Former Intel CEO Andy Grove Wants Struggling Industries To Stop Slacking

lousyd writes "Andy Grove, former CEO of Intel and current instructor at Stanford Business School, has a message for industry. He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history. He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was. On the issue of computer patents, he insists that firms must use their patents or lose them: 'You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger.'"

Comments

use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

A "use em or lose'm" rule would be good for fixing the patent troll problem, but it would do nothing to prevent software companies from attacking free software or from ruining standards.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[hedwards]

Hmm, so you're posting via prayer?

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Anonymous Coward]

And that's exactly what they want (stop loosing some money to patent trolls but keep all the "advantages" of this absurd system). Bad is, it puts small inventors out of equation (although the patent system was specifically designed because of them) because their ideas will be legally stolen before they can turn it into a product.

I'm sure that politicians would be in favor of a pro-corporate change, because it does it's purpose of protecting established technical strongholds from arising competitors. That way western economies want to keep being protected from countries that manage to develop a competition and to keep technological and economical advantage forever. I belive this is primarilly why government is so keen on keeping software patents around, despite many complaints. Free software is a headache to all of them, as it's basically a domestic community product, so attacking and endagering it provokes a strong backlash and stone throwing on politicians and "offending" companies.

The protection of a lone inventor is just an utopia, anyway. So, I'm in favour of shutting the patent system down alltogether, but I don't belive it will happen. It's not in the interest of wealthy people.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[GaryOlson]

Then explain to me how we are communicating with a common language. Show me the government regulation or contract we have mutually signed which sets out the standards for the English language.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[betterunixthanunix]

Which, of course, explains how C++ was standardized, and why very few programs are written in Ada...

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[cavehobbit]

I have been thinking lately, (don't let that scare you), that instead of the patent system granting exclusive rights, it should grant exclusive royalties.

In other words, it becomes a registration system that grantees payment of royalties to inventors for a specific period of time, paid by anyone that wants to use a patent.

So a patent holder can not restrict use of an invention. this allows others to use it as a base for further invention and innovation. It also removes, to a big extent, any reason for companies to fight patent awards, or try to steal or use patents without paying, which might lower the number of lawsuits, etc. Why risk paying lawyers when you can just use it cheaply and legally?.

I am not certain how to determine the royalty rate though. Could an auction system work? Or maybe a percentage of the cost to manufacture, which would be harder to fudge than percentage of profit?

One reform does need to be made, similar to what the parent mentions: You should not be able to file a patent application for anything that is already being produced and marketed by anyone, including yourself. If you forget to file and it is sold or produced before the patent application is filed, well, you screwed up. It should automatically be in the public domain, regardless of what ever kind of excuses or prior evidence you can mock up.

The world has changed since the 18th century when the basis for the U.S. patent system was formed. (I dunno about other systems). It is far easier to keep track of what people are making and selling in distant places than it was 300 years ago, and easier to assess royalties, etc. There seems to no longer need to be a simple ban on anyone else using a patent.

Yeah, lots of details lef tout, and probably lots of holes, and a bunch of new problems different than the current ones. But would it be an improvement over the current system? Maybe you patent gurus here can comment.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[rolfwind]

I read that the original argument for patents was to avoid the secretive guilds of the medieval era. That is, in exchange for temporary societal protection and granting of monopoly, information was opened up. Now, perhaps that was the argument needed when back in the day, all you really "owned" was what you could protect and horde.

But I wonder how much of that purpose today's patents actually achieve in obtaining, for the public, new info worth having, rather than obvious variants, rehashed variants, or things that could be reversed engineered from products of the company. Many of the interesting things still are done under "propietary" (read: secret) processes.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[commodore64_love]

Andy Grove said, "You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger." And later he added, "Hey you kids, get off my damn lawn!" ;-)

But Mr. Grove is correct - government often makes things stagnate and hold steady, such as when AT&T had a government-protected monopoly over the phone lines and computer modems. From the 1950s to the 1980s the only speeds available were 110 bit/s and 300 bit/s. If AT&T still held that monopoly, we'd still have 0.3 kbit/s modems and the late-90s web explosion would have been impossible (too slow).

But the Carterphone decision (circa 1981) eliminated that monopoly and multiple companies began a "speedwar" that rapidly moved speeds from 0.3 to 56k in only ten years time. And then they branched-out further with cable companies bring 1 Mbit and higher speeds, which forced phone companies to adapt or die.

Another (in)famous example was the Government-owned Tribant car. Yeah sure the government made sure people had cars, but the technology was stuck in the 1940s. Government stagnates.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[bhima]

Not that I really have a dog in this hunt but I think the comparison of colloquial English and computer communication protocols is an extremely poor one. Perhaps legal English would make for a better but still imperfect comparison... and that certainly has a long history of regulation, negotiation, contractual agreement.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[MrNaz]

No, the correct response is "Amen".

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[binarylarry]

Ramen.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[bjourne]

Not true. Read up on the history of Bell Labs, the state owned research branch of AT&T. Without it, computing wouldn't be anything like today.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Phurge]

Instinctively I tend to agree with you.

Taking away the capacity of the patent holder to screw down the person who is innovating based upon patented work is a good thing, but then the patent holder deserves a return for their R&D. Perhaps if the rules were fixed up front, that would be give certainty. I'm not sure about auctioning, since a lot more variables come into play. Perhaps if you set royalties at 20% that would be good for both patent holder and user over the long term.

But what about derivative works based on two or more patents? - So I'm not sure the whole royalty system would work so easily.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Chris Mattern]

Yes, true. AT&T had Bell Labs, which did indeed make all kinds of amazing discoveries that are the foundation of modern computing and data communications. However, AT&T management had no interest in pushing those discoveries out in to the field. They had a government-backed monopoly that was making them more than adequate money, and when push came to shove, they had no interest in disturbing the status quo.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[TheRaven64]

The other difficulty is setting the rate for the royalty. Should a component for a car gearing system get the same royalty as a component for an MRI machine, even though the latter cost ten times as much R&D spending and will ship a tiny fraction of the number of units? If not, how do you decide how much more it should cost? I'm in favour of compulsory licensing for copyright and patents, but setting the royalty rate is difficult.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[TheRaven64]

Andy Grove said, "You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger." And later he added, "Hey you kids, get off my damn lawn!" ;-)

I think Andy Grove deserves more respect than you are giving him. Remember, this is a man who can vocalise two asterisks in a row.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Roogna]

Well reading the description, making it a percentage would fix that anyway. A component for a cheap item would cost less because the profit/gross/whatever is less. While the component for the very expensive item would cost more for the royalties.

The real key would be weather the patent royalties percentage is based on an amount that took into account the other royalties being paid or not. If say it was %20 (which is probably very high for some such thing) then it'd be really easy for someone building, say a MRI machine, to infringe enough patents (just five needed!) to mean whoever builds the machine not only is paying out all their profit from the machine to patent holder, but would STILL owe others.

So it'd probably need to be more complicated of a formula than a straight percentage. Something more like %5 (max, free to negotiate with the patent holder for less), of say %80 of the gross on a sale. Leaving a profit for all involved. And on very complicated items (even like a car), it should probably be calculated per component. Because it's very easy for something like a car, or computer, or MRI machine to have hundreds of patented components. But you could probably calculate it based per component that would be replaceable on the cost of replacing the single component.

As complicated as it would get, it would basically solve the software patent issue in regards to open source software. Since it's being given away, no profit, no royalties owed on patents. And it'd put the patent system back firmly where it belongs, manufacturing inventions.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Moryath]

It would never work.

The patent system is broken. Patents are only supposed to be given to truly innovative work, not simple "evolutionary" changes (e.g. "the logical next step.") Thanks to "patent-slamming" (the practice of companies like IBM, Micro$oft, and others sending in thousands on thousands of patent filings per year on the theory that if even 1% gets through they can patent-troll those and block competition), the patent office is overworked. The overworked patent office, in turn, has been granting patents to all sorts of things that never, ever should have qualified.

A great example of this was Wizards of the Coast's "patent" on card game mechanics, to wit "The method of claim 3, wherein said step of designating one or more of the cards comprises rotating the one or more cards on the playing surface from an original orientation to a second orientation", which under a proper analysis done by any COMPETENT and non-overworked patent attorney should have been invalidated by prior art by the collected works of one Edmund Hoyle over two hundred years ago.

The patent playing field is broken and needs a re-set, with strong rules preventing things like patent-slamming from happening and getting back to the point where only true innovation is rewarded with a patent. Until that time, we're fucked.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[JAlexoi]

Yet, now no company is willing to invest in seemingly dead end applied research. And all the thanks to the power of the quarterly earnings and fast ROI demanding investors.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[klapaucjusz]

Andy Grove said, "You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger." And later he added, "Hey you kids, get off my damn lawn!" ;-)

But Mr. Grove is correct - government often makes things stagnate and hold steady, such as when AT&T had a government-protected monopoly over the phone lines and computer modems.

I think there's a confusion between two things. There's government-backed projects, which tend to give excellent results -- the Internet, Bell Labs, NASA, the French railway system, etc.

Then, there's government backed monopolies and subventions to dying industries, which tend to promote obsolete technology, and do so at a very high cost -- the AT&T telephone system, General Motors, the European steel industry, and, some might argue, the current banking system.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[damburger]

Government projects in democratic countries are answerable to the people, and thus has to consider all the consequences so society of their actions. Keeping a perhaps inefficient steel industry around prevents unemployment and keeps communities together, and if a government run steel industry is managed by a democratically elected government, it has to take these things into account.

Private enterprise has no such burden; it can take a shit on workers, communities, natural resources, pretty much at will. It shifts all the negative consequences of its actions off its own balance sheet and lets society (normally through government) cover the costs of sorting it all out.

The widely spread myth that private enterprise is more 'efficient' is merely an accounting anomaly; democratic government has to take responsibility for its actions and pay to sort them out. Private industry can make someone else pay to sort them out.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[dirvine]

Good idea, keep thinking. One issue I see is that small companies and inventors may actually want some market traction and use patents to allow this. Think if you had a brilliant new spell-checker or email thingie that did something amazing and everyone would want it. If you could not protect your own product at least for a wee while (I think there shoudl be limits of course) then some of the existing incumbents would simply use your product, even pay the small royalty and prevent you from becoming a business.

This may not seem to bad until you consider that perhaps you wanted to actually build a business for the good of everyone, say to give everyone free Internet or something (anythings possible) and large ISP's etc. simply prevented it by altering their model slightly to keep them in jam and keep mad fekers like you from destroying their stranglehold on the customers.

So I like your idea it's closer to workable than now but perhaps this is something that requires consideration, it was one of the reasons for patents in the first place and it's abused to death now (I admit).

Perhaps there could be rules as to the size of the entity doing patents, i.e. anything above SME cannot prevent straight use and pay (small feasible) royalty but anything SME or smaller can. Just another idea.

Again though consider the guy who creates a pill to cure cancer and buggers about trying to create a company to exploit it, delaying the intro of the new tech. Not easy!

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[TheRaven64]

As complicated as it would get, it would basically solve the software patent issue in regards to open source software. Since it's being given away, no profit, no royalties owed on patents. And it'd put the patent system back firmly where it belongs, manufacturing inventions.

Actually, it would be a nightmare for F/OSS. What happens, for example, to Linksys if Linux infringes a software patent? Do they pay the royalty based on what Linus sold them the kernel for (i.e. nothing) or do they pay the royalty based on the cost of their router? If it's the latter, then F/OSS becomes incredibly problematic to use, because you can ship Ubuntu for free but a Netbook running Ubuntu will require lots of patent licenses. If it's the former then I can get around the patent for the MRI machine component by spinning off a company that makes them and sells them to me at a loss.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[tsm_sf]

I live in a world where saying "I want to patent turning a playing card 90 degrees" doesn't get you kicked in the nuts?

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Planesdragon]

I have been thinking lately, (don't let that scare you), that instead of the patent system granting exclusive rights, it should grant exclusive royalties.,

No. The government should not dictate how much a patent is worth -- which is the effect of what you suggest.

Patents (and copyright) are a way of giving market value to creative effort. Any "reform" of either that removes the absolute ability of the inventor (author) to control whom uses their IP removes said IP from the market, and instead makes it a form of government regulation.

Should patents and copyright be reformed, to make some things which are currently protected (business methods & software respectively) not eligible for them? Yes. But should the basic idea be altered? Not unless you're also going to make big changes to our market-based system.

(Yes, software should not be covered by copyright -- it should be governed by a design patent, same as any other product of engineering.)

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[wheeda]

Tax patents. Let the patent owner state a value. Have the tax rate be a few percent. If someone wants to use the stuff that is patented, they would pay the patent owner the stated value. The patent would then become public domain. 1. This increases the tax base. 2. Rewards inventors. 3. Gets rid of patent trolls. Or maybe it doesn't, but at least they pay a lot of taxes. 4. Makes it easier for me to develop a product if I know what it is going to cost to acquire the patents.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[BryanL]

From the article (I know it is not required reading on Slashdot) I don't get the impression he was aiming his remarks at the Government. He was talking to business people. Some of those were even members of his own family. True, the Government controls the way patents are granted, but companies control how they are used. "Sitting on patents stifles the industry" was the message he was sending.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Waffle Iron]

$ uuidgen
8f576c4d-b428-4fb6-9c6d-238964a2eadd

Please provide an example of ANY use in history of this UUID that I created.

If not, STFU, I can get a valid patent on it.

Because after all, if it's never been done, it must be patentable.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Anarchduke]

No it isn't. It doesn't matter whether another card game has ever rotated a card 90 degrees before.

Where do you get the idea that merely rotating a piece of paper should qualify for a patent?

That is ... patently ridiculous.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Roogna]

Well, I'd hardly call it any more of a nightmare than it is now. And indeed, such a thing, as I said would be complicated. Who owed how much on what portions would obviously have to be detailed out in such a patent reform. Same as to prevent such things as spinning off companies to sell at a loss... though again, that's why it'd be on the gross, not the net. i.e. I sell my sister company the widget for $5, it wouldn't matter that it cost me $10 to make, the gross would still be $5 (even if the net is -$5), so the royalties would come out of that $5, not the -$5 that is left.

Either way, it's a moot point, a forced cap on what a patent would be worth would be a great reform. The actual implementation of such though would be quite complicated. Just as the current patent system is already quite complicated. An ideal system would put patent lawyers out of business (Sorry to any out there!;) but such a system would also always entirely be theoretical. There's too many ins and outs, especially when dealing with corporations vs. individuals and visa-versa to ever have a true ideal system. So the idea instead would be to make the system "better" than it is now.

Deciding on what the "better" would be though is almost as complicated as defining the laws surrounding any kind of patent system in the first place. Which I'd say is probably why we've yet to get any true patent law reform. It's a tangled mess of laws and anything we change it for is likely to simply be a different tangled mess of laws. Which means any reform, no matter the system is unlikely to happen quickly.

Meanwhile, as a small business owner, I'm just happy whenever anyway puts forth a theoretical solution to the issue and more than content to try and follow the train of thought through to a conclusion on how it would work out for me.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[burnin1965]

And later he added, "Hey you kids, get off my damn lawn!" ;-)

Interesting view on Grove's statement, I assume you are basing that on the belief that all the patent trolling and threats are something new? Actually Grove's statement is fresh and enlightening as patent trolling and threats have been around for almost as long as the USPTO. Look up some history on the sewing machine patent wars of the 1850's or the aircraft patent wars in the early 1900's.

But Mr. Grove is correct - government often makes things stagnate and hold steady

I can't say I know Grove's political opinions and beliefs but you seem to be reading your own bias into his statements. Grove does not say government often makes things stagnate and hold steady, in fact he is stating that certain industries are already stagnated and holding steady and the government intervention is simply maintaining the status quo.

From the 1950s to the 1980s the only speeds available were 110 bit/s and 300 bit/s. If AT&T still held that monopoly, we'd still have 0.3 kbit/s modems and the late-90s web explosion would have been impossible (too slow).

Actually from the 1950's to the 1980's the only affordable data speeds for a home connection were in the 110bps to 300bps range. This was not due to the lack of technology development by a government mandated monopoly, in fact quite the opposite. The government mandated monopoly created a massive telecom infrastructure and AT&T was continually working on the technology to interconnect that system efficiently and effectively. The T-Carrier was designed and implemented in the late 1950's and early 1960's and provided 1.5Mbps. ISDN became available in many areas in the mid to late 1980's and provided two 64Kbps lines that could be bonded into one 128Kbps line. I still have an old 3-Com ISDN modem sitting in a box in the basement. :)

So from the 1950's to the 1980's there were bit rates available well above the 100 to 300 bps you noted. This may not have been apparent to home computer users connecting with POTS modems at the time because these services were not marketed to and the equipment likely was not affordable for a home user.

But the Carterphone decision (circa 1981) eliminated that monopoly and multiple companies began a "speedwar" that rapidly moved speeds from 0.3 to 56k in only ten years time.

I disagree. The decision made way for long distance pricing wars, but had no effect on data rates. The explosion in data rates came with the rise of the internet and was made possible by the companies developing modems they sold to house holds and the racks at the ISPs. The telecoms had nothing to do with this other than providing the analog POTS connection between the two. Now the bandwidth explosion after 56k was addressed by the telecoms as the POTS had reached its limit and it was up to the telecoms to provide better infrastructure.

But there is an interesting point from your statement, "eliminated that monopoly", that more than government controls affects the development of technology and better pricing and services for end users.

Two cases in point, the patent wars between sewing machine companies and aircraft manufacturers I noted earlier ended and industries prospered once the patents were pooled to eliminate the monopolies. In the case of the sewing machine patents the industry players created the pool, in the case of the aircraft industry the government had to step in and create the pool.

Now I'm not saying the government should start jumping into the markets and controlling everything, to the contrary, they should stay out and only get involved when it is necessary for the benefit of the p

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[drsquare]

Patents themselves are government intervention in the market.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents (and copyright) are a way of giving market value to creative effort. Any "reform" of either that removes the absolute ability of the inventor (author) to control whom uses their IP removes said IP from the market, and instead makes it a form of government regulation.

What utter bullshit.

The purpose of patents is not to create or inflate
value.
Patents are ment to encourage disclosure without destroying value.
There's absolutely no reason for the patent holder to retain control if it's not necessary to his benefitting from the patent.
 

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Trepidity]

Now we have the opposite, though. The American tech industry of the past few decades has flourished by commercializing those good ideas you mention that had been invented at government labs, academia, etc., but never put outside the labs and commercialized. Now we're running out of good ideas to mine, so our main new tech product is new kinds of websites. Industry just doesn't do the fundamental research necessary to produce anything but incremental advances.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Jewbird]

I'm with you up until the point of public disclosure. I think it makes sense to have a grace period of at least one year to file a patent so people can determine if there's a market for a product before dealing with the taxing process of patent filings. It makes a lot more sense to encourage innovators to focus on building a product rather than dealing with paperwork.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[jbengt]

However, AT&T management had no interest in pushing those discoveries out in to the field.

More to the point, they had to be very careful about leveraging their monopoly illegally, so in many instances they had to avoid keeping things to themselves. Hence, the liberal licensing for Unix, which led to BSD, POSIX, and eventually Linux.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[mcornelius]

That it was never done before is not enough to get a patent under US law. The discovery or invention must be novel. They did not discover or invent rotating 90 degrees and it was not a novel concept.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[HuguesT]

Thanks for the link to the Wright-Curtiss patent war of the early 20th century in aviation. There it states that because of that patent war, aviation did not progress as swiftly in the US as it did in Europe, so much so that when the US entered WWI, it had no competitive aircraft and was forced to use French ones!

This is a perfect illustration that in the wrong context, especially patent trolls, patents actively hinder progress.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[svirre]

Goverment hides it inefficiencies in huge budgets, and are rarely above using official secrets laws to bury failed projects further.
Living in a country where the goverment is extremely eager to run it's own projects I can safely tell you that the goverment gets extremely little back for it's money. Not to mention that politically run project tend to be used to game the electoral system, with popular projects beeing directed into counties where a representative for the ruling party is at risk.

Private enterprise are accountable to their shareholders who do a much better job at enforcing operational efficiency than voters.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[dangitman]

The market itself is government intervention. Who do you think prints the money?

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[symbolset]

This is a perfect illustration that in the wrong context, especially patent trolls, patents actively hinder progress.

Only if by the wrong context, you intended every possible context. Patents prevent progress.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[rtb61]

Grove is far from being correct, he is lost, confused and disingenuous. The big difference between the computer industry and the auto industry is the computer industry sacked their employees and off shored without batting an eye lid and, the automotive industry was consistently placed under pressure to retain local employment. How much is left of computer manufacturing in countries where the people can afford to buy them.

The reality is the current warped system of global trade where employees in countries who manufacturer the product cannot afford to buy it because their wages are cents on the dollar compared to countries where employees can afford to buy the product.

Left to it's own devices upon a global basis, free market capitalism would self destruct into a medieval state of, war for profit, purposeful economic sabotage, complete destruction of the environment and slavery for the masses.

Government is a function of the people, the only time government goes out of control is when it is controlled by a minority for the benefit of that minority, pretty much when it is being run exactly like a for profit corporation that quite contentedly bankrupts it's competitors (even internal ones, corporate interdepartmental intrigue). All industry in western countries where wages are 100 times the wage of third world countries are doomed but, shut them down and the employees lose the ability to buy that third world product who then end up starving.

So what is gained, what is the reason, nothing more than short term profit and don't give a rat's attitude. As long as the current rank of corporate executives can turn themselves into millionaires the country and the people can, well, they don't care what happens to the country and the people, typical corporate executives are completely and utterly indifferent to it.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[blackest_k]

Bridge uses rotated cards to make it easy to count tricks.
Some Tarot Layouts have a crossed card.

That's two games with crossed cards as part of the game mechanics.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[mabhatter654]

$ uuidgen
8f576c4d-b428-4fb6-9c6d-238964a2eadd

Please provide an example of ANY use in history of this UUID that I created.

If not, STFU, I can get a valid patent on it.

Because after all, if it's never been done, it must be patentable.

As far as the PTO is concerned after Regan came to office that was the official policy... the PTO is a "profit center" and the Republicans felt they should be giving out as many patents as they could to increase revenue. If an inventor didn't file, it's not the government's fault... "anybody" can file a patent (for significantly rich values of anybody... but we're republicans after all) It's not the PTOs job to know about ALL invention, only the patents they have granted and widely published/produced items. The idea was to take the money, award the patent if there is nobody else complaining about it.

Patents and Copyright grants are the New Nobility of the 21st century much like grants to castles were the right to power of the previous centuries.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[Virtual_Raider]

Not that I really have a dog in this hunt but I think the comparison of colloquial English and computer communication protocols is an extremely poor one. Perhaps legal English would make for a better but still imperfect comparison... and that certainly has a long history of regulation, negotiation, contractual agreement.

Actually while he could have said HTTP/S, (X/H)TML, IP, TCP, ATM.... the great vast majority of what needs to happen for us to communicate here (including English, si yo comienzo por ejemplo a hablar en español ou français vous ne jamais m'entendrais bien n'est pas?) are in fact standards. Some of them are de facto, some de jure, all standards.

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[bronney]

Slashdot is in English for exactly the same reason why your grandma's computer runs Windows. It's conquest. If the Japanese had the scale of the conquest of the British, you would be posting in Japanese right now.
.
It's not a "good" thing that we speak English if you think about it. How many cattle were raped in the process?

Re:use em or lose'm for patents doesn't fix much

[jwdb]

Used to be whomever felt like it with enough clout to get you to trust their notes, until the government intervened again and gave themselves the exclusive right to print notes. So a market based on money is possible without that kind of government intervention.

So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dangitman]

He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.

Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[godIsaDJ]

He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.

Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.

Given the history of such enterprises, learned speculation would tell it'd have to be worse... You are saying that since they didn't have a chance to screw that up, magically it would turn out to be their only success...

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[Josh04]

No, that's not what they said at all. They said it's ignorant to assume either way.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dangitman]

I dunno, government funding of private enterprise has worked pretty spectacularly in the past. For example; the railroad system, The New Deal, WWII spending, interstate highways, aerospace technology, the Apollo missions, ARPANET, etc. And those are only a few examples from the US, ignoring other countries' initiatives.

Of course, there are plenty of spectacular failures too, but that's true of any human endeavor. But like I said, this is just speculation. Would we have had the internet at the time we did without government funding?

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[hedwards]

So, is it also ignorant to assume that if I take a few steps off my roof that I'll fall and hurt myself? I mean it's only about 15 feet, I suppose if I fell correctly, I might not break anything.

This is a pretty well known problem, and there's a very good reason why the assumption is valid. Innovating and coming up with new ideas is both hard and expensive. If you don't believe that government intervention of this sort kills progress, just look at the various Russian industries that have and are going nowhere.

Now look at industries in the US that have been messed with in a similar way by our government, surprisingly there isn't that much difference beyond what corruption explains. What you're arguing against is a pretty fundamental element in economics, and while I question a lot of ideas that economists have, this one has a lot of merit to it.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dyfet]

The private sector was clearly interested only in hoping "data islands" from which "publishing" could be strictly controlled (and billed) along with limited interconnection through proprietary network protocols, and not in creating some kind of generic interconnection as such where network services and data could be offered by any participating peer. If we did not have the government funded Internet at the start, we would still be today essentially experiencing some decadent of or something like Compuserve or AoL, that is a metered data service delivered from an isolated digital island, and perhaps even things like broadband may never have become widely available outside of businesses looking to connect ipx over x.25 networks :).

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[commodore64_love]

>>>For example; the railroad system, The New Deal, WWII spending, interstate highways, aerospace technology, the Apollo missions, ARPANET, etc.
>>>

OMG. You call these successes? Let's see:

- railroads were funded *privately* not publicly. And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Ditto the government-run post office.

- The New Deal was a major fuckup that extended the recession from 1929 to 1950. Contrast that with the 1921 recession when the government did nothing, and yes it was bad, but the economy quickly recovered in 1922.

- WW2 was a horror not a success.

- Most interstate highways (like I-76/I-80) are paved-over already existing State Turnpikes, which were *private* funded businesses. Their genesis lies in the spirit of entrepreneurship. Now that government has taken-over a lot of them are falling apart (see bridge collapses).

- Aerospace was born in the backyards of hobbyists with a vision, and brought to fruition by a military looking for weapons, which you're right - governments are very effective at waging war.

- ARPAnet is something for which government deserves credit, but after 1980 the government was intelligent enough to step aside and let private companies take over, and that's why these was an enormous boom (from 0.1 or 0.3 kbit/s speeds under the government-run stagnation to ~100,000 kbit/s speeds with competitive speedwars).

- Social Security has been a joke, because if you live long enough to get it, the "interest rate" earned on your original deposit is only 1%... below the inflation rate so effectively negative growth. If you don't live long enough to see retirement (a more common problem than many people realize), the money you get back is ZERO! ----- You'd be better-off having a simple savings account could be handed-off to your children if you die, rather than disappear forever. Plus you'd earn much much greater growth, than investing in the government's SS.

I'll stop here. I could go on-and-on-and-on about government failures, bankruptcies, misappropriation of funds, et cetera, but my hands hurt so I'll just stop here and let you absorb what you've heard.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dangitman]

- railroads were funded *privately* not publicly. And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Ditto the government-run post office.

No, the first transcontinental railroads were heavily government funded.

- The New Deal was a major fuckup that extended the recession from 1929 to 1950.

In some people's opinion, but it is likely that without action it would have been a lot worse.

- WW2 was a horror not a success.

The war itself was, but America profited massively from it, in economic and technological terms.

- Social Security has been a joke, because if you live long enough to get it, the "interest rate" earned on your original deposit is only 1%...

I didn't mention Social Security, but the point of it is not to provide a return on investment, but to provide security to society. Which it does, with varying effectiveness.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dangitman]

P.S:

I didn't respond to all your points, because many of them you conceded that government involvement was useful. However, your Social Security example is particularly off-base, because I was talking about government-private relationships, which Social Security is not really an example of. It seems to me that private enterprise when combined with government backing (combined mandates for public benefit) produce more remarkable results than either purely government or purely private endeavors do.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[commodore64_love]

>>>No, the first transcontinental railroads were heavily government funded.

False. ONE transcontinental railroad (the first) was supported with free land from the Congress. The funding was entirely private, and all future railroads were done without government assistance. And of course the original lines that connected all of the cities east of the Mississippi River, and west of the Sierras, were privately funded too.
.

>>>provide a return on investment, but to provide security to society. Which it does, with varying effectiveness.

A private savings account would provide greater security, simply because you know that if you die before 70, it will be passed-onto your children, rather than disappear. It's also greater security because living on a half-million-dollar savings FEELS more secure than living on a teeny-tiny $500 government check.

And last but not least, we already have Welfare and Food Stamps to provide for those in need. The SS program is redundant and not necessary. Plus it's been used/abused by the government to fund other projects as if it was just an ordinary tax meant to be spent.

SS == Epic fail. Almost-everything the government touches is a fail

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[P0ltergeist333]

Yeah, not to mention the funding of Bell Labs by the NIH when among other things, the transistor was invented. And it's not like ARPANET (what eventually became the internet, thanks to infrastructure improvements specifically for and due to the public use) had anything to do with selling microprocessors and NIC cards and communications related IC's. And he must have forgotten that 21 million dollar contract from Darpa that intel got in 1992, not to mention government orders for the i860's and i960's, also in the early 90's. Coincidentally close to the development of the Pentium, which could arguably be said to be responsible for their utter domination of the processor market until AMD came back in 1999 with the Athlon followed by the XP and 64, which finally allowed them (coincidentally) a market share almost exactly big enough to prevent claims of monopoly... Talk about revisionist history.

For what it's worth, I agree with him about patents.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[TheRaven64]

And he must have forgotten that 21 million dollar contract from Darpa that intel got in 1992, not to mention government orders for the i860's and i960's, also in the early 90's.

There's a big difference between a government contract and a government bailout. In the former case, the government expects you to produce something, although this appears not to apply to contracts awarded to EDS.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[misexistentialist]

SS also provides disability insurance. And if you die early you're children still benefit by not having to pay for monthly check.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[JAlexoi]

railroads were funded *privately* not publicly. And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Ditto the government-run post office.

I will be corrected if I am wrong. But isn't US postal service a non profit seeking organization, that sets it's service prices just to cover expenses? And when you don't target profit, you are by definition "on the verge of bankruptcy", so is any other 0 profit seeking entity.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[Locklin]

If we did not have the government funded Internet at the start, we would still be today essentially experiencing some decadent of or something like Compuserve or AoL, that is a metered data service delivered from an isolated digital island...

Oh? like on my cell phone!

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[JAlexoi]

WW2 was a horror not a success

And yet the United States of America emerged as the most wealthy and dominant power in the world AFTER WW1 and WW2. After those 2 wars everybody owed US a lot of money.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[damburger]

Yes, the moon landings were a textbook example of how the government can't get anything done. Idiot.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[westlake]

- railroads were funded *privately* not publicly.

The western railroad was funded by enormous land grants.

The western railroad profited from countless indirect subsidies to those who needed its services - the cattleman, the mine owner, the timber baron.

The "recovery" in 22 was short-lived and did not reach the agricultural sector.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[Sibko]

And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's constantly on the verge of bankruptcy. Ditto the government-run post office.

The USPS have been posting significant profits for years now.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[Anarchduke]

I can tell you've never been on welfare or food stamps. Otherwise you wouldn't be talking out your ass this way.

In any case, the purpose of social security was to provide a source of financial income to old people.

You sound like someone who really needs to get laid, or go into anger management courses, or both.

"The Government" - I would like to know which agency within "The Government" you are referring to. I would also like to know what government you are referring to. If you are in the US, you could be referring to the federal government, your state government, your county government, or your city government. And within "The Government" there are scores of different agencies, all responsible for different programs, initiatives, and regulations.

Perhaps giving a more clear example instead of your blanket "government sucks" line might make this more clear.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[Anarchduke]

Which is why when the economy tanked during the Great Depression, social security was created, since nobody wanted millions of elderly starving to death.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[Anarchduke]

Don't you know that the moon landings were faked? Even Neil Armstrong is convinced that his historic moonwalk was faked.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[jpmorgan]

The public funding of the transcontinental railroad was highly successful. Congress funded two companies, one starting from the east and one starting from the west, with a plan to join in the middle. Which was a great plan in theory- whichever company went the fastest would lay down more track and get paid more (mostly in land), before the two met. Unfortunately when the two did meet they both decided they liked the government funding so much they just went right on building. They built hundreds of miles of parallel tracks before congress ordered them to stop.

I've always found that (true) story hilarious.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[jpmorgan]

No, being non-profit does not mean you are on the verge of bankruptcy. Bankruptcy would imply that they are no longer able to cover their debts, which is different from not making a profit.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[sgt_doom]

I would like to add to your excellent and highly accurate post, Good Citizen dangitman, as opposed to bothering with some of the idiotic and moronic criticizing posts which follow it: If Wall Street could ever come up with anything remotely as successful as Social Security (an insurance program for the majority), we would all be mightily impressed.

Instead, they keep coming up with an infinite amount of securitized financial scams (or as they call them, "instruments") to continue The Great Financialization.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[Trepidity]

False. ONE transcontinental railroad (the first) was supported with free land from the Congress. The funding was entirely private, and all future railroads were done without government assistance.

That isn't true at all.

The U.S. government spent $10 million purchasing land from Mexico, the Gadsden Purchase, for the express reason of helping Southern Pacific complete the southerly-route transcontinental railroad. It also received land grants.

The northerly-route transcontinental railroad, Northern Pacific, also received quite a lot of land grants.

In total, the U.S. government subsidized the construction of railroads in the 2nd half of the 19th century by giving them title to one-tenth of the territory of the United States.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dangitman]

False. ONE transcontinental railroad (the first) was supported with free land from the Congress. The funding was entirely private,

How is providing free land not funding? Do you think land is worthless or something? You're also incorrect, funding was also provided via government bonds. And it wasn't only one railroad that was given free land and money.

You need to get your facts straight, son.

A private savings account would provide greater security, simply because you know that if you die before 70, it will be passed-onto your children, rather than disappear.

So, what if you don't have the money to put into a private savings account?

And why are you trying to derail the conversation into one about Social Security, which I never mentioned?

Almost-everything the government touches is a fail

That's clearly nonsense. You don't seem to care for objectivity at all, you've clearly made up your mind that government is bad, and facts don't matter.

The majority of businesses fail over time, and there have been some spectacular failures. So, by your method of ignoring anything good and only seeing the bad, I guess it's equally valid to say that everything that private enterprise does is "a fail."

By the way, "fail" is not a noun.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[dangitman]

Don't many of the current bailouts also have conditions applied to them? As far as Andy Grove's comments go, why would the hypothetical bailout of the mainframe manufacturers have to be money with no strings attached? Couldn't such a bailout be conditional on them doing something for the public good, or meeting some infrastructure goal?

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[P0ltergeist333]

From the parent: "He believes that health care and energy, especially, could learn a lesson from computing's innovative and relatively government-free history."

I was calling bullshit to that statement, especially where Intel is concerned.

"...computing's innovative and relatively government-free history." Is complete fantasy.

Besides, the contract in question was for software, which Intel was hardly known for before or since. Bailouts come in many forms.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[elnyka]

He asks students to imagine if mainframe vendors had asked government to prop them up in the same way that General Motors recently was.

Perhaps there would have been more supercomputers? Or the internet would have arrived sooner and networking would be more advanced? None of us know what would have happened. Assuming it would have been worse is just speculation.

I doubt that the market for super computers would have increased given that the number of problems that actually require them has always been small, and that the price of manufacturing has always been high.

OTH, micro computers have allowed, via clustering, to venture into financial number crunching (cruise lines come to mind) to a degree that very likely would have never due to the cost (or at best have done so at a much greater cost than what is now possible.)

Considering the lethargic and pretty much clueless reaction of the big iron makers of the day (IBM, Unisys, Burroughs) as the minicomputer/microcomputer market was taking shape, I extremely doubt we would have had the internet as we have it today. BTW, I'm not referring to "internet" as the hardware and software technologies that make the internet possible, but the internet as a facilitator of communication and business as we have it today.

We would still have computing focused on big iron number crunching. People-focused technology like multimedia, gaming and personal finance packages like Quicken would not exist. Don't get me wrong, technical innovation would still exist, but it would be geared toward big-iron and centralized data/business processing

The arrival of the microcomputer brought computing at the masses' fingertips (no, I'm not into socialist rhetoric.) This eventually created a market niche, a space of business and technology opportunities that was bound to grow. From there it grow into people's inter networking and from there into e-commerce and easier (at least in theory) B2B.

Things like multimedia would most likely never be known outside academic/research circles, with the mouse and the GUI still being under development in some dark corner at Xerox Palo Alto.

Obviously, all of this is pure conjecture. The scenario you describe is probabilistically possible. Taking into consideration the nature of business during the pre-microcomputer, I do not see it as being a highly probable one.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[drinkypoo]

The USPS is feeling the crunch and has been laying off a few workers, and failing to replace still more. On the other hand, AFAIK it's still the cheapest and most reliable in the world. I hear they have a new "If it fits it ships" rule for priority mail &c so they are an even more attractive option now for small packages.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[khallow]

I dunno, government funding of private enterprise has worked pretty spectacularly in the past. For example; the railroad system, The New Deal, WWII spending, interstate highways, aerospace technology, the Apollo missions, ARPANET, etc. And those are only a few examples from the US, ignoring other countries' initiatives.

First, a number of those things don't qualify as government funding of private enterprise. The spending on the Second World War is a key example. Others aren't successes now, for example, the New Deal and railroad funding. Apollo didn't create any long term infrastructure in space. Sometimes these things work and sometimes they don't. One thing I've noticed is that the current bailouts don't seem to make sense economically. For example, GM's debt will take decades to pay back given their current revenue and profit. Some banks have received huge bailouts (many tens of billions) yet haven't fundamentally changed how they operate. There's no guarantee that they won't fail again in a few years.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[commodore64_love]

>>>I can tell you've never been on welfare or food stamps

I'm on welfare right now, you insensitive clod! (Look at that: I made my point AND used a meme at the same time. Woo-hoo!) So yes I know what it's like. Comfortable. As it should be because that's what safety nets are for - to catch citizens if they fall off the highwire of life and need assistance to survive.

Getting back to my main point:

The SS program is redundant and not necessary. Plus it's been used/abused by the government to fund other projects as if it was just an ordinary tax meant to be spent. SS == Epic fail. Obama and Clinton and others say that the healthcare industry is broken, but NOTHING is as broken as the Social Security program and needs to be fixed NOW. Evolve the SSI into a needs-based system (i.e. for those who run out of money), or else it will collapse faster than Madoff's ponzi scheme collapsed

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[commodore64_love]

>>>So, what if you don't have the money to put into a private savings account?

Then you sign-up for Welfare when you retire at age 70 or higher. That's what that program is for - to help those without enough money to care for themselves.

>>>The majority of businesses fail over time

If only the government would do that same (or have the balls to layoff not-needed workers to reduce expenses, rather than have them just sitting-around doing nothing). Government is a MONOPOLY and therefore no better than if Microsoft had a monopoly, or Comcast had a monopoly, or Ford had a monopoly.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[commodore64_love]

Perfect example of government waste.

BTW you say "pay" but the two railroad companies didn't receive money. They received free land, which is an important distinction because land didn't cost the 1800s taxpayer anything out of his pocket. If the 1800-era Congress had said "We're going to give-away trillions of dollars to private companies," they would have had another civil war on their hands as the People revolted.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[commodore64_love]

>>>US postal service...by definition "on the verge of bankruptcy"
>>>

I see your point. Let me rewrite my previous statement to more accurately reflect the current state: "Railroads were funded privately not publicly. And now that rail has been taken-over by government, it's [several billion in debt]. Ditto the government-run post office."

There. And that's the truth - what was once a profitable passenger-rail industry has gone deep, deep into debt. And while UPS and FedEx post profit year-after-year, the government post office is posting loss-after-loss.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[commodore64_love]

>>>>> WW2 was a horror not a success

>>And yet the United States of America emerged as the most wealthy and dominant power in the world AFTER WW1 and WW2.

In other words we grew wealthy-and-powerful on the back of Europe, China, and Japan's ruin (aka "the lost generation"). I think this cartoonist expresses it quite well - http://newman.baruch.cuny.edu/digital/redscare/IMAGES_LG/Ghosts_of_War.gif - Ironically it appears China is now doing the same thing - loaning tons of money which we must now payback. Do you view the Chinese takeover of your government and your marketplace as a "success"?

I suppose from Beijing's viewpoint the answer is yes. But from OUR viewpoint it sucks, and I bet from the European/Japanese viewpoint the post-WW2 American takeover also sucked. I stick with my original comment about WW2 being a "horror" not a success.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[khallow]

Instead, they keep coming up with an infinite amount of securitized financial scams (or as they call them, "instruments") to continue The Great Financialization.

Which remains a better place for your money than Social Security. At least the "infinite scams" return more on average than they lose. Remember just a few years ago, when government proposed a 25% cut in lifetime benefits (which is lower than if government just forced you to buy US treasuries of the appropriate duration)? That was before the current mess lowered the US's future expected available tax revenue. In my view, the prime "success" of Social Security is as an excuse for Congress to spend several hundred billion more dollars each year for decades after its formation. Each new generation has received less than the one before it. That "success" is about to end with an "infinite" series of deficits.

As an "insurance program", Social Security is a joke. It could have been implemented as a genuine retirement insurance program, namely a needs-based retirement program. It wasn't. Instead it involved everyone whether they needed it or not. And a program you can't opt out of has no place in a democratic society.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[P0ltergeist333]

Funny you should ask this. Cell technology came from... wait for it... Bell Labs.

Re:So, what's the answer supposed to be?

[bhiestand]

Now look at industries in the US that have been messed with in a similar way by our government, surprisingly there isn't that much difference beyond what corruption explains. What you're arguing against is a pretty fundamental element in economics, and while I question a lot of ideas that economists have, this one has a lot of merit to it.

Like our socialist fire departments, medicare, unemployment insurance, and military? You're right, our defense budget has really fallen as we've moved to privatize the military!

You seem to be arguing the "Government is always bad" point of view. This is a failed argument because government programs have historically ranged from highly successful to stupendously fail. Additionally, many functions simply can not be performed as well by private enterprise.

O really!

[siloko]

You can't just sit on your a** and give everyone the finger

Beg
to
differ,
twice,
three times and maybe even
four!

Re:O really!

[Lidadai]

thanks anyway.. Lida Lida Lida Lida

Re:O really!

[Arthur Grumbine]

Burma Shave

No thanks

[BlackPignouf]

Government-free energy implies more coal power plants.
Few energy companies are interested in multi-billions long term investments in energy efficiency & renewables.
The path of least resistance is coal, which also happens to be the dirtiest solution.

Re:No thanks

[afaiktoit]

If only there were as many protests to stop mountain top removal as there are to stop from putting up wind farms. Plus all the slack coal gets over their slag and ash dumps and all the mercury they're putting into the fish.

Re:No thanks

[BobMcD]

The path of least resistance is coal, which also happens to be the dirtiest solution.

This.

Except, not probably in the way that you think.

If we want to see the world use energy efficiency and renewables, then ideally we find a way to make them the path of least resistance.

Make it make cents, and suddenly it will make sense as well. It doesn't work in every case, but on the supply side of the equation it gets exponentially more important.

Re:No thanks

[GaryOlson]

No, government-free energy implies more nuclear. Excessive government regulation of nuclear power has artificially increased the cost of nuclear power beyond reason. Nuclear power has a far lower cost of operation.

Re:No thanks

[NotBornYesterday]

Operation, perhaps. But the long-term waste storage problem is a real bitch. Of course, without outdated government concern over proliferation, we might have fuel reprocessing coupled with more advanced reactors, leaving us with waste that is nasty for a shorter term, and a whole lot less of it overall.

Re:No thanks

[commodore64_love]

>>>Government-free energy implies more coal power plants.

Vice-versa government-run "cash for clunkers" means perfectly good cars were taken off the road, squashed, and thrown into landfills. The government didn't even bother to strip the parts and sell them (recycling), but instead declared that to be illegal. Had a private megacorp done that they'd be pilloried but when government does it, it's labeled a success.

Next up - "cash for breakers" where people are encouraged to break their windows and buy all new ones.

Re:No thanks

[maxume]

The hardest part about long term waste storage is getting people to give it as little thought as they give the millions of tons of material pumped into the atmosphere by coal power plants (and it is becoming clear that they actually put more radiation into the environment than nuclear, so it isn't just a matter of the potential problems associated with the CO2).

The idea of creating institutions that need to stand for thousands of years is a little scary, but I'm a lot more scared of turning off the lights.

Re:No thanks

[maxume]

Very few of the cars destroyed were worth more than $4500 (think about it for a few minutes). And only the drive train needed to be destroyed, junk yards were free to strip other parts from the vehicles (and even the drive train was almost certainly sold as scrap, not buried in the ground).

I'm doubtful that the program accomplished a great deal (It seems clear that it is a great way to do Keynesian stimulus, but it isn't as clear if that is a good idea), but if you didn't like cash for clunkers, you should be outraged by government programs that pay people, directly, for replacing their windows (with modern energy efficient windows).

Re:No thanks

[similar_name]

Vice-versa government-run "cash for clunkers" means perfectly good cars were taken off the road, squashed, and thrown into landfills. The government didn't even bother to strip the parts and sell them (recycling), but instead declared that to be illegal.

That's simply not true, only the engine block is seized. The car can then sold to registered salvage dealers who strip the vehicle for parts.

Re:No thanks

[Vahokif]

Nuclear is the one place I'd appreciate excessive regulation.

Re:No thanks

[NotBornYesterday]

Okay, I'll bite. I'll admit I'm no nuclear expert; all comments below are strictly IMHO/AFAIK.

Let me clarify my original comment. In the US, we seem intent on burying the waste we produce. It seems to me that since most of a conventional "used" reactor rod is usable fuel, reprocessing our "waste" first is a good idea. Too bad our government is slow to support it.

Also, alternative reactor designs offer the ability to burn what was once considered waste, leaving stuff that has a shorter half-life, meaning that the length time required for sequestering it is less, which seems like a good thing.

Your thoughts?

Re:No thanks

[Chris Mattern]

If only there were as many protests to stop mountain top removal as there are to stop from putting up wind farms.

If only the mountain top removal was near rich liberal Democratic politicians, and the wind farms near poor Appalachian mountaineers...

Re:No thanks

[Wonko the Sane]

We've had the technology since the 60s to build reactors that don't produce fuel "waste". The only thing standing in the way of progress in the field for the last 50 years is government interference and anti-nuclear hysteria.

Re:No thanks

[Zak3056]

Compare and contrast: Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.

You're not helping the pro-government case with that particular example.

Re:No thanks

[PPH]

In either case (coal or nuclear), the government serves the purpose of transferring the costs of using the public commons (the atmosphere, ground water, etc.) to the industries seeking to use them. Or at least that's what they should be doing.

Want to burn coal? Fine, but I own a share of that air you're dumping CO2, SO2 and assorted other goodies into. Same goes for leaking radioactive crap into the public's property.

Ideally, a market solution should be tried as proposed for CO2 emissions, where some will be tolerated. But market prices will dictate who gets to produce how much. But in the case of radioactive waste, how should we price it? And what do we do if the price is so high (which it probably will be in this case), that violators will just declare bankruptcy and walk away from their mess?

Re:No thanks

[jedidiah]

What you think that those cars can't be PUSHED into position?

Get a few construction workers and you can plain CARRY cars around.

Just because you are a pasty scrawny thing, it doesn't mean the rest of country is like that.

Re:No thanks

[jpmorgan]

I wouldn't blame it on 'government' as a concept. The Russians recently blew up a hydro plant. They're just naturally good at making things go boom.

Re:No thanks

[Spril]

> Nuclear power has a far lower cost of operation.

Only by spreading their costs to the rest of society!

The nuclear industry gets huge payments from the federal government to deal with their radioactive waste because they created the idea that society should be responsible for dealing with it. Even my house insurance has an exclusion saying I get zilch for losses caused by nuclear power accidents. Neither of these is a problem for coal, gas, wind, or hydro power.

Re:No thanks

[toddestan]

The requirement is that the car dealer that takes the car in must seize the engine. I don't know where you live, but most new car dealers aren't anywhere close to the salvage yards, so pushing them around really isn't an option.

Also, the seized engine effectively prevents a lot of the re-use of parts. Typically when a salvage yard gets an old car through the normal channels, it will usually still run to some extent. That allows the yard to easily test whether parts like the transmission, alternator, AC compressor, power steering, brakes, to see if they work. With the engines seized, they can't do any of that. They can still test the parts in other ways, but that cuts into their already slim profits.

Given all of that, some dealers with a lot of the cars are calling in the mobile car crushers, and all but the most valuable hulks are being crushed on the spot.

Re:No thanks

[commodore64_love]

>>>Very few of the cars destroyed were worth more than $4500 (think about it for a few minutes).

The real question is - Can I think of 45 parts that are worth $100 or more? Yes easily. When you take a perfectly-good (but old) car and break it up into pieces, you can get a lot of dollars from each individual piece. In fact that's probably what I should have done with my old car - piece it out on ebay - rather than sell it for a measly $500.

Plus even if the cars were not worth much, Congress still should have allowed junk dealers to label these cars "scrap" and recycle the parts through their networks, rather than outlaw the practice and fillup landfills. What Congress did is the exact-opposite of the "green" philosophy.

Re:No thanks

[commodore64_love]

>>>The car can then sold to registered salvage dealers who strip the vehicle for parts.

False. My NBC station did a story about this, where they interviewed local dealers/salvagemen, and they were all rather annoyed that the government specifically forbade the practice. QUOTE: "I'd like to sell this car to the local junkyard down the street, but Congress has forbidden that. The car MUST be taken directly to a crusher."

Re:No thanks

[similar_name]

Hate to burst your bubble but I work at a wholesale auto auction and we sell those cars to salvage dealers that are on an approved list. They have 180 days to strip the car for parts before they shred them.

Look for yourself at cars.gov It's under 'What happens to the vehicle I trade in?'

You'll also find the specific mention in law at the bottom of the third page here.

And here's an article about the parts flooding the market.

I don't know where you live but the dealers/salvage people their don't know what their talking about.

Besides, I can't believe you of all people would cite NBC as a reliable source :)

Re:No thanks

[similar_name]

Ahh, I'm not all the way awake yet.

The second to last line in my post should read "I don't know where you live but the dealers/salvage people there don't know what they're talking about"

Re:No thanks

[maxume]

The only parts that had to be scrapped were the engines (and maybe the transmissions, I'm not sure about the latter), and they didn't have to be sent to landfills (they could be sold to a metal yard as scrap iron or whatever).

I'm too lazy to do it...

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

I'm too lazy to do it, but I think if I looked hard enough, I'm pretty sure I'd find a giant heap of government subsidization in Intel's past. It might be disguised as tax breaks, favorable legislation, or some sweet no-bid contract deal, but I doubt many companies get to Intel's size without getting some help along the way from their friends in state and federal governments. They were just smart enough to get it done in a way that's a lot less visible than the "ZOMG I CAN HAZ BAILOUT" approach taken recently.

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[commodore64_love]

It actually makes sense to have companies be taxfree. They provide jobs which is a useful service to the nation and should be encouraged, just the same way we encourage other useful services like the foundation for the arts or the government-run school system or or city metro or whatever.

Plus we all know that taxes get paid by consumers anyway. If next year the Congress announced a 20% National Tax on every product sold, do you think Walmart or MS or other Corps would just say, "Oh that's okay. We'll pay it ourselves." Of course not. They'll pass it onto the customers as 20% higher prices. Corporate taxation is just a hidden tax that ultimately comes out of OUR wallets.

I think an organization that provides Americans with jobs should be tax exempt, if only as a way of saying "thank youse for my jarb". ;-)

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[obarel]

You mean like the $525m grant Intel received from the Israeli government?

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[Wonko the Sane]

But...But... If we stopped the massive taxation on businesses then it might be affordable for companies to build their products in the US instead of importing everything. Then how would we manage to destroy the middle class and the economy?

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

It actually makes sense to have companies be taxfree.

Whether it does or not, I think it's a little silly for a former CEO of a company like Intel to wag his finger at other industries and lecture them about getting benefits from the government.

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[TheRaven64]

It's more subtle than that. The idea of taxing corporations is that not everything corporations sell is sold you your taxpayers. If, for example, a US corporation is paying tax in the US and selling 10% of its products to Canadians, then only 90% of the corporate taxes have to be paid by US taxpayers, the rest are paid by Canadian taxpayers (you didn't believe that whole 'no taxation without representation' thing did you?). For large companies, this percentage is much higher, and so taxing the corporation means you get to lower taxes for the people who elected you. Of course, this stops working when corporations start using off-shore tax havens. It also doesn't work particularly well when you are a net importer from an economic standpoint, but it still does from a psychological standpoint ('foreign companies are making your cost of living go up, the government is lowering taxes!').

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[slashqwerty]

Plus we all know that taxes get paid by consumers anyway.

This is not entirely true. Consider oil for example. The price is set by supply and demand. Taxes don't come into this equation until it pushes the cost higher than would normally be set by supply and demand. Let's say it costs $0.30/gallon to pump oil out of the ground, ship it overseas, and refine it. Demand is high enough and supply is low enough that gas still costs $2.50/gallon at the pump. Regardless if we pay $0.01/gallon or $1.00/gallon in taxes, the law of supply and demand will still set the pump price at $2.50/gallon. Taxes in this case are paid by oil company shareholders, not consumers. Of course at some point taxes would push the price up. For example, if taxes were $3.00/gallon.

It actually makes sense to have companies be taxfree.

There are other reasons to tax companies. If you tax companies for the harm they cause the environment they will modify their business to cause less harm, thus lowering their tax burden. In that manner you would only pay the tax if you patronize businesses that harm the environment.

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[Trepidity]

In addition, profit isn't fixed. When a tax is raised, some portion of it may come out of pockets of the corporation's customers, and some portion of it may reduce the corporation's profit margins, thereby coming out of the pockets of the corporation's stockholders. It's usually a mix of the two; which place most of the money comes from depends on the particular market the corporation is in--- how much pricing power they have, how fat their profit margins were to begin with, what competitors they have, etc.

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[NewbieProgrammerMan]

Pop psychology, how quaint. Not that you'll believe me (or even really care anyway), but I'm partial to constitutionally limited government that stays out of my way and doesn't play favorites.

Which brings me to the point at hand: I'm talking about the kind of tax breaks that aren't available to the local small businesses. The kind that are handed out to get Something Big And Important to come to Our Town/Country/State so the local Builders Of Monuments To Themselves will be remembered as somebody that could bring home the pork.

Tax breaks are fine with me. Tax breaks that use the power of the state to take money from me and *not* take it from someone else are not.

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[khallow]

I like how federal money taints. If I receive even a little fed money in the past, my success for the rest of my life is due to that money. And the federal government spreads it around. My view is that you can find federal money oozing in any large endeavors or social phenomena. But Intel didn't get as big as it is by getting pumped with federal money or by having its scientists paid with partial federal money. They got big by providing a lot of high value (and high margin) CPUs for the most popular computers of the day.

Re:I'm too lazy to do it...

[toddestan]

Plus we all know that taxes get paid by consumers anyway. If next year the Congress announced a 20% National Tax on every product sold, do you think Walmart or MS or other Corps would just say, "Oh that's okay. We'll pay it ourselves." Of course not. They'll pass it onto the customers as 20% higher prices. Corporate taxation is just a hidden tax that ultimately comes out of OUR wallets.

That's not always true. For inelastic goods, you can just pass the cost onto the consumer and they'll pay it. But for elastic goods, increasing the cost of producing the good by 20% won't bump the price up by 20%. Instead, you'll reach a new equilibrium where the consumer pays some of the tax (in higher prices), and the business owners and/or shareholders pays the rest (in the form of reduced profits).

But ... without HMOs how will people get well?

[MartinSchou]

Without health maintenance organizations no one would ever be able to maintain their health ... right?

Re:But ... without HMOs how will people get well?

[commodore64_love]

>>>Without HMOs no one would ever be able to maintain their health ... right?

Wrong. You could just pay cash. That's what I do - just below $200 a year for my annual doctor's visit. It's cheaper to do that than to have insurance, just as it's cheaper to own a car than to rent it.

Re:But ... without HMOs how will people get well?

[Maguscrowley]

Some people have chronic health conditions that need monitoring. Or would you like me to just see how things roll without my psychiatric medication, appointments, or the means to pay for my in-patient treatment? Perhaps you'd like to put me up for a while in your downstairs closet instead?

I don't bite .... trust me ... >:D

apples to oranges comparison

[Anonymous Coward]

People die because they can not get access to or afford health care, no so with Intel products.
Plus the U.S. Federal Gov requires that E.R.s treat those who can not pay*. Hey Andy, how about Intel give away CPUs, Chipsets, Motherboards and SSDs (w00t!) to those who can't afford 'em?

* So I've heard.

PS, no I did not read the article.

Re:apples to oranges comparison

[CrimsonAvenger]

Plus the U.S. Federal Gov requires that E.R.s treat those who can not pay*. Hey Andy, how about Intel give away CPUs,

So, guys with guns forcing someone to give away his stuff is basically the same as someone giving away his stuff of his own free will?

Wow....

Re:apples to oranges comparison

[commodore64_love]

>>>People die because they can not get access to or afford health care, no so with Intel products.

In the United States there are only 8 million U.S. citizens that are not covered by either a private or government program. That's less than 3% of all Americans. PLEASE please stop exaggerating the problem just to push-forward your agenda. There is no reason to punish the other 97% with a government monopoly takeover.

Instead all you need to do is extend the existing programs (like medicare) to those 3% of uncovered persons. A simple fix.

Re:apples to oranges comparison

[agnosticnixie]

PLEASE please stop exaggerating the problem just to push-forward your agenda.

1. This is not the only point in the issue
2. Pot, meet kettle, it's black too.

Re:apples to oranges comparison

[beringreenbear]

Okay... I'll see your "Expand the current program!" and counter with "Will you pay the higher taxes to expand said current program that offers services that are not available to you?"

Note: I'm not saying what I think the solution is. I'm just poking holes in your solution. I'll concede your point that health care is a clusterfuck and that the real solution is to take down the 60+ year built-out infrastructure, replacing it with different efficiencies. The US has the best rescue care in the world. If you need an organ transplant or you have cancer; if you can pay for it; you can get the best possible care in the world. Maybe we need to instead leave that infrastructure alone (you buy insurance for the big stuff) and figure something else out for the rest.

Re:apples to oranges comparison

[drsquare]

To a libertarian, eight million people are merely a statistic. They're closer to fascists than they realise.

Re:apples to oranges comparison

[sunspot42]

Mod this up!

And the "coverage" that folks without traditional healthcare have access to is pretty awful - like free clinics with hours-long waits. Hard to go there for your "healthcare" if you have to work.

And what of..

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

software patents Mr. Grove? Has that helped creativity? I would have loved to have seen Mr. Grove go further and address this topic.

healthcare

[mc moss]

"Another business he believes to be ripe for disruption is health care. He complains that the industry seems to innovate much too slowly. The lack of proper electronic medical records and smart âoeclinical decision systemsâ bothers him, as does the slow-moving, bureaucratic nature of clinical trials. He thinks pharmaceutical firms should study the fast âoeknowledge turnsâ achieved by chipmakers, so that the cycles of learning and innovation are accelerated."

I don't think this guy understands how the healthcare industry works. We can implement a change with electronic medical records but when it comes to clinical trials and drug testing, it is not just bureaucracy that slows it down. The very nature of using human subjects as opposed to electronic devices means doing long and thorough testing, and we still don't have a complete picture of how everything fits together in the human body.

Re:healthcare

[Ronald Dumsfeld]

Quite.

I seem to remember some floating-point error with Pentium processors.

I suppose the healthcare equivalent would be the 'wonder drug' Thalidomide.

Re:healthcare

[Maguscrowley]

A few chromosomes were just ... truncated in the reproduction process =D

Re:healthcare

[smoker2]

Except there was nothing wrong with Thalidomide. Giving it to pregnant women was a mistake, but when used for the purpose it was designed for (a sedative), it was and still is very successful. It was due to that success that it was considered useful for pregnant women with morning sickness. It had "remarkably few" side effects, unfortunately the big one wasn't discovered due to only being tested on rodents, who metabolise the drug differently from humans.

Thalidomide does not affect your DNA, doesn't cause mutations in any way. It had a purely chemical effect on developing foetuses :

Lead researcher Dr Neil Vargesson said the fact that thalidomide was taken by mothers-to-be at an early stage in their pregnancy was crucial to the deformities because that is when the limbs of babies are still forming. 'The blood vessels involved in this process, at this stage of pregnancy, are still at an immature stage when they rapidly change and expand to accommodate the outgrowing limb,' she [sic] explained.

'But the antiangiogenic activity of the drug stops the growth of these blood vessels and that results in limb defects. 'Now we understand which property of the drug causes limb defects, it remains possible that we could make a safer form of the drug that has the clinical benefits for sufferers of leprosy but does not cause limb defects.'

Found here, which is reporting this. The mere fact that it has taken 50 years to find out why it caused birth defects, shows that it wasn't a trivial problem that they could have prevented. How many drugs/chemicals/cosmetics are tested on pregnant apes these days ?

Re:healthcare

[khallow]

I don't think this guy understands how the healthcare industry works. We can implement a change with electronic medical records but when it comes to clinical trials and drug testing, it is not just bureaucracy that slows it down. The very nature of using human subjects as opposed to electronic devices means doing long and thorough testing, and we still don't have a complete picture of how everything fits together in the human body.

There are two things to remember here. First, the cumbersome nature of human testing including the bureaucracy is a large barrier to entry that benefits those who can already play the game. Second, at some point we're going to figure out how to test using electronic devices. That is, there will be electronic models of the human body good enough to filter out a number of test drugs before anyone injects them into a living body (human or otherwise). I wouldn't be surprised if at some point this century, we not only have such electronic models, but portable devices that can deliver drug mixtures (that is mixtures of several different drugs) based on that model to living patients in real time.

Here're his previous comments

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

Here are his previous comments:

• Andy Grove on software patents

...but there's one more from around 2006 that I'm still looking for. Check back in a few minutes.

Re:Stop letting Stanford Business School people ..

[dangitman]

Get rid of the accountants, economists, marketeers and MBAs from power. Put them back to work where they belong. Put people who know what's going on in the executive positions.

That's a decent proposal, but also has the problem that you are taking talented people away from the jobs they do best. Someone still has to do the marketing and economic analysis. But sure, a lot of MBAs are simply charlatans, and they should be cut loose. But putting engineers and scientists in management positions doesn't strike me as the best solution.

Relatively govt free?

[quickgold192]

If it wasn't for the government's (military's) need to crunch huge amount of numbers in the 60s and 70s, we would be decades behind in terms of computer technology. If I wasn't typing this on a phone I would link a source, but rarely does an industry as big as computing start off "relatively govt free"

Re:Stop letting Stanford Business School people ..

[Wonko the Sane]

I'm going to have to take a shower after writing this, but I agree 100% with John C Dvorak on this subject.

Re:"Relatively government free"

[hedwards]

You do realize that, you're totally taking that and twisting it around, right? DARPA and the NSA demand results, they don't necessarily care what the cost is, but they do demand technological advancement or they will go elsewhere to get it. As opposed to the government tinkering in failing businesses giving them cash and pushing them around as to how to produce things for purchase by consumers.

It's not really the same thing.

Er Wait a Minute...

[sonicmerlin]

Wasn't Intel recently slammed by the EU for anti-competitive behavior? I guess that's their version of not "slacking"?

Re:Er Wait a Minute...

[ComputerGeek01]

Yeah, I think they were hit for "paying off" big manufactors NOT to buy competitors products. IMO this isn't slacking though; I'd imagine with all of the bribes and negotiations that took place they would had to have been very pro-active.

Re:Read the article,

[loki_tiwaz]

he hardly mentions healthcare in the way the summary implies. He states that the pharma industry needs to get it's ass in gear, and that's about it.

legalisation would sure put more money in pharma's pockets hahaha.

it's not really a surprise that a redundant and useless industry like pharmaceuticals is having a hard time these days. same with cars. these are things that are pretty vacant. nobody needs a new car every two years, a properly built car should last 30 years at least with an engine change and regular maintenance. and most drugs are sold to cover up symptoms of other problems like misconceptions about how much of each nutrient we actually need and the subtle long term effects of things that are classified 'safe'.

when times are tough, frivolous things tend to lose the consumer dollar. maybe if big pharma started funding real health research and exploring recreational psychoactive drugs they'd see their bottom line pick up. proper results in the former and safe drugs in the latter increase lifespans and happiness which results in a better economy. this idiotic idea that people can't be trusted to administer psychoactive drugs responsibily basically means these very clever pharmacology people have a very narrow field. psychoactives is a wide open field and nobody's legally allowed to capitalise on it. big pharma is best equipped to. shame it's not likely to happen.

the legacy of highly effective brainwashing campains against psychoactive drugs is a society that is afraid of the idea of investigating the field at all, let alone making it into a proper industry. if the entrenched psychoactive drug industries didn't have the advantage of irrational ridiculous laws and ideas about psychoactive drug use i'm sure they'd be in the shitter these days too. i can tell you one thing for sure, caffeine would NOT be the most widely consumed drug if people had the option of a vibrant research industry exploring other potential stimulants. and i'd say the liquor industry would probably be begging for bailouts too if they had to compete with a legal cannabis industry.

and before i neglect this point... guess which industry is the most thoroughly full of redundant non-useful activity? finance? not to say banks don't perform critical useful functions in society, but the more abstract derivatives get the less relevant they get to reality.

Re:Read the article,

[GaryOlson]

From TFA:

"The lack of proper electronic medical records and 'smart clinical decision systems' bothers him..."

. How is the pharma industry responsible for my medical records?

Re:Stop letting Stanford Business School people ..

[GaryOlson]

Thanks for the link. Now I have to agree with you and take a shower also.

massive government subsidies

[jipn4]

The computing industry has received massive government subsidies. The Internet, high performance computing, CPU architectures, compiler construction, and plenty more was financed by DARPA and other US government agencies, as well as European and Japanese government function. The subsidies were in the form of research grants, technology transfer from government research labs, among others. Knowledge and technologies were also massively transferred in the form of graduate students, academics, and government researchers coming into the private computing sector.

There's nothing wrong with--it's government doing what it should be doing. But if Andy Grove thinks computing did it all by itself, he's kidding himself.

If other sectors (automotive, energy, transportation, environment, etc.) are supposed to catch up, the government needs to invest massively in basic and applied research, fellowships, and government research labs in those areas.

Re:Read the article,

[NotBornYesterday]

Right. Because we need more potent alternatives to crystal meth.

Look, if you want to legalize pot, go for it. No big deal. But sweeping up all "psychoactive drugs" together and legalizing them is a dumb fucking idea, and yes, there are a lot of people to stupid to manage taking psychoactive drugs responsibly. You want an example? Look at alcohol. Look at the deaths resulting from the widespread legal use of said drug, and tell me with a straight face that the answer is to unleash big pharma to make and market more chemical toys to play with.

And I'll bet that the same folks who are saying "The government should just, like, legalize drugs, dude" today are the ones who would be raving about a government/big pharma conspiracy to enslave our minds and empty our wallets with a flood of psychoactive drugs if your Utopian fantasy came to pass.

Re:Read the article,

[loki_tiwaz]

You want an example? Look at alcohol. Look at the deaths resulting from the widespread legal use of said drug, and tell me with a straight face that the answer is to unleash big pharma to make and market more chemical toys to play with.

yes, of course, the answer to a small part of the population mishandling something is prohibition. what about education? and your answer specifically implies that alcohol should be banned. yeah right, good luck with that. people only accepted prohibition of psychoactive drugs because they had available drug options, as well as of course the highly effective brainwashing techniques used to demonise the terrible drugs of the time - back in those days cannabis was the drug the filthy peasants used and that's why they attacked it.

fact is that people are using the drugs (amazing but true) anyway. and not enlarging the options for people is not helping, because it's a case of the devil you know. like meth, sure, it's got a lotta downsides, i know from personal experience. but what alternative is there?

at some point society as a whole is gonna have to really re-evaluate this whole business because the mess the current situation has created is a RESULT of prohibition. not the existence of any given drug.

lets say that somehow magically prohibition worked and all the illegal drugs suddenly evaporated. nobody was using illegal drugs. don't you think they'd turn to legal ones? do you even comprehend how big the legal drug abuse problem is now? oxycontin, vicodin, suboxone, valium whatever you care to name. legal drugs are more used in the wrong way than illegal ones. people use drugs for a reason and focusing on their behaviour when they misuse them is missing the point entirely.

AT&T and other monopolies

[Anonymous Coward]

But Mr. Grove is correct - government often makes things stagnate and hold steady, such as when AT&T had a government-protected monopoly over the phone lines and computer modems

The reason AT&T was created as a monopoly was to help build telephone infrastructure.

There used to be dozens of telephone companies and electrical utilities. However they only served urban areas and everyone strung up their own cables. When they went bust the cables were left there as there was no one to clean them up.

Monopolies were legislated so that one company could build the infrastructure for all residents (urban and rural). They were guaranteed a fixed profit and in exchange had to serve all areas equally, with urban dwellers subsidizing the building of infrastructure in rural parts (farming was greatly helped by electrification in many aspects--which helped them become more efficient and lower food prices).

Now perhaps the phone monopoly was allowed to live too long. Or perhaps the monopoly should have been for the infrastructure (cables), and there should have been competition for the actual service (like Sweden does with ISPs). But the monopoly was initially formed for very good reasons, and without it we wouldn't have the electrical and telephone infrastructure as quickly as we did.

And other government interference was Europe mandating GSM: it forced all companies on the same playing field and gave people choices in equipment and services. Whereas in the US laissez faire model you have multiple carriers, with multiple standards, with only token "competition" between them because once someone on one system the switching costs can be very high.

The competition should be in services, not in infrastructure. The infrastructure should be one open standard (either voluntarily picked or mandated).

Re:AT&T and other monopolies

[bubbha]

Not to mention NASA. The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years. Government set the strategy and arranged for private companies to make it happen.

Note that the space program (and military) drove the creation of technology to create commercial integrated circuits. How convenient to forget the help that government provides after the fact.

Of course without that arrogance - perhaps he would never have become the effective manager that he once was.

Re:AT&T and other monopolies

[ultranova]

Not to mention NASA. The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years. Government set the strategy and arranged for private companies to make it happen.

More importantly, no private company could or would had paid the bill. I'd argue that we haven't, in fact, reached Moon yet: sure, we put a few people there for a few days, but it cost so enormously that we had to discontinue the trips, and in fact currently lack the capability to reach it at all.

We have reached the orbit, in that putting equipment there is commonplace and economically sensible and can actually be done by private companies rather than just by nation-states; we haven't reached it in the sense that putting people there was safe or cheap. I argue that we should discontinue efforts to return to Moon - much less reach Mars - and concentrate instead on getting a firm hold on Earth orbit. Once any of us can choose to take a one-night trip to an orbital hotel rather than two weeks in Hawaii, then it's time to reach further.

Sorry about getting offtopic.

Re:AT&T and other monopolies

[commodore64_love]

>>>The market and private enterprise could never have put a man on the moon in 10 years.

That's true, but what have we done since then? Virtually nothing. Had the project been done privately, you're right it probably would have been slower (it took about 30 years to gradually build America's first national railroad system), but we'd have a thriving industry on the moon, and probably Mars too, that would be continued to the present day. Instead what we got was a government boondoggle that led to a dead end. Lots of pomp-and-circumstance but no foundation.

If you're still not comprehending what I mean, just read Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon" which presents an alternate history of how private industry could have accomplished, not just landing on the moon, but also creating a thriving space-based marketplace.

>>>to create commercial integrated circuits.

True. As I said before in regards to ARPAnet, government can often serve as a good genesis, but then it needs to get out of the way. Can you imagine where we'd be if PCs were created by Government? Well we don't have to imagine because the French dabbled in the idea in the 80s, and what was produced was a slow text-only online computer, whereas the commercial computers had already moved into music and video.

Government (and monopoly in general) == stagnation. Competition == Innovation to try to beat the other guy.

Right on, brother!

[bonze]

... and can anybody on /. point me towards somebody who can hook me up with some Substance D, or maybe some Chew-Z?

I heard that shit's OUTTASIGHT!

Grove is ignoring history

[Salamander]

The fact is that government did move to prop up many mainframe makers, and even more so with the makers of supercomputers which long ago displaced mainframes as the largest and most expensive systems. It's still happening today. Go look at the Top 500 lists, and you'll see that practically all of the top systems are government-owned. Thinking Machines would never have gotten off the ground without extensive government support, Cray/SGI wouldn't have survived the 90s, and let's not forget DARPA's contributions. Government has contributed positively to innovation in computing, not caused it to stagnate. If the government had shown any inclination to get involved in the auto industry the way they have been involved in computing, we'd all be driving all-electric or hydrogen-fueled cars today, supported by an appropriate recharging/refueling infrastructure and complemented by a robust cargo/mass-transit infrastructure. Grove's an idiot.

Re:Grove is ignoring history

[damburger]

Lets not forget that IBM was involved in a massive, government funded, data processing project in Europe in the 1940s

On a less flippant note, the microprocessor was a direct product of the US nuclear missile program. Nobody was pushing for miniaturised computers until the government put billions into making it happen so they could fit a guidance computer on a missile.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/06/05/tob_minuteman_1/print.html

Minuteman II's navigation system was nearly one quarter the size of Minuteman I with approximately two and a half times as much memory. Midway through the decade, the Minuteman project was responsible for about 20 per cent of all IC sales and had become the largest purchaser of semiconductor microcircuits. While the American government's direct contribution of integrated circuit R&D is arguably modest, it was undeniably the technology's sugar-daddy.

But that is the trick to being a good capitalist; rewrite history and claim you've never received any help from the government, and it was the 'genius of the market' which made you rich. Don't be afraid to wag your fingers at any other government subsidy though - because its all evil socialism!

Re:Read the article,

[NotBornYesterday]

your answer specifically implies that alcohol should be banned

Not at all. I homebrew beer, and firmly believe in my right to consume alcohol. Plus, prohibition has been tried and didn't work. My point is that I see no value in letting more genies out of the bottle (har har, no pun intended). There is a vast world of difference between having a drink or two and sucking on a crackpipe.

the mess the current situation has created is a RESULT of prohibition. not the existence of any given drug.

I disagree. Many drug problems exist independent of prohibition. Addiction does not depend on prohibition. In fact, the point I was trying to make with alcohol was not that it should be banned, but that legalization DOES NOT eliminate the problems. Here is an example of a legal drug causing lots of problems. Do we really need to multiply that? Alcohol and pot are baby aspirin compared to coke, meth, heroin.

like meth, sure, it's got a lotta downsides, i know from personal experience. but what alternative is there?

Soo ... you're saying that a lack of legally available meth is the problem? What alternative is there? How about not taking it? Works for most people.

do you even comprehend how big the legal drug abuse problem is now?

Better than you think.

Re:You can't just sit on your a** and give the fin

[Sulphur]

That is dark complectioned, you insensitive clod.

The Bill Gates Lesson

[suso]

I guess Andy has forgotten what happened when Bill Gates tried to compare the computer industry to the car industry. GM CEO fired back with some embarrassing points about the computer industry.

Re:Read the article,

[Locklin]

While prohibition is generally stupid, I have to agree with the gp in that releasing pharmaceutical companies to do what they please would be a huge mistake. It's entirely possible to engineer a drug that once tried, 100% of people would empty their savings and sell their house to get more.
We already know enough about the reward mechanisms in the brain to have a good idea of where
to start. There's a big difference between weed, and what big pharma' could create with billion dollar research programs and trillian dollar, fully legal, markets.

Agree to disagree.

[TaoPhoenix]

I wholly reject that theme.

Spreadsheets let people map out information to decide things. "An idiot with a spreadsheet was still an idiot before".

Re:Agree to disagree.

[Wonko the Sane]

Mostly spreadsheets are crutches for people who lack the analytical reasoning ability to understand and use relational databases. Spreadsheets should be used like Notepad is used: a quick and dirty way to sketch something out before actually implementing it with the proper tool.

Re:Agree to disagree.

[Wonko the Sane]

Judging by your responses to various topics recently, you really are a cock aren't you.

I might appear that way because I can't help but feel frustrated at the enormous amount of wasted opportunities I see everywhere.

Maybe it will help if I explain with an analogy.

This tool is a good and useful tool. It is something any mechanic (for that matter any homeowner) should have in his toolbox.

In a pinch you can use these pliers in the place of a wrench, a socket or even a hammer but no sensible person would say that those tools are now obsolete.

Now imagine an entire generation of mechanics who were never taught about socket sets, wrenches or hammers. They were trained to do everything with pliers and not to worry about those other tools. They may not even know those other tools exist.

That's why I am frustrated. You can only watch so many bolt heads get stripped because some idiot was trying to turn it with a pair of pliers instead of using wrench before it gets to be too much to bear.

With cheese

[copponex]

Let me address the real issue here. Just because the US has poorly managed it's infrastructure does not mean the rest of the world has. Capitalist fanaticism is just as dumb as communist or anarchist fanaticism.

For instance, the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation. Who is more efficient? France has a nuclear powered high speed rail system that is ridiculously efficient, clean, and well used. Just because lobbyists are directing all our infrastructure to the dead idea of highways and urban sprawl doesn't mean that subsidized rail is a bad idea. It means that rail and sensible land use aren't receiving as much money as they should.

The best illustration of the failure of US governance can be seen quite plainly in healthcare. I don't care what anecdote you have. Statistically, the rest of the world pays at least 35% less than what we do for health care, they live just as long, and they are happier with their system than we are with ours. This is because they have grown up and realized that the market solution is not always the best.

Another example is telecommunications infrastructure. Across the whole of Europe, well regulated broadband has covered nearly every inch of the continent with low cost, high speed internet access. Even in countries with similar population densities, like Norway and Sweden and Finland. Sure, you can find complaints. Give them the choice of a government option or a closed option like Comcast or AT&T, and you'll quickly discover that people don't want to be locked into a vendor. It would be like Georgia Power (where I live) only allowing Georgia Power appliances to use electricity. The liberation of American network access, if it ever happens, will be with corporations fighting to the bitter end to keep their profit margins intact, built not on their own dime, but the infrastructure subsidized by you and me from programs throughout the 90s.

You've swallowed wholesale the lie that corporations are better than government for everything. Just take a look at the 1880s before public outcry ended child slavery, 70 hour workweeks, unsafe working conditions, and crippling manual labor. That's the reality of corporate governance. These deplorable conditions didn't disappear, they were just outsourced to countries where the leaders are willing to exploit their workforce for kickbacks.

You can advocate an intelligent position, where corporations are kept in check by a more powerful and localized government, and the local government is kept in check by a powerful participatory democracy. Or you can advocate for the madness of money being the only metric by which success can be measured. You could munch on a Baconator while the rest of the world continues to improve through science and collective innovation, and we become an echo chamber of reality shows and televangelists and Fox News anchors, trying to convince a nation literally dying from it's own selfishness and gluttony that they're still #1.

Re:With cheese

[commodore64_love]

>>>the whole of Europe is covered by subsidized rail. Europe uses less than 20% of the energy that we do for transportation.

Apples-and-oranges. Europe is basically one gigantic urban zone, whereas the U.S. (and Canada) are a gigantic rural zone with a few urban zones alone the edges. NATURALLY Europe's going to burn less for transport, simply because everything is closely compacted. In contrast a drive from St. Louis to the next major city (like Kansas City) is almost 5 hours.

Also it's a mistake to think trains are more efficient. Due to frequent stops-and-starts (which waste energy) they get the energy-equivalent of 25 miles per gallon per passenger. That is better than your typical 20mpg SUV, but nowhere near as good as my 2002 hybrid Insight which is 70 mpg per driver, or if I take a friend, goes upto 140 mpg per passenger.

Re:With cheese

[khallow]

You've swallowed wholesale the lie that corporations are better than government for everything.

The original poster states, for example, that governments are better at waging war.

Just take a look at the 1880s before public outcry ended child slavery, 70 hour workweeks, unsafe working conditions, and crippling manual labor. That's the reality of corporate governance. These deplorable conditions didn't disappear, they were just outsourced to countries where the leaders are willing to exploit their workforce for kickbacks.

So we have a case of governments exploiting their workforce for kickbacks and you call that "corporate governance"? It's a case of government doing the sort of things governments do.

You can advocate an intelligent position, where corporations are kept in check by a more powerful and localized government, and the local government is kept in check by a powerful participatory democracy. Or you can advocate for the madness of money being the only metric by which success can be measured.

On the horns of a false dilemma, I see. Here's my view. It doesn't make sense to allow a small group of businesses whether corporations or not to run things. They have their own vested interests and it'll just be a greedy, selfish mess. But there's also plenty of evidence that large governments are themselves big problems for the same reasons. They have similar vested interests and unlikely the business, the profit motive doesn't restrict a government bureaucracy. The only tenuous constraints in a democratic society is the indirect will of the voters and the fact that too much government interference reduces tax revenue. My view is that government does some things better (if simply because no smaller group would be trusted with the task at hand, like national defense), but most of what government does isn't in that category. For example, entitlement spending as a whole is a giant money sink. I gather they make up somewhere around half of all government spending. While there are compelling reasons to consider a nationalized health care system (as you do above) superior to the current mess, it's worth remember the current mess was, many decades ago, a lot healthier system and superior to current health care systems. I think people are ignoring the harm caused by many changes and degradations over the years: greater malpractice risk, expansion of required coverage by health insurance, mandated health benefits by employers, and the decay and increased expense of the US educational system (to name a few things).

The people who insist despite the obvious signs to the contrary that regulation is far too low for US businesses are an ideal match to the most rabid libertarians who advocate elimination of government. They're similarly unrealistic and probably would cause similar levels of harm to society and the economy.

Re:Stop letting Stanford Business School people ..

[Rod Beauvex]

That's just they thing. Failure, as we have seen the past year, is not talent, and these people have no idea what the hell they're doing, and therefor have no business doings these jobs. Being rich does not qualify you to run a business, branch of government, ect.

IT is slacking - look at licenses, warranty...

[Lazy Jones]

... when the IT industry has learned to sell products that *are* fit for a particular purpose and come with at least a rudimentary form of warranty, then it can try to lecture other industries. Until then, please keep quiet and enjoy the easy life.

Plenty of tax breaks in Intel's past (and present)

[sgt_doom]

Yup, Intel has enjoyed their share of tax freebies: everytime they offshore a job, they get a tax break (thanks to legislation passed during the Carter Administration). Yup, they make use of those offshore "profit laundering" finance centers. Intel can't point the finger, but can be given the finger.....

oh really?

[brokeninside]

• Intel receives massive subsidies from local and national governments to build its fabrication plants. For example, After a year and a half of negotiations, Israel's finance minister announced the government has agreed to grant Intel Corp. a 12.5% subsidy for a new wafer fab.
• Intel has been the beneficiary of massive amounts of knowledge from research fed into the public sphere by government funded projects. In fact, Intel is presently lobbying for increased government investment in various types of research from which Intel will directly benefit. Intel supports increased government funding of research and development in security innovation, including peer reviewed cryptography.
• Intel present receives a tremendous number of tax credits for the R&D they do. Further, they are lobbying to increase these credits. Intel supports making the U.S. R&D Tax Credit a permanent part of the tax code.

If you took out all of the profits from direct and indirect government subsidies, it would be an open question whether or not Intel would a profitable concern. The largest difference between the firms being bailed out now and Intel is that Intel got on the gravy train earlier and spread its subsidies out over its entire lifetime.

my worthless comment

[descil]

Andy Grove is a dipshit dumbass.

Uh...

[Spewns]

"relatively government-free history." WTF? All of the most significant innovation in computers and technology came out of the public sector - government grants, defense contracts/spending, universities. I guess I shouldn't be floored by such a stupid, wrong claim though. It's a (former) CEO of a US corporation afterall.

People matter more than public or private

[rcharbon]

To quote the learned and famous, well, me writing about health care:
"First, you have to discard the idea that a private organization is inherently more efficient than a government organization. Both types of organizations are made up of people. On average, people are the same, smart or stupid, hard-working or lazy, friendly or cranky, whether they get checks from Uncle Sam or from Aetna. There are no management secrets unique to one side or the other.

The main difference between the two types of organizations is their goal. Managers of a public health insurance plan strive to perpetuate their jobs and those of their political bosses by maximizing the perceived health care benefits for the voting public. A private insurance companyâ(TM)s primary goal is to generate a profit for the owners of the company. That may involve providing a service to their policyholders, but only to the extent it helps make money."

Note that neither organization has the goal "provide health care". The organization's success in providing health care depends in large part on the extent that the people in the organization have the goal of providing health care, independent of the organization's real goals.

Now replace "health care" with the industry of your choice.

Government bureacracy is necessary in healthcare

[Xabraxas]

The lack of proper electronic medical records and smart "clinical decision systems" bothers him, as does the slow-moving, bureaucratic nature of clinical trials.

I'm ok with the slow-moving nature of clinical trials. Even with them drugs like Vioxx are being approved and killing people. Just imagine if it was standard procedure (and not just denial and deception) to ignore long term results.

Re:Read the article,

[loki_tiwaz]

Plus, prohibition has been tried and didn't work.

so what are you saying? prohibiting psychoactive substances doesn't work?

prohibition drives drug production and distribution into the general criminal millieu (just like in al capone's days) and anything we see as a negative side of drug abuse is amplified by such things as fluctuating purity, contamination, the crime committed by addicts to pay the inflated prices justified by prohibition, not to mention the fact that any genuine research about drugs is gonna be difficult to do when the people funding it are probably looking to see 'drugs are bad' in the conclusions of the studies.

also this point needs to be talked about:

Here is an example of a legal drug causing lots of problems. Do we really need to multiply that? Alcohol and pot are baby aspirin compared to coke, meth, heroin.

what basis is there for the idea that legalisation is going to increase drug use rates? surely the people who want to use drugs are already using them, and the only thing that will change is the ones who were using legal ones may decide to spend their money on ones that used to be illegal.

your statement is based on the unfounded faith in the idea that prohibition is actually reducing drug use. if you look at the epidemiology of drug use, interestingly enough you find in places where the law is soft on prohibiting the less harmful drugs (eg, cannabis and the netherlands) that they actually have lower drug use rates and lower crime rates.

prohibition is like the mother of drug advertisments. by banning a drug you make it into a forbidden fruit and just like the old myth of adam and eve and the serpent and the fruit of knowledge, and half the population is going to use it JUST because it's forbidden. prohibition gives a very dangerous avenue for the outlet of the urge to defy society that the majority of the population experiences in a big way during their teenage years.

even with drugs that are ostensibly legal, like tobacco, for example, the overall poor opinion of it creates a hook for the young ones and this is why we are seeing that rates of taking up smoking in young people hasn't significantly changed even though advertising has been banned, i believe actually in some places it's increased.

Soo ... you're saying that a lack of legally available meth is the problem? What alternative is there? How about not taking it? Works for most people.

i'm not saying that at all. i think that the whole drug regulation system needs to be reformed, and all drug use needs to be monitored by doctors. this way the people with the inability to moderate their use to keep it in balance with their social responsibilities can be given the treatment required to bring about this more healthy way of approaching a given substance. what we are seeing in california and other places with medical marijuana is where all psychoactive drugs need to go. prescription only. sure there will be some who will bypass the regulatory systems but i doubt it would be any worse than your average country with alcohol and tobacco that isn't taxed so high it's almost banned. and sure, doctors will write scripts for people who shouldn't be taking a drug or taking as much of a drug, but this is something you can legislate and mitigate, and sure, there will be some people selling drugs without prescriptions, but several things will be at last set right:

purity and contamination will be all but gone

prices will drop and this in itself will reduce drug-related crime by reducing the amount of money required for the drugs

overall rates of use will drop as the forbidden fruit thing is mostly eliminated, and the monitoring and control of rates of production goes into the hands of our elected officials who can then have some real control over how much drugs people have access to.

Re:Read the article,

[loki_tiwaz]

i don't think the mechanisms of drug addiction are capable of a 100% effective rate of addiction. just one little gene regulating the response of one section of the mechanism being divergent from the average could make it fail.

for example, i've tried a few times but opiate drugs just don't make me feel good. a comfortable signal attenuation at best. not everyone has a link between their opiod receptors and serotonin/dopamine receptors that reacts as strongly, producing the critical warm euphoria you hear opiate addicts raving about.

the idea of serious money going into it is good but i really don't think it will be like that. advertising for potentially addictive psychoactive drugs is on its way out, tobacco fell first and alcohol is under serious attack now, next will be caffeine. what needs to happen is that a much broader variety of various chemicals is studied for key danger indicators, and the degree of control over supply should be in line with the risk of mortality from a single dose. drugs which lack effects on critical life support systems should be regarded as generally safe. alcohol, opiates, benzodiazepines, these are all dangerous drugs because they suppress breathing. alcohol is the least dangerous in part because it has to be taken orally, meaning that passing out is likely before dropping. and same with cocaine, which is a cardioaccelerator, meaning it can intensify the signals to the heart in both rate and power, causing some kind of hypertensive crisis.

Here's the link: If cars developed like MS Windows

[H4x0r Jim Duggan]

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/crash.htm

A**? Really?

[suzerain]

So let me get this straight...The Economist doesn't censor the word "ass", but slashdot does? Are you fucking kidding me?

Andy Grove, the weasel who killed Intergraph

[hardwarefreak]

he shocked the gathered bigwigs by declaring that the industryâ(TM)s approach to hoarding patents was an abuse of intellectual-property rights and risked undermining its future

The fucking irony, Dr. Grove... You may be a great man, and deserve respect for your accomplishments, but you should also be excoriated for your truly underhanded and evil business practices. You single handedly put Intergraph out of the hardware business by stealing the Clipper chip's back side L2 cache technology, after making dozens of promises to Intergraph regarding access to the Pentium Pro, the first Intel chip to use the patent, and which as a result of the new L2 bus, more than doubled the performance of the Pentium on a per clock basis. This one patent you stole from Intergraph *_MADE_* Intel performance. Without the back side L2 cache bus, no Intel chip since the Pentium would have performance worth a damn. Same for all the others who adopted it--IBM, SUN, AMD, MIPS, Fujitsu, Hitachi, pretty much every CPU maker. The difference was, they all legally licensed the patent, and paid royalties. You, Dr. Grove, are a f--king thief.

http://www.techlawjournal.com/courts/intergraph/Default.htm

Democratic society?

[sgt_doom]

When you happen to come in contact with this democratic society you speak of, be sure to clue me in on it, huh?

While occasionally the stock market has its upticks, such as the 24 hours after President Obama's speech on 9/09/09 presenting the backdoor bailout for the insurance industry (predictably, the insurance stocks went sky-high the next day), a social security program still makes sense, along with a single-payer universal health insurance program.

I assume those infinite series of deficits refers to all that deficit spending which has created all those phony billionaires, while socializing their debt to the rest of us.

Those who have been made to fight for their country take it all the more seriously.