“These are people who thought a lot about religion,” [Alan Cooperman, associate director for research at the Pew Forum] said. “They’re not indifferent. They care about it.”

From Mitchell Landsbert’s Los Angeles Times article “Atheists, agnostics most knowledgeable about religion, survey says“, Tuesday, Sept 28, 2010.
(Hat tip Nick Momrik.)

So, what is [Intellectual Ventures] actually doing? Buying up loads of patents and licensing them to companies who calculate it’s not worth the fight is patent trolling 101. Yet the scale they’re operating on puts them on new ground, and opens new opportunities. It seems obvious to get corporate investors on board by promising them immunity from patent claims. With enough patents you stop trying to license them one-by-one and just tax each industry at some non-negotiable rate. No doubt they have more tricks I haven’t even thought of, but these potential devices really do make them a new breed of Super Trolls.

…

Now, I don’t really care if one company leeches off the others. But if they want to tax software, they have to attack free software otherwise people will switch to avoid their patent licensing costs. And if you don’t believe some useful pieces of free software could be effectively banned due to patent violations, you don’t think on the same scale as these guys.

Rusty Russell, “Superfreakonomics; Superplug for Intellectual Ventures.“, July 7th, 2010

I’m also opposed to software patents.

Watching Patent Absurdity: how software patents broke the system is time well spent.

Related Posts:

• My own Great Artists Still Steal, March 4, 2010
• VC and principal of Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson has a lot of great insights and updates on patents.

That’s a whistleblower in the purest form:  discovering government secrets of criminal and corrupt acts and then publicizing them to the world not for profit, not to give other nations an edge, but to trigger “worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms.”  That’s the person that Adrian Lamo informed on and risked sending to prison for an extremely long time.

…

The reason this story matters so much — aside from the fact that it may be the case that a truly heroic, 22-year-old whistle-blower is facing an extremely lengthy prison term — is the unique and incomparably valuable function WikiLeaks is fulfilling.  Even before the Apache helicopter leak, I wrote at length about why they are so vital, and won’t repeat all of that here.  Suffice to say, there are very few entities, if there are any, which pose as much of a threat to the ability of governmental and corporate elites to shroud their corrupt conduct behind an extreme wall of secrecy.

…

Any rational person would have to acknowledge that government secrecy in rare cases is justifiable and that it’s possible for leaks of legitimate secrets to result in serious harm. I’m not aware of a single instance where any leak from WikiLeaks has done so, but it’s certainly possible that, at some point, it might. But right now, the scales are tipped so far in the other direction — toward excessive, all-consuming secrecy — that the far greater danger comes from allowing that to fester and grow even more. It’s not even a close call. Any efforts to subvert that secrecy cult are commendable in the extreme, and nobody is doing that as effectively as WikiLeaks (and their value is not confined to leaking, as they just inspired a serious effort to turn Iceland into a worldwide haven for investigative journalism and anonymous whistle-blowers).
Glenn Greenwald, “case of Bradley Manning, Adrian Lamo and WikiLeaks“, Salon, June 18th, 2010

‘…the ePub format, which is open and freely available for any device, unlike the Kindle’s proprietary format, which functions only for Kindle. The ePub format is used by every electronic reader except the Kindle, and promises to be a big selling point for Google Editions, the search firm’s planned Web-based electronic bookstore scheduled to launch this summer, which will allow buyers to read books and much else on any number of devices. (This may include, by year’s end, Google’s own tablet computer.) It’s through ePub that readers have instant access to millions of books in the public domain, that electronic publishing has a chance to become standardized, and that writers will have more options when it comes to disseminating and selling their books. …’
Sue Halpern, “The iPad Revolution“, The New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010 (future date)

Photo "Electronic Book" cc by-sa flickr user timonoko

e-text and e-books are topics I’ve been passionate about since ~1998 when Boris Mann tried to convince me that reading a book on a Palm Pilot could be an enjoyable experience — I never did get through more than a few chapters back then.

I’ve watched with fascination as audio, and then video, not text have migrated to digital. Although, writing has always been the main interface to computing, and digitization it is magnitudes smaller than the other medians, the reading experience has been much harder to improve upon than the listening and viewing experiences.

Fast forward to today and since Christmas (spoiled), I’ve read a half-dozen books on my Kindle 2. I’m already itching for better tech. I’m continuing to eye where publishing goes next, particularly the free culture implications

Sue Halpern’s whole article is excellent, and provides deep insights into e-reading, where the iPad fits in, and where e-books fit into Apple’s iPad business. Her essay is among the best I’ve read in a while: clear domain expertise, wide knowledge (open source shout out), objective, and excellent prose.

I emailed Sue, and she confirmed for me,

“DRM [(digital rights management) protected] books don’t go anywhere– yet. I think this will change when Google gets into the game. Right now epub on new books mainly benefits publishers, who don’t have to have books digitized in numerous formats in order to be read on various devices.”

“Where we think we’ll make our money — where we think we’re able to differentiate ourselves from IBM and everybody else — is by building complete and integrated systems from silicon all the way up through the software, all prepackaged together,” [Oracle CEO Larry Ellison] said.
By Jim Finkle, Can that guy in Ironman 2 whip IBM in real life?, May 13, 2010

“The HST may well be an effort on the part of an unabashedly pro-business government, encouraged by a similarly minded federal government, to shift a portion of the tax burden from producers to consumers. It may be that it unfairly penalizes working people, and unjustifiably rewards those who already have more than enough. That’s still not reason enough to defeat the HST.”

Sure, it is. Though I agree that

“Taxes are almost never discussed in their proper context, as the price we pay as citizens for the services we receive from our governments.”

But I can’t relate to

“…would be hopelessly constrained, trapped by an ever-shrinking stream of revenue and forced to outsource, downsize, and otherwise remove itself from areas of enterprise and activity in which government currently acts.”

I don’t understand why the government has an ever-shrinking stream of  revenue. The taxes I pay as a citizen is a percentage of whatever I earn, so my own contribution shouldn’t be shrinking — in fact it’s an ever increasing percentage as I make more money.

I oppose the HST because:

1. The timing stinks — recession & sunset of expensive winter olympics.
2. Premier Gordon Campbell’s government did not sell this to us in an sincere and holistic manner. This government doesn’t have credibility in any promises they are now making.