While the ruthless corporate CEO as villain is pretty much a stock character in modern pop culture, superhero comics have always conspicuously placed successful businessmen on both sides of the hero/villain divide. Yet an interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, pattern recently occurred to me. Just off the top of my head, here are some of the […]
CEOs in Comics: Villains Earn, Heroes Inherit
September 21st, 2011 · 66 Comments
Tags: Art & Culture
Ronald Dworkin: Heartless Libertarian?
September 21st, 2011 · 25 Comments
Ronald Dworkin is probably the most prominent living liberal political philosopher in the United States. Unsurprisingly, he favors a national system of universal healthcare. But at a philosophical level, Dworkin also very clearly holds exactly the same position a lot of viewers seem to regard as not simply wrong, but self evidently monstrous when it […]
Tags: Moral Philosophy
Why Yahoo’s “Occupy Wall Street” Block Actually Matters
September 20th, 2011 · 2 Comments
Yahoo found itself at the focus of some brief fuss today, after their e-mail service’s spam and malware filters started blocking many emails that contained the phrase “Occupy Wall Street” or linking OccupyWallStreet.org in connection with an ongoing protest that had attracted some 3,000–5,000 people over the weekend, with a few hundred die-hards remaining on […]
Tags: Tech and Tech Policy
Living High and Letting Die
September 19th, 2011 · 16 Comments
I’ve seen plenty of outraged online discussion over past week concerning this exchange—and especially the audience reaction to it—from the recent Tea Party debate: “A healthy, 30-year-old young man has a good job, makes a good living, but decides: You know what? I’m not going to spend 200 or 300 dollars a month for health […]
Tags: Moral Philosophy
He’s My Favorite Fictional Character!
September 19th, 2011 · 30 Comments
As a young boy, I was an avid reader of a series of biographical picture books called ValueTales, which illustrated such virtues as confidence, kindness, and imagination through lightly fictionalized accounts of the lives of historical worthies ranging from Confucius to Louis Pasteur and Harriet Tubman. At the same time, I was enamored of ancient […]
Tags: Art & Culture · Religion
Quick Thought on the Netflix Split
September 19th, 2011 · 9 Comments
As the Internet scratches its Hydra-head over Netflix’s announcement that it’s splitting off its DVD-by-mail rental service under the unlovely heading of “Qwikster,” Tim Lee tweets that Bill Gurley’s speculation is the most plausible explanation he’s seen for a move consumers seem to be universally panning: So here is what I think happened with Netflix’s […]
Tags: Art & Culture · Economics
Wiretap Law Online: A Second Look at Paxfire
September 14th, 2011 · 2 Comments
A few days ago, Ars Technica asked me to comment on a class action lawsuit against Paxfire, a company that partners with Internet Service Providers for the purpose of “monetizing Address Bar Search and DNS Error traffic.” The second half of that basically means fixing URL typos, so when you accidentally tell your ISP you […]
Tags: Privacy and Surveillance · Tech and Tech Policy
Public Opinion and Presumption
September 12th, 2011 · 6 Comments
Gallup reports a record high number of respondents telling pollsters they “approve” of marriages between blacks and whites. In one sense, this is obviously great news, but something about the question itself bothered me. In part, it was that the framing still embeds the assumption that “marriages between blacks and whites,” a term that encompasses […]
Tags: Horse Race Politics · Journalism & the Media
What Do Infringement/Theft Analogies Really Illustrate?
August 18th, 2011 · 14 Comments
Mike Masnick finds another MPAA flack in high dudgeon in response to the simple factual observation that, especially a rough economy, studios and networks risk audience flight to BitTorrent if they don’t make their own digital offerings more consumer-friendly: In other words: movie and TV theft is inevitable. Why? Because it’s easy to steal something […]
Tags: Tech and Tech Policy
When Are Patents Obvious?
August 15th, 2011 · 19 Comments
I recently did a diavlog with my friend Tim Lee on the new BloggingHeads spinoff site TechHeads, during which I had a thought that seems like it might be worth spinning out. We’re all accustomed to seeing horror stories about ludicrously broad, bad technology patents that have given rise to a wasteful arms race between […]
Tags: Economics · Law · Tech and Tech Policy