Students at have put together a fun experiment. They’ve calculated just how much it would cost to build a Death Star from Star Wars. The steel alone, they estimate, would cost at “2012 prices, about $852,000,000,000,000,000. Or roughly 13,000 times the world’s GDP.” Kevin Drum says this is a bargain – for the Galactic Empire: […]
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Matt Yglesias makes a smart point: [I]f you take the long view of world history you’ll see that the question that needs explaining isn’t “why is so much stuff happening in Asia” but rather “why is so little stuff happening in Asia.” For most of human history, Asia is where all the action is since […]
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Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) showed up at in to issue a stark warning: we’re running out of time to stop legislation aimed at cracking down on copyright infringement. That legislation – the Stop Online Piracy Act in the House and the Protect IP Act in the Senate – is intended to […]
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House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, right, and Senate Judiciary Committee Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. are the men behind the latest attempt to stamp down on piracy – and free speech – online. The Stop Online Piracy Act and its counterpart in the Senate, the Protect IP Act, represent the greatest threat to […]
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Rumors of an Apple TV set have been floating about the internet for a long time, but it looks like eager fans can expect full-blown Apple television sets should hit shelves in third or fourth quarter 2012 according to PCMag.com: In the doldrums between rumor-mongering about Apple’s iPhones and iPads, speculation about the company’s plans […]
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Two bills aim to lock down the internet with a host of new government censorship powers. Two bills are moving through the Senate and the House at the moment, aimed at creating a host of new controls and regulations over the internet, and threatening to change the way everybody does business and interacts online. SOPA, […]
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You can pay $40 a month for 1.5Mbps “high-speed” internet from a provider like or, if you’re lucky, you can be part of Sonic.net’s 700-home roll-out of fiber lines that pump internet into your home 600 times that fast for less than twice the cost. At $69.99 the plan is less than a third of […]
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Matt Yglesias points out that Apple has a patent on this: Now, this is pretty silly. In the world of software, this is like getting a patent on a doorknob. Sure, a doorknob is a very clever thing. In fact, doorknobs make doors far more useful – without them, we might not even want doors […]
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