Planet Unicorn

This video is weird. Random. And funny.

Busting Bad Patents

Sam will like this one.

The Electronic Freedom Foundation is working to destroy bad patents that are limiting creativity. They find people who have patented obvious stuff that they didn't invent, and are suing others for using it. The EFF is collecting evidence that the "invention" existed before the patent, and has already invalidated one of their top 10.

I love the Patent Busting Project.

Take copyright away from corporations?

This blogger suggests taking the current 125 year copyright away from corporations, who sue people for legal uses of copyrighted material. He suggests bringing it down to five years.

Individuals would still get to copyright stuff for a long time, just not companies.

While I think it would be an improvement, I do think he goes too far. I'd be content with the original 28 year copyright term. Long enough to provide an incentive to make stuff, to make money. Short enough to allow cool stuff to become public domain, so we can creatively adapt it.

Stranger Than Fiction

This movie is fantastic. Beautiful story, gorgeous pictures of people in Chicago. Well acted. Being about a man who finds out he's the main character in someone's book, it has to have a great plot. And it does.

Interestingly, this movie is one of about twenty titled "stranger than fiction". If you include "Ruth is stranger than fiction", which probably sucked.

Chinese Dog Ownership

I took pictures of people walking dogs in Shanghai, because I knew that in my grandfather's day, pets were unthinkable. People were starving, so giving food to an animal that didn't work was wasteful.

Now I find out that there are still rules. You can't have a dog taller than 14 inches, and only one dog per family.

Since I don't like dogs, I'm totally ok with those rules. But I can see why people would want freedom. And I can see why the nation with a population problem would restrict dog population, too.

Publicly funded research made public

The president just signed a law that requires that all NIH funded research be made publicly available on a website. I think this is good news. I'd like to be able to read about the latest in science without having to pay enormous fees to a journal.

I can see that journals need to cover the cost of existing, and the cost of peer review. And so universities and scholars pay enormous fees to have access to the journals. It just seems like those fees could go down, especially as online access reduces many of the costs of running a journal.

Maybe I'm wrong, but I think the public domain has withered far too much, and I'm glad to see it expand in any direction.
Maybe publicly funded TV shows will be next to enter the public domain...

Pretty TV ads

Yes, these are ads for TVs. But they're really PRETTY ads.