Kate,

here's another current and relevant exhibit for your study of "rape culture"

http://digg.com/d3y7h7

"Woman Who Cried Rape Gets 2 Years in Jail -- Jennifer Day, 34, who made the false allegation against former boyfriend Andrew Saxby after a row, was told by the judge that she had undermined efforts to treat genuine rape victims fairly and sympathetically."

what weak and rubbish analysis...there is no "case" against Roethlisberger: there is no criminal complaint. and as the above shows, even when there's a "victim", there's not even necessarily a "crime".

if we're into equality, shouldn't the woman who lies about rape receive the same sentence as the man would have!? logic would say 'yes'; I suspect Broadsheet has a contrary view.

are you sure he's not just in mid-Michael Jackson Memorial Dance Move?

...you'd better be damn sure that god has faith in him.

"Appalachian Trail"...it's the new "Wide Stance"

ssia

of all the people like David Sirota who expect the taste of 8 years of shit to be washed away in 100 days or a few months.

how disingenous! and how entitled! I hope that is the message your children take away!

so shut up, grow up and stop heckling from the sidelines if you want things to be changed. ffs.

Hi Patrick,

I was half hoping that you would discuss this aspect which has been raised in other media -- alas I did not see it mentioned in your article or in the letters so far.

This concerns two Qantas Airlines A330s that experience uncommanded pitch-down maneuvers. If, as you suggest, it was confluence of multiple incidents, and turbulence and lightning are not likely to be fatal in their own right, was this perhaps the lethal ingredient?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72

Global warming and climate change are important topics. This article (nor the report it would seem), however, does not serve their causes. Meaningless statistics about loose or multi-variable correlations serve only to attract the sort of skepticism that damages those with a specific and worthy message.

Lots of people die every day for all manner of reasons: that is life, and that should not be news to anyone. If we care about people, things like sanitation and education can bring real improvements to the lives of more than "hundreds of thousands" people. That would be more than a think tank ever did.

I wonder, what's in this for Kofi Annan?

This stuff all sounds very fancy, but to me the thesis is flawed and the proposal is not particularly insightful.

So as a former Amazonian and current IT service management professional, my response is: Nothing to do with "moving to the cloud" per se dictates the need to install a governance model. Why? Any enterprise worth its salt should already have an IT governance model in place. So suggesting that the cloud -- with IT infrastructure (servers, switches, firewalls, storage) like any other enterprise -- also be governed by models that successfully employ 'best practices' to manage IT services (helpdesks, capacity, availability, service level, and financial management) is, well, obvious.

And to suggest that the "cloud" all of a sudden introduces a new, radically complex environment is also a bit disingenuous: IT in financial institutions or any complex multi-national enterprise already confront a tangle of outsourcing, offshoring, third-party contracts, SLAs and OLAs, regulations, privacy and data retention laws. This is not new territory.

I would also argue, based on personal experiences, that these models or frameworks are really just that: the success and, most importantly, quality of the endeavour relies on the implementation and the execution (namely, the people). It takes a lot of time to develop the maturity in an organization to successfully implement these frameworks and in my view some of them are hopelessly out of date. And I believe many are less successfully implemented than their promoters would ever let on.

So the real question is: which governance model do you actually propose and why? Or, if you are a suggesting a unique breed of governance model is now required, what would be its defining features?

There is an obvious answer if you understand the source of this technology, which basically arises from unused capacity in the infrastructure, which at a certain scale becomes a marketable commodity provided it is managed properly. Amazon developed these services for their own use, and were they unreliable or poorly managed, they would not form the business they are today (elastic cloud computing and storage services). The successful governance model is right there, but behind closed doors.

seriously, Salon...style over substance?

it's like my subscription is a bailout for stale ideas.

next please.