Today’s Links: July 17, 2012

OPINION

ROB COX: “Yahoo Tackles Existential Problem With Engineering”
“[Yahoo] has hired Marissa Mayer, one of the few females to rise up through Silicon Valley’s geek hierarchy, to be its next chief executive. […] The riddle she must solve, though, is not easily deciphered from the Javascript on Yahoo’s home page. Is Yahoo a tech company or a media and marketing business? The last CEO, Scott Thompson, tried straddling both.”

MATTHEW YGLESIAS: “Offshoring Is Fine”
“The Romney camp’s answer is that it’s unfair to criticize him for offshoring, outsourcing, and layoffs at Bain-controlled companies between 1999 and 2002 because in practice he was on a leave of absence running the Salt Lake Olympics. These efforts to wriggle out of accountability for a business career that Romney has cited as a key qualification for the presidency are fundamentally lame. The timing of the kerfuffle distracts from the actual substantive question about Romney’s Bain tenure: Did Bain’s management team do anything wrong by shipping jobs overseas when they thought doing so would be profitable? The answer is almost certainly no.”

DOUG BANDOW: “A New Military Draft Would Revive A Very Bad Old Idea”
“Politicians have been busy taking America into war.  Some commentators want to make the American people pay by conscripting 18-year-olds into the military. It’s a bad idea.”

NEWS

SECURITY – U.S. Tightens Security for Economic Data
“On Tuesday morning at precisely 8:30, after a 10-second countdown synchronized to the Naval Observatory’s atomic clock, a Labor Department official flipped a master switch in the agency’s battened-down pressroom and computers blurted out the monthly Consumer Price Index. Until that moment, the market-sensitive data was guarded with launch-code secrecy, a precaution against anyone who might try to take advantage of an accidental or a surreptitious leak to gain an insider’s edge in the financial markets, turning milliseconds into millions.”

ANTITRUST – Antitrust ruling says Microsoft didn’t kill WordPerfect—Novell did
“After all these years, Microsoft and Novell are still fighting over what went wrong for WordPerfect in the months after the release of Windows 95. The delayed release of WordPerfect for the then-latest version of Windows helped Microsoft’s operating system and its own Office suite win the war for market share. Novell has been crying ‘antitrust’ ever since.”

FDA – US FDA approves first drug shown to reduce risk of HIV infection
“A daily pill to protect people at risk of HIV from infection has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), potentially offering a new and powerful weapon in the battle against Aids.”