Real geeks hack their tech. And when it comes to cooking, you can buy something that is half as good as what you can build, for twice the price -- as this ridiculous article handily demonstrates. Food hacking (or Modernist Cuisine, if you prefer) is a very big field these days. Want a great steak? Start with sous vide immersion cooking to get the perfect medium rare, then hit it with a flamethrower for the char. Play with your food.

Immersion Cooker (about $100 all-in):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/hopped-up/whole-rig.jpg

Weedburner Charring (about $35 at Harbor Freight):
http://beach.traxel.com/img/sous-vide/weedburner-char.jpg

Here's some more info on building your own meat jacuzzi:
http://qandabe.com/2011/70-diy-sous-vide-universal-controller/

Copyrighted works (well, some of them at least) are not particularly fungible so they do not compete against eachother to any large extent.

Yes, retail price cooperation is illegal, but short term collaboration on prices isn't the driving price factor on monopoly goods. For the pricing curve It doesn't really matter if they sit in the same room or not; they'll see the same demand curve and decide on similar revenue maximization points over the longer term, and you'll still get the same rising price until demand fails (through falling disposable income, lack of interest or time, etc).

For a real in-your-face example, note Sony's action on Whitney Houstons death. An expected increase in demand leads to practically real-time raising of prices. The players in the field know exactly how to set prices to exact maximum revenue, and competitive pressure has nothing to do with it.

That's entirely possible, but in that case it's because Apple brought a higher end market with them. Revenue with monopoly pricing is maximized by setting prices in relation to what the market can bear. Copyright is not a free market and filing antitrust suits over pricing or price collusion is specious; there is no free market pricing, there is no competition and that is by design.

If the DOJ was at all interested in competition they'd work to abolish copyright and let the Pirate Bay put some competetive pressure on the market.

Actually, the pesticide that currently seems to be most strongly implicated in colony collapse disorder is imidacloprid, which is not the same as the bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) GMO corn toxin. Unless you have seen something even newer? Still, that of course doesn't preclude BT damaging other parts of the ecosystem.

Considering Monstantos corporate ethics, if they could create a corn variety that causes cancer in anyone eating it, I would bet they would. The company has such a history that trusting it with food is grossly negligent.

Even knowing the markets won't do you much good anymore as the decisions on the direction of the stock market are pretty much set between the Fed, the ECB and algos. You need to know the right people to know when to bail or when to double up because fundamentals have nothing to do with it anymore (or there would barely be a bank left in europe, for example).

Gold might remain a viable hedge, but even there you have a strong effect driven by central bank currency devaluation, which means that again, you need to be in the know to time your entrypoint. And unless you're of the physical-gold, backed by lead persuasion, you're probably better off in a broad commodity index for countering inflation as that somewhat negates speculative bubbles.

If anything, invalidating intellectual property laws is a good way to increase competitiveness, something that Greece needs badly. It's also a very cheap and painless way to go about it.

It's not random chance that economies like China or India that don't cater as much to the monopoly damage of IPR tend to grow much faster. The odd thing is that many supposedly free-market proponents actually seem to believe that implementing what is in effect a significant private taxation system on the economy is somehow going be beneficial.

As most software incorporates many functions, any of which may or may not be patented, patents are a net liability for any startup. Even if they may have one or two, chances are high that their idea cannot be usefully brought to market without infringing on tens to hundreds of other patents.

As an investor I'd worry a lot about any of the owners of any of those patents deciding to end my investment.

It would be possible to build a non-confrontational system that accomplishes what some want the patent system to do, but the monopoly aspect has to go. Something non-damaging like the 'patent office' paying a certain amount for every use of a 'patent' like registration would be much more palatable and create an incentive for all stakeholders to grant only the good 'patents' (as the total funding would be limited and overgranting would mean miniscule payouts).

a world without software patents would be 'open slather for anybody who can just go faster than the next person.'

Well, yes -- that is pretty much the essential nature of "Open." Anyone who has the skill, time, and energy can build whatever they want, even if it is based on someone else's work. It has its ups and downs, but saying the software world would be more Open if it were more restrictive is an internally inconsistent statement. It is logically self-contradictory.

There are those who believe that using the system against itself is better than changing the system. Some believe the GPL is better than would be the elimination of software copyright. I actually fall into this camp (though I do believe in reducing the strength and duration of patent and copyright). But it would not be more Open. Open has some shortcomings, and that may lead a rational person to believe that absolute Open-ness is less efficient than some degree of Closed-ness. But that does not mean you can redefine Open to mean partially Closed. Just say you believe in a balance between Open and Closed. It's OK to believe in shades of gray.

Not every question demands an absolutist answer, but rational discourse does rely on words like Open having a clear and unequivocal meaning in a given context. Dilute your hard-core ideology, not the terminology you use to describe it.

Knowing an interest that someone has specified sound very compelling, but compare it to advertising in i a magazine or on a webpage. If someone is reading a gardening magazine or gardening webpage you can assume they are interested in gardening, and even better they are most likely actively interested in gardening while they are reading. Thus you get better targetting by simply chosing where to advertise than who to advertise to.

Adsense, iirc, builds on that principle and targets the ads based on the contents of the webpage being read, not a profile built on the consumer. The viewer might, of course, not be in the market but they are interested in the subject at hand at the time they are reading the page.

Still, I can think of some fields where the facebook approach would be better and events or other time limited opportunities would be one of them. If you know there is something the consumer has a high interest in but simply will not be able to decide themselves when to purchase then you're better off targetting by interest.

There is a significant difference tho; with google there is actually a fair chance that the searcher is looking for a product related to the actual search at hand, while with facebook you're basically trying to surreptitiously slip sales in to a largely unrelated activity.

Targetted advertising simply isn't that worthwhile if you cant target it temporally. You may know my interest intimately, but you're not going to sell me anything unless I'm actually in the market for that specific thing at that specific time. At best you can build brand awareness, but there are many ways to do that that are at least as good or better by simply targetting specific venues, mags, etc.