Ask anyone who works in the tech world about the patent system and, unless they work for a patent troll, the response is likely to be vile. The system is so broken that developers and engineers can't build anything without risking tripping across someone else's patents; large companies keep patent infringement suits at bay with a "mutually assured destruction" strategy of grabbing as many patents as they can, and agreeing (formally or informally) not to sue others for infringement unless they are sued first. It's a bizarre and twisted system, and quite a few people (myself included) would like to see it abolished entirely. But that seems a fairly radical point of view.

Remember how totally absent George W. Bush was from the Republican convention? It was clear that the GOP realized he was unpopular, and flushed him down the memory hole to avoid tainting the image they wanted to build of Romney.

The problem is, W is less unpopular than Romney. Trail Blazers Blog reports:

PC Pro blogs about what may be the worst typo ever:

According to The Sydney Morning Herald, "Declassified US Air Force counter-intelligence documents, released under US freedom-of-information laws, reveal that military personnel who contact WikiLeaks or WikiLeaks supporters may be at risk of being charged with "communicating with the enemy", a military crime that carries a maximum sentence of death."

Since I support WikiLeaks, military folks should probably stay away from me...

The US military has designated Julian Assange and WikiLeaks as enemies of the United States - the same legal category as the al-Qaeda terrorist network and the Taliban insurgency.

From the "advertising is a form of mind control" department: Logos 'brand' youthful minds

A generation of young people is growing up with the logos of fast-food companies "branded" on their brains. Scientists say scans of children show the pleasure and appetite centres of their brains light up when they are shown advertising images such as the McDonald's logo.

...

The study, conducted at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and the University of Kansas Medical Center, selected 120 popular food and non-food brands, including McDonald's and Rice Krispies, and BMW and FedEx. They used a type of MRI scanner – functional magnetic resonance imaging – which homes in on changes in blood flow: when areas of the brain become more active, blood flow increases.

Scans were carried out on children aged 10 to 14 as they were exposed to 60 food and 60 non-food logos. The results showed the food logos triggered increased activity in areas of the brain known to be involved in reward processing and in driving and controlling appetite.

At the NYT, Joe Nocera looks at how the mythology around the investment class and low capital gains taxes have contributed to the economic inequality that threatens our nation.

Romney and the Forbes 400

In the last year alone, the cumulative net worth of the wealthiest 400 people, by Forbes’s calculation, rose by $200 billion. That compares with a 4 percent drop in median household income last year, according to the Census Bureau. One would be hard pressed to find a clearer example of how powerfully income inequality has taken root.

...

In the printed copy of his Congressional testimony, Burman has a chart that plots the ups and downs of the economy since the 1950s with changes in the capital gains rate. There is no correlation between the two. The idea that a lower capital gains rate spurs economic growth is one of the enduring myths of conservative thought.

The American dream exists not because of the capital gains differential but in spite of it. It is the tax break that most glaringly exists to benefit the wealthy. If you have any doubts about that, all you need to do is read the latest Forbes 400.

CNN reports that Facebook has teamed up with Datalogix, a company that specializes in spying on you via "customer loyalty" programs. Datalogix monitors the purchasing habits of about 70 million American at more than 1,000 retailers.

Matching e-mail addresses or other data on "customer loyalty" programs with the info on your Facebook account, Facebook and Datalogix will be able to see whether you buy the crap that Facebook advertizes to you, and thereby work toward greater control of your purchasing behavior.

The solution to this sort of privacy invasion: Adblock Plus, Ghostery, and don't sign up for "loyalty" programs. (And pay cash when practical for purchases at brick-and-mortar stores, certainly for anything remotely interesting.)

Glenn Harlan Reynolds, professor of law at the University of Tennessee, discusses Jill Stein's campaign in USA TODAY (all caps seems to be their preferred orthography).

Meet Jill Stein

Even Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson— in no danger of overexposure — is drawing much more press attention than she is. Stein puts that down to fear that if she got more attention, her candidacy would pull votes from the clear favorite in the race for many in the press, President Obama. She disagrees.

"Ninety million eligible voters are expected to stay home because they don't want to vote for either Obama or Romney," she observes. "Americans are chomping at the bit for more choices. Don't they deserve more choices?"

Stein says the anti-third-party effort is "mostly an effort to silence political opposition," by the Republicans and Democrats. "The mythology is essentially a fear campaign designed to drive people back into the establishment fold. This politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of: A President who will attack our civil liberties, launch war overseas, limit immigration? What have we gotten with Obama? War, drone attacks, troops (even) in central Africa. Obama has deported more immigrants in three years than Bush did in eight. The politics of fear has delivered everything we were afraid of."

When the story about this wretched film Innocence of Muslims first broke, I wondered how anyone had managed to get together enough people who were nuts enough to participate in making such dreck and yet sane enough to run cameras, learn lines of dialogue, build sets, refrain from drooling, and all the other things that go into even the lowest-budget Grade Z film. I played leading roles in the no-budget amateur films Mega Rat and Dick's Last Shoot, so I know firsthand that making even the worst film takes at least enough brain cells that I would expect someone to be immune to such crude bigotry.

Thanks to Neil Gaiman relaying the story of actress Anna Gurji, we now know what happened: the cast and crew made a different movie, which was then dubbed. It's quite a story.