Adults should keep the phone away from the head and use the speakerphone or a wireless headset, he says. He even warns against using cell phones in public places such as a bus, because it exposes others to the phone's electromagnetic fields.

What alarmism! Give me a BREAK. I'm not a physicist, but isn't there something called the Inverse-square law of light/EM intensity that would protect the other passengers of the bus? Or are we all so allergic to the EM we've been exposed to for about 100 years now that a tiny dose of EM from several feet away is going to hurt us?

Cancer expert unaware of Inverse Square Law

Lisdexamfetamine (L-lysine-d-amphetamine) is an inactive molecule prodrug (brand name Vyvanse) consisting of the psychostimulant d-amphetamine coupled with the essential amino acid L-lysine. Lisdexamfetamine was developed so that the psychostimulant is released and activated more slowly as the prodrug molecule is hydrolyzed—consequently cleaving off the amino acid-during the first pass through the intestines and/or the liver. Essentially, this makes lisdexamfetamine an extended-release formulation of d-amphetamine; however, the release characteristics are integral to the molecule itself, rather than simply the pill construction.

Lisdexamfetamine - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And people accuse me of offensively characterizing people who reach different conclusions than I have. It is to laugh. In reply, and attempting to remain more civil than Robin had been, I said this.

You misread the article, Robin. If you look at the power-consumption results on page 14, you’ll see that the Hitachi drive drew more power *at idle* than the Sandisk SSD did *under load* - and that doesn’t even count the difference in cooling needs. The MemoRight SSD also used less power at idle than the Hitachi did, and idle is where most notebook drives are most of the time. Those results are starkly at odds with the traffic-generating headline, and until the inconsistency is resolved I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions. What problems do exist with SSD power consumption are also more easily solved than you let on. Some functions can be moved back to the host, others to dedicated silicon which can do them very efficiently. It’s not like hard drives don’t have processors in them drawing power too, y’know. When somebody does a head to head comparison where the drives are idle 90% of the time and only reading 90% of the remainder, and properly accounts for the fact that whole-system I/O performance might not scale perfectly with drive performance, then it’ll be worth paying attention to.

Of course, Robin tried to poison the well by preemptively dismissing any methodological criticism as “denial and obfuscation” but I’d like to expand on that last point a bit. At the low end of the scale, a slightly improved I/O rate might prevent a processor from entering its power-saving sleep modes. At the high end of the scale, a slightly improved I/O rate could push a multi-threaded benchmark past the point where context switches or queuing problems degrade performance. In these cases and many others, the result can be more instructions executed and more power drawn on the host side per I/O, yielding a worse-than-deserved result for a faster device on benchmarks such as Tom’s Hardware used. Since the power consumed by CPUs and chipsets and other host-side components can be up to two orders of magnitude more than the devices under test, it doesn’t take long at all before these effects make such test results meaningless or misleading.

I’m sure Robin knows a thing or two about storage benchmarketing, which is not to say that he has engaged in it himself but that he must be aware of it. Workloads matter, and any semi-competent benchmarker can mis-tune or mis-apply a benchmark so that it shows something other than the useful truth. Starting from an assumption that Tom’s Hardware ran the right benchmark and demanding that anyone else explain its flaws is demanding that people reason backwards. Instead we should reason forwards, starting with what we know about I/O loads on the class of systems we’re studying, going from there to benchmarks, results, and conclusions in that order. That’s where the �... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Canned Platypus » SSD Power Consumption

If your software business is based more upon your patent portfolio than your ability to execute, your reality is about to change. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has just added two important new tests for patentable subject matter will invalidate many if not most software patents.

With a recent (June 2008) decision, the USPTO has taken the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.” Most software patents are process inventions but can meet neither of these requirements: they do not generally physically transform anything, and they are usually defined broadly so that they can protect the invention while running on any general purpose computer. Very specifically, the USPTO has categorically stated that a general purpose computer is not a "particular machine."

The Patent Law Blog has a lot more information on this important ruling.

GT VentureLab: Requiem for a (patent) dream

The Patent and Trademark Office has now made clear that its newly developed position on patentable subject matter will invalidate many and perhaps most software patents, including pioneering patent claims to such innovators as Google, Inc.

In a series of cases including In re Nuijten, In re Comiskey and In re Bilski, the Patent and Trademark Office has argued in favor of imposing new restrictions on the scope of patentable subject matter set forth by Congress in § 101 of the Patent Act. In the most recent of these three—the currently pending en banc Bilski appeal—the Office takes the position that process inventions generally are unpatentable unless they “result in a physical transformation of an article” or are “tied to a particular machine.”[1] Perhaps, the agency has conceded, some “new, unforeseen technology” might warrant an “exception” to this formalistic test, but in the agency’s view, no such technology has yet emerged so there is no reason currently to use a more inclusive standard.[2] null

WOO WOO

Patent Law Blog (Patently-O): The Death of Google's Patents

Abstract: Despite their widespread use as predictors of the spot price of oil, oil futures prices
tend to be less accurate in the mean-squared prediction error (MSPE) sense than no-change
forecasts. This result is driven by the variability of the futures price about the spot price, as
captured by the oil futures spread. This variability can be explained by the marginal convenience
yield of oil inventories. Using a two-country, multi-period general equilibrium model of the spot
and futures markets for crude oil we show that increased uncertainty about future oil supply
shortfalls under plausible assumptions causes the spread to decline. Increased uncertainty also
causes precautionary demand for oil to increase, resulting in an immediate increase in the real
spot price. Thus the negative of the oil futures spread may be viewed as an indicator of
fluctuations in the price of crude oil driven by precautionary demand. An empirical analysis of
this indicator provides independent evidence of how shifts in the uncertainty about future oil
supply shortfalls affect the spot price of crude oil and how they undermine the forecast accuracy
of oil futures prices. Our model is consistent with a number of empirical regularities and results
obtained by alternative methodologies.

What Do We Learn from the Price of Crude Oil Futures? - killian.pdf (application/pdf Object)

Here it is: The single best forecast of oil prices in one month, three months, or a year is -- [sound of drumroll] -- today's oil price.

With oil prices at exorbitant levels, I'm forecasting that next year's price will also be at . . . exorbitant levels. I'm not saying that prices won't change, but I am saying they're about as likely to go up as they are to go down. Let's call this the no-change forecasting rule. It won't work for everything, but it does pretty well for oil prices.

Marketplace: Here's how to predict future oil prices

And it turns out that they all do worse than one simple forecast: the current oil price. That’s right: the most accurate forecast of oil prices over the next month, year, or quarter is the current oil price. We call this the no-change forecast.

The Alquist-Kilian finding was the subject of my latest commentary for NPR’s Marketplace (available here; or here for the audio version). Here’s the highlight:

Amazingly, this simple rule did better than the average of dozens of professional forecasters! In fact, the no-change forecast was 34 percent more accurate at predicting oil prices in 3 months time, and 18 percent more accurate at predicting prices in a year’s time. While professional prognosticators might argue that this difference isn’t statistically significant, it sure is embarrassing.null

Forecasting Oil Prices: It’s Easy to Beat the Experts - Freakonomics - Opinion - New York Times Blog

When the masses went to see a movie in June of 08, they had a choice. Naturally, they chose to see the movie that was the best available, the one they wanted to see the most. If you're the third best choice, you lose.

The alternative? The makers of Speed Racer could have spent less money and made a movie aimed at pocket 2, a niche movie where they could have easily made it through the Dip, easily overwhelmed competition for that niche, easily become the best in that world.

Bruce Lee wasn't the best movie star in history. But he was the best kung fu star in history. Different dip.

The most common misconception about Long Tail thinking is that if you don't succeed at pocket 1, don't worry, because the tail will take care of your product and you'll just end up in #2. That's not true. #2 isn't a consolation prize for mass market losers. Mass market losers are still losers. In order to become a mass market star you make choices about features and pricing and quality--and if you lose that game, there's no reason to believe that those choices are going to pay off for a different market.

The long tail doesn't offer a consolation prize. Instead, the wide selection (in every market, not just digital ones) is a collection of smaller long tails, each with its own dip, each with its own winners (and losers). Pick the biggest market you can successfully dominate, the biggest slice where you can get through the Dip and be seen as the best in that world. nullnullnull

Seth's Blog: The Long Tail and the Dip

I have seen Monster Cable take untenable IP positions in various different scenarios in the past, and am generally familiar with what seems to be Monster Cable's modus operandi in these matters. I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points.

After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs' practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am "uncompromising" in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not.

I say this because my observation has been that Monster Cable typically operates in a hit-and-run fashion. Your client threatens litigation, expecting the victim to panic and plead for mercy; and what follows is a quickie negotiation session that ends with payment and a licensing agreement. Your client then uses this collection of licensing agreements to convince others under similar threat to accede to its demands. Let me be clear about this: there are only two ways for you to get anything out of me. You will either need to (1) convince me that I have infringed, or (2) obtain a final judgment to that effect from a court of competent jurisdiction. It may be that my inability to see the pragmatic value of settling frivolous claims is a deep character flaw, and I am sure a few of the insurance carriers for whom I have done work have seen it that way; but it is how I have done business for the last quarter-century and you are not going to change my mind. If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it.

I will also point out to you that if you do choose to undertake litigation, your "upside" is tremendously limited. If you somehow managed, despite the formidable obstacles in your way, to obtain a finding of in... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

Blue Jeans Cable Strikes Back - Response to Monster Cable — Reviews and News from Audioholics