Yearly Archives: 2006

Reviews

Measuring the cost of corruption

The World Bank has put together a very informative collection of papers and websites on corruption at this web page. They define corruption as “theft of public resources for private gain”, and they define and evaluate the various costs associated with corruption.

They name two in the summary: one is redistributive, and is incurred when businesses with political power abuse that privilege to get a contract at the expense of their competitors, and the other is a welfare cost, which is to the overall economy, and thus makes everyone worse off.

The papers and websites are all free to access, and the language is surprisingly clear-cut and demonstrative. This is a really good resource, and I encourage you to take advantage of it. Here is the link to it.

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Reviews

Affordable travel

The NYT Travel section has assembled a fantastic collection of articles they’ve called “Affordable Travel”. They’ve got wonderful tips on how to save money when traveling through Europe on all the big cities such as: Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Berlin, Copenhagen, Dublin, Geneva, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan, Oslo, Paris, Prague, Rome and Venice. Here is the link to the collection of articles.

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How To

New clothes washer uses steam and no detergent

Gizmag has the details on a new electric-powered clotheswasher that uses no detergent, only steam. The steam cycle can be used alone, or in combination with the normal hot/warm water cycles. It’s made by LG.

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Thoughts

Congress readies new digital copyright bill

I find this unbelievable, yet Congress seems poised to pass another revision of the DMCA, expanding the reach of this already-controversial bill. It only goes to show the power that special-interest groups have in Washington.

For example, under this new law, if Sony’s rootkit malware were removed by anti-virus software, Sony would have the right to sue those companies! Sounds very silly, doesn’t it!

Just talking about or attempting to bypass copyright protection on anything can land you in jail for up to 10 years! This parallels a French law that their legislature wanted to pass late last year.

I am left to ponder whether lack of forethought and absence of logic have hopped on the back of the bird flu swans and have now infected our politicians… Maybe they’ve been here all along, ever since the 1st version of the DMCA was passed years ago.

Here’s a link to the CNET News article.

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Thoughts

RIAA sues family that doesn't own a PC

This is funny, but in a very sad and surreal sort of way. The RIAA has now filed suit against a family that doesn’t even own a computer. (!) They maintain the family shared songs illegally online, and they even published a list of those songs. I have to wonder how they shared the songs… telepathically, perhaps? Boing Boing has the details on this.

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