November 2011

Over 5,000 people have signed a the following We the People petition:

We demand a vapid, condescending, meaningless, politically safe response to this petition.
Since these petitions are ignored apart from an occasional patronizing and inane political statement amounting to nothing more than a condescending pat on the head, we the signers would enjoy having the illusion of success. Since no other outcome to this process seems possible, we demand that the White House immediately assign a junior staffer to compose a tame and vapid response to this petition, and never attempt to take any meaningful action on this or any other issue. We would also like a cookie.

Starting soon , any customer who has a Verizon 4G smartphone will be eligible to get double the data for the same price. For example, someone who subscribes to the 2GB for $30 plan will receive 4GB instead. For $50 you can get 10GB instead of 5GB, and for $80 you can get 20GB instead of 10GB per month. Existing customers will have to request the change via customer service or through their My Verizon accounts, while new customers can request this when they sign up. The doubling of data promotion is only for a limited time, so Verizon customers should get on this quickly.

Interoperability among wireless carriers in the sub-1 GHz spectrum band could enable the U.S. government to earn as much as $3.5 billion more in upcoming spectrum auctions than if interoperability is not mandated, argues a report issued by Information Age Economics.

The report, titled “Non-Interoperability at 700 MHz: Lower Revenues & Higher Prices,” was sponsored by the Rural Cellular Association. It offers harsh criticism for AT&T and Verizon, arguing that those companies have introduced 700 MHz services based on non-interoperability that “increase their market power in the U.S. at the expense of all other service providers and stakeholders.” Without an interoperability mandate, the report authors argue that many potential bidders will not bid in future 700 MHz auctions because they will be “discouraged by the prospect that they may not be able to acquire competitive devices, in terms of cost and performance, in a timely manner because component and device vendors will understandably focus their limited development resources on the larger business opportunities and profits offered by the Big Two.” Already device manufacturers focus on the Big Two in designing 700 MHz devices--and the report authors note that 700 MHz spectrum won by operators other than the Big Two in recent auctions has been “forced to remain unused for a much longer period than is desirable to the detriment of the U.S. economy, small and medium sized wireless operators and their customers.” The report authors argue that the Big Two are using potential interference concerns as an excuse for not supporting an interoperable approach to the 700 MHz band but that those concerns are unjustified.

One of the great puzzles of the industrial revolution is why it began in England. Why not France, or Germany? Many reasons have been offered. Britain had plentiful supplies of coal, for instance. It had a good patent system in place. It had relatively high labor costs, which encouraged the search for labor-saving innovations. In an article published earlier this year, however, the economists Ralf Meisenzahl and Joel Mokyr focus on a different explanation: the role of Britain’s human-capital advantage—in particular, on a group they call “tweakers.” They believe that Britain dominated the industrial revolution because it had a far larger population of skilled engineers and artisans than its competitors: resourceful and creative men who took the signature inventions of the industrial age and tweaked them—refined and perfected them, and made them work.

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire, invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanization of cotton manufacture. Yet England’s real advantage was that it had Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule; and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooth the acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; and William Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water power to the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adapted the wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts, also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling -- and the tweaker’s tweaker. He created the “automatic” spinning mule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton’s original creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the “micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highly productive and remunerative.”

Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts? In the eulogies that followed Jobs’s death, last month, he was repeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor. But Walter Isaacson’s biography suggests that he was much more of a tweaker.