Kodak and Sony End Patent Fight.
NEW YORK - Eastman Kodak Co. on Wednesday said it signed a licensing pact with Sony Corp. that settles a dispute over digital camera and imaging technology patents, and grants each company access to the other’s patents.
Wow—they cross-licensed each others’ patents to each others, after millions spent acquiring the patents and suing each other! What a boon for the economy! (Where “economy” means “lawyers,” of course.)
I thought bashing great chain bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders went out of style about ten years ago, yet here is the New York Times today with a piece lamenting the not-very-newsworthy death of a 26-year-old independent bookstore, Micawber Books in Princeton, New Jersey.
Daniel Kahneman (the psychologist who won the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2002) and Jonathan Renshon try to explain why those who are more willing to favor military action and coercive force succeed in tipping the scales in international affairs:
The founders of social movements and schools of thought often try to distance themselves from their followers. (Or their later interpreters do this for them). Thus one can ask if Freud was a Freudian, Ricardo a Ricardian, Walras a Walrasian, Keynes a Keynesian (chapter 5 Keynesian? chapter 12 Keynesian?), and so on.
Web junkies have become accustom to the idea that anything Google does is glorious, so it has come as something of a shock to realize that the its takeover of Blogger has been, well, not going well. In fact, for many people, the conversion has been a calamity.
This is a fascinating review of Rothbard’s economic treatise, by Henry Hazlitt, published in National Review, September 25, 1962. He loves the book, of course, but introduces criticisms toward the end, particularly pertaining to the Rothbardian perspective on repudiating government debt, the legalization of blackmail, and the strict distinction between patents and copyrights.
Brad Setser at RGE Monitor provide this commentary on the management of foreign dollar holdings. Setser cites several sources on the accumulation by governments around the world — mostly of oil exporting nations — of large dollar-denominated funds.
Below are the headlines of four obituaries that have run in The New York Times. The first is that of the recent obituary of the Anti-Communist Augusto Pinochet. The next three are those of the obituaries of the Communist mass murderers Mao, Stalin, and Lenin. Please be sure to note how many are described as having ruled by terror.
[This article was published in in The Irrepressible Rothbard, available in the Mises Store.]
Upon the collapse of centralizing totalitarian Communism in Eastern Europe and even the Soviet Union, long suppressed ethnic and nationality questions and conflicts have come rapidly to the fore. The crack-up of central control has revealed the hidden but still vibrant “deep structures” of ethnicity and nationality.
