Slashdot Mirror

Detroit and Tokyo live in the world where trial lawyers will rip ya a fresh asshole if a jury can be convinced your design wasn't 'perfectly safe.'

Well then perhaps they should start with the automakers that make over sized Soccer-Mom Assault Vehicles and over powered Impotence Compensators. The trend towards ever larger and more powerful cars is what is increasing the danger of our roads. The gains made by auto safety improvements has only served to As Click and Clack pointed out in a recent Nova show about the "Car of the Future", no commuter needs 500hp, and that is ridiculous to even offer it. Automakers will be quick to point out that consumers (as a broad trend) buy the most horsepower they can afford for the car type they buy. But huge monster cars are not a true necessity for a car to be a success. Lets look at one of the most successful cars of all time. The 1967 VW Beetle weighed 1850lbs and had 53hp, and they worked just fine. With modern techniques it should be easy enough to make a vehicle with enough room, with a curb weight of under a ton. Then a simple 75 hp engine can get you where you are going just fine. There is no need to go 0-60 in under ten seconds if most cars on the road do it in fifteen seconds. Perhaps if there were tighter regulations on vehicle size (without a special license) and size to horsepower ratio limits, then there would be more room for innovative cars like the Aptera. Structural engineering of cars is really only half the crash test, the other half is the size of the other car they collide with.

And getting all of those SUVs off the road is easy, it's called $10-a-gallon gas.

How the hell can they do that?

Two methods: the sounds of keystrokes and the intervals between keystrokes.

How the hell can they do that?

Two methods: the sounds of keystrokes and the intervals between keystrokes.

Disclaimer, I haven't actually tried the software in the links above.

Mutant Coconuts migrate even more easily : http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2005/03/24_octopus.shtml

I'm using whatever the default window manager comes with Ubuntu when using desktop effects (compiz).

There has been a shift (at least a decade old) of applications using a single window rather than multiple windows.

I suppose it depends on the major, but I've been looking at the course requirements for EECS at Berkeley (my major in the fall) and I will be getting credit for most of the stuff I took, eg. APCS AB will count for CS61b. They do have a limit on the number of AP classes you can use to satisfy the humanities requirement, which is annoying for me since part of the reason I took all those humanities AP classes was to never have to do humanities courses again. However, for the most part, it seems like they'll take most AP exam scores for credit.

This page has the list of AP equivalencies to Berkeley courses, seems pretty reasonable. Also, I suppose part of the reason I took a ton of AP classes was for grade inflation, because I had to in order to keep my class rank high. Most people wouldn't care, my friend got into EECS at Berkeley as well (supposedly their hardest major) and he got a bunch of Bs and doesn't do much homework, but I just have the personal motivation to try to outdo everyone else academics-wise.

re: "There does not yet exist an application that people use that really needs multiple cores."

This one does. Well, not need multiple cores, but it will happily use as many cores up to full utilization that you can throw at it. I see plenty of 8-core servers at the top of the projects' stats sorted by machine. This is an application that plenty of people who aren't IT pros are running.

Sorry, but no. It's called black hole evaporation, and black holes lose energy (hence mass), through this mechanism.

What you've described is a way that energy can be created from nowhere. If what you suggest were right, we'd all be doomed, as any small black hole would get bigger through Hawking radiation, and would then consume everything.

Furthermore, the general case of recognizing cycles is an unsolvable problem, thanks to the halting problem. If it was a solvable problem, it would have already been solved at run-time.

No. Recognizing cycles is not unsolveable. It's not even hard. See this introduction to graph algorithms. See section 1.4: "In order to detect cycles, we use a modified depth first search called a colored DFS. All nodes are initially marked white. When a node is encountered, it is marked grey, and when its descendants are completely visited, it is marked black. If a grey node is ever encountered, then there is a cycle."

Alas, without a system for users to submit their own jokes I don't think there's enough data in the system to get useful results out of it.

Ask and ye shall receive (if the site recovers from slashdotting): http://eigentaste.berkeley.edu/user/suggestjoke.php

http://eigentaste.berkeley.edu/user/jokes.php

For those who want to actually see it, not a blog about it - Jester

I actually forget which character I was off by. For some reason I think it was a consonant I got wrong but from looking at my spelling of character as "charactor" it could as easily been an "e" to an "o". Like I said, I was actually surprised that I could read what someone was typing upside down from watching their fingers move on the keyboard.

You should check into doing it. You will be surprised to learn how easy it is or how easy it is to get part of what is being typed.

This also reminds me of a story a while back where someone was able to record the sounds of keystrokes and decode them later using some custom software. It is definately something to think about when considering an "over the shoulder" threat.

Wow, Stanford. I hate to break it to you guys but the United States Geological Survey beat you to it. On the other hand, I would like to try out the seismograph software. On the other hand, the boys down at Berkeley have instructions on how to build your own seismograph. I think I'll try that out until the software becomes available.

You think that nobody has a real interest in parallel computing? Intel's put their money on it already - they've allotted $20 million between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois to research parallel computing, both in hardware and software.

I am a EECS student at Cal right now and I have heard talks by the UC Berkeley PARLab professors (Krste Asanovic and David Patterson, the man who brought us RAID and RISC), and all of them say that the computing industry is going to radically change unless we figure out how to efficiently use parallelism. This is the first time in history that software performance is beginning to lag behind how fast we can make our hardware. The failure of the frequency scaling to continue to improve system performance has been shown in the failure of the NetBurst microarchitecture - remember the Prescott? And the failure of the Tejas and Jayhawk? Building faster chips is over, it's a mechanical engineering issue - we can make chips put out more heat per area than the surface of the sun. Quoting professor Hennessey from Stanford:

"...when we start talking about parallelism and ease of use of truly parallel computers, we're talking about a problem that's as hard as any that computer science has faced. ... I would be panicked if I were in industry. ... you've got a very difficult situation."

To whoever is saying that parallelism is just a fad, you're really missing a lot of what's going on in the computing world. We've already switched to dual- and quad-core CPU's, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon.

You think that nobody has a real interest in parallel computing? Intel's put their money on it already - they've allotted $20 million between UC Berkeley and University of Illinois to research parallel computing, both in hardware and software.

I am a EECS student at Cal right now and I have heard talks by the UC Berkeley PARLab professors (Krste Asanovic and David Patterson, the man who brought us RAID and RISC), and all of them say that the computing industry is going to radically change unless we figure out how to efficiently use parallelism. This is the first time in history that software performance is beginning to lag behind how fast we can make our hardware. The failure of the frequency scaling to continue to improve system performance has been shown in the failure of the NetBurst microarchitecture - remember the Prescott? And the failure of the Tejas and Jayhawk? Building faster chips is over, it's a mechanical engineering issue - we can make chips put out more heat per area than the surface of the sun. Quoting professor Hennessey from Stanford:

"...when we start talking about parallelism and ease of use of truly parallel computers, we're talking about a problem that's as hard as any that computer science has faced. ... I would be panicked if I were in industry. ... you've got a very difficult situation."

To whoever is saying that parallelism is just a fad, you're really missing a lot of what's going on in the computing world. We've already switched to dual- and quad-core CPU's, and it doesn't look like it's going to stop any time soon.

Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet - people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the number of the shoe shops were increasing. It's a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result - collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds who cursed their feet, cursed the ground and vowed that no one should walk on it again.
Credit to Douglas Adams

TBH, this sounds a lot like SETI@home and all its ilk. Although I would have to read the patent to see how common they are.

Client asks for data, server sends data, client utilises free cycles to work on the task, client returns result to server, rinse and repeat. Pretty similar but is it enough?

A new method of distributed computing, sideband computing, that is global, scalable and can utilize many idle CPU resources worldwide. Sideband is defined as when a user connects to some (normal) network services, a separate communication channel is opened, through which a server distributes its tasks to all the clients and collects the results later. By this method, any network server which has a lot of clients can compute very large parallel computing problems by dividing it into small individual parts and have them calculated by its clients. With little cost, the network server can act as a supercomputer.

The 13 dwarfs paper is out of EECS at Berkeley. The official site and public blog is here: http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/

In my opinion, this paper should be required reading for anyone interested in high performance computing.

We hear oh, threads are good, but then I read this propagated by SQLite and written by someone at Berkley.

Then there is my own observation, If I have a mount of work (w) to do n times, then the product (w*n=p) is the total work. If I queue it then I approach total wall time being w*n as well. If I tackle it as multi-threaded, then I start n threads which each do w work. However, because the threads compete for scheduling, and the OS has at least n more context switches, we actually reduce the amount of work being done in any amount of time. In addition, the caches effectively become smaller because you have to share your cache space with other threads. And we've also just added a degree of complexity to the processing because you will likely need critical sections and mutexes.

Which leads me to to my general conclusion (in terms of most software written) that for general programs, the threading should be accomplished by a thread for each unique (in terms of algorithm) processing task. A GUI thread, a database thread, a static service thread. By separating these, you'd enforce a degree of abstraction and concurrency. And all that is needed are callbacks (to async. process the value from the DB and update the GUI). The non-general cases like executing a PHP script as part of a web server (where the algorithm depends on the script file itself), or a highly scalable large problem (i.e. sorting, dynamic programming).

Just my thoughts from an alleged pragmatic programmer.

1) We've hit the "Power Wall", power is expensive, but transistors are "free". That is, we can put more transistors on a chip than we have the power to turn on.

2) We also have hit the "Memory Wall", modern microprocessors can take 200 clocks to access DRAM, but even floating-point multiplies may take only four clock cycles.

3) Because of this, processor performance gain has slowed dramatically. In 2006, performance is a factor of three below the traditional doubling every 18 months that occurred between 1986 and 2002.

To understand where we are, and why the only way to go now is parallelism versus clock speed increase, see The Landscape of Parallel Computing ReseView from Berkeley.

Actually, if you check out the BEE2 website (http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/, BEE2 being the precursor to BEE3) you'll notice a Casper (http://casper.berkeley.edu/) logo in the upper left. That is the SETI folks!

Except that instead of running SETI@home, they used heavily FPGA optimized designs. Since most radio astronomy only requires a few bits of precision (2-8) modern CPUs or GPUs are incredibly wasteful for them. So intead they use heavily optimized fixed-point math circuitry. By using FPGAs they can keep them easily reconfigurable and get enough throughput to deal with e.g. Hat Creek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Creek_Radio_Observatory).

Actually, if you check out the BEE2 website (http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/, BEE2 being the precursor to BEE3) you'll notice a Casper (http://casper.berkeley.edu/) logo in the upper left. That is the SETI folks!

Except that instead of running SETI@home, they used heavily FPGA optimized designs. Since most radio astronomy only requires a few bits of precision (2-8) modern CPUs or GPUs are incredibly wasteful for them. So intead they use heavily optimized fixed-point math circuitry. By using FPGAs they can keep them easily reconfigurable and get enough throughput to deal with e.g. Hat Creek (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hat_Creek_Radio_Observatory).

The RAMP project (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/) tried that. We're actually looking for a old priest, a young priest and a couple of virgins. We haven't been able to get near the rack since we booted it up, and frankly the blood pouring from the faucets is starting to make a mess.

Ironically the folks in ParLab (*ahem*) just arranged a field trip to meet with some of the people who do that kind of work. We read slashdot too you know...

But try putting that GeForce in your cell phone. And don't come crying to us when your ass catches on fire from the hot cell phone on your back pocket. Or for that matter when your pants fall down from carying the battery around.

ParLab (http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/) is interested in MOBILE computing as well as your desktop.

Interestingly enough, Dave Patterson http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/patterson.html, once president of ACM http://membernet.acm.org/public/membernet/storypage_2.cfm?ci=June_2006&announcement=1&CFID=1668767&CFTOKEN=37941036 was once on a project to do that http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/. Now he's working on ParLab http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/. I don't always agree with him (and vice versa) but he's nobody's fool.

Faith, young grasshopper...

If you want a more technical reason DRAM and CPU's don't go together, spend an informative hour looking up the IC fab process for CMOS logic (CPUs) and DRAM. They're VERY VERY different. DRAM needs capacitory density to get the price-per-bit down so they use their own custom fabs optimized for that. This makes it really hard to fit lots of logic and DRAM on to one chip.

Interestingly enough, Dave Patterson http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/patterson.html, once president of ACM http://membernet.acm.org/public/membernet/storypage_2.cfm?ci=June_2006&announcement=1&CFID=1668767&CFTOKEN=37941036 was once on a project to do that http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/. Now he's working on ParLab http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/. I don't always agree with him (and vice versa) but he's nobody's fool.

Faith, young grasshopper...

If you want a more technical reason DRAM and CPU's don't go together, spend an informative hour looking up the IC fab process for CMOS logic (CPUs) and DRAM. They're VERY VERY different. DRAM needs capacitory density to get the price-per-bit down so they use their own custom fabs optimized for that. This makes it really hard to fit lots of logic and DRAM on to one chip.

Interestingly enough, Dave Patterson http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Faculty/Homepages/patterson.html, once president of ACM http://membernet.acm.org/public/membernet/storypage_2.cfm?ci=June_2006&announcement=1&CFID=1668767&CFTOKEN=37941036 was once on a project to do that http://iram.cs.berkeley.edu/. Now he's working on ParLab http://parlab.eecs.berkeley.edu/. I don't always agree with him (and vice versa) but he's nobody's fool.

Faith, young grasshopper...

If you want a more technical reason DRAM and CPU's don't go together, spend an informative hour looking up the IC fab process for CMOS logic (CPUs) and DRAM. They're VERY VERY different. DRAM needs capacitory density to get the price-per-bit down so they use their own custom fabs optimized for that. This makes it really hard to fit lots of logic and DRAM on to one chip.

The BEE2 does: http://bee2.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/Bee2LinuxKernel.html. The BEE3 wont. But we'll put a linux computer right next to it, just for you. I promise.

ParLab is so not about branch predictors and out-of-order execution. As you say, that's a hardware design problem and a solved one at that. Boring.

While I'll agree that not all programmers are stuck with the serial programming model, threads aren't exactly a great solution (http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2006/EECS-2006-1.html). They're heavyweight and inefficient compared to running most algorithms on e.g. bare hardware or even an FPGA. Plus they deal badly with embarrasing parallelism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embarrassingly_parallel). And finally they are HARD to use, the programmer must explicitly manage the parallelism by creating, synchronizing and destroying threads.

Setting aside those problems which exhibit no parallelism (for whom there is no solution but a faster CPU really), there are many classes of problems which would benefit enormously from better programming models, which are more efficiently tied to the operating system and hardware rather than going through an OS level threading package.

The funding being announced here is for ParLab whose mission is to "solve the parallel programming problem". Basically they want to design new architectures, operating systems and languages. And before you get all "we tried that an it didn't work" there are some genuinely new ideas here and the wherewithall to make them work. ParLab grew out of the Berkeley View report (http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/) which was the work of very large group of people to standardize on the same language and figure out what the problems in parallel computing were. This included everyone from architecture to applications (e.g. the music department).

RAMP is a multi-university group working to build architectural simulators in FPGAs. In fact you can go download one such system right now called RAMP Blue (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?downloads). With ParLab starting up there will be another project RAMP Gold which will build a similar simulator but specifically designed for the architectures ParLab will be experimenting with.

As a side note, keep in mind when you read articles like this that statements like the "Microsoft BEE3" are amusing when you take in to account that "B.E.E." standards for Berkeley Emulation Engine. Microsoft did a lot of the work and did a good job of it, but still...

The funding being announced here is for ParLab whose mission is to "solve the parallel programming problem". Basically they want to design new architectures, operating systems and languages. And before you get all "we tried that an it didn't work" there are some genuinely new ideas here and the wherewithall to make them work. ParLab grew out of the Berkeley View report (http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/) which was the work of very large group of people to standardize on the same language and figure out what the problems in parallel computing were. This included everyone from architecture to applications (e.g. the music department).

RAMP is a multi-university group working to build architectural simulators in FPGAs. In fact you can go download one such system right now called RAMP Blue (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?downloads). With ParLab starting up there will be another project RAMP Gold which will build a similar simulator but specifically designed for the architectures ParLab will be experimenting with.

As a side note, keep in mind when you read articles like this that statements like the "Microsoft BEE3" are amusing when you take in to account that "B.E.E." standards for Berkeley Emulation Engine. Microsoft did a lot of the work and did a good job of it, but still...

The funding being announced here is for ParLab whose mission is to "solve the parallel programming problem". Basically they want to design new architectures, operating systems and languages. And before you get all "we tried that an it didn't work" there are some genuinely new ideas here and the wherewithall to make them work. ParLab grew out of the Berkeley View report (http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/) which was the work of very large group of people to standardize on the same language and figure out what the problems in parallel computing were. This included everyone from architecture to applications (e.g. the music department).

RAMP is a multi-university group working to build architectural simulators in FPGAs. In fact you can go download one such system right now called RAMP Blue (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?downloads). With ParLab starting up there will be another project RAMP Gold which will build a similar simulator but specifically designed for the architectures ParLab will be experimenting with.

As a side note, keep in mind when you read articles like this that statements like the "Microsoft BEE3" are amusing when you take in to account that "B.E.E." standards for Berkeley Emulation Engine. Microsoft did a lot of the work and did a good job of it, but still...

The funding being announced here is for ParLab whose mission is to "solve the parallel programming problem". Basically they want to design new architectures, operating systems and languages. And before you get all "we tried that an it didn't work" there are some genuinely new ideas here and the wherewithall to make them work. ParLab grew out of the Berkeley View report (http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/) which was the work of very large group of people to standardize on the same language and figure out what the problems in parallel computing were. This included everyone from architecture to applications (e.g. the music department).

RAMP is a multi-university group working to build architectural simulators in FPGAs. In fact you can go download one such system right now called RAMP Blue (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?downloads). With ParLab starting up there will be another project RAMP Gold which will build a similar simulator but specifically designed for the architectures ParLab will be experimenting with.

As a side note, keep in mind when you read articles like this that statements like the "Microsoft BEE3" are amusing when you take in to account that "B.E.E." standards for Berkeley Emulation Engine. Microsoft did a lot of the work and did a good job of it, but still...

The funding being announced here is for ParLab whose mission is to "solve the parallel programming problem". Basically they want to design new architectures, operating systems and languages. And before you get all "we tried that an it didn't work" there are some genuinely new ideas here and the wherewithall to make them work. ParLab grew out of the Berkeley View report (http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/) which was the work of very large group of people to standardize on the same language and figure out what the problems in parallel computing were. This included everyone from architecture to applications (e.g. the music department).

RAMP is a multi-university group working to build architectural simulators in FPGAs. In fact you can go download one such system right now called RAMP Blue (http://ramp.eecs.berkeley.edu/index.php?downloads). With ParLab starting up there will be another project RAMP Gold which will build a similar simulator but specifically designed for the architectures ParLab will be experimenting with.

As a side note, keep in mind when you read articles like this that statements like the "Microsoft BEE3" are amusing when you take in to account that "B.E.E." standards for Berkeley Emulation Engine. Microsoft did a lot of the work and did a good job of it, but still...

I remember working on the now system http://now.cs.berkeley.edu/ . Its a distributed system and they have parallel programming languages such as split-c or titanium (parallel java) and it support MPI. I guess a network of those BEE3s would be called a bee hive?

Read http://view.eecs.berkeley.edu/wiki/The_Landscape_of_Parallel_Computing_Research:_A_View_From_Berkeley (specifically the white paper linked from it)

no flame bait either .. but just as most always ..

i will most likely receive the flame bait .. troll label .. written off as paranoid etc.

that was the whole idea ..

"they" the ruling class have known for a long time that the vast majority of people will simply not believe that it could happen .. it's called denial .. their most reliable and important weapon ..

modern democracies .. such as america have been useful and necessary distractions .. to give the lower classes the illusion that they have some power over the system .. while their plans could unfold ..

if you still believe the official story of 9/11 events .. time to think again ..

google "false flag operations"

this really has been a private planet since the military was outsourced to the private sector read:the ruling class .. after the first world war .. the real beginning of the modern phase of the plan .. as it was the only realistic option for the ruling class after the industrial revolution .. that or lose their control of the planet .. and subjugation to the lower classes .. ie. being just like everyone else .. no privileges .. no power over others (the real aphrodisiac by the way)

they almost lost the war in the sixties with a relatively open and FREE press (their only real achilles heel) but they were able to gain control of the mass media .. game over .. end of story ..

there have been a lot of canaries in the mine .. but the majority have refused to take them seriously .. just as expected ..

just a few interesting links ..

once you really start looking .. you will be overwhelmed with information .. another thing working in their favor ..

this is a good place to begin as it was a modern pivotal event .. even if it appears a little insignificant ..

http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=21

most people thing the Nazis lost the war .. think again .. just a temporary setback ..

http://www.spiritone.com/~gdy52150/noon.html

and a few more to get you started ..

http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.net/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?noframes;read=73328
http://www.theforbiddenknowledge.com/hardtruth/aliensindenver.htm
http://www.trufax.org/
http://www-bsac.eecs.berkeley.edu/archive/users/warneke-brett/SmartDust/
http://www.freezone.org/mc/swfqw.htm
http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/ST/ST.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/raisethefist/
http://www.alpha-education.co.uk/

this one is even fun ..
http://www.theyrule.net/

you can find more "truthful" information out there than you probably want to know .. as "they" do not believe that it posses a t

You think this is bad? Just wait till the coming cataclysmic battle between F6 and the Seti@Home distributed computing grid. The horror will be unspeakable.

If you are really interested in why, then this classic paper on chip scaling S. Borkar, Design Challenges of Technology Scaling, IEEE Micro, pages 23-29, July 1999 explains why todays chips consume so much power.

Yeah, the UC Library is awesome. It's also available to UC alumni, so to all the current UC students: you have 3 years after you graduate to get a lifetime membership in the alumni association for $500. After that, it's $750, which is still a good deal for a lifetime of being able to use the UC Berkeley library (and other UC libraries too). I pretty much always have about 20 books checked out from the library, and that $500 is the best $500 I ever spent. I use it far more than I did when I was a student.

I assume other university libraries have similar arrangements for alumni, so if you're the sort of person who is likely to want to read a lot of stuff that university libraries are great for (I use cal's library primarily for math and comp sci), don't forget about your school library.

Yeah, the UC Library is awesome. It's also available to UC alumni, so to all the current UC students: you have 3 years after you graduate to get a lifetime membership in the alumni association for $500. After that, it's $750, which is still a good deal for a lifetime of being able to use the UC Berkeley library (and other UC libraries too). I pretty much always have about 20 books checked out from the library, and that $500 is the best $500 I ever spent. I use it far more than I did when I was a student.

I assume other university libraries have similar arrangements for alumni, so if you're the sort of person who is likely to want to read a lot of stuff that university libraries are great for (I use cal's library primarily for math and comp sci), don't forget about your school library.

Incidentally, Richard Feynman did some early work on phages as a break from physics in 1961 - here is the paper he co-authored.

Good point about the evolution of resistance - perhaps someone will get a clue and start inoculating hospitals with an MRSA eating phage.

James Besen and Eric Maskin, Sequential Innovation, patents and imitation. It was on the web some years ago as an MIT working paper.

Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The Patent Paradox Revisited: Determinants of Patenting in the US Semiconductor Industry, 1980-94

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=158610

drafts of both that and this:

Bronwyn H. Hall and Rosemarie Ham Ziedonis, The effects of strengthening patent rights on firms engaged in cumulative innovation: insights from the semiconductor industry.

from here:

http://emlab.berkeley.edu/users/bhhall/bhpapers.html

Protecting Their Intellectual Assets: Appropriability Conditions and Why U.S. Manufacturing Firms Patent (or Not)

http://www.nber.org/papers/W7552.pdf

And this is different from these others... how exactly?

http://www.vubiq.com/news.php
http://gigaom.com/2008/02/20/60-ghz60-second-hd-movie-downloads/
http://bwrc.eecs.berkeley.edu/Research/RF/ogre_project/

You might have more fun with the debate if you took the time to get your facts (not theories) straight.

Likewise we still only see macro exolution in the fosil record and haven't observed it in living animals.

Evo in the news: Musseling in on evolution This news brief, from September 2006, reviews a recent case of evolution in action. In just 15 years, mussels have evolved in response to an invasive crab species. Find out how biologists uncovered this example of evolution on double time.

From here.