Today, Brussels, tomorrow, the world!Paul Krugman has discovered that EU foreign minister Catherine Ashton has a full size replica of a dalek in her sitting room. She received it as a present from her husband.
I’m not certain if I am amused or alarmed….
This is big. Basically, the Supreme Court is reviewing a patent on a business method, specifically a way to hedge against inclement weather (I sh$# you not, someone patented betting on a cloudy day), and it could effect the future of much genetic and software algorithm patents, which, after all, are more discoveries than inventions.
I am with the anti-patent side, whose basic argument is here:
Eben Moglen, director of the Software Freedom Law Centre is emphatic that business process patents should never have been allowed in the first place. Patent law, he says, cannot award ownership of facts of nature, or mere mental activities, or algorithms because the Supreme Court has been unambiguous on that point for more than 150 years. However, for the last 20 years, the USPTO and its supervising appellate court have been liberal with patents for inventions consisting of software or business methods enabled by software.
But I would actually go further: While I understand the need to update patent law to apply to new technologies, I believe that the standard should be a clear showing that a lack of significant innovation is resulting from the lack of protection.
After all, the basic reason for IP, Patent and Copyright specifically is to encourage innovation by limiting the rights of other people to use that expression or invention*, as it says in Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution of the United States:
The Congress shall have power to …..
To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
(emphasis mine)
It’s about public benefit, not property rights: a temporary exclusive license is granted to an individual in order to help society as a whole.
While some solutions have been offered to deal with this problem, most notably crowd sourcing patent review, the real solution is to go back to where we were in 1985, when neither genes, species, nor software algorithms were patentable. We got innovations in those areas without those protections.
It should be noted that the Supreme Court only takes the cases that it wants to, and lately when it takes up patent cases, it does so to slap down the USPTO and/or the Federal Patent Court, both of whom tend to be like a man with only a hammer, and see everything like a nail.
In arguments, the court, except for Clarence Thomas, who never talks, appeared to be somewhat disparaging of the arguments of the plaintiffs:
Huge legal expenses and 13 years later, the two men behind the case, Bernard Bilski and Rand Warsaw, had their day in the U.S. Supreme Court on Nov. 9. Most legal experts though, agreed that the duo had no chance of victory. “I don’t think anyone other than Bilski thinks that Bilski deserves a patent,” says Mark Lemley, a professor of law at Stanford University. (See the 50 best inventions of 2009.)
The bench seemed to reflect this view, and several Justices suggested somewhat humorously that if the Bilski argument were to proceed, a number of other ludicrous patents could be issued. Justice Antonin Scalia asked if under Bilski’s argument, methods of horse-training could be patented, while the court’s newest member, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, asked if a “method of speed-dating” was patentable.
The interesting thing here is that most of the business community, excluding patent trolls and their close relatives, realize that the current system is completely out of control, which is obvious when the Wall Street Journal has an OP/ED that describes the case as, “The Supreme Court v. Patent Absurdity“.
*Trademark protection is really about protecting the consumer by ensuring that what they buy is what they thought that they were buying.
The shape of anti-stealth
The USAF is expanding a massively parallel supercomputer. It is made from 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles, and its purpose is deriving more resolution from radar imagery:
The U.S. Air Force is looking to buy 2,200 Sony PlayStation 3 game consoles to built out a research supercomputer, according to an document posted on the federal government’s procurement Web site.
The PlayStation 3s will be used at the Air Force Research Laboratory’s information directorate in Rome, N.Y., where they will be added to an existing cluster of 336 PlayStation 3s being used to conduct supercomputing research.
The Air Force will use the system to “to determine the best fit for implementation of various applications,” including commercial and internally developed software specific to the PS3’s Cell Broadband Engine processor architecture. The research will help the Air Force decide where Cell Broadband Engine processor-derived hardware and software could be used in military systems.
The Air Force has used the cluster to test a method of processing multiple radar images into higher resolution composite images (known as synthetic aperture radar image formation), high-def video processing, and “neuromorphic computing,” or building computers with brain-like properties.
The thing to note is that the PS/3 costs about $250 online, so the cost of buying all these boxes is under ½ a million dollars.
That’s less than most missiles out there, and by fusing the data, you can get a much more accurate picture of position and heading, probably close enough for a targeting solution.
If you assume that each one of the data centers costs about $1 million, even a relatively poor nation could deploy dozens of centers around the country, and use them to detect stealthy attack.
Heck, with a size of 12.8″(W) x 3.8″(H) x 10.8″(L), 0.304 you could fit 2200 PS3s in a box 8¾ feet on a side, so, if you assume that putting them and a rack and cabling them together increases the required volume by a factor of 5, you can fit the system on about 4 flatracks (picture).
If you were just to buy the boxes, and extract the electronics, you might be able to fit this in one flatrack, though at that point, power and cooling get iffy.
Still, the technology for ganging the PS3’s cell processors into a massively parallel supercomputer is very much public knowledge, with most of the requisite software being GPLed open source.
So, the crew of the HMS Scimitar decided to do target practice on a buoy, which should be no big deal, only before opening fire, they adorned their target the Spanish Flag, and the ambassador to Spain has been forced to apologize:
The Royal Navy was accused yesterday of using a Spanish flag as a machine-gun target.
Giles Paxman, the UK’s new ambassador in Madrid, was forced to apologise after sailors fired at a red-and-yellow flag affixed to a buoy while patrolling off Gibraltar.
He was summoned to the Spanish Foreign Ministry for a dressing down and officials said he had conceded there had been an ‘error of judgement’.
I’m not entirely sure why the crew did this, it was not for any historical purposes, as the anniversary of the battle of the Spanish Armada was August 8.
My guess is that this has something to do with the 300 year long dispute over Gibraltar, but even so, I think that one ship captain is facing early retirement in Her Majesty’s Navy.
So it appears that Harry Reid is telling the “Dean of the Washington Press Corps” to go Cheney Himself:
“In tomorrow’s Washington Post, David Broder, their distinguished senior columnist, certainly not a political conservative, expresses his reservation as a citizen about the steps that we could be about to take,” McConnell said.
Reid couldn’t have been less impressed. “To focus on a man who has been retired for many years and writes a column once in a while is not where we should be.”
(emphasis mine)
David Broder has been highly respected for his writing columns calling liberals DFHs* and giving a tongue bath to the conservative establishment since the 1960s.
Actually, it’s been the same article, written over and over again.
Nice to see that Harry Reid is calling him irrelevant. One wishes that this statement had been made decades ago by hundreds of more people.
Of course Broder is a conservative. He has been a spokesman for the status quo for over 40 years, though his real constituency is the Washington, DC cocktail party circuit.
*Dirty F$#@ing Hippies.
You know, we all thought that we elected FDR or JFK in 2008, but it appears that we elected Herbert Hoover instead:
This recession has taught us that we can’t return to a situation where America’s economic growth is fueled by consumers who take on more and more debt. In order to keep growing, we need to spend less, save more, and get our federal deficit under control. We also need to place a greater emphasis on exports that we can build, produce, and sell to other nations – exports that can help create new jobs at home and raise living standards throughout the world.
(emphasis mine)
Unemployment is, 10.2%, 17½% if you use U6, which the metric that most closely matches the numbers used to arrive at the 24.9% level during the Great Depression, and he thinks that it’s time to cut the deficit.
It’s the wrong prescription, and notwithstanding polls, people don’t vote on the deficit, they vote on the economy, and except for little Timmy Geithner’s friends in wall street, the economy has consistently gotten worse, and it will continue to get worse as Obama plays to Wall street, and not Main Street.
Too True
At least David Horsey at the Seattle PI.
Note, however, that the “Very Serious People” inside the beltway don’t.
Up and Running
But no time to remove the flag?
They have finally got all the Europrop International TP400-D6 engines running on the EADS A400M military transport a the same time.
If you look closely (bottom pic), you will notice that they have so busy, that they still have the South African flag on the fuselage, even though that nation canceled their contract.
What can I say, this is a day for death spirals.
Compare and Contrast
Well, we have yet another report that the F-35 well over budget and behind schedule:
Reports prepared by the Defense Contract Management Agency for Defense Department officials show that Lockheed and other contractors are months late on deliveries of test airplanes and components for future production aircraft.
The program is even farther behind on testing, and the reports say Lockheed could exhaust its development budget within a year.
Problems cited in the documents, obtained by the Star-Telegram under the Freedom of Information Act, support a recent Pentagon assessment that F-35 development will require two more years and billions of additional dollars.
That’s not the death spiral part. The death spiral part is that many of the partners are looking at deferring or canceling purchases on the basis of the schedule slips and price increases:
In a long-awaited decision, cabinet’s national security committee was due to sign off on the $16 billion purchase before Christmas.
But defence budget pressures and Defence Department concerns about Australia becoming the lead foreign customer for the initial production models of the F-35 fighter are expected to force a postponement until the new year of a government green light for the acquisition.
As the budget numbers come out, you will see reductions or orders, which will drive unit price up, which will lead to reductions of orders, rinse, lather, repeat.
Models at the Paris Airshow
With an associated “space tug”
Escape tower system
Orbital module separation
Full size mockup
Lifting body configuration
Configuration:
1-Reentry capsule; 2-Docking section; 3-Docking port; 4-Service module
Mat Rodina, aka Stanislav Mishin, generally posts on issues of Russian diplomacy and economics, with a generally nationalist bent.
I find it a good read, because I think that helps one understand some of the Russian concerns out there, though I frequently disagree.
Well, this Tuesday, he went looked at space technology, and posted about eh Kliper spacecraft, which has been proposed to replace the Soyuz. (see also the wiki)
Given the experience of the space shuttle, where the juxtaposition of solid boosters and a cryogenic fuel tank in parallel to the vehicle have led to disaster, the fact that the configuration sits atop, as opposed to astride, the tankage, much like the Dyna-Soar concept is probably a good thing.
On the other hand, the fact that it also has a cargo capacity of roughly 1000 kg is to my mind a mistake. The shuttle showed that mixing manned and payload functions in a single launch is uneconomical.
It’s propulsion includes a service module which is not returned from orbit, much like the current Soyuz or the Apollo capsules.
The Kliper has had a number of different concepts over the years, winged, lifting body, and something called a “hybrid version”, according to Buran-Energia.
Pictures are from the Wiki, or Buran-Energia.
Sort of NSFW, there are nekked butts.
I will never think about the phrase, “Naked Furniture,” the same way again.
The band is Valley Lodge, the song, All of My Loving.
But I’ll make an exception for these 11.
Cool.
For the “Kill Bill” movies
Benjamin Moore paints
My favorite, Bubble Gum
The Economist
And here they are, ordered, and numbered for the year so far.
Video h/t Know Your Meme, and technically Caturday is Saturday, but I always do my cat blogging on Friday.
H/t driftglass.
On Tuesday, we were getting reports from there was a conspiracy afoot to emasculate the bill in the dead of night, using an amendment put forward by Representative Mel Watt (D-NC) wherein the GAO could “audit” the Fed, but could not actually get detailed information. It actually made the Federal Reserve less transparent.
Yves Smith rather colorfully, and very accurately described the amendment as, “Tantamount to saying you are permitted to operate a strip club as long as the patrons are prohibited from looking at un or underclad bodies.” (heh)
What followed was a bit of theater, where the opponents of the audit, rolled out economists who argued that the audit proposal was destructive, but neglected to mention their own financial ties to the Federal Reserve:
But far from a broad cross-section, the “prominent economists” lobbying on behalf of the Watt bill are in fact deeply involved with the Federal Reserve. Seven of the eight are either currently on the Fed’s payroll or have been in the past.
The Fed connections are not outlined in the letter sent around to committee members on Wednesday, but are publicly discernible through a review of their resumes, which are all posted online.
It should also be noted that the publishing staff of almost every significant economic academic journal has similar conflicts of interest with regard to the Federal reserve.
Well, despite the best efforts of the Federal Reserve, and Barney Frank, and Mel Watt, the Paul/Grayson audit bill was passed by the House Finance Committee by a vote of 43-26, 15 Dems voted for it, in addition to all the Republicans.
Hopefully, this will progress further, but my guess is that the knives will be coming out on this.
Major props to Ryan Grim of HuffPo, he’s the author of the HuffPo links here, who has been on this like white on Rice.
Both Sweden and Finland signed on to the new northern natural gas pipeline from Russia to Europe, meaning that in 2012, Ukraine will no longer be the only way for Russian gas to make it to Europe.
This means that gas transit fees to the Ukraine, and the price of natural gas sold to the Ukraine, as well as the gas that is “lost in transmission” (stolen) are all likely to decrease.
In the short term, it means that the Russians want to make sure not to honk off anyone with short term gas disruptions, hence the recent agreement between the two government to waive penalties for Ukraine buying less gas than agreed to in their contract, because they don’t need to when they are an IMF economic disaster zone.
I think that the new pipeline may be why the Azeris are talking about selling their gas to Asia, particularly the Chinese, rather than Europe right now too.
They realize that the Ukrainian pipeline is likely decreasing utility in the future, and they can hook into the Russian system in fairly quickly once the northern pipeline is completed, so having the option to selling to Asian markets is a plus.
Once again, the Fed discovers consumers in order to forestall an audit, and the Consumer Financial Protection Agency taking over their purview.
This time, the Fed is going after fees on gift cards.
Seriously, is there anyone with two brain cells to rub together who does not understand that the Federal Reserve was hostile to the idea of actually enforcing consumer protections until Congress started about auditing it and taking away some of its enforcement power.
If the credit crisis is over, and the recession is coming to an end, why are “Citigroup Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. are hoarding cash as if another crisis were on the way?”
Methinks that something wicked this way lurks in off balance sheet entities.
Rep. Allen Boyd (FL-02), a prominent Blue Dog who voted against the Stimulus and the Healthcare Bill, is trailing state Senate Minority Leader Al Lawson in the primary, with Lawson leading 35%-31%.
Understand that the rule of thumb is that undecideds currently break about 2:1 for the challenger, and Boyd knows this, so he is already running ads in the district.
To be fair, this is not a Blue Dog in a solidly Democratic district, McCain got 54%, but it’s been a Democratic seat for decades (there was a guy who switched mid-term, and he got defeated the next election), and the congressional seat went Democratic by over 20 points.
I think that the district, and the nation, can be better served by someone less inclined to be reflexively right wing.