From my experience as an ISV selling a low-price tool, it's very hard for teachers to get you paid unless it's out of their own pocket. This kills most school sales for us.

School boards tend to require *all* purchases to go through a rigid, old-fashioned admin maze where the teacher submits a purchase order, the administration maybe approves it & mails a PO, vendor receives PO and possibly rejects it due to oftentimes onerous terms & conditions, vendor ships the product, invoices the school, does some more chasing after the money when they don't pay, etc, etc. For e-goods, there is sometimes a hassle getting paid because there's no physical item that their receiving department can confirm they received. There are usually no shortcuts like you'd have with regular businesses, e.g. the teacher buying or contributing and then getting reimbursed. Definitely no corporate credit cards in this market, either.

Obviously this cuts out e-vendors who require up-front credit cards or e-checks (just about all of 'em), and no teacher's going through that maze just for $10 - 20 unless they're crazy desperate. I'd suggest you either set up a scheme where payments/contributions are low enough for teachers to pay out of their own pocket and where you make it clear that you recognize and appreciate their personal expense, or high enough to make it worth everybody's while to go with purchase orders.

Microsoft technically was at the starting line.

It's actually a 2-way matchup: Android vs. Windows. Apple doesn't want to be #1. They're married to their high-margin boutique business model and the really big market numbers are for low-cost items where Apple can't outgun the entire rest of the hardware industry. Android aspires to the mass market but faces several very real perils from different directions right now (e.g. fragmentation, no control over the total experience, the patent war isn't over yet, ridiculous process for pushing updates, problems with partners due to the Motorola deal, inconsistent Marketplace App quality, etc.), so odds are very good that Google will fumble one or more of those... at which point Windows will be waiting, with nowhere to go but up.

The question will then be whether Windows is ready to pursue the advantage. Um, make that "ready enough" since we're discussing a Microsoft product.

Remember that Microsoft's biggest cash cows (Windows NT family, Excel, Word) were once distant also-rans (vs. Novell, Lotus, Word Perfect) that ended up being the last man standing. Admittedly, Microsoft wasn't above pursuing their advantage whenever their competitors faltered, but mainly they just kept ratcheting up their products + marketing and watched the others screw up. XBox, Exchange Server & a bunch of others also come to mind. Oh, and Bing: it's solidly #2 now that Yahoo has fallen, though they're still way behind Google.

Of course Microsoft have also had many failures (hell, they completely blew Hotmail's #1 spot), especially recently, but the tablet OS business is no sideshow: they well know it's do or die for them. They will use their biggest guns (they still have plenty) to make their OS attractive by sheer effort and perseverence, even if it costs billions, takes 2 more versions of Windows, and they have to bribe every 3rd party developer + device maker on the planet. They wrote the book on how this is done and they won't run out of money in the meanwhile.

The villains are the "think tank" that's asking the questions with a view to getting the desired answers to "prove" an extreme position. Those of you who studied classics under the Jesuits will recognize the survey's setup:

1 - Do you think college does a good job of preparing students for a sustainable CAREER in IT? (Let's say 75% Yes)
2 - Does college train graduates for the nitty-gritty specific requirements of your company? (8% Yes)
3 - Referring to question 2: fantasies aside, should college train graduates for those specific requrements (10% Yes)

#1 is the "honest" question, designed to make sure people answer #2 in contrast to it. #2 is the answer the questioner desires to "prove" and publish. #3 is used to target think tank fund-raising to the 10% who think college should be a trade school.

Honestly, folks, 8% is the tipoff. There are some clueless managers out there, but not 92% of them! Those folks were just answering the questions exactly as posed.

RECOGNIZE & RESIST these tactics. When you see non-peer reviewed (or anonymous) "research," THINK BEFORE YOU EMOTE and remember that most of the outfits who ask these questions have an agenda. When you are asked to answer loaded surveys like this, don't just toss them. See them for what they are and advisedly answer them incorrectly.

It's much worse than that: I'm not sure that a medium-sized airline would even get a chance to spend their non-existent $2B. Let's suppose the carriers got lucky and there were no catastrophic accidents of failures from flying thru ash. There would probably be sub-catastrophic engine damage that would manifest itself over time. What's the probability of that? Nobody knows, we're talking a manly shoot-from-the-hip gamble.

What would happen if an extra 10,000+ engines from the entire European fleet prematurely came in for overhaul over the next 6-18 months? Engine overhaul capacity is a very finite thing, and so is turbine manufacturing. Overhaul facilities are already booked for scheduled maintenance well into the future. Overtime + existing parts stock definitely wouldn't cover this, and the necessary mechanics take forever to train and legally certify. Just replacing all those engines with new ones is a non-starter for many reasons.

The backlog would take years to clear. In the meanwhile, a big chunk of the entire fleet would be out of action for a long time. Could any airline survive that? Could the economy?

Branson's effectively suggesting that the entire industry should have taken a cowboy-style gamble on their entire future to save a week's losses, not to mention the broader economic and security consequences of such a disaster! Branson's never been a risk-adverse guy, but gambling the entire fleet...?!

Steve Jobs has done a pretty good job of giving Apple his face and his persona. I don't have any kind of Apple hardware, but have to marvel that they still has a passionate culture after all these years. Contrast that with your typical enterprise customer, say some typical insurance company.

To properly cater and market to faceless corporations, you have to become one. There are no shortcuts, it takes a machine to relate to a machine. Case in point, Microsoft started losing its juice when it got serious about enterprise. Those MS guys used to laugh at the "old" IBM; they howled derisively when the IBMers tried to become cooler by switching from blue suits to sport jackets. Now Microsoft have become them and the enterprise customers love 'em -- they're on the same wavelength. They made lots of money but lost their soul.

Again, "human input." That would be the end users making their queries in this case. They would seem to be the equivalent of photographers operating their cameras here, so I'd expect that the end users own the copyright on the output.

Reading http://laws.findlaw.com/us/499/340.html, it's clear that there's a "creativity" requirement for copyright, and that only tangible instantiations of a work are copyrightable -- not general principles or algorithms. Wolfram's system is on full autopilot and would seem to be the analog of a camera in this discussion, and my understanding of the current state of technology and law is that only humans are capable of creativity.

Wolfram's software is surely copyrightable, as are certain human-created elements (e.g. their logo) which are copied into the final output. The human user's formulated query is probably copyrightable "authorship." However, Wolfram's system has no humans in the loop and a mere mechanical process cannot change authorship, so it would seem that the user and Wolfram both own copyrights on different parts of the output. The user probably owns the "meat" of the results, much as if I would own the copyright if I rented Wolfram's camera to take photos.

Anybody can claim copyright on anything, but making it stick is another matter.

Machine-generated output per se isn't copyrightable, since machines aren't (yet) capable of original authorship. Of course, computer output is copyrightable if it also contains original, human-generated content, for example Wolfram's logo, etc. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright, search for "authorship."

I have seen cases where patents are issued for "inventions" that were allegedly previously published in big-name publications (e.g. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory).

As a real-world matter, getting and abandoning a patent has a significant advantage over other methods of publication: if somebody else tries to patent your invention later, the Patent Office has a better chance of rejecting their application. The fact is that the USPTO examiners are pressed for time and usually only search their own patent and patent application databases for prior art because it's quick & easy for them. Anyone who's ever been involved in a patent application will remember that the examiner raises prior-art objections by throwing patents or apps back at you, not journal articles or websites.

Obviously, helping the USPTO to reject a patent in the first place is much better than the expense, time and anxiety of trying to overturn somebody else's patent later. Naturally there's no guarantee that the examiner's search will actually turn up your patent or application, but being in their data base improves your odds significantly.

Don't bother to RTFA, everybody here already knows everything in that article.

There's a much safer way of charging your EV from overhead power cables for free. People have been doing it to heat their homes (illegally, of course) in outlying areas of Canada for years: place an inductor under a 350kV powerline & run wires to your house. The powerline operators hate it because the inductance messes up their power factor, and the poachers eventually get caught because the powerline operators sporadically use a small plane to patrol their rights of way for inductors. But, a 10 minute recharge-and-flee time would make detection near-impossible!