Today’s Links: October 7, 2011

OPINION

JEFFREY A. TUCKER: “Steve Jobs and the Beautification of Capitalism”
“What made Jobs’s tenure at Apple great is that he wedded profits with aesthetic loveliness. Not every businessperson can or should do this. Even the entrepreneurs who provided the masses with tacky things are just as deserving of our admiration and praise, for they too do their part to lift us all out of the poverty and squalor that is the state of nature. And aside from the prettiness of certain products or the elegance of the smartphone, there is another overarching beauty that we find in the market: a lovely, orderly, productive global matrix of cooperative exchange that leads to human flourishing for everyone, even in the absence of a global dictator. This is as beautiful a system as any product Steve Jobs ever made.”

ERIC SCHMIDT: “Eric Schmidt on Steve Jobs”
“I should tell you this story. We’re in a meeting at NeXT, before Steve went back to Apple. I’ve got my chief scientist. After the meeting, we leave and try to unravel the argument to figure out where Steve was wrong—because he was obviously wrong. And we couldn’t do it. We’re standing in the parking lot. He sees us from his office, and he comes back out to argue with us some more. It was over a technical issue involving Objective C, a computer language. Why he would care about this was beyond me. I’ve never seen that kind of passion.”

BRIAN PALMER: “Did Dropping Acid Make Steve Jobs More Creative?”
“Apple founder and tech visionary Steve Jobs died on Wednesday. Jobs was heavily influenced by 1960s counterculture, and once told a reporter that taking LSD was ‘one of the two or three most important things‘ he did in his life. Can LSD really make you more creative? Possibly. Psychology researchers conducted a lot of studies in the 1950s and ‘60s on the relationship between psychedelic drugs and creativity. Their methodology was inconsistent, though, and the results were somewhat scattered”

NEWS

PRIVACY – Italian Wikipedia Site Gets Disabled to Protest 
“User-generated encyclopedia Wikipedia shut down itsItalian website yesterday to protest a proposed privacy law drafted by the Italian government, reports The Atlantic. The law would force websites to remove any information identified as defamatory to an individual within 48 hours of a complaint. The website would also have to publish an unaltered correction issued by the party that originally made the complain, or face a fine of up to €12,000 (about $16,000). ”

PROTESTS – Hundreds March in LA in Economic Protests
“The civil disobedience was the finale to a 2½-hour protest against perceived corporate wrongdoing and the government bank bailout. At its peak, more than 500 labor union members, housing activists, students and anti-corporate protesters marched through the streets of downtown, past bank skyscrapers and through plazas where pin-striped financial district employees were eating lunch.”