The non-obvious utility of patents
Different people have described the Metabolite patent, currently under review by the US Supreme Court, as being about protecting a fact, but if you could patent the fact of homocysteine’s correlation...
View ArticleEurope and the people without culture (?)
Last week, Umair Haque (bubblegeneration) predicted that Europe would prove to be the next innovation leader–not because of any forthcoming shift toward a culture of entrepreneurialism, but because the...
View ArticleFree money
Should money be as free as speech? After all, it is also a form of communication. In the past year, the internet has spawned a few companies aimed at helping individuals borrow and lend without...
View ArticleGovernment art
Here is a teaser from the first chapter of Good & Plenty, Tyler Cowen’s new book about public art and the liberal tradition, out next week: I write with one foot in the art lover camp and with...
View ArticleWhy aid still won’t work
In this month’s lead essay at Cato Unbound, ‘Why Aid Doesn’t Work,’ William Easterly makes a rational case for directing international aid dollars toward programs where the results can be objectively...
View ArticleA little bit legal
The decision reached today on US immigration policy (as a compromise on Bush’s guest worker scheme) sounds… confusing. Not to mention expensive. Three categories of illegal immigrant, each slighly more...
View ArticlePartisan neutrality?
Mike Masnick, posting on Techdirt, notes an unfortunate development in U.S. politics: the adoption of network neutrality as a partisan issue. At which point the discussion starts to sound eerily...
View ArticleThe standards of the assembly line
Tom Evslin tells a story on Fractals of Change that illustrates exactly why we need to throw over our quaint, industrial-era notions of what constitutes work (aka labor, aka toil). Here’s his take on...
View ArticleChina’s not-so-great wall
Techdirt points to a story in the Toronto Star about three Canadian hackers who have created a software work-around for China’s ‘great firewall’. The subtle irony is that the hackers’ solution, called...
View ArticleShowtime at the Smithsonian: The opposite of privatization?
The Smithsonian’s entrepreneurial impulse to exploit new media for profit is a healthy one, at root. The Smithsonian is already a quasi-private entity, where most staff is on the public payroll, while...
View ArticleDaryl Hannah, up a tree…
Daryl Hannah was arrested yesterday for sitting in a tree, defending the South Central Farm, a community garden in Los Angeles scheduled for development by the property’s owner, Ralph Horowitz. The...
View ArticleWhen you see a fruitcake
Count this against the serendipitous beauty of found objects, but I just got suckered into opening an email I had not intended to, and found this bit of salient, nonsensical prose heading up a...
View Article