According to a new friend in the Australian foreign service who's studying Arabic here, those in the American foreign service caught purchasing or downloading pirated content lose their job. If they murder, extort, or otherwise harm someone, however, they do not necessarily lose their job. Oh, the power of lobbies.

--Ari

Interesting post on the downsides of Vista content protection. It was a surprising idea at first, but on second thought it's not entirely unpredictable that changing people's screen content is not a good idea.... Just for the record, I've volunteered for MRI studies where they were playing music on the Windows machine which ran the MRI.

A Stiglitz rant against patents. Nothing new here, but it's good he's writing about it.

--Ari