load01 07/27/2011

• Intellectual Ventures And The War Over Software Patents : Planet Money : NPR

  Update, July 26: This story from Planet Money's Alex Blumberg and NPR's Laura Sydell aired this weekend on This American Life. (Check out TAL's "Ways to Listen" page to find how you can hear the story.) A shorter version of the piece is also airing today on All Things Considered. Here's the story.
  
  Nathan Myhrvold is a genius and a polymath. He made hundreds of millions of dollars as Microsoft's chief technology officer, he's discovered dinosaur fossils, and he recently co-authored a six-volume cookbook that "reveals science-inspired tech­niques for prepar­ing food."
  
  Myhrvold has more than 100 patents to his name, and he's cast himself as a man determined to give his fellow inventors their due. In 2000, he founded a company called Intellectual Ventures, which he calls "a company that invests in invention."

  tags: technology

• Help-Wanted Ads Exclude the Long-Term Jobless - NYTimes.com

  The unemployed need not apply.
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  Another Unfortunate Record
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  Economix Blog: Discriminating Against the Unemployed (July 26, 2011)
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  ROOM FOR DEBATE
  
  The Bias Against the Unemployed
  Should employers be allowed to discard a résumé because the applicant is not currently working?
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  Kevin Moloney for The New York Times
  A recruiter told Kelly Wiedemer, an information technology operations analyst, that despite her skill set she would be a “hard sell” because she had been out of work for more than six months.
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  That is the message being broadcast by many of the nation’s employers, making it even more difficult for 14 million jobless Americans to get back to work.
  
  A recent review of job vacancy postings on popular sites like Monster.com, CareerBuilder and Craigslist revealed hundreds that said employers would consider (or at least “strongly prefer”) only people currently employed or just recently laid off.

  tags: misc

• Microsoft-Watchers See A Company In Decline

  Today at BYTE it wasn't all Google+, Apple OS X Lion and Ubuntu talk. Rather, we've been debating a question that--in all my years covering tech, beginning as a beat reporter on Microsoft--was one I thought I'd never hear.
  
  Is Windows dying? And then, riffing off of that, the discussion moved to the Windows Phone 7 update code-named Mango, due this fall.
  
  And then it migrated to the fate of Microsoft in general, given the steady erosion of Redmond's influence in a now tablet- and mobile-focused world.

  tags: technology

• Recession Study Finds Hispanics Hit the Hardest - NYTimes.com

  WOODBRIDGE, Va. — Hispanic families accounted for the largest single decline in wealth of any ethnic and racial group in the country during the recession, according to a study published Tuesday by the Pew Foundation.
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  Pew Report on Wealth Gaps
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  Times Topic: Hispanic-Americans
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  Room For Debate: How Cuts Will Change the Black Middle Class
  
  The New York Times
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  The study, which used data collected by the Census Bureau, found that the median wealth of Hispanic households fell by 66 percent from 2005 to 2009. By contrast, the median wealth of whites fell by just 16 percent over the same period. African Americans saw their wealth drop by 53 percent. Asians also saw a big decline, with household wealth dropping 54 percent.

  tags: culture

• For Suspected Hackers, a Sense of Social Protest - NYTimes.com

  SAN FRANCISCO — The F.B.I.’s arrests of 14 people last week were the most ambitious crackdown yet on a loose-knit group of hackers called Anonymous that has attacked a string of government agencies and private companies over the last eight months.
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  Kelly Jordan for The New York Times
  Keith Downey, 26, likened bombarding PayPal online to a sit-in.
  Related
  
  16 Arrested as F.B.I. Hits the Hacking Group Anonymous (July 20, 2011)
  But at least some of the suspects are not your typical hard-core hackers, judging from interviews with two of them and the online traces of others. Some did not bother to cover their digital tracks as they participated in what they saw as an online protest. And some say they were unaware that their feverish clicks on a home computer may have been against the law.

  tags: culture

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