Department of Homeland Security Not Focused on Terrorism. I thought terrorism is why we have a DHS, but they’ve been preoccupied with other things: Of the 814,073 people charged by DHS in immigration courts during the past three years, 12 faced charges of terrorism, TRAC said. Those 12 cases represent 0.0015 percent of the total [...]

RUSSIA VS. ESTONIA: 21st Century State vs. State Conflict. What does “guerrilla” war between interdependent states look like in the 21st Century? Very much like the war now going on between Estonia and Russia. Russia is using the removal of a statue commemorating Russian war dead from Tallinn (the capital of Estonia) as a pretext [...]

Hoffman on Hard Fantasy and the Absence of Law. It turns out that Dave Hoffman and I have more in common than just being corporate law professors and bloggers. We also both like fantasy. In an interesting post, Hoffman looks at the turn towards what he calls “hard fantasy.” Several of the writers he discusses [...]

How to be a great receptionist Being a pretty good receptionist is easy. You’re basically a low-tech security guard in nice clothes. Sit at the desk and make sure that visitors don’t steal the furniture or go behind the magic door unescorted. But what if you wanted to be a great receptionist? I’d start with [...]

Former Nortel Subsidiary Picks Fonality’s PBXtra Over Nortel. Today, I spoke with Fonality’s CEO Chris Lyman and Amon Prasad, Director of Information Technology for BLADE Network Technologies. BLADE Network Technologies is a former subsidiary of Nortel and get this – they selected Fonality’s Asterisk-based PBXtra over a comparable system from Nortel. Even though Nortel offered [...]

Grace Queen Elizabeth has ruled with grace for over a half century. Her meeting with Virginia Tech people today is just one more example of that. Of course some handler suggested it—but she agreed and, I have no doubt, expressed sympathy as few could. God save the queen. [The Tom Peters Weblog]

Microsoft starts dropping Longhorn features. Microsoft has announced that several cool virtualization features will be dropped from what was promised for Longhorn release. Bink quotes a seemingly angry quote complaining about the lack of live migration, no hot-adding of resources, CPU core limitations, etc. I’m sure there are many that will be very disappointed about [...]

Joey Stanford: iFolder. SLED 10 has a nifty program called iFolder. iFolder is all about file sharing – making, sharing, and backing up files easier. Emplify has some debs up. Does not work in Feisty. It probably needs some MOTU guru to work on packaging this properly. iFolder is a simple and secure storage solution [...]

UN panel urges greenhouse gas reductions now. Technologies are available to significantly reduce greenhouse gases but nations must adopt them far more aggressively to avert the worst consequences of global warming, the leading scientific authority on climate change said yesterday. [Boston Globe -- Front Page]

The end of “desktop vs. web apps”. Hybrid apps are no longer the future—they’re now. In my career I’ve heard lots of predictions—Apple will go out of business; soon there will be only six or seven websites; the browser is dead; we’ll all be running “thin clients”; Java will replace C/C++ everywhere—that I haven’t believed. [...]