. The hospital was now concerned about the conflicts of interest and wanted him to repeat his work.

They even offered to support Wakefield’s work to replicate his research but, probably knowing that it would be much harder to recreate fraudulent research under intense scrutiny, he did nothing for over a year before he simply left, not before getting the officials to agree to a gag.

Someone who conducted research that has been shown to be fraudulent in nature, who was working to convert that research into huge piles of money, who eventually left the research labs due to his conflicts of interest, will have a fine life continuing to feed off of the money of denialists.

That is the apparent business model.

Google – still doing no evil or protecting ‘advertising monopoly cash-cow’?

by AMagill

Google reaffirms intent to derail HTML5 H.264 video with WebM browser plugins
[Via AppleInsider]

After igniting a hailstorm of controversy over its intent to drop HTML5′s H.264 support from its Chrome brewer, Google has reaffirmed its intent to push its own open WebM video codec via Flash-like plugins for Internet Explorer and Safari users. The reason: Google wants to ship free platforms without incurring external licensing fees.

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Read this and see how Google is turning rapidly to the Dark Side. This has to do with Google not wanting to pay others for their IP. H.264 carries some licensing fees for companies like Google. Since Google gives Chrome away for free,  it has to sell more adds to make up for the licensing.

So in this dispute, Google isn’t standing up for open standards, it’s standing up for the right to push ads through platforms based on free operating system software, relieving it from having to deal with Microsoft and Apple and other platform vendors. The only way it can afford to do that is if video is delivered without technologies that cost money.

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Partnered with Adobe’s Flash Player, Google can roll out commercial video on Android and Chrome OS and simply have Adobe pay for it as the middleware vendor of a proprietary plugin platform running on top of Google’s own. This makes it clear that Google’s WebM strategy has little to do with openness, and is really just intended to save Google money.

All this stuff about being wanting to be more open is a smoke screen. They want others to pay, even if it requires proprietary plug-ins. OPenness does not trump cheapness.They have made WebM free for now but they could always change that. And they have not let anyone get a real detailed look at WebM in a way to satisfy IP experts that WebM does not infringe on other patents.

Now Chrome is also supposed to be the basis for a lot more of Google’s strategy than just a browser. It is an operating system also. I bet this carries over to that also.

One of the benefits of HTML5 was to get around proprietary plug-ins. Now, thanks to Google, we will have to maintain plug-ins either from Adobe or from Google. Google just undermined the strategy moving forward of an open standards panel, sending everything back to square one.

The industry has adopted the best video codec because of its quality. And they pay for that quality. Google wants them to adopt a lower quality video so it does not have to pay. Do people really want to see crappy quality video on their new 52 inch HD TV?

According to the article, WebM can not really be improved without definitely hitting patent minefields. But Google does not really care if its software uses other people’s IP. Android is another example of this which is why Oracle is suing Google over possibly misappropriating Java technology.

Seems a little evil to me. Not really something that serves the needs of their consumers. It does, of course, serve the needs of Google’s customers – the advertisers.

Onecommenter hit the nail on the head, with perhaps the new slogan for Google:

“Do no Evil’, really??

Shouldn’t it be more like: ” Externalise costs and risks to third parties to protect advertising monopoly cash-cow”.

I think this is a bonehead move by Google, where it has allowed its own needs – offer more advertising for ‘free’ – to trample those needs of the people using its products.