Posner had a significant influence on the Microsoft antitrust trial back in 1999-2001, both his legal thinking before the trial and being appointed by the judge in that trial to serve (ultimately unsuccessfully) as a mediator amidst the trial.
I still don't understand why the IE + Win bundling would be illegal or unethical yet, but Microsoft definitely understood it, because their defense was "we didn't bundle it" rather than "bundling is fine". I wonder how the case would have gone if they just went the second route.
If you are interested in earlier conspiratorial sci-fi books featuring hardware trojans, you might try to get a copy of another sci-fi novel called "Acts of the Apostles" by John Sundman.
John Sundman wrote and published the book in 1999 after working for many years at Sun Microsystems so it is a fiction born out of the Silicon Valley geek/tech culture of that era.
Pertinent only to this thread's context, and not indicative of anything in particular, John would have been at Sun for many years at the same time as Nvidia cofounders Chris Malachowsky and Curtis Priem, late 80s through early 90s.
This warning goes back much much longer than 2016 even. Minimizing dependence of Europe on USSR/Russian energy was an unsung large part of Reagan's administration's strategy for winning the Cold war which was largely an economic battle whose policy preconditions for economic warfare were set as far back as 1962.
After Reagan's election in 1980 the US tried very hard to slow and/or block the creation of the Urengoy–Pomary–Uzhhorod (Trans-Siberian) pipeline when it started imposing sanctions on the USSR after it declared martial law in Poland. German president Schroeder had agreed to the pipeline in 1980.
The US imposed export controls on technical equipment used for building that pipeline. It urged European governments not to build the pipeline, it then expanded the embargo to all global subsidiaries of US companies and anyone with licenses with US firms. The US even allegedly created dummy plans for covert defective pipeline equipment and leaked those plans resulting in a trans siberean pipeline explosion that delayed the project. (Some claim the explosion was caused by bad construction techniques and/or was just a psyop.)
All this to pressure the Russian economy which was not in good shape and for whom the pipeline would have been an economic lifeline for the USSR. The Europeans, wanting to reduce middle eastern dependence on oil persisted and eventually got the US to rollback the global sanctions in return for other forms of sanctions. Peter Schweitzer wrote about this as early as his 1994 book "Victory" but there are various others who have covered it since. The pipeline started shipping oil to the French in 1984 despite all that. The US started its pipeline focus rather late in part because it did nothing under Carter, but the energy dependence it helped lock in was a major, major bone of contention in the early 80s between the US and Europe.
Wow, that X post is the most succinct but persuasive and damning thing I've read about Google's ad business developments in years (I don't watch it particularly closely.) Thanks!
Don't take it at face value. There is a serious rebuttal but I cannot find it now (post is from previous quarter). Anyway, he's twisting facts to fit the narrative.
Fun fact: Irix 5.3 in Nov 1994 was the first desktop OS to allow web URLs to be desktop shortcuts, pre-Windows95+MacOS similar capability. SGI licensed Netscape Mosaic so they could do that.
Large Chinese companies seem to have researched+adopted HTAP much more in the last five years than US companies from what I can tell staying abreast of HTAP developments.
So, to (mis-)summarize the Atlantic piece, we're doing this??:
1. We, Oceana, are at "war" with Eurasia. They're the worst! Our leaders have made friends with Eastasia. We can do great things together with Eastasia! Eastasia is great! <
Sounds like the earlier feeling of trying to do software development in the age of having executives trying to move most of that effort offshore to "arbitrage the labor differential".
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