The legal war to control the smartphone platform: Google vs. Apple

(ars technica, by James Grimmelmann )

In the flood of stories about tactical filings and counter-filings, it's easy to get lost in the details. But step back and it's clear that the Smartphone Wars aren't just a war of all against all; there's an underlying logic to these disputes. Most companies are fighting to control one part of the hardware-software stack, then use that control to pry money free from the layers above them.

 via The Daily Beast

If the Venice Biennale is the Olympics of the art world, then the United States has just taken home the gold. Bruce Nauman, one of the most influential living American artists, secured a Golden Lion for the States on Saturday for his work Topological Gardens. Nauman’s mixed-media work represents developments from his four-decade career, which the judges described as “iconic embodiments of human pain and fragility to pithy jabs at our frailties.”Many in the art world see Nauman as "the elder statesman of innovaton," writes Peter Dobrin of the Philadephia Inquirer, describing the artist as having shaken up the art world for decades, which indeed, he has. Critics often wonder whether what Nauman creates is actually art.