Nextgov

Video: Jon Stewart Rips Senators for Letting Apple Off Easy on Corporate Taxes

Jon Stewart last night derided a Senate panel’s kid-gloves treatment of Apple Inc.’s testimony on its complex corporate tax structure.

Tuesday’s hearing in front of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations was meant to discuss the corporate tax laws that allow Apple to shelter over $102 billion through a web of foreign subsidiaries. However, it quickly became a forum in which senators expressed their love of the company’s products to Apple CEO Tim Cook.

“I love Apple!,” said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo.  Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., asked Cook why he had to keep constantly updating all the apps on his iPhone.

Stewart noted “there is nothing Apple can do to get us mad at them,” and said people would probably keep buying the company’s products even if the hearts of kittens powered its electronics.

Watch the full clip below:

How Feds Fail

During a panel discussion on innovation’s role in government on Monday, an audience member asked participants how they react when innovations fail.

The panel took place at the American Council for Technology and Industry Advisory Council’s annual Management of Change conference in Cambridge, Md. Here’s what the panelists said. It’s been edited for length.

Gadi Ben-Yehuda, innovation and social media director at the IBM Center for the Business of Government:

I’ve never lost a game; it’s just that some games have ended before I can win. If something I’m working on doesn’t get adopted I write up an after action report, lessons learned, things to try for next time. I’ve usually expanded my rolodex. I have new people I can call on. I thank everyone for their time and try to spread what praise is available around.

Gwynne Kostin, director of the Digital Services Innovation Center at the General Services Administration’s Office of Citizen Services and Innovation Technologies:

One of the things I strive to do is never let the word “no” come out of someone’s mouth. If I feel like “no” is going to happen then I pull ...

Not All Data Are Equal

This article has been updated to correct a typo in the original headline. 

One step to making government more data-driven is figuring out which data can lead to good decisions and which are less valuable, Office of Management and Budget official Kathryn Stack said Monday.

“Frankly one of the steps we should be much more disciplined about is having an honest and candid discussion about which of those data sets you can rely on and which ones you can’t,” said Stack, OMB’s deputy associate director for education, income maintenance and labor. “The ones that are high quality we are no doubt underutilizing now. At the same time we are probably wasting a lot of resources on lower-quality data sets trying to figure out what they’re telling us.”

Stack’s office led a project to rationalize data the government collects from state and local education officials so the federal government can rely on the same data that state officials do. She was speaking during a panel discussion on using data to make better government decisions at the Excellence in Government conference sponsored by Nextgov’s parent company Government Executive Media Group.

Across the government, officials are aiming to ...

There’s Nowhere Cooler Than Here

With the day-to-day challenges feds face in government IT, it is easy to overlook an important fact:  They have one of the best jobs in the world. Not necessarily the easiest or the best paid. Rather, one of the most satisfying and consequential. They have an opportunity to work with a variety of technologies to address issues of critical importance. This was the point that CompTIA CEO Todd Thibodeaux recently made and it is something I observed first-hand over a nearly 40-year career with the federal government. 

Having started in government at the age of 18, I was fortunate to have worked with thousands of talented and dedicated civil servants. Over time, many of them became the technology leaders of various agencies.  We came to the federal government as a call to duty to serve our nation and make a difference. 

Having worked across the 1970s, 80s and 90s, I can attest that these earlier mainframes, PCs, distributed computing and 3GL programming languages were just as challenging as today’s data analytics, cloud computing, open source software and mobile devices.  And while many note that the private sector is often an earlier adopter, these technologies -- then and now -- were not ...

The Internet Equivalent of Yelling Fire in a Crowded Theater

"The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic . . . The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent."

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. wrote that familiar analogy in the Supreme Court case Schenck v. United States. The underlying premise of Schenck limiting the First Amendment was later narrowed in Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969 to only prohibit only speech that could cause imminent lawless action. 

Earlier this week, after the Associated Press's Twitter account was hacked to broadcast the message “Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured,” the stock market fell as the false news rapidly spread. While the markets quickly recovered when the truth was revealed, the incident raises an interesting question: How should we treat the Internet equivalent of falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater in the hacking realm?

While law enforcement is certainly investigating the breach, depending on the nature of the hack ...