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Making money from enforcing patents is no more wrong than investing in preferred stock.

Nathan Myhrvold

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Nathan Myhrvold
Age: 65
Born: 1959
Born: January 1
Author
Computer Scientist
Engineer
Entrepreneur
Inventor
Mathematician
Paleontologist
Photographer
Seattle
Washington
Nathan Paul Myhrvold
Preferred
Stock
Investing
Wrong
Making
Money
Enforcing
Patents

More quotes by Nathan Myhrvold

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The simplest fix for better grilling is to line the inside of your barbecue with tin foil. It dramatically affects how evenly the heat is distributed. That crusty black hibachi or Weber grill is doing your food no favors.
Nathan Myhrvold
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Risk is the sort of word that is easy to discuss upfront but tough to handle when it comes time to pay the piper. There will always be some who wimp out and second-guess when the pain hits, but that is a childish reaction.
Nathan Myhrvold
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The whole hardware industry has experienced the phenomenon in which every time computers get cheaper, they appeal to a new set of users every time they get more powerful, old customers upgrade.
Nathan Myhrvold
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The best value for money in cooking equipment, in my mind, is first a digital scale and digital thermometer. They're both about $20. They help you cook so much more accurately that they're both enormously valuable.
Nathan Myhrvold
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A person's basic humanity is not governed by how he or she came into this world, or whether somebody else happens to have the same DNA.
Nathan Myhrvold
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One of the ugly secrets of the renewable-energy industry is that its products make no economic sense unless they are highly subsidized.
Nathan Myhrvold
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The way Moore's Law occurs in computing is really unprecedented in other walks of life. If the Boeing 747 obeyed Moore's Law, it would travel a million miles an hour, it would be shrunken down in size, and a trip to New York would cost about five dollars. Those enormous changes just aren't part of our everyday experience.
Nathan Myhrvold
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The world has shown that if you provide capital and expertise to an area that is starved for capital and expertise, really good things will happen.
Nathan Myhrvold
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New online formats gutted the newspaper-ad business. Why pore over tiny print looking for a job in the want ads when you can tap a few keywords into monster.com, then click through and apply? Why pay a steep per-character rate for a classified when you can hawk a whole garage full of used stuff on EBay or Craigslist for free?
Nathan Myhrvold
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The depressing thing about battery technology is that it gets better, but it gets better slowly. There are a whole bunch of problems in materials science and chemistry that come in trying to make existing batteries better.
Nathan Myhrvold
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Among modern occupations, only cult leaders and TV weathermen rival the technological visionary's ability to retain credibility despite all evidence to the contrary.
Nathan Myhrvold
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Most estimates of the mortality risk posed by asteroid impacts put it at about the same risk as flying in a commercial airliner. However, you have to remember that this is like the entire human race riding the plane - it is one of the few risks that really could wipe us all out.
Nathan Myhrvold
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Most decisions are seat-of-the-pants judgments. You can create a rationale for anything. In the end, most decisions are based on intuition and faith.
Nathan Myhrvold
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I've never filed a patent lawsuit. I hope never to file a patent lawsuit. That may be unrealistic, but it would be great if I could avoid doing it... Lawsuits are a ridiculous way to do business.
Nathan Myhrvold
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If you have a block of ballistics gelatin and a high-speed camera, pretty soon somebody gets a gun!
Nathan Myhrvold
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I wanted to figure out how long to cook things. I did some experiments and then wrote a program using Mathematica to model how heat is transferred through food.
Nathan Myhrvold
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Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice - or, in other words, make mayonnaise - you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better.
Nathan Myhrvold
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In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for.
Nathan Myhrvold
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When I was about nine years old, I announced to my mother that I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner. And I went to the library and got this whole pile of books. I'd love to say it all turned out great. It didn't. But, sort of, from that point on, whenever there was serious cooking at home, I was the one who did it.
Nathan Myhrvold
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My career at Microsoft really was getting in the way of my cooking.
Nathan Myhrvold