Paul Jacobson

Tag: Don’t be evil

  • Sometimes democracy isn’t such a good thing

    If anything the ANC leadership race is a good illustration of where democracy can be more harmful than beneficial.  Take a party with a huge majority in parliament, throw in a leadership race between an incumbent who hasn’t fulfilled his potential and a disgraced challenger who has tremendous popular support and we have a receipe…

  • South Africa (Proprietary) Limited

    I think it is time to give up the last vestiges of this ideal of a nation based on equality, dignity and respect for human rights.  South Africa is no longer a nation, it is a privately held corporation on a massive scale.  You have to look carefully if you want to catch a glimpse…

  • … please turn out the lights …

    That’s it, the event we (well, a small percentage of “we”) have feared has come to pass and it is time to see if we (the aforesaid small percentage of “we”) have the brass ones to leave Facebook. Microsoft has bought 1.6% of Facebook for $240 million which makes Microsoft a part owner of one…

  • The Guy McLaren debacle

    Ok, I know I said I wouldn’t comment on this saga publicly at the risk of being sued but sometimes I have to just get my thoughts out there. I read the posts on Muti about McLaren’s offering to his clients including Nic’s post and the initial post on The Colony. I also watched two…

  • Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go service misses the point

    So Microsoft has announced a pay-as-you-go option for emerging markets, ostensibly to make Office 2007 more affordable to people in these markets. This option is only available to people who buy new computers (now with Windows Vista) and costs R199 for the first three months with first time users to receive an additional 3 months…

  • DoC’s lip service to urgency

    It seems our communications minister has a very strange concept of urgency. Hitting the wire* has a post that reveals that the minister is really just paying lip service to her stated goal of reducing telecommunications costs in South Africa and unbundling the local loop (the connection from the network to each home/business, also referred…

  • The thing with censorship and freedom of expression …

    This was going to be a comment in response to Twylite’s comment on my post about Patricia De Lille’s call for censorship of bloggers but it started to develop into a full post instead. When the government starts telling us what we can and can’t say, we have censorship. I do agree with one aspect…

  • David Bullard responds …

    … and the message is pretty clear really. We all did exactly what Bullard was aiming for. We, the bloggers, focussed so heavily on Bullard’s clearly inflammatory column so much that we drove a lot of traffic to it. All we did was feed the Bullard marketing machine. This has been a pretty effective case…