“R Street is a free-market think tank with a pragmatic approach to public policy challenges.”         — R Street About Page — If one is going to comment on public policy, then one ought to make an effort a) to understand the nature of a given topic; and b) to present facts instead of fiction.  In this ...

Embed from Getty Images I recently watched a documentary on Netflix called The Secret Rules of Modern Living: Algorithms, hosted by mathematician Marcus du Sautoy, and I would recommend this user-friendly guide for anyone who, like me, has basically sucked at math their whole lives.  In one segment, du Sautoy describes how a matching algorithm pairs compatible donor sets with ...

Remember when Barack Obama first entered the White House, and he made a deal with the Secret Service to keep his Blackberry?  Admitting to his addiction to the device, the president got the agents to create a secure Blackberry that he could use while in office; and to those of us who were fans of the new president, this seemed ...

FCC Chairman Wheeler has endorsed a proposal, generally referred to as AllVid, to allow third parties to sell subscriptions to television viewing through devices other than the set-top boxes rented from the cable or satelite companies.   While that may sound good for consumers and competition—and the chairman has certainly made a lot of noise about the amount we supposedly ...

Photo by author. This week the Supreme Court declined to consider the Authors Guild v Google case, which lets stand the Second Circuit Court ruling that Google’s use of scanned published works for its search tool Google Books constitutes a fair use.  Various pundits and advocates have hailed this as a victory for the fair use principle.  In fact, I ...