Hotel portals are usually a delightful convenience. You enter the location where you'd like to stay plus how many, add the date and, just like that, you're presented with a broad selection of overnight accommodations. If, however, a handful of portals process 75% of all direct bookings, this can quickly lead to monopoly positions with the potential for abuse. It can even prompt the courts to take action over best price guarantees.
Last week, a piece of news shook the IT world. The US government had banned federal agencies from using security software from Russian company Kaspersky as the Department of Homeland Security was worried about potential connections between Kaspersky and the Russian secret service. In an unprecedented move, all Kaspersky software now has to be removed from all government PCs within 150 days. Looking closer, a couple a questions arise the most important of which is: is there anything left that is safe to install?
One of my earliest memories concerns advertisements on TV. A famous soccer player had just finished shaving and was about to apply his after shave when, would you believe it, the flask was empty! His merry whistling stopped, he hesitated for a moment and then took out another flask to continue with his morning routine. The clip itself was boring but the star appeal affected me and I got my dad the same after shave for Christmas. Recommendations by friends or personal role models are even more effective, especially with young people, and the advertising industry blatantly exploits that.
I recently came upon an offer I could hardly ignore. Amazon's Fire HD 8 was being sold in its basic version for just $50 on "Prime Day". Reason enough to give it a go - it's not like there was anything else to do during my vacation. My reasoning was that, at that price point, I wouldn't be getting a high-end device but it was likewise unlikely that Amazon would market a dud under their own name . Oh the excitement!
Confessions at the sausage stand are rather unusual yet I recently overheard one. A lady was whispering (surprisingly loudly) to her friend that she could remember exactly one phone number by heart. Her cellphone would take care of the others. While I was moving up in line, I thought about this and found I could come up with a total of seven numbers. This raised a question: how much could I really remember without tools?
