Boing Boing

Jim from Open Rights Group sez, "MPs have worked out that attempts to verify adult's ages won't stop children from accessing other pornographic websites: so their proposed answer is to start censoring these websites." (more…)

I’ve always been fascinated with the cosmos (who isn’t?), and I even once splurged for a telescope to put in the garden for my family to enjoy. But with only one college astronomy class (101) under my belt, my knowledge of the stars falls into the “Dummies” category. Which is why I loved DK’s new book, The Stars: The Definitive Visual Guide to the Cosmos.Not that it’s only for dummies. The large 10.1 x 12.8 book is for astro newbies as well as the more seasoned who will enjoy the scenery and surely pick up some new stellar facts. It's for teens as well as adults, jam-packed with starry science that falls into three sections. The first, “Understanding the Cosmos,” covers the basics and beyond, from the Big Bang, starbirth, supernovae and neutron stars to black holes, colliding galaxies, galaxy clusters and a lot more. “Constellations,” the second and largest section, is loaded with the significance and charts of constellations – some popular ones (like those from the zodiac) as well as many I’d never heard of before (like Vulpecula the fox and Monoceros the unicorn). The third, smallest section of the book, “The Solar System,” just touches on our sun and planets, and was the one section that the authors could have expanded.In true DK fashion, The Stars compliments its smart yet accessible text with a heavy dose of charts, maps, sidebars, and brilliant photos. The authors managed to make every page highly fresh and engaging.The Stars: The Definitive Guide to the Cosmos by DK 2016, 256 pages, 10.8 x 12.1 x 0.9 inches (hardcover)$26 Buy a copy on Amazon

Musical Cars (A sequel to 15 point turn)The guy on the scooter just wanted to add a bit of a challenge into the mix.

It took me a while to figure out what the deal is with this photo. I thought at first someone coated their thighs in oil. But then I saw it for what it really was. It reminds me of a Necker cube, only for legs.

I learned that there are two forms of mimicry in nature -- honest mimicry (e.g., bees and wasps look similar and advertise that they can sting) and dishonest mimicry (e.g., some flies look like bees and wasps to trick predators into thinking they can sting).Inés Dawson, a graduate and PhD student at the University of Oxford, is the creator of this video, which is part of a science series on YouTube called Draw Curiosity.

Kendall Seifert loves squirrels and swingers, and operates gathering places for both types of creatures at Squirrel Creek Lodge. Seifert is 53, and operated a wildlife rescue center *and* a swingers club at the same site, until state authorities raided his Littleton, CO business in a fairly transparent attempt to throw a wet blanket on the sex stuff by way of targeting the squirrel stuff. (more…)

As a nonprofit, the Yale Record has never endorsed a political candidate. Even in this most momentous of elections, some things have to remain sacred.In particular, we do not endorse Hillary Clinton’s exemplary leadership during her 30 years in the public eye. We do not support her impressive commitment to serving and improving this country—a commitment to which she has dedicated her entire professional career. Because of unambiguous tax law, we do not encourage you to support the most qualified presidential candidate in modern American history, nor do we encourage all citizens to shatter the glass ceiling once and for all by electing Secretary Clinton on November 8.

The Internet Archive has a wonderful front-end: GifCities, a search engine for the myriad of GIFs that once graced legendary website hosting service Geocities. [via Andy Baio]GifCities: The Geocities Animated Gif Search Engine was a special project of the Internet Archive done as part of our 20th Anniversary to highlight and celebrate fun aspects of the amazing history of the web as represented in the web archive and the Wayback Machine. Geocities was an early web hosting service, started in 1994 and acquired by Yahoo in 1999, with which users could create their own custom websites. The platform hosted over 38 million user-built pages and was at one time the third most visited site on the web. In 2009, Yahoo announced it was closing down the service, at which point the Internet Archive attempted to archive as much of the content as possible. ... Mining this collection, we extracted over 4,500,000 animated GIFs (1,600,000 unique images) and then used the filenames and directory path text to build a best-effort “full text” search engine. Each GIF also links back to the original Geocities page on which it was embedded (and some of these pages are even more awesome than the GIFs).If you're just here for the under construction GIFs, here are all of them.

With nearly $28 million in the pot, the eight minutes of "speech play" between Will Kassouf and Griffin Benger came to a very satisfying end. Everyone is debating which of the two players crossed the line. (more…)

Samsung's got problems: its Galaxy Note devices are bursting into flames, and have been banned from the skies. (more…)

💩 (via JWZ)

Japanese culture website Tofugu has a rundown of the best Japanese horror movies of all time. Number 6 on the list is Hausu, a cartoonishly gory flick from 1977.https://youtu.be/NN0HVJ5tkIMThis is what makes Hausu great. It's an absolutely childish horror movie. So much so that the characters are one-dimensional (their names even indicate their behavior). But it all plays into the experience. Watching Hausu as an adult means you're forced to think like a child and find scary the things children find scary. This makes for gory fun when the piano starts dismembering people, blood gushing out its sides.Sometimes Hausu's blend of silliness and gore is perfect. Other times not so much. But despite the film's imperfection, it works because it's authentic. Though people in 2010 praised Hausu for its "wackiness," I think affection for the film comes from its authenticity. Hausu knows exactly what it wants to be and goes for it full force. Combine that with a childlike perspective and you've got a film worth falling in love with.

Hillary Clinton's campaign team "scrambled" after coming to believe Joe Biden would oppose her for the Democratic presidential nomination, reports Fox News. Some delicious, if insidery machinations turned up in campaign chief Joe Podesta's hacked email, as published by Wikileaks:just three days later, the Biden threat appeared vanquished. Ron Klain, a former Biden chief of staff who is now an operative for the Clinton campaign, emailed Podesta with a cryptic note of thanks.“It’s been a little hard for me to play such a role in the Biden demise – and I am definitely dead to them -- but I’m glad to be on Team HRC, and glad that she had a great debate last night,” Klain wrote.Six days later, on Oct. 21, Biden, with Obama by his side, gave a news conference from the White House declaring he wouldn’t run.Biden would have sailed away from Trump much earlier and faster than Hillary Clinton did. But beyond the easy victory she's likely to win anyway all told, he doesn't have much to recommend him over her, and lacks many of her — yes, I know! — her scruples.

Keeping a cat in a NYC bodega is technically against the rules, but everybody loves bodega cats. Everybody but a certain Yelp review, who is now getting a lot of flak for complaining about a bodega cat at SK Deli in the East Village.You gotta be a miserable gentrifying ass bitch to yelp about the bodega cat pic.twitter.com/rinaytDanY— سنكامي (@SynKami) October 24, 2016From Brokelyn:The reviewer has been getting roasted by fellow Yelpers with comments like: “No one likes you. This deli has pretty much anything you might want out of a deli. Owner is a hard ass but the cat is awesome,” which is about the perfect description for most bodegas in New York. From Gothamist:Deli and bodega owners face fines of up to $3,000 for having a cat or cats in their establishments, but they also face fines of $300 for the discovery of rodent fecal matter. Lost inventory is another cost, as rats and mice like to chew through containers and eat the food that is left overnight on shelves like a rodent buffet.

Ken Crossland has a good explainer piece on the Hillary Clinton email issue that conservatives have used to bludgeon her campaign for months.Hillary Clinton isn’t a technophile. She viewed her set-up as a means to an end. Was it working? Great. Did she care how it worked? No. It’s likely as simple as that....I’m pretty convinced, viewing the evidence, that Hillary Clinton believes she’s in the right with her email server, that it helped her do her job well, and that it kept America safe. What irks the public is that we know that she knows that we know that Clinton doesn’t actually care that she used a private server, and the only thing she laments is that it blew up in her face.

Welp those two...Cats squabble over a saucer of milk, until they are both hit by a crisis of conscience.

Andrew Lekashman offers a brief pictorial a history of mechanical keyboards, from adding machines to dumb terminals to Symbolics monstrosities to modern blank-key hacker totems. There was a lot of ingenious tech left by the wayside on the way to finding the perfect click.Pictured above is one not included in the roundup, a particularly beautiful Raytheon(!) model that can be bought on eBay for $300, then sent to me.Lekashman's tastes are grittier:Ultrasonic I PlusThis keyboard is acoustic and operates entirely by vibration. This makes it more like a musical instrument than a workplace device. This is something that hasn’t been replicated in the keyboard market since 1982. The specific principle that allows it to work is called Time Difference Of Arrival (TDOA). This is like a form of echo-location to measure which key hits the acoustic transfer bar. Whenever a switch is pressed, a metal “slapper” strikes the bar, and transducers measure the sound wave produced, which differs based on the distance of the slapper from the transducer. Typing on the keyboard is delightfully clicky and pleasantly tactile.

The YouTube channel INDUSTRIAL JP is a wonderland of machinery and music operated by a label in Japan. [h/t Joel] (more…)

According to Google Trends, the search term "memes" is now more popular than the search term "Jesus," a fact noticed by Dominik Vincent Salonen, @Kuwaddo on Twitter. https://twitter.com/Kuwaddo/status/790912204237332480

FOLLOW @RubenBolling on the Twitters and a Face Book.JOIN Tom the Dancing Bug's subscription club, the Proud & Mighty INNER HIVE, for exclusive early access to comics, extra comics, and oh, so much more. GET Ruben Bolling’s new hit book series for kids, The EMU Club Adventures. (”A book for the curious and adventurous!” -Cory Doctorow) Book One here. Book Two here. More Tom the Dancing Bug comics on Boing Boing! (more…)

The fakers at ADDYOLOGY posted a scam video purporting to create a homemade wireless smartphone charger that is both dangerous and useless. The always-entertaining ElectroBOOM did this epic takedown and electronics tutorial. (more…)

Recent revised estimates upping the number of galaxies in the universe seem even more mind-boggling when contemplating this image released from Hubble this week. It shows NGC 362, one of about 150 globular clusters on the outskirts of just one galaxy, our own Milky Way. (more…)

YouTuber Barb Ackue (get it?) was kind enough to upload an important moment in US history: Commander John Young complaining about flatulence while Apollo 16 was on the lunar surface. After working through some technical issues, Young says: (more…)

Liza Mandelup directed this lovely short documentary on a camp for children with xeroderma pigmentosum, or XP, a genetic skin condition which makes those with the trait extremely sensitive to sunlight. Activities happen during the night, allowing these young people to enjoy the outdoors together. (more…)

*deep inside the Apple lair, Tim Cook approaches his captive adversary*"There will be no escape for you, Mr. Bond."Images of New MacBook Pro With Magic Toolbar Leaked in macOS Sierra 10.12.1 [macrumors]

In this Scientific American video, Rubik's Cube master Ian Scheffler, author of the new book Cracking the Cube, explains some of the math behind "speedcubing." Scheduler's book sounds fascinating even though the only way I could get my Rubik's Cube solved is to hand it to my 10-year-old son's friend Luc who was the first to dazzle me with the fine art of speedcubery. From the description of Cracking the Cube:When Hungarian professor Ernő Rubik invented the Rubik’s Cube (or, rather, his Cube) in the 1970s out of wooden blocks, rubber bands, and paper clips, he didn’t even know if it could be solved, let alone that it would become the world’s most popular puzzle. Since its creation, the Cube has become many things to many people: one of the bestselling children’s toys of all time, a symbol of intellectual prowess, a frustrating puzzle with 43.2 quintillion possible permutations, and now a worldwide sporting phenomenon that is introducing the classic brainteaser to a new generation.In Cracking the Cube, Ian Scheffler reveals that cubing isn’t just fun and games. Along with participating in speedcubing competitions—from the World Championship to local tournaments—and interviewing key figures from the Cube’s history, he journeys to Budapest to seek a meeting with the legendary and notoriously reclusive Rubik, who is still tinkering away with puzzles in his seventies.Getting sucked into the competitive circuit himself, Scheffler becomes engrossed in solving Rubik’s Cube in under twenty seconds, the quasi-mystical barrier known as “sub-20,” which is to cubing what four minutes is to the mile: the difference between the best and everyone else."Cracking the Cube: Going Slow to Go Fast and Other Unexpected Turns in the World of Competitive Rubik's Cube Solving" by Ian Scheffler (Amazon)

Just a pilot and his pal, a deadly Titan. I'm looking forward to Titanfall 2 as a welcome break from Destiny. It launches on October 28th.

@nathan: "Barack Obama is the Nickelback of presidents."@DJ_lcpl: "Barack Obama...bro, do you even lift!?"(Obama's response: "Well, I lifted the ban on Cuban cigars, that's worth something.")@realDonaldTrump: "President Obama will go down as perhaps the worst president in the history of the United States!"(Obama's response: "Well, @realDonaldTrump, at least I will go down as a president.")

Let Shub-Niggurath teach your child the alphabet with C Is for Cthulhu: The Lovecraft Alphabet BookI wish we had this book when my daughter was younger. Things would be much different!C Is for Cthulhu: The Lovecraft Alphabet Book via Amazon

I received the shocking and sad news that Jon Lebkowsky's 16-year-grandson Carson died suddenly this week. Jon was one of the early editors at bOING bOING (the zine) and a great supporter of Boing Boing on The Well. He is also one of the founders of EFF Austin and an all around activist for good. Please consider donating to Carson's funeral expenses at Go Fund Me.I am a family friend of the the Lebkowsky family, and have known Carson since he was a tiny tot. Carson was just 1 month shy of his 17th birthday, November 23rd. He knew and loved God, loved his family and friends, and loved to make others smile. Carson had such a huge heart, and would give whatever he had to help someone. He was so proud of his family and his love for them showed when he was with them. His personality was so outgoing... as long as you were laughing and smiling he was having a great time! On the morning of October 23, 2016, Carson's family went to wake him up to start the day only to find that he was not breathing. EMS arrived and made every attempt to save Carson, however it was unsuccessful. Carson passed away in their family home in Austin, Texas.Carson leaves behind his parents, Robert and Dana; his older brother, Colton; grandparents, numerous aunts and uncles, cousins, and a lot of friends. He will be greatly missed and never forgotten.His death was very unexpected and I have started this fundraiser to help with the funeral expenses. The death of a child is something that no family is every prepared for, emotionally or financially. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Please say a prayer for the family, share the link to this page, and please donate if you can. Any amount is greatly appreciated. Carson Scott Lebkowsky November 23, 1999 - October 23, 2016

I still love Twitter and hope it finds a way forward. But it looks like all the potential suitors have passed on buying it, and job cuts are in the offing.Twitter Inc., having failed to sell itself, is planning to fire about 8 percent of its workforce as the struggling social-media company prepares to go it alone for the time being. Twitter may eliminate about 300 people, the same percentage it did last year when co-founder Jack Dorsey took over as chief executive officer, according to people familiar with the matter. Planning for the cuts is still fluid and the number could change, they added. The people asked not to be identified talking about private company plans.The other day, "George Zimmerman" was trending again. It was right there in the little box on the homepage. When you clicked on this hashtag, the second result was (and still is) an exhortation to follow a fake/ironic George Zimmerman account, with this bio:Perhaps I get unique results for some algorithmic or settings-based reason that escapes me; it shows up irrespective of whether I have the "sensitive media" content filters checked. It looks like anyone from Salesforce or Disney who fired up Twitter last week and clicked on this promoted topical hashtag got this in their face. Maybe it's naive to think they would have been influenced by this, or that it's an easy thing to exclude at Twitter's scale. But I can't escape the nagging feeling that it being there represents a decision. I don't get it. So I guess my question for Twitter is this: what value is there in telling those who click on a top trending hashtag that Fake George Zimmerman hates niggers? Why is that worth keeping, when 300 employees aren't?

Whisk yourself back to the days of bulky devices, outmoded physical media, and painfully obvious visual puns with these 1990s high-tech stock photos. Literal surfing and literal webs! Large format high resolution only $399 on some stock sites! (more…)

In 1912, Herbert Ponting captured remarkable film and images of Captain Robert Falcon Scott's ill-fated Terra Nova Expedition. Amateurs and pros have all worked to restore and colorize Ponting's work. (more…)

Pierre Michel-Estival created this fabulous short film Prayer.9 "Your subconscious is not an intimate possession anymore." (more…)

You can buy high-res versions on Etsy, with Europe and other countries also on offer.High resolution map of all the permanent and temporary streams and rivers of the contiguous 48 states in beautiful rainbow colours, divided into catchment areas. It shows Strahler Stream Order Classification. The higher the stream order, the thicker the line. Map made mostly with the open-source QGIS software.

The Shuttleworth Fellowships hand millions directly to people starting out on a journey to radically transform the world to make it more open; this year, I'm Honourary Steward, meaning I'll help pick the grantees. (more…)

I've been noting humorous updatings of Ambrose Bierce's 1906 humor classic The Devil's Dictionary for years -- there was the publishing edition, and this corker on copyright -- but the Educational Technology edition, by New Storytelling author Bryan Alexander has a currency and an urgency that scores an acerbic bullseye. (more…)

The stainless steel shakers are designed to have a lot of heft (the Enterprise is 7oz empty, the Bird of Prey is 5 oz): they're $60 from Thinkgeek. (more…)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xdMteqm994The Dirty Cow vulnerability dates back to code included in the Linux kernel in 2007, and it can be trivially weaponized into an easy-to-run exploit that allows user-space programs to execute as root, meaning that attackers can take over the entire device by getting their targets to run apps without administrator privileges. (more…)

[Full size]The 281 People, Places and Things DonaldTrump Has Insulted on Twitter: A Complete List [Jasmine C. Lee and Kevin Quealy/New York Times]

Five Republican Congressional candidates -- Reps. Bob Dold (R-Ill.), Mike Coffman (R-Colo.), David Jolly (R-Fla.), John Katko (R-N.Y.) and Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) -- have threatened broadcasters with libel suits over Democratic campaign ads that tie the men to their own party's presidential candidate, millionaire Donald J Trump. (more…)

Daily Show writer Daniel Radosh's son came home from school with a permission slip that he'd have to sign before the kid could read Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451, which is widely believed to be an anti-censorship book (Bradbury himself insisted that this was wrong, and that the book was actually about the evils of television). (more…)

Gerald Daugherty, a Republican county commissioner in the Austin-area Travis County, has produced one of the best ad-spots of the season, depicting him as a politics-obsessed public servant whose long-suffering, side-eyeing wife can't wait for him to be re-elected so she won't have to listen to him drone on about how much he wants to help people and fix things in the county. (more…)

Reporters posing as representatives of a Chinese tycoon approached Trump and Clinton PACs and offered them $2 million; only the Giuliani and Trump, Junior-backed Great America PAC agreed, and moreover, assured the fake Chinese benefactor that the origin of the contribution would be covered up and that he would have influence with Trump after the election. (more…)

Since 2014, the Electronic Frontier Foundation has been representing "Mr Kidane," an Ethiopian-born US citizen whose computer the Ethiopian government hacked while he was living in DC, in order to extract the identities of his contacts in Ethiopia and target them for violent human-rights-abusing reprisals over their democratic opposition to the country's ruling dictatorship. (more…)

Though the Dawn of Justice movie is bound to be a disappointment (see eg Batman vs Superman), the $45 Wonder Woman Dawn of Justice onesie (with cape!) (and gold foil tiara on the hood!) is not a bad consolation prize (and the cape zips off).

In 1967, Philippa Foot posed the "Trolley Problem," an ethical conundrum about whether a bystander should be sacrificed to rescue the passengers of a speeding, out-of-control trolley; as self-driving cars have inched toward reality, this has been repurposed as a misleadingly chin-stroking question about autonomous vehicles: when faced with the choice of killing their owners or someone else, who should die? (more…)

Rhode Island dickhead Alan Sorrentino wrote a letter to the editor of the East Bay RI, the local paper of record, chastizing women over 20 for wearing yoga pants in public because they lack the "benefit of nature's blessing of youth" and thus "on mature, adult women there is something bizarre and disturbing about the appearance they make in public." (more…)

Science fiction great -- and 2015 World Fantasy Convention lifetime achievement honoreee -- Sheri Tepper died yesterday, at the age of 87. (more…)

(Image: ccPixs.com) I’m not a medical expert. My science career ended in Mr. Maciel’s high school biology class. I remember the basics, we’re all made of cells and whales eat krill, but world governments aren’t calling me to consult when the next outbreak of Ebola occurs. I don’t purport to know what I’m talking about, but I did just watch a Grey’s Anatomy marathon, so I feel confident I can handle a discussion on the complexities of our healthcare system. Matthew B.J. Delaney's Black Rain is available from Amazon.Here’s my medical prediction: whatever you may be sick from, human beings will figure out a cure. Of course you might be dead by the time we do, but we’ll figure out something. We’re good at that. And by ‘we’ I mean people much smarter than I am who actually went to school for science and stuff. For thousands of years humans have been figuring things out. Fire. Space travel. Tinder. And our figuring has been increasing exponentially. We’ve got more human brains on the job now than ever before thinking about things from toilet bowl night lights to artificial synapses. So whatever you’re sick from, we’ll get you that cure. I just hope you have the money to pay for it. I may not know fancy doctoring, but twelve years as a police officer in New York City has taught me about human nature. And humans are motivated by incentives. The incentive to avoid death and suffering is called fear. The incentive to gather resources is called survival. When we gather more than our fair share of resources it’s called greed. Humans are pretty good about restraining greed. We learn at an early age the value of sharing. Stable societies exist on principles of individual fairness, but individuals don’t control pharmaceuticals. Corporations do. The days of Jonas Salk are over, modern medicines are researched and developed not by selfless individuals, but by selfish giant corporations. And corporations are incentivized by profits and motivated by greed. At the risk of alienating a generation of Wall Street fans, greed isn’t always good. Greed can be good. Greed is part of human nature. You’re greedy. I’m greedy. We may show our greed in different ways, but its still present to some extent in all of us. Corporate greed propels invention, and invention works great for society. It brought us lots of fun things like railroads and Facebook and the Pet Rock. Usually the pricing of these new and exciting products is held in place by consumer demand. No matter how good a product might be, people will only pay a certain price. This is true with Big Macs and Mach 3 razors and Buicks; raise the price too much, people stop buying. But when it comes to healthcare, those primal incentives of fear and survival take over and normal consumer behavior no longer applies. The healthcare industry is like the Zombie apocalypse…it’s the perfect storm of fear and greed. The greed produces the supply. The desire to make profits is the incentive to invest in the development of new medicines. The fear produces the demand. People will pay limitless amounts to avoid suffering. This creates a totally inelastic demand curve. “Drugs are typically non-discretionary and consumers are relatively price-insensitive.” I didn’t write this little gem. This came from a Pharma Bro slide presentation to investors. You’re Snow White and you’ve just taken a bite of the poisoned apple. How much will you pay for the antidote? The wicked Step Queen knew the power of control over life and death. So too does the Pharma Bro. That’s why he raised the price of HIV medicine by five thousand percent and got away with it. Greed can be good, but unchecked greed is always terrible. Unchecked greed leads to more Ferraris and beach houses for Pharma bros (yay!), but it also means increased pricing for the sick and dying (boo!) and the general commodification of the American healthcare system (super boo!).Thank God that we live in the United States where we’re protected by strict price controls on drug pricing. Wrong. There are no drug price controls in the United States, which means we have to rely on the generous nature of big pharma to set pricing, and we all know how generous large pharmaceutical companies can be. But this is not a shared problem. This is an American problem. Dig out that shoebox under your bed and take a look at your passport. If it says United States of America on it, congratulations, you are subsidizing the rest of the world’s health care industry. The research and development of most major pharmaceutical companies is funded by overcharging sick American consumers in an American market with no price controls and then releasing the same medicines to overseas price controlled markets at significantly cheaper prices. Does that mean Americans are more afraid of death than the rest of the world? Is that why we’re willing to pay more in America for life saving drugs? That’s insanity. We stormed the beach of Normandy! We sent up a bunch of guys to divert that asteroid in Armageddon and beat the alien invasion in Independence Day and War of the Worlds. We’re the home of the brave. We pay more in America because we don’t have a choice. Lack of a price controls allows big pharma to set pricing, and with inelastic demand, we’ll pay whatever they tell us to pay. So too would anyone. There was a popular documentary a few years ago about how awesome the French healthcare system was. In France, the government set the prices of medicines. In the United States, large pharmaceutical companies set drug prices. Which do you think will be lower? Cancer will kill you just as fast in Pittsburgh as it will in Paris, but the sucker in Pittsburgh has to pay four times more to buy the medicine he needs to stop it from doing so. Of course the French healthcare system is awesome, someone else is paying for it. When you swallow that pill, you’re not paying for the 47 cents of ingredients that actually go into your body, you’re paying for the hundreds of millions of dollars of research and development that went into that pill’s creation. If you’re swallowing that pill in France, you’re doing it cheaper because of America. America has opened a tab at the pharma bar and everyone else is drinking for free, but setting price controls isn’t entirely the answer. It works for other countries, because American consumers pick up the research tab. Consider, though, if we all had limited pricing: profits would decrease, but so too would the rate of new innovation. I like being alive. And I want those pharmaceutical companies to be as motivated as possible to keep coming up with better ways to keep me and my friends going. Jonas Salk took no patents for his polio vaccine. He believed public health to be a moral commitment. It is a moral commitment. And morally, we should all pay our fair share. It’s an entirely complicated issue, but understanding the basic inequities of the international healthcare market is a great first step to developing a new system which spreads the costs fairly amongst us all and de-commodifies the American market.Matthew B.J. Delaney published his first novel, Jinn, in 2003. Winner of the International Horror Guild Award, the novel was optioned for film by Touchstone Pictures, was featured as People magazine’s Page-Turner of the Week, and received a Publishers Weekly Starred Review. Delaney received a bachelor’s degree in economics from Dartmouth College and a master’s in public administration from Harvard.Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, he left a career in finance and moved from Boston to New York City to join the New York City Police Department. He has been a member of the NYPD for twelve years and has been assigned to precincts throughout Manhattan and the Bronx as well as within Police Headquarters and the Intelligence Division. He is currently a decorated special operations lieutenant serving in a Brooklyn violent crime suppression unit. He continues to write in his spare time.