Michael Crichton has a funny NYT editorial piece “This Essay Breaks the Law“. In it he talks about the absurd things patents are being granted for these days.

The question of whether basic truths of nature can be owned ought not to be confused with concerns about how we pay for biotech development, whether we will have drugs in the future, and so on. If you invent a new test, you may patent it and sell it for as much as you can, if that’s your goal. Companies can certainly own a test they have invented. But they should not own the disease itself, or the gene that causes the disease, or essential underlying facts about the disease. The distinction is not difficult, even though patent lawyers attempt to blur it.

He’s on target.

It’s equally bad in the software space: the big companies patent everything they can just to amass up a defensive portfolio; the little companies try to patent so they can look better to investors and potential acquirers, but patent filing costs too much to do it aggressively; and patent trolls try to shake down everyone with a bank account. Yuck.

Alternatives, please.

Mike Zintel has some cool game screenshots of .NET apps running on the xbox. The platform product and tools were officially unveiled as “XNA Framework” at the Game Developer’s Conference earlier this week. Continue reading →

Jon Udell did a blog post and an InfoWorld article this week on Amazon’s new S3 storage service. At the end of his blog post he comments, “With a service like S3, we could all agree to use Amazon’s politically neutral object store. With the right wrappers, we could even continue to use our own preferred applications.” And he muses further, in his InfoWorld piece:

I’d like to find out whether metering infrastructure services in this way will prove technically and economically viable. When we talk about a grid of Web services, we like to compare it to the power grid, but the analogy is deeply flawed in at least one way. My electric bill isn’t itemized. I don’t know what it costs me to run each of my appliances, or how long it will take to amortize the cost of replacements. Lacking this feedback, we make poor individual decisions that, collectively, add up to a tragic misallocation of resources.

Neat thought. It reminds me, though, of a little nightmare I’ve nursed for years: what will happen when we come to rely heavily on chunks of “public utility” computing infrastructure? If such services become truly essential to our daily lives, will governments decide to treat them as Essential Services, and regulate them? Think electricity, roads, water, Plain Old Telephone Service, 911. Continue reading →