Posts by Paul Campbell
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Jack if you like Gogol Bordello check out Balkan Beatbox they're great
though their latest video is a tad derivative:
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Bart: the issue around biotech and patents seems to be heading towards where the tech area is going now - the problem with patents is that they take a long time to be granted - often longer than your product cycle, worse is that someone else may have a sleeper (a patent in progress) that pops up after you've committed lots of money and effort to something. In a lot of cases you're better off showing your hand as prior art than depending on a patent that way you can move fast to market.
In the tech world patent have largely become something for defense (you sue us with that and we'll come down on you like a ton of bricks with these ....), or something to trot out for the investors when the time comes to go public.
Patent pools and the open source patent compacts seem to be a great way to go for people who want to innovate fast, standing on each others shoulders
I'm generally against software patents (and that includes genes which after all are just software, with millions of years of prior art) - even hardware patents are usually a bit hokey - too much patenting little tiny things rather than big ideas - I've always thought you should only patent things about which you would feel proud explaining to Mr Edison why they're such neat ideas - sadly I've worked for companies that are hot on filling up that patent portfolio - I have maybe 20 of the things but only 2-3 of them come even vaguely close to being Edison-worthy
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Actually given its demographics Japan may be starting to lag a bit - China (and India, don't forget India) are growing in leaps and bounds, still limited by funding in Universities though.
In some ways India's a bit ahead - half of the best chip designers I've worked with have come out of India, not so many from China - more because they've had closer ties to the west for longer
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For those for whom TV3's flash just doesn't want to work:
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I've spent almost all my career (30 odd years) working for startup companies, mostly in Silicon Valley.
For me R&D is largely engineering, not science - it's all about people having bright ideas and getting them to market before anyone else does. So scrapping Labour's $600m R&D tax credit and replacing it with $300m of largely science funding targeting at benefiting only medium to large companies (not startups at all) is, well, quite useless. It doesn't help me get my bright idea to market at a time when local funding has largely dried up.
I think that science funding IS important, but, in my industry at least, it's not the same as day to day R&D - good science takes time, years, in a world with product cycles that are measured in months these are apples and oranges.
So I'm eagerly waiting for National's plan to address engineering R&D ..... but not holding my breath
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I'm very pleased the NZRFU had the balls to stand up and apologise - now Mr Key, what about someone doing an apology on behalf of Muldoon's government?
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I lived in the US for 20 years and largely avoided sports - but my boss had season tickets for the then new SF baseball park - I took my 9yr old son, not a baseball fan either - to watch - he was supremely bored, luckily there's a lot more going on in the stands to keep people's attention.
Turns out watching professional baseball is very much a thinking game - lots of thinking about positioning, strategy, etc etc - not much happens for long periods until bam! bases are loaded and a home run - no fun for a 9yr old and if you're not paying close attention all the time you'll miss the important 20 seconds of the game
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I've long thought that the best thing that the change to MMP gave us was unintended, it sort of gave the public a chance to shake up the snowglobe a bit - it gave a bunch of fl.../people (Roger Douglas is a great example, another is Jim Anderton) whose politics and their party's had drifted apart permission, and the ability, to jump ship and follow their muses .... I think we need to find a way to make it happen every generation or so
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Rich: the whole guy-in-a-uniform thing might have gotten you a date in the 70s, but since the Village People came out (or rather since the general public stopped treating them like Liberace don't-ask/don't-tell) it's not as good a strategy as it once was ....
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hmm - I guess it's official - there are now 34 seats left to decide and the Tories need 35 to get a majority