stuki

The appeals court argument seems reasonable, if applied in a more typical context of creative end user content. Mickey Mouse is copyrightable because he's not just any old mouse, but rather a specific one.

But as for API's? Although Sun might have had choices, there is no a priori added value derived from the specific choices they did make, other than the fact that they have become standardized, so engineers are used to working with them.

Mickey is Mickey because the specific qualities Disney gave him, in and of itself makes him rather more interesting than some randomly chosen rodent. Which language API's, as even the court (or the article author, I'm unclear) acknowledges, generally are not.

How do you even go about measuring "total energy in the system?"

Intuitively, adding greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere should, in isolation, increase energy in the system. But what if we really were heading for a new ice age as some feared in the 70s. And the only thing that prevented us from freezing to death, was the concerted effort of those notoriously concerned and altruistic SUV drivers taking one for the team, by revving up their Hummers.

You'd have to put an unusually high value on air cleanliness to argue that oil, period, and the scale economies it has enabled, has not have a net ROI in total.

Whether the marginal added "value" to some, of commuting in a hummer vs a Prius, is worth the cost to third parties of the incremental added pollution is, of course, a different matter.

I like that thought. Assuming the heat exchange plumbing and attendant sensors could be made efficient and reliable enough to be relied on, the ability of panel designers to optimize their panels for operation in a tighter temperature band, should allow for improved efficiency of primary generation as well.

Sounds like this mega plant is designed with a fair amount of redundant capacity; for cloudy days, maintenance etc. If so, this may facilitate "real world scale" testing of approaches like yours without unduly affecting "production."

With solar still a tiny fraction of the total mix, and with plenty of paid for, weather independent capacity already existing, it's likely more efficient to lean on those for when the sun don't shine.

In the Southwest, where counteracting the direct effect of solar radiation (cooling/Ac) is a main consumer of power, this makes even more sense.

Why would the 99% of people who are able to exit and enter a regular car, benefit from being carted around in a "fully accessible vehicle?"

What's wrong with simply providing a transportation allowance, or means tested reimbursements, to those few who may need it, and set it high enough that it becomes profitable for a reasonable fraction of car for hire drivers to equip their car to deal with them?

In BI, a similar tradeoff between lots of fancy preaggregation, versus optimizing search across the raw, un- (or lightly-) processed base data comes up quite frequently.

Commonly, the choice of approach is dictated by the number of end users querying the same data. If it's relatively specific queries ran frequently by many users, the aggregation approach can be made snappier and save lots of processing power.

But for power users, it becomes a nuisance real fast to be limited not only by stored base data, but also by the somewhat arbitrarily chosen aggregate structures. I'm assuming people doing log analyses of server logs fall within "power users" in most shops. At least I'd hope so :)

As an aside, the Go language (that I'm currently flapping between loving and not so much), versus Python at al., seems to be born of somewhat similar thinking.

I have to say I think crypto currencies is an area where the keep it simple approach is extremely beneficial. If it means fever optimizations, and leads to a greater dependency on off chain transactions, so be it. For genuinely wide spread adoption, more important than speed and transaction volumes, are an ironclad faith in the integrity of the underlying code itself.

The Germans will say you need to take your eyes off the road for far too long to be safe in order to operate a touch screen, compared to using a scroll wheel with tactile feedback........

Because pretty soon you will deal with a non US currency.....

For a "datatype" as commonly needed as "money", it has always struck me as strange that a more standardized and widely agreed upon approach to dealing with them, have not emerged.

The groups at Apple who engage in patent lawsuits, are highly unlikely to be "practicing" much other than patent litigation. Similarly, if IV started selling statues of Nathan Myhrwold on the web as a new line of business, and hence laying claim to be a "practicing" entity; they would still be trolls.

MS and Sony (And Apple) themselves are one part tech companies building salable products, and one part patent trolls. Sum total, the existence of usurious IP laws are, by their management, perceived as at least as beneficial as it is onerous.

Those getting hurt by the trolling, are smaller, potentially innovative, companies without patent war chests. But their hurt is measured in all the things that did not come to market; hence remain unseen, unmarketed, unpaid for, and therefore unable to pay for representation in a political system such as ours.

What Apple wants (And MS and Sony), is to be able to troll others, including former employees, who set up on their own. While preventing others from doing the same to them. Or, even simply have that particular sword hang over anyone who might want to market a product in competition with them, as well as those guys' potential investors.

Don't know how transformational it has been yet, but I feel the idea that all side effecting code needs to be specifically noted by the programmer, a la Haskell, will one day be seen as a watershed.

We're only at the very early stages of the parallelisation of hardware, but as that trend intensifies, I can't imagine compiling efficient code without explicit compiler knowledge of what code might side effect.

Hmm....

Marc Andreesen claims the whole world (or at least Hollywood, but he gives no obvious reason why to stop there) will be rebuilt in Silicon Valley's image....

Tim O'Reilly seems to think finance is some subset of web2.0....

Facebook is valued at $15billion; Google $200-....; and TechCrunch who knows what....

The Paypal Mafia....

And now this....

I do hope YC has made enough to sustain through less heady times.

No Indian university?

A nasty side effect of using a terse language for apps that are split between a nice, algorithmic core and verbose, overly generic library calls for UI and storage, is that the algorithmic part shrinks to an almost nonexistent fraction of total code volume, and only the ugly parts remain visible.

I hope MS's productization of F# includes partial classes with type inference across (loaded) files, so that F# become as code gen friendly as C# and VB is. And that they add F# as an output language for their code generators. That way one will only have to deal with a graphical representation of the ugly parts most of the time.

Isn't it more a question of how much of your computer you are willing to expose without explicitly authorizing it? As long as webapps don't demand much, you let them bypass explicit installation. Even Gmail 'installs' something to run locally according to some broad interpretation of the term. The difference between that and signed oneClick type installs with auto update from a trusted source is pretty slim.

I just can't help but think that for webapps to get fundamentally richer, they are going to need increasing access to client resources, such as the ability to communicate with each other across process boundaries. At that point, security concerns will probably dictate a somewhat more formal installation process for them as well.

It's worse than that. Simply by operating shitty public schools 'for free', the ruling riff-raff is crowding out investment in private alternatives for the less than well off. With no public schools available and minimal to no regulation of private ones, every neighborhood would have private alternatives with plenty of eligible kids to fill them.

I suspect well off neighborhoods would still in general have 'better' schools, simply due to having more resources, but even the poorest of parents would have at least some competitively exposed, hence at least decent, options. If nothing else, charity, churches and such would help out the neediest of kids.

As it stands now, a poor parent in an inner city (even more so in one as much at war with religious anything at all as Oakland), is pretty much left without viable alternatives to the local public indoctrination institutions.

Does anyone know of any regulatory or institutional reasons why it may be easier for a hedge fund than a venture fund to make truly speculative investments like this? Or is this (if even true) just a one off outlier?

Mike Shedlock has some interesting background data:

http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/10/what-fact...

In the US, most motorists are going 55-65, swerving across lanes in tractors with tinted windows, and have never heard of leaving the left lane to faster moving traffic. Also, the way most of America is laid out, every trip, even 'local' ones, has a freeway leg, so there is constant merging on or off. Without blinking, of course. In Continental Europe, freeway traffic is much more predictable.

Another thing is, Amsterdam to Nice can be driven overnight, on mostly empty freeways.

And last, your manager was likely exaggerating grossly. Amsterdam to Nice at 120 avg., would take only about 7hrs 30 minutes door to door (Or Sea to Shining Sea). With 3 kids, that's more like the time spent at rest stops along the way.

It's pretty sad that thousands, maybe millions, of people may be wasting away in cubicles partially due to silly regulations regarding depreciation schedules for cubicles vs. permanent walls.

It's also telling that Microsoft seems almost alone in bucking the trend amongst large computer industry companies. If their competitors had spent their money in ways that enabled their engineers to be productive, instead of on lawyers, lobbyists and pr firms blaming MS for 'monopolistic' practices, maybe they could on occasion produce something people would pay for, too.

up to 10x10" metal parts from files downloaded from myGun.com...

I guess the 1st amendment will only apply to states too, soon.

How about Tallinn? Hardly a tech hub, but from what I have heard (never been there), a bit of a startup scene.

Part of the reason for SV's attraction for tech startups (besides Stanford) was that it originally was a much more 'family friendly' place than contemporary San Francisco. Naked people, free flowing booze, drugs and late night parties are more important to media than tech hubs. Hence the difference between Hollywood and Mountain View.

And is there still a place left on earth with any kind of entrepreneurial activity without Indians and Chinese involved? People from those cultures have for centuries spread out all over the world, leaving everything behind to follow trading opportunities. Outside Japan and Korea, their diaspora seem to own pretty much anything worth owning in both Asia and Africa. And quite a bit of America as well. At least from my experience, they seem about the unlikeliest candidates for the 'corporate drone' stereotype one can possibly choose. Once the general population in those countries starts having access to even 1950's level of US higher education spending, there's bound to be a lot of entrepreneurial activity there.

Once you found a cure, you could pick up a sword, or boxcutter, and force scientists to stop coming up with new viruses.

....Imagine how powerful you could get by finding a cure for that virus....

Foreigners, who almost by definition have less local knowledge than locals (duh), are more likely to be stuck overpaying for less than premium assets, rather than getting the prime ones. The most talked about European investments in the US as of late seems to have been in Chrysler and subprime mortgages. Hardly stellar examples of high return assets.

Hollywood has been riding high on this principle for decades, sucking in foreign money like a turbocharged vacuum cleaner on crack, and promptly distributing it to themselves, their lawyers, surgeons, trainers and decorators, as salaries and bonuses. All the while, the local insiders/studios keep the choicest releases to themselves. They only need financing 'help' for the risky, read subprime, stuff.

What's really sad, for European savers at least, is that despite being fully aware of this, their homegrown movie industries continue to be an even shittier bet.

As long as America maintains a comparative advantage in producing startups and printing stock certificates, what's wrong with Americans trading these for stuff Europeans are better at producing, like fancy suits and deconstructionist manifestos?

Even then, widespread aversion to hiring from one of two equally productive groups creates a big incentive to break the mold. And that incentive will only keep increasing as long as no one steps out. In the limit case, you pretty much have access to an 'unlimited' pool of free labor. This line of reasoning does presuppose a reasonably free country, though.