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The cover story of The Economist this week is about the development of alternative sources of energy, and how little the Bush administration is doing to encourage that development. Rather than implementing policies to decrease the demand for fossil fuels and increase the supply of alternatives, the government's policies, including the new Energy Bill, simply focus on increasing the supply of fossil fuels.

Sigh.

The cover story of The Economist this week is about the development of alternative sources of energy, and how little the Bush administration is doing to encourage that development. Rather than implementing policies to decrease the demand for fossil fuels and increase the supply of alternatives, the government's policies, including the new Energy Bill, simply focus on increasing the supply of fossil fuels.

Sigh.

This research is also reported in the current issue of The Economist, October 25-31. It is on page 73 of the print edition; here is a link to the online version.

Oh please! Quit being such a free market fanboy and stop viewing "quality of life" in terms of raw GDP.

This article from the Economist which pretty much debunks the notion that Americans are so much better off than Europeans.

The simple fact is a lot of the stuff we spend money on, such as excessive prisons and gold plated highways that foster urban sprawl, raises our GDP output, but not our general welfare.

Chasing the leader

Feb 6th 2003
From The Economist print edition

Are Europeans really so much worse off than Americans?

AMERICA has been the world's economic leader for over a century. Economic theory suggests that western Europe should be catching up. Yet average GDP per head in the European Union, measured at purchasing-power parity, is only three-quarters of that in the United States. A popular explanation is that European firms are less productive because they are hampered by labour- and product-market regulation. But European productivity, measured by output per hour worked, has in fact almost caught up with America's. If Europeans are so productive, though, why are they apparently so much poorer than Americans?

America's much-trumpeted "productivity miracle" in the late 1990s created the misleading impression that Europe significantly lags America in the productivity league. It is true that, since 1995, American GDP per hour worked has risen by an annual average of 1.9%, compared with only 1.3% in the European Union. However, over any longer period, up to half a century, Europe's productivity growth has outpaced America's. Since 1990 American productivity has risen by 1.6% a year; the EU's has risen by 1.8%. Since 1950 America's productivity growth has averaged 2%, Europe's 3.3%. According to figures from the Conference Board, an American business group, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands all now boast higher output per hour than the United States. Average productivity in the EU is still 7% less, largely because of lower productivity in Britain, Spain, Greece and Portugal--but the gap has continued to close over the past decade.

The narrowing of the productivity gap has not, however, been reflected in living standards, as measured by GDP per head. The chart, taken from an analysis* by Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, shows how Europe's productivity and GDP per head fell relative to America's from the mid-19th century until around 1950. Productivity has since rebounded, almost reaching American levels. GDP per head, on the other hand, rose sharply until 1970, but then flattened off at 77% of America's.

The surge in Europe's productivity since 1950 is largely explained by reconstruction after the war and the belated exploitation of electricity and the mass production of cars--40 years after America. The puzzle is why Europe's GDP per head has lagged so far behind productivity. Germany's GDP per man-hour is 1% higher than in America, but its GDP per person is 25% lower. The main reason is that average hours worked in Europe have fallen so sharply. In part, this reflects an increase in unemployment and withdrawals from the labour force; but it also reflects a preference for shorter working weeks and longer holidays.

A broader analysis of living standards, based on economic welfare rather than crude GDP, argues Mr Gordon, would place some value on Europeans' greater leisure time. But how much of the depressing effect of shorter hours on Europe's GDP per head should be ascribed to people's free choice to take longer holidays than overworked Americans, and how much to union pressure or government policies that try to spread jobs by compulsory limits on hours of work? Mr Gordon guesses that one-third of the discrepancy between Europe's productivity and its GDP per head, relative to America's, represents freely chosen leisure. Corrected for this, Europe's income per

Settlements for tort litigation now exceed $200 billion annually in America. At 2% of GDP, this is far more than in other rich countries...

Of this, Trial Lawyers Inc, America's law firms, take a juicy $40 billion. Their revenue growth has been a remarkable 9% a year over the past three decades, more than the compound growth of the Dow Jones industrial average...

Trial Lawyers Inc now caters to at least 74 separate product lines. Alongside old favourites such as asbestos and malpractice lawsuits, hot growth markets now include lawsuits over obesity, mobile phones and mould, as well as more speculative innovations such as business disruption litigation on behalf of Hollywood prostitutes "disrupted" by film-production teams....

Basically they showed that conventional TCP is not very good at scaling to large flows like the ones in the article. He described a typical broadband Internet connection as being able to utilize only about 27 percent of the available bandwidth, while their modified FAST TCP connection reached 95 percent efficiency. He had some nice test results showing how the protocols reacted to having to share bandwidth with other flows, and pointed out how when other flows finished and more bandwidth opened up, conventional TCP was very slow to take advantage of the increased bandwidth.

There's an older Economist article describing the protocol in more detail for those who are interested.

Agent's seem to be in the news.

There's also an article in the Economist about using "agents" to model economic and social systems.

So the question is: to what extent are these "agent" systems something new, and to what extent is it just re-packaging and/or hype?

You can read about Robert Reich's views on offshoring, and he is definately not a Republican.

The US faces a massive current account deficit with the rest of the world. There are three solutions. #1 is to start a massive global trade war, just like before the Great Depression. #2 is to devalue the dollar, leading to massive US inflation.

The third solution is to recognize that some industry will grow in India and China, and that people there will finally be able to afford more American products. 40 million Chinese now have $1000 or more per year to spend on home remnnovation, hello Home Depot China!

1. no offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
2. no offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment
3. offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
4. offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment

To eliminate some combinations that are impossible, we first consider whether we can eliminate offshoring. Offshoring occurs from the moment that Americans engage in trade with any foreign country. For example, if we buy apples grown in Thailand, then we are engaging in offshoring because the foreign labor grew those apples. Can we eliminate foreign trade? No.

The stickier question is whether offshoring eliminates jobs. According to the "The misery of manufacturing", "The Economist" says, "No." The USA is a big market, and manufacturers locate engineering and design centers in the market in which they have a significant presence. For example, Hyundai is now building a factory and design center in the USA, according to "Speed Kills" by "Forbes".

Therefore, we cannot eliminate offshoring, and it is neither bad nor good. It is neutral. We are left with only option #3 (offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment) and option #4 (offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment).

Can we eliminate H-1B/L-1 employment? Absolutely yes. Since companies can offshore their R&D work, they can build an R&D center in India and hire all the engineers that they claim to need. Each engineer hired in India will cost only 1/10 of the cost of an H-1B/L-1 engineer.

Supporters of H-1B/L-1 employment say that an Indian employed as an H-1B worker in the USA will spend his $100,000 salary in the USA, thus creating more jobs. That observation is bogus. If the Indian wants to work for an American company, he should go back to India to work at $5,000 at the American site in Bangalore. The American company will then save $95,000. That money does not simply sit idly in the bank. The American company will re-invest that $95,000 into the domestic facilities and hire an American citizen.

Furthermore, when Hyundai sets up its design center in the USA, the Indian will be in India, and the jobs at the design center will go to American citizens.

In short, option #3 (offshoring but no H-1B/L-1 employment) is the best scenario. In fact, offshoring defeats the strongest bogus argument supporting H-1B/L-1 employment. When a company like Google says that it absolutely needs to hire H-1B/L-1 workers because Americans are not good enough, then we say, "Fine. Set up shop overseas. There is plenty of labor there."

Please read "H-1B Myths". Contact your representative in Washington and tell them to terminate the H-1B/L-1 program. Do not wait for the person sitting at the next computer terminal to do your civic duty. Move your ass. Do the your job.

... from the desk of the reporter

1. no offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
2. no offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment
3. offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment
4. offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment

To eliminate some combinations that are impossible, we first consider whether we can eliminate offshoring. Offshoring occurs from the moment that Americans engage in trade with any foreign country. For example, if we buy apples grown in Thailand, then we are engaging in offshoring because the foreign labor grew those apples. Can we eliminate foreign trade? No.

The stickier question is whether offshoring eliminates jobs. According to the "The misery of manufacturing", "The Economist" says, "No." The USA is a big market, and manufacturers locate engineering and design centers in the market in which they have a significant presence. For example, Hyundai is now building a factory and design center in the USA, according to "Speed Kills" by "Forbes".

Therefore, we cannot eliminate offshoring, and it is neither bad nor good. It is neutral. We are left with only option #3 (offshoring and no H-1B/L-1 employment) and option #4 (offshoring and H-1B/L-1 employment).

Can we eliminate H-1B/L-1 employment? Absolutely yes. Since companies can offshore their R&D work, they can build an R&D center in India and hire all the engineers that they claim to need. Each engineer hired in India will cost only 1/10 of the cost of an H-1B/L-1 engineer.

Supporters of H-1B/L-1 employment say that an Indian employed as an H-1B worker in the USA will spend his $100,000 salary in the USA, thus creating more jobs. That observation is bogus. If the Indian wants to work for an American company, he should go back to India to work at $5,000 at the American site in Bangalore. The American company will then save $95,000. That money does not simply sit idly in the bank. The American company will re-invest that $95,000 into the domestic facilities and hire an American citizen.

Furthermore, when Hyundai sets up its design center in the USA, the Indian will be in India, and the jobs at the design center will go to American citizens.

In short, option #3 (offshoring but no H-1B/L-1 employment) is the best scenario. In fact, offshoring defeats the strongest bogus argument supporting H-1B/L-1 employment. When a company like Google says that it absolutely needs to hire H-1B/L-1 workers because Americans are not good enough, then we say, "Fine. Set up shop overseas. There is plenty of labor there."

Please read "H-1B Myths". Contact your representative in Washington and tell them to terminate the H-1B/L-1 program. Do not wait for the person sitting at the next computer terminal to do your civic duty. Move your ass. Do the your job.

... from the desk of the reporter

>> stronger than the dollar

This is like saying a gallon is stronger than a quart.

Currencies are just different units of measurement. What you need to keep your eye on is the PPP, or purchasing power parity, fancy econ-speak for the idea that all currencies should have equal claim on resources after differences in the currency's face value have been worked out. The PPP for all currencies should be about the same in the long run, or arbitrage will occur to shore up the difference.

Check out the Big Mac for a semi-serious overview of PPP.

Based on the natural history or spread of HIV in Africa, Weinstein and Alibek proposed that declining immunological responses to smallpox -- due to the elimination of the disease and the discontinuation of immunizations -- may have been associated with the emergence of HIV.

This observation bears an uncanny resemblance to the observation that eliminating various childhood diseases causes a person to later become susceptible to other illnesses. Please visit the web site, "MEDIA REPORTS ASK THE QUESTION: IS THE CURE WORSE THAN THE DISEASE? ". In "Plagued by Cures", "The Economist" observes that the incidence of asthma rose sharply after the elimination of measles, for example.

I would wager good money that Dr. Raymond Weinstein has stumbled onto the cure for AIDS. Please read "Smallpox Vaccine Could Prevent AIDS". All previous attempts tried to attack HIV directly but failed because the virus (1) mutates too rapidly for vaccinations to succeed or (2) cleverly hides in remote cells that anti-viral drugs cannot reach. On the other hand, this proposal by Weinstein to use smallpox vaccination to close the door (i. e. the CCR5 receptor) to HIV infection instead of killing the virus directly just might stop HIV infection.

I am optimistic.

... from the desk of the reporter

Where can I see these articles? I need to pass them around.

I think I've found one at economist.com.

I agree with a newspaper or book offering greater depth, but I find a happy medium in a good weekly magazine, particularly The Economist. Great writing, informed reporters, and a decidedly detached journalistic perspective seperate it from anything else I've seen out there. I used to subscribe, but had a hard time finishing each magazine by the time the next one arrived...

They are trying to pitch the site as an Economist-style, no-bylines gig.

If you want to read a magazine like The Economist, then read The Economist.

Never invest in an group whose goal is: "We aim to be like 'them'!"

and never invest in Sun, but that's another story... :)

-B

Oh, there's also discussion about this research in The Economist

According to "IBM steals server sales from Sun", IBM has been handily defeating Sun in its bread-and-butter market. As Sun's share of the UNIX server market shrinks, Sun itself shrinks. The worst is yet to come.

... from the desk of the reporter

According to "IBM steals server sales from Sun", IBM has been handily defeating Sun in its bread-and-butter market. As Sun's share of the UNIX server market shrinks, Sun itself shrinks. The worst is yet to come.

... from the desk of the reporter

Even if there is any money, fines for failed security, false advertising, and anti-trust problems could slap that last dot-com MLM spinning further into the red.

So, RedHat could actually be ahead.

I saw this article over an hour ago, not through slashdot, and i thought i had a story to submit due to misreading the sentence, though i guess the sentence itself was easy to misread.

If you click on Linux in Backgrounds it takes you to a page in the Economist's Research Tools section, there i read "In May 2003 Microsoft attacked on another front, signing a licensing agreement with SCO, which produces a proprietary brand of Unix and has launched a far-reaching copyright-infringment lawsuit against IBM."

On my first and second, and perhaps third, reading of the sentence i somehow thought that "and" belonged to Microsoft, meaning that microsoft launched a lawsuit against IBM. And i sorta wondered why they said that until i realized the "and" actually belonged to SCO. Try it, it still feels easy to misread.

I'm torn on whether to be surprised by this--the Economist has run stories before (there was one last issue on the SCO deal) that seem to be subtly, quietly favoring GNU/Linux.

Here are a couple other, older Economist citations:

• From a story called "Hackers Rule" from February 18th, 1999:

  Companies using the Internet often rely on open-source software for mission-critical tasks. Yahoo!, the worlds most popular website, uses an open-source operating system called FreeBSD, a web-server program called Apache and the programming language Perl. Without collectively written code, the Internet would disintegrate: Apache runs on 53% of all web servers, and Sendmail routes 78% of all e-mail.

• From a story called A lingua franca for the Internet from September 20th, 2001

  These languages rose to prominence largely because they are so flexible and adaptable to the needs of the Internet. Examples include Perl, a language that can be used to communicate between a web server and its clients, and Python, a language used, among other things, for managing discussion forums on the Internet. Other examples with more awkward names include Tcl/Tk, awk and C Shell. There is even a scripting language called JavaScripta clever marketing ploy, since it is linguistically unrelated to Java.

Those two are interesting, among other reasons, for the technical precision in percentages (I said it was precise; I didn't say it was accurate :-), the awareness of non-Linux open-source operating systems, and, well, that little jab about JavaScript's (re)naming being a "clever marketing ploy"--in other words, a deceit, by any other name.

If you read over the various articles the searches pull up, it sure seems that the Economist is a lot more on the ball than say, Time or Newsweek.

--tom

(PS: You might take quick exception to their characterizations of Perl and Python, but a reread will show that those were just example application areas cited.)

I'm torn on whether to be surprised by this--the Economist has run stories before (there was one last issue on the SCO deal) that seem to be subtly, quietly favoring GNU/Linux.

Here are a couple other, older Economist citations:

• From a story called "Hackers Rule" from February 18th, 1999:

  Companies using the Internet often rely on open-source software for mission-critical tasks. Yahoo!, the worlds most popular website, uses an open-source operating system called FreeBSD, a web-server program called Apache and the programming language Perl. Without collectively written code, the Internet would disintegrate: Apache runs on 53% of all web servers, and Sendmail routes 78% of all e-mail.

• From a story called A lingua franca for the Internet from September 20th, 2001

  These languages rose to prominence largely because they are so flexible and adaptable to the needs of the Internet. Examples include Perl, a language that can be used to communicate between a web server and its clients, and Python, a language used, among other things, for managing discussion forums on the Internet. Other examples with more awkward names include Tcl/Tk, awk and C Shell. There is even a scripting language called JavaScripta clever marketing ploy, since it is linguistically unrelated to Java.

Those two are interesting, among other reasons, for the technical precision in percentages (I said it was precise; I didn't say it was accurate :-), the awareness of non-Linux open-source operating systems, and, well, that little jab about JavaScript's (re)naming being a "clever marketing ploy"--in other words, a deceit, by any other name.

If you read over the various articles the searches pull up, it sure seems that the Economist is a lot more on the ball than say, Time or Newsweek.

--tom

(PS: You might take quick exception to their characterizations of Perl and Python, but a reread will show that those were just example application areas cited.)

I'm torn on whether to be surprised by this--the Economist has run stories before (there was one last issue on the SCO deal) that seem to be subtly, quietly favoring GNU/Linux.

Here are a couple other, older Economist citations:

• From a story called "Hackers Rule" from February 18th, 1999:

  Companies using the Internet often rely on open-source software for mission-critical tasks. Yahoo!, the worlds most popular website, uses an open-source operating system called FreeBSD, a web-server program called Apache and the programming language Perl. Without collectively written code, the Internet would disintegrate: Apache runs on 53% of all web servers, and Sendmail routes 78% of all e-mail.

• From a story called A lingua franca for the Internet from September 20th, 2001

  These languages rose to prominence largely because they are so flexible and adaptable to the needs of the Internet. Examples include Perl, a language that can be used to communicate between a web server and its clients, and Python, a language used, among other things, for managing discussion forums on the Internet. Other examples with more awkward names include Tcl/Tk, awk and C Shell. There is even a scripting language called JavaScripta clever marketing ploy, since it is linguistically unrelated to Java.

Those two are interesting, among other reasons, for the technical precision in percentages (I said it was precise; I didn't say it was accurate :-), the awareness of non-Linux open-source operating systems, and, well, that little jab about JavaScript's (re)naming being a "clever marketing ploy"--in other words, a deceit, by any other name.

If you read over the various articles the searches pull up, it sure seems that the Economist is a lot more on the ball than say, Time or Newsweek.

--tom

(PS: You might take quick exception to their characterizations of Perl and Python, but a reread will show that those were just example application areas cited.)

I'm torn on whether to be surprised by this--the Economist has run stories before (there was one last issue on the SCO deal) that seem to be subtly, quietly favoring GNU/Linux.

Here are a couple other, older Economist citations:

• From a story called "Hackers Rule" from February 18th, 1999:

  Companies using the Internet often rely on open-source software for mission-critical tasks. Yahoo!, the worlds most popular website, uses an open-source operating system called FreeBSD, a web-server program called Apache and the programming language Perl. Without collectively written code, the Internet would disintegrate: Apache runs on 53% of all web servers, and Sendmail routes 78% of all e-mail.

• From a story called A lingua franca for the Internet from September 20th, 2001

  These languages rose to prominence largely because they are so flexible and adaptable to the needs of the Internet. Examples include Perl, a language that can be used to communicate between a web server and its clients, and Python, a language used, among other things, for managing discussion forums on the Internet. Other examples with more awkward names include Tcl/Tk, awk and C Shell. There is even a scripting language called JavaScripta clever marketing ploy, since it is linguistically unrelated to Java.

Those two are interesting, among other reasons, for the technical precision in percentages (I said it was precise; I didn't say it was accurate :-), the awareness of non-Linux open-source operating systems, and, well, that little jab about JavaScript's (re)naming being a "clever marketing ploy"--in other words, a deceit, by any other name.

If you read over the various articles the searches pull up, it sure seems that the Economist is a lot more on the ball than say, Time or Newsweek.

--tom

(PS: You might take quick exception to their characterizations of Perl and Python, but a reread will show that those were just example application areas cited.)

The original link in the /. story goes to a page with some ad(s), however, the ads never materialize from the 3rd party server, which blocks the story from being shown at all! Control that ad server and censor what The Economist publishes on the web ;-). Smart people use CSS instead, not HTML tables.

The original link in the /. story goes to a page with some ad(s), however, the ads never materialize from the 3rd party server, which blocks the story from being shown at all! Control that ad server and censor what The Economist publishes on the web ;-). Smart people use CSS instead, not HTML tables.

The issue is that when a country moves away from the dollar, the cash comes back into circulation causing a downward pressure on exchange rates (As has been seen recently). The Fed can't really control this because it has only relatively crude tools and they don't have much control away from the domestic markets.

Actually, I worked on some capital markets reform projects, so you could say that I'm a kind of barefoot economist.

I have zero interest in Bennifer as well, and I would still agree that those stories qualify as "Ultra Liberalism 101". Equally, I'm sure that if I go to certain other sites, I might see a similar list ragging on about abortion, prayer and other nonsense, and I would dub that "Ultra Conservatism 101".
If you want real news, read something like the Economist. If you want ultra liberal crap, read the Nation. If you want ultra conservative crap, read/watch Fox News.

" Shipments of recorded music have dropped by 26% since 1999. The industry has responded with price rises, and so revenues have fallen by "just" 14%.
.....
Meanwhile, music companies continue to look flat-footed compared with other industries affected by piracy, such as the movie business. Warner Brothers slashed the price of its DVDs a few years ago, spurring an upsurge in sales. A side-effect was that some DVDs ended up being cheaper than CDs, making the CDs, which are typically shorter and have no visual content, look distinctly overpriced."

" Shipments of recorded music have dropped by 26% since 1999. The industry has responded with price rises, and so revenues have fallen by "just" 14%.
.....
Meanwhile, music companies continue to look flat-footed compared with other industries affected by piracy, such as the movie business. Warner Brothers slashed the price of its DVDs a few years ago, spurring an upsurge in sales. A side-effect was that some DVDs ended up being cheaper than CDs, making the CDs, which are typically shorter and have no visual content, look distinctly overpriced."

So what? It doen't have anything to do with the phyco Mc'bribe' or the actions of SCO.
Either "the Economist" or SCO seem to think it is.

More on this.

So since, SCO's from Utah why not substitute "mormons" for "open source": you're not born a mormon, you either become one by choice or are indoctrinated into the community by your parents just as parents indoctrinate their open source ideology onto their children.

By the way, McBride himself is a mormon, which explains a hell of a lot of things.

According the the Sep. 6th issue of The Economist there is a company in Massachusetts called MagiQin the final stages of testing a system which it plans to release commercially in the next few months.

"The scheme devised by MagiQ, called Navajo, does not use quantum effects to transmit the secret data. Instead, it is the keys used to encrypt the data that rely on quantum theory. If these keys are changed frequently (up to 1000 times a second in Navajo's case), the risk that an eavesdropper without the key would be able to decrypt the data can be proved mathematically to be zero.

mathematically unbreakable.

but we've heard that before.

"Just add another wheel to the Enigma machine Hermann. Those dim-witted English shopkeepers vill never figure it out... "

Ask anyone in Iraq whether it's safer over there right now or before the war (and yes, anyone includes the americans over there).

For one, I'm sure, you did not ask. Noone did. Such poll would be rather biased too, you know, because who really disliked Saddam's rule were routinely killed.

Imagine a driver loosing control of her/his car. The car spins and hits the guardrail, which badly injures everyone inside, but prevents it from going onto the other side of the road, which would not only have killed everyone inside, but also injured/killed others in head-on collision(s).

Will the occupants of the unfortunate car -- and some other witnesses -- blame the guardrail? You bet some will! They will also be quick to point out, that the car's suspension was made by a subsidiary of the same company, which made the railing. And yet despite all the compassion I may have for their sufferings, I can not blame the railing -- it did the right thing, prevening more injuries and destruction.

As Economist put it recently, after 12 years of wrangling it was right to call Saddam's bluff, even if bluff is all it turned out to be.

The US publicly states it is forming two separate expeditionary forces capable of fighting (and winning) a war on their own. Expeditionary forces aren't exactly defensive, you know.

Maybe this gives you an impression of how the rest of the world is starting to think about the US.

Then "the world" is stupid and/or ignorant. The US has maintained this policy since the WWII. As long as "the world" was scared of the Soviets, nobody minded (except for the Warsaw Pact). Now, that the US is, actually, considering a reduction of its military capabilities to winning one while merely sustaining another major campaign (as opposite from winning both, as you describe) you come out and claim we are agressive... If it was not for our "agression" you'd likely be speaking Russian by now and had to get in line in the dairy store at 6 in the morning to get milk.

Hmph. At the risk of sounding like a leftie:

All very Orwellian and Big Brother, the whole experiment was brought to an end by the CIA sponsored coup d'etat on the September 11th, 1973.

Why is this "Orwellian and Big Brother[ish]"? You seem to forget that the "CIA sponsored coup" was actually a pretty bloody affair itself... More than 3000 people "disappeared" (tortured and fed to the fishes), some because they were just suspected of left-of-center sypathies.

But don't take my word for it, read the following:
Amnesty International 1, Amnesty International 2, Amnesty International 3, Human Rights Watch, and even this week's Economist, etc... I could go on, but you get my drift.

Also, four times a year they run a special called the Technology Quarterly that covers new things in the tech world, which coincidentally was also in this week's issue. The topics this time around included cheaper solar cells, superconducting power transmission lines, nanomaterials, and quantum encryption.

The European Commission wants to avoid the American situation, in which case law drives authorities to issue computer-related patents all too easily, in particular for business methods and algorithms.

I hope they're right. If Europe really wants to become more independent from US influence, avoiding a US-style patent regime would be a wise choice.

I'm pretty sure that it's not really possible for a private citizen to charter the "Vomit Comet", but there are flights in Moscow. A US company is expecting to offer flights RSN.

Looks like Microsoft is trying to get on the "Grid Computing" bandwagon, which has been gathering steam ever since the economist ran an article about it. Oracle and IBM both have major Grid Computing initiatives, and Microsoft wants to pretend they can play with the Big Dogs in the Server Room.

Imagine once the Microsofties dumb the concept down to the Windows level... the 'My Grid' and 'Grids Close To Me' icons on an ostensibly well-trained admin's desktop... aaaaarrrggghh!

Of course, having this as a goal presupposes that it is a huge advantage. ISTM that countries like the US and Russia with ``uge great... tracks of land'' can set asside quite big areas to drop a capsule into. Yes it's more expensive to go get a capsule than to have a space plane come to you, but lan transport is quite cheap and so I doubt such costs come close to the costs of launching the wings into space, let alone the other costs of the space-plane designs.

But to say that their R&D toward an orbital space plane was misplaced goes against the very grain of space exploration.

It is not the R&D which is the problem, but the attempt to use what should have been an R&D test bed as a production vehicle.

If NASA had built one space plane, better than the shuttle because it wouldn't have needed the design compromises included to try and turn it into a day to day service, and had in parallel developed lauch systems using up to date but stable technology, everyone would have won, except a few beurocrats and politicians.

We might even have a workable space plane by now, since there could have been real R&D on the prototype using some of the money not spent on trying to keep the shuttle going.

BTW, The Economist has a reasonable article about the scuttle this week. I think you need to be a subscriber to get the online version, so if you're interested go buy some dead tree or hit a library.

The leading article of this week's Economist (subscriber-only unfortunately) is a great summary of why the space shuttle needs to be retired. The shuttle is too expensive, unsafe, and unnecessary to justify dumping more money into the program. The vast amount of money that NASA spends on the shuttle and space station could be much better spent elsewhere. The space station exists because of the need to give the shuttle a purpose and the shuttle program only continues because of the space station. NASA should ditch the shuttle, encourage private enterprise in the space business, and concentrate on developing new methods of space travel that might actually result in new exploration instead of simply traveling around the earth in circles.

There's a reasonably good survey of the whole debacle in this weeks Economist. The metaphor they use to describe the whole thing is hilarious. I won't spoil it, but let's just say that Clarence Darrow would be on our side!

True, although the $3 or $4 billion profit per quarter and 80+% profit margins in the Office and Windows sections (with the current donations, "super deals" to the OEMs, academic versions, etc., mind!) sure do.

Then there's the issue of Enron-style accounting. In 1998, Microsoft ran an $18 billion loss. Sure 1998 was a while ago, but it was also when the IT sector was gravy. Since then sales of new Intel boxes have plummeted and MS-Windows sales depend largely on OEMs. Now the prices for MS-Office are plummeting to near free-market prices. Microsoft depends on MS-Windows and MS-Office as it's only two cash cows and both look to be drying up.

I say again that there is no guarantee that there's enough money in the bank to keep MS operating through the end of the year.

The campus agreement you describe for StarOffice sounds interesting. I'd think more universities would be interested in it as a long term investment in electronic publishing as there are plans for it and OpenOffice.org to support the upcoming OASIS XML-based format. That'd increase the likelihood of parsable term papers, theses, and dissertations.

The US has the best power grid in the world

As mentioned before, NA does not have the best power grid in the world. In fact, many would argue that NA has the oldest and most unreliable power grid amongst the developed nations (most of Europe and Asia have much better systems). Refer to this article.

--PCB

"So, when DARPA, the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, asked Aurora, a company based in Manassas, Virginia, to design an unmanned aerial vehicle that was quiet, small, could fly for several hours on autopilot, and could deliver two cylinders the size of Coke cans to a distant location, Aurora happily obliged."

The DOD Small Business Innovation Research Resource Center appears to show the awarded contract for Aurora Flight Sciences Corp:

"The best solution to deliver small, covert communications/ sensor packages is an autonomous airborne vehicle that operates outside the enemy's threat envelope: the Clandestine Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (CUAV)."

Now we know what all the pieces are for!

Helevius

And compared with Nextel's service, which connects users almost instantly, it can take two seconds to establish a PTT connection over a GSM network, and four to six seconds over CDMA, says Bob Plaschke of Sonim, a firm selling PTT upgrades to operators.

And compared with Nextel's service, which connects users almost instantly, it can take two seconds to establish a PTT connection over a GSM network, and four to six seconds over CDMA, says Bob Plaschke of Sonim, a firm selling PTT upgrades to operators.

In my opinion, you have three classes of people that are capable of writing a worm:

The curious amateur

This guy has a couple clever ideas, few scruples, and a lot of spare time. All the wide-spread (and well-covered) worms, to date, have come from this kind of guy.

The white-hat professional

These are your security researchers other security professionals. these are the guys that get paid to work in this field every day. They're smart, the understand the details of the security business, and they're fully aware of the extreme vulnerability of the Internet. Like you, the know how bad a "real worm" could be.

The black-hat professional

These are your security researchers and security professionals. These are the guys who's job is security. They're smart, they understand the details of the security business, and they develop tools (including worms, trojans and viruses) to take advantage of these vulnerabilities. These tools are developed for a specific purpose: to further the objectives of their employer. You don't hear about them, because their tools are low-n-slow and their impact is very targeted and controlled.

The difference between a white-hat and a black-hat is a matter of perspective. The world is a big place. Certain governments do not have the same morals as others. Read The Economist. The French intelligence services work very closely with French businesses. The Chinese have equally questionable practices.

The future is not that bleak. The worms that are designed and released for wide-spread, global impact are the modern-day equivalent of graffiti on billboards. It's an ego trip, nothing more. The ones to worry about are the ones who don't have an ego, and have a specific purpose.

Hope you're checking your logs, and I hope you notice when he hacks your systems.

J.J.

Also, do you feel that the elected governor is assisted or confounded by the slew of ballot initiatives that come through every election cycle? If elected, would you seek to expand this participatory government because it empowers the people, keep it at the same level, or rein it in because it makes effective long-term strategy so difficult?

well; looks like these researchers know how to get attention. I got the news here in the Economist's excellent vulgarized science section

They have provided substantial returns to investors for years. They make $8 billion dollars in PROFIT every year.

It's pathetic that so many equate captialism with fraud.