This is an actual law firm; they take personal injury cases and advertise on the New York City subway system, and probably on TV and the radio, too. I’m glad someone finally understands my pain.

It’s not the world’s most accurate resource on lots of things, I’ll concede.  But do you know how much a subscription to Helicopter Prison Escape Quarterly costs?  It’s not worth the expense, in my expert opinion.  Just go read the Wikipedia article.  My favorite on the list is Pascal Payet, who has apparently escaped from prison in a helicopter three(!) times.

Just think of the Wikipedia articles in fifty years: the List of Jetpack Prison Escapes is waiting for us, in the future.

Remember that iPhone app a while back that sold for $,1000, and didn’t do anything other than show people that you spent $1,000 on a single app?  That crazy idea netted some programmer $5,600 before Apple took the program down, to the mixed delight and horror of the collective internets.

There’s a new kid in the $1,000 iPhone app club, though.  And this one is nowhere near as nonfunctional as the last one.  The program in question is called “BarMax,” made by a company of the same name.  BarMax (the company) offers bar review courses for recently-minted J.D.’s who hope to pass the California Bar Exam.  Courses in New York run about $3,000: the idea that you can get the materials you need to pass for a mere thousand dollars sounds dirt cheap.

I found the sticker shock of an iPhone program amusing, especially considering how reasonable it is by bar review course standards; doubly so, considering that it’s dwarfed by the the cost of law school itself.  Hell, we’ve all mortgaged our futures to get here.  What’s another Cleveland between friends?

The patent system is designed to promote the progress of the useful arts and sciences: Congress is given the authority to do crazy, un-capitalist stuff like give an inventor a monopoly on his shiny new “machine that peels potatoes in the shape of Hitchcock’s silhouette.”  Oh, sure, we limit the time to a couple of decades, but it’s an iron-clad right to hock those tater obliterators¹ without limitation, right?

Not exactly.