He's totally wrong about this issue. But this is the guy who stood up when Bush administration thugs (Card and Gonzales) tried to get the Justice Department to sign off on their warrantless wiretapping program. He refused, prevented them from going around him and later threatened to resign: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
You can disagree with him on encryption (and I do), but this is not a guy who has no respect for the Constitution.
Umm. The government has taken him to court, many times. The courts have ruled against Bundy repeatedly and demanded that he pay grazing fees and fines. He refuses to pay and says he doesn't recognize the authority of the US government.
Washington and Hamilton (who I think count as Founders and had a good sense of the intended power of the government under the constitution) sent troops to Western PA to collect taxes on whiskey. Perhaps the government had other options that would have worked better, but the one they chose is well within the constitution and the history of this country.
There's a real problem with using Google being used in schools. See http://www.edweek.org/ew/artic.... They are collecting information that is part of a student's academic record. That looks like a violation of FERPA law. The big surprise in this lawsuit is that Google hasn't agreed not to collect that data, just that they won't use it to present ads to kids (at least, not in school. It isn't clear if Google thinks it's OK to push ads to you on your home account).
When Apple sells an iPhone in, say, France, they pay a royalty to Apple Operations International for use of patents. This reduces the profits on the iPhone sale in France (so saves on French taxes) and shifts the money to Ireland (actually to nowhere - Apple Operations hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in years). But the patent royalty is on an "invention" made in California. Apple US should be making money (and paying taxes) on the patent royalties, but they don't. The true profit on the phone includes the money allocated to patent royalties, but Apple doesn't pay taxes anywhere on that portion.
Whenever a patent story comes out, everyone's concerned about whether the patent will be used to lock up some obvious functionality. That's not why Apple gets patents. It works like this:
1 - Apple gets patent
2 - Apple sells patent to Irish subsidiary for small amount of money
3 - Apple comes out with iPhone that incorporates patented technology.
4 - Apple pays subsidiary royalty on patent for each iPhone sold
In this way, Apple moves profit on iPhone sales from Apple itself to the subsidiary. The subsidiary is incorporated in Ireland, so it is not taxable in the US. The subsidiary's major operations are in the US, so it is not taxable in Ireland.
Profit!! Tax-free!!
Patents are no longer an IP strategy. They're a tax avoidance strategy.
To be fair, the "NYT" didn't lie - Broder did. The NYT backed up one of their journalists. Which they should!
WRONG. The editor should have read the article, said "You're full of shit" and rejected it.
You don't throw your soldiers out into the enemies tender mercies, just 'cause.
No, the NY TImes did not blindly defend Broder. The NY Times has a "Public Editor" - an independent source who investigates and publicly discusses whether the Times did the right thing on controversial stories. She's been looking into this controversy pretty closely - see her blog. She hasn't finished her investigation, but she does say "I reject Mr. Musk’s central contention that Mr. Broder’s Sunday piece was faked in order to sabotage the Model S or the electric-car industry."
Like any organization, the NY Times makes mistakes. But they have enough integrity to own up to it when they do.
And Apple is free not to license those patents and come up with a new and unique way of doing it.
No. That's the whole point of a FRAND patent. Apple is not free to do it some other way. Apple needs to follow the standard. The deal is that Moto's tech gets to be in the standard because they agree to license it freely and relatively cheaply.
I'm not sure what you think inflation means, but it has nothing to do with whatever it is you think you're calculating. CPI blahblahblah...
Inflation can be measured both in terms of dollars in existence (which he is measuring) and in terms of prices, which the CPI purports to measure.
No. Inflation can only be measured in terms of prices. Tripling the money supply does not triple prices (at least not always). If you haven't learned that from the non-reaction of inflation to QE, then you must believe your "theory" trumps all evidence.
As far as the CPI all being a government conspiracy of some kind, if you don't believe it, just use the BPI. Still no price rise in reaction to expansion of the money supply. But maybe MIT is in on the conspiracy...
I guess your model is that price changes count when you say they do (VW bugs) but can be dismissed when you think they're not reflective of the "real" price (electronics and jeans).
I agree that wages for many have not kept up with inflation, but I have no idea what that has to do with the level of inflation itself.
Measuring prices for the CPI is hard and there are tons of papers arguing various aspects of the methodology but there's no reason to believe there's some kind of conspiracy to hide inflation. The BPI, which is privately produced and uses a completely different method of measuring prices, basically matches the CPI.
I'm not sure what you think inflation means, but it has nothing to do with whatever it is you think you're calculating.
Also, the CPI absolutely does include housing and fuel - see http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaq.htm#Question_7
I guess you're thinking of "core inflation" rather than CPI but, unfortunately for you, neither has increased by anything close to what your "theory" would predict.
Sorry, yes it does. Not because of the impact on discrimination, but because the companies now have the added cost of documenting that they do not discriminate. This is one more cost that makes it more difficult for a smaller company to survive in the market.
No. This does impose a cost, but the cost is the same for all companies in the market, so it doesn't disadvantage the small company (well, possibly there are economies of scale in favor of the larger company but that's not necessarily true and, in any case, those economies of scale apply to lots of things that have nothing to do with regulation). In any case, the cost is really small. Documenting non-discrimination is basically documenting how the company came up with the rate. If they don't already document that, then they aren't going to survive long.
I happen to think that it is not the government's business to enforce anti-discrimination practices on private companies. What people seem to forget is that the segregationist policies that lead to the Civil Rights marches were not a result of lack of government regulation, they were a result of government regulation.
I think people seem to forget that because it isn't true. In what way was Woolworth's refusal to serve blacks at their lunch counter a result of government regulation? American General Life charged black customers more for insurance than white. In what way was this a result of regulation?
OK, but you said "all government regulation stifles competition", which is complete nonsense.
How about anti-trust laws? They require a whole bunch of regulations for corporate reporting approval of mergers, etc. The whole purpose of these regulations is to increase competition. You might try to argue that you have some brilliant new set of anti-trust laws that would do a better job (and maybe you do, though I doubt it), but you're insane if you think that fewer anti-trust regulations will, necessarily, lead to more competition. We know what happened before anti-trust.
So look at anti-discrimination regulations. Insurance companies, for example, are not allowed to price based on race, even if their research shows that race is a predictor of life expectancy. Does this reduce competition among insurance companies? No - the companies just adjust their tables to price for the average across races. There's an even playing field for the companies, so the industry is every bit as competitive as it would be without these laws. In fact, this is a case where regulation is essential (unless you think that discrimination by race would be OK). If you left this to the unregulated free market, then any insurance company that advertised that it didn't use race in rating policies would rapidly go out of business, as it would attract mostly high-risk customers but would need to price to the average. Government regulations help keep the playing field even.
True. The more likely scenario is that he coasts on the momentum that Apple has now. Five years from now, the stock's at $350. He's still there, since he hasn't done anything all that stupid (I mean, look at how long Balmer's at Microsoft?). So, he collects his $175M bonus and gets to play the game for another five years. I still don't see how this puts a fire under him.
Don't get me wrong - I like Cook, and I think he's smart and a really hard worker. But, honestly, do you really think that someone with hundreds of millions of dollars really finds the prospect of getting N hundred million more all that motivating?
Guys like Jobs and Cook work hard because that's what they want to do with their lives. The money gives them bragging rights over other CEOs but, really, I don't think Cook's going to do the job any differently, just because he has the prospect of an enormous payoff down the road.
How is this motivation to do well? Suppose Cook royally screws up and Apple stock drops to $100/share. Then his bonus is only worth $100 million. That's quite a penalty. Give him a million options, and he'll need to keep the stock price going up.
Patent 5,946,647 was filed in 1996, when Apple came out with Apple Data Detectors (Mac OS 8). The patent is almost certainly about that.
This article describes ADD, including what its developers considered to be unique and different from other approaches.
My take on this is that ADD did come up with some clever ideas in implementation that solved the particular problems they were addressing (focusing on simple problems and fast detection). It's clear that what's unique is the particular implementation, not the idea of detecting phone numbers and such. They cite lots of other examples of the idea.
So, there are two possibilities. Either the patent covers the idea (and thus is inappropriately broad and will be ruled invalid) or the patent is about the particular implementation, in which case it should be simple to implement in a way that avoids violation. In either case, HTC and Android will be fine.
Dred Scott was both immoral and wrong as a matter of law.
The decision went well beyond the constitution in ruling that descendants of slaves could never become citizens, even if they were not and never had been slaves. The issue of descendants was irrelevant to the Dred Scott case (Dred Scott was a slave) and, in any case, the judgement that the constitution forbids descendants of slaves from becoming citizens was and is a bad interpretation of the constitution.
To make it clear that this stupid decision was, in fact, stupid, we passed an amendment. But the fact that we needed to pass the 14th amendment to correct Taney doesn't mean that Taney was right.
Lest you be deceived by the article summary, let's run down the content:
Turner Broadcasting and NBC Universal: No, they're not providing shows. They're just updating their websites, so that you can view them on your TV.
HBO: Yes, you get HBO shows on demand. If you already subscribe to HBO. This is perfect for all 10 people who went for the high-end cable package but who don't have a DVR.
Netflix and Amazon on demand: Just like pretty much every internet-connected box produced in the last 3 years.
I don't want a web browser on my TV. I do want a way to ditch my cable TV and still get access to shows on demand. So far, at least, this doesn't get us any closer than Apple TV, Roku, Boxee or anyone else.
Do you really think that improving education doesn't fall under "promote the general welfare"? It has just as much justification as "provide for the common defense". Especially since Jefferson and other founders believed so strongly that a representative government would fail without educated citizens, you could also argue that support for education is necessary to "secure the blessings of liberty."
"I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393
You can say that Apple's approval process for the iPhone is unnecessary and capricious and therefore evil.
You can say that, in the long run, locking down the iPhone will stagnate innovation and Apple will therefore never dominate the smartphone market.
But you can't say that "independent application developers have a difficult time getting anything published and widely available." There are over 100,000 apps available, and they've been downloaded 2 billion times. The model has been, so far, enormously successful. You can wish it wasn't so, but it is so.
No, that'll just send the Chinese economy into the crapper. And the American one as well. And the European one...
And you base that on what? Free-market sloganeering or an understanding of economics?
Actually, the House bill (or, at least, one version of it - I haven't kept up) does impose trade penalties on countries that don't limit greenhouse gas emissions. Economists who have studied this argue that this is not only sound economics but that the WTO would consider this to be fine under international trade laws.
No, I don't believe the CBO numbers, but they are, at least, numbers, not scary claims about "useful to society jobs that we will destroy" that have no basis in any kind of analysis.
The point is that economic analyses, like the CBO's and the MIT study's, are much more speculative than the climate science that you attack.
And yet you dismiss both economic analysis and climate science in favor of, I guess, your vague feeling that doing anything will be really, really hard and will cost about a jillion dollars. Oh, and reducing CO2 will hurt the carnation industry.
This is a really good point. We should be at least as skeptical of economic models as of climate models.
But if you do want to pay attention to economic models, you should know that they don't always predict that serious action on climate will cause "severe economic consequences." The CBO, for example, predicts that the cost of Waxman-Markey are fairly modest.. A study by MIT also found that cap-and-trade would not be very expensive
Nice anecdote. But if you read the article I linked, you'd know:
Last year customer satisfaction with the veterans' health system, as measured by an annual survey conducted by the National Quality Research Center, exceeded that for private health care for the sixth year in a row. This high level of quality (which is also verified by objective measures of performance) was achieved without big budget increases. In fact, the veterans' system has managed to avoid much of the huge cost surge that has plagued the rest of U.S. medicine.
Call it socialized medicine, if you must, but what's wrong with single-payer government health care?
As a small business owner, I'm amazed at how much time management spends on employee healthcare issues (they want to raise our premiums 40% for next year). We're a software company. We don't know much about healthcare, and its a waste of our time to have to shop around for it every year (plus deal with HR issues when the insurance company screws up). Why should healthcare be attached to employment?
A couple of objections that I hear to Government involvement make no sense:
I don't want the Government involved in medical decisions.
This gets stated as if we were in the back in the 50s where medical decisions were made by doctors and patients. They're now made by insurance companies. At least with the Government, I have some input.
The Government's inherently inefficient.
Not in healthcare. Our largely private system is the most inefficient in the world. The most efficient healthcare systems in the US are the ones run by the Government: The VA system and medicare.. Some will reject this out of hand, since it's the NY Times and Krugman, but there is good empirical data showing this and good economic theory that predicts the inefficiency of private healthcare. One reason is that healthcare doesn't operate like other markets. One of them is that there's no rational basis for choice among competitors - choosing the right healthcare plan is ultimately about predicting your future health (am I more likely to need coverage for this or that?), so the market doesn't always choose right. Another is that a government system doesn't need to spend lots of money on marketing (which is where private systems spend their money). A third is that we, morally, are required to give healthcare to those in crisis. But a private system forces crises (by undervaluing preventative and early care), making ER visits the norm for some.
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He's totally wrong about this issue. But this is the guy who stood up when Bush administration thugs (Card and Gonzales) tried to get the Justice Department to sign off on their warrantless wiretapping program. He refused, prevented them from going around him and later threatened to resign: http://www.washingtonpost.com/... You can disagree with him on encryption (and I do), but this is not a guy who has no respect for the Constitution.
Umm. The government has taken him to court, many times. The courts have ruled against Bundy repeatedly and demanded that he pay grazing fees and fines. He refuses to pay and says he doesn't recognize the authority of the US government. Washington and Hamilton (who I think count as Founders and had a good sense of the intended power of the government under the constitution) sent troops to Western PA to collect taxes on whiskey. Perhaps the government had other options that would have worked better, but the one they chose is well within the constitution and the history of this country.
There's a real problem with using Google being used in schools. See http://www.edweek.org/ew/artic.... They are collecting information that is part of a student's academic record. That looks like a violation of FERPA law. The big surprise in this lawsuit is that Google hasn't agreed not to collect that data, just that they won't use it to present ads to kids (at least, not in school. It isn't clear if Google thinks it's OK to push ads to you on your home account).
When Apple sells an iPhone in, say, France, they pay a royalty to Apple Operations International for use of patents. This reduces the profits on the iPhone sale in France (so saves on French taxes) and shifts the money to Ireland (actually to nowhere - Apple Operations hasn't filed a tax return anywhere in years). But the patent royalty is on an "invention" made in California. Apple US should be making money (and paying taxes) on the patent royalties, but they don't. The true profit on the phone includes the money allocated to patent royalties, but Apple doesn't pay taxes anywhere on that portion.
Whenever a patent story comes out, everyone's concerned about whether the patent will be used to lock up some obvious functionality. That's not why Apple gets patents. It works like this:
1 - Apple gets patent
2 - Apple sells patent to Irish subsidiary for small amount of money
3 - Apple comes out with iPhone that incorporates patented technology.
4 - Apple pays subsidiary royalty on patent for each iPhone sold
In this way, Apple moves profit on iPhone sales from Apple itself to the subsidiary. The subsidiary is incorporated in Ireland, so it is not taxable in the US. The subsidiary's major operations are in the US, so it is not taxable in Ireland.
Profit!! Tax-free!!
Patents are no longer an IP strategy. They're a tax avoidance strategy.
To be fair, the "NYT" didn't lie - Broder did. The NYT backed up one of their journalists. Which they should!
WRONG. The editor should have read the article, said "You're full of shit" and rejected it.
You don't throw your soldiers out into the enemies tender mercies, just 'cause.
No, the NY TImes did not blindly defend Broder. The NY Times has a "Public Editor" - an independent source who investigates and publicly discusses whether the Times did the right thing on controversial stories. She's been looking into this controversy pretty closely - see her blog. She hasn't finished her investigation, but she does say "I reject Mr. Musk’s central contention that Mr. Broder’s Sunday piece was faked in order to sabotage the Model S or the electric-car industry."
Like any organization, the NY Times makes mistakes. But they have enough integrity to own up to it when they do.
And Apple is free not to license those patents and come up with a new and unique way of doing it.
No. That's the whole point of a FRAND patent. Apple is not free to do it some other way. Apple needs to follow the standard. The deal is that Moto's tech gets to be in the standard because they agree to license it freely and relatively cheaply.
I'm not sure what you think inflation means, but it has nothing to do with whatever it is you think you're calculating. CPI blahblahblah...
Inflation can be measured both in terms of dollars in existence (which he is measuring) and in terms of prices, which the CPI purports to measure.
No. Inflation can only be measured in terms of prices. Tripling the money supply does not triple prices (at least not always). If you haven't learned that from the non-reaction of inflation to QE, then you must believe your "theory" trumps all evidence.
As far as the CPI all being a government conspiracy of some kind, if you don't believe it, just use the BPI. Still no price rise in reaction to expansion of the money supply. But maybe MIT is in on the conspiracy...
Sure. Inflation will be on us - any day now...
I guess your model is that price changes count when you say they do (VW bugs) but can be dismissed when you think they're not reflective of the "real" price (electronics and jeans).
I agree that wages for many have not kept up with inflation, but I have no idea what that has to do with the level of inflation itself.
Measuring prices for the CPI is hard and there are tons of papers arguing various aspects of the methodology but there's no reason to believe there's some kind of conspiracy to hide inflation. The BPI, which is privately produced and uses a completely different method of measuring prices, basically matches the CPI.
I'm not sure what you think inflation means, but it has nothing to do with whatever it is you think you're calculating. Also, the CPI absolutely does include housing and fuel - see http://www.bls.gov/cpi/cpifaq.htm#Question_7 I guess you're thinking of "core inflation" rather than CPI but, unfortunately for you, neither has increased by anything close to what your "theory" would predict.
Sorry, yes it does. Not because of the impact on discrimination, but because the companies now have the added cost of documenting that they do not discriminate. This is one more cost that makes it more difficult for a smaller company to survive in the market.
No. This does impose a cost, but the cost is the same for all companies in the market, so it doesn't disadvantage the small company (well, possibly there are economies of scale in favor of the larger company but that's not necessarily true and, in any case, those economies of scale apply to lots of things that have nothing to do with regulation). In any case, the cost is really small. Documenting non-discrimination is basically documenting how the company came up with the rate. If they don't already document that, then they aren't going to survive long.
I happen to think that it is not the government's business to enforce anti-discrimination practices on private companies. What people seem to forget is that the segregationist policies that lead to the Civil Rights marches were not a result of lack of government regulation, they were a result of government regulation.
I think people seem to forget that because it isn't true. In what way was Woolworth's refusal to serve blacks at their lunch counter a result of government regulation? American General Life charged black customers more for insurance than white. In what way was this a result of regulation?
OK, but you said "all government regulation stifles competition", which is complete nonsense.
How about anti-trust laws? They require a whole bunch of regulations for corporate reporting approval of mergers, etc. The whole purpose of these regulations is to increase competition. You might try to argue that you have some brilliant new set of anti-trust laws that would do a better job (and maybe you do, though I doubt it), but you're insane if you think that fewer anti-trust regulations will, necessarily, lead to more competition. We know what happened before anti-trust.
So look at anti-discrimination regulations. Insurance companies, for example, are not allowed to price based on race, even if their research shows that race is a predictor of life expectancy. Does this reduce competition among insurance companies? No - the companies just adjust their tables to price for the average across races. There's an even playing field for the companies, so the industry is every bit as competitive as it would be without these laws. In fact, this is a case where regulation is essential (unless you think that discrimination by race would be OK). If you left this to the unregulated free market, then any insurance company that advertised that it didn't use race in rating policies would rapidly go out of business, as it would attract mostly high-risk customers but would need to price to the average. Government regulations help keep the playing field even.
True. The more likely scenario is that he coasts on the momentum that Apple has now. Five years from now, the stock's at $350. He's still there, since he hasn't done anything all that stupid (I mean, look at how long Balmer's at Microsoft?). So, he collects his $175M bonus and gets to play the game for another five years. I still don't see how this puts a fire under him.
Don't get me wrong - I like Cook, and I think he's smart and a really hard worker. But, honestly, do you really think that someone with hundreds of millions of dollars really finds the prospect of getting N hundred million more all that motivating?
Guys like Jobs and Cook work hard because that's what they want to do with their lives. The money gives them bragging rights over other CEOs but, really, I don't think Cook's going to do the job any differently, just because he has the prospect of an enormous payoff down the road.
How is this motivation to do well? Suppose Cook royally screws up and Apple stock drops to $100/share. Then his bonus is only worth $100 million. That's quite a penalty. Give him a million options, and he'll need to keep the stock price going up.
This article describes ADD, including what its developers considered to be unique and different from other approaches.
My take on this is that ADD did come up with some clever ideas in implementation that solved the particular problems they were addressing (focusing on simple problems and fast detection). It's clear that what's unique is the particular implementation, not the idea of detecting phone numbers and such. They cite lots of other examples of the idea.
So, there are two possibilities. Either the patent covers the idea (and thus is inappropriately broad and will be ruled invalid) or the patent is about the particular implementation, in which case it should be simple to implement in a way that avoids violation. In either case, HTC and Android will be fine.
Dred Scott was both immoral and wrong as a matter of law.
The decision went well beyond the constitution in ruling that descendants of slaves could never become citizens, even if they were not and never had been slaves. The issue of descendants was irrelevant to the Dred Scott case (Dred Scott was a slave) and, in any case, the judgement that the constitution forbids descendants of slaves from becoming citizens was and is a bad interpretation of the constitution.
To make it clear that this stupid decision was, in fact, stupid, we passed an amendment. But the fact that we needed to pass the 14th amendment to correct Taney doesn't mean that Taney was right.
I don't want a web browser on my TV. I do want a way to ditch my cable TV and still get access to shows on demand. So far, at least, this doesn't get us any closer than Apple TV, Roku, Boxee or anyone else.
Do you really think that improving education doesn't fall under "promote the general welfare"? It has just as much justification as "provide for the common defense". Especially since Jefferson and other founders believed so strongly that a representative government would fail without educated citizens, you could also argue that support for education is necessary to "secure the blessings of liberty."
"I have indeed two great measures at heart, without which no republic can maintain itself in strength: 1. That of general education, to enable every man to judge for himself what will secure or endanger his freedom. 2. To divide every county into hundreds, of such size that all the children of each will be within reach of a central school in it." --Thomas Jefferson to John Tyler, 1810. ME 12:393
It is not at all unusual for a minority shareholder (especially a founder of the company) to retain approval over sales, even after VC investment.
You can say that Apple's approval process for the iPhone is unnecessary and capricious and therefore evil.
You can say that, in the long run, locking down the iPhone will stagnate innovation and Apple will therefore never dominate the smartphone market.
But you can't say that "independent application developers have a difficult time getting anything published and widely available." There are over 100,000 apps available, and they've been downloaded 2 billion times. The model has been, so far, enormously successful. You can wish it wasn't so, but it is so.
And you base that on what? Free-market sloganeering or an understanding of economics?
Actually, the House bill (or, at least, one version of it - I haven't kept up) does impose trade penalties on countries that don't limit greenhouse gas emissions. Economists who have studied this argue that this is not only sound economics but that the WTO would consider this to be fine under international trade laws.
No, I don't believe the CBO numbers, but they are, at least, numbers, not scary claims about "useful to society jobs that we will destroy" that have no basis in any kind of analysis.
The point is that economic analyses, like the CBO's and the MIT study's, are much more speculative than the climate science that you attack.
And yet you dismiss both economic analysis and climate science in favor of, I guess, your vague feeling that doing anything will be really, really hard and will cost about a jillion dollars. Oh, and reducing CO2 will hurt the carnation industry.
This is a really good point. We should be at least as skeptical of economic models as of climate models. But if you do want to pay attention to economic models, you should know that they don't always predict that serious action on climate will cause "severe economic consequences." The CBO, for example, predicts that the cost of Waxman-Markey are fairly modest.. A study by MIT also found that cap-and-trade would not be very expensive