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US Report Sees Perils To America's Tech Future
dcblogs sends this excerpt from ComputerWorld:
"The ability of the U.S. to compete globally is eroding, according to an Obama administration report released Friday. It described itself as a 'call to arms.' Titled 'The Competitiveness and Innovative Capacity of the United States (PDF),' it points out a number of 'alarms,' including: the U.S. ran a trade surplus in 'advanced technology products,' which includes biotechnology products, computers, semiconductors and robotics, until 2002. In 2010, however, the U.S. 'ran an $81 billion trade deficit in this critically important sector.' In terms of federal research, in 1980 the federal government provided about 70% of all dollars spent on basic research, but since then the government's share of basic research funding given to all entities has fallen to 57%. It also says real median household income has stalled, and argues for policies that foster innovation."
You want to foster innovation? Make it so a company doesn't have to spend zillions on lawyers to deal with trolls.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Not just software. Biotechnology patents appear headed for the same sort of train wreck from what little I know of them.
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Folks have been shouting these warnings from the rooftops for quite a while. First we sent the factory, now we are sending the associated engineering/science jobs over too. Other countries are investing more in education, while we have been busy making mocking of smart people an art form.
What we need is to extend copyright, broader and stronger patents and generaly to beef up all IP laws. How about automatic injunctions for all accusations of patent infringement, like SOPA and PIPA gives copyright holders? That should spur on innovation!
Oh, and cut taxes and gov't spending!
30+ years chiseling away at workers rights, outsourcing skilled trade to other countries, and eviscerating education funding
only to reflect upon your work and remark, "gosh, people arent that smart and we dont do much with technology but consume it"
you chose it as a model of hypercapitalism. when we agreed to shuffle the working class, the middle class, into early retirement, fast food dead end jobs, and bankrupted private pensions it was a choice. when we caved the stock market and drained dry the last cent from the 401k of the middle class, we did so knowing it could only make the rich richer, and the poor poorer. as we danced in our lemon socialism and hapilly bailed out the wealthiest conglomerates and banks, we were instructed that the hardship would be socialized and the profit would be privatized. "americans," the ones that do most of the living and working in our society, dont do much because they cant do much; this has been assured by the government of the people, for the people, and it has no right to question its work.
we are reaping the benefit of generations of obscene wealth, fueled by trickle down reagonomics and stoked by politicians who consider market capitalism a golden calf that does no evil. Our society is driven by profit, and so long as the goal is profit, the outcome and returns will be consolidated to a plutocracy that doesnt care if little johnny learns to read or write, so long as he works enough hours at the walmart to consume the products at the walmart.
Good people go to bed earlier.
An empire that is starting to buckle under its own weight of ridiculous spending and incessant world conquest. Sound familiar?
The report on page 1-8 has a nice graph of average math scores. However it occurs to me that what matters most for innovation is not average scores but the number of students above a certain level of ability. Basically, if a country has enough high-scoring math students to fill the pipeline of scientists and engineers, it doesn't matter how many low-performing students are dragging down the mean. One of the reasons large Asian countries (China, India, and I would guess Indonesia) are well poised for technical progress is that they have a large population and hence a large talent pool. As long as they can efficiently discover and cultivate their talent they should be fine.
I have never seen anyone talk about the number of high-performing students a country really needs to fill its pipeline. But if you want to talk about being competitive, especially in the next decade where pressure on public budgets at all levels will go from bad to worse, doesn't it make more sense to concentrate on finding the good students and giving them opportunities (scholarships, etc.), and on bumping the above-average ones over that threshold into excellence, than to continue vain attempts to improve the average?
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
I think that the larger issue with America these days is connected to our cultural tendency about measuring success in terms of money and power. In the newer generations, this is displacing the very values that made the nation great, and resulting in short term and immediate results kind of thinking. We are teaching our youth to think like a 5-year old with a tantrum, with an insane sense of entitlement and no responsibility. And the older generations are not much better. Add to this the fact that there are no visionaries among the people with power to make changes in the nation, be it the heads of large corporations, the congress, or elected officers. Long term is thought as "5 years down the road". That does not scale for the size and complexity of America today. We need a 100-year plan, not a "will do whatever necessary to get re-elected next year" plan. And this long term plan should not be based on controlling the rest of the world or waging wars when other countries do not submit to our might; we should use our resources wisely to take care of our own people instead, and shift to a sustainable economic model so we do not need resources from other countries. The only reason we have not collapsed onto ourselves is that the rest of the world is messed up too. But we can do so much better than that. My impression is that unless we start thinking long term and incorporate healthier values into education, to slowly revert this tendency, the decline of America will not only continue but accelerate in all areas, including technology, quality of life for the average citizen, and the position of our country in the world. At this rate, we will be a part of the 3rd world in 50 years. We can do better for our children.
If it's that trivial to reverse engineer is it really worth the patent? For discussions sake let's take James Dyson's vacuum cleaners. They are of a novel design, likely took a fair bit of R&D, and by most standards are probably worth a patent (despite copying the basic principles from elsewhere and simply applying them to a vacuum cleaner).
How long a monopoly should he have been granted for that design? Ten years? Twenty? If the answer is one to two years then that is probably the lead time on designing a good product in that sector even when you are reverse engineering the design. That time would still be enough for Dyson to establish themselves in the market, make a good return on their R&D, and then compete against the established players in a free market. Dyson would have been forced to compete on quality, value, and other traditional differentiators rather than being able to just benefit from the patent granted monopoly.
That introduction of competition soon after the initial release is actually likely to spur more innovation from many more companies and will ultimately benefit the consumer far more than granting any single entity a monopoly.
Perhaps a high quality patent system with a shorter time limit on patents is a lot better than the current system; but I would argue we are unlikely to ever get that, and that having no patent system at all is at worst the next best option.
Not quite. Once China started doing some stuff and did a good job, we sent more. And now it's gotten to where we simply don't have the process engineering expertise to fabricate a lot of really high-tech stuff, and it will take years to regain that expertise. You can't learn that kind of stuff from a book, you only really learn it from experience, and since we no longer have any factories doing some of those things, there's nowhere to get experience. So China makes parts we have no capability of making even if we wanted to. At least not for a decade would we be competitive.
Its not the issue of racism. Its the wholesale destruction of entire sectors of the work force as companies look for ways to cut their bottom line. I'm looking for a tech job in the silicon valley. Over the last 3 months I have to say I'm getting sick and tired of not having spoken to a single person who is American, speaks without an intense Indian or Chinese accent (in fact I may have passed over perfectly good jobs because the person speaking to me was completely and I mean completely unintelligible.) I've worked with hundreds of people from India and China (hell I'm half Chinese, my Mother is Chinese, I was born in Taiwan.) I don't have a problem with these people's race, I like them, I like their food, I love their cultures. I have a problem with the fact that I've watched my salary slowly erode to about 50%. How am I supposed to compete with a tidal wave of HB-1 visas who come from a country with a billion people so the fact that they represent the top half a percentile and have a Masters degree, still means there are millions of them and they're perfectly willing to take my job at half the price. If it now takes a Masters Degree to get a job pushing a broom in the valley because of the glut of skilled foreign workers, there's no room for native workers, how is a native worker supposed to compete. there's no finance for older native workers to improve themselves (the collapsing state economy has steadily made going back to school harder and harder.) There's no market for young fresh native workers coming out of school. All the while, money that would be spent here to improve our State's economy is being pumped into making China or India more wealthy.
Out sourcing jobs in general and the tech market in particular is, in my opinion the very best way possible to implode both America's economy and future ability to determine it's own technological future. All you have to do to make something disappear in America is stop investing in it. Stop investing in skilled American workers, and surprise, in no time at all, they'll just go away. I have good friends who used to be happy engineers, engineering away. Now they cook food, or sell real estate (good luck with that), or they've moved into the health care industry. What they don't do is engineering. All it took was two massive economic busts since 2001. I look at the ads today on DICE, and its crazy what they're asking now for a customer support engineer. If you're tired of talking to people with Punjabi accents think enough to dull a knife when you call for technical support, tell the vendors you deal with, that you want to speak to an American support engineers in the future, in fact let them know you will now stop doing business with companies that outsource their support. OR, you won't have to worry any more, because very soon there won't be any here to do the job anyway.
Outsourcing makes sense for tiny start-ups paying to realize a dream out of there own packets in the midst of the bootstrap (though as our currency meets parity with the yuan and the rupee, even this use is quick disappearing.) I'm just saying, we need to provide serious tax incentives for companies that use native workers and even more serious tax liabilities for companies that heavily outsource. The world is flattening out economically, and that's probably a good thing at a number of levels. But until we reach that point, if we don't protect our working class, we'll destroy the American consumer, and then where's our economy? We're in the midst of the economic spasms caused by American corporations trying to squeeze the beast from both ends and killing off the American workforce in the process. Its time to say enough. its time to ensure that Americans have meaningful work first, because short-sighted runs to profit ultimately hurt everyone save a vanishingly small few. This blind free-fall to the bottom of the pig trough by Corporate America needs to come to a crashing halt, while there's something still left to save.
A certain segment of the /. population loves to decry government involvement in anything, stating that business, unhindered, would naturally step-in to cure the various evils and ills that the government is so inept at dealing with, and the service would be better, people would be happier, and a modest profit could be made on the side.
Having seen the results of this sort of thinking first hand, I can honestly say that these people are delusional. Of course, I know that I won't ever convince them to change their minds (especially when I insult them), but I feel like typing, so here goes.
I used to be a lab assistant working in a large U.S. university's biomedical research facility. The area I worked was devoted to the keeping, raising, and study of cephalopods. We were the largest such facility in the US and among the top in the world for that type of science. Granted, it is a very specialized field, but the prestige was genuine and we attracted top talent.
Most of our funding came from government grants. The NSF and a few others were our bread and butter even though most of our research was directed toward marketable technologies and techniques. We also sold squid parts to commercial labs. Turns out, squid have a massive axion connecting their eye and the optical lobe of the brain. If humans had a T1 running from our eyes to our brains, squid have an OC-198. We also researched the color changing properties of cephalopod skin, their hydraulic muscle structure, their three heart circulatory system, their corneas and eye lenses (they match ours btw. If you've ever had eye surgery to replace a torn lens, thank a squid), their ink, and their behavior.
To keep all of these critters in one building took a lot of large equipment and a lot of highly skilled people; people that could have made buckets of cash in a commercial setting but chose the lab because we were figuring out thinks like why squid don't get cancer or suffer nearly as many degenerative diseases of the eye. We were trying to figure out why squid and octopuses suffered dementia near the end of their lives and how we could help prevent it. See, once we do that in squid, the way to doing it in people is considerably shorter.
Anyway, all that work took money and that meant begging Uncle Sam for more and more cash which seemed to take more and more paperwork every year. What the government couldn't or wouldn't fund, we supplemented with corporate donations and gifts. The whammy here is that a bunch of biologists who would rather be in 30 feet of water in the Caribbean watching squid fuck are notoriously terrible at convincing others of the need for their research. Still, it had to get done, and done it got. Once you knew the way to fill everything out for the government, it was much easier. They were concerned that you weren't fucking off with the money, that you weren't engaged in monkey torture or feeding rat poison to children, and that you were accounting for every penny. If they were going to give you money, they wanted to know what you did with it. Ok, cool, keep our receipts and stop feeding rat poison to the local children, easily done. The corporate "gifts" and donations were another kettle of squid. They too wanted to know that you weren't fucking off with the money, and wanted it accounted down to the penny, but they were neutral on most ethical subjects. They also wanted to give suggestions. Hey, it would really help out BigCo. if you could figure out a way to reliably and cheaply extract or synthesize cephalotoxin or some tetrodotoxin. In fact, it would help so much that your grant rides on your ability to do so.
And there is the hook. Sure, it is the corporation's money to do as they see fit, but when they step in to "help" they don't want base research, they don't want behavior studies, and they don't give a shit about learning to understand cephalopod communications or the possibility of sentience, they want something that will help their bottom line and they want it right god damn now.
No
The backing of patenting an "IDEA" is ludicrous, sorry but there is no other way to describe it.
Do you think that only 1 person had the idea of using a shopping cart icon, or calling their on line store "a Shopping cart" back when the WWW became available to the average consumer? or even back during DARPA when we were dreaming of the WWW?
If you answer "yes", quite frankly you are a moron so please don't read any further. If you answer "no", then why would the USPTO give 1 company a patent for a shopping cart icon, an on-line store, or a name for an idea on a web page? Before you say "but.. but.. but.." it was done, and lawsuits have been flying ever since on the stupid things that they allow to be patented.
Microsoft is now suing B&N over 5 patents, all relate to either: Background downloading, Icons changing based on activity, or status bars and their placements. These are not things that should have ever been patented. It's like GM getting a patent on the wheel, and Ford getting a patent on the gear.
How can anyone think that it's beneficial? I'm baffled, and every person I talk to only likes patents for 2 reasons. 1, it gets their name on one and 2. they can now barter with other people that have patents. It does nothing for innovation and only protects people now a days from other people with patents.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.