For anyone who has wondered whether patents actually help the economy, take a look at Facebook’s recent $40 million dollar purchase of 18 patents on social networking. Let’s take a look at this situation for a moment. To start with, we should remember that Friendster was sold just last year for $37 million dollars, three [...]
Last night a local census taker came to my door and asked me a number of personal questions. As anyone reading this likely knows, I care deeply about my privacy, but I was happy to fill out the census. This might seem counter-intuitive, especially given all the apparent controversy over giving personal information to the [...]
I’ve been following the Health Care debate since about the middle of the Democratic presidential primary, when all the candidates first announced their plans for how to change things if elected. In that almost two years, I’ve heard a lot about these things: the public option, town hall meetings, teabaggers, Stephen Hawkings, and endless coverage [...]
Last Friday morning I sat down at my computer and tried to answer a simple question: whether I needed to move the car that day. On a normal Friday the answer would have been “Yes”, but last Friday there was a light coat of snow over the city that I hoped would bring a snow [...]
Farms vs. WoW In 2006, I read a great blog post that pointed out how the professional media is still working from a very old picture of the American lifestyle. The post, called “Farm Fetish,” explained that more people in the United Stated have World of Warcraft (WoW) accounts than work on farms or ranches. [...]