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CIA operative Nathan Muir (Redford) is on the brink of retirement when he finds out that his protege Tom Bishop (Pitt) has been arrested in China for espionage. No stranger to the machinations of the CIA’s top echelon, Muir hones all his skills and irreverent manner in order to find a way to free Bishop. As he embarks on his mission to free Bishop, Muir recalls how he recruited and trained the young rookie, at that time a sergeant in Vietnam, their turbulent times together as operatives and the woman who threatened their friendship

台灣有什麼樣的脈動？世上沒有任何一個國家的人像台灣一樣，工作時數每年高達2,282小時，30%的人每週工作超過62小時。台灣人口密度高居世界第二，只低於孟加拉。雖然台灣面積小於瑞士，卻是20個最成功的工業國家之一。台灣是筆記型電腦製造的領導先驅，有世界第三大外匯存款，也是手機密度最高的地區（平均每人擁有1,14支手機）。然而，只有三個國家的性生活是少於台灣，且根據「Elle」雜誌研究指出，台灣女性是世界上最不快樂的。台灣同時也是最多戴近視眼鏡的國家。

最近中國付給太平洋的小島諾魯一億五千萬美元，讓他們放棄台北而和北京建交。台灣很難跟得上，只能試著在正式關係之外，讓自己（特別在經濟上）無可取代。這就要花更多的精力並且也是寂寞的工作。

最後一天我們開車去「兒童育樂中心」，那是種亞洲華德迪士奈樂園，是一個美麗的、花了相當多錢建造的地方，卻看不到遊玩的兒童。一個都沒有！「現在的小孩喜歡在家玩電腦」，一個管理員告訴我們。另一個則說：「大部份的孩子晚上都還有課。」門口守衛說：「父母沒時間帶孩子來。」

在回程的路上我捕捉到一個景象：無人的遊樂場中，一個穿著西裝的男人坐在鞦韆上打著手機，而雨滴也開始落下。

Initial reports were that Indonesia planned withhold samples of the H5N1 bird flu it had isolated in order to ‘keep control of intellectual property rights’ in an exclusive deal with Baxter. It then transpires that the govt had concluded that the normal approach to ’sharing’ sample with the WHO led to the WHO ’sharing’ samples with pharmacorps, which would then screw high prices for derivative vaccines out of the country that ’shared’ originary samples. Once that came out, the govt agreed — after a notably short five-hour negotiation — to ’share’ them, ‘but only after steps were taken to ensure developing countries get fair and equitable access to vaccines.’ Which makes it sound, in a classic mode of journalistic ~misrepresentation, as though the WHO caved in very quickly when its role in facilitating expropriation of knowledge that is at once indigenous *and* ‘high-tech’ was exposed.

This might be a very interesting precursor of a trend in which LDCs with access to critical ~primary sources play an extreme-sounding IPR card, not so much to profit from it but, rather, to demolish normal cycles of loss after loss. It’s hard to tell from the thin coverage; but it’s interesting to specualte about other applications of this approach to disassembling rentier networks.

聽到 Jimmy Wales 述說他的 wikipedia 誕生與成長的故事，我覺得我就像是在 1913 年亨利福特在高地公園發表他的移動式生產線構想的前夕，聆聽他的故事。（接著是福特功績的描述）

…Listening to Jimmy Wales spin his tale of Wikipedia’s birth and growth I imagined was like listening to Henry Ford on the eve of his launching his moving assembly line at Highland Park in 1913. Until Ford came along car production had been an odd-ball activity.The US produced 7,000 cars a year,mainly from small workshops owned by rich people and they were then sold to other rich people.No one had dared think cars could be for the masses.They could not see how that might be done. But for most of that decade, Ford a renegade outsider and his team of engineers, had been experimenting with a fundamentally different approach to production,with the aim of creating a product for a mass market of mid-Western farmers.A bit like the encyclopaedias of today, the car workshops of 1913 used only skilled craftsmen to make bespoke products. Ford wanted to use a rag-bag army of barely literate workers to achieve the task.To most of the rest of the car industry it must have sounded crazy.Yet most of the ingredients of Ford’s mass production system were already around to be borrowed: the moving line came from the meat packing industry; the interchangeable parts came from the machine tool industry; the scheduling skills came from railroads. Ford’s genius was to understand how they could be brought together. Ford created a new way to see organisations: how to mobilise resources on a mass scale, to make standardised products for mass markets and in the process bring about far reaching social and economic changes.What Ford did for the industrial economy Jimmy Wales is doing for the knowledge economy. And like Ford he is doing it by borrowing ideas from many different sources.None of the organisational ingredients that make up Wikipedia are in themselves new: peer review comes from academia and science; the wiki was a tool developed elsewhere on the net; the encyclopedia is a well established form; the way Wikipedia settles disputes borrows from other, older communities; the barefoot philosophy of amateurs doing jobs previously reserved for professionals was pioneered by social entrepreneurs. What is new is the way that Wales and Wikipedia has put it all together. Even now most people cannot see how the mass of people could become participants in innovation rather than merely consumers. Yet just as Ford transformed the way we made products, so Wales and others of his ilk are transforming the way we create ideas, together.