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 […]

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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 […]

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The makers of Sesame Street released the following message today, in response to a Facebook petition that had called for Bert and Ernie to finally come out and get married: Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from […]

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Reading Jeremy Waldron’s new paper on torture and “moral absolutes”, the following setup for an action movie that will probably never get made sprang more or less full-formed into my head. The film follows two protagonists: One is a recent recruit to an elite antiterrorism unit (think 24), the other has just stumbled upon (and […]

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So, I’m as big a fan as anyone of the birth control pill, even though I’m an indirect beneficiary of its wonders. And notwithstanding my generally libertarian sympathies, I even think it makes an enormous amount of sense to make subsidized—and in some cases free—contraceptives available to people who genuinely can’t afford them, if only […]

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Andrew Cohen at Bleeding Heart Libertarians kicks off what will apparently be a series of posts on moral objectivity by considering the subjectivist position—the view that whether certain acts are right or wrong depends on the values of a particular person or culture. He takes a position I’ve always leaned toward myself, which is that […]

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