How do you reconcile a humanitarian need (vaccines for diseases that effect millions in the developing world) with the necessary exigincies of the free market (people in the developing world can’t afford to pay enough for the vaccines to justify the research necessary to develop them) without substituting heavy-handed and ineffective government coercion for market efficiencies? One option is to fund advance market commitments, in which a developed world government promises to buy a certain (substantial) quantity of vaccines if and when they’re developed.

In Robert Cringely’s world, everything is a lot simpler, and logic is enough. Like in a recent column, where he suggests we solve the last mile problem by building it ourselves, with Microsoft’s help.

Galileo is Europe’s answer to the US tax-funded GPS system. GPS is free to use to anyone with a receiver – but Galileo needs to reimburse its investors somehow. Because they share bandwidth, there was a deal that said some of the codes for Galileo had to be put in the public domain. When this failed to occur, a team of Cornell University researchers reverse-engineered the signals and cracked the codes anyway. Information wants to be free, but sometimes it needs a little help, I guess.

Computers are getting everywhere these days, and thanks to Icelandic prosthetic maker Ossur the latest place it has turned up is in an artifical knee joint in a ‘bionic leg’. The joint is loaded with sensors, a processor and some memory, and its software allows it to ‘learn’ how to move more effectively with the gait of the wearer. Newer models incorporate motors to do the work the missing muscles would have performed.

People have been talking about Google superceding Microsoft as the tech top-dog for ages, using a slew of different indicators to prove their point. Here’s a new one from a sociological perspective – malware writers and hackers are starting to target holes in Google services instead of Microsoft software. If you look at malware as a form of anti-authoritarian activity (consciously or otherwise), does this show Google to be the new public enemy number one?