A supply of tea with milk and sugar would be nice.  If it is tea I
really like, I like it without milk and sugar.  With milk and sugar,
any kind of tea is fine.  I always bring tea bags with me, so if we
use my tea bags, I will certainly like that tea without milk or sugar.

If I am quite sleepy, I would like two cans or small bottles of
non-diet Pepsi.  (I dislike the taste of coke, and of all diet soda;
also, there is an international boycott of the Coca Cola company for
killing union organizers in Colombia and Guatemala; see
killercoke.org.)  However, if I am not very sleepy, I won't want
Pepsi, because it is better if I don't drink so much sugar.

There’s more. A lot more.

ASUSTeK started out making the simple circuit boards within a Dell computer. Then ASUSTeK came to Dell with an interesting value proposition: ‘We’ve been doing a good job making these little boards. Why don’t you let us make the motherboard for you? Circuit manufacturing isn’t your core competence anyway and we could do it for 20% less.’ 

Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. On successive occasions, ASUSTeK came back and took over the motherboard, the assembly of the computer, the management of the supply chain and the design of the computer. In each case Dell accepted the proposal because from a perspective of making money, it made sense: Dell’s revenues were unaffected and its profits improved significantly. However the next time, ASUSTeK came back, it wasn’t to talk to Dell. It was to talk to Best Buy and other retailers to tell them that they could offer them their own brand or any brand PC for 20% lower cost.

From Forbes:

Apple’s initial legal victory over rival HTC in a patent infringement suit could pave the way for Apple to collect high royalties from devices running Google Android, according to one analysis.

Mike Abramsky with RBC Capital Markets believes that Apple has the upper hand over HTC, which is a smaller handset maker with a limited portfolio of intellectual property. As such, Apple could potentially push for an injunction and ask the U.S. International Trade Commission to bar the import of HTC handsets.

Instead, Abramsky believes it’s more likely that Apple will try to establish a high royalty precedent on Android devices. He said the iPhone maker could garner a deal that’s similar to or even higher than the $5 per unit that Microsoft collects on HTC Android devices.

From Apple Insider

$5 a unit. Wow.  But Apple has some remarkable technology covered by the patents at issue. For example

When the handler 44 requests a facsimile transmission, for example, the real-time function block issues commands to start the real-time engine and install the various modules that are needed for it to function as a virtual telephone. Binary facsimile image data is transferred to the real-time engine via the FIFO buffers, where it is encoded as PCM data which is further encoded according to the transport medium over which it is to be transmitted. If the adapter is connected to a telephone line, for example, these signals can be encoded as 16-bit pulse-code modulated (PCM) samples, and forwarded directly to the adapter 36 via the serial driver 42 . Alternatively, if the transport medium is an ISDN line, the modem signals are encoded as mulaw-companded 8-bit PCM signals. The different types of encoding are stored in different tables, and the appropriate one to be used by the real-time engine is installed by the real-time function block during the initial configuration of the engine and/or designated by the API 48 at the time the command to transform the data is issued.

Too stunning. There should be a Nobel prize in there – at least. Take a look.

This is one of my big beefs with the way we think about capitalism in this country: We fundamentally support what I call incumbency capitalism. We don’t support innovation capitalism. What’s the difference? Every rule around tax credits in the oil industry is set up by, and influenced by, the lobbyist from the oil industry. The royalty rates aren’t free auctions for offshore drilling; they are influenced by the oil industry. Depreciation policy is incumbency policy meant to benefit large capital expenditures instead of R&D investments. So, we can easily change a few of the rules, encourage more R&D and maybe less capital investment or other things. And almost all policy, because it is influenced by incumbents—and not just in oil and gas, but in nuclear, in solar, in wind—is influenced and shaped by incumbents. And I call that incumbency capitalism.”

—Vinod Khosla, Managing Partner, Khosla Ventures

Comcast demanded a “recurring fee” from Level 3 “to transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’scustomers who request such content,” Thomas Stortz, the chief legal officer for Level 3, said in a statement Monday afternoon, seemingly alluding to the Netflix service. The action “threatens the open Internet,” Mr. Stortz added.

Comcast did not immediately respond to the company’s claims. A spokesman for Netflix declined to comment.

The clash appeared to expose a new battleground in the delivery of Internet video. Companies like Netflix, which streams films and TV episodes to millions of paying customers, are encroaching on the terrain of incumbents like Comcast, which is eager to protect both its subscription television business and its emerging video-on-demand business

http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/29/netflix-partner-says-comcast-toll-threatens-online-video-delivery/

So I’d suggest that WIPO start examining how the copyright system might enable and support the development of robust, efficient copyright information systems that everyone – owners, users, governments, and the public – can use to facilitate frictionless transactions related to copyrighted works. There are many possible ways to accomplish this. It should be open to all kinds of legal mechanisms – such as voluntary agreements, public-private partnerships, regulations and even statutory amendments – whatever might help create systems that serve the public interest in making copyright more accessible, more sensible and more effective in the Networked World.

That ends my brief presentation to the technocrats in the room. Coming from Microsoft and being here at Stanford in the heart of Silicon Valley, let me now distill it for those of you who are not only technocrats but also techies. Looked at in terms of copyright, the Digital World was perceived as a bug. The ease of copying led to rampant infringement that harmed creators. In contrast, again looked at in terms of copyright, I submit that the Networked World should be embraced as a feature. The ability to create new works and share them with a vast audience across a multitude of platforms via a network creates great opportunity for creators.

http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/node/6560 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/blog/tom-rubin

via Lessig

And two quotes from Mark Twain.

Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.

Honesty is the best policy – when there is money in it.

But many FOSS-based transactions are not commercial in the foregoing sense. Instead, software subject to a FOSS license may come into a product without the producer knowing that this has happened or, in any realistic way, assenting to the terms. Also, the software often comes from a non-commercial party. An engineer downloads software from an academic’s site and uses part or all of it in the company’s newest product. This is fine if one of the truly free, non-restrictive licenses is involved, but it creates potential havoc where one of the falsely labeled free but more restrictive licenses purportedly governs.

I’m certainly not an advocate of free software, but if you are going to take other people’s work and put it into your product, you should try to get permission. No?

Once I got a very angry email from an engineer who was an advocate of free software.  Well I got a lot of those, but while this particular one contained the usual explanation that our use of patents and copyright – for our own work – was grossly immoral and unethical and so on, it came from a company that I had noticed in the USPTO web pages. I wrote back, noting that his employer was a significant filer of software patents. “Yes” he replied, “but we’re a commercial company”.

Sam Johnson, once said “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money“.  To me, a lot of the complexity of software licensing is due to a kind of falseness about who gets what. The engineer who downloads someone else’s code should see what limits are placed on his or her use of the code. Just because software was written by an amateur or a student or a teacher (or a small business ), doesn’t mean it belongs to whoever wants it. In our world, everyone is commercial to some extent.

They are not asking us to say we don’t know of any problems or that we have made efforts to limit them, they are asking us to guarantee as a matter of contract that our code is perfect. Our software is pretty good. It’s tested well beyond what we see as the industry norm, written by experts, and designed to be testable and rugged. But it’s not perfect. In fact I cannot imagine a single type of engineering for which such a guarantee makes sense.

There is a good reason why the Deming Wheel is a wheel and not a straight line: quality is an iterative process. Engineering is hard. Software engineering suffers from both the staggering complexity of software objects and the immaturity of the field. It’s worth another post on why software is so tough a problem – to me, it seems to be more about the complexity of the interfaces than anything else. We have deliberately designed and developed so that an upfront investment in quality can reduce support and modification costs.  And experience validates the method. But free of errors?  That’s a ridiculous demand, but an interesting one

What prompts the demand for guarantee of zero defects? It’s easy to suppose that ignorance is the cause, but that seems dubious because you’d think ignorance like that would be rapidly corrected. It may just be a pure power play by big companies who want to be able to hold a threat over vendors, but my sunny nature makes it hard for me to imagine that people are so nasty – well, it may be true. A third, more likely possibility is that the demand is a symptom of the disordered incentives of large firms. The interest of the firm is to balance closing the deal rapidly, with getting a good price, and with avoiding legal risks and the risk of vendors who might fail to deliver or make unreasonable demands once the firm becomes dependent on the product.  But the incentives for the people who generate and negotiate contracts in a big firm often are weighted only on the last risks. If the deal happens and the vendor disappears after entangling the purchaser in an ugly IP lawsuit (and how often does that happen?), the people who structured the deal for the purchaser will look bad. But if the deal never happens or takes a long time or bloats costs, they can’t be blamed. Indeed, for the outside counsel generally brought in to this type of deal, that means billable hours and no risk at all. So the part of the business that actually carries out the core functions of the firm becomes weighted down with people who have every incentive to prevent them from succeeding. This seems to happen in many large firms where internal signals drown out any data about customers, revenue, and all that other minor stuff.

Two lawsuits provide the frame for The Social Network. One was brought by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twins at Harvard who thought they had hired Zuckerberg to build for them what Facebook would become. The other was brought by Eduardo Saverin, Zuckerberg’s “one friend” and partner, and Facebook’s initial CFO, who was eventually pushed out of the company by Silicon Valley venture capitalists. These cases function as a kind of Greek chorus, setting the standards of right, throughout the film. It is against the high ideals they represent that everything else gets judged. And indeed, the lawyers are the only truly respectable or honorable characters in the film. When they’re ridiculed or insulted by Zuckerberg, their responses are more mature, and better, than Zuckerberg’s. (If you remember the scene in “The Wire” where Omar uses his wit to cut the lawyer to bits, that’s not this film.) The lawyers here rise above the pokes, regardless of the brilliance in Zuckerberg’s charge. This is kindergarten. They are the teachers. We’re all meant to share a knowing wink, or smirk, as we watch the silliness of children at play.

In Sorkin’s world—which is to say Hollywood, where lawyers attempt to control every last scrap of culture—this framing makes sense. But as I watched this film, as a law professor, and someone who has tried as best I can to understand the new world now living in Silicon Valley, the only people that I felt embarrassed for were the lawyers. The total and absolute absurdity of the world where the engines of a federal lawsuit get cranked up to adjudicate the hurt feelings (because “our idea was stolen!”) of entitled Harvard undergraduates is completely missed by Sorkin. We can’t know enough from the film to know whether there was actually any substantial legal claim here. Sorkin has been upfront about the fact that there are fabrications aplenty lacing the story. But from the story as told, we certainly know enough to know that any legal system that would allow these kids to extort $65 million from the most successful business this century should be ashamed of itself. Did Zuckerberg breach his contract? Maybe, for which the damages are more like $650, not $65 million. Did he steal a trade secret? Absolutely not. Did he steal any other “property”? Absolutely not—the code for Facebook was his, and the “idea” of a social network is not a patent. It wasn’t justice that gave the twins $65 million; it was the fear of a random and inefficient system of law. That system is a tax on innovation and creativity. That tax is the real villain here, not the innovator it burdened.

- Lessig in TNR

What struck me about the movie was how it showed the misogynistic shallow world of Silicon Valley as even more shallow and misogynistic than it really is. Must be what Hollywood is like. As for Lessig’s argument, I wonder how many people sympathized with those Greenwich/Harvardians who, by the way, look like they’ve gone back to Federal Court to get more money.  And does Lessig really think those lawyers came off looking wise and mature?

For me, the funniest thing about the movie was the dreary Harvard OS class that Zuckerberg walks out on. Oy,did that seem tedious.

From:       mante () aero ! polimi ! it (Paolo Mantegazza)
Date:       1998-03-16 15:52:14
[Download message RAW]

Hello, fresh news on using the FPU within RTLinux.
I've been able to convince a collegue, performing active vibration control
of plates to decrease the transmitted noise, to use RTLinux with the FPU
support of my variant. (I was smart in having the other take the risk,
wasn't I?). Please note that is the same technique I posted some time ago
for an rt_prio_sched of the standard release.
They are sampling the response of three piezosensors, carry out some signal
conditioning and simple compensation and evaluate a direct proportional
feedback to actuate three piezoactuators. They use a 200 Mhz plain Pentium
and  conditioning and feedback are performed by using the FPU without any
problem, with X running and with the system lively, at 18 Khz. The signal
are checked on a scope.
For those interested the piezo sensors and actuators are three ceramic disks
bonded to the panel. The DA acquisition are carried out with a DAS1600 card
along with two DA conversions, the third DA output with some other card
whose brand I forgot.
This is a preliminary activity in view of the implementation of a neural
controller. The only way they found to crash the system was to unplug the
computer by stepping onto a flying socket.
After these simple tests their doubts on using RTLinux are fading away and
I am happy that they can trust me somewhat more now.
I have not checked the system personally yet, but this is just a
confirmation of my testings.
Having understood that "fixed FPU support" meant "sound and working" I'm
eagerly waiting for the new 2.2.xx related RTLinux release with a native
improved FPU support.
Ciao, Paolo.