Harry Potter Covers
For you Harry Potter fans Felix at felixsalmon.com has put together a matrix of the covers from 3 different editions of each of the 5 books. He thinks US readers have been shortchanged. You get to vote.
Yearly Archives: 2003
Netflix Patent
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
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
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
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.
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