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This is less of an attempt by Intellectual Ventures to shed the "patent troll" label and more of an attempt to get some money after the big boys refuse to pay them for their shenanigans. As noted by BusinessWeek and others, they had their second round of layoffs in less than a year:

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

So they're flailing a bit to try and generate a second revenue stream. I guess VCs are handing out more money than the courts.

I've been posting about this, and the spin some politicians are pushing is reprehensible. Recently, Arizona allowed fees to charge rooftop-based solar energy producers for the privilege of selling or donating electrons to others for use. A few incredible or insane politicians are trying to spin it as if solar adopters are leeches despite the fact that they already pay for interconnect fees and all the excess energy they use.

The alternative, of course, is to go completely off the grid using your own batteries, which will end up costing the power companies (and the politicians in their pockets) even more.

But it's not all without a shred of truth. There are definitely some costs associated with high adoption rates of solar, and the breakdown is pretty easy to explain:

• Substations convert and distribute 220 to your neighborhood, from high tension wires from the power plants.
• Substations convert one direction only -- from the high-voltage to the line voltage.
• High usage is generally in the warm daytime, through early evening.
• Solar covers most of the high usage times. Some companies charge more for energy use during these times.

This works great for the power companies when a few people on one substation have some solar power generators, because they feed it back into the grid for use by those without solar. As a result, the power company can charge the full amount for the electrons used (often at higher prices), but they don't have to transfer it long distances which inevitably carries loss due to capacitance and resistance. And they get all of this without investing in the cost of increased production at the power plants.

This also works great for the solar generators, because they reduce their use during the most expensive times, and usually push themselves into a lower usage tier due to overall reduced usage. A household that uses 500kWh might only draw 100kWh net from the grid over a month, and the first 100 are usually very cheap. Some places pay for excess electrons put onto the grid, others do not.

But here's the limitation: if all your neighbors have solar, it will exceed consumption during times of bright sunlight. In other words, the substation will send out no energy (nobody needs it), and in fact cannot backfeed it to other substations. This can cause a real issue when there's a surplus. Line voltage may even go up from 110 to around 130. This is when they need energy storage. Batteries are one method, but flywheels can work well, too. They could spin up a flywheel to consume the excess energy, then release it later as-needed (e.g. a dark cloud). In fact, they can spin up a flywheel at nighttime, too, when they have excess production, to smooth out daytime use. It's not just for independent generating stations, but this infrastructure will smooth out their plants for normal use, too.

Some unscrupulous legislators are trying to saddle solar generators with the cost of those who choose not to use solar. They claim exactly the opposite, that the solar producers are driving up costs. Really, they're making a needed upgrade more obvious and in any case, there is literally no way they are "driving up costs" by reducing their own usage. That fails the basic 5th grader test.

Localizing the storage is far more efficient than sending it hundreds of miles, plus it future proofs the obvious issues of people inevitably moving away from coal and natural gas generators. These local storage solutions or backfeeding substations should be pushed by all, even those without solar generation.

Harlequin Enterprises Limited engages in the publishing and sale of books for women worldwide. The company publishes printed and electronic books in various languages in the areas of romance, fiction, nonfiction, young adult novels, erotic literature, and fantasy. The company was founded in 1949 and is based in Don Mills, Canada with additional offices in Toronto, New York, London, Tokyo, Milan, Sydney, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Athens, Budapest, Granges-Paccot*, Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, and Istanbul.

Company Overview of Harlequin Enterprises Limited....

-----
* - Granges-Paccot is a municipality in the district of Sarine in the canton of Fribourg in Switzerland. [I just had to look this up,]

I'm going to take a wild guess and speculate that the Swiss arm of the business is curiously profitable. Swiss people just LOVE romance novels. Profitable ones especially.

Successful entrepreneurs are notoriously unsentimental.

To put things in perspective:

On May 2, 2014, News Corp acquired romance novel publisher Harlequin Enterprises from Torstar for $415 million. The deal closed On August 1 2014.

News Corp

Harlequin Enterprises Limited engages in the publishing and sale of books for women worldwide. The company publishes printed and electronic books in various languages in the areas of romance, fiction, nonfiction, young adult novels, erotic literature, and fantasy. The company was founded in 1949 and is based in Don Mills, Canada with additional offices in Toronto, New York, London, Tokyo, Milan, Sydney, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Athens, Budapest, Granges-Paccot*, Warsaw, Rio de Janeiro, Mumbai, and Istanbul.

Company Overview of Harlequin Enterprises Limited

Harlequin will become part of News Corp's HarperCollins group.

-----
* - Granges-Paccot is a municipality in the district of Sarine in the canton of Fribourg in Switzerland. [I just had to look this up,]

imho, whoever figures out how to 3D print structures using Roman Concrete will win.

"A most unusual Roman structure depicting their technical advancement is the Pantheon, a brick faced building that has withstood the ravages of weathering in near perfect condition, sitting magnificently in the business district of Rome. Perhaps its longevity is told by its purpose . . . to honor all gods. Above all, this building humbles the modern engineer not only in its artistic splendor, but also because there are no steel rods to counter the high tensile forces such as we need to hold modern concrete together."

Source: http://www.romanconcrete.com/docs/spillway/spillway.htm
See also:
Businessweek Article
romanconcrete.com
Wikipedia Article

In short I stand corrected. US manufacturers have fully caught up with foreign makers in most categories of vehicle quality.

GM still leads the way in ignoring safety defects.

Why? Because employees at GM know that if you investigate safety concerns you will get fired.

Like this guy:

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

> And California will continue it's steady slide down the economic toilet.

What slide?

You want slide, look at this place.

You are not buying stuff at the same price as 6 years ago, maybe you should actually pay attention to the receipts.

beef, pork, avocado, fruits, veggies, almonds, pinenuts, walnuts, mozarella, cheddar, other cheeses, seafood, grains, soy, soy, palm oil, milk, gasoline, beer and more beer, limes, canadian bacon, barley, restaurants, restaurants, restaurants,electrical energy, car rentals, hotel rooms, cab fairs,

air travel and air travel gets more expensive in many other ways, various extra fees, less room, more seats on planes

aluminium,

You can say a lot of things about the negative side of modern nations becoming so invested in the global economy, but there's a good side to those countries not wanting to disrupt that economy by getting into wars. It's the fact that those countries start less wars. There's pretty good evidence that Russia has been less aggressive in the Ukraine than they were originally planning because after Crimea the sanctions issued by other countries have already had a significant effect on their economy. (Russia's Growth Was Already Slowing - Then Came Crimea, Russian government admits economy in crisis as Ukraine weighs, Sanctions Will Work, All Right. Just Ask the Oligarchs)

If Russia's economy had been better to begin with they probably wouldn't have started this whole mess, and personally i think that would be a good thing, even if it prompted Russian ultra-nationalists to complain about the government selling out to corporate interests.

The Capitalist CEO acquires his wealth by making and selling things, or providing a service to other people, or managing an organisation that does this. If people don't like his product or service, he doesn't make any money.

According to a recent study, there's no connection between a CEO's performance and pay. The last Fortune 500 company I worked for laid me off along with 10% of the workforce so the CEO could give himself a 66% raise for having a lousy fiscal year from selling fewer techie widgets than expected. Neither the board nor Wall Street punished him for his mismanagement. He bought another vacation home to keep up with all the other CEO Jones.

That's not Capitalism, that's Marxism.

Amazon is the worlds best organization for packing and shipping stuff. If they expect the money they can spend will give them an advantage in creating an exciting phone...its called hubris. A smartphone is a piece of jewelry. Its not like a book reader.
Amazon's smartphone breakfast, lunch and dinner will be eaten by companies like Xiaomi http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-07-22/the-latest-slick-cheap-smartphone-from-xiaomi-chinas-rising-mobile-power?google_editors_picks=true. They do only one thing...and they do it well.

MS already has a hideous management technique called "stack ranking" that killed morale (http://www.forbes.com/sites/frederickallen/2012/07/03/the-terrible-management-technique-that-cost-microsoft-its-creativity/).

The correct tense is had. http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Yeah, Sears is run by a rabid Randian: http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Does having a life vest under my seat add to my travel time? What's the additional cost, per trip, for having it there?

Actually the safety equipment as a hole does add a significant amount of weight to an aircraft and you pay for the fuel so the answer is yes. In addition to that all the safety features of an aircraft are part of the cost of purchase of a plane which you also pay for. This equipment also has to be replaced at certain intervals and it must also be inspected. All added cost to your ticket. As for time, you would save more time if people just came prepared to the security checks. Lost more time wasted by confused people.

Statistically speaking, they are a waste of money. Though the most in-depth studies were on the first generation bags. They were a complete failure. They "saved" less than 5% of the time, and killed about 5% of the time. The money wasted on them would have saved more lives if it were spent on rural medivac helicopters. Airbags kill. Statistics and actuaries say so. Why do you want things that are a waste of resources and don't save lives?

Just like smoking doesn't cause lung cancer according to experts in the early 80s. Here's a more recent link than 2001 that shows just how effective airbags are. I'm sure they are even safer in today's vehicles.
http://www.businessweek.com/st...

There's also a strange ocean plastic collection story repeating 2013, 2014 where the inventor stays 19 years old (reported by various news sources), year after year.

but your credit history, Hospitals Are Mining Patients' Credit Card Data to Predict Who Will Get Sick

Great article on the Hanford cleanup. Doesn't strike me as B-Team stuff.

Several companies already do what is mentioned in this article. http://www.sentryds.com/ would be an example of how this is already being done. http://www.businessweek.com/ad... (and the marketing swag).

Why should we give welfare to everybody when only a few people need it?

Anyway, if you're living below the poverty line, you probably bike or take mass transit, so the gas tax won't affect you directly. Yes, it will raise store prices slightly, but it will also reduce the need to make up the shortfall with transportation sales taxes such as Measure R in Los Angeles. For the poor, higher store prices in exchange for lower sales taxes is not such a bad tradeoff.

A person truly concerned for the welfare of the poor opposes minimum parking requirements, which raise housing prices, raise prices at the store, raise tax rates, and places a traffic burden on the nearby streets and freeways; and supports demand-responsive tolling which is less regressive than fuel taxes and makes the roads more efficient and therefore reduces or eliminates the need to widen them at taxpayer expense.

Its well known that services like Spotify don't make much money. They charge the cost of a CD a month, which is way more than I used to spend on CDs. Yet, everyone in the chain is struggling.

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...:

" Roger Entner of Recon Analytics says streaming music services should be sustainable when they reach 10 million paying users. "

I am not sure how big the streaming market will become, but 10 million users just to break even sounds like a lot. I wouldn't be surprised if 10 years from now only two or three streaming services are actually profitable.

Those 2 or 3 companies will wield all the power and eventually re-negotiate deals that are horrid for the music industry.

I worry that the (indie) labels are just being short sited. They should welcome several players in the streaming market and charge them a reasonable rate. That's the best way they can ensure the streaming music industry is alive and healthy.

"With persistent memory, the machine state gets messed up, you are so screwed."

Uh, have you looked into your computer recently? I believe you'll find either this little device called "an HDD" or this other little device called "an SSD". And people with those seldom get screwed.

If you read the article from the previous slashdot story about HP's "The Machine", you will find that they are not simply trying to use memsistors to replace main memory, but that they are also trying to consolidate the storage memory and working memory into a single piece of memory, this is why it is considered to be substantially different memory architecture which also requires the OS to work a little differently too... if you are old enough think "Ram Disk"

The difference being that usually any stored data to be used by the processor has to first be loaded into working memory from the large slow storage memory... as i'm sure you are aware, which is why SSDs are so popular... but even NAND is many times slower than SDRAM, so the separation remains.

The idea is that if a sufficiently fast, dense, persistent and cheap type of memory can be found then the best of both can be consolidated into one. The concern of the OP is that issues affecting running state could affect the traditionally less dynamic stored state... Working memory is usually treated as volatile and disposable, and your block device is not, but the line is now blurred.

I think it's a reasonable concern, but one that is likely to be addressed by the OS, a less physical separation between what is running state and what is not would need to be implemented, but at the same time the advantages of not "loading" data need to be retained... making everything that goes into the running state duplicate would bring back the "loading" problem slightly.

Actually, in New York City, a Taxi Medallion (required on a per-car basis) is around a million dollars.

Maybe the problem is not with Uber, but with the cost of being licensed. Is ~200,000 Euros really justified?

200k EU is cheap compared to NYC's $1M medallians.

It's blatently anti-competitive.

No, it is the essence of competition. Every market has rules. The city limits the number of licenses in order to keep the number of taxis reasonable. Many cities also regulate the rates. These are the "rules" of the market. The fact that medallions trade for that much indicates that taxis are still profitable and new players are willing to pay that much for a medallion in order to enter the market. Medallions, in general, are fully transferrable and can be freely sold or traded. New ones are auctioned off periodically. If the market was anticompetitive, the major players would collude and not bid against each other, resulting in lower medallion costs. The fact that people can and do pay that much for one indicates that there is enough competition.

Maybe the problem is not with Uber, but with the cost of being licensed. Is ~200,000 Euros really justified?

200k EU is cheap compared to NYC's $1M medallians.

It's blatently anti-competitive.

A NYC taxi medallian can break $1M..

And that doesn't include other regulatory costs, insurance, vehicle, nothing.

First of all, the level of firearm ownership in an area does have an effect on the firearm homicide rate. It correlates -

http://ajph.aphapublications.o...

Violent crime has gone down in most of the industrialized world over the past 3 decades, regardless of whether a country restricts firearms or not -

http://rgambler.com/2013/11/03...
http://jpo.wrlc.org/bitstream/...
http://www.economist.com/news/...

However, America's violent crime rate is much higher than most developed countries -

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/201...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

The growing consensus (in public policy circles at least) these days is that it is not gun ownership that is causing this violence, but the American gun culture -

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...
http://world.time.com/2012/12/...
http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/t...

The problem is that we keep looking at gun ownership rates The Swiss has high levels of gun ownership, but they also have a very strict culture of gun safety and training. Men are required to undergo military training and be in the reserves for 10 years, keeping their sealed army-issued firearm at home or in the Zeughaus, for use in case of invasion. Thus, they have lots of guns, but little gun crime.

Now, the question is how do you measure gun culture? In America you have this issues with two main groups poisoning the culture - the gangs and the "don't tread on me" types. How can you design a study to measure the effect of this culture on gun crime?

Employment in manufacturing in the united states is down over 30% in 40 years.
In that time, the population has quadrupled from 76 million to 308 million.
Manufacturing employees have dropped from 18 million to 12 million.
Manufacturing jobs have dropped from 23% to 4% of jobs. Similar declines in UK and Japan.

Ok, so we have the US, UK, and Japan. That in total is roughly 7% of the global population. Why do you think that is at all an accurate characterization of global industry employment?

During that same period, China went from zero employment in modern manufacture (they had plenty in primitive and mostly useless industries like excessive brick manufacture in 1970) to 100 million.

India has still held steady at over 10% employment in manufacture since 1960 despite massive population growth (over 100 million currently BTW) and the recent global recession. I doubt they had a lot of modern manufacture back in 1960.

While sure, that's probaby somewhat less manufacture jobs as total global employment (though apparently it's still around 14% of total global employment today), it's still growth in jobs as I noted.

Further, I see from the googling that I did to come up with the above links, that there's a lot of dishonesty currently in discussion of global employment in manufacture. The biggest change is simply that too many people are discounting both the transition of manufacture from the developed world to the rest and the recent, very severe global recession. We also have the ignoring of attendant resource extraction and service industry jobs associated with this manufacture.

Just because a recession results in a short term decline in global manufacturing employment doesn't mean that it will result in a long term decline in global manufacturing employment. Nor is focusing solely on the US, UK, or Japan an honest appraisal of global manufacturing employment.

Like Electricians? companies cant pull this shit on Electricians, if IT people would pull their heads out of their ass and unionize the problem would solve it's self overnight.

Corporations hate unions and have a ton of advertising power. They've managed to convince otherwise intelligent people that forming communities for the common good is bad. It's like pointing AT&T and saying that mom and pop shops are the devil. Though I will say that having to hire a union boss just to make sure a few temp workers don't slack off is stupid. Once again, there are good unions and bad ones.

Here's a quote I love: http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Generations of students, steeped in neoclassical economics, were taught that setting the price of labor above its equilibrium level causes supply to exceed demand and leads to more unemployment. It makes sense. But as physicist Doyne Farmer once wrote, “If one were to go through any standard introductory economics textbook, and color every statement pink with weak empirical confirmation, most of the book would be pink.”

It talks about Wages, but also applies to what Econ Textbooks say about unions.

Posting as AC because a pro union stance would probably kill any future job prospects.

No serious economist supports the minimum wage.

You're uninformed and have a vastly over-sized opinion of your own knowledge. Plenty of very credible economists support the idea of a minimum wage, in fact many support a minimum wage nearly 50% higher than the current US minimum wage source here

You know when you see 'stupid' people saying they don't see why doctors, lawyers, scientists, programmers etc get paid so much because they don't understand what they do and thus think it must be easy? That's like you commenting on what 'serious' economists think when you clearly haven't got a fucking clue.

Amazon is not going after Apple, they are going after IBM. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure are the leaders in this space, and are hitting reliability and scalability metrics that are pushing the old models out of business.

Bloomberg had a great article this month on how IBM is losing *government* contracts (its bread and butter) to AWS.

  http://mobile.businessweek.com...

yea, HBO is really killing themselves.

You speak wisely Kimosabe. There is a shortage of welders now.

So, while what you say is correct, you're missing the point entirely.

Another point that seems to be missing from the discussion is fracking. This isn't traditional oil drilling they're talking about. Fracking wells, unlike traditional wells, come with a very sharp drop in production after only a couple of years.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/u-dot-s-dot-shale-oil-boom-may-not-last-as-fracking-wells-lack-staying-power

Chesapeake Energyâ(TM)s (CHK) Serenity 1-3H well near Oklahoma City came in as a gusher in 2009, pumping more than 1,200 barrels of oil a day and kicking off a rush to drill that extended into Kansas. Now the well produces less than 100 barrels a day, state records show. Serenityâ(TM)s swift decline sheds light on a dirty secret of the oil boom: It may not last. Shale wells start strong and fade fast, and producers are drilling at a breakneck pace to hold output steady. In the fields, this incessant need to drill is known as the Red Queen, after the character in Through the Looking-Glass who tells Alice, âoeIt takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.â

Low taxes on output for 4 years means the State has given up its opportunity to tax most of a fracking well's production.

This is a naked resource grab that will leave the land scarred and the frackers no where to be found once the oil disappears.

I assume you thought to reply to me because of the similarity between your scenario and the mistake GP made?

It really sounds like another instance of regulatory capture, in which the industry encourages or allows an idea to become enshrined into law that just so happens to benefit its bottom line. The fossil fuel industry is one that can bring to bear a nearly unlimited budget for things like lawyers, lobbyists, advertisers, etc. If they ignore or applaud a law, it's because it serves their interests. Otherwise you'd get a demonstration of the clout they wield. I mean, to anyone unfamiliar with this industry, "you keep the first few years' revenue, then you pay" sounds gracefully fair.

So, while what you say is correct, you're missing the point entirely.

Another point that seems to be missing from the discussion is fracking.
This isn't traditional oil drilling they're talking about.
Fracking wells, unlike traditional wells, come with a very sharp drop in production after only a couple of years.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/u-dot-s-dot-shale-oil-boom-may-not-last-as-fracking-wells-lack-staying-power

Chesapeake Energyâ(TM)s (CHK) Serenity 1-3H well near Oklahoma City came in as a gusher in 2009, pumping more than 1,200 barrels of oil a day and kicking off a rush to drill that extended into Kansas. Now the well produces less than 100 barrels a day, state records show. Serenityâ(TM)s swift decline sheds light on a dirty secret of the oil boom: It may not last. Shale wells start strong and fade fast, and producers are drilling at a breakneck pace to hold output steady. In the fields, this incessant need to drill is known as the Red Queen, after the character in Through the Looking-Glass who tells Alice, âoeIt takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.â

Low taxes on output for 4 years means the State has given up its opportunity to tax most of a fracking well's production.

This is a naked resource grab that will leave the land scarred and the frackers no where to be found once the oil disappears.

Does this number include the duplicate HD channels, the spanish channels, the religious channels, or the pay-per-view channels?

The Spanish speaking market is far from trivial.

May 07--Univision Communications Inc. executive Randel Falco is warning that Comcast Corp.'s proposed $45.2 billion deal for Time Warner Cable Inc. could create a single cable-TV company that serves 91 percent of the nation's Hispanic households.

''That gives this new company staggering influence over Hispanic consumers,'' Falco said this week.

The nation's Hispanic population would be concentrated in the big Comcast/Time Warner Cable markets of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Miami.

Comcast's deal-making worries Univision exec

While the "average viewer" may only watch about twenty channels, they won't be not be the same channels, even in the same household. Disney understands this, which is why ESPN sports and Disney family entertainment are very successfully and very profitably bundled.

Agree with them or not, the NRA knows what is needed to protect their favorite amendment.

The influence of industry dollars? Sorry, I don't think there are any privacy manufacturers.

In 2011, the NRA raised over $200M from individual contributors. Between 2005 and 2012, the NRA received $15M from gun manufacturers, which averages to a little over $2M per year.

This means that the industry funds approximately 1% of the NRA; the other 99% comes from its membership.

Source: Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

False. It's a nice myth of antiquity, of the good old days being better than today but it is totally false.

Today's concrete is far better than what was produced in the past. Of course, I'm not talking about crappy badly done concrete but the good stuff that is used in most good engineering works. Sure, you can point to a government bid sidewalk falling apart but that is meaningless anecdotal evidence in this discussion. That's politics and greed, not materials science and chemistry.

[Citation needed]

Mine is

The most common blend of modern concrete, known as Portland cement, a formulation in use for nearly 200 years, can’t come close to matching that track record, says Marie Jackson, a research engineer at the University of California at Berkeley who was part of the Roman concrete research team. “The maritime environment, in particular, is not good for Portland concrete. In seawater, it has a service life of less than 50 years. After that, it begins to erode,” Jackson says. The researchers now know why ancient Roman concrete is so superior.[...]the findings, which were published earlier this month in the Journal of the American Ceramic Society and American Mineralogist, are considered so important[...]

link

http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://www.groklaw.net/article...
http://www.basicallytech.com/b...
http://www.digitalresearch.biz...
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
"The PC world might have looked very different today had Kildall's Digital Research prevailed as the operating system of choice for personal computers. DRI offered manufacturers the same low-cost licensing model which Bill Gates is today credited with inventing by sloppy journalists - only with far superior technology. DRI's roadmap showed a smooth migration to reliable multi-tasking, and in GEM, a portable graphical environment which would undoubtedly have brought the GUI to the low-cost PC desktop years before Microsoft's Windows finally emerged as a standard. But then Kildall was motivated by technical excellence, not by the need to dominate his fellow man."

Yet, consider what came from Chuck Moore of pre-Bayh-Dole true academic traditions of MIT & Stanford and then internal support in manufacturing and then supporting government-funded Astronomical research:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
http://www.colorforth.com/HOPL...
"NRAO, 1971 ... NRAO appreciated what I had wrought. They had an arrangement with a consulting firm to identify spin-off technology. The issue of patenting Forth was discussed at length. But since software patents were controversial and might involve the Supreme Court, NRAO declined to pursue the matter. Whereupon, rights reverted to me. I don't think ideas should be patentable. Hindsight agrees that Forth's only chance lay in the public domain. Where it has flourished."

Forth still can be a great BIOS and command line system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O...

Although IBM deserves credit for popularizing the VM idea with System 360 and then VM.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V...

Smalltalk by Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls and others was a another great option.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Kildall, Moore, and Kay/Ingalls all got the idea of virtual machines (with their own ways). Lisp-ers may have got a bit of that too.

We had choices as a society. I saw some of them first hand in the 1970s and 1980s when I started in computing. I bought Forth cartridges for the Commodore VIC and C64. I worked very briefly on a computer with CP/M (although using Forth on it though). The OS choice pushed by the person born with a million dollar trust fund who "dumpster dived" for OS listings won (who did little of the development work himself) -- with an empire built on QDOS which has shaky legal standing as a clone of CP/M which is probably why IBM did not buy it itself. And we were the worse for it as a society IMHO.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
http://www.complex.com/tech/20...

But that problematical path would not have been possible without political and legal decisions to base the development of computing around the idea of "artificial scarcity" via copyright

I find it odd that you would bring up pets.com from 14 years ago. Is there no better example of the waning importance of Silicon Valley?

This just underscores my point of how folks have been incorrectly predicting the decline and fall of SV for a long time now. Going out on a limb, IMHO, a lot of this is rooted in a desire to see SV taken down a notch. In other words, I believe such negative assessments are based more on emotion than any real evidence the bay area is slowing down. The failure of pets.com in 2000 might make for a sensational story, but it's unwise to write off the bay area as "a little bubble", "too confident" or "arrogant". To do so in 2000 would have meant missing out on things like the transformation of Apple, the ascension of Google, the success of startups like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, etc.

I've lived in both Austin as well as SV. Both places are great, but from a tech perspective, IMHO Austin doesn't hold a candle to SV. I just now googled some stats on VC funding in Austin vs SV. In Austin it surged from 81.7 million in Q1 2013 to 213.8 in Q1 2014. Not bad.

http://www.bizjournals.com/aus...

But this compares with 2.2 billion invested in Silicon Valley in Q1 2013 and 4.7 billion in Q1 2014 (or about 1/2 of the world-wide venture capital investments).

http://www.mercurynews.com/bus...

For good measure, I looked up VC stats for the entire state of Texas. In all of 2013, Texas got 1.3 billion. 50% went to Austin startups. This compares with 12.3 billion for Silicon Valley for 2013.

http://www.businessweek.com/ap...

There's a reason VCs choose to invest their money in bay area startups. They believe in the place...its past, present and future...and are willing to bet substantial amounts of money on it.

At this point Greenpeace is as stuck in its position of advocating against Nuclear Energy as the NRA is against gun control, and they are both looking like obstacles to any positive change in the status quo

I oppose taxpayers paying for nuclear power. Actually I advocate eliminating all subsidies. And don't think energy companies aren't subsidized. Allocation of subsidies in the United States lists some subsidies different energy producers received between 1950 and 2010. Nuclear power received $73 billion in federal subsidies. "BusinessWeek" has the article When It Comes to Government Subsidies, Dirty Energy Still Cleans Up date 21 October 2012..

I also support the NRA and their stance on gun controls. The only effective gun control is when the shooter hits what they aim at. And if they hit someone they should pay for it. I find it ironic the first "environmentalists", those who cared for the environment, were conservationists and hunters. Now how can hunters be environmentalists? They kill wildlife. Guess what, they also want the environment that that wildlife lives in to be clean and not polluted. Teddy Roosevelt was an avid hunter who as president created the National Park Service. He wanted to preserve wild lands for hunting among other reasons. Many hunters supported this too.

FalconWolf

It really depends on the end game for *you*.
Client data might be used for "full spectrum" efforts e.g. propaganda, deception, mass messaging, pushing stories, spoofing, alias development or psychology.
i.e. the service you use is weekend.
The other aspect is how many groups knew of this crypto trick? The US and just a few friendly govs, their staff, their contractors and any ex staff or staff open to faith or cash needs.
Just another way in :)
http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Except that the town wasn't screwed up - a well outside of town was on fire for several days. One person (an employee) unfortunately did die. The payoff was for the noise and inconvenience not due to any contamination. Then, some ant-drilling group posted some petition showing that the residents were pissed off. The only problem? Nobody in the town had actually signed it. Here's the link: http://www.businessweek.com/ap.... You may want to read your news more critically and not jump on the internet's immediate "omg, evil corporation" crap that seems to fester immediately when some news comes up.

I wish you had not posed this AC. The moderators may miss a very good and informative post. But, it does not support the mantra of "Oil Bad, Green Good" so they may have modded it "-1 Attacks My World View."

Except that the town wasn't screwed up - a well outside of town was on fire for several days. One person (an employee) unfortunately did die. The payoff was for the noise and inconvenience not due to any contamination. Then, some ant-drilling group posted some petition showing that the residents were pissed off. The only problem? Nobody in the town had actually signed it. Here's the link: http://www.businessweek.com/ap.... You may want to read your news more critically and not jump on the internet's immediate "omg, evil corporation" crap that seems to fester immediately when some news comes up.

Believe it or not, there are also some instances where cryptography is not needed, such as for purely publicly accessible information that can benefit from being cached, etc.

I don't think there is any instance where cryptography would not be useful, as long as privacy is an option. Most Internet communications are point-to-point, so caching should not be done in between. From an opsec point of view, it's less risky to use encryption for confidential information if you also use encryption for everything else, too.

Even for publicly cached data, you could use cryptography for authenticity instead of confidentiality. For example, DNSSEC is about proving the authenticity of DNS information, so your name resolver doesn't get fooled by DNS hijacking. Authenticity turns out to be useful even for completely mundane stuff.

Who really killed the EV? It was the "consumer" who was beating down the manufacturer's door for an EV but never put down their cash when the manufacturer delivered on that demand.

Tesla is, in fact, a highly profitable company. They paid off their $465 million Department of Energy loan nine years early. So the rest of your rant is irrelevant. Tesla is profitably making electric vehicles that actual customers are buying. And they already have designs coming up that will be considerably less expensive than the Model S, and will almost certainly see much higher sales figures as a result.

This is political wisecrackery with no legitimate basis to back it up. Congress has been informed for over seven years that this is an untruth. (Here's an article in Businessweekfrom all the way back in 2007 citing a study done by the Urban Institute debunking this myth.

This information has been reported to Congress on both the floor and in committee hearings. (Sorry, at one point, I had an old printout of one report supporting this statement. I can't seem to locate it, either in paper form nor on Google.) Congressional leaders willingly refuse to accept this truth, simply because there is more to gain politically by not accepting it. (Huge amounts of money are circulated by lobbyists in support of political agendas influenced by this...opening up more H1B visas, for example.)

Rush speaks for his corporate masters in the sense that he must keep ratings up. Rush's audience is older white men - many are in fact college educated - surprised me too.

Rush makes, what $30 million/year? To get that he has to suck that demographic in. To do that, he spouts the shit they want to hear and the shit the pisses them off.

See, the best way to get people to listen or watch is to piss them off and to scare them.

Rush, Hannity, all of Fox News does this - they even bend the truth significantly to do it.

Here's their rhetorical formula:

1. State a fact - ex. a law was passed to force (actually encourage) banks to lend money for homes in poor neighborhoods (Community Reinvestment Act of 1977)

2. State a half truth that makes sense - "Banks HAD to lend to poor people who probably couldn't afford it!"

3. State a lie - "This Democrat law caused the financial collapse of 2008"

4. Skip details that also hurt "their" side - Bush enforced that law while he was POTUS (see previous cite) and the fact that those borrowers had a LESS of a default rate than the general population. (Old white middle class guys don't want to hear that poor black people are better than they are.)

Here's another little secret - Rush and Hannity and all of Fox News popped champagne when Obama was elected and reelected - "There's not much to talk about when your guy is in office." - station manager of a Talk Radio Station.

Posting as AC to make it a little harder to find me.

The Jeff Hammerbacher articlethat quote is from on this subject is also very good: http://www.businessweek.com/ma...

Then why on earth would NSA code be inserted into Android.

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

bah

I also submitted this story. Here's a link to the Bloomburg Businessweek article.

From T other FA: "Eventually, Getty could include advertisements within the embedded images, much like YouTube videos embedded on personal blogs show ads [...] But Peters says Getty hasn’t figured out how exactly that will work."

Note that they are also specifically *not* stating that they will stop filing lawsuits over unlicensed use of their images, although they're moving away from that in the case of non-commercial use. The big question is, where will Getty draw the line and decide what is and isn't a "commercial use" of their images? And, is this a means for them to justify seeking larger payments for unlicensed use - because they will be able to argue that there's a "free alternative"?