Nigerian Terrorists

We can detect explosives at airport security checkpoints, so the next step for the terrorists is to bring chemicals that can be mixed to produce explosives. On Friday a Nigerian terrorist tried to mix chemicals at his seat and just managed to burn himself. I'm not sure why he didn't do it in the lavatory. On Sunday another Nigerian on the same flight barricaded himself in the lavatory. Is it not obvious what is going on? They are experimenting. They want to know how long they have to work in the john. But all the news media are describing it as a false alarm.

I hope our homeland security people are smarter than our journalists.

Economic Growth

Politicians want you to believe that their favorite policies will promote economic growth. Perhaps they will, but it is almost always temporary. Look at it this way, the technology of 500 BC allowed for a certain per capita productivity. The technology of 1990 allowed for a greater per capita productivity. On average the growth rate in the intervening years is a direct consequence of advances in technology and population growth. The only sustainable ways to promote economic growth are to invest in technology and to encourage population growth. Seeing as population growth stinks (and is the root cause of global warming), that leaves technology.

Admittedly some politicians do promise to invest in technology. But most just call for measures that will boost consumer confidence, etc. As if getting people to send more money to China will help. Case in point, lowering interest rates. The Federal Reserve should not be in the business of trying to impose a 'natural' growth rate. Their job should be to insure a stable money supply. Bernanke has exactly the right idea with 'inflation targeting'. Short term actions to soften recessions are fine, if you know when to stop. Good luck with that. What politician would ask the Fed to stop boosting the economy when unemployment is in double digits?

The moral is: for economic growth, invest in universities, basic reasearch, and large scale projects with technology spinoffs.

ePatents

Microsoft just lost an appeal of a patent infringement lawsuit brought by Canada based i4i. Here's what the chairman of i4i said: "This is both a vindication for i4i and a war cry for talented inventors whose patents are infringed, ... The same guts and integrity that are needed to invent and go against the herd are at the heart of success in patent litigation against a behemoth like Microsoft."

So I looked up the patent. It addresses a standard problem in markup languages, namely, how do you separate the content from the markup. In HTML, a bold word might be represented as "One <bold>word</bold> in this sentence is bold."

But what if the content itself has tags in it. For example, to write the above paragraph I had to represent the 'bold' tags in a way that did not just make a word bold. So I had to write something like "One &lt;bold&gt;word&lt;/bold&gt; in this sentence is bold". Now imagine what the representation of that sentence is.

The patent in question solves this problem in a natural way. It simply removes all the special tags (the formatting instructions) into a separate part of the file. So our sentence would look like this (assuming it was the only thing in the file):

One word in this sentence is bold.
---- start formatting ---
<bold> at character 4
</bold> at character 8

The advantage is any tags that appear in the content are just content. If you think this solution should be obvious to any serious programmer, you're paying attention. I solve much more difficult problems than this every day at my job. This obviousness of course invalidates the patent. For this brilliant breakthrough, i4i was awarded almost $300 million.

The Business Card Drawing Scam

Ever been to a business show or conference and been asked to put your card into a glass bowl for a drawing? I was talking to a guy who worked an exhibit. He said they didn't give away their prize. Normally, they choose a card from someone who is likely to make a big purchase, but this time they did not find any good prospects, so they saved the prize for next time.