Monthly Archives: June 2003

Netflix Patent

This entry was posted in Patents on by

As I have commented before there are patents being issued that have no business existing. This one fits in that category.

Don’t get me wrong. Netflix offers a great service. If you regularly rent DVDs then it may work very well for you. But, there is nothing about this process that walks, talks or smells like an invention. This is a rental service using standard technology not an anti-gravity device.

Here are some example descriptions from the patent:

According to one aspect of the invention, a method is provided for renting items to customers on a subscription basis.

According to the approach, customers provide item selection criteria to a provider provides the items indicated by the item selection criteria to customer over a delivery channel.

There is lots of language like this accompanied by fairly trivial flow charts all doable by your average business systems analyst who has been asked to create a system to manage rentals. Folks there is not any invention in the classic sense here. This is like issuing a patent to someone who uses purple letters instead of green letters on their lemonade stand.

Max Proposes

This entry was posted in Election 2004 on by

Max Sawicky proposes that Kucinich would enhance his chances by narrowing the focus of his campaign to these three areas:

Just to get the juices flowing, I will suggest three areas for emphasis. On the surface, they are obvious enough. The difference is in how they are handled.
War. George Bush has committed impeachable offenses in the conduct of foreign policy. Lies the likes of which have never been seen were used to justify the Iraq venture. I go back to my maximalist anti-war position: it doesn

Affirmative Action

This entry was posted in Constitution on by

Brad Delong writes an excellent piece on affirmative action in response to Andrew Sullivan that begins:

Andrew Sullivan doesn’t see what is so wrong with an elite university with no black people in it:

But why is a racially un-diverse but intellectually multi-faceted campus such a bad thing? Why is a world without… [affirmative action] so “intolerable”?

I think that the politest possible response is that this demonstrates, more than anything else, that Andrew Sullivan is simply and totally clueless about what America is.

Read the rest of the post and the comment thread. There are some challenging ideas that you may not agree with. I know I am going to have to give quite a bit of thought to a couple of questions he raises: 1) how long the marks of historical experience can be considered to last and 2) the concept of collective responsibility.

Compassionate Bobble Head Saves Education

This entry was posted in Uncategorized on by

SK Bubba has some words about the miracles wrought with tax cuts and John Williams at Thudfactor extends the analysis.

It is pretty astounding how many things can be done with a tax cut. In particular I like this juxtaposition from the Washington Post article covering the same event SKB commented on:

“The tax relief plan has encouraged Harold and his wife to make additional investment, which is good for the economy,” he said.
As has become typical for Bush travels, Hamilton is a frequent contributor to Republican campaigns.

….

Filtering Internet Access at Public Libraries

This entry was posted in Constitution on by

Almost lost in the crush of commentary on the Michigan affirmative action decision is this example of a place where, based on the laws they are writing and the decisions they are making, congress critters and supreme court justices should not be treading.This is as good a reason as any for libraries to just say no to federal dollars:

The aid comes through two separate programs. The first, the “E-rate” program administered by the Federal Communications Commission, requires Internet service providers to give discounts to libraries; this was worth $58.5 million to libraries in the year ending June 2002. The second provides direct federal grants to link libraries to the Internet; the grants totaled more than $149 million in fiscal 2002.

While $200 million is more then spare change it works out to less then $23,000/per public library (there are 9074 of them). If the Bushies are around long enough they will likely make this moot when they scrap these programs.

Eugene Volokh thinks that this decision may not be the last we hear of this issue and Peter Lewis has just about the right perspective:

Another issue: Whose filter will the libraries use? The software has to be compiled by someone whose value judgments are trustworthy.
Say, here’s an interesting idea: How about filters endorsed by Roman Catholic priests? Or, maybe librarians in Kansas will choose filters created by the same school advisory board that required science teachers to give as much class time to Christian creationism as to Darwinism. How about a filter created by the government itself, which cuts off funding to agencies that seek to disseminate information about birth control, and spends $8,000 to drape the naked right boob of the statue Spirit of Justice in the Justice Department? (Clarification: I’m referring to the boob on the statue, left.)