Nokia sold off their real hardware expertise for about $200 million USD before they even hired Elop. After that, Nokia was no better at hardware than an HTC.

Imagine if IBM announced it was stopping development of its own chip and foundry business and just selling it off.

It should offend anyone who follows tech if a company that had been a world leader for decades would listen to the bean counters and stop investing in a core technology which constituted a major part of that company's identity. That's exactly the sort of irresponsible and short-sighted decision-making that should be denounced forever for what it is, simply evil.

Well Nokia pre-Elop did exactly that. Nokia chose to disinvest from the wireless modem business, going from a position where they owned the IP for the entire hardware stack to simply selling it off.

And this was at a time when everyone else was starting to rush INTO the development of LTE chipsets not sell off the entire unit BEFORE the company was seriously tanking.

Incomprehensible and evil.

The handset business should simply be spun off or maybe sold to someone like Huawei. The future of Nokia is the Nokia Siemens Networks of which Nokia just recently bought the part Siemens owned. Of course Nokia will still be hobbled by having dumped its wireless chipset business years ago, as Ericsson made sure to obtain the LTE chipset related parts off of the to be dissolved ST-Ericsson joint venture.

The next big opportunity for LTE-related upgrading business is China, Ericsson having cashed in huge in the United States. What China desperately wants is for the TD-LTE variant that is being deployed on China Mobile to become an equal alternative to the FDD-LTE already deployed in say the US. They are willing to let the Europeans cash in and not just leave the business to home-grown companies such as Huawei, showing how eager the Chinese are becoming for European assistance.

Well before Elop arrived at Nokia, Nokia had already disinvested in everything that the winners today invest in. Where is Nokia's LTE chipset? Where is Nokia's modern ARM SoC? Apple went out and bought Palo Alto Semi and developed their own ARM SoC. Qualcomm developed not just their own LTE chipset but also their own ARM SoC. Samsung has their own LTE chipset and ARM SoC. Huawei I believe has their own LTE chipset and ARM SoC through Hisilicon. Intel bought Infineon. Nvidia bought software reprogrammable wireless solution Icera.

And how come no one mentions Qualcomm as the company whose CEO should be a hero to every tech geek: Qualcomm's CEO DR. Paul Jacobs earned his Ph.D. in EECS from Cal-Berkeley. Whereas Nokia's pre-Elop leadership appears to have no idea of the coming technological trends that every other future successful player in the industry knew.

Here's what really happened that killed Nokia.

Ericsson worked with Verizon to create LTE which could operate with Verizon's legacy CDMA network. By working with the telecoms to create LTE, Ericsson is going to benefit from decades of contracts to provide support and equipment to telecoms worldwide in the adoption of LTE.

Nokia chose to anger the telecoms by backing WiMAX in an alliance with Intel, WiMAX being promoted as a technology that could disintermediate the major carriers. Considering 9/11, this was an EXTREMELY bad time to threaten the US telecoms. Think about it. Nokia did not get access to Intel's fabs. Unfortunately for Nokia, in 2008, it became clear that its fab partner, Texas Instruments, was bowing out of its alliance. One can follow the ugly story of the Nokia-Intel alliance here. By backing the wrong technology, WiMAX instead of LTE, Nokia went from owning the IP for the entire wireless stack to selling it all off. So now Nokia has to go to another party for its wireless chips, in particular, for the upcoming LTE.

Only Nokia was at the same time engaged in an IP battle with Qualcomm, its real mortal rival. Qualcomm possesses the IP for interoperability with CDMA, Verizon's network. And Nokia lost that battle, an unprecedented IP settlement to the tune of a massive instant payment of roughly $2.3 billion USD.

So Nokia by not developing an LTE chipset found itself at the mercy of its mortal enemy, a company that would have been glad to have seen Nokia disappear from the face of the Earth a few years ago, especially as Qualcomm's business of licensing IP could be threatened previously only by the likes of European Nokia. And Nokia made itself into the mortal enemy of the US telecoms by pushing for WiMAX in its alliance with Intel, in the decade following 9/11.

What could have possibly pushed Nokia into making such an alliance with Intel and such a technologically and politically mistaken decision of pursuing WiMAX? I speculate it was all due to a fateful decision by the previous Nokia leadership to (badly) follow the advice of a fellow Finn, none other than Linus Torvalds . (And yes I get the irony that Torvalds was at one time working for a competitor to Intel, that's why Nokia's leadership clearly followed his advice horrendously.) "But it had a "Plan B", and had been considering it for years. In 2002, I'm told, Linus Torvalds convinced Nokia to create a Linux unit."

Regrowing body parts or even growing new ones is certainly useful for kaiju.

Remember, all of this patent litigation is the fault of the anti-Vietnam War movement's scapegoating of science. The Mansfield Amendment(s) banned the Department of Defense from funding basic research in the universities, breaking the system that had come into existence after World War II demonstrated the value of government funding of basic research. The funding was transferred from the politically powerful Department of Defense to the politically powerless National Science Foundation.

With funding cratering, the Bayh-Dole Act attempted to leverage whatever funding was left by allowing universities to patent the fruits of government funded research instead of formerly assigning intellectual property back to the federal government. And so the universities rushed to have their professors patent anything they could think of.

The Eolas patent litigation is a direct result of this sequence of events, the patents arising from University of California research.

Software-type patents are a problem unique in their virulence to the United States. There must therefore be an explanation in US history why this system has developed as it has. But unfortunately the real people responsible won't admit their fault.

What is being overlooked about Pacific Rim is that it would have been clear to everyone before it was greenlit that it had no established IP and not attached major actor to help promote it. So why was it greenlit at all at a purported $190 million USD production budget?

Just reading say Wikipedia there is something interesting about who is producing and distributing Pacific Rim: It is a partnership between Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros., a very lucrative partnership with many major films to its credit that is scheduled to end in 2014 with Legendary Pictures switching to Universal to apparently play a similar role.

One also sees that the same Legendary Pictures and Warner Bros. are teaming up in 2014 for a revival of the Godzilla franchise. The question I have is who retains the rights to make movies from the Godzilla franchise after the partnership dissolves? If Legendary Pictures retains all the rights, then it would seem a smash-hit revival of the Godzilla franchise would be just what Legendary Pictures should wish to bring to its new partnership with Universal. One can now see Pacific Rim as possibly being an expensive ad campaign to show just how advanced special effects have become for monster movies.

In addition, Pacific Rim appears to have clearance to be shown in the Chinese market, a market that restricts the number of foreign films permitted to be released there. It might be of some value just to retain business relationships and the slot.

Who says Intel would be willing to sell chips to Apple at the same prices Apple can spend on ARM?

The critique that I am surprised hasn't exploded the electric car myth is only briefly flirted with in the article: We've reached peak parking. With people flocking to mega-cities, many with populations headed to about 10 million, there isn't close to enough land for either the wide-laned roads for people to drive any kind of car or the land for parking. This isn't exactly a new or unknown critique either. See for example Gary Hustwit's documentary Urbanized.

That does not appear to be the problem, that is, a new compiler version: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2013-June/042598.html Note the report to freebsd-current was submitted Sat Jun 22 13:09:04 UTC 2013. /usr/src/sys/fs/nfsclient/nfs_clstate.c:5160:33: error: format specifies type 'long long' but the argument has type 'uint64_t' (aka 'unsigned long')

Building current FreeBSD appears to have been broken since last night on amd64, as of the tinderbox build at 2013-06-22 13:32 UTC http://tinderbox.freebsd.org/ This frequent and lengthy build breakage appears to be both a technical and a social problem. It is a technical problem because FreeBSD appears to lack suitable incremental build tools so that developers can quickly test patches before committing them. It is a social problem because even using plain CVS, OpenBSD's developers seem to have almost zero problem keeping their current source at least buildable.

There's new infrastructure that has been developed from FreeBSD, pkgng. It holds the promise of much better binary package management. There's just one problem: https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng "As a consequence of the security incident on 11th November 2012, for the time being pre-compiled packages for pkgng are not available from any official FreeBSD repository." The security incident happened in NOVEMBER 2012. Yet as of at least June 5, 2013, "Target dates for when service may be resumed have not been released."

And Linux back then supported booting the OS from an extended partition, a feature FreeBSD didn't have until many years later.

Let's explode that myth. Here's what actually happened. Linux distributions such as Slackware back then supported booting from a floppy into the OS so that one could run the rest of the userland from a hard drive. That meant one could preserve Microsoft Windows booting yet run Linux at the same time with no risk. I cannot stress how important a feature that was back then to someone like me, back when PCs were very expensive and had to be shared among family members. The FreeBSD developers took a different tack. Their OS was for grown-ups, for servers. They openly mocked on their mailing lists the feature of being able to boot into the OS from a floppy drive. (Note this is different from being able to INSTALL from floppy, everyone back then could do that.) The FreeBSD developers CHOSE to not be popular.