ndmckinney|net

According to a report from the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, there are 90 guns per 100 citizens in the United States. Worldwide, there are 875 million guns, 270 million of which are in the hands of American citizens.

The report goes on to say that only 225 million of the worldwide supply of firearms are in the hands of law enforcement and military personnel. The remainder are held by private citizens.

And yet, somehow, our high incidents of crime are unconnected to gun ownership. Strange…

[Via Le Monde.fr : Les citoyens des Etats-Unis sont les plus armés au monde]

One of the more interesting aspects of having an RSS reader is that, assuming you catch the original post, you can see when someone publishes an update to their original post. Take for example this set of postings from Slate magazine, shown in order of most recent publication:

I am not sure why they chose to change the word “jihad” to “war”, especially considering that the article title still uses “jihad” in the title. Either way, I’m curious whether or not major (and minor, for that matter) media publications should disclose when they make changes of any sort, no matter how innocent, after publication. I can see how the argument can go both ways. On the one hand, some weblogs, such as Boing Boing, use the strikeout font to indicate when they’ve made changes after publication, usually to correct for factual errors. As you can imagine, this is perhaps the stupidest way an awkward to achieve such disclosure. On the other hand, the corrections page tends to get buried in the back of a publication, leaving the more attractive space free for errors. Even with the corrections model, though, it is becoming easier to have a permanent space for corrections (the message being “we are always going to make mistakes”).

This particular instance is probably more benign than in other instances, where substantive content is radically changed. I also receive alerts from Reuters, and those articles always contain a summary of the changes that were made as a caption at the beginning, although the specific details are not disclosed. This may be the most reasonable balance on the internet, since the corrections pages will not necessarily be stumbled upon as it would be in a print publication.

My question is this: is it better to have a full disclosure policy (à la Boing Boing), a limited disclosure policy (the Reuters model), or to simply make changes and hope no one notices (the Slate way)?

UPDATE: Ironic, I know, but the entry was edited so the pop-up image would display correctly.

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Wired Magazine discusses the controversy over Gustave Whitehead, perhaps the first person to actually fly a heavier-than-air machine.

See also Gustave Whitehead’s Flying Machines

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I’ve just downloaded the alpha release of Adriaan Tijsseling’s ecto blogging software. It’s a revamped version of ecto2, although “ecto3 is not ecto2″.

Among the new features, ecto3 includes a new rich-text editor, as well as support for a number of other blog APIs.

That’s about all I have right now. I’m just posting to test it out.

In a decision issued Monday, 6 August, an Indian court has rejected Novartis’ patent claims on Glivec. While Doctors Without Borders (MSF) claims that this is a “major victory” for accessibility of medicines in developing countries, I believe India is the only real winner in this case. Novartis was already subsidizing the use of Glivec in India for 99% of the patients who were undergoing treatment, so access to medicine was not the real issue.

I believe that the real issue in the case is not of access to medicine, as the court states, but of expropriation of a patent from Novartis (who had been issued a patent on the new application of Glivec in 49 other states) for the benefit of India’s large generic drug industry. Given the interest of the Indian government in this case, I believe that the rule of law was set aside for the benefit of national politics.

Unfortunately, this decision will give other developing countries (poor) justification to engage in similar expropriations of foreign pharmaceutical patents (if I’m not mistaken, Brazil is attempting to do the same to an HIV-treatment drug).

Note: I have a particular interest in this case, since I argued for Novartis in a moot court exercise at Erasmus University (although in the context of a WTO decision, not of an Indian national court).