Henry David Thoreau, via Fabius Maximus:

Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents on injustice.

… In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgement or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.

Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others — as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders — serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as the rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few — as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men — serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it.

“Burn the Ships“.

Apple has a habit or one might credibly argue a devotion to changing adaptors, interfaces, parts and connectors. The change may be required to support a new standard (such as Thunderbolt – a high speed peripheral interface – soon to be replaced by Thunderbolt 2…), be necessary to enable a smaller form factor or simply to pursue emerging strategic interests. Victims of Apple’s devotion to progress, include the floppy disc, cd-rom/dvd drive, iPhone/iPad/iPod connectors, Firewire and PowerPC CPU’s.

One such change caught me unawares last week.

Apple quietly introduced MagSafe 2 at the 2012 Apple Worldwide Developer Conference. A clever invention, the original “MagSafe” uses a magnet to connect a power supply to a laptop. Older readers might recall the curse of laptop power connectors past. Inadvertently kick a power cable and the connected laptop tests its strength with a free fall to the floor.

MagSafe equipped MacBooks mean that a power supply kick disconnects the cable without physically moving or damaging the laptop. Useful.

Yet last week, I attempted to connect a just released 2013 MacBook air to my desktop Thunderbolt display. The latest MacBook Air sports a MagSafe 2 power adaptor, which is unfortunately incompatible with the still for sale (and premium priced) Thunderbolt display featuring the original MagSafe connector.

The Apple online store missed an opportunity to tell me, when ordering: “Jim. Add a MagSafe 2 adaptor for $9.99. You’ll need it”. Apple knows that I have a Thunderbolt display. Apple also knows the software that I’ve purchased through the App Store along with my other products, such as an iPhone and iPad.

Reflecting on my wasted time last week over a trivial adaptor, (the nearby Apple Store did in fact, have the $9.99 MagSafe 2 adaptor in stock, but I loathe malls; Disappointment) I am surprised that Apple has not implemented a more personal online shopping experience. Why not use the data they have and offer a suggestion or three along the purchase route?

A few lessons:

1. Apple continues to have the intestinal fortitude to burn the ships, even for the smallest interface, in this case MagSafe to MagSafe 2.
2. Apple has the supply chain power to deliver the necessary adaptors and connectors at the right place and at the right time. I can think of countless other purchase experiences where a key item was missing or out of stock. The Apple Store appeared to have a reasonable supply of MagSafe to MagSafe 2 adaptors.
3. Apple is missing an opportunity to tie my purchasing history into the online shopping experience. Understanding that my MacBook Air purchase required a $9.99 adaptor would have been helpful. My years of Apple customer service experience generally reveals a well run organization. I am surprised that someone has not put this CRM style enhancement in place.
4. It would be interesting to understand Apple’s internal calculations when contemplating such changes. There are a host of issues worth consideration, from aesthetics, customer experience, hassle, supply chain, retail, staff awareness, support and SKU bloat.

Spiegel:

All of these motives probably play a role. The truth is that the Germans would love to be able to engage in more online espionage. Until now, the only thing missing has been the means to do so. Consequently, an outraged reaction from Berlin would have seemed fairly hypocritical.

Roughly half a dozen countries maintain intelligence agencies like the NSA that operate on a global scale. In addition to the Americans, this includes the Russians, Chinese, British, French and — to a lesser extent — Israelis and Germans. They have all placed the Internet at the heart of their surveillance operations. The vision of a wildly proliferating, grassroots, democratic Internet with totally secluded niches has long since become a thing of the past. Tomorrow’s world is a digital habitat where even the most far-flung corners are exposed to outside eyes, and where everything can be stored for posterity — and actually is stored, as with Prism.

What is surprising about the NSA’s program is its size and professionalism. The objective here is also shared by agencies in other countries, above all the BND, Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, which is currently significantly extending its capabilities. Last year, BND head Gerhard Schindler told the Confidential Committee of the German parliament, the Bundestag, about a secret program that, in his opinion, would make his agency a major international player. Schindler said the BND wanted to invest €100 million ($133 million) over the coming five years. The money is to finance up to 100 new jobs in the technical surveillance department, along with enhanced computing capacities. This may sound like a pauper’s version of the Prism program, but it represents one of the most ambitious modernization projects in the BND’s history, and has been given the ambitious German name Technikaufwuchsprogramm (literally “Technological Coming-of-Age Program”).

Ed Wallace:

Even more important to the story line could be the fact that farm prices would explode again in corn country, thanks to the increasing prices the futures markets were bidding for that particular commodity. As Fortune magazine reported this May 10, the Kansas City Federal stated, “despite the drought in Iowa last year, farmland prices have nearly doubled since 2009 to an average price of $8,296 an acre.”

So that 1989 movie’s charming idealism could be updated to today’s more cynical and extremely profitable reality: Between the near tripling of the price of corn and the bubble-level price of $8,296 an acre for Iowa farmland, Kinsella and his family find that their windfall is far greater than watching the ghosts of the 1919 White Sox play yet another boring game.

In the film’s climax, Kinsella would walk proudly out onto the field. There he would inform his father and Shoeless Joe Jackson that they’ve played their last game on his farm because, after he sells the final corn crop for a fortune on the commodities market, he will be selling the farm for eight grand an acre. And with that line the idealistic Ray Kinsella would become the Gordon Gekko of Iowa.

The Economist:

You have not had an easy time of it over the last few years
No. I had a horrible heart attack and still have symptoms of that sometimes. Then cancer, which is in remission. But the stroke is the hardest thing because I just lost my ability to speak and to write. So I have had to relearn that literally one word at a time, and sometimes I use the wrong word or can’t find words. But overall I feel very blessed

It is incredibly brave to start lecturing again
My wife comes most of the times I teach and stands on the front row to help me. She’s been wonderfully supportive

In your lecture you suggested that firms are too beholden to data. How does that view fit with the age of big data?
It is truly scary to me. By definition, big data cannot yield complicated descriptions of causality. Especially in healthcare. Almost all of our diseases occur in the intersections of systems in the body. For example, there is a drug that is marketed by Elan BioNeurology called TYSABRI. It was developed for MS [multiple sclerosis]. It turns out that of the people who have MS a proportion respond magnificently to TYSABRI. And others don’t. So what do you conclude from this? Is it just a mediocre drug? No. It is that there is one disease but it manifests itself in different ways. How does big data figure out what is the core of what is going on?

You have written much about how technology will disrupt higher education
Two thing are salient. Firstly, the technology per se is not disruptive or sustaining. Rather it is the way it is deployed in the market. So if all that Harvard did was provide MOOCs to everyone so they could employ the technology in existing business models, it wouldn’t change much. But where it would make huge difference is on the delivery of education amongst a population that can’t come to Harvard Business School. And those are people who are working, or who have kids, and they can’t drop it all to get a traditional education. So firms have started corporate universities, and rather than saying you need to take this course for a semester and you have to learn what we say you need to know, corporate universities call Harvard up and say: “We need to teach strategy in a week. It needs to be customised to the, say, chicken industry. And it needs to start on this day and finish on this day.” And that’s a very different delivery of content. So MOOCs will be important when we are using that to replace learning from a teacher to learning on the job. But these will be a one to one replacement of a real teacher.

Much more on Clay Christensen, here.

Tap or click on the photo to view a larger, panoramic image. A beautiful, warm day to bale hay.

One does not often see traditional hay bales. Today’s approach is generally “round bales” or large, “square bales“.

STEPHEN BRAUN, ANNE FLAHERTY, JACK GILLUM and MATT APUZZO:

The revelation of Prism this month by the Washington Post and Guardian newspapers has touched off the latest round in a decade-long debate over what limits to impose on government eavesdropping, which the Obama administration says is essential to keep the nation safe.

But interviews with more than a dozen current and former government and technology officials and outside experts show that, while Prism has attracted the recent attention, the program actually is a relatively small part of a much more expansive and intrusive eavesdropping effort.

Americans who disapprove of the government reading their emails have more to worry about from a different and larger NSA effort that snatches data as it passes through the fiber optic cables that make up the Internet’s backbone. That program, which has been known for years, copies Internet traffic as it enters and leaves the United States, then routes it to the NSA for analysis.

Whether by clever choice or coincidence, Prism appears to do what its name suggests. Like a triangular piece of glass, Prism takes large beams of data and helps the government find discrete, manageable strands of information.

John le Carré:

In my recent novel A Delicate Truth, a retired and patently decent British foreign servant accuses his old employers of being party to a Whitehall coverup, and for his pains is promptly threatened with the secret courts. Yet amid all the comment that my novel briefly provoked, this particular episode attracted no attention.

What are secret courts? Why do we need them? To protect Britain’s special relationship with the United States, we are officially told; to protect the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services. Never mind that for decades we have handled security-sensitive cases by clearing the court whenever necessary, and allowing our secret servants to withhold their names and testify from behind screens, real or virtual: now, all of a sudden, the credibility and integrity of our intelligence services are at stake, and need urgent and draconian protection.

Never mind the credibility and integrity of parliament and centuries of British justice: our spies come first. And remember, these aren’t criminal courts. These are civil courts where anyone attempting to obtain redress for a real or perceived injustice perpetrated against him by British or American secret agencies must have his claims heard and dealt with in secret.