He keeps doing it because there is a ton of money to be made by lawyers within the current system.

- Fees to create, file, and defend bogus patents
- Fees involved with court cases over bogus patents and patent trolls (some involving negotiated settlements of billions)
- Fees negotiating licensing deals, contracts, and other instruments felt necessary in the over-litigious environment

Remember Obama is a lawyer and all his friends are too, and he (being a Democrat) gets a lot of financial backing from lawyers. Through that lens I think it's hard for him to see the downsides -- to innovation, to the business environment -- of the current system.

Not sure if troll. Employment and wages are just the start of personal motivation. Those will only cause a person to show up. Did the soldiers who stormed the beaches at Normandy do it because of their paychecks? Do the players in the World Cup only try hard because they think it might lead to lucrative endorsement deals? I know an awful lot of people here in silicon valley who could easily retire, but they keep working because they have dreams and feel their work is meaningful.

You misunderstand the job of a senior leader. Their job isn't to have all the answers and be right all the time. It's to steer the organization to success. It's not so different from being a military commander, or the coach of a football team. Some things will go wrong as a result of the calls you make. If you dwell on those failures and second-guess yourself in front of your people, it only serves to harm your team's ability to succeed.

When you're a football coach and your team is down at halftime, what's your locker room speech? "I'm sorry guys I really fucked up a couple of those calls. I guess I have a lot to learn. But our stats guy says there's still an 11% chance we might win, so we might pull out a miracle!" When you act without confidence, it makes your team lack confidence in themselves and that's halfway to defeat.

My experience with senior leaders is they always feel doubt inside. They're just good at hiding it because they know it isn't productive.

The way I think of it is: There are several different kinds of intelligence. IQ tests cover things like pattern recognition because they want to be language-independent and objective. There are other kinds of intelligence like social intelligence -- understanding, inspiring, and motivating people. And intelligence coming up with big new ideas, and so on. The standard IQ tests have blind spots in these areas.

I've worked a lot with CEOs in my 25+ year career, and by and large they are impressive people. And I don't mean in the con-man way you seem to feel. They understand how to read people and motivate action. I'm reminded of the anecdote where an engineer at Apple was responsible for developing a laptop power supply, a classic "boring" task, when Steve Jobs randomly popped by his desk and asked what he was working on. In the course of a 5 minute conversation with Steve he came away feeling he had the most important job at the company. There's a type of intelligence there that IQ doesn't capture, and it isn't pure bullshit.

Plenty of research shows that diversity within a team contributes to better problem-solving, and a better overall outcome.

HOWEVER, the kind of diversity that counts most isn't skin color or genital configuration. The diversity that counts is a person's skills, personality, and problem-solving approach. It's about pairing big-picture thinkers with detailed ground-up thinkers. It's about partnering organizers with people who need to be organized. And so on.

Companies know all this. They know what makes teams effective. They talk about skin and genitals because that's what's expected of them.

I agree completely. The EU regulators are well-intentioned I'm sure, but they seem to be equating "Google" with "The Internet". That's a compliment to Google but very misleading. People are going to think they can take information off the internet by filing a request with Google.

google.com is the US-based site and isn't subject to these rules.

From the FAQ:

On what basis do you claim these things? Objectively speaking the world has been improving over the last 50 years along almost every dimension you could look at, in some cases dramatically: Air quality, water quality, length of workweek, access to information, health care and lifespan, crime rates of all kinds (murder, theft, sexual assault), standard of living. Even average IQ scores have been rising.

Everybody can contribute to improving our world, whether they are a "bean counter" (your term), writer, or philosopher. I think the key question for any PhD -- independent of field -- is how can you lift your head up from your extremely specialized knowledge, and think more broadly about how your skills could solve a larger problem that people care about. As a PhD myself I always thought of that as the last and final test in getting my degree: It wasn't defending my dissertation, but what came next as I took that training out into the world and figured out how to make something useful of it. What a PhD really teaches is how to think independently and solve problems; and that includes applying the degree and training itself to your future career.

The main rationale for tenure is to provide a safe environment for unpopular ideas. In the sciences at least you do have ideas like plate tectonics and the big bang model, which start out as laughingstock ideas but eventually gain acceptance. The argument is: If people are afraid to propose controversial ideas then what happens to future innovations like this? You could look at a scientist like Hugh Everett, who had his big controversial idea (the Many Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics) too early in his career -- before he got tenure. He was effectively laughed out of academia.

All of this probably only applies at the top research universities where such ideas are being generated and discussed. At a teaching-oriented school there is much less rationale for tenure.

I have a PhD in physics, where a much fewer percentage of people get tenure-track positions. I feel every grad student's pain here.

Mathematically the entire doctoral system is designed to turn out more PhDs than can be absorbed by academia. Seeing why is simple: If the number of academic positions is constant over time, then every tenured professor who advises PhD students can only expect on average one of his or her students to get a similar position. This is just the mathematics of population replacement. The problem of course is that many professors turn out dozens of PhD students, far above replacement.

The key for any PhD student -- regardless of field -- is to accept the fact that you will most likely spend the bulk of your career employed outside of academia. In engineering and many of the sciences this is understood, and people regularly go to tech companies and other places where the PhD profile is valuable. In humanities there aren't so many obvious places for PhDs to go HOWEVER this in my experience is more perception than reality. Marketing departments are full of English PhDs with very successful careers. The absolute key is to not define your skills too narrowly. If you bill yourself as, "I'm an expert in X, Y, or Z" you'll likely be disappointed, but if you can think of yourself as "I'm a good writer and problem-solver." you'll have a much better time of it.

Unfortunately when you're a student, the "system" has no incentive to prepare you for this likely reality. They think of their mission as turning out academics, and because of selection bias (every professor by definition succeeded in getting an academic position) it's a self-reinforcing belief. There is a huge risk of disillusionment and bitterness if you the student have unrealistic expectations. I maintain that if more degree-granting institutions looked at where their graduates end up, then with some simple adjustments they could make it a far more useful experience: For example shortening the time to PhD, providing greater opportunity to acquire marketable skills, and more interaction with program graduates.

In similar vein how many of us use our "computers" to do actual mathematical computations? Technology often ends up being misnamed.

No, this is a much stronger statement. Yahoo is not losing money, they are profitable. And they have relatively little debt for a company -- $1.2billion. When the net value of a company like this is negative, it's the market's way of telling management that they should close up shop, pay off the creditors, and give all the money back to shareholders.

This situation (profitable company where cash/investments minus liabilities exceeds market cap) isn't all that common. Apple was in this situation back in the mid-1990s. Fortunately for shareholders the executive management didn't just close up shop.

Being in the industry myself (technology that is, not politics), it is absolutely true that every one of the current tech companies learned a hard lesson from Microsoft. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon...they all have lobbying efforts.

This is all probably inevitable given the central position that technology has taken in our society. For decades technology was below the radar, more or less unregulated, and us geeks could be blissfully uninvolved in national politics. Now tech is like every other successful industry: You have to be present in the national debate or random -- generally bad -- things are likely to happen to you.

It's a trust issue more than a legal issue. As it turns out American companies were for years under gag orders for certain kinds of government (FISA) data requests. They couldn't even discuss their existence. Under pressure from leaks, now the US government is relaxing and allowing them to reveal some aggregate data about these previously-secret requests.

The fact that all this "openness" has only come under duress makes one strongly suspect that the spying will only shift into some new program. The legality of FISA is almost beside the point when it comes to the question of who do you trust with your data.