In the latest eruption of boardroom turmoil at a global media conglomerate, the chairman and chief executive of Bertelsmann of Germany, Thomas Middelhoff, was unexpectedly ousted today after clashing with the family that controls the company.

Analyst: "[Middelhoff] was doing all the right things to turn a provincial, parochial German company into a global player. It's a big step backward for the company."

"This is a terrible time to try and sell a wireless asset, but [Deutsche Telekom] is under quite a bit of pressure. Nobody got rid of Sommer to just leave things the way they were."

Morningstar analyst: "VoiceStream is gone. Without question, you cannot be the sixth player. It's bad enough being third, fourth, or fifth."

Is America Online's subscriber base about to peak?

Online ads are down, accounting is in question; subscriber growth rates declining rapidly toward the negative; forced to offer deep discounts to manufacture growth; AOL admits "broadband is [even] less profitable than dial-up".

EarthLink CEO: "Even if [AOL is] wildly successful [in the broadband market], they will never be able to replicate their dominance in dial-up." On AOL's strategy: "It's profitless prosperity."

AT&T is seeking at least $1 billion in cash from AOL Time Warner as a condition for accepting AOL's plan for dissolving the Time Warner Entertainment joint venture.

Qwest Communications International, the dominant provider of local telephone service in 14 Western states, said last night that it had incorrectly accounted for more than $1.1 billion of transactions from 1999 to 2001 in the latest revelation of accounting irregularities at a telecommunications company.

Qwest also said that its accounting problems might extend to areas beyond the sale of fiber optic capacity, where most scrutiny had been focused until recently.

Qwest CEO Notebaert: "We will not be the next shoe to drop." ... "I don't feel confident making any predictions about [telecom industry] recovery."

Qwest's ability to evade a bankruptcy filing depends to some degree on its ability to secure additional financing from its banks. Qwest CFO, on compliance with loan requirements: "We don't know what the second quarter is going to look like."

Qwest shares are down 94% in the last year. ... Serious doubts exist over whether [bandwidth swapping] deals were appropriate in any way [regardless of the accounting method employed].

The US government ... has great trouble moving beyond puny measures where a poorly defended collection of nerve gas canisters in Siberia is concerned -- a collection that could kill each person on the planet 46 times.

The government already has officials whose job descriptions include pestering scientists around the country not to publish information about their research methods in certain fields of study out of the nonspecific worry that it might fall into the "wrong" hands.

However, the government has enormous difficulty making an effort to get into any of four former biological weapons sites in what used to be the Soviet Union -- places terrorist networks have known about for years in frightening detail.

[Discussion of the Nunn-Lugar program ... ]

The biggest successes have involved strategic nuclear weapons, but great gobs of chemical, biological, tactical nuclear, and conventional submarines capable of carrying cruise missiles remain on the agenda. The miracle is that to date nothing has been stolen or sold to a terrorist network and that no scientist on the edge of poverty has succumbed to the financial incentives from those networks and rogue nations to turn traitor.

If you look at how companies approach knowledge management, you can see that the problem is in the execution. Companies commonly make catastrophic mistakes ...

Realize you don't have to solve every information problem on the first day. Start small, demonstrate successes and develop evangelists for your efforts. One caveat: You need to think big even as you start small.

Focus as much on the value and reliability of the information as on how the information is stored.

[A firm] built a way for people to query each other -- people no longer just looked up information but could find the scientists who generated the information and ask a precise question. Employees were delighted. They made better decisions, and in less time.

On July 2, Salon published an interview with John Gilmore, a software entrepreneur and longtime Internet visionary, that called for the outright abolition of ICANN. Gilmore is also helping to fund a lawsuit by Karl Auerbach, a popularly elected ICANN board member, that is demanding access to ICANN's financial books.

In response to the Gilmore interview, Salon received an angry letter from ICANN's chief counsel, Joe Sims, and was also approached by Esther Dyson, who sought an opportunity to explain some of the "nuances" of ICANN's operations.

Salon: John Gilmore says we should have thousands of top-level domains.

Dyson: If people are redesigning the system from the start you'd probably do it entirely differently. But why could God build the world in only seven days, you know? Because he had no legacy systems.

In the long run you could create thousands of top level domain names, but you'd end up with the same issues. As long as you have names you're going to have scarcity, and artificial scarcity. ICANN should create a whole lot more top level domains and take the artificial scarcity out of the market.

The Council for Responsible Genetics (CRG) is a non-profit / non-governmental organization devoted to fostering public debate about the social, ethical, and environmental implications of the new genetic technologies.

Too often, the debates about the social and ethical implications of biotechnology have been left to the scientific "experts." As a link between scientists and lay people, the CRG is working to encourage public understanding and involvement in these debates.

The central principles that guide the vision of the CRG are:

[A great transcription of Richard Hamming's 1986 talk on what it takes to do great work. All I can say is: wow. I'm doing lots of thinking on this now, having read this. Speaks very deeply to my mind of things involved in the work I do. Brilliant paper. - dnm]