Doesn’t say much, does it? Look up the 11 digit error code, 17257300799, on Google Search and the Turbo Tax support website. Nada. Play around with the program and you’ll trigger other 11 digit error codes such as 17942563671 and 17638845067. Information about similar messages on the TurboTax website goes something like this:

We have seen reports with some TurboTax customers where you attempt to start a new return (or transfer from a 2009 return) and the program shuts down with a serious and unexpected error.

One of the problem reporter error numbers we have seen has been 1991550181, but it could be any 11-digit number. Please be sure you have attempted all troubleshooting steps from our “Other Articles to Try” section on the left side of this page so you can eliminate other system problems first.

Duh. The “Other Articles to Try” section lists the usual suspects (such as antivirus software) that cause things to go wrong when installing software. I laughed when I read that the error code could be any 11-digit number. How in the heck do you troubleshoot a random number? Looking it up doesn’t work.

Want to try your hand at fixing this bad boy? Follow these steps.

1. On the lower left side of the box, click What is sent in the error report?

2. You’ll see a box that starts “The following information is included in the error report.” On the left side, click Error Info underneath About This Report.

3. The next box (see below) will show detailed information about the error. What helped me was the .NET exception message highlighted in gray.

4. Use this information and your bare wits to correct the error. On my machine, restrictive permissions caused the message “Access to the path … is denied.” Fixed in a jiffy with the Windows Explorer security dialog.

Best of luck. If worse comes to worse, you can always surf over to the IRS website, download, print, fill out, and mail 2010 Form 4868, “Application for Automatic Extension of Time To File U.S. Individual Income Tax Return.” That will give you a few more months to wrestle with TurboTax.

Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without Hell.

Mr. Bass hit the nail on the head. Too bad nobody in Washington is listening. Here is an eye-opening video interview before the testimony. Your patience with the advertisement at the beginning will be rewarded by keen insights into what is coming next, including possible sovereign default.

[R]ecently I hosted a meeting of the advisors to one of my portfolio companies. It was an impressive group of tech veterans. Each of them had been involved in the building of multi-million dollar high tech companies. Yet, what struck me about this summit was how many of these computer gurus carried with him a good, old fashioned notebook… I was surprised to see so much scribbling and so little typing. Since that meeting, I have kept my eyes out for this notebook phenomenon and have been amazed by how many startup CEOs, Venture Capitalists, attorneys, etc. have forsaken the digital world for the analog.

Acknowledging that paper isn’t perfect, the article cites problems of exposure to elements and lack of backup. Yet such problems have never troubled me. In 25 years of carrying notebooks, I’ve never lost or ruined one, while during that same period I’ve been grateful for computer backups dozens of times. You’ve heard of notebook computers bursting into flame, but not my trusty book. I consider paper notebooks stable, durable, and unobtrusive.

Folks in Mr. Hornik’s circle prefer the classic leather-bound Moleskine and the pocket-sized graph paper Rhodia, but my choice is more prosaic: the WilsonJones S300-3R Record Ruled. The Rhodia does bring back memories of my college days in France. I must admit a twinge of Moleskine envy and I’ve considered giving the awesome Livescribe Pulse pen a try. Still I can’t imagine why anyone would risk annoying colleagues by tapping on a phone or computer during a meeting.

Let’s drop in on Senate hearings in 1994, to find out what happened to that toilet seat from 1983:

Senator GRASSLEY: The Defense Department wants you to believe that they are making dramatic changes in the way things are purchased, particularly spare parts. I think the most outstanding example is the $600 toilet seat of 1983. And we thought that we had that problem taken care of and, 16 [sic] years later, the $600 toilet seat was costing $1800.

Today InfoWorld reported that federal CIO Vivek Kundra unveiled a new General Services Administration (GSA) initiative called Apps.gov. That initiative is supposed to solve a common problem of federal IT procurement:

Kundra said that the government could save a lot of money by using many of the Web-based and cloud technologies that are already available to consumers. It costs the U.S. Transport Safety Administration (TSA) $600,000 to set up a blog, he said. By contrast, consumers can get a Blogger account free.

“If in our lives, we can go online and provision Webmail within a matter of minutes, why must the government spend billions and billions of dollars on information that may not be sensitive in nature?” he said.

Good question. I sure hope this TSA blog, which DOES run on Blogger, cost taxpayers a lot less than $600,000 to set up. The TSA blog could be a showcase of how government agencies use inexpensive consumer technology to accomplish their mission.

But will any savings materialize? How much, do you think, will the government pay to set up a blog in 2020?

Update: The InfoWorld article quoted above doesn’t quite convey the full context of Mr. Kundra’s remarks. His speech, formerly on YouTube, but now removed, was worth watching.

Mr. Malamud isn’t just talk: he pioneered the publication of U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) data on the Web. Should he make headway in opening up our court records, my hat is off to him. Bravo, Mr. Malamud.

Consider the Free economic paradigm:

[S]omebody’s paying, but it’s probably not you; indeed the costs may be so distributed that we individually don’t feel them at all.

I tend not to prize goods I don’t pay for. After spending $80 to rent a seat at the concert hall, I cherish every second of undivided attention to music. Had I invested over 10,000 hours of blood, sweat, and tears to master the cello – as Slava did – I’d appreciate Dvořák’s brilliant Cello Concerto even more. Downloading a free song, on the other hand, gets no skin in the game. If the first few seconds fail to entertain, the song drops with a thunk into the digital trash bin. Music appreciation degrades to sound bites instead of deep contemplation. No investment, no engagement, no feeling, no value.

Free hypes the glittering generality that a near-zero marginal cost of distributing information will lead to an era of abundance, using the sci-fi term “post-scarcity economics.” This ridiculous oxymoron ought to remain in the realm of fantasy because allocating scarce resources is precisely the point of economics. For pirated songs, photos of inebriated teens on Facebook, or silly tweets on Twitter, there is no scarcity, so economics does not rule. Readers might overlook one nugget of fool’s gold like “post-scarcity economics,” but Free is a mother lode of contradictions and tautologies.

Mr. Anderson does a yeoman’s job surveying the societal, technological, financial, and marketing basis of free goods. He recites many familiar anecdotes, quotes, and history lessons. Insights on trends in the computer, network, and media industries seem apt and even farsighted. I’d rate the book’s distillation of the Free business models a paragon of clarity.

Yet Free is no outlier. Unlike Mr. Gladwell, who starts with a premise that resonates, Mr. Anderson fights an uphill battle, ultimately failing to convince that a free lunch is on the path to success.

LOL!

Susan Pfund
Oakdale, Minn.

That whole letter clocks in below Twitter’s 140 character limit. Why pay $155 for an annual WSJ subscription when you can browse any random Twitter stream and get LOLs, with a few bonus OMGs thrown in, all for free?

Both sides said they settled in large part to avoid legal fees that already totaled roughly $40 million apiece…

Why didn’t either side recognize sooner that $80 million could have been better spent on education? Princeton president Shirley M. Tilghman’s depiction of this episode as “a tragedy” hits the bullseye.

Taking a long pull at my latte, I gave his question some thought, and came up with several possible explanations, none of which consoled him. First, it seemed to me that pushing social networking to its extremes is by no means unprecedented; small-town behavior, where everyone knows everyone else’s business, has been doing that for centuries. Nor did I feel that the fact that some site produces such trivia is an indication that social networking is doomed; on the continuum of group behavior there are always extremes, which tend to wash out over time.

These remarks did nothing for Vinny’s despair over the deterioration of social networking, so I tried again, recalling Michael H. Goldhaber’s article on The Attention Economy and the Net. Goldhaber argues that the product of the Net that carries value is not information (of which there is a glut) but attention, which can be viewed as existing in inverse proportion to the amount of information. But that was no help either, for I wondered how any of these non-stop personal situation reports like Enjoying the weekend with family… Just got a great $400 haircut could generate much attention for the typical twitterer.

I finally gave it my best shot, arguing that not all such services would be worthless. For instance, imagine a service that reports your child’s whereabouts at any time. In spite of the privacy concerns, as a parent who has lived through his child’s struggle for independence, I have been torn between the desire to let her make her own way and the need to protect her if necessary.

Vinny seemed mollified, if not encouraged, by these observations, but time will tell whether social networking will produce useful results or just chatter.

You might think of Web 2.0 collaboration as a 21st century innovation, but its principles date back to ancient Greece. The classical era of Athens featured democratic institutions that ruled for over 500 years. The marketplace (agora) formed the center of civic life and the main communications hub. Athens’ rise in economic power through sea trade fueled the growth of democracy, which created political and economic rights for everyone except women, slaves, and aliens. Every man over age 18 who had completed military duty, regardless of wealth, could speak and vote in the Assembly, which set the laws. Just as economic growth and democracy emancipated Athens from the rule of tyrants, the Web today seems to offer individuals a level playing field against corporate and media interests.

Another interesting parallel between Athenian democracy and the Web is representation. Each citizen represented his own interests directly (with no elected representatives) and the modern Web similarly minimizes the need for intermediaries. Drawbacks of this model include the potential of extreme behavior. For example, Athenians had the annual opportunity to ostracize and banish unpopular people, somewhat like being voted off the island in a modern-day Survivor television episode.

Fast forward to English philosopher John Locke in the 17th century, when the ideals of economic freedom and political equality converged again. According to him, the individual is the ultimate source of political power. Government’s right to rule comes only from power delegated by its citizens, rather than the other way around. The theory of private property holds that a worker owns the value of his own labor. Locke’s theories of liberty form two preconditions needed to stimulate collective intelligence, not to mention their role in sparking the French and American revolutions.

Thinking on classical liberalism in the late 18th and early 19th centuries by such American luminaries as Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and James Madison further solidified respect for the collective wisdom. Even the inverted form, “you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time,” attributed to Abraham Lincoln, captures the essence of collective intelligence.