Casey Handmer teaches us why SpaceX needs Starlink:

There are only few trillion dollar industries in existence: energy, high speed transport, communications, IT, healthcare, agriculture, government, defense. Despite common misconceptions, space mining, lunar water, and space-based solar power are not viable businesses. Elon has a play in energy with Tesla, but only communications provides a reliable, deep market for satellites and launch.

Elon Musk’s first space-related idea was to spend $80m on a philanthropic mission to grow a plant on a Mars lander. Building a Mars city will cost maybe 100,000 times as much. Starlink is Elon’s main bet to deliver the ocean of gold needed to philanthropically build a self-sustaining city on Mars.

Some of Musk’s ideas, like the cybertruck, seem ill-conceived. Nobody I know who owns a truck, and I know lots of people who own trucks, would buy this monstrosity. Casey walks through the physics and the economics of a cloud of satellites to cover the earth with internet access. Starlink is not some marijuana induced dream. Casey’s calculations estimate a middle of the road cost of $0.003/GB.

The SEA-WE-ME 4 is a major submarine cable running from France to Singapore, commissioned in 2005. It is capable of transmitting 1.28Tb/s, and cost about $500m to deploy. If it operates for 10 years equivalent 100% capacity, with a 100% overhead for capital costs, then the price per bit works out to be $0.02/GB. Transatlantic cables are shorter and a bit cheaper, but the undersea cable is just one entity in a long line of people who need money to deliver data. The middle of the road estimate for Starlink is 8 times cheaper, all in, than just the undersea cable.

This is the best thing I’ve read about space in years. Highly recommended.

via Om Malik

Unscrupulous lawyers in search of an easy revenue stream often acquire rights to patents and then sue large tech companies for infringement. Rather than bleed legal fees fighting all the lawsuits, these tech companies often strike licensing agreements or settle with these patent trolls.

In 2017 Blackbird Technologies, one such patent troll, asserted a ridiculous software patent (which we should do away with, but that’s another post) against Cloudflare. Instead of following the traditional playbook, Cloudflare decided to fight back. Instead of fighting it out in the courts using the traditional method, they created a new pattern for everyone else to stand up to patent trolls. Their clever method consisted of three parts:

(i) defending ourselves vigorously against the patent lawsuit instead of rolling over and paying a licensing fee or settling, (ii) funding awards for crowdsourced prior art that could be used to invalidate any of Blackbird’s patents, not just the one asserted against Cloudflare, and (iii) asking the relevant bar associations to investigate what we considered to be Blackbird’s violations of the rules of professional conduct for attorneys.

They won in court, but it took two years and they spent a lot of money. But winning once isn’t enough; Blackbird could bring other patent suits against other companies. The community submitted prior art on 49 of Blackbird’s patents, and an anonymous donor allowed Cloudflare to challenge other Blackbird patents with administrative proceedings (a less costly way to invalidate a patent that suing in federal court).

Finally, Cloudflare filed ethics complaints against both of Blackbird’s co-founders before the bar associations of Massachusetts and Illinois. The rules of professional conduct for lawyers prohibit them from acquiring a cause of action to assert on their own behalf. Blackbird purchased the patent they asserted against Cloudflare for $1, but it’s likely there was some additional side agreement that Blackbird would split any legal proceeds with the inventor. Bar proceedings are generally confidential, but could result in sanctions including disbarment, suspension, and/or financial penalties.

Not only did Cloudflare win their case, but they made it substantially more difficult for Blackbird to sue other tech companies. It was more work for them, and also more money. But if everybody who got sued by a patent troll followed this pattern, I think we could make patent trolls go away. Every tech company should do this.

And software patents suck.

UPS delivers prescription medications to US homes by drone for the first time:

These aren’t the first drone deliveries that have been made in the US, nor are they even the first from UPS specifically. Google offshoot Wing launched a drone delivery service of its own last month in Virginia which delivers over-the-counter medicines and other health and wellness items, and UPS has also been operating a drone delivery pilot at WakeMed Hospital in North Carolina since March where it says it has now made 1,500 deliveries. What’s new is that UPS Flight Forward’s service includes prescription medications, and that it’s flying them directly to residential homes.

My guess is that in less than 5 years drone delivery will not only be commonplace, but it will be the primary mechanism for delivering small packages. It’s easy to imagine a tractor trailer full of packages and drones arriving in a community and spending several hours flying those packages to their final destinations. This approach would be much more efficient than driving the truck to every delivery.

Amazon built its business on Oracle databases. They are an Oracle customer no more.:

We migrated 75 petabytes of internal data stored in nearly 7,500 Oracle databases to multiple AWS database services including Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Aurora, Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), and Amazon Redshift. The migrations were accomplished with little or no downtime, and covered 100% of our proprietary systems. This includes complex purchasing, catalog management, order fulfillment, accounting, and video streaming workloads. We kept careful track of the costs and the performance, and realized the following results:

• Cost Reduction – We reduced our database costs by over 60% on top of the heavily discounted rate we negotiated based on our scale. Customers regularly report cost savings of 90% by switching from Oracle to AWS.
• Performance Improvements – Latency of our consumer-facing applications was reduced by 40%.
• Administrative Overhead – The switch to managed services reduced database admin overhead by 70%.

That didn’t take long. Today SoftBank takes control of WeWork. Co-founder Adam Neumann gets $1.7 billion windfall, but has to leave the board. He now has no involvement in the company other than as a shareholder.

Mr. Neumann is clearly very good at lighting other people’s money on fire. The only explanation for the enormous payout to the disgraced former CEO is that SoftBank believes this gives them a chance of keeping the value of WeWork above $0.