j-g-faustus

NPEs [1] are not the problem as such, they are simply the ones most clearly illustrating the implications of the current patent system.

PEs are encumbered by a number of other restrictions - their "cold war" type standoff against competitors, their need to maintain a mostly positive brand in the public eye, their need to minimize the risk of a catastrophic loss in a lawsuit. So they utilize only a fraction of the latent power of their patents.

NPEs have no such restrictions. They have no competitors, no brand to maintain, no economic risk beyond what it costs to register a new shell company.

So what we see from NPEs is what the patent system actually means. It's "pure patent system". By implication, the fix is to change the patent system. Preferably by abolishing software patents, at least. (I can't speak for other fields.)

In the history of computing, I think Babbage's difference engine, von Neuman and some of the stuff from Xerox Parc in the 1970s probably deserved a patent or two. Apart from those, no.

[1] Non-practicing entities, for those who don't know. (I had to look it up.)

Number of Teslas registered in Norway: 15 in 2010, 48 in 2011, so they sold 33 Teslas in 2011.

Source: Statistics Norway[1], the official state agency for everything statistics.

Compared to say ~300,000 registered Toyotas (2011), I guess it depends on how you define "big" :)

But we do have a somewhat sizeable enthusiast "electric car" community. We deal with the cold by plugging in whenever possible, and most electric cars are used only for local transport.

There's apparently two Tesla S in Norway at the moment. It has generated interest here as well, and we have articles like "How to charge the Tesla Model S" [2] on a site that translates to "charging-stations.no",

[1] http://statbank.ssb.no/statistikkbanken/Default_FR.asp?PXSid...

[2] http://www.ladestasjoner.no/nyheter/75-hvordan-kan-tesla-mod...

I think the older standard was 10A circuits for most of the house, 16A for kitchen and washing room and a dedicated 20A for the electric stove. I thought 10A was the most common still, but I may be wrong there.

The standard for newer houses, the past 10-15 years or so, is indeed 16A. I have 5x16A + 1x20A and a 35A main circuit breaker, so I can pull about 8kW all together. Enough for a few kettles :) (This is for a a 40m^2/400 sq.ft. condo. A house would have more circuits and a larger main circuit breaker. And this is for Norway - we tend to follow similar standards as Denmark and Sweden, but there may be differences I'm not aware of.)

I'm in Scandinavia, and our standard household circuit is 10A@230V for 2.3kW.

But when you need a lot of power, you would install a 400V three-phase circuit (230 V between one phase and ground, 400V between two phases), something like this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_and_multiphase_power...

This kind of circuit isn't very common in households, but it's fairly simple to get one if you need it - most houses have three-phase power right up to the door, so an electrician can install it in a few hours. My grandfather had one for his circular saw.

But yes, hunting for these circuits on a road trip will be harder than finding a household circuit. Although that could change rather quickly if electric cars prove popular.

It's the only explanation I can find for the fact that patents like this are approved :)

(My alternative hypothesis revolves around evil conspiracies to extend property rights into the realm of generic ideas, with the aim to create a modern equivalent to the medieval landed gentry who can get rich entirely by rent-seeking[1]. All in all, I prefer the "examiners don't understand what they approve" explanation :)

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

I believe patents work by making the description impenetrable enough to make the examiner's eyes glaze over.

So they approve the patent in self-defense, and don't notice that it's just a list of trivialities.

It still doesn't sound very impressive if you translate it to plain English:

    A computer-implemented method for providing recurring delivery of products, 
    the method comprising performing instructions under the control of a computer
    system for:

Create a list on a computer.

    receiving at the computer system a designation of a delivery slot and
    a recurring delivery list comprising one or more list items, each of 
    the one or more list items identifying a product, a 
    quantity to deliver, and a frequency of delivery;

Listing where, what and how often to deliver.

    periodically generating, by the computer system, an order having
    a date and time for delivery based on a next occurrence of the 
    delivery slot, the order being generated in advance of the date 
    and time for delivery such that the order has a period of time of
    pendency prior to the delivery;

Each day, create a list of the deliveries to be made today

    creating, by the computer system, one or more order items for the order 
    based on a last delivery date and the frequency of delivery of each 
    list item in the recurring delivery list;

For each delivery, list which items to deliver.

    receiving at the computer system a change made to a first list item 
    of the recurring delivery list during the period of time of pendency 
    of the order;

If the customer updates their order, change the delivery.

    in response to receiving the change, determining, by the computer system,
    whether the order includes an order item corresponding to the first 
    list item;

Compare the customer update to the delivery stored in the system.

    in response to determining that the order includes an order item 
    corresponding to the first list item, modifying, by the computer 
    system, the order item corresponding to the first list item based
    on the change made to the first list item of the recurring 
    delivery list; and

Change the deliverly list in the system to reflect the customer update.

    providing, by the computer system, the order to an order fulfillment
    system capable of causing the one or more order items to be delivered 
    substantially on the date and time for delivery.

Give the list of "today's deliveries" to someone who can actually make the delivery.

I still fail to see how this differs dramatically from pretty much every delivery service ever. The delivery guys may not create these lists themselves, but their dispatchers do.

The only thing that differs from say UPS is the 'recurring order' part - say "send me three lettuce every Friday". But grocery deliveries have worked like this for quite a while.

Actually, it seems quite adequate judging from these graphs on Apple's EPS (earnings per share) growth: http://www.businessinsider.com/chart-of-the-day-apples-days-...

Apple has had a few quarters where year-over-year growth was around 100% (last in Q1 2011), that hasn't been the case in the last few quarters.

The market may be overreacting, but given that investors look at graphs like this and try to project the growth trajectory from the past few quarters several years into the future, pricing Apple a bit below Microsoft in terms of P/E doesn't seem all that unreasonable.

True enough. IBM and Microsoft currently trades at a P/E (price-to-earnings ratio) around 15, Google at 23, and Apple was at 11 when the market closed.

So at least according to the "a company is worth X years of future earnings" model, Apple is priced as a company that will grow even less than IBM and Microsoft over the next X years. Or perhaps it's priced to grow a bit more in the immediate future, but to start declining after that.

There are certainly other factors at play as well, but I don't know them well enough to enumerate them.

My main point was simply that when you think of "present company value" as the integral (the area under the graph) of the earnings graph far into the future, and add growth rates and fluctuating uncertainty, several non-intuitive aspects of company pricing start to make more sense. Even if it doesn't explain everything.

Consider a simple model where the "fair value" of a company is the sum of their next 10 years of profit:

If a company made $1m last year and is expected to stay flat for the next decade, it's worth $10 million.

If a company made $1m last year and profits are expected to grow 10% annually, it's worth $16 million.

If a company made $1m last year and profits are expected to grow 100% annually, it's worth $1 billion.

The implicit model for stock pricing is more complicated, but you can see correlations even in a simple model like this.

Nobody knows what will happen several years into the future, so it's mostly bets and speculations. Especially in high-growth companies, where many of the bettors appear to believe that trees grow to heaven, and the company's yearly profits will soon exceed the world GDP.

So the stock of high-growth companies sell at an enormous markup compared to current profits. By the same token, that markup can evaporate very quickly if a formerly-high-growth company shows any sign of slowdown.

In terms of the simple model above: If traders used to think that the $1m-profit company would grow 60% annually for the next decade, and something happens that makes them believe that it won't be more than 40%, the value of the company would immediately drop by more than 60%.

You used to have to show ID and provide an address when you bought a TV, then it would go into a "these households have a TV" database, and you would receive a yearly bill.

The extension is that it no longer applies only to TVs, but to PCs and tablets as well.

There was a time when many people looked forward to a faster CPU, because it meant you could open Word documents more quickly.

That time is long gone. As a developer, laptops have been fast enough for my purposes since around 2000.

Coding Horror, 2010:

    CPUs? All stupid fast at any price, with more cores 
    and gigahertz than you'll ever need unless you're one 
    of those freaks who does nothing but raytracing and 
    video transcoding all day long.

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2010/09/revisiting-solid-st...

Excluding servers and scientific computing, the only groups I know of that still want more power are hardcore gamers and video editors. Even for these, the bottleneck is frequently somewhere else than the CPU.

I think my mother and sisters represent mainstream computing better than I do: The check mail, watch YouTube videos and look at pictures of the family. There's nothing there that requires more computing power than what tablets have today.

The Google Nexus 7 is $200. It has enough computing power for what most of my family uses computers for. It still has other limitations that may make it unsuitable as a wholesale PC replacement - say ports for plugging in a large monitor, options for printing, drivers for various USB devices - but those limitations do not primarily call for a faster CPU.

If you disagree, I'd be curious to know where you see a mass market for significantly more CPU power than what we expect from the natural evolution of ARM.

Why would grandma want to buy a powerful $1000 tablet when a $200 tablet can do everything she wants to do perfectly fine?

The main issue is that the vast majority simply don't need all that much computing power, it was the lack of alternatives to the PC form factor that kept CPU power, prices and Intel's profit margins inflated.

I don't doubt that there will be a market for powerful tablets. But it's a small market; the grandmas of this world won't be buying them any more than they used to buy powerful workstations.

Will you shoot video with the cameras? Or stills?

Partially related: http://photo.stackexchange.com/questions/30317/how-can-i-fin...

That question is about time lapse with a single camera, but it includes some camera suggestions, including the GoPro action cam and Canon P&S with the CHDK hack: http://chdk.wikia.com/wiki/CHDK

Interesting, thanks for the link.

Not sure what you mean with "bare sensors", a sensor won't do you much good without shutter, lens, and a way to control the aperture?

To go cheap, I'd replace the DSLRs with webcams. It sacrifices resolution (obviously), but reduces bandwidth and computation requirements, and lets you play with the effects until you get a client who can foot the bill for a high-res version.

Space heating, water heating, refrigeration and air conditioning add up to 75% of the energy used by households in USA: http://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.cfm?page=us_energy_...

Although I was slightly surprised that "lighting and other appliances" is as much as 25% of the home energy use.

They can claim that they take the environment seriously.

Of course, if they are successful in reducing overall energy consumption, they will increase the cost of energy to cover their costs and maintain their profit margin.

This actually reminds me of the Plato/Artistotele difference. Plato held that there was an ideal, perfect version of everything in a sort of Idea Heaven, and the goal of the philosopher was to get ever closer to understanding that ideal.

Aristotele, on the other hand, thought that Heaven was too remote, and held that we could learn more by measuring what we see in this world. As opposed to the presumably ideal, but unaccessible, concepts in Heaven.

The medieval church loved Plato, the scientific revolution loved Aristotele.

My point is that the difference between these two frameworks for interpreting the world seems to be fundamental. Fundamental in the sense that the distinction has been with us for at least a couple of milennia, and we are apparently not likely to agree on a single answer anytime soon.

That's not what I'm reading. (I assume that you too read Norwegian, so we're not discussing artifacts of Google Translate?)

From an article on the opposition to the law[1] (my translation):

   The Department of Health hasn't tried to hide that the 
   goal is a stricter set of laws which can be  
   used if Breivik is sentenced to compulsory mental   
   health care.

   The department has long wanted a change of laws to 
   improve the security in institutions that hold highly 
   dangerous patients. This work was sped up after July 22.

See also [2], which says approximately the same thing.

The criticisms I've seen seem to center on that the new law makes it too simple to declare someone "dangerously insane".

Do you have a link supporting your interpretation?

[1] http://nrk.no/227/dag-for-dag/lovforslag-moter-kraftig-motbo...

[2] http://www.aftenposten.no/nyheter/iriks/Lex-Breivik-splitter...

The "regional security departments" the article refers to are high-security psychiatric wards.

The problem was that if the court declares Breivik insane, Norway couldn't (legally) put him in a high-security criminal prison, and there was no equivalent for psychiatric cases. Now there is.

It is a change, and clearly in response to this case, but the scope of the change is limited.

> to the extent that it affects productivity

I believe that's the key. In a similar fashion, we (society) don't want kids to interfere with productivity, so we stuff them in kindergartens and schools so they are out of our way until they reach their 20s and can be regarded as fully productive. And we put old people in nursing homes for the same reason.

I wonder if the current practice of everyone hiring only "the best of the best" is suboptimal for society as a whole, since it leaves a lot of potential productivity on the society table: Someone with a disability might be (say) only 5-10% as productive as the average healthy adult, but add up everyone with some sort of disability and it sums to a nontrivial amount of underutilized capacity.

But I'm not sure. It's a game of numbers: There are administrative costs to hiring and managing (say) 10-20 people to do one person's job. If the "less productive" part of the population is small enough and the productivity difference between "less productive" and "more productive" is large enough, it could be a net productivity win to pay the "less productive" some small amount of money to go away and stop bothering the "more productive".

Which is essentially what we do today.

Is "limits scale" a bug or a feature?

I expect that a lot of the success of the capitalist model stems from the fact that most actors in this model are not too big to fail. (See "internet": To make a resistent system, minimize the impact of any single node going down.)

The idea of a "market" is based on something like a bazaar, where no individual actor matters. When any single actor is large enough to matter on their own, you are leaving the the market model behind. There are terms like "monopoly" and "oligopoly" for that.

When the issue is "we can't let these actors fail, they are so big that it would destroy the market", it sounds like the solution should be a simple size limitation.

Where's the problem with that?

As I said, it's a few years ago. Today you can get 5 GHz with Sandy Bridge on air (although it might entail testing a few dozen CPUs to find one that can reach that high).

But the OP was referring to speeds up to 10 GHz, those still need something special. Here's a current Guiness record, 8.4 GHz using liquid helium: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKN4VMOenNM

Other materials might potentially clock higher, an IBM research prototype chip reached 500GHz: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5099584.stm

Here's an article describing what it takes to reach those speeds: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/5-ghz-project,731.html

The article is a few years old, and the clock limits have changed, but the principles of reaching them are the same.

As for replicating it at large in the public market, I don't anticipate that liquid nitrogen feeds will be ubiquitous anytime soon :)

He also says that "at low light levels, the human eye integrates [light] up to about 15 seconds".

    The REST interface is designed to be efficient for large-
    grain hypermedia data transfer, optimizing for the common 
    case of the Web, but resulting in an interface that is 
    not optimal for other forms of architectural interaction.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch... (Section 5.1.5)

    When a link is selected, information needs to be moved 
    from the location where it is stored to the location
    where it will be used by, in most cases, a human reader.

http://www.ics.uci.edu/~fielding/pubs/dissertation/rest_arch... (Section 5.2.1)

It certainly sounds like "human browsing" was the primary use case. Unless I missed something?

Interesting, thanks for the link.

I guess this is similar to what non-programmers see when looking at source code: An impenetrable mess of gobbledygook where it would require months or years of dedicated effort to figure out what the different commands actually do.

The UK "Locomotive Act" of 1865 required automobiles to carry a crew of three, one of which should walk in front of the automobile carrying a red flag. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locomotive_Acts

The law was supported by people with interests in the railway and horse-and-carriage industries. It took about 30 years, until 1896, before most of the restrictions were lifted.

I'm pretty sure automated vehicles will become standard at some point, but I expect it will take a few decades before we get there: For the technology to mature, for public opinion to accept the idea and for parties protecting other interests to give up the fight.

Some people find programming easy.

I was well into my twenties when I started programming, but I found the logic very natural - if this do that, otherwise do something else.

A friend of mine was skilled in natural languages (she spoke several languages reasonably well) and wanted to learn programming (it's just another form of language, right?), but she gave up after a semester - she found programming languages to be hopelessly nitpicky with nonsense rules and no relation whatsoever to languages used to communicate between humans.

For some segment of the population the basic premises of programming come easy, and it's just a matter of spending time enough to learn the details.

Others struggle mightily with the same basic premises, it seems like they can't really switch to the "extremely narrow minded one step at a time and you can't substitute uppercase letter O for numeric zero even though the look the same" frame of mind that is a prerequisite for doing any kind of programming in any language.

It's possible that programming is learnable by everyone, but it certainly seems to come more natural to a few.

I suspect that the difference is more deep seated than we normally give it credit for, possibly even somewhat analogous to the mix of "fast twitch" and "slow twitch" muscle fibre (http://sportsmedicine.about.com/od/anatomyandphysiology/a/Mu... ) that can give someone a natural advantage in certain kinds of sports.