Chaos Manor View Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Larry and I seem to have caught mild colds over the weekend.

Russian Missiles for the Ayatollah

Vladimir Putin blows a raspberry at Obama. 

Russian President Vladimir Putin Photo: Mikhail Metzel/TASS/ZUMA Wire

April 13, 2015 7:15 p.m. ET

http://www.wsj.com/articles/russian-missiles-for-the-ayatollah-1428966935?mod=trending_now_4

153 COMMENTS

· Vladimir Putin blew a geopolitical raspberry at the Obama Administration on Monday by authorizing the sale of Russia’s S-300 missile system to Iran. The Kremlin is offering the mullahs an air-defense capability so sophisticated that it would render Iran’s nuclear installations far more difficult and costly to attack should Tehran seek to build a bomb.

· Feeling better about that Iranian nuclear deal now?

· The origins of this Russian sideswipe go back to 2007, when Moscow and Tehran signed an $800 million contract for delivery of five S-300 squadrons. But in 2010 then-President Dmitry Medvedev stopped the sale under pressure from the U.S. and Israel. The United Nations Security Council the same year passed an arms-embargo resolution barring the sale of major conventional systems to the Tehran regime.

· That resolution is still in effect, but the Kremlin no longer feels like abiding by it. With the latest negotiating deadline passed and without any nuclear agreement in place, Moscow will dispatch the S-300s “promptly” to the Islamic Republic, according to the Russian Defense Ministry.

· So much for the White House hope that the West could cordon off Russia’s aggression against Ukraine while working with Mr. Putin on other matters. Russia and the West could disagree about Crimea and eastern Ukraine, the thinking went, but Washington could still solicit the Kremlin’s cooperation on the Iranian nuclear crisis.

· State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki dismissed news in February that Russia’s state-run weapons conglomerate Rostec had offered Tehran the Antey-2500—an upgraded version of the S-300 system. “It’s just some reports,” she said. White House spokesman Josh Earnest similarly boasted in March of how “international unanimity of opinion has been critical to our ability to apply pressure to Iran.”

· Now Mr. Obama wants to delegate responsibility for enforcing his nuclear deal with Iran to the United Nations, which means that the Russians will have a say—and a veto—there, too. Think of this missile sale as a taste of what’s to come.

This actually changes little: by the time the systems are installed and Iranian SAM operators are trained, the window for an Israeli denuclearization strike will be passed or very nearly so. US countermeasures against the SAM S-300 are presumably operational and effective already. For that matter, IDF has already practiced SAM S-300 engagements unless they have taken leave of their senses, not a strongly probable event.

No US air action against the Iranian nuclear facilities is likely during the current administration – not likely is probably too mild a description – so this probably affects IDF only until after the January, 2017. By then, Iran may have a demonstration weapon and could have an operational weapon within months – depending of course on their definition of operational. A plutonium fission weapon – Little Boy – is easily constructed if you have ten kilos of weapons grade Pu. See the Smyth Report for further details. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smyth_Report

One presumes that somewhere in the US establishment there is planning for living with a Nuclear Iran – a far different proposition from a Nuclear North Korea.

http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2013/12/ideas-bank/neurostimulation-is-the-next-mind-expanding-idea

Amol Sarva: ‘Neurostimulation is the next mind-expanding idea’

Brent Clark

This article was taken from the December 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired’s articles in print before they’re posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

The idea of stimulating brain performance seemed very plausible when I first heard about it, taking my PhD in cognitive science at Stanford. Your brain operates with electricity; why couldn’t electric current or waves boost it a bit? Gentlemen physicists such as Volta and Galvani were fiddling with frogs’ legs and cadavers back around the late 18th century. Another Italian wrote about curing melancholia with electricity in 1804. And today, everyone knows about the power of shock therapy.

But what appeared on my radar in 2003 was different: a headset that sent weak electromagnetic waves into your head. Lawrence Osborne, in The New York Times Magazine, reported that after his brain was electrically stimulated, he suddenly produced some incredible cat drawings. Admittedly, this was no peer-reviewed journal: in fact, no lab had been able to reproduce the findings of the man behind this and similar experiments, a University of Sydney physicist named Allan Snyder.

Last year, my latest startup, Peek, was acquired and I was considering my next move. I started thinking of the most amazing technologies I’d seen. Those cat drawings had stayed in my mind. Why not produce devices to enhance the brain?

I found a key paper: neurophysiologist Michael Nitsche in Göttingen published an actual measurement showing stimulation was affecting neurons. Meanwhile, some hardcore neuroscience companies were working on “pacemakers for the brain” to treat epilepsy or depression, and showing solid trials.

A marginal branch of neuroscience was now producing thousands of papers a year. Nature, the gold-standard journal, began cautiously surveying the research.

Peter Thiel once lamented: “They promised us flying cars and all we got was 140 characters.” This really was flying cars. I decided my next startup was going to make commercial neurostimulation real.

I hooked up with a cyberneticist, Lee Von Kraus, went to Radio Shack, bought a breadboard and a few components, and we built a gadget that sends electromagnetic waves. I put it on my head. And this is when I saw the light. Meaning, I was completely blinded by a blast of current that overwhelmed my optic nerve with stimulation.

Realising I wasn’t blind, I started looking for the boost. Singing songs, drawing dogs, memorising things. Nada. We started tinkering. The gadget was a little bundle of circuitry in a pill bottle, with batteries and electrodes. I tied them to my head with a shoelace. I put it on for 15 minutes, then played the iPhone running game Canabalt. I achieved five high scores in a row. Eureka.

We gathered up a dozen adventurers and put our homemade gadget on them, then ran a battery of standard cognitive psychology tests. They jumped a standard deviation in performance (the difference between a 20-year-old and a 60-year-old). Hard data.

Now things were getting exciting. A dinner-party conversation with an actor, and suddenly I was backstage with our gadget on Broadway. The actor put it on before show-time and delivered what he called the night of his life. A chat with one of the first investors to back our new company, Halo Neuroscience, led to his passion for racing. So we went to the race track, and he and his Porsche club tried our gadget. He set the track record.

It was becoming evident to me that neurostimulation can lift essentially any cognitive function: accelerate learning, enhance creativity, boost memory, juice linguistic fluidity. As a startup, we chose to target a medical condition.

We got off the race track and back into the lab, where we’ve just closed a successful 12-person controlled trial on fixing a particular brain impairment. We’re about to move to a 100-person trial — the largest ever done. In the super-human future, the potential of neurostimulation goes way beyond electro-doping Ferrari drivers: the real hope lies in treating brain damage, possibly from early next year.

Amol Sarva is an entrepreneur and cofounder of Virgin Mobile USA, Peek and Knotable. He blogs at a.sarva.co

Don’t try this at home.  But if you do, please let me know what happens and describe the apparatus…

Subject: S-300 (missile) – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jerry:

Obama’s so called agreement regarding Iran’s nuclear weapons program provoked speculation that Israel would be compelled to attack Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. The only question was when. The news that Russia has agreed to resume delivery of S-300 SAMs to Iran answers that question. To have any hope of being successful and not sacrificing it’s air force, Israel will have to attack before the new S-300 missiles become operational.

http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-300_(missile)

James Crawford=

That was more or less my conclusion.

Hi Jerry,
Just a minor correction to your 4/14 View: “A plutonium fission weapon – Little Boy – is easily constructed if you have ten kilos of weapons grade Pu.”
“Little Boy” was the name of the uranium gunbarrel design nuke as used on Hiroshima. The plutonium implosion design was called “Fat Man” due to the girth of the shaped high explosive charges surrounding the hollow plutonium core.
Regards, Peter

A “Fat Man” bomb was dropped over Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945, near the end of World War II. Released by the B-29 Bockscar, the 10,000-pound weapon was detonated at an altitude of approximately 1,800 feet over the city. The bomb had an explosive force (yield) of about 20,000 tons of TNT, about the same as the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Because of Nagasaki’s hilly terrain, however, the damage was somewhat less extensive than of the relatively flat Hiroshima.
“Fat Man” was an implosion-type weapon using plutonium. A subcritical sphere of plutonium was placed in the center of a hollow sphere of high explosive (HE). Numerous detonators located on the surface of the HE were fired simultaneously to produce a powerful inward pressure on the capsule, squeezing it and increasing its density. This resulted in a supercritical condition and a nuclear explosion.

http://www.nationalmuseum.af.mil/factsheets/factsheet.asp?id=1016

I certainly mixed them up, and to make it worse, I know better; no one doubted that the Uranium bomb would work, but there was considerable concern about the Pu weapon. 

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View Sunday, April 12, 2015

The Writers of the Future Awards Ceremony and dinner are later this afternoon, so this will be brief. I hope to be home in time to post a bunch of accumulated Mail, but I see that I am typing slow; it may have to wait until tomorrow.

WOTF makes too much of new writers so the winners need reminding that except for a very few, this is as good as it gets for years, but that shouldn’t discourage new writers from entering the contest. The week of instruction by Tim Powers and his guest speakers that all the quarterly winners get (all free, including transportation, room and board, etc.) is worth more than the Grand Prize. You can find the rules on line.

Anyway it’s time to get into my tux; actually I’m doing the tux with variations since my fingers cannot handle the studs and tie…

2300 Well it was fun, but it’s late and I better get to bed.  I still have pills to take.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View Friday, April 10, 2015

If you would have peace, be prepared for war.

Niven and Barnes were over yesterday for a long story conference, then we had lunch, I took a log walk and did exercises, and that pretty well used up all my energy.

1600: the traditional Time Warner Internet slowdown at 1600 has started. I’m sure it has something to do with net neutrality.  Actually I am not sure, but I can’t help suspecting it.

As expected, Iran is wiggling on the “deal” that Secretary Kerry and President have so painfully “negotiated” with Iran regarding Iran’s nuclear capability. As we said, we are now on a road to Iranian nuclear capability. By the time a new President takes office, it will be inevitable. We, and more significantly the Israelis, must learn how to live with it.

Iran openly labels the United States as the Great Satan which must be destroyed – “Death to America” is routinely chanted at official rallies. This we are told is mere rhetoric and may safely be ignored. If they kill any of us with nukes, we will kill all of them back and so lay waste to Iran that the land will be uninhabitable – and that, Iran is told, is not mere rhetoric.

Israel’s Prime Minister denounced the deal President Obama favors even before the Iranian Supreme Leader did. “Such a deal paves Iran’s path to the bomb,” he says, and it might “spark a nuclear arms race throughout the Middle East.” The Ayatollah’s rejection makes an Iranian nuke more certain. Even before the collapse of President Obama’s deal Netanyahu said after the session that “Israel will not accept an agreement which allows a country that vows to annihilate us to develop nuclear weapons, period.” Netanyahu say that he considers an Iranian nuke an existential threat.

What Israel will do now is unclear. Whatever they do it must be soon, or there will be no point in it. Of course that remains true for the U.S.

Iran

Dear Mr. Pournelle,
The comments you quoted from Mr. Stephens were quite interesting. However, I didn’t see that he addressed one point which I consider critical. That is, assuming that we were to bomb Iran, how long could we expect to set back their nuclear program?
Let’s assume, for the moment, a “surgical” strike whose targets are all nuclear facilities. Comments I’ve read from people who ought to know something maintain that we’d probably set back the program two or three years; with the predictable consequence that Iran would immediately begin the best financed and most clandestine program it could to produce nuclear weapons *immediately*.
Here, I think, we run into the North Korea quandary. It is already possible for any tyrant to make the case that, however appalling you are, if you have nuclear weapons the United States will leave you alone; whereas if you do not have nuclear weapons you live on sufferance. That’s awkward. While I certainly wouldn’t want to encourage nuclear proliferation, I’m not sure it’s helpful to persuade tyrants that they *really, really need* nuclear weapons.
Now, of course, the problem could perhaps be “solved” by strikes aimed not at nuclear plants but at destroying Iran as a civilization. At which point we really would have become a Satan. Or, at least, an apocalyptic Babylon.
So my question to Mr. Stephens would be: short of becoming monsters, there is probably no permanent way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons. In consequence, do we really want to pursue a strategy whose likely result would be to urge them to get the bomb *really quickly?* Or are delaying tactics more likely to produce useful results?
Buying time is always a useful purchase. And perhaps the horse will learn to sing.
Yours,
Allan E. Johnson

Jerry:

Obama’s deal on nuclear weapons obviously paves Iran’s path to nuclear weapons rather than blocks it, but it might delay the journey. Obama might be wagering that by the time that Iran becomes a legitimized nuclear state that has the infrastructure to mass produce nuclear weapons, the demographic changes resulting from Iran’s plunging birth rates will cause political reform.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-02-300115.html

The fact that Iran will almost inevitably get nuclear weapons and North Korea already has nuclear weapons should inspire a reassessment of President G W Bush’s policies. Bush identified an “Axis of Evil” that were state sponsors of terrorism and were at risk of obtaining nuclear weapons. The invocation of the terms of the ceasefire from the first Gulf War to justify the invasion of Iraq to overthrow Saddam Hussein was obviously intended to position the US to invade Iran as well as eliminate the threat of Iraq getting nukes. The failure to discover evidence of an active WMD program in Iraq undermined the domestic and foreign political support for action against Iran.

The failure to find WMD in Iraq combined with the election of a pacifist government in South Korea also precluded military action against North Korea before that country could obtain nuclear weapons.

I would wager that within a decade the resurgence in nuclear proliferation in the Middle East and globally will escalate to “limited” nuclear war. At that time, President Bush will be at least partially vindicated but it will be a catastrophic victory.

James Crawford=

Allan Johnson puts the case well and compellingly. Our choices are few, and our technical capabilities are uncertain. Strikes at Iranian nuclear capabilities will be bloody given their locations. Commando style raids would make the destruction more thorough but would be far more costly. The Iranians have been clever in their designs and location. Uncertainties about the success of a surgical denuclearization attack are quite high for the US or any conceivable coalition working with us.

Of course that is doubly, triply, true for Israel; to assure the attack’s success might require nuclear weapons, and I am quite certain that at least some IDF generals have said this to the War Cabinet. First use of nuclear weapons has so many devastating diplomatic and domestic political consequences that I doubt Mr. Netanyahu would seriously consider it.

Buying time may be all that is possible.

I have not seen a serious discussion of the best tactics for accomplishing that goal. James Crawford has outlined one scenario. It is fairly clear that he has stated the Obama strategy of hope: the Iranians will morph into responsible world citizens. We can all hope that he is right.

We would do well to keep our powder dry. As Appius Claudius one admonished the Senate of Rome, “If you have peace, be prepared for war.”

Dr. Pournelle:

In regards to the notice from the FBI (and other places) about attacks on WordPress installations:

WordPress powers about 20% of all blogs (according to something I read somewhere), it is a highly-available target.

On all of the WP blogs that I manage (your Chaos Manor and Chaos Manor Reports being two of those), I have installed a plugin (WP Updates Notifier, here https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-updates-notifier/ ) which emails me whenever there is a new update for a plugin or theme. Works very well; recommended.

And since I manage about 15 different WP blogs, I have recently added “Infinite WP” (https://wordpress.org/plugins/iwp-client/ ) which allows me to manage multiple WP sites from one interface. Once you install Infinite WP on a ‘master’ WP install, you add other WP sites you own via a plugin on each of those sites.

Then Infinite WP can notify you of updated plugins or themes as often as you want … and (the best part), you can update all the plugins from the one Infinite WP admin page. Very nice; recommended.

The WordPress ‘core’ gets its updates automatically. So with that, plus one of the two plugins mentioned above, a WP blog owner can ensure that all is current (as are both of your blogs) and not vulnerable to that “ISIS” attack.

Regards, Rick Hellewell – the web guy for Chaos Manor, Chaos Manor Reports, and elsewhere

Please take heed.

‘A Department of Children and Family Services supervisor fired after the

2013 beating death of an 8-year-old Palmdale boy is close to getting his job back.’

Warning: the details of what were done to this poor child are horrific.

<http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-social-worker-fired-20150409-story.html>

Roland Dobbins

The Iron Law at work again. The unionized government employees have become a new aristocracy, responsible to no one. Under the old spoils system where political office winners doled out the jobs, often to precinct captains and ward heelers, it was possible to turn the rascals out if the jobs did not get done; it was in the interests of those who had the jobs that they get done, or at least that the citizens did not get too upset and vote in a reform party. It wasn’t a very good system, but there was at least some political responsibility in it. It is defended in Boss Flynn’s autobiography, now so out of print that you can’t find it, but once a fairly popular book: Flynn was one of Roosevelt’s political associates and a Tammany leader. Like Benjamin Franklin he held the office of Postmaster General, once a powerful cabinet level position generally reserved for the President’s chief political advisor; not a bad idea, actually.

The theory of civil service was that it would let government jobs go to those who merited them and relieve government workers from pressure to do political tasks for the political leaders. Of course it didn’t work, and this is an all too common result. After all, political leaders are responsible to voters: the present system assures their re-election so long as the government employee unions support them; the public hardly matters.

Indiana and tech

Dear Dr. Pournelle,

An article I believe you will find interesting:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2015/04/07/calling_out_the_high-tech_hypocrites_126169.html
“The recent brouhaha over Indiana’s religious freedom law revealed two basic things: the utter stupidity of the Republican Party and the rising power of the emerging tech oligarchy. As the Republicans were once again demonstrating their incomprehension of new social dynamics, the tech elite showed a fine hand by leading the opposition to the Indiana law.”

This isn’t the first time something like that has happened; consider Obama’s social media offensive in 2008 that took Clinton by surprise. 
These are the new realities we have to live with:
1) Technology is transforming the way politics is done in the United States.
2) This is elevating technology purveyors to political prominence far beyond what they would otherwise have;  people like Zuckerberg not only have great control over the media, they also understand it well. They can play it better even if they have no overt control.
3) These technologists are almost overwhelmingly liberal.  
This was seen during Clinton’s email scandal. Some of the Republicans boasted they didn’t use email at all. Hardly a show of any kind of technical credibility.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/12/us/politics/storing-emails-from-these-senators-will-be-easy-if-they-ever-send-one.html?_r=0
Republicans need to become tech-savvy in a hurry if they want to have any chance of success; I wonder if this is not part of the reason the party has taken such a nosedive. I’m not even sure the Republican party as such which is salvageable; we may need a new party willing to use crowdsourcing , social media, and all the rest of it, unhampered by the existing GOP bureaucracy.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.

Chaos Manor View Tuesday, April 07, 2015

It is 1600 and on schedule Time Warner is extremely slow and often halted. This happens regularly. Fortunately it will fix itself in an hour or so, or at least it has done so daily so far. I have posted a large and diversified mailbag today; you will find it below.

Obama and the ‘Inevitable Critics’

We are dealing with a case of Mutually Assured Obfuscation.

http://www.wsj.com/articles/bret-stephens-obama-and-the-inevitable-critics-1428361609?mod=rss_opinion_main

ENLARGE

A satellite image of Iran’s Fordo uranium-enrichment facility in 2013. Photo: DigitalGlobe/Institute for Science and International Security

By

Bret Stephens

April 6, 2015 7:06 p.m. ET

1184 COMMENTS

‘So when you hear the inevitable critics of the deal sound off, ask them a simple question: Do you really think that this verifiable deal, if fully implemented, backed by the world’s major powers, is a worse option than the risk of another war in the Middle East?”

That was Barack Obama on Thursday, defending his Iran diplomacy while treating its opponents to the kind of glib contempt that is the mark of the progressive mind. Since I’m one of those inevitable critics, let me answer his question.

Yes, it’s worse. Much worse.

Yes, because what the president calls “this verifiable deal” fails the first test of verification—mutual agreement and clarity as to what, exactly, is in it.

Brett Stephens concludes that the deal proposed by Obama will lead to an Iran with usable weapons in quantity; and therefore preventative war is preferable. He continues:

But let’s accept the president’s premise. Should the current deal hold, Iran will be able to develop all the nuclear infrastructure it wants by the time my youngest child is in college. And it will do so not over Washington’s objections, but with our blessing.

Maybe by then the Iranian regime will have changed for the better. More likely not. Their economy will have revived thanks to the end of sanctions. Their geopolitical position will be stronger thanks to the internal convulsions of some of their neighbors. And they will have a nuclear infrastructure capable of producing many bombs on short notice—too short for the U.S. to do anything about it. The same will likely be true of Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

So let me rephrase the president’s question: Is targeted military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities—with all the unforeseen consequences that might entail—a better option than a grimly foreseeable future of a nuclear Iran, threatening its neighbors, and a proliferated Middle East, threatening the world?

I know my answer. What’s yours?

It is a grim question, and we may be sure that no one likely to become President of the United States will begin a new war in the Middle East. The answer of the United States has been given: Iran will have the bomb, and, as Stephens says, with our assistance in shoring up the Iranian economy. Iran has repeatedly stated that these are end times, and the mission of their nation is the extirpation of Israel.

The Israelis are well aware of all this.

There is also this:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/iran-positions-itself-to-be-a-tech-leader-in-turbulent-middle-east/2015/04/06/e52ad4ea-d948-11e4-8103-fa84725dbf9d_story.html?hpid=z1

Tech investments show an Iran eager to end isolation (WP)

By Craig Timberg April 6 at 12:31 PM

As world powers have been working to curb Iran’s nuclear program, the Islamic Republic has been bolstering its ambitions in cyberspace, positioning itself as a potential technological leader in a turbulent and strategically crucial region.

Iran in recent years has inaugurated a new, high-capacity data link to Europe, introduced 3G and 4G cellular service to millions of customers and become a major buyer in a bustling new marketplace for IP addresses — the fundamental building blocks of the online world.

Western experts watching these development see little evidence that these steps are intended to bolster Iran’s already formidable cyberwar capabilities. Instead they see a nation making investments in civilian technology that could help Iran build a more modern, open economy, especially if a tentative nuclear deal struck last week yields a permanent accord and an easing of international sanctions.

Despite deep-seated wariness of Iran, some observers see these technological developments as a sign — along with the nuclear talks themselves — that President Hassan Rouhani is eager to normalize Iran’s relations with the outside world after years of combative isolation.

Iranian companies over the past 15 months have bought more than 1 million IP addresses, said Dyn, a New Hampshire-based Internet performance analysis company. At roughly $10 per address, this represents a substantial investment in making it easier for Iranians to get online.

I have long said that the best weapons against Iran are smart phones and tablet computers: the West’s panzer divisions among the weapons of cultural mass destruction. I am not really being whimsical when I say we ought to drop cell phones from airplanes in Iran while simultaneously using technology to let them be used.

Patent case could shift power balance in tech industry   ft

Richard Waters in San Francisco 

A US appeals court is set to hear a landmark patent case on Wednesday that could change the way royalty rates are set for commonly used intellectual property in the tech industry.

The case, pitting Microsoft against Google, has already involved a lower court in setting patent rates for the first time, in a move that critics warn will upend the balance of power between leading tech companies.

Microsoft brought the case in 2010 against Motorola Mobility, the handset maker later acquired by Google. The search company sold Motorola’s operating business to Lenovo last year but kept its patents and has now taken the case to the court of appeals.

The dispute centres on so-called standard-essential patents, which cover technology that is included in industry-wide technology standards. Since others have to use the technology if they want their own products to meet an industry standard, the companies that submit their patents for approval by standards bodies are required to license them out on “reasonable and non-discriminatory”, or RAND, terms.

Microsoft sued Motorola after the handset maker asked for 2.25 per cent of the final product price for use of several of its patents that are included in standards for WiFi and video compression technology. Microsoft said the demand would have cost it $4bn a year. Judge James Robart, in a federal court in Seattle, laid out a different method for calculating the royalties that would instead cost Microsoft less than $2m a year.

If upheld, Judge Robart’s approach could tilt the balance of power in negotiations away from companies that own large portfolios of commonly used patents and instead favour those — like Microsoft or Apple — whose businesses are based more on implementing technology standards in their products.

“It’s going to be very significant indeed. Nobody quite understands what the term [RAND] means,” said Alexander Poterack, chief executive of General Patent Corp, a US intellectual property firm.

In its appeal brought in Motorola’s name, Google has argued that the judge was wrong to take up Microsoft’s complaint in the first place, since the Motorola royalty demand was only the opening shot in a negotiation that should have been left to run its course. The court could have ruled on Microsoft’s breach of contract complaint without getting involved in the thorny issue of rate-setting, it claims.

“The litigation set bad policy by encouraging parties to run to court rather than negotiate”

– David Balto, a former FTC chief of competition policy

“The litigation set bad policy by encouraging parties to run to court rather than negotiate,” said David Balto, a former chief of competition policy at the Federal Trade Commission.

Some in the tech industry also argue that, if the ruling stands, companies will not be as willing to allow their technology to be included in industry standards, since it would rob them of much of their negotiating leverage.

The calculation method that Judge Robarts came up with “would conceivably apply to lower the reasonable royalty available to every single [standard-essential patent]”, the American Intellectual Property Law Association wrote in an amicus brief to the court.

Companies who have joined the opposition to the ruling include Qualcomm, many of whose patents cover mobile communications technologies that have been adopted in industry standards. The calculation method is a “one-sided directive that advances only implementers’ interests in obtaining licences at the lowest possible cost,” it said in a court filing supporting Motorola’s position.

Ultra-fast charging aluminum battery offers safe alternative to conventional batteries

Stanford scientists have invented a flexible, high-performance aluminum battery that charges in about 1 minute. Credit: Mark Shwartz, Precourt Institute for Energy, Stanford University

Stanford University scientists have invented the first high-performance aluminum battery that’s fast-charging, long-lasting and inexpensive. Researchers say the new technology offers a safe alternative to many commercial batteries in wide use today.

“We have developed a rechargeable aluminum battery that may replace existing storage devices, such as alkaline batteries, which are bad for the environment, and lithium-ion batteries, which occasionally burst into flames,” said Hongjie Dai, a professor of chemistry at Stanford. “Our new battery won’t catch fire, even if you drill through it.”

Dai and his colleagues describe their novel aluminum-ion battery in “An ultrafast rechargeable aluminum-ion battery,” in the April 6 advance online edition of the journal Nature.

Cheap and safe energy storage makes irregular power sources like solar panels and windmills much more usable; and of course electric cars and trucks much more economic.

Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.