Capital-V "VALUE" is a purely mental abstraction, about which one can wax Platonic and ultimately empty; but the distinction between commodities or instruments with substantial utility (iron, aluminum, books, potatoes) and ones that are kept around mostly because they symbolize 'value' ($20 bills, gold, bitcoins) is arguably still relevant.

I don't entirely like the term 'intrinsic value', 'utility' might be closer; but some commodities are like D-list celebrities, who are famous primarily for their fame, and are valued primarily for their value, while others are valued because of the various purposes they serve. The lists overlap (gold, say, has a number of specialty applications in electronics; but would be extremely unlikely to command its present price if it had the same prestige as iron); but even when they do, the delta between the assigned value and the value in utility is usually pretty noticeable.

Were you transported by time-traveling mercantilists from somewhere in the mid 17th century?

Hmm... good thing that Real finance has honest, dependable, known, counterparties like AIG to keep risk in check!

(Please note, the above should not be construed as implicit endorsement of bitcoins; but merely an observation that so long as the rewards for gambling with other people's money are so good, people will find ways of doing risky things in basically any asset class.)

About ten years ago, I went to a talk at Stanford where someone showed that the increasing costs of wafer fabs would make this happen around 2013. We're right on schedule.

Storage can still get cheaper. We can look forward to a few more generations of flash devices. Those don't have to go faster.

Picasa acquired by Google - New York Times, 2004. "'They came to the conclusion that it would be easier to buy this business than to build it themselves. It's the type of acquisition you can expect Google to do more of in the future.'' The self-driving car technology was acquired from Stanford, along with Sebastian Thrun. Google did do a lot with language translation in-house; that's probably the most innovative area. Most of Google's big-name products, though, came from elsewhere.

Google is good at scaling, and yes, many of the acquired products had to be rewritten to scale up. Still, Google Earth today looks a lot like the Keyhole Earth Viewer I had in 2003.

The worst part is the remnant of the "loser pays" provision. If you try to enforce a patent against a big company, if you lose you have a good chance of being hit with the big guy's legal bills. There's no cap on that. That provision was amended, which made it "slightly less awful", as one congressman put it. After the amendment, the new language now means you get to litigate over the legal fees. Statistically, the patent holder wins about 40% of the time, and even with a good case, it's easy to make a mistake and lose.

The Leahy bill is better. It's more narrowly directed towards bulk-type patent enforcement operations, doesn't have a loser-pays provision, and proposes a small claims court for smaller patent cases.

In the context of WWII, the atomic bomb undoubtedly created a net savings of both allied and Japanese lives.

But you really don't want to debate this in a Sushi bar.

it wasn't just Germany developing atomic weapons, Japan was as well

Among their plans was one to dirty-bomb the US west coast, San Francisco in particular.

They also understood the potential for a fission bomb and were working on it. This is why they recognized the A-bomb right away.

That's also why it was important to bomb Nagasaki the week after Hiroshima. This discredited the generals' claim that making these things was hard and the US couldn't have very many of them. Dropping two in as many weeks raised the spectre of one a week forever.

And the generals were right. As I understand it, the US had one in the pipeline and enough material for one or two more. Then there'd have been a several month pause, followed by about one a month.

This dearth of material, combined with the fact that the first one dropped was an untested design so failure WAS an option, was why there wasn't a demo to try to convince the Japanese to knuckle under without an actual bombing. The less-than-a-handful were too precious to be spent on other than actual targets.

Everyone knows that 'willpower' is an intangible substance that some people possess more of, because they are better, and other people lack, because they are bad. I don't want to hear any more of this materialist nonsense. The rest of the universe may be causal; but human behavior isn't, because something!

This isn't an anti-patent troll bill. It's an anti-small inventor bill. It's designed to make it more expensive to enforce patents. That won't affect Google vs Apple vs Microsoft, etc. It just makes it harder for a little company to enforce a patent against a big one. That was the intention. (The Leahy bill in the Senate isn't that bad, but the Goodlatte bill that just passed the House is awful.)

This bill has been pushed through by a hate campaign against inventors. It's a well-funded campaign, and it's suckered in many people. The money is coming from Google and Facebook, who are hiding behind front organizations such as the Application Developers Association and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The EFF's effort is funded by Google and Facebook, with $2 million laundered through a clever legal trick.

There are very few real "patent trolls". The EFF has tried to identify every one they can, and they only found 15. They started a campaign to attack "trolled patents" in court and at the USPTO, and and they only found one. There are a few other broad patents being enforced aggressively, notably Ultramercial. That's about it.

Using that thin basis, the "patent troll" problem has been hyped as a major threat. There are hate sites aimed at inventors:

• "Trolling Effects" (EFF) "Trolling Effects is a resource for those who have been targeted by patent trolls. Here you can learn more about these bad actors."
• The American Association of Advertising Agencies: "These are not companies in the traditional sense that employ workers or create, market and distribute products or services; rather, they are legal entities whose sole purpose is to threaten with patent claims and then secure expedient - and lucrative - settlements based on these claims."
• Application Developers Alliance: "Even the worst and least-expensive old patents are used like extortionist sledge hammers."

I used to respect the EFF, but once they took Google's money, they, too, turned to the dark side.

The big push was from Google. Google, along with Facebook and Twitter (but not Apple) sponsors the Application Developers Alliance, which is a lobbying group against "patent trolls".

To understand why this matters to Google, look at where Google's products came from. Google, despite their reputation for innovation, has obtained most of their technology through acquisitions of smaller companies. Google has acquired 131 smaller companies over the years. Since the original search engine, almost all successful Google products came from the outside. YouTube, AdSense (DoubleClick), Google Earth (Keyhole), Blogger (Genius Labs), Android, Google Docs (Upstartle), Google Analytics (Urchin), Google Talk (Grand Central) etc. all came from acquisitions. In house, Google developed Google Wave and Google Buzz.

As a net buyer of IP, it's in Google's interest to keep the value of patents down. They don't want a small company to be able to say no to Google.

Sure. Addressable LED strings are cheap, and widely used for annoying blinking holiday decorations. If you don't want to solder, here's an assembled USB light string controller.

Actually, getting hooked on prescription painkillers is frequently pretty similar to getting hooked on heroin, and a not terribly uncommon way to get started. Most of the painkillers worth bothering with are zesty opiates, the user's supply of which will dry up rather suddenly once their medical excuse and/or supply of flexible doctors does. Street opiates have purity issues, and aren't covered by insurance; but dealers can be more accommodating of non-prescription users.

Ok, sorry, Mexican cartels have convenient proximity to the US; but are, obviously, pretty willing to do business with anybody who has money and wants drugs.

Were you to poison the goods, you'd get a few dead drug mules and a somewhat interesting look at the cokeheads of most of the developed world. Happy now?

Actually, I do. But I'm weird - I don't mind grey skies and drizzle, that being the tradeoff for a couple months of green, sunny mid-70s days in the summer.