Remember, Peak Oil is a theory.
Another theory is that of Abiotic Oil production, which essentially states that oil (or any petroleum) is not a "Fossil Fuel".
For the past 100 years or so, we've all been taught the rather simplistic idea that dinosaurs died and created oil deposits. There is a distinct possibility that is just fantasy.
The theory of Abiotic Oil states that oil is produced as a geological process - not a biological one. In fact, Russia (where the theory originated) has been using this theory successfully for several decades to predict where to search for new oil deposits.
Who knows? Perhaps its some of both... but the point is do not buy wholesale into the latest fad theory.
You are correct that Solaris on supported hardware is the definition of stability. No arguments.
The problem Solaris x86 has is where to find supported hardware. I've tried Solaris 10 on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 and IBM xServer 206 -- both of which it refused to play nice with. I even tried it on a PC clone that was about as far to generic that I could find - still no dice.
So, while I would love to try out Solaris, I can't find to seem a reasonable hardware option to experiment with it on.
It seems that the only *supported* systems are built by Sun (surprise, surprise). So, I think it is totally valid to view Solaris x86 as a non-starter until they get more hardware support. Until then, most people in the x86 arena are going to continue to run Linux -- Solaris x86 in its present form is just another form of vendor lock-in.
The above is written like someone that has done very little serious thought about this issue. Not intended as an insult, just stating an observation.
The classic paradigm for understanding national defense is the "capability and intent" approach. This is a very sound and well-rooted approach to national security issues. You fundementally fail to acknowledge this in your post.
Let us assume that Capability to mean 'do they have the capability to destory the US', and lets take Intent to mean 'do they *want* to destroy the US'
With this approach (CaI) we can understand how enemies of the US fall into various categories. For instance, lets take the Soviet Union of 1980's.
Did the Soviet Union have the capability to destroy the US? Yes. However, they never seriously intended to do that. We felt the same about them. This is why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was able to work. When two countries symetrically match each other on the matrix - its easier to avoid war through diplomatic / political process.
However, in the new era, the US faces a very asymetrical approach to its enemies. Most of the hardline terrorist cells - and to some degree Iran - absolutely *intends* to destroy the US. There would be no greater feeling for them then to kill millions of Americans. The only thing stopping them at this point is that they don't have the capability to do that yet.
This is the theory behind why the US is pusing for things like Missle Defense. Perhaps, in the long run, its an unworkable idea, but the idea is that enemies of the US would have to increase their capabilities even further than just getting their hands on some ICBM's. Even if a rogue state was to launch missles at the US they would have to assume that there would be a possibility that no missles or very few might make landfall. This is admittedly not a perfect solution for the US, but like in the computer world, security is like an onion. Many layered. This is but one layer of a comprehensive national defense.
I understand you want to get some formalized training while the getting is good. Don't blame you there.
But, honestly, the absolute best way to learn something like this is to do it.
Download asterisk and start playing. You can even connect a free soft-phone (SIP) to it so there is really no up front cost.
IMHO, formalized training is only useful *after* you have already learned a good deal about the subject matter. It gives you a chance to organize all you thoughts that have been plaguing you, and have a compentent teacher answer them for you.
Going in cold to VOIP lab, when you leave you will understand some jargon - but most of the deep concepts will escape you.
Not to nitpick...but I think the cost are much higher than you are estimating.
You must remember that they *could* just leave the 14.4B in the bank. (BTW: Even at a moderate 5% return, 14.4B would generate about 770mil per year - which in turn equates to an additional $650 per month / per resident)
Point is, part of the calculation with a sum of money this large needs to take into account the 'loss of invesment' due to the expenditure of the capital in the first place.
Taking those things into consideration, I don't forsee how this thing could ever realistically be profitable. If their goal was profitability (which it obviously isnt), they should be a complex of medium-height buildings (each about 30 stories).
If you figure about 15 apartments to the story and 30 stories per building, you are looking at 450 apartments per building. Figure that each holds 2 people on average and thats about 900 people to the building. Given these assumptions, about 12 buildings would be sufficient to house 100,000 people. There is no way that 12 buildings like that could come close to even requriring half as much capital as 14B would.....Someone needs to be hit in the head with a cluestick over this one...
We had a client that had a 1780 day uptime on his Netware 3.12 server...When it was time to reboot (because of a scheduled upgrade)...
The server wouldn't boot, upon later investigation, it was determined that a significant percentage of the hard drives bearings had turned to dust!!
...as long as they were spinning it was fine, but as soon as they powered down, the dust settled in such a way that spinning them up was not possible...
This is TRUE story too, saw it with my own eyes...
-dm
DSP farms are a great idea in theory, (Not withstanding the network latency issues already mentioned). The real problem is:
DSP functions can't be easily parallelized
That is to say: suppose we have a 10-second sound we are trying to render. Lets suppose you want to break that up into 10 1-second slices to farm out to your DSP cluster. The problem becomes, these are not discrete items. The sound of slice 4 depends on what was happening in slice 1, 2, and 3 in a cumulative fashion. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to render slice 4 until you know what waveforms should be present from the previous slices....
I've thought of the same thing for Text-To-Speech conversion - but I ran into the same kind of problem, except it was a question of punctuation. For instance:
This sentence, my friends, is hard to parallelize, right?
(Its hard because of the speech breaks that would occur at the punctuation marks.)
-DM
I looked into this...
on
eLection '04
·
· Score: 2
...about a year ago - I thought about developing a prototype electronic voting machine to show off to potential investors.
At first I couldn't beleive that it wasn't already being done. The problem I discovered is that each state and/or locality has their own rules regarding the usability specifications. For instance, a voting machine in Florida may require slightly different specs than a voting machine in Michigan. Each one will need to be approved by each local election committee on a case by case basis. There is no way that every locality has enough $$ to design, develop, and test something as complex as an electronic voting system..Hence, they are waiting for a vendor to supply one to them....However, due to the practical reasons - no vendor is going to try and make 1001 different voting machines...so it ain't gonna happen for awhile.
Before electronic voting can happen...there needs to be some federal guidlines that mandate one set of usability specs - then all the states will have to adopt those specs. Good idea, but this WON'T happen in 4 short years. Maybe by 2008...but probably 2012 until its nation-wide.
You're making two basic errors of logic concerning the economy. You are not taking into effect:
(a) The economy is not a static system.
(b) Inflation.
With regard to (a) you're are assuming that the economy is akin to a pie - that it can (and should) be divided and given to those who have less - This idea is a fable that is brought on because we are used to thinking about money as a concrete thing as opposed to an abstract thing. The ideology that supports a redistribution of wealth usually does so on this basis. It infers that because someone is a millionaire -- THEN they are taking money from YOU.
This is patently absurd. Wealth is created. The economy is NOT a pie -- it is a fluid system. Last year the US GDP was ~ $3.9 Trillion. 20 years ago it was much less. And conversely, 10 years ago Russia's GDP was significantly higher than it is now. Economies expand and contract with the relative economic health of the underlying society. There is no "pre-set" amount of money out there that needs to be divided. Money is NOT a natural resource.... it is more like source code. Just because you write more in no way limits the amount of code that I can write??
For your basic premise that if wealth was redistributed it mean the "same amount of money in the system" -- that idea is all fine and good, except for the tricky little thing known as inflation. Lets suppose everyone doubles their income tommorrow. Shortly thereafter, you will notice that the price for a loaf of bread goes from 1.25 to 2.50. The end result is that everyone makes more money - but things just cost more. New Boss = Old Boss.
Of course, we could try what the USSR tried. They tried to operate their economy pretending like inflation didn't exist. They were selling bread from their government factories that cost them more then they could charge. And you see how well this worked......
A community as decided to enact it's own laws and vote in a way that reflects their own view!!!! Oh No!!! That's not how America is supposed to work. Let's slashdot them and tell them how angry we are about them violating our Rights Online (even though none of us live there...)
Every child should be free play any video game...regardless! Even if the goal of the game is to rape, mutilate, dismember, kill jews, blacks, whatever...ALL CHILDREN SHOULD BE CONSTIUTIONALLY PROTECTED TO PLAY ANYTHING RENDERED AS A VIDEO GAME!!!!
(In the voice of comic-store guy):
Worst article ever!
By and large the "IT Worker Shortage" is a scam. Mostly what the large companies want is legal "slaves", and essentially that is what an HB1 visa allows.
Some of the limitations of a H1B Visa worker are:
Can only hold a specific job title
Can not be an owner of company stock
Only valid to work for 1 company
Only good for specified time (4 years?)
Essentially, the situation that this creates is an employee that can not advance, can not change jobs, and constantly has the threat of deportation looming over them.
Working conditions will never improve for domestic IT workers as long as companies can bring in overseas talent and expect them to work 24 X 7 for peanuts.... I fully support legal immigration and welcome all new comers to our country, however, this is just a way for companies to get IT workers, but not have to treat them like US citizens....
Most of those who claim to know what it is explain it as "what people have that machines never
will", gleefully ignoring the fact that humans are machines.
Humans are *not* machines! That implies a certain cause-and-effect type of reasoning. The human mind is probably closer to a quantum processor.
For instance,
Explain what is music and what is not?
Well, if you can't explain it -- why do you like it??
...I have unfortunately. I would venture to say that most of them are *not* just the curious garden variety hacker types. In some sense, they are pretty much sociopaths. The ones that I have known (crakers, that is) don't necessarily *want* to destroy information -- its just that it truly doesn't matter to them. They don't see months or years of work, all they see is a way to fulfill their need to break into a system and anything that gets in their way is expendable.
There was a cracker that used to work for my company -- once management found out about him, they let him go. But during lunch, he used to go on and on to me about the new virii he was creating. I kid you not, there was a certain passion to his voice about it. (much like pyros, I'm told). Anyway, you really got the sense talking to him that people simply didn't matter -- all that mattered was cracking as many systems as possible.
I don't know if these kids in MI were just a little too curious or if there's something more to it. But often times, this goes beyond a simple "boys will be boys" explanation.
What if, barring the problem of fast internet access, you could share your recorded TiVo shows with others?
For instance, you do a search on TiVo for shows about "Computer Programming" and you get a listing of everyone who has shows that fit that description currently on their hard drives. Then you either stream it, or copy it in-bulk to your box. After watching it, you decide that it was so good that you want your friend to see it...so you email the link over to their TiVo box...etc..etc..
This would undoubtly cause some real weirdness in the TV industry because distribution would then be *totally* outside their control. How do you advertise when you don't control the distribution? (Besides product placement). This is essentially the same problem that the RIAA has with Napster.
For those of you who didn't read Tom Perrine's statement to the subcomittee... the best quote was from Dr. Steve Bellovin of AT&T...
(sic) protect us from a govt technology that can "scale up to oppression"
In the context of what the good Dr. was talking about. The real problem with Carnivore is that it is trivial to scale this thing up to spy on anybody for any reason. With traditional wire-taping, its relatively difficult for the FBI to do (they need to send out a tech, attach wires, etc.) But for Carnivore, they can change the search parameters remotely.
The point is, that it should be made expensive for the FBI to run a query on someone via Carnivore. This would help ensure that they weren't using it wholesale against anyone and everyone that they had 'reasonable suspicion' about.
Cringley posted the UK story a few weeks back, along with a tidbit about australia that's even worse.
Apparently, down-under the government is trying to pass a law that allows the ASIO (the australian version of the CIA) to let some G-men crackers break into any web site that breaks the law in order to shut them down.
Ostensibly, this is to prevent porn -- but the person quoted by Cringley feels that it is the government snuggling up to Rupert Murdoch to keep video off the net.
Don't know about that... but its still worth a read. Check it out at: here
If you hired someone to build a bridge, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that the customer who ordered the bridge owned it....
I mean, no judge worth is salt is going to let this stand up --- regardless if it was specifically stated in the original contract or not.
If this other web developer was creating something at the direction of the ad agency -- the ad adgency owns it. That much is implied by the relationship. He was simply the tool builder that implemented the design....
The first web developer sounds like a real class act...undoubtly this was one of his first jobs...and probably one of his last....
I think that alot of your suppositions are flawed and a little sophmoric. You fail to appreciate two main points in your statement that AI will "..put people out of work.."
History has shown that machines have allowed prices to fall for the basic items that a human needs to live. Rent and Food as a combined total comprise a smaller percentage of our living wages than it did in previous times. This shift in each individuals resource allocation has allowed humanity as a whole to develop things like computers, tv, radio, etc. And the next wave of intelligent machines will bring the cost of living down even further
Tied to the above - what do you mean that it will 'put people out of work' - if by that you mean that there won't be as many humans making tennis shoes and other meaningless consumer items than I think that is a GOOD thing.
The basic problem with your assement of the future is that we have it good NOW. Quite the contrary. You need to lose some of those old-school ideas of 'work' and just what that means....
I think a better term than AI is PI - Pseudo-Intelligence
Bezos as opened a huge can-o-worms for himself. In the conversation between TOR and Bezos - there is a point where they both agree that Amazon would not go after small web developers who are using the 1-click on their web sites.
The problem with this is that part of your duty as a patent holder to actively enforce it. You can't have 9000 cases of 'patent infringement' going on and then bring 1 case against B&N just because they are your competitor. The courts are not going to allow you to selectively enforce your patents only in cases where it directly affects your bottom line.
Bezos should have never opted to patent the idea. His site already held proir art - so B&N or whomever - would not have been able to get a patent for it anyway. So Bezos now has a couple of options:
Enforce his patent worldwide. (very expensive and huge PR nightmare)
License out his patent (complicated and still a PR mess)
Give up on the patent and let it whither on the vine - and accept that B&N and the rest will copy it(Probably best choice)
The best thing to diffuse these stupid lawyer tricks in the future is the idea of a public database for prior art. A site that accepts submissions from the general public (ie small developers) that list the technology that they are using and a link to a working example thats in use. As the submissions would grow - this would effectively bring all of these useless patents brought to the USTPO null and void because examples of prior art would exist.
Slashdot Mirror
For the past 100 years or so, we've all been taught the rather simplistic idea that dinosaurs died and created oil deposits. There is a distinct possibility that is just fantasy.
The theory of Abiotic Oil states that oil is produced as a geological process - not a biological one. In fact, Russia (where the theory originated) has been using this theory successfully for several decades to predict where to search for new oil deposits.
Who knows? Perhaps its some of both... but the point is do not buy wholesale into the latest fad theory.
The funny thing was overtime fell from 10 hrs / week (per employee) to 1 or 2 hrs / week once people knew they were being watched.
The other funny thing was the guy we caught going to his GF's house for a noon-er. Imagine that, pulling up for some lovin in a 2-ton garbage truck.
Plus I'm told it helps if you have a monkey riding shot-bucket in your decked out camaro.
The problem Solaris x86 has is where to find supported hardware. I've tried Solaris 10 on a Dell PowerEdge 2650 and IBM xServer 206 -- both of which it refused to play nice with. I even tried it on a PC clone that was about as far to generic that I could find - still no dice.
So, while I would love to try out Solaris, I can't find to seem a reasonable hardware option to experiment with it on.
It seems that the only *supported* systems are built by Sun (surprise, surprise). So, I think it is totally valid to view Solaris x86 as a non-starter until they get more hardware support. Until then, most people in the x86 arena are going to continue to run Linux -- Solaris x86 in its present form is just another form of vendor lock-in.
I would buy it just to be able to play around with it (its only $80), but won't install windows for it.
The above is written like someone that has done very little serious thought about this issue. Not intended as an insult, just stating an observation.
The classic paradigm for understanding national defense is the "capability and intent" approach. This is a very sound and well-rooted approach to national security issues. You fundementally fail to acknowledge this in your post.
Let us assume that Capability to mean 'do they have the capability to destory the US', and lets take Intent to mean 'do they *want* to destroy the US'
With this approach (CaI) we can understand how enemies of the US fall into various categories. For instance, lets take the Soviet Union of 1980's.
Did the Soviet Union have the capability to destroy the US? Yes. However, they never seriously intended to do that. We felt the same about them. This is why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) was able to work. When two countries symetrically match each other on the matrix - its easier to avoid war through diplomatic / political process.
However, in the new era, the US faces a very asymetrical approach to its enemies. Most of the hardline terrorist cells - and to some degree Iran - absolutely *intends* to destroy the US. There would be no greater feeling for them then to kill millions of Americans. The only thing stopping them at this point is that they don't have the capability to do that yet.
This is the theory behind why the US is pusing for things like Missle Defense. Perhaps, in the long run, its an unworkable idea, but the idea is that enemies of the US would have to increase their capabilities even further than just getting their hands on some ICBM's. Even if a rogue state was to launch missles at the US they would have to assume that there would be a possibility that no missles or very few might make landfall. This is admittedly not a perfect solution for the US, but like in the computer world, security is like an onion. Many layered. This is but one layer of a comprehensive national defense.
If Eolas wins this case, expect a massive deluge of Patent suits across the entire industry.
And you thought SCO vs IBM was wild....just wait, methinks it will get worse before it gets better.
I understand you want to get some formalized training while the getting is good. Don't blame you there.
But, honestly, the absolute best way to learn something like this is to do it. Download asterisk and start playing. You can even connect a free soft-phone (SIP) to it so there is really no up front cost.
IMHO, formalized training is only useful *after* you have already learned a good deal about the subject matter. It gives you a chance to organize all you thoughts that have been plaguing you, and have a compentent teacher answer them for you.
Going in cold to VOIP lab, when you leave you will understand some jargon - but most of the deep concepts will escape you.
You must remember that they *could* just leave the 14.4B in the bank. (BTW: Even at a moderate 5% return, 14.4B would generate about 770mil per year - which in turn equates to an additional $650 per month / per resident)
Point is, part of the calculation with a sum of money this large needs to take into account the 'loss of invesment' due to the expenditure of the capital in the first place.
Taking those things into consideration, I don't forsee how this thing could ever realistically be profitable. If their goal was profitability (which it obviously isnt), they should be a complex of medium-height buildings (each about 30 stories).
If you figure about 15 apartments to the story and 30 stories per building, you are looking at 450 apartments per building. Figure that each holds 2 people on average and thats about 900 people to the building. Given these assumptions, about 12 buildings would be sufficient to house 100,000 people. There is no way that 12 buildings like that could come close to even requriring half as much capital as 14B would.....Someone needs to be hit in the head with a cluestick over this one...
Just my .02 /
-dm
We had a client that had a 1780 day uptime on his Netware 3.12 server...When it was time to reboot (because of a scheduled upgrade)...
The server wouldn't boot, upon later investigation, it was determined that a significant percentage of the hard drives bearings had turned to dust!!
This is TRUE story too, saw it with my own eyes... -dm
DSP functions can't be easily parallelized
That is to say: suppose we have a 10-second sound we are trying to render. Lets suppose you want to break that up into 10 1-second slices to farm out to your DSP cluster. The problem becomes, these are not discrete items. The sound of slice 4 depends on what was happening in slice 1, 2, and 3 in a cumulative fashion. Therefore, it becomes very difficult to render slice 4 until you know what waveforms should be present from the previous slices....
I've thought of the same thing for Text-To-Speech conversion - but I ran into the same kind of problem, except it was a question of punctuation. For instance:
This sentence, my friends, is hard to parallelize, right?
(Its hard because of the speech breaks that would occur at the punctuation marks.)
-DM
At first I couldn't beleive that it wasn't already being done. The problem I discovered is that each state and/or locality has their own rules regarding the usability specifications. For instance, a voting machine in Florida may require slightly different specs than a voting machine in Michigan. Each one will need to be approved by each local election committee on a case by case basis. There is no way that every locality has enough $$ to design, develop, and test something as complex as an electronic voting system..Hence, they are waiting for a vendor to supply one to them....However, due to the practical reasons - no vendor is going to try and make 1001 different voting machines...so it ain't gonna happen for awhile.
Before electronic voting can happen...there needs to be some federal guidlines that mandate one set of usability specs - then all the states will have to adopt those specs. Good idea, but this WON'T happen in 4 short years. Maybe by 2008...but probably 2012 until its nation-wide.
_DM
(a) The economy is not a static system.
(b) Inflation.
With regard to (a) you're are assuming that the economy is akin to a pie - that it can (and should) be divided and given to those who have less - This idea is a fable that is brought on because we are used to thinking about money as a concrete thing as opposed to an abstract thing. The ideology that supports a redistribution of wealth usually does so on this basis. It infers that because someone is a millionaire -- THEN they are taking money from YOU.
This is patently absurd. Wealth is created. The economy is NOT a pie -- it is a fluid system. Last year the US GDP was ~ $3.9 Trillion. 20 years ago it was much less. And conversely, 10 years ago Russia's GDP was significantly higher than it is now. Economies expand and contract with the relative economic health of the underlying society. There is no "pre-set" amount of money out there that needs to be divided. Money is NOT a natural resource.... it is more like source code. Just because you write more in no way limits the amount of code that I can write??
For your basic premise that if wealth was redistributed it mean the "same amount of money in the system" -- that idea is all fine and good, except for the tricky little thing known as inflation. Lets suppose everyone doubles their income tommorrow. Shortly thereafter, you will notice that the price for a loaf of bread goes from 1.25 to 2.50. The end result is that everyone makes more money - but things just cost more. New Boss = Old Boss.
Of course, we could try what the USSR tried. They tried to operate their economy pretending like inflation didn't exist. They were selling bread from their government factories that cost them more then they could charge. And you see how well this worked......
-DM
Dont miss these upcomming Ask Slashdot questions...
What impact has mathematics had on science?
How does technology influence society?
World War II - discuss amongst yourselves...
Every child should be free play any video game...regardless! Even if the goal of the game is to rape, mutilate, dismember, kill jews, blacks, whatever...ALL CHILDREN SHOULD BE CONSTIUTIONALLY PROTECTED TO PLAY ANYTHING RENDERED AS A VIDEO GAME!!!!
(In the voice of comic-store guy): Worst article ever!
Some of the limitations of a H1B Visa worker are:
Can only hold a specific job title
Can not be an owner of company stock
Only valid to work for 1 company
Only good for specified time (4 years?)
Essentially, the situation that this creates is an employee that can not advance, can not change jobs, and constantly has the threat of deportation looming over them.
Working conditions will never improve for domestic IT workers as long as companies can bring in overseas talent and expect them to work 24 X 7 for peanuts.... I fully support legal immigration and welcome all new comers to our country, however, this is just a way for companies to get IT workers, but not have to treat them like US citizens....
Now, with this out of the way -- they will *have* to answer why Win 2000 and Win ME are such a slugish sellers?
Anyone want to short MSFT over the next year?
Humans are *not* machines! That implies a certain cause-and-effect type of reasoning. The human mind is probably closer to a quantum processor.
For instance,
Explain what is music and what is not?
Well, if you can't explain it -- why do you like it??
There was a cracker that used to work for my company -- once management found out about him, they let him go. But during lunch, he used to go on and on to me about the new virii he was creating. I kid you not, there was a certain passion to his voice about it. (much like pyros, I'm told). Anyway, you really got the sense talking to him that people simply didn't matter -- all that mattered was cracking as many systems as possible.
I don't know if these kids in MI were just a little too curious or if there's something more to it. But often times, this goes beyond a simple "boys will be boys" explanation.
For instance, you do a search on TiVo for shows about "Computer Programming" and you get a listing of everyone who has shows that fit that description currently on their hard drives. Then you either stream it, or copy it in-bulk to your box. After watching it, you decide that it was so good that you want your friend to see it...so you email the link over to their TiVo box...etc..etc..
This would undoubtly cause some real weirdness in the TV industry because distribution would then be *totally* outside their control. How do you advertise when you don't control the distribution? (Besides product placement). This is essentially the same problem that the RIAA has with Napster.
(sic) protect us from a govt technology that can "scale up to oppression"
In the context of what the good Dr. was talking about. The real problem with Carnivore is that it is trivial to scale this thing up to spy on anybody for any reason. With traditional wire-taping, its relatively difficult for the FBI to do (they need to send out a tech, attach wires, etc.) But for Carnivore, they can change the search parameters remotely.
The point is, that it should be made expensive for the FBI to run a query on someone via Carnivore. This would help ensure that they weren't using it wholesale against anyone and everyone that they had 'reasonable suspicion' about.
Apparently, down-under the government is trying to pass a law that allows the ASIO (the australian version of the CIA) to let some G-men crackers break into any web site that breaks the law in order to shut them down.
Ostensibly, this is to prevent porn -- but the person quoted by Cringley feels that it is the government snuggling up to Rupert Murdoch to keep video off the net.
Don't know about that... but its still worth a read. Check it out at: here
Suddenly, the FBI seems all warm and fuzzy....
I mean, no judge worth is salt is going to let this stand up --- regardless if it was specifically stated in the original contract or not.
If this other web developer was creating something at the direction of the ad agency -- the ad adgency owns it. That much is implied by the relationship. He was simply the tool builder that implemented the design....
The first web developer sounds like a real class act...undoubtly this was one of his first jobs...and probably one of his last....
History has shown that machines have allowed prices to fall for the basic items that a human needs to live. Rent and Food as a combined total comprise a smaller percentage of our living wages than it did in previous times. This shift in each individuals resource allocation has allowed humanity as a whole to develop things like computers, tv, radio, etc. And the next wave of intelligent machines will bring the cost of living down even further
Tied to the above - what do you mean that it will 'put people out of work' - if by that you mean that there won't be as many humans making tennis shoes and other meaningless consumer items than I think that is a GOOD thing.
The basic problem with your assement of the future is that we have it good NOW. Quite the contrary. You need to lose some of those old-school ideas of 'work' and just what that means....
I think a better term than AI is PI - Pseudo-Intelligence
The problem with this is that part of your duty as a patent holder to actively enforce it. You can't have 9000 cases of 'patent infringement' going on and then bring 1 case against B&N just because they are your competitor. The courts are not going to allow you to selectively enforce your patents only in cases where it directly affects your bottom line.
Bezos should have never opted to patent the idea. His site already held proir art - so B&N or whomever - would not have been able to get a patent for it anyway. So Bezos now has a couple of options:
The best thing to diffuse these stupid lawyer tricks in the future is the idea of a public database for prior art. A site that accepts submissions from the general public (ie small developers) that list the technology that they are using and a link to a working example thats in use. As the submissions would grow - this would effectively bring all of these useless patents brought to the USTPO null and void because examples of prior art would exist.