It's good to be Green

PC manufacturers and Global warming

A few weeks ago, Former Vice President Al Gore testified in front of Congress telling them that the world faces "a true planetary emergency" unless it dramatically and immediately reduces emissions that most scientists tie to global warming.

One industry that's making a particularly large environmental impact, is the PC manufacturing industry. As small as today's PCs are, the amount of resources that are required to produce a PC, including the costs of any toxic wastes that are produced as a byproduct, and runtime costs are getting larger and larger. The amount of power required to keep YouTube or Google alive is astronomical.

What is Green Computing?

Instead of focusing on the the traditional bottom line economics of a computing solution, Green computing is about incorporating the social and environmental impact of a computing solution. This means being responsible for each step of your products lifecycle, which I've separated into three simple steps: Creation, Runtime, and Cleanup.

Creation: Minimize the waste generated by the production process.
Runtime: Maximize the energy efficiency of the product's runtime.
Cleanup: Manufacturers should ask themselves two questions:

1. Are the wastes generated by our production process recyclable?
   
2. How easy are we making it for our customers to recycle their hardware?

Greenpeace Ranking

Every year, Greenpeace produces the Green Electronics Guide which ranks leading mobile and PC manufacturers on their global policies and practice on eliminating harmful chemicals. This guide also considers how much responsibility the company takes on once the products are discarded by consumers. Factors such as promoting consumer recycling and the phasing out of toxic chemicals are considered.

A partial list follows. Companies are ranked between 1 and 10, where 10 is the best and 1 is abysmal:

1. 8 - Lenovo. The brand formerly known as the IBM Thinkpad line, is at the lead with the most improvement over the last two years. Lenovo is based in China.
2. 7 - Dell. Looks like the latest line of hardware by the Texas based PC manufacturer is also in the lead
   
3. 4 - Sony. Their inconsistent take back policy results is a low ranking for the makers of the PlayStation 3 and PSP
   
4. 2.7 - Apple. Rounding out the bottom of the list is Apple. It turns out that Apple withholds the full list of regulated substances and still uses Tetrabromobisphenol (TBBA), a fire retardant extremely poisonous to water organisms.
   

What are you going to do about?

"What am I going to do about it? I don't make the products, why should I care?"

Yes, but you purchase them. And if Apple's recent press release about selling 100 million iPods is any indication, you buy lots of them. I'm not here to convince you that PlayStations are evil or that iPods cause cancer; I can't and I won't.

What we need is to inform consumers that there are methods of manufacturing that reduce waste and harmful byproducts. Manufacturers will tell you that it will end costing you more money. Don't buy that. Costs will only be affected in the short run. If enough people become aware of the problem then innovation will find a way to reduce these environmental costs and all manufacturers will benefit from the technology.

Legislators and Coders

Why can't the people who write laws be more like coders?

Anybody who has done legal research knows that the layout of most laws and regulations follow a logic that is largely inaccessible to the public. In fact, if it is tied to logic at all, it is only by the most tenuous of threads.

Instead, I wish that either coders were hired to write laws, or legislators had to learn a bit about coding.

That way, we'd stop seeing silly things like:

• section 43 of the Lanham (trademark) Act is actually 15 USC 1125
• various parts of the patent act state that a particular rule will go into effect 6 months after the ratification of one provision or another

Instead, each particular element of law should come with some header information. The header information would tell you what version the law is, when it was last changed, when it went into effect, etc.

Another benefit would be the inevitable use of some sort of CVS system for all laws. Instead of having to reference other laws that were passed to modify a different section of another code, we'd all be able to take a quick look at the version history and figure out what is going on.

Sorry... bit of a rant there... but I wish the people writing laws had a little experience writing code. After all, the law is no more than a list of 'fuzzy' code statements.

Copyright and Computer Code

Marc's post below mentions copyright and computer code and brings up some interesting points regarding the current state of copyright law. Section 102 of the copyright code states that copyright protection may be extended to:

"[O]riginal works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression, now known or later developed, from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device."

On its face, the law may seem quite clear, however many years of case law has struggled with the exact meaning of "works of authorship." How, exactly, do we define "authorship"? Must a work contain a requisite amount of creativity to be granted protection? Perhaps we should only grant protection to works with particular aesthetic qualities? Should we grant protection to simple copies? Only to copies that required a significant amount of work to reproduce?

In the end, courts have been loath to provide a definition of authorship that contains judgments regarding aesthetic qualities, or a necessary amount of hard work. Instead, a work of authorship may be found in anything containing some 'minimal' degree of creativity.

"Original, as the term is used in copyright, means only that the work was independently created by the author (as opposed to copied from other works), and that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. 1 M. Nimmer & D. Nimmer, Copyright §§ 2.01[A], [B] (1990) (hereinafter Nimmer). To be sure, the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice. The vast majority of works make the grade quite easily, as they possess some creative spark, “no matter how crude, humble or obvious” it might be. Id., § 1.08 [C] [1]" (Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., 499 U.S. 340, 111 S.Ct. 1282 (March 27, 1991)).

So, with only a minimal amount of creativity satisfying requirements for copyright, how does that affect computer code? Could a single define statement contain a minimal spark of creativity such that it should be awarded copyright protection? How about a series of define statements?

Certainly, there isn't much creativity in a define statement. After all, define statement are selected to have obvious meaning to the uninformed reader - a define statement containing too much creativity would be quite worthless.

However, when a coder selects the names for a series of variables, even if largely informed by a set of standards and rules, isn't there that spark of creativity? A particular order and format must also be selected for displaying the variables. The selection of a particular word to describe a particular value requires some amount of creativity. Perhaps such selection and organization also communicates some information about the structure and functionality of the code? Further, the define statements may be interspersed with comments - all presumably containing the necessary spark of creativity.

On the other hand, how many different ways are there to write a series of define statements? The variable name and the code's structure are largely determined by the project at hand. In many cases, several programmers working independently would probably come up with the same series of statements. If that is the case, then the code may fall prey to the idea-expression exception for copyright protection. If any idea can only be presented in one particular way, such that any expression of the idea would result in the same particular expression, then it cannot be granted protection. A simple recipe for cooking is a great example of information that may be creative in its particular format and display, but will be denied protection because, in the end, there is only one way to write a recipe.

The question of the copyrightability of a series of define statements is difficult. Increasingly, the trend has been to extend copyright to just about everything. Would the courts stop at define statements?

SCO group--formerly known as Caldera Systems

In 2003, the SCO group--formerly known as Caldera Systems--filed a $1 billion lawsuit in the US against IBM claiming that they had, without authorization, contributed SCO's intellectual property to the codebase of the open source, Unix-like Linux operating system.

Fast forward to 2007 where we discover in the latest March 7th hearings that out of the bajillion lines of GPL code in the Linux kernel, only 326 lines of code are said to be an issue. Furthermore, most of those lines are #define statements that specify abbreviations.

And just what is a #define statement? It's a statement that says "take this value, and assign it to this label." It's done so that when writing software, programmers can avoid using those values directly and instead use the labels.

Let's get back to SCO. Claiming these abbreviations, or shorthand, are copyrightable, is like trying to claim a copyright on abbreviating 10 Cir, when referring to the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals which is where this case will likely end up. That is, if SCO doesn't go bankrupt first.

Judge Linn on patent drafting

Not only do patent attorneys and agents find patent drafting incredibly frustrating, but judge seem to as well. As blogged by fedcirc.us, Judge Linn, a CAFC judge, grew frustrated during oral argument and stated the following:

“This is an interesting case...it's so typical of so many patent cases that are litigated and come up to this court. We have a term in the claim that's in dispute...it's not used anywhere in the written description. If that term was used in the written description, there wouldn't be this kind of debate. We're left hanging. Why patents are written this way I don't know. And then to compound the complexity, the application only has one embodiment, which of course puts into play this debate about '...is that just an embodiment or is that the invention'. We have both of these intriguing problems which are sort of self-inflicted by practicioners. I don't know why, but they're self-inflicted problems....”

Read the fedcirc.us analysis for a more thorough description of this case and the issues presented.

Terrorists becoming harder to profile

As reported by the Washington Post, terrorists are becoming more and more difficult to profile. The statement, though, begs a question:

Have we ever been able to profile them?

I think the only constant characteristic of terrorists is that they all tend to be pretty pissed off. Maybe we could start there?

The article provides several examples showing why profiling people to discover the "evil doers" is such a ridiculous idea:

In neighboring Belgium, people are still perplexed over what drove Muriel Degauque, 38, a blond, white Catholic, to convert to Islam and travel to Iraq to blow herself up in November 2005. Nizar Trabelsi, convicted two years earlier of plotting to bomb a NATO base in Belgium, had been a European soccer star before going to Afghanistan to attend al-Qaeda training camps.

In Britain, three of the suspects arrested in last summer's alleged transatlantic airline hijacking plot were religious converts who grew up in north London's affluent suburbs. One was the well-to-do English son of a Conservative Party activist; he worked in a bar and loved the movie "Team America."

Ford to Sell Aston-Martin

As reported by the NY Times, Ford is selling Aston Martin. The sale of Aston Martin - a luxurious sports car brand with its roots in England - will raise an estimated $848 million.

To be honest, I'm a little surprised that Ford has elected to sell Aston Martin. Personal observations in Phoenix lead me to believe that the brand was quickly becoming popular and probably profitable - something that you'd expect Ford to cling to.

Aston Martin, which was profitable in 2006 as sales increased by 50 percent, to 6,500 vehicles, is the first nameplate sold by Ford since it announced a revamping plan last year that it calls the Way Forward.

Although I love Aston Martins and hope that the brand doesn't change too much, I think these kind of major changes are very important if Detroit is going to weather this storm. Obviously the status quo isn't working. If Detroit is ever going to be the leader again something needs to change.

It'll start with the sale of some major divisions, but eventually the engineering will have to change too. With the caveat that Detroit actually survives, I'm really looking forward to all these changes.