Gary Becker and Julio Elias have a paper (PDF) online making the case for allowing a market in live donor kidneys, and calculate that a market price of $15,000/kidney would be enough to clear the organ donation market of the persistent shortage of kidneys. Of course selling organs is illegal in the United States and…
April, 2005
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In two separate articles, James Boyle (Public information wants to be free) and Michael Geist (Keeping an Eye On a Canadian Prize) write about an extremely odd trend — governments “protecting” public information with copyrights. In the United States, of course, almost all information made public by our various government entities is in the public…
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Mark Morgan points out that Archos has released the mother of all handheld devices, the Pocket Media Assistant 400. This thing does it all — and for a whopping $800, it better! The PMA 400 features a 3.6″ LCD screen, a 30 gigabyte hard drive, music record/playing, video capture/playing, PDA functionality via Qtopia (the PMA…
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Lately, I’ve been spending too much time with NASA’s WorldWind 1.3 application. Basically, WorldWind presents a 3D model of the Earth and lets you zoom in to any place on Earth. It accesses any number of satellite photo systems that the users chooses, so its a great tool for navigating various public satellite imagery. Its…
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On the passing of the Pope, National Review’s John Derbyshire laments the general decline of the Catholic church and of Christianity in general in the Western world. Derbyshire blames it all on secular hedonism, Both [conservative and liberal critics of the RCC] surely nkow in their hearts that the real culprit is the irresistible appeal…
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Check out what happened Today in Alternate History.
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Since I’m busy ragging on right wing blogs this morning, might as well point out another — if a bit old — bit of nonsense by John Hinderaker. You might remember Hinderaker as the Powerline blogger who believes that video never lies. That struck me as beyond bizarre at the time — you’d thing conservatives…
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As I noted a couple weeks ago, Powerline helped spread the nonsensical claim that Terri Schiavo had never been given the sort of tests that people would normally be given to determine if they were in a persistent vegetative state. Now, Powerline’s John Hinderaker is simply lying about what his blog said about the controversial…
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For some reason, Instapundit is linking to someone who is flat out falsely charging the New York Times with plagarism. According to blogger Dinocrat (Jack Risko), The New York Times copied an erroneous Wikipedia entry into its news pages today. From the NYT’s article on the Marburg Haemorragic Fever outbreak in Angola: There is no…
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Related to my earlier post about search engines, generally, and Google, specifically, there is of course the wonderfully titled Just Fucking Google It, complete with Bart Simpson offering advice. Which would be made easier, of course, if people have the tools and skills to intelligently search Google. But many of them do not, and the…