Rick’s Short Circuit: Tax man hanging it up?

A look around the Web this morning finds that the urge to tax cell phone use is fading, we may need fewer patents, and girls are not much interested in computer science.

The IRS is backing away from plans to tax personal use of corporate cell phones, the Wall Street Journal reports, adding, “The request is a turnabout from last week, when the IRS proposed measures to improve enforcement of the law, which is now widely ignored by employers and employees. One option proposed by the IRS would have counted 25% of employee cell phone use as personal, and thus subject to tax as income.” The article quotes IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman as saying, "The passage of time, advances in technology and the nature of communication in the modern workplace have rendered this law obsolete."

Also in the Journal, L. Gordon Crovitz explains why technologists want fewer patents. “This month, the Supreme Court agreed to reconsider what can be patented, he writes, adding, “At stake are tens of thousands of existing patents and a rethinking of why we have patent protections in the first place. One measure of how badly the patent system needs reform: IBM, for years the company that’s been assigned the greatest number of patents now says too many patents are being granted.”

He quotes IBM lawyer David Kappos as saying, "The nature of innovation has changed. Today, we benefit from inventions made possible through highly collaborative and interconnected technologies. Many of the products that consumers demand are complex and include contributions from multiple innovators that incorporate hundreds if not thousands of patented inventions."

“We shouldn’t grant monopolies on concepts,” Crovitz writes, and he quotes Thomas Jefferson: "No one possesses the less because everyone possesses the whole of it," he wrote. "He who receives an idea from me receives it without lessening me, as he who lights his candle at mine receives light without darkening me."

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger wants California kids to stop lugging around expensive textbooks and go digital, reports the Mercury News. “Schwarzenegger’s ‘digital textbook initiative’ calls for California’s 6.2 million public school students to move away from hard-bound chemistry and calculus books and embrace texts in electronic form,” the Mercury News reports, saying the initiative is aimed at reducing the state budget for textbooks, now at $350 million, with a single Algebra I textbook for ninth-graders in San Jose costing the district $64.77.

Also in the Mercury News, columnist Chris O’Brien notes that her four-year-old daughter’s interest in “puters” might be fleeting. She writes, “I suspect her growing interest in computers comes from watching Mommy working on her own laptop. Whatever the reason, I’ll admit to being more than a little happy about it. I’m not hoping she’ll become a full-fledged geek, but I do want her to feel confident and excited about using computers….”

She notes, however that “I’ve got a lot of work ahead to keep up her enthusiasm. According to a study released last week, there remains a depressingly large gap between the way teenage girls and boys view computers and careers in computer science.” The study, conducted by the Association for Computing Machinery, found that among college-bound high school students ages 13 to 17, that 45% of boys but just 10% of girls thought majoring in computer science would be "very good." compared with 10 percent of girls.

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Electronic News Today: Is Moore’s Law near its end?