January 08, 2003

SANDISK CORP (SNDK)
form 8-K
ITEM 5. OTHER EVENTS AND REQUIRED FD DISCLOSURE.
On December 23, 2002, we issued a press release announcing the settlement and dismissal of all pending litigation between SanDisk Corporation and Micron Technology, Inc. A copy of our press release is attached hereto as Exhibit 99.1 and is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.


ITEM 7. FINANCIAL STATEMENTS, PRO FORMA FINANCIAL INFORMATION AND EXHIBITS.
(c) Exhibits

http://biz.yahoo.com/e/030108/sndk8-k.html

waltz

My son signed up for DISH a few months ago and it came with Replay, this records up to 40 hours.( same idea as Tivo ). He loves it. With two small children he records the program and watches it later or can come back late and view without the commercials.

shane

Zeev

Is ADPT on your radar screen? If so what are your thoughts.

TIA

shane

Zeev

Does that include ZRAN? Not holding over the W/E.

TIA

shane

He wants it to be about him.

analyst11

Why not just go back and read Zeev's msg to you and the one to Matt.

You will find what he has said is the truth.

shane

Thursday, December 19, 2002
8:30 a.m. Initial Jobless Claims. for Dec. 16 Week. Consensus Estimate: 400K. Previous: +83K.
10:00 a.m. DJ-BTM Business Barometer. Previous: -1.0%.
10:00 a.m. November Chicago Fed National Activity Index. Previous: -0.81.
10:00 a.m. November Conference Board Leading Economic Indicators. Consensus Estimate: +0.6%. Previous: unch.
12:00 p.m. December Philadelphia Fed Business Index. Consensus Estimate: 5.0. Previous: 6.1.
8:20 p.m. Federal Reserve Chairman Greenspan addresses the The Economic Club Of New York on the economic outlook in New York.

Zeev

What do you see as the down risks for ZRAN at this point.

TIA

shane

Zeev

Would do you expect of ZRAN ?

Best Guess!!

shane

ajtj99

What do we get if we sign up for your "WebCam"?

Good predicitons or what?? <G>

shane

zeev - anyone

What do you think about this area being the next BIG Thing.


Semiconductor Firms Join Effort
To Improve Medical Research

By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


For a generation, the microchip has done a lot to make modern life easier. Now it may help make it longer.

Ever since scientists succeeded in sequencing the human genome a couple of years ago, a race has been on to develop a new generation of gene-based drugs. But analyzing the data using conventional methods is both time-consuming and expensive. To find a way to speed up the process, researchers turned to the semiconductor industry. The chip makers' answer to the problem is called the biochip.

This new generation of chips promises to cut the costs and time required to develop new drugs and eventually could help doctors diagnose diseases earlier and devise more effective treatments. For the semiconductor industry, the new field offers an opportunity to cushion the effects of the often-brutal swings in its core memory-product market.

"It really is pioneering stuff," says Malcolm Penn, chief executive of Future Horizons, a semiconductor-research firm. "This proves that there's life in this industry yet."

HEALTH INDUSTRY EDITION



For more health coverage, visit the Online Journal's new Health Industry Edition at wsj.com/Health, and receive daily Health e-mails.



The chips themselves can hold thousands of gene fragments from a patient, which scientists analyze to find deviations. Identifying irregularities can provide researchers with the key to determine how a specific disease affects genes and how the genes respond to certain treatments.

In 2001, the biochip market was valued at about $1 billion (€992 million), but analysts expect it to swell to nearly $3.5 billion by 2005. So far, Affymetrix Inc., of Santa Clara, California, has dominated the market with its GeneChip product.

But recently, some of Europe's leading semiconductor firms -- STMicroelectronics NV and Infineon Technologies AG (www.infineon.com) -- have decided to develop their own products. Unlike Affymetrix, a niche player that concentrates solely on the biotech market, the European firms are among the semiconductor industry's biggest. Until now, they have been more at home in the world of personal computers than medical research.

Leading this field in Europe is Germany's Infineon Technologies. Infineon, a former unit of engineering group Siemens AG, recently introduced a product called the Flow Thru Chip, which received the 2002 Silver Award in The Wall Street Journal Europe's Innovation Awards.

"We see huge potential in the long run," says Infineon Chief Executive Ulrich Schumacher.

What separates Infineon's chip from some of its predecessors is that it is made of silicon instead of glass. The advantage of silicon is that it makes experiments faster, provides more precise readings and is cheaper. Infineon and other semiconductor makers can produce silicon biochips with little additional investment because they can use existing manufacturing techniques and capacity.

But Infineon's particular innovation is that its chip is porous. This means that a genetic sample can be evaluated in three dimensions because it flows through microscopic holes in the chip. The chip itself costs about $100.

Infineon scientist Volker Lehmann came up with the basic design for the chip back in the mid-1980s. While experimenting with different etching techniques for silicon, Dr. Lehmann discovered a method of creating uniform-size holes in the material's surface. As it turned out, the technique couldn't be used in the manufacture of conventional memory chips as he had hoped.

But in the late 1990s, Dr. Lehmann found another use for his discovery -- the biochip. "In scientific research, you always keep your eyes and ears open for new opportunities to apply your inventions to other people's problems," he says.

Two years ago, Infineon put a team together and started developing the chip with Gene Logic Inc., a Gaithersburg, Maryland, biotech company

While Infineon could provide the platform for the chip, it lacked the necessary expertise to tailor it to the needs of the researchers. "Partnerships are essential," Dr. Lehmann says.

Such cooperation was also a key in the development of Infineon's next product -- the electronic chip. One of the advantages of silicon is that it can be used as a base for electronic circuitry. This allows for the development of a more sophisticated chip that can take over some of the analytical work performed by a scientist. In other words, such a chip would be easier to use and reduce the cost of gene analysis even further. The goal is to expand the use of the chips from the laboratory to doctors offices and hospitals, where it could be used for diagnostic purposes.

Researchers for STMicroelectronics in Italy have developed what they call a "Lab On Chip," which employs some of the same basic technology as Infineon's "Flow Thru Chip." The ST chip funnels fluid containing a DNA sample through channels buried in the silicon and can amplify and detect the DNA present.

ST has about 100 staffers working in this area, and has drawn on techniques used in its other chips, such as those made for ink-jet printers. The company hasn't yet begun production of the chips, but estimates they will cost about $50 each initially. Because it isn't practical to clean the channels on the chip, they would be disposable. ST says it's developing software for researchers and health-care personnel to analyze the data generated by the lab on chips, which it says could be used for broader medical and biological applications beyond basic DNA analysis.

"This is an extremely exciting area," says Salvo Coffa, director of Silicon Optoelectronics, Bioelectronics and Nano Organics for ST in Catania, Italy. As for the size of the market for such chips, "It depends on how good we are at reducing their cost and demonstrating how good they are compared to the existing solutions," Mr. Coffa says. He says ST's prototype chip integrates more functions than its counterparts.

"It becomes really interesting when you can use the chips in the field," Mr. Schumacher says. "You can make life much easier, much more efficient."

For drug makers, biochips have already become a key tool in testing the safety and efficacy of new drugs and developing "personalized medicine" -- treatments that would be tailored to individual patients' genetic makeup.

Roche Holding AG, for instance, is developing one DNA chip, with Affymetrix, that it says will be able to tell how well a patient might respond to certain drugs, such as antidepressants and antihistamines, by detecting variants in a couple of genes responsible for drug metabolism. It plans to launch the chip as a drug-development tool as early as next year. It's also working on a handful of other biochip-based tools to help early disease-detection tests. The company estimates the market for cancer-screening tests alone will exceed 15 billion Swiss francs (€10.23 billion) during the next two decades.

Indeed, the biochip may just be the first step in a broader revolution that will involve more integration with the world of information technology.

"The pharmaceutical industry is about to go through the same transformation we started to see in electronics 20 years ago," says Thomas Klaue, director of business development at Infineon. "Everything is going to get smaller, faster and more reliable."

-- Kevin J. Delaney, Vanessa Furhmans and David Pringle contributed to this article.

Write to Matthew Karnitschnig at matthew.karnitschnig@wsj.com

Updated November 22, 2002

Rich1

Why??

shane

OT.

Guarding against corporate scandal

To prevent future Enrons, publicly held companies should be required by the feds to purchase accounting insurance

By Daniel Gross
SLATE.COM

Nov. 12 — If the new accounting oversight board ever gets down to business — William Webster resigned as chairman even before Wednesday’s first scheduled meeting — it probably won’t be bold enough to address the deepest problem in the accounting business: Companies pay for their own audits.

THIS PRINCIPAL-AGENT conflict has existed since New Deal-era securities laws first required “independent” audits of public companies. As long as an accounting firm was reasonably competent, it had every incentive to go easy on its clients — even if the public would benefit from more vigilance. Toughness would just encourage the client to replace the auditor with a more pliable firm. The conflict became truly intractable in recent decades, as the tax code grew more complex and accounting firms built massive consulting arms. With audit fees shrinking to a sliver of overall revenues, accountants had even less incentive to ride herd on their clients.

A MATTER OF INCENTIVE

In theory, an auditor’s concern for its own reputation should deter it from signing off on cooked books. But the experience of Arthur Andersen, which presided over a series of accounting debacles before Enron without major client defections, shows that deterrence doesn’t happen in practice. Either companies were too lazy to change accountants, or they were simply oblivious to Andersen’s failures, or they may have wanted the lax treatment for themselves.
So even if Rudolph Giuliani is named to head the accounting oversight board, the misalignment of carrots and sticks will remain in the structure of the industry. Certified public accountants, like lawyers, are licensed by the public to perform certain services. An old-fashioned guild, the accounting industry has a monopoly on the auditing business. Yet the profit motive dictates that CPAs’ highest duty is owed to the paying client rather than to the non-paying investing public.

The key to real accounting reform is to remove the economic incentive for accountants to be halfhearted in their audits. One way would be to make the audit of public companies a federal function. That would guarantee independence, to be sure. But the government’s inability to hire low-skilled airport screeners in a timely fashion doesn’t exactly instill confidence that it could assemble a crack team of accountants. Besides, even if you’ve got an executive branch pushing for accounting strictness — and we certainly don’t have that now — members of Congress have shown an alarming tendency to interfere with the federal agencies charged with setting accounting standards. You can be sure Congress would make life impossible for any federal audit service that went too hard on favored corporations.

AN INSURANCE POLICY

But there is a way to use the power of the marketplace — which until now has conspired against good auditing and accounting — to bring corporations to heel. We should require publicly held companies to purchase accounting insurance. Joshua Ronen, a professor of accounting at New York University, floated this idea in a March New York Times op-ed. It makes even more sense today.
Here’s how it would work. Public companies, as a condition of doing business, would be required to buy accounting insurance. Accounting insurance would cover all, or a portion, of damages suffered by investors because of accounting fraud or earnings misstatements, with a certain deductible and a cap.
In order to assess the risk of insuring a company’s books, insurance companies would hire accountants and pay them to conduct annual audits. Since the auditors would be representing their new customers — insurers — not the audited companies, they would have both the freedom and the incentive to be tough and thorough. Meanwhile, accountants could continue to offer their consulting services to public companies, because the conflict of interest created when they both audited and consulted to the same company would disappear.

MITIGATING RISK
Advertisement

Signing off on faulty books would be devastating for an accounting firm. Insurance companies are nothing if not risk-averse; mitigating risk is their business. If an accounting firm were to botch one audit or help insiders cook the books, that firm would jeopardize the dozens or hundreds of auditing assignments it got from insurance companies.
The insurance companies would charge premiums based on the perceived risk. That risk would be dictated not simply by the audits but also by the past actions of the company and its executives — the way accident-prone drivers pay higher rates or smokers with a history of accidental fires shell out more for home insurance.
For companies with honest, clean, and transparent books, accounting insurance will be a relatively minor cost of doing business. A company run by Warren Buffett would pay a low premium. For companies or executives with a history of earnings exaggeration, insurance would be more expensive. A company headed by Jeff Skilling would find it very difficult to obtain accounting insurance. Premiums and ratings would be disclosed to investors in financial statements, so they could draw their own conclusions about the accounting risk inherent in a given company.
It would be a challenge for insurers to price the audit coverage at first, but insurers have shown an ability and eagerness to insure everything from the knees of college football players to priceless works of art. And this is a market with sufficient history and sufficient size to quickly develop an orderly pricing regime.

ASSESSING CREDIT RISKS
Accounting insurance would have other salutary effects. When honest companies are victimized by fraud — say by an internal bad apple or by a company that they acquire — the litigation and hangover can last for years. Insurance might provide a more rapid settlement and allow new management teams to revive the business faster.

Sure, requiring public companies to purchase accounting insurance would be a coercive government mandate. But we also require drivers to carry auto insurance, and mortgage companies require home buyers to purchase home insurance. These requirements certainly don’t inhibit ownership or the ability to conduct transactions in either market.
The accounting insurance market would work much like the credit market. Companies’ bonds and other debt instruments are rated by outside agencies. Those with lower ratings pay higher interest rates. Investors can make a conclusion about a company’s prospects based on its credit rating and decide if they think the potential reward is worth the risk. This credit risk market is one of the great tools of American capitalism. Audit insurance could be a worthy supplement.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/834188.asp

shane

Photonic Crystals in Uniforms
By TERESA RIORDAN


THESE may be lean economic times, but there is brisk demand for scientists who work on military projects.

One project is the $50 million contract the Defense Department gave earlier this year to researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The goal is to build a sort of exoskeleton that among other things is supposed to give soldiers superhuman strength, protect them from biological and chemical weapons, and even help heal their injuries.

One of the researchers on the case is Yoel Fink, an assistant professor at M.I.T. Using, in part, technology he created, Mr. Fink and his team aim to embroider the supersoldier fighting uniform with polymer threads that — by selectively reflecting or absorbing different wavelengths of light — would silently flash an optical bar code. That way, for example, troops wearing specially tuned night-vision goggles would be able to distinguish between foe and friend during a night firefight.

The supersoldier project, officially known as the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies, has special meaning for Mr. Fink, who grew up in Israel and served in the army there.

"I spent three years of my life in the infantry," said Mr. Fink, who is now 36 years old. "It absolutely hits close to home because I know how vulnerable infantry soldiers are."

If two recently issued patents are any indication, though, Mr. Fink's ambitions extend beyond the battlefield.

Last month, Mr. Fink and several colleagues were granted United States Patent 6,463,200 for a fiber that steers light beams efficiently over long distances. The technology is being developed by OmniGuide, a start-up in Cambridge, Mass., that Mr. Fink co-founded and that recently secured $10 million in a second round of financing.

In August Mr. Fink received a more fundamental patent, Number 6,433,931, which broadly covers the use of certain polymers as photonic crystals — an innovation that Mr. Fink hopes will one day revolutionize optics the way the semiconductor revolutionized electronics.

As a tenure-track researcher at M.I.T. whose ideas are the foundation of a start-up company, Mr. Fink now seems a rising star. But when he first arrived at M.I.T. as a graduate student in 1995, he spent nearly a year and a half casting about for a project and a thesis adviser.

John D. Joannopoulos, a solid-state physicist at M.I.T. and expert on photonic crystals, did not take Mr. Fink into his laboratory. "He basically told me, `Look, I don't have any positions available,' " Mr. Fink said.

So when Mr. Fink came up with what he considered a revolutionary idea for building photonic crystals, he instead approached Edwin Thomas, a respected materials scientist at M.I.T. "I went to see him and said, `I want to talk,' " Mr. Fink recalled. Mr. Thomas said he could not talk because he was on his way to Greece.

Undaunted, Mr. Fink gave Mr. Thomas a copy of Professor Joannopoulos's book, to which Mr. Fink had stuck a yellow sticky note pithily outlining his idea. When he returned Mr. Thomas called Mr. Fink, eager to start working on the idea. Within a few weeks Mr. Fink had financing from the Air Force to pursue it.

For three months, Mr. Fink, Mr. Thomas and Tim Oyer, an M.I.T. patent lawyer, feverishly laid out a road map for developing the crystal. "We wanted to do with photons what people have been doing for years with electrons — to manipulate the flow of light in materials," he said.

Photons are the smallest known units of light, with both particle and wave properties. Photonic crystals allow for the manipulation of light.

Mr. Fink was by no means the only researcher trying to produce photonic crystals. "What struck me was that there wasn't a very good way to build these crystals," he said. "People were trying to build these structures by modifying semiconductor techniques."

While other researchers were trying to create photonic crystals by etching into silicon, Mr. Fink proposed a radically different idea: making a photonic crystal out of plastic.

The plastic he wanted to use was something called a block co-polymer, essentially a plastic made from two different types of polymers. Imagine one polymer as a string of pearls and the other polymer as a string of rubies, both of them loosely strung. Now imagine that when they are dropped into a jar and shaken, they self-entwine and pack themselves into a structure that repeats itself in a specific pattern — say, two rubies, four pearls, two rubies, four pearls and so on. "This a structure that forms itself," Mr. Fink said. "It doesn't require complicated processing."

In part it is this pattern, as well as the differing reflective qualities of the "rubies" and the "pearls," that gives this crystal such potential, Mr. Fink said.

Off the battlefield, how might life be different in the future if photonic crystals came to pass? Fashion mavens might leave the house in a turquoise outfit in the morning and retune the same outfit to tangerine when they went out to dinner. Optical communications systems might someday be woven into our clothing, making cellphones and hand-held devices seem like quaint artifacts of the early 21st century. And the innards of computers might rely as much on optics as on electronics.

Professor Fink has since won over Professor Joannopoulos, who ultimately became his thesis adviser and whom he now considers a mentor. But he acknowledged that though it had been proved experimentally, his self-assembling plastic photonic crystal project was still a long way from reality.

"It's a very beautiful idea," Mr. Fink said. "What's keeping us from flying with it right now is that we need a clever chemist — which I am not — to synthesize the polymer."

Mr. Fink says the first application to come out of his research is likely to be a light-transmitting fiber for a highly secure military communications network for the military. The main patron for his research, after all, is the Defense Department.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/11/technology/11PATE.html

shane

Zeev

No action this morning??

shane

Blondie,what gold stocks are you buying?

Zeev

Would a pullback of a buck on GNSS be an entry point?

If not,what would be your entry p[oint?

TIA

shane

Zeev

What are your thoughts on GNSS. It has gone from the 10 range to 14+.

shane

mlsoft

For your INFO

Read your post and I also have cable modem running WinXP & 512 MB Ram, thru a router with three computers networked. I generally have 6 to 14 open windows on each computer with 2 streaming data on running on each one.
I have had this set up for 4 + years and It has worked great.
Weather blew out two Modems and a couple of times the Techs have had to crank up the signal at the terminal about a half of mile from here.

Mostly however it works great.

shane

yankee

You can purchase a DVD Burner for $ 350 and yes I beleive they will be many people buying them for Xmas.

shane

D2

What is your outlook for GNSS at this point?

shane

Zeev

Take a look at ENDO.

shane

satorino'

That sounds good to me. It is nice to have a "ATM" as Zeev calls them.

We will see tomorrow what the market says.

shane

Commercial Real Estate
Billionaires Bet On Buildings
Stephane Fitch, 10.21.02, 12:00 PM ET

Some property magnates know a few things that most property investors don't. When they act on them, they can unleash horrified gasps from the unknowing.

These magnates have been buying skyscrapers around the U.S. for record prices (see table below)--as in 50% to 100% more than it costs to build new office space or buy other used property. They are doing this just when rents around the country are off 10% to 20% from a year ago and headed lower.

To Peter Korpacz, a real estate researcher for PricewaterhouseCoopers, it doesn't add up. He recently declared in The Wall Street Journal: "There is a bubble in the commercial real estate market."

Puhleeze.

Look closer at some of the folks doing the buying: Forbes World's Richest People member Mortimer Zuckerman of Boston Properties (nyse: BXP - news - people ), Forbes 400 Richest Americans member Neil Bluhm of Walton St. Capital and Forbes 400 member John E. Anderson of Topa Equities, a Forbes 500 Largest Privates company. Not exactly flash-in-the-pan types.



Sky-High Buildings And Prices
Buyer City Yield* (%) Price ($mil) Price/Square Feet
Generali/Lend Lease** San Francisco 9% $117 $388
Broadway Real Estate Greenwich, Conn. 8.5 115 483
Deutsche Bank/RREEF Chicago 8.5 400 309
Boston Properties New York 8.2 1,060 631
Challenger International Boston 7.7 109 416
John E. Anderson Los Angeles 7.9 182 305
Blue Capital Investments Washington, D.C. 7.9 78 388
Walton Street Capital New York 7.4 270 620
Taconic Partners/New York State New York 6.5 158 552

Sources: Commercial Real Estate Direct. *Net operating income for next 12 months as percentage of purchase price. **Purchase was of a partial interest; yield and price per square foot are calculated accordingly.


All three men got an alarmingly close look at the real estate collapse of the early 1990s--the worst in living memory--and survived. Don't bet they'd be buying if it didn't make some sense. Even Bluhm, who did take a thrashing in the last downturn, has restored his reputation as a shrewd buyer whose investments in the 1980s held up far, far better in the long run than anybody expected.

So what do these seasoned buyers see? First, they're looking at the initial yields on their purchases, around 8%. That's a 4% "spread" over the less-risky 10-year U.S. Treasury bond, which is as wide a spread as has existed in years, says Orest Mandzy of Newtown, Pa.-based Commercial Real Estate Direct, a real estate data and news service.

Sounds good, but here's something better. Even as beaten down as the S&P 500 is, its earnings yield (the inverse of its price-to-earnings ratio) is stuck way down at 6%. Normally, you'd expect it to be higher, not lower, than commercial real estate yields. Read: No bubble here.

Second, Zuckerman and his cohorts are looking at the fundamentals. Scott Latham, of New York City-based real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield, says they are wagering this year's drop in rents is only temporary.

"Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Optimism is a character trait in our industry," he says. This time, Latham says, the optimism is warranted.

There's no glut of empty space on the market. For example, vacancy in New York City is 11% now, compared with 18% a decade ago. And most of the vacant space isn't being put on the market by either of the two nightmare sources: overeager developers or busted tenants. Rather, Latham says, it's from healthy companies just looking to clear out space they'd "inventoried" in order to anticipate growth when times were good.

That means no fire sales. The sublease crowd is asking for relatively high rents and getting them. Average rents are $25 per square foot in Los Angeles, $30 in Boston, Chicago and San Francisco, $40 in Washington, D.C., and nearly $60 in New York City, according to New York brokerage Julien J. Studley. All these rents are two or three times typical operating costs.

Talk to Scott Lawler, who runs Broadway Real Estate Partners. He says the office complex in Greenwich, Conn., that his investment firm purchased for $500 a square foot, called Pickwick Plaza, is so tightly leased, tenants desperate for space must beg existing tenants for sublease space. He ought to know. Broadway is one of the sub-lessees that had to get on bended knee.

Finally, seasoned real estate buyers usually think far into the future. There's no recovery now, but there will be. The buyers should be able to improve their returns when older tenants' leases are rolled over at higher rates.

Bubble? No. Smart? Quite likely.

http://www.forbes.com/2002/10/21/1021fm_realestate.html

Zeev

What do you see in GNSS? I see one report says a loss of 0.15,
another says PRO FORMA gain of 0.05. With the est earnings of
0.06.

Looks to me like they came in under by a penny. Do you see this different?

shane

D2

Yes, I read that also. It seems to be weak this morning. I could see it dipping and coming right back up, however it can't seem to get a foothold. Down 1.40 + as I type.

shane

Zeev

What are your thoughts as to why GNSS took this dive? Bad news coming on earnings today?

shane

Zeev,

What do the turnips tell you about GNSS?

What would be a good re entry point?

TIA

shane

Professor Summers Offers
Economic-Policy Precepts

Lawrence Summers, the boy-wonder professor who grew up to be Treasury secretary and is now president of Harvard, returned to Washington this week and posed as an economics professor again. No longer required to mouth political platitudes and wiser about the way ideas influence government, Professor Larry offered five precepts for policy. None are original; all are timely.

Properly functioning markets are the best way to organize economic activity, but that's not intuitively obvious.

Aristotle, Mr. Summers allowed, was a very smart fellow, something he rarely acknowledges about anybody beside himself. But Aristotle believed that a heavy object falls faster than a lighter one, which seems intuitively obvious. Galileo proved him wrong. Similarly, the old notion that exports are good for a nation because they create jobs while imports are bad because they destroy jobs is intuitively obvious -- and wrong. Trade, especially imports, is good because it makes us richer. "No one ever says on Christmas morning: Without trade with China, I'd only be able to buy half as many toys for my kids," Mr. Summers quipped at a forum sponsored by Resources for the Future, an environmental think tank.

"It is common at the moment to be a bit down on the market system" because of the "profound corruption" of business that is being exposed, he said. But corruption is often a consequence of the absence of markets. Without tariffs or quotas, there is no reason to bribe a customs official. Without a secret system to allocate initial public offerings, there is no way to use the shares as bribes. The biggest step the U.S. ever took to reduce corruption, he said, was to repeal Prohibition. (He ducked a question about whether he favors repeal of drug laws.)

Advocates of market-based solutions have nothing to concede on a moral level.

"I don't think there is anything morally attractive when people choose to take jobs that pay $1.25 a day" because the jobs improve the way they live, "and then we say we won't take the fruit of their labors," Mr. Summers said. "There is nothing morally unattractive about saying: We need to analyze which way of spending money on health care will produce more benefit and which less, and using our money as efficiently as we can. I don't think there is anything immoral about seeking to achieve environmental benefits at the lowest possible cost."


Larry Summers


The globalization debate reflects tension among three things: flows of goods, capital and people across borders; national sovereignty; and such widely shared goals as clean air and a fair income distribution.

Free-market champion Milton Friedman would surrender the third to achieve the first two. Protectionist pundit Patrick Buchanan would chuck the first. The World Federalist Association would sacrifice the second. The rest of us are searching for a "practical and prudent" balance, Mr. Summers said.

It's clear that the world can't combat global warming without international understandings that limit national sovereignty, he said. It is also clear to him that global-warming treaties should dictate objectives, not means of achieving them. But it is "much less obvious" that the rest of the world should tell individual nations and their governments how much pollution to accept.

Designing market institutions is key.

The failures of federal auctions of the radio spectrum and of California electricity deregulation demonstrate that "it's not enough to say we're going to have a market system and let it rip," he said. The implication: It is worth investing taxpayer money in basic R&D. Economist Vernon Smith won the Nobel Prize this year, in part, for pioneering work on the design of auctions. Yet in a 1992 spat over spending, the Senate condemned 31 National Science Foundation grants as "wasteful" -- including one made to Mr. Smith to study auctions.

Property rights are crucial, but intellectual property may be different.

"No one in the history of the world ever washed a rented car," Mr. Summers said. "Why? Because they didn't own it. Preserving its value wasn't important." Farmers who don't own the land won't worry about depleting the soil. Companies that don't own forests won't worry about sustainable harvesting. So does the same go for intellectual property? After all, what's the incentive for coming up with new ideas if you can't get a monopoly on their use?

But Mr. Summers noted discomfort with an intellectual-property regime that means some patients -- even those willing to pay more than the cost of producing a pill -- can't get medicine they need. And he noted that while two people can't sit in the same airline seat or use the same hammer, two people can use the same idea simultaneously.

The market mechanism and property rights are excellent at conserving scarce resources and putting them to the most profitable use, says Paul Romer, a Stanford economist. They aren't so good at encouraging the production and distribution of new ideas, which are crucial to progress.

Sometimes, Mr. Summers sounds like a market fundamentalist: "You can't repeal the laws of economics for political convenience." He does think economic principles get too little respect. But he also thinks that it is how we apply the laws of economics in a modern society that matters.

Write to David Wessel at capital@wsj.com

Updated October 17, 2002 11:59 p.m. EDT


http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,capital,00.html


shane

Zeev

Re : BRCD BRCM MLNM

Lunch Tatics or 2:22 ?

TIA

shane

Zeev

Where do you see MU making the turn.
I have a buy at 12.23.

TIA

shane

ZEEV

Is coco a play here at 37.65?
TIA

shane

Zeev

Have you see any news on USPI. I have searched and found
SG Cowen Strong Buy on 8/27 and 9/16 Nasdaq/NM:USPI - News) today announced that Monica Cintado, 33, has been promoted to senior vice president - development.

could it be a vote of no confidence?

brightness

OT
Same counties that had the problem in 2000.
What Jeb should do is replace the County Supvr of Elections with someone with an IQ above 60.

shane

MarketTurmoil

"
Zeev Post

In edit back in COO at $51.67, will try and clean another $.50 o so.

Still in EXTR, this one, NVDA and GNSS I'll try and hold for at least a 15% move, if can.

Zeev "

shane

ZEEV
Did you stop out of EXTR.
What do the turnips say, wait, buy and hold ??

shane

Softechie

Agree, some people always have to blame someone else, they can't take responsibility.

What do they call them !!! Whiners ??

SONICblue, Intel To Create Portable Entertain Device


DOW JONES NEWSWIRES

SAN JOSE -- Sonicblue Inc. (SBLU ) and Intel Corp. (INTC) agreed to develop the ReplayTV Portable Video Player.

In a joint press release Monday, the companies said Intel's XScale technology-based processors and advanced video codecs will be combined with Sonicblue's ReplayTV platform.

Sonicblue's PVP will house a large capacity hard drive and support multiple audio and video formats, including native ReplayTV files, so recorded television content can be transferred directly from ReplayTV set-top boxes for portable enjoyment. The Sonicblue ReplayTV PVP will also connect to a personal computer so that users can transfer and play personal, MP3 and other commercially available multimedia content from their PC.

The Sonicblue ReplayTV PVP is expected to be available in 2003.

-Stephen Lee; Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5400

Updated September 9, 2002 6:38 p.m. EDT


shane

ZEEV

Whatz Z turnips plan for exit on EXTR.

TIA

shane

Texas Instruments CEO Sees Mobile Internet Driving Growth

By RIVA RICHMOND

Of DOW JONES NEWSWIRES
NEW YORK -- Order rates for Texas Instruments Inc.'s (TXN) chips have been on an upswing during the last two quarters, thanks to firming demand for consumer electronics and a subsided inventory glut at hardware makers.

But a new wave of growth at the Dallas-based company, the market-share leader in chips for cell phones, won't come without technological innovation that gives consumers better reasons to buy new gadgets, said Chief Executive Tom Engibous at a luncheon with Wall Street Journal editors and reporters Wednesday.

That reason will be the "mobile Internet," a future of powerful wireless devices that keep people plugged into the global Internet wherever they are and provide everything from online video to international phone calls at local prices.

For now the vision is well ahead of the technology, both hardware and software. But as the gap is closed in the coming years, "we could be in for one of the biggest growth spurts that we've seen in a decade and a half," Engibous said.

Texas Instruments is doing its part: creating high-performance, multifunction chips for these devices, which could come in the form of souped-up cell phones, MP3 players or digital cameras or could be multifunction devices. Texas Instruments' next-generation chips will keep it ahead of the competition and help it hold on its market leadership.

The company's focus on consumer markets, where spending on technology has continued to flow, has provided Texas Instruments some shelter during the technology-industry slowdown.

Engibous warned against the folly of bold predictions about what, precisely, the mobile Internet will ultimately look like. Rather, industry should focus on taking practical steps toward building viable products, he said, quipping: "I think we should be selling Bibles, not religion."

-Riva Richmond; Dow Jones Newswires; 201-938-5670; riva.richmond@dowjones.com

Updated September 4, 2002 7:00 p.m. EDT

http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,BT_CO_20020904_008153,00.html?mod=INDUSTRY

shane