I recently saw the new documentary Shouting Fire: Stories from the Edge of Free Speech. The film is about the First Amendment and free speech in the United States. More specifically, it's about the perceived endangerment of free speech in the US. There is a clearly political tone to the piece: it's makers seem staunchly in favour of the First Amendment as an inviolate tenet of American life, to be sacrificed for no one and nothing.

Just as John Mackey's statements about health care reform in the Wall Street Journal caused a firestorm of criticism that sparked what I consider to be a misguided boycott of Whole Foods by many on the left (see my blog posts here and here), now the right has caused the resignation of Van Jones as a green jobs advisor to President Obama " a terrible loss instigated by what I consider irrelevant and misguided reasons.

From Martin Wolf's analysis in Financial Times. It would take little for banks to have hands free again. What emerges from the crisis is a system even worse than the one who had caused it. The bank rescue lets the banks free hand to remake the same mistakes.

My daughter spent 4 1/2 months living with her father this last winter and spring. In our house, she did not watch television and movies were limited. At his house, she was given a television in her room. The differences since she spent those four months watching the stupid box are enormous.

Like any other industry, pharmaceutical companies are continually chasing profits. In recent years, companies like Pfizer have grown fat off of cardiovascular drugs such as Lipitor (used for lowering cholesterol). However, it seems there's a shift in Big Pharma's business model. It seems nearly all the major players are jumping on the cancer bandwagon, and ramping efforts in the realm of cancer research.

A couple months ago, the FDA approved Avastin for use in treating brain cancer. The new approval is just the latest in a growing number of applications for the drug. First approved in 2004 to fight colorectal cancer, Avastin is now considered an avenue of treatment for lung, breast and other forms of cancer. However, the effectiveness of Avastin is highly variable on a case-by-case basis.

We generally take for granted that owners have the power to exclude non-owners from their land. But at one time in the United States,unenclosed and undeveloped land was open to the public for the purpose of hunting, gathering kindling and berries, and walking. Eric Freyfogle, The Lost Right to Roam, in On Private Property: Finding Common Ground on the Ownership of Land 29 (2007). Today, about half the states still allow hunting on private land unless the owner has posted "no trespassing" signs.

Today, Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, gave a widely-awaited speech on the subject of Net Neutrality. He pointed out (correctly, in my view) that much of the success of the Internet, including its success in areas undreamed-of by its founders, is in large part due to its open standards and architecture.

Spain has passed from rating 'AAA' to rating 'AA', after Standard & Poor's, the 1st international rating agency (IRA), lowered its assessment of long-term debt; so she did with Greece, Ireland and Portugal. This is the first time that the S&P financial rating drops for Spain in 30 years.

This month I'm conducting some research into web hosting security issues and ran into the aftermath of the German law passed in 2007 banning security research publication. The policy has had the effect of silencing security researchers from that country. While investigating issues in PHP security I came upon the Month of PHP Bugs website and when I attempted to download a proof of concept to illustrate what type of security issues PHP had back in 2007 I got an explanation from security researcher Stefan Esser explaining why he no longer feels comfortable publishing results to the Internet.

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