Indeed, 30 by 30 kilometres is already 900 km^2, 1/3 of 2700 km^2. Should I be all that concerned about any 30 x 30 km^2 area in a wilderness? I'm not so sure.

It's too bad in some sense that the Bundesliga is so famous it would be prohibitively expensive for PBS to bring back "Soccer Made in Germany."

The difference is night and day in the summaries at least. Reading the summary of the first story, one would conclude that progress is as much dependent on a group of companies funding ASML, that the cost is a major factor forcing companies to pool their efforts, and that as a result the number of major players at the leading edge is likely to stay small but stable. It is also highly unlikely one company alone can leapfrog the others for a major length of time, although say Intel can spend a lot of money to get a couple of years advantage. The second summary mentions TSMC and Intel but carefully leaves out the other company that has made the news with a major investment in ASML, Samsung. But emphasizing that Samsung is going to stay at the cutting edge of fab technology, especially with its rumored deal with Apple to be the fab for Apple's next generation of chips starting in 2015, would call into question just how important is the patent battle between Apple and Samsung, when in reality Apple and Samsung are stuck in this marriage funding the next generation of fabs.

Who else is stuck using a derivative of Firefox 17 other than Debian users of Iceweasel?

It's surprising to me that tech forums aren't praising Qualcomm to the skies for actually having management that understands tech. How many other major American companies have a CEO who earned a Ph.D. in EECS from Cal-Berkeley ? I think Qualcomm's CEO as an example is especially important considering the utter disaster Dr. Hector Ruiz was at AMD.

You're right, Nokia made a bad choice. YEARS before Elop got there. As the New York Times assessed when Nokia sold off their wireless modem business: "As handset manufacturing has evolved, wireless modems are increasingly being included in larger, multifunction chipsets along with the phone engine, applications processor, power manager and software."

Nokia's mistake was to not invest resources to expand their platform, to do what other companies were doing in acquiring the expertise and business relationships to product integrated chipset solutions. This was especially critical as they were about to lose their fab partner Texas Instruments.

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?