Ben Slade

"American citizens have repeatedly amended the Constitution to defend democracy when the Supreme Court acts in collusion with democracy's enemies, whether they are slavemasters, states imposing poll taxes on voters, or the opponents of woman suffrage. Today, the Court has enthroned corporations, permitting them not only all kinds of special economic rights but now, amazingly, moving to grant them the same political rights as the people. This is a moment of high danger for democracy so we must act quickly to spell out in the Constitution what the people have always understood: that corporations do not enjoy the political and free speech rights that belong to the people of the United States."

"...The Washington Post published an political lobbying article, presented as a news story, which could be a signal of the death of the Post as an independent and objective news source.

The piece, entitled 'Support grows for tackling nation's debt,' appeared to be one of those background news pieces common in newspapers like the Post.

But article was written not by the newspaper's reporters - and not by an objective wire service, like the Associated Press - but by a new organization called The Fiscal Times, whose founder and major backer [is] Peter G. Peterson [partner in Wall Street’s Blackstone Group and former Republican Treasury Secretary, president of the Concord coalition to reduce the deficit]

I might even support radical plans to cut the deficit, but that's not the point. I want to know who I can trust, and apparently the Washington Post is no longer on the list.

It's just shocking that the Post would so casually sell their journalistic soul. Shouldn't an editor at the Wash Post get fired or demoted for this?

The crash has laid bare many unpleasant truths about the United States. One of the most alarming, says [Simon Johnson] former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund [and current MIT Professor], is that the finance industry has effectively captured our government—a state of affairs that more typically describes emerging markets, and is at the center of many emerging-market crises.

If the IMF’s staff could speak freely about the U.S., it would tell us what it tells all countries in this situation: recovery will fail unless we break the financial oligarchy that is blocking essential reform. And if we are to prevent a true depression, we’re running out of time.

James Galbraith, the Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair of Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government at the University of Texas, says that the currently proposed reforms of Wall Street are woefully inadequate. Specifically:

• "More discipline on existing players to prevent abuses that led to disaster last year." This includes restrictions on executive compensation and criminal investigations of past abuses (as we'll discuss in a subsequent segment.) He also advocates a tax on financial transactions to reduce churning and short-term volatility.
• "A total restructuring of the system itself." Galbraith believes many institutions dubbed "too big to fail" should be either broken up or wound down. Generally speaking, "the financial sector grew far too much in relation to the economy in the last 15 years," he says.
• "It doesn't serve any larger purpose to have such a huge presence of financial institutions in the economy. It creates a predominance of casino activity."

Some written material is merely "text" and can be absorbed equally well regardless of medium. I've claimed that I like reading novels just as much on a Kindle as in printed form. All that matters is a novel is the words. But some material is designed for something other than a computer screen, and is best absorbed from printed pages, with illustrations and thought-through layout. Most of what's in a good magazine is in this category. Long, narrative articles are simply better to read on a sequence of pages, with illustrations and margins and call-out text, than as clicked-through screens.

I'm saying: subscribe to our magazine (The Atlantic Monthly) because you'll enjoy it more that way. And: subscribe because you should! Anyone who worries about the "crisis of the press" has a chance to do something about it for two bucks a month.

An article in the Communications of the ACM (March 2009, vol 52 #3) makes software engineering sound just slightly better than a voodoo ritual (no disrespect to voodoo intended). I would also ask a related question, "does computer science have anything to do with software engineering?". For example, objected oriented design is the accepted software design methodology today, but what science exactly is behind this? CS seems to deal with the logic and complexity of algorithms, but that's really a very small part of software engineering.

Anyway, here are some quotes from the article:

In its most general form, the "engineering process" consists of a repeated cycle through requirements, specifications, prototypes, and testing. In software engineering, the process models have evolved into several forms that range from highly structured preplanning (waterfalls, spirals, Vs, and CMM) to relatively unstructured agile (XP, SCRUM, Crystal, and evolutionary). No one process is best for every problem.

Despite long experience with these processes, none consistently delivers reliable, dependable, and affordable software systems. Approximately one-third of software projects fail to deliver anything, and another third deliver something workable but not satisfactory. Often, even successful projects took longer than expected and had significant cost overruns. Large systems, which rely on careful preplanning, are routinely obsolescent by the time of delivery years after the design started. Faithful following of a process, by itself, is not enough to achieve the results sought by engineering...

software engineering literature ... relies heavily on software anecdotes and draws very lightly from other engineering fields. Walter Tichy found that fewer than 50% of the published software engineering papers tested their hypotheses, compared to 90% in most other fields.

The authors argue that license fees, regulations and patents are now so misused that they drive up the cost of creation and slow down the rate of diffusion of new ideas. Levine explains, "Most patents are not acquired by innovators hoping to protect their innovations from competitors in order to get a short term edge over the rest of the market. Most patents are obtained by large corporations who have built portfolios of patents for defense purposes, to prevent other people from suing them over patent violations."

Boldrin and Levine promote a drastic reform of the patent system in their book. They propose the law should be restored to match the intent of the U.S. Constitution which states: Congress may "promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writing and discoveries."

According to IEEE's Spectrum magazine, "from now on, you can get a U.S. patent only on a mousetrap—not on the idea of catching mice".

On 30 October 2008, the much-maligned “business method” patent died at the hand of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the very court that had given birth to it a decade earlier. The occasion was the case of In re Bilski, and although the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to utter the last word, the overwhelming likelihood is that you will no longer be able to patent the newest way of making a buck. If you want to protect new modes of shopping, delivering legal services, reserving a rest room on an airplane, or settling futures contracts, don’t ask the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) for help.

An actual "business method" patent on the concept of using a laser pointer to play with a cat: