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"from the because-fuck-you,-that's-why dept When pharmaceutical companies defend outrageously-priced medicines, they often claim these massive profit margins are there to help them recoup the money dumped into research and development. But that has nothing to do with the high prices. r&D costs are consistently lower than companies portray them."

""Showing the total economic value of free/libre and open source software helps move from the perception of free software being community theater, and clearly shows it is professional," said Todd Weaver, CEO of Purism Computer. "The benefit for software developers is that they can point to cash value for their software released under free licenses.""

"The global trend toward democratization of the last two decades has been accompanied by the resurgence of various politics of "identity/difference." From nationalist and ethnic revivals in the countries of east and central Europe to the former Soviet Union, to the politics of cultural separatism in Canada, and to social movement politics in liberal western-democracies, the negotiation of identity/difference has become a challenge to democracies everywhere. This volume brings together a group of distinguished thinkers who rearticulate and reconsider the foundations of democratic theory and practice in the light of the politics of identity/difference.\nIn Part One Jürgen Habermas, Sheldon S. Wolin, Jane Mansbridge, Seyla Benhabib, Joshua Cohen, and Iris Marion Young write on democratic theory. Part Two--on equality, difference, and public representation--contains essays by Anne Phillips, Will Kymlicka, Carol C. Gould, Jean L. Cohen, and Nancy Fraser; and Part Three--on culture, identity, and democracy--by Chantal Mouffe, Bonnie Honig, Fred Dallmayr, Joan B. Landes, and Carlos A. Forment. In the last section richard rorty, robert A. Dahl, Amy Gutmann, and Benjamin r. Barber write on whether democracy needs philosophical foundations.\nThis is an excellent yext for someone interested in models of the public sphere. While all the authors are proponents of the deliberative model of democracy (as opposed to, for instance, the liberal, interest-based, technocratic, communitarian, or civic-republican) many of them place their arguments in the context of other models. So, the book reads like a symposium of like-minded people, rather than like a rally of true believers.\nAlmost all of the essays are accessible to a generalist, but several really stand out (especially those by Benhabib, Fraser, and Young)."

"Ken Starks "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." -r. Buckminster Fuller"