Month: June 2007

Tim Lee (Not Tim Berners-Lee!) on Software Patents:

In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, “If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today’s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete standstill today.”

Back when I was toiling at The Worst Job I Ever Had, there was talk of a debate between J. Bradford Smith, MSFT’s general counsel, and Larry Lessig, a man who need no introduction, on intellectual property in the digital age. I guess it never came to pass, but I thought at the time it might have been an interesting dialog, no matter how little of it I understood.

What Google Thinks Is Related to This Website:

Things Google thinks are similar to delong.typepad.com:

Google thinks that this humble website is similar or related to Dr Delong’s.

I Can Has More Risk?:

So, if I understand correctly: private insurers are pulling away from coastal markets. People are therefore getting insurance from last-resort insurers. Last-resort insurers don’t have enough money to deal with a catastrophe. If a catastrophe ensues, we (meaning either ‘those of us who purchase insurance’ or ‘the taxpayers’) will collectively be on the hook. That certainly sounds like something that the same ‘we’ should be thinking about now, before catastrophe strikes.

What the starry-eyed libertarians always forget to account for (or perhaps they assume we won’t notice) is the number of people who will make bets they won’t have to cover: so long as government get off people’s backs, they’re all for it.

• Food in France
  (tags: food markets health)

Personal Backup X4 – System/Disk Utilities:

Backs up your files automatically or manually, to removable media (such as recordable CDs or DVDs), to partitions on your hard disk, to network volumes, to an iDisk, to an iPod, to external hard drives (USB ou FireWire) or to disk image files. Intego Personal Backup X4 also restores backups, synchronizes data between two computers (such as a desktop computer and an iBook or PowerBook), and clones your Mac OS X volume.

This looks interesting. I suspect a lot (all?) of these solutions are variants on rsync and cpio and I’m just too lazy to provide the glue that will make it all work.

Left Behind

If Libby gets sprung, the only reason will be to protect Bush from what Libby might say in prison. Bush has no loyalty or honor or even comrades. You might as well appeal to his ability to fart the 1812 Overture.