Monday June 30
Ranting for W.
Say it ain't so, Dennis. Miller Emerges as New Voice for Bush Re-Election.
Dennis Miller -- who made the rant an institution on HBO -- doing personal stand-up routines at fundraisers for President Bush? Jean-Paul Sartre once quipped that we all get more conservative as we get older, but this is way over the top. Reuters reports that Miller is "gaining a reputation as a conservative comic by attacking Democrats with biting humor." I loved Miller for his hawkish views on terrorism and the Iraq War, which mirror my own, but the depth of this guy's compassion is measured in millimeters. It's hardly a badge of honor to be an emerging hero to the conservative movement, extolled by the National Review. Of course, that's just his opinion, and he could be wrong!!!
Posted by glenn at Business Methods Run Wild
The U.S. Patent and Trademark office recently granted a patent to NetFlix for their online DVD ordering system. [NYTimes.com]. Now, I am a long-time NetFlix customer, but this indicates there's a real problem in our patent system with the increasing issuance of so-called "business method patents." Tim Hanrahan and Jason Fry write in Real Time for the Wall Street Journal that
Hear, hear!! It was bad enough with Amazon's "one-click" patent, but now we've got insurance patents, order-processing patents and other patents for what are not inventions, but just ideas. Of course ideas are creative and deserve protection, but they should not be patentable. The difference is that copyright and trademark permit others to use creative ideas -- within limits -- to make better works, but patents are exclusive. It's a difference of kind, and a crucial distinction between things that people actually build and things that they just dream of. Dreams are wonderful fantasies, as are business methods patents.