【文章內(nèi)容簡(jiǎn)介】 ficulty is to construct the agreements. The Americans would happily reach one accord on standards for medical devices and them hammer out different pacts covering, say, electronic goods and drug manufacturing. The EU following fine continental traditions wants agreement on general principles, which could be applied to many types of products and perhaps extended to other countries. Lesson 9 Royal espionage Alfred the Great acted his own spy, visiting Danish camps disguised as a minstrel. In those days wandering minstrels were wele everywhere. They were not fighting men, and their harp was their passport. Alfred had learned many of their ballads in his youth, and could vary his programme with acrobatic tricks and simple conjuring. While Alfred39。s little army slowly began to gather at Athelney, the king himself set out to perate the camp of Guthrum, the mander of the Danish invaders. There had settled down for the winter at Chippenham: thither Alfred went. He noticed at once that discipline was slack: the Danes had the selfconfidence of conquerors, and their security precautions were casual. They lived well, on the proceeds of raids on neighbouring regions. There they collected women as well as food and drink, and a life of ease had made them soft. Alfred stayed in the camp a week before he returned to Athelney. The force there assembled was trivial pared with the Danish horde. But Alfred had deduced that the Danes were no longer fit for prolonged battle: and that their missariat had no anization, but depended on irregular raids. So, faced with the Danish advance, Alfred did not risk open battle but harried the enemy. He was constantly on the move, drawing the Danes after him. His patrols halted the raiding parties: hunger assailed the Danish army. Now Alfred began a long series of skirmishes and within a month the Danes had surrendered. The episode could reasonably serve as a unique epic of royal espionage! Lesson 10 Silicon valley Technology trends may push Silicon Valley back to the future. Carver Mead, a pioneer in integrated circuits and a professor of puter science at the California Institute of Technology, notes there are now workstations that enable engineers to design, test and produce chips right on their desks, much the way an editor creates a newsletter on a Macintosh. As the time and cost of making a chip drop to a few days and a few hundred dollars, engineers may soon be free to let their imaginations soar without being penalized by expensive failures. Mead predicts that inventors will be able to perfect powerful customized chips over a weekend at the office spawning a new generation of garage startups and giving the . a jump on its foreign rivals in getting new products to market fast. 39。We39。re got more garages with smart people,39。 Mead observes. 39。We really thrive on anarchy.39。 And on Asians. Already, orientals and Asian Americans constitute the majority of the engineering staffs at many Valley firms. And Chinese, Korean, Filipino and Indian engineers are graduating in droves from California39。s colleges. As the heads of nextgeneration startups, these Asian innovators can draw on customs and languages to fe righter links with crucial Pacific Rim markets. For instance, Alex Au, a Stanford Ph. D. from Hong Kong, has set up a Taiwan factory to challenge Japan39。s near lock on the memorychip market. Indiaborn Reddy39。s tiny California pany reopened an AT amp。 T chip plant in Kansas City last spring with financing from the state of Missouri. Before it bees a retirement village, Silicon Valley may prove a classroom for building a global business. Lesson 11 How to grow old Some old people are oppressed by the fear of death. In the young there is a justification for this feeling. Young men who have reason to fear that they will be killed in battle may justifiably feel bitter in the thought that they have cheated of the best things that life has to offer. But in an old man who has known human joys and sorrows, and has achieved whatever work it was in him to do, the fear of death is somewhat abject and ignoble. The best way to overe it so at least it seems to me is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life bees increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they bee merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being. The man who, in old age, can see his life in this way, will not suffer from the fear of death, since the things he cares for will continue. And if, with the decay of vitality, weariness increases, the thought of rest will be not unwele. I should wish to die while still at work, knowing that others will carry on what I can no longer do, and content in the thought that what was possible has been done. Lesson 12 Banks and their customers When anyone opens a current account at a bank, he is lending the bank money, repayment of which he may demand at any time, either in cash or by drawing a cheque in favour of another person. Primarily, the bankercustomer relationship is that of debtor and creditor who is which depending on whether the customer39。s account is in credit or is overdrawn. But, in addition to that basically simple concept, the bank and its customer owe a large number of obligations to one another. Many of these obligations can give in to problems and plications but a bank customer, unlike, say, a buyer of goods, cannot plain that the law is loaded aga