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I want to invest in a movie where Brad Pitt gets the snot beat out of him. For real. Sign me up.

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Turns out an inflected language is the bee’s knees for programming.

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Ah, back to the good old days. I guess even wolves couldn’t make it under Communism.

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Further adventures from the fantasyland of ‘intellectual property’.

Well, here’s a pleasant surprise. We’ve been talking a lot about the rise of publicity rights as a relatively “new” form of intellectual property, driven by a collection of confusing state laws that create a poorly defined “right” for someone to block the use of their likeness (and, in some cases, their appearance, voice, mannerisms, gestures and more…). This has given rise to a new group of what can best be called “publicity rights trolls,” looking for ways to exploit these laws for cash. There are some cases making their way through the courts that question whether or not publicity rights violate the First Amendment, but in a surprise ruling up in Washington, a federal judge has ruled that the state’s publicity rights law is unconstitutional.

Eric Raymond peeks behind the curtain.

A group of Nokia shareholders is planning an attempted coup at the May 3rd general meeting. They want to start by firing Elop and his henchmen, then reframe the Microsoft tie-up as a tactical play for the U.S. market, then put the company fully behind MeeGo as their bid for the smartphone future.

Interesting times in Finland.

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While activists in New York and D.C. kvetch about Walmart invading poor neighborhoods and providing cheap goods to low-income shoppers, activists in Boston are grumbling that Whole Foods is invading middle class neighborhoods and providing expensive goods to middle-income shoppers.

I’m sure that this question is just burning a hole in your mind.

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And it took them quite a while to notice.

And we’re all still waiting for someone to care.

The Other McCain does it so well.

Such preening moral narcissism, the pharasaical desire to strut one’s superior virtue like a peacock flaunting his tail, is the inescapable essence of liberalism. But you don’t need me to tell you that, when Thomas Sowell has written an entire book about it: The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation as a Basis for Social Policy.

One might describe the liberal’s typical pose as, “I have noble sentiments and virtuous opinions — admire me!” This is why they constantly accuse others of harboring malign motives (racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.) and why nothing so outrages a liberal as when you deny them the admiration they so desperately crave.

If you’ve ever gotten into an argument with a liberal, you recognize this holier-than-thou game for what it is. One minute you’re arguing about a specific incident (in this case, the charges against Julian Assange) and then next thing you know, the liberal starts lecturing you as if you were a third-grader, demanding that you accede to whatever point he’s pushing. He throws out a hypothetical case or employs some inapt analogy that he thinks will prove him right, and if you call him on that, he’ll take the argument off in some other direction. This is when you realize that the supposed subject of the argument is merely a pretext, and that the real point he’s trying to prove is actually quite simple: “I’m better than you.”

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What’s fascinating (and wonderful) to see today is how the changing marketplace means that the actual content creators are in control. This doesn’t mean the death of middlemen — not by a long shot. There’s still a huge role for middlemen to play — but it’s as enablers, not gatekeepers. In a world with enablers, the content creators are still the ones in control. The middlemen become supporting players. This is why I always find it funny when those who support the old system claim that they’re the ones “helping” creative types. But that’s clearly not the case. What they’re helping are the gatekeeper middlemen, who have done everything possible to pressure content creators into bad deals because they had no other choice. These days, thanks to the wider choices enabled by the internet, content creators are able to restack the pyramid and put themselves in control, with middlemen actually helping, rather than capturing all of the value.

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The researchers discovered three or possibly four versions of Stuxnet. The first was completed just 12 hours before the first successful infection in June 2009. They guess that it was the result of an malware-tainted email that was opened, or a booby-trapped USB device that was connected to a computer.

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One question that has come up a number of times is what kind of business entity would be best for superhero organizations like the Avengers or the Justice League.

Yeah, that’s been on my mind a lot lately….

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My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Cringely reads the tea leaves.

That’s why Nokia did the deal with Microsoft, which will be assuming the burden of all that software development and paying Nokia for the privilege. It’s a short-term play that makes perfect sense in an industry where CEOs last an average of four years. Stephen Elop’s four years are now fairly certain, his golden parachute packed and ready.

When watching the clip of Elop and Steve Ballmer appearing together on stage, I kept waiting for Ballmer to pat Elop on the head and say ‘Good dog! Good dog!’

(Does Steve Ballmer look like Uncle Fester, or is it just me?)

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Useful advice.

Robert Samuelson takes the government to the woodshed.

There’s something wildly irresponsible about the national government’s undermining states’ already poor long-term budget prospects by plying them with grants that provide short-term jobs. Worse, the high-speed rail proposal casts doubt on the administration’s commitment to reducing huge budget deficits (its 2012 budget is due Monday). How can it subdue deficits if it keeps proposing big new spending programs?

Despite the subsidies, Amtrak does not provide low-cost transportation. Longtime critic Randal O’Toole of the Cato Institute recently planned a trip from Washington to New York. Noting that fares on Amtrak’s high-speed Acela start at $139 one-way, he decided to take a private bus service. The roundtrip fare: $21.50. Nor does Amtrak do much to relieve congestion, cut oil use, reduce pollution or eliminate greenhouse gases. Its traffic volumes are simply too small to matter.

The reasons why passenger rail service doesn’t work in America are well-known: Interstate highways shorten many trip times; suburbanization has fragmented destination points; air travel is quicker and more flexible for long distances (if fewer people fly from Denver to Los Angeles and more go to Houston, flight schedules simply adjust). Against history and logic is the imagery of high-speed rail as “green” and a cutting-edge technology.

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‘Oh, wait, you mean they were serious!? SHIT!’

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If you grew up thinking there were nine planets and were shocked when Pluto was demoted five years ago, get ready for another surprise. There may be nine after all, and Jupiter may not be the largest.

The hunt is on for a gas giant up to four times the mass of Jupiter thought to be lurking in the outer Oort Cloud, the most remote region of the solar system. The orbit of Tyche (pronounced ty-kee), would be 15,000 times farther from the Sun than the Earth’s, and 375 times farther than Pluto’s, which is why it hasn’t been seen so far.

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Well, we can hope.

FILTON, just outside Bristol, is where Britain’s fleet of Concorde supersonic airliners was built. In a building near a wind tunnel on the same sprawling site, something even more remarkable is being created. Little by little a machine is “printing” a complex titanium landing-gear bracket, about the size of a shoe, which normally would have to be laboriously hewn from a solid block of metal. Brackets are only the beginning. The researchers at Filton have a much bigger ambition: to print the entire wing of an airliner.

Far-fetched as this may seem, many other people are using three-dimensional printing technology to create similarly remarkable things. These include medical implants, jewellery, football boots designed for individual feet, lampshades, racing-car parts, solid-state batteries and customised mobile phones. Some are even making mechanical devices. At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Peter Schmitt, a PhD student, has been printing something that resembles the workings of a grandfather clock. It took him a few attempts to get right, but eventually he removed the plastic clock from a 3D printer, hung it on the wall and pulled down the counterweight. It started ticking.

Power Line does some fisking.

Obama made his mark on the NEH with the appointment of Republican former Rep. Jim Leach to serve as its chairman for a four-year term. Or should that be former Republican Rep. Jim Leach? Having been defeated for reelection to the House in 2006, Leach abandoned his party and endorsed Obama in a speech at the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. For his service to Obama, Leach must have had dreams of office higher than the chairmanship of the NEH — his name was floated as the possible United States Ambassador to the United Nations — but the NEH is what he got. Leach was sworn in as chairman on August 13, 2009.

Hey, 30 years as a Congressman makes it hard to say no when the price is right.

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This touches on the essential interface between the state and the individual.

To what extend is reproduction a ‘basic human right’? And to what extent does ‘society’, that complex next of relationships that allow human beings to live together advantageously, have a legitimate interest in regulating reproduction?

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Of course. Souls don’t come cheap, even these days.

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Presumably it won’t make you slip on the ice and fall 1300 feet to your death.

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Sarah Lacy is one of the better tech journalists around. This is somewhat long but condenses a lot of interesting information about what’s going on in tech in recent times.

But before we get to the specifics of the Facebook mafia, it bears noting that not all companies produce bona fide mafias. It’s more than just alums doing well. A true “mafia” is a collection of co-founders, early hires and top engineers who’ve been battle-tested together with an enthusiasm and financial resources to start many different ventures immediately. There’s also a communal sense of co-investing in and supporting one another, hence the idea of keeping it “in the family.” While plenty of smart entrepreneurs and angel investors came from or filtered through Google, Yahoo, eBay, Amazon and Microsoft, those gargantuan successes didn’t really create a mafia that catalyzed at a certain moment of time, resulting in an cluster of cool new stuff.

In fact, few big successful, lasting companies spin out mafias, because those companies grow to such a large size that the unique DNA of the culture gets watered down. And for financial reasons, insiders used to be tethered to the company until after its IPO. By then, they’d missed being in the middle of the next big startup wave. Instead mafias tend to fall out of companies that didn’t go as far as they could have. It creates a frustrated sense of still having something to accomplish, or as Peter Thiel said about the PayPal mafia, “You had a lot of smart, competitive people who all needed something to do.”

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As cell phones have spread, so have large cell towers — those unsightly stalks of steel topped by transmitters and other electronics that have sprouted across the country over the past decade.

The wireless industry is now planning a future without them, or at least without many more of them. Instead, it’s looking at much smaller antennas, some tiny enough to hold in a hand. These could be placed on lampposts, utility poles and buildings — virtually anywhere that has electrical and network connections.

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Too bad it’s in one of the lounge areas of the Titanic.

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THE industrial revolution of the late 18th century made possible the mass production of goods, thereby creating economies of scale which changed the economy—and society—in ways that nobody could have imagined at the time. Now a new manufacturing technology has emerged which does the opposite. Three-dimensional printing makes it as cheap to create single items as it is to produce thousands and thus undermines economies of scale. It may have as profound an impact on the world as the coming of the factory did.

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There is no theoretical or factual argument for income redistribution that cannot be met by a superior theoretical or factual argument against it. In the end, the case for (somehow) reducing income inequality turns on an emotional appeal for “social justice,” that is, for reshaping the world in a way that pleases the pleader. As if the pleader — in his or her pure, misguided arrogance — has superior wisdom about how the world should be shaped.

In fact, “social justice” usually (but not always) is code for redistributing income, either directly (through the taxing and spending power of government) or indirectly (through the power of government to require favoritism toward certain groups of persons). Make no mistake, there is no justice in “social justice.” True justice consists of two things, and only two things: the enforcement of voluntary, mutual obligations; the punishment of wrongdoing.

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In Amazon’s bid to cement its reputation as the premier eReader authority, Jeff Bezos and his cohorts may have just hit the kind of home run that turns noncommittal sideline spectators into bona fide devotees. I’m talking about all the people who, to this point, have watched the explosion in popularity of eReaders with the cold disinterest that audiophile record collectors have for mp3 players. I’m talking about people like me, who have been waiting for something to really sell them on the notion that eBooks might be worth their while.

Amazon’s free Kindle apps do that. And its development is a cunning move that suggests Amazon is not in the Kindle hardware biz, but in the eBook game.

When I was a young man I would shop for pants based on whether the back pockets were big enough to hold a substantial paperback. I carried a book with me everywhere I went. Now, however, these are no longer considerations: Every pair of pants has a pocket big enough for my Droid X, which has the Kindle and Nook and Aldiko apps on it. So I always have a ton of books with me.

When the Kindle first came out, I got one for my wife, and she loved it, but I couldn’t see getting one for myself. Hundreds of dollars for a device that wouldn’t fit in a pocket and only did one thing? Couldn’t see it. Then Amazon came out with its free Kindle apps. I now have a Kindle app on my Mac, on my PC, and on my phone. They work really really well for reading — unlike some people, I have no problem reading for long stretches on a computer screen — and the PC and Macintosh apps will accept e-books in the correct format even when I didn’t get them through Amazon.

I used to buy a lot of fiction through Amazon, but no more. Let’s see: hardback for $16, or paperback for $8, and wait until the UPS guy shows up — and then figure out where to put it amongs the 4,000 books my wife and I already have … or give it to the library, which means I no longer have it available if I want to read it again. Or $5 for the Kindle version, which is available immediately and forever on whatever device I happen to have available at the time, and no worry about where to store them. Not a hard choice.

I can see a circumstance under which I would buy actual paper books: Big ones with pictures and charts, or reproductions of old-time works, or something like that. But regular fiction/nonfiction books? Nope, e-books for me from now on.

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Some days it doesn’t even pay to get up in the morning.

Robert Samuelson speaks truth to power.

We are deluged with Ronald Reagan celebrations and retrospectives, but most are misleading. They omit Reagan’s singular domestic achievement and the wellspring of his popularity: the defeat of double-digit inflation. In 1979 and 1980, inflation averaged 13 percent; by 1984, it was 4 percent — and falling. Without subdued inflation, the economy would have remained a mess and Reagan might have lost his 1984 re-election bid. He certainly wouldn’t have won his 58.5 percent to 40.4 percent landslide.

Without Reagan, Volcker would have failed. But this story confounds the preferred narratives of both liberals and conservatives. The lesson liberals draw (and urge Obama to imitate) is that Reagan’s political success reflected his optimistic presidential stagecraft. It wasn’t policy, it was presentation. Wrong. Reagan earned his success the hard way — by backing policies that, though initially unpopular, served the nation’s long-term interests. That’s called leadership, a quality Obama has yet to demonstrate.

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Probably good advice. They sound pretty mean.

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It would appear that both the Director of National Intelligence and the Director of Central Intelligence are dumber than rocks — not to mention obviously incompetent.

It’s just another fine day in the Obamanation.

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Well, they’re from Harvard, so I’ll want independent confirmation.

Steve Sailer does Hollywood.

That’s pretty funny when you think about it: a major player in Hollywood is a Scientologist for his entire career, but he finally rebels because … one Scientologist staffer in another city signed a petition against gay marriage.

To me, the most interesting thing about Scientology is how it was an outgrowth of the Golden Age of Science Fiction. L. Ron Hubbard was a sci-fi writer, the great editor John W. Campbell heavily promoted his Dianetics (which was originally intended not as a religion but as an equally plausible and cheaper competitor for Freudianism), and Hubbard’s pal Robert A. Heinlein supposedly gave him the idea that you could get rich starting your own religion.

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I’ve decided that all of this child pornography hysteria has nothing to do with protecting teenaged girls who willingly take their clothes off for online and mobile phone audiences from damaged self esteem.  I’ve decided that all of this child pornography hysteria has to do with protecting the egos of old feminist battleaxes so past their prime that their wrinkled ugly faces and fat distorted bodies pale so greatly in comparison that no man with a penis would ever choose her over a ripe teenage girl at the peak of her beauty.

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The federal Department of Education would categorize Michelle López-Mullins — a university student who is of Peruvian, Chinese, Irish, Shawnee and Cherokee descent — as “Hispanic.” But the National Center for Health Statistics, the government agency that tracks data on births and deaths, would pronounce her “Asian.” And what does Ms. López-Mullins’s birth certificate from the State of Maryland say? It doesn’t mention her race.

Ms. López-Mullins, 20, usually marks “other” on surveys these days, but when she filled out a census form last year, she chose Asian, Hispanic, Native American and white.

But its really, really important, you see….

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Police launched a full-scale search for the leopard following Tuesday’s attack, which happened near the town of Brits in South Africa’s North West province.

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SkyNet, here we come….

Arnold Kling looks at how things are shifting around.

Consider the following hypotheses.

1. The Great Depression and World War II ended the last vestiges of the Jeffersonian agricultural economy in America. The yeoman farmer disappears.

2. The current recession is accelerating a transition away from the industrial era in which efficiency requires ever-increasing scale along with tight worker discipline. The robotic human worker disappears.

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A teenager girl collapsed and died from sudden adult death syndrome (SADS) minutes after she was kissed her for the first time, an inquest has heard.

‘Sudden Adult Death Syndrome’? WTF? Can’t they just say ‘She died, and we can’t figure out why’?

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US security officials are reportedly worried that a new generation of drug-smuggling submarines – able, unlike their predecessor semi-submersibles, to travel completely submerged beneath the waves – might be used to carry out terrorist operations.

The Texan paper also quotes Laurence McCabe, a professor at the US Naval War College, as stating that the appearance of true submarines in criminal hands is causing much concern in military and security circles.

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Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size? (The “slow food” movement that we keep hearing about has fewer than 20,000 members nationwide.)

The Roman historian Livy famously regarded the glorification of chefs as the sign of a culture in decline. I wonder what he would have thought of The New York Times’ efforts to admit “young idols with cleavers” into America’s pantheon of food-service heroes.

Naturally the food-obsessed profess as much respect for tradition as for evolution. Hamilton, in Blood, Bones and Butter, writes of her childhood dinners: “The meal was always organized correctly, traditionally, which I now appreciate.” Even relatively young traditions like the Thanksgiving turkey must be guarded zealously against efforts to change or opt out of them. Foreign traditions destigmatize every dish even for the American. In Best Food Writing 2010, one foie gras lover asks another whether he would eat tortured cat if there were sufficient Mongolian history behind the dish; the answer is yes.

I am not making this up.

Steve Sailer finally gets on the bus.

What I’m reminded of is that fairly similar stuff happens in Mexico regularly without the U.S. press paying much attention at all.

All these years, I’ve been trying to pay attention to Mexico when everybody else is obsessing over the Middle East. After all, I reasoned, Mexico is right next door to us, while the Middle East isn’t. Plus, you gotta admit this Mexican stuff can be pretty colorful. How about the growing cults of Jesus Malverde, the narco saint, and Santa Muerte?

On the other hand, how much of this Mexican history has turned out to be all that important? Mexico seems to keep on being Mexico, just with more Wal-Marts and more chopped heads. Maybe the American press was right to pay little attention to Mexico. On the other hand, how much of this Middle East stuff that preoccupies them turns out to matter much either?

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The parents of a dead Israeli man have launched a legal action in the hope that a court will let them use his frozen sperm so that they can have a grandchild.

I can’t see how anybody could have a problem with this.

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An Australian teenager has died after he fell from a multi-storey car park while typing a text message.

19-year-old Ryan Robbins escorted a couple of women to their car late last Friday, in Melbourne. After they parted ways, Ryan began texting a friend, while walking.

He did not notice the railing – about waist-high – and tripped over, plunging to his death. Ryan had been drinking but was not drunk, according to his grandmother Patricia Schroeter.

Think of it as evolution in action. And, of course

In an interview with the radio station 3AW, she blamed inadequate safety measures at the car park for Ryan’s death and called for taller barriers to be mandatory.

“I don’t want anyone else to lose their children or… to go like this, not if it can be prevented,” she said.

Teaching the kid to be NOT QUITE SO CLUELESS is apparently off the table.

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James Hobbs was attacked in Highbridge on 15 January after he popped out to Tasty Bitez for some meaty goodness. He suffered a deep cut across the throat, but “held the wrapped £3.40 takeaway to his neck for several minutes” until his cousin could provide a towel to stem the flow of blood.

Be prepared.