[The Working Title Blog]

Reading Wired's recent interview with tech mogul Tim O'Reilly and he makes a couple of important points about innovation, growth, and the patent/copyright system in the tech industry. Excerpt: TIM O'REILLY : Everybody wants to foster entrepreneurship, but we have to think about the preconditions for entrepreneurship. You grow great crops in great soil. And the soil is the commons. Increasingly, we have monopolistic companies that try to take as much as they can for themselves. And we have a patent and copyright regime that makes sure nothing goes back into the commons unless by an extraordinary act of generosity. This is not fertile soil for innovation. [...] Pursing this path is not only altruistic. If companies don't think systemically enough--if they try to capture too much of the value--eventually innovation moves somewhere else. WIRED : If you could pick a company that needs to hear this, which would it be? TIM : Apple. They are clearly on the wrong path

As a hunter myself, I feel like I want to support the NRA... at least in principle. In practice, however, I find myself less and less able to do so. I'm generally and morally opposed to the methods, media spin, and propaganda tactics they have begun to employ (or maybe they always have, I just was too young and/or naive to see it for what it was?). They should represent responsible and practical ownership of firearms, not an off-shoot or subset of the Republican Party. I think nearly everyone would agree that there are simply some people in our society that we do *not* want, nor should be allowed to, own firearms... people with a history of violent behavior, for example. It's out societal responsibility to keep firearms out of criminals' hands and keep them in the hands of responsible citizens. Yet any reasonable attempt to do so is met with outrage and fury by the NRA, heralded as the first step in abolishing our rights to firearms. "They want us to WAIT 1