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As a result of the Defendant’s unlawful infringement of the Microsoft patents-in-suit, Microsoft has suffered and will continue to suffer damage.

The patent system's primary goal seems to have become protecting patent holders, which really ought to be only a secondary function. The original purpose of patents was to encourage innovations that would benefit society. It was a simple trade: if you invent something that will help society, society will give you protection against competition for some period of time. Somehow the system has morphed from a tool for encouraging innovation into a panicked land grab. And in the case of software patents like the ones in this suit, society receives very little benefit for the protection it provides.

But as they look at all of the wireless and Internet-enabled systems the auto industry is dreaming up for tomorrow's cars, they see some serious areas for concern.

Yes, it is a bit absurd to be concerned about somebody planting a laptop in your car then gaining control. They could just cut the brake lines without even having to get into the car. The point is that cars in the future will have wireless connections and be able to send diagnostic reports over this connection. That will create some level of connection between the vehicle's sensors and a network outside of the car. In fact, it's almost certain that some vehicle systems will be controlled by inputs from an external connection. Can you imagine every airbag in southern California simultaneously deploying?

The auto industry has never really had to consider this type of network security in their software. I think it's in everyone's best interest if they start thinking about it.

On the asymmetry of loyalty, it's just basic economic incentives. An individual has to be much more concerned about what their former employer says about them than a company does about what a single former employee says. It may not be perfectly 'fair,' but that's just the way the world works.

I thought that Mark's post was valuable in understanding the perspective of some hiring managers or investors since inevitably a few of those people will be looking at my resume. But I was not convinced that Mark's hiring filter was the correct approach to hiring. As an entrepreneur you're the underdog and need to find ways to do more with less. If all the big name companies are afraid of job hoppers, then you should be looking even harder at job hoppers. Your best chance at finding that diamond-in-the-rough employee is to take a closer look at the applicants that were never really evaluated at other companies because they were "caught by the filter."

Since you're already letting people login with google, it might make it easier for people to pay if you accepted payment via google checkout.

Apple's new policy won't cause their developers to leave immediately, the market is just too big. What they have done is sent a clear message to developers that if they don't want to do it "the Apple way" then they should be keeping their eyes open for other opportunities. Apple has essentially made a huge gamble that they can be the smartest guys in the market forever. I think that's unwise.

http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/Electrical-Engineering-and-Compute...

With the exception of price, these are all metrics of the shoe's performance. I chose the word "performance" deliberately because it is very general and can be measured differently by different customers.

I think this post is a more valid commentary on how products should be sold than how products should be made. For example, I used to sell a fairly complex piece of engineering software. I found that the most effective way to demo the software was to find out about one of the customers problems and show the software solving that problem over and over. Often I would only end up showing 2 or 3 features of a program that had thousands. That doesn't mean that the customer wouldn't go on to find value in many other parts of our product once they started using it, it just means that in the context of a sales meeting, making one point well is often as good as you can do.

In a web startup it can often take roughly the same amount of time to make a first version of the product as it would to write a business plan. When time to make a product or a plan are equal, the relevant question becomes obvious: Will I learn more from making and testing V1 or from making a business plan? But there are very few other business categories where there is parity between the resources required to write the business plan and the resources required to create the product. For example, I work on electro-mechanical systems which often have multi-year development cycles. In our case the relative cost of a business plan is very low, even if we only gain 10-20% additional knowledge about the venture.

The value of a business plan is also likely to be tied to the volatility of the market that the business is entering. Web-based businesses are outliers in terms of market stability as well. Given how quickly the web is changing, a plan would likely contain outdated information before it was even completed. But if you're starting a restaurant the costs are much more stable and there's no reason you couldn't figure them out before spending any money.

The problem with extending physical mimicry to more complex software is that the interface ends up adopting design compromises made for the physical world. I remember the idea of a "virtual shopping mall" where you would virtually walk through the mall, look around and pick a store to go into. But a shopping mall has to be a certain size because it has to hold a certain amount of stuff. It takes time to walk from one end of a mall to the other, but there's no reason to extend that compromise (made to gain physical space) should ever be made in software. For anything beyond a very simple application you're better off asking the user to learn a few things about how the software works and designing the interface for its medium.

Maybe difficulty of the problem, or level of competition.

The challenge for me is that sometimes a big problem can suck the momentary excitement out of a project. Passion really starts to set in when I push myself and am able to come up with solutions.

In the days of expensive print advertising, the investment required to take out an ad was often enough of a barrier to legitimize a business to consumers. The model has changed, but I believe consumers are still looking for companies that make some kind of investment to prove their authenticity. The new version of the expensive print ad is the investment in time and effort required to gain the trust of industry experts and influencers.

I tend to disagree with the authors conclusion. I'll concede the theoretical point that anything can be computed, but this doesn't make computer science fundamental. By my definition, Physics is the study of the most fundamental components of the universe and algorithms are an indispensible tool in that study.

It is possible to write an algorithm that perfectly describes what happens when you get hit by a car. This is not the same thing as you actually getting hit by the car. In other words, algorithms are a description of what is happening, not the actual events themselves.

The important consideration is the size of the deficit (in time or money or ownership) a company accepts and what they gain in exchange. And the bigger the deficit, the higher the stakes.

I think drunk driving is another example of the same pattern. We've ratcheted down the blood alcohol content limit to 0.08% in most places (generally equivalent to a couple of drinks) yet there are habitual offenders still on the road. I had a friend get hit head on by a drunk driver with 8 DUI's.

In both cases the focus should be on dealing with the serious offenders swiftly and severely and not on maximizing the number of infractions.

Unfortunately, scarcity is, and always will be, a reality. And that is a fact hard-wired to natural science. Sure it may be possible to create an economic system that delivers "free software to everybody," but it could never go much further than that. We still need to live in houses and wear clothes and even build the computers that will be used to write all this software. All of these goods are made from scarce natural resources and no amount of tinkering with the rules of the economy will change that fact.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/business/23scene.html

Maybe we rate cars in Miles/Joule and rate energy sources in Joules/$. Makes the math pretty simple.

1. Moving forward, MPG is not going to be a good measure of efficiency or operating cost.

2. GM is run by salespeople, not engineers.

In my view the biggest reason for the Segway's failure is that it's a product designed for an infrastructure that doesn't exist. Kamen and his team envisioned cities without cars when they were designing the Segway. Unfortunately all that's available are crowded sidewalks, making the Segway the most expensive way to move along at walking pace.