You're mincing words. The patent is awarded for the application of an algorithm - even if the algorithm was not invented by the patent applicant. For example, if Federal Express uses the solution to the traveling salesman problem to schedule its deliveries, it may apply for a patent covering its "novel method of scheduling deliveries." The algorithm used here is linear programming. Assuming the patent was granted, patent infringement occurs when UPS begins to use the traveling salesman problem to schedule deliveries. Patents like these are granted all the time, which was my point. Too many patents are granted for trivial inventions.
You are correct. Source code is not patentable, although it may be copyrighted. However, algorithms, techniques, etc. are patentable. Implementing a patented algorithm in any language infringes on the patent. The fact that Microsoft copied the AT&T code verbatim is irrelevant. If they had independantly implemented AT&T's algorithm in any language, they infringed. To my non-lawyer's eyes, the court can side with AT&T without depending on software patentability.
Having said that, the US Patent Office grants patents for too many trivial "inventions." Single Click Through is an example of one. Raising the bar a bit at the patent office would benefit most of us.
The controversial field of Sociobiology (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology) posits that social and economic phenomena at least partly explain biological phenomena such as evolution. The field uses tools such as linear programming models that maximize utility functions of such creatures as the slimewort subject to physical and "social" constraints in the environment. Sociobiology originated in the 1970s, so the thinking exhibited in the article is not exactly new. Although most biologists believe that Sociobiology is a bunch of poppycock, most also believe that it is highly amusing.
We have huge stockpiles of shipping containers in the US, owing to our huge trade deficits. Drive through northern New Jersey near the port area to see them. I'm sure other major US seaports have similar stockpiles.
Sun could get cheap containers and do us all a big favor by recycling these eyesores.
Of course, if Sun is assembling these data centers offshore and shipping them to the US, this idea won't work.
I only addressed your first point on the business cycle. Other posters refuted your ill-conceived gold standard argument. The great depression is another example of an inventory-induced depression, later exacerbated by poor policy including tariffs. Prior to the great depression, money supply did not significantly increase. During the great depression, restrictive monetary policy was pursued resulting in significant and painful disinflation.
Excessive debt can occur in a gold-based or a paper-based currency. I assume that, in addition to government debt and private debt, you are also considering our balance of payments deficit as problems. They are, but allowing the market to sort these out will be much less painful than your solution to the problem - hyperinflation.
You've got both your microeconomics and your macroeconomics wrong.
An efficient high tech economy produces a less drastic - not a more drastic business cycle as stated in your first point, your other points notwithstanding.
Most economic crashes resulted from excessive inventory buildups. The crash of 1873 is a classic example of this. In such a crash, firms forecast increasing demand for their goods and, consequently, ramp up production to meet this perceived demand. When the demand fails to appear, the firms (1) slash prices in the hope of unloading their inventories, (2) stop producing goods so as to not exacerbate their inventory problems, and (3) stop buying materials and services needed for production. The affected parties, including the firms' suppliers and the firms' employees, in turn, reduce their purchases of goods and services and, ultimately, the entire economy suffers. The behavior of the firms and the affected individuals is addressed by microeconomic theory.
The high tech economy dampens the business cycle because it reduces excessive inventories. It does so in three ways. First, modern forecasting methods are much more accurate than the rough methods of forecasting used earlier (say prior to WW II). Second, the quantity, quality, and timeliness of the data going into modern forecasting models is much better than available previously. Finally, modern manufacturing is much more adaptable to changing product mixes forecasted by these models.
A review of economic history shows that the modern business cycle is less volatile than older business cycles. I'm sorry that you are pissed off, but the evidence supports the "economics BS" cited in your post.
GE is an extremely profitable company. It pays a dividend of better than 3% and tends to have either the largest or the second largest market share in the markets that it chooses to compete in. It is an extremely well managed company and has been so for decades. Although it has a different business model, Berkshire-Hathaway also owns many business in multiple sectors. It is the source of wealth for the second wealthiest man on the planet, Warren Buffett. Its not easy to achieve this type of success, but I'd put my money on Google before I'd put it on most other businesses.
What Google is doing is not really vertical integration. They are, however, doing some things that other companies outsource. Consider Linux support. Most companies will purchase a commercial distribution that includes support for the OS. They do this because they do not have the expertise to support the OS themselves. Google, of course, can easily support its probably heavily modified version of Linux. Not only can they fine-tune the OS to meet their needs, they do not have to pay Red Hat, Novell, et al. large amounts of money on an ongoing basis for each of their thousands of servers.
Google can also do some things that appear to be outside of their space because the economic incentive to do so is so compelling. Consider, for example, electricity consumption. As the owner of the largest server farms on the planet, Google has plenty of incentive to reduce electricity consumption. If Google thinks that the chip makers could do better, they can work closely with chip makers to get something better or they can roll their own. They don't need to get into manufacturing. There are plenty of contract chip foundaries, e.g., Taiwan Semiconductor that could make the chips. The point is, Google has lots of options because of its size and because of its smarts.
Horizontal integration is not necessarily a bad thing. Tell me how GE's locomotive division adversely affects GE's jet engine division's customers. The only thing that these two divisions share is access to GE's superior management and business processes.
Actually, the check would be picked up in the 21st Amendment, a bar across the street from the Massachusetts Statehouse, that is popular with lobbyists, legislators, and other political types.
One thing afflicting my US boomer generation is an extreme denial of the level of savings it takes to retire. I've read that the average portfolio value of people in their 40s and 50s is $50,000. If one excludes the poor and near poor, the average portfolio value is maybe $100,000. Living off of that plus Social Security requires a large intake of dog food and other similarly delicious delicacies. Complaining about our relatively measly Social Security benefits or the disappearance of defined benefit pensions is a diversion. These benefits are what they are and, in fact, Social Security and Medicare are endangered as the boomers begin to retire. My generation's pathologically high preference for current vs. future consumption sounds pretty "immature" to me. Does this ring true to anyone else?
Read Fred Brook's "Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". Brooks was in charge of the development of the mainframe operating system, OS/360, in the 1960s. I have no idea how many LOCs are in OS/360, but the project was one of the most massive software projects ever undertaken. Brooks observed that adding more developers to a late project can actually delay the project even more.
My point was that the government is "interfering" with the market by subsidizing petroleum. Consequently, consumers over-consume and suppliers under-supply.
Petroleum is heavily subsidized in the United States. A very large portion of the budgets of the Departments of Defense and State are devoted to guaranteeing (or attempting to guarantee) reliable supplies of petroleum. These budgets are financed by general tax revenues. Consequently, consumers are paying $3.00/gallon of gasoline when the true cost is probably greater than $5.00/gallon. If taxes on petroleum were increased to finance the true cost of petroleum and other taxes (primarily income taxes) were decreased to maintain revenue neutrality, several things would happen. First, consumers would reduce their consumption of petroleum products. Second, new sources of energy, both conventional and alternative, would appear. The new sources of energy would appear because at the higher price, the new sources become economically viable. I know it is naive to think that politicians would pursue such a policy and, if they did, they would probably add many horrible things to our already absurd tax laws. Additionally, the implementation of the new taxes is crucial. Implementing the taxes at once, of course, would be disastrous. Phasing in the policy over, say, five to ten years allows all parties to plan and adjust their behavior. Before anyone starts whining about the effect on low income people, there is a tax credit that transfers money to these people. This negative tax would also need to be adjusted. Note that I have proposed a tax on petroleum, not just gasoline. All petroleum based products are currently subsidized.
As an unhappy PortalPlayer stockholder, I have been reading everything I could find on the company since the news hit the street yesterday morning. The stock price has been driven down to less than two times the cash (on a per share basis) the company has in the bank - a very pessimistic valuation.
Something not mentioned in the article is pricing. Some believe that either PortalPlayer has been too greedy or the new supplier (not known now) very agressively priced its chip. The new supplier might be Samsung, who already supplies flash memory for the iPod. Samsung could give Apple a "twofer" price on memory and processor. Another potential supplier might be Sigmatel. Until someone at Apple leaks the name of the supplier we will not know who the new supplier is. Apple employees, get busy!
Doing business with Apple is not always a happy experience - ask IBM.
All of your work on company time and using company assets belongs to your employer. Whether your work is stored on paper or on a computer is immaterial. If you choose to conduct personal business on company time and with company assets including paper, computers, or telephones, then you are subjecting yourself to revealing your personal business to your company. Many companies are required to do this by law. For example, whenever a company is sued, the first thing that the lawyers want is the email backups. Some industries (e.g., stock brokers) also must present logs of telephone calls.
This is not a personal freedom thing; its not a privacy thing. If you use your employer's business assets to conduct your personal business, then your communications are subject to review because the business has a legitimate right to view those communications or because the government has the right to subpoena the communications.
Hydrogen can be a part of the solution to the high energy utilization/high energy cost/high polution/urban sprawl syndrome. Consider a system composed of mass transit powered by fuel cells and safe, environmentally friendly nuclear "pebble" reactors. These reactors main product is, of course, electricity. Their main byproduct is hydrogen. The reactors scale nicely to accomodate different sizes of metropolitan areas and are safe enough to be located near cities, thereby reducing transmission costs. Hydrogen/fuel cell distribution, normally a problem with fuel cells (try replacing the gasoline filling station infrastructure with a fuel cell distribution system), are minimized by producing standard fuel cells and distributing them to a metropolitan mass transit system. China, BTW, is working on such a system as we speak.
Probably you or I will never code "LAM, whatever" management code. An obvious use of this is within JVM Hotspot code. In addition to optimizing the byte code, Hotspot could also optimize the underlying hardware level.
If subscribers paid for the bandwidth that they use instead of paying flat monthly fees, they would receive a message that even the most technically unsophisticated user would understand: a higher cable/DSL bill. Not doing something about it is like not fixing a leaky faucet and paying exorbitant water bills. Imagine what sending 100,000 or even a million e-mails would cost.
There is nothing new with this technique. You just OR, AND, etc. bitmaps over a block of executable code such that a new block is obtained, run the block, and repeat as necessary. However, the maintenance burden produced by this technique is huge. Every time that you modify the code, you must modify all of the bitmaps used subsequently.
My favorite resume contained the applicant's Meyers-Briggs score. He claimed that the score was quantitative evidence that he was a highly motivated, self-starting,... team player. After a good laugh, the resume went into the trash.
Having done contract work for the UN years ago in Brazil, I must agree with annielaurie. To get the contract approved, I had to facilitate communications between the Rome-based FAO (a UN agency) and the UNDP's (another UN agency) Brasilia mission via extremely expensive international calls. This was pre-VoIP, pre-web, and almost pre-Internet (I think it was still called the ARPANET then) then and I was a graduate student. I wasn't surprised at this, because I had previously worked at the World Bank for a couple of years. They were so bureaucratic that they had two personnel departments.
The problems with the Northeast grid are well documented. Technology Review had an article, http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/fairley07 01.asp, two years ago that discussed the vulnerabilties of the Niagara-Mohawk link between Canada and NYC as well as possible solutions to the problem. Unfortunately, it takes time and a great deal of money to implement solutions to problems such as these.
Slashdot Mirror
You're mincing words. The patent is awarded for the application of an algorithm - even if the algorithm was not invented by the patent applicant. For example, if Federal Express uses the solution to the traveling salesman problem to schedule its deliveries, it may apply for a patent covering its "novel method of scheduling deliveries." The algorithm used here is linear programming. Assuming the patent was granted, patent infringement occurs when UPS begins to use the traveling salesman problem to schedule deliveries. Patents like these are granted all the time, which was my point. Too many patents are granted for trivial inventions.
Having said that, the US Patent Office grants patents for too many trivial "inventions." Single Click Through is an example of one. Raising the bar a bit at the patent office would benefit most of us.
Bill Joy warned us about this.
The controversial field of Sociobiology (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociobiology) posits that social and economic phenomena at least partly explain biological phenomena such as evolution. The field uses tools such as linear programming models that maximize utility functions of such creatures as the slimewort subject to physical and "social" constraints in the environment. Sociobiology originated in the 1970s, so the thinking exhibited in the article is not exactly new. Although most biologists believe that Sociobiology is a bunch of poppycock, most also believe that it is highly amusing.
Sun could get cheap containers and do us all a big favor by recycling these eyesores.
Of course, if Sun is assembling these data centers offshore and shipping them to the US, this idea won't work.
Excessive debt can occur in a gold-based or a paper-based currency. I assume that, in addition to government debt and private debt, you are also considering our balance of payments deficit as problems. They are, but allowing the market to sort these out will be much less painful than your solution to the problem - hyperinflation.
You've got both your microeconomics and your macroeconomics wrong.
Most economic crashes resulted from excessive inventory buildups. The crash of 1873 is a classic example of this. In such a crash, firms forecast increasing demand for their goods and, consequently, ramp up production to meet this perceived demand. When the demand fails to appear, the firms (1) slash prices in the hope of unloading their inventories, (2) stop producing goods so as to not exacerbate their inventory problems, and (3) stop buying materials and services needed for production. The affected parties, including the firms' suppliers and the firms' employees, in turn, reduce their purchases of goods and services and, ultimately, the entire economy suffers. The behavior of the firms and the affected individuals is addressed by microeconomic theory.
The high tech economy dampens the business cycle because it reduces excessive inventories. It does so in three ways. First, modern forecasting methods are much more accurate than the rough methods of forecasting used earlier (say prior to WW II). Second, the quantity, quality, and timeliness of the data going into modern forecasting models is much better than available previously. Finally, modern manufacturing is much more adaptable to changing product mixes forecasted by these models.
A review of economic history shows that the modern business cycle is less volatile than older business cycles. I'm sorry that you are pissed off, but the evidence supports the "economics BS" cited in your post.
GE is an extremely profitable company. It pays a dividend of better than 3% and tends to have either the largest or the second largest market share in the markets that it chooses to compete in. It is an extremely well managed company and has been so for decades. Although it has a different business model, Berkshire-Hathaway also owns many business in multiple sectors. It is the source of wealth for the second wealthiest man on the planet, Warren Buffett. Its not easy to achieve this type of success, but I'd put my money on Google before I'd put it on most other businesses.
What Google is doing is not really vertical integration. They are, however, doing some things that other companies outsource. Consider Linux support. Most companies will purchase a commercial distribution that includes support for the OS. They do this because they do not have the expertise to support the OS themselves. Google, of course, can easily support its probably heavily modified version of Linux. Not only can they fine-tune the OS to meet their needs, they do not have to pay Red Hat, Novell, et al. large amounts of money on an ongoing basis for each of their thousands of servers.
Google can also do some things that appear to be outside of their space because the economic incentive to do so is so compelling. Consider, for example, electricity consumption. As the owner of the largest server farms on the planet, Google has plenty of incentive to reduce electricity consumption. If Google thinks that the chip makers could do better, they can work closely with chip makers to get something better or they can roll their own. They don't need to get into manufacturing. There are plenty of contract chip foundaries, e.g., Taiwan Semiconductor that could make the chips. The point is, Google has lots of options because of its size and because of its smarts.
Horizontal integration is not necessarily a bad thing. Tell me how GE's locomotive division adversely affects GE's jet engine division's customers. The only thing that these two divisions share is access to GE's superior management and business processes.
Actually, the check would be picked up in the 21st Amendment, a bar across the street from the Massachusetts Statehouse, that is popular with lobbyists, legislators, and other political types.
One thing afflicting my US boomer generation is an extreme denial of the level of savings it takes to retire. I've read that the average portfolio value of people in their 40s and 50s is $50,000. If one excludes the poor and near poor, the average portfolio value is maybe $100,000. Living off of that plus Social Security requires a large intake of dog food and other similarly delicious delicacies. Complaining about our relatively measly Social Security benefits or the disappearance of defined benefit pensions is a diversion. These benefits are what they are and, in fact, Social Security and Medicare are endangered as the boomers begin to retire. My generation's pathologically high preference for current vs. future consumption sounds pretty "immature" to me. Does this ring true to anyone else?
That would be 349 procedures on Naval Academy students - a much smaller universe.
Is a bear Catholic? Does the Pope shit in the woods?
Read Fred Brook's "Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering". Brooks was in charge of the development of the mainframe operating system, OS/360, in the 1960s. I have no idea how many LOCs are in OS/360, but the project was one of the most massive software projects ever undertaken. Brooks observed that adding more developers to a late project can actually delay the project even more.
My point was that the government is "interfering" with the market by subsidizing petroleum. Consequently, consumers over-consume and suppliers under-supply.
Petroleum is heavily subsidized in the United States. A very large portion of the budgets of the Departments of Defense and State are devoted to guaranteeing (or attempting to guarantee) reliable supplies of petroleum. These budgets are financed by general tax revenues. Consequently, consumers are paying $3.00/gallon of gasoline when the true cost is probably greater than $5.00/gallon. If taxes on petroleum were increased to finance the true cost of petroleum and other taxes (primarily income taxes) were decreased to maintain revenue neutrality, several things would happen. First, consumers would reduce their consumption of petroleum products. Second, new sources of energy, both conventional and alternative, would appear. The new sources of energy would appear because at the higher price, the new sources become economically viable. I know it is naive to think that politicians would pursue such a policy and, if they did, they would probably add many horrible things to our already absurd tax laws. Additionally, the implementation of the new taxes is crucial. Implementing the taxes at once, of course, would be disastrous. Phasing in the policy over, say, five to ten years allows all parties to plan and adjust their behavior. Before anyone starts whining about the effect on low income people, there is a tax credit that transfers money to these people. This negative tax would also need to be adjusted. Note that I have proposed a tax on petroleum, not just gasoline. All petroleum based products are currently subsidized.
As an unhappy PortalPlayer stockholder, I have been reading everything I could find on the company since the news hit the street yesterday morning. The stock price has been driven down to less than two times the cash (on a per share basis) the company has in the bank - a very pessimistic valuation. Something not mentioned in the article is pricing. Some believe that either PortalPlayer has been too greedy or the new supplier (not known now) very agressively priced its chip. The new supplier might be Samsung, who already supplies flash memory for the iPod. Samsung could give Apple a "twofer" price on memory and processor. Another potential supplier might be Sigmatel. Until someone at Apple leaks the name of the supplier we will not know who the new supplier is. Apple employees, get busy! Doing business with Apple is not always a happy experience - ask IBM.
All of your work on company time and using company assets belongs to your employer. Whether your work is stored on paper or on a computer is immaterial. If you choose to conduct personal business on company time and with company assets including paper, computers, or telephones, then you are subjecting yourself to revealing your personal business to your company. Many companies are required to do this by law. For example, whenever a company is sued, the first thing that the lawyers want is the email backups. Some industries (e.g., stock brokers) also must present logs of telephone calls. This is not a personal freedom thing; its not a privacy thing. If you use your employer's business assets to conduct your personal business, then your communications are subject to review because the business has a legitimate right to view those communications or because the government has the right to subpoena the communications.
Hydrogen can be a part of the solution to the high energy utilization/high energy cost/high polution/urban sprawl syndrome. Consider a system composed of mass transit powered by fuel cells and safe, environmentally friendly nuclear "pebble" reactors. These reactors main product is, of course, electricity. Their main byproduct is hydrogen. The reactors scale nicely to accomodate different sizes of metropolitan areas and are safe enough to be located near cities, thereby reducing transmission costs. Hydrogen/fuel cell distribution, normally a problem with fuel cells (try replacing the gasoline filling station infrastructure with a fuel cell distribution system), are minimized by producing standard fuel cells and distributing them to a metropolitan mass transit system. China, BTW, is working on such a system as we speak.
Probably you or I will never code "LAM, whatever" management code. An obvious use of this is within JVM Hotspot code. In addition to optimizing the byte code, Hotspot could also optimize the underlying hardware level.
His signature indicates his first language is Portuguese, so give him a break.
If subscribers paid for the bandwidth that they use instead of paying flat monthly fees, they would receive a message that even the most technically unsophisticated user would understand: a higher cable/DSL bill. Not doing something about it is like not fixing a leaky faucet and paying exorbitant water bills. Imagine what sending 100,000 or even a million e-mails would cost.
There is nothing new with this technique. You just OR, AND, etc. bitmaps over a block of executable code such that a new block is obtained, run the block, and repeat as necessary. However, the maintenance burden produced by this technique is huge. Every time that you modify the code, you must modify all of the bitmaps used subsequently.
My favorite resume contained the applicant's Meyers-Briggs score. He claimed that the score was quantitative evidence that he was a highly motivated, self-starting, ... team player. After a good laugh, the resume went into the trash.
Having done contract work for the UN years ago in Brazil, I must agree with annielaurie. To get the contract approved, I had to facilitate communications between the Rome-based FAO (a UN agency) and the UNDP's (another UN agency) Brasilia mission via extremely expensive international calls. This was pre-VoIP, pre-web, and almost pre-Internet (I think it was still called the ARPANET then) then and I was a graduate student. I wasn't surprised at this, because I had previously worked at the World Bank for a couple of years. They were so bureaucratic that they had two personnel departments.
The problems with the Northeast grid are well documented. Technology Review had an article, http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/fairley07 01.asp, two years ago that discussed the vulnerabilties of the Niagara-Mohawk link between Canada and NYC as well as possible solutions to the problem. Unfortunately, it takes time and a great deal of money to implement solutions to problems such as these.