At the urgent request of the Pentagon, scientists and engineers are rushing to create an artificial arm that works like a flesh-and-blood one for the growing number of soldiers who are losing their limbs in the Iraq war.

This will no doubt have some ignorants saying, "thank God for the Pentagon, now we have prosthetic limbs able to perform fine movements." Not to sound callous, but amputation and paralyzation are not common enough for the market to have decided that much more should be done above what has already been done. The allocation of what will no doubt be an astounding number of millions of dollars in research money could have been spent on something more in demand/efficient.

By the way, the similarity between the argument for government-funded research and the arguments used to show the existence of the free rider problem is impossible to ignore.

In my youth there were these things called LPs, big, ugly and made of vinyl. They (normally) included the song lyrics so that we'd be able to figure out what the hell Bob Dylan was singing. In the digital age more and more of us buy our music via download, whether from Apple, Rhapsody, Napster, or any other internet based content distribution system, those lyric sheets are no longer available. A young software developer saw a need, and tried to meet it. He created a software plug-in for iTunes, called PearLyrics, that would search available internet lyrics databases to bring users the lyrics for their downloaded songs. Simple, no? Indeed, he was not unique, Apple's latest OS has a plug-in architecture called Dashboard, a way of launching applets (called Widgets) quickly, and many developers had created Widgets that served the same purpose. PearLyrics, however, was the most popular.

However, the Music Publishers Association has decided that buying a song doesn't entitle you to know what the hell the singers are saying. Because they've been issuing cease & desist orders to one and all. Now, as these plug-in applications do nothing more than search websites for available data, they could indeed win in court. However, because the people that wrote these mini-applications are all small fries, their resources are not equal to the sort of fight that they would face to defy the MPA. This is the official statement of Pearworks concerning the end of their program, and why. More disturbing still is the hard-on that the MPA seems to have for websites that serve up lyrics, for reference this quote from Lauren Keiser of the MPA sums up the attitude of the armed banditi, ""throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective". Really? Jail time for guessing what singers are singing?

So, next up for the MPA is the closing of internet lyrics sites, and jailing their owners. And the US government will be complicit in jailing its citizens to protect the corporate profits of music publishers. Just as it already jails people to ensure the corporate profits of large software developers, record companies and movie distributors. There isn't even any debate by the denizens of state whether or not lyrics websites actually do impact the corporate profits of music publishers. Have any of you that aren't musicians ever bought a lyrics book for an album? Professional musicians may need accurate lyrics and tablature, but does anyone else? In fact, this whole enterprise looks more like an attempt by corporate America to use government to create new customers by fiat.

An English academic (whose abstract I do not have handy, and if anyone knows his name, please email me) observed that people tolerated copyright because it was not overly oppressive, but that once it became oppressive they would turn against it. Unfortunately that has not been the case, while protest has risen on the anarchist fringe, the progressive fringe, and the academic fringe, there has been no united opposition to the ruthless extension and criminalization of intellectual property laws in the U.S. Like a slow boiled frog Americans simply accept the Sovietization of their society. America, ain't it great to live in the land of the free?

MRE's for sale!

In the aftermath of this year's devastating hurricane season there is, yet another, valuable lesson to be learned.

The lesson: Markets will and do develop in spite of government rationing.

Just as markets developed in the former Soviet Union amongst individuals who traded the goods they were rationed for the goods they preferred, so also, markets have been formed for buying and selling the goods that have been rationed, by the state, to this year's hurricane victims. Big surprise.

Markets can’t be stopped. Furthermore, as is beautifully demonstrated in the case of the eBay MRE’s, modern technology makes it that much easier to circumvent the state and for markets to thrive.

Four news stories have recently caught my attention.

-Wherein Google is planning to blanket the globe in free wireless Internet access
-Wherein MIT built a $100 laptop
-Wherein the Pentagon sponsored a race between unmanned robotic vehicles
-And now, something to replace the lightbulb a hundred times over

Now what do these stories all have in common? Answer: mass shortsightedness, particularly on the part of the state.

Right now, people pay money, somewhere in the double digits, for the privilege of access to the proto-Matrix we currently refer to as the Internet -- that herald of the post-post-modern era destined to replace the television, gouge Hollywood, and put the Playboy Mansion on the auction block. In its decade-long reign over information exchange, it has arguably boosted global affluence, challenged more economic assumptions, enabled more agoraphobia, and supplemented more intimacy than the automobile, China, Domino's Pizza, and the detachable showerhead combined. And through it all, you and I, when we weren't warchalking back in 2003, have been paying for it.

Now imagine it's free. Starting with San Francisco, Google wants everyone in the world to have Internet access. This, of course, will make every personal digital assistant a free-unlimited-calling cellphone; every Starbuck's a hotspot; every house a hub. And it might happen earlier than the other service providers would prefer (which I guess means "before all the shareholders' grandchildren are dead").

That will be the real information revolution. Of course, it would be much more so if the poor could get in on the action early on. Oh, hello, what's this:

MIT has build a $100 wireless-capable laptop. They won't be for sale, at least not in the first three seconds of their distribution: MIT plans to hand them out to underprivileged youth all over the world. If you're anything like me, you believe that the next Einstein, Edison, or Gutenberg is hiding somewhere in the third world (the sheer numbers suggest it) without the resources to transform the world with a better mousetrap. Add $100 laptops and free wireless access to the equation: pornography and innovation carried by the four winds to all corners of the planet!

I've said all that can be said about self-driving cars on the above-linked forum thread. They represent a savings of countless hours of driving, parking, searching for one's lost car, drunk driving costs and injuries, traffic inefficiencies, and I'm sure porn figures into this one too, somewhere.

In the newest world-changing and me-exciting development, grad student Michael Bowers has discovered that the luminating capabilities of LEDs actually trump traditional lightbulbs in every regard, including brightness, longevity, application and cost. They make it seem as though any object can be made into a light source, and I for one am completely mentally prepared to ignore all evidence to the contrary. I'm serious, I am pumped.

Now for the comedy:

For Google's free Wi-fi bid, the government is back to its tired old routine of preemptively regulating an "inevitable" natural monopoly. Not that I'm not tickled by their enthusiasm, but I pine for the days when they expressed their latent Luddism in a more healthy way; though I suppose they don't remember the outcome of the ephemeral "email tax" plot with quite my nostalgia.

For the $100 laptops, the state of Massachusetts wants to buy them in bulk to use in classrooms. This alone isn't so bad, but MIT is likely to extend this strategy into Malnourishtan, selling to state heads rather than the free market, where they'll either be cynically retraded for arms with some other country or effectively ransomed to the middle class.

For the robot car race, the sponsorship says it all: the Department of Defense is interested in purchasing the technology to trick out its Bradley Armored Transports and other such warzone strategery.

Why do I call this comedy? Because what the government wants for technology means less and less every day. Free wifi will happen with or without the government's anti-trust precautions. Those laptops will be on Ebay before sundown. And for every dollar saved in funeral costs by the family of a slaughtered soldier because Robo-car delivered his smoldering remains a day earlier, you and I will save $100 -- quintuple that if you believe time is money.

There may have been a time the pharaohs could control the ramifications of technology; those days probably didn't exist but either way are far behind us. The state is losing influence; it merely doubles in size for every exponential growth spurt brought on by scientific breakthrough. It'll be interesting to see howmuch longer they can keep this up.

And as for the LED story, it' s still quite new, but if anyone comes upon an article about the government's response to the story, I'd love a link. If the Pentagon thinks they can make a bomb out of it, you all owe me a Coke.