Category: Stories

  • Obama administration joins Google

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    Steve Jobs may have engineered the most audacious reverse-takeover in tech history when Apple “acquired” NeXT in 1996. Within a year, Jobs and his NeXT colleagues had purged Apple executives from all the key positions (although the chief accountant remained – which may tell you something about chief accountants). But that’s small beer compared to…

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  • Google’s doing to Twitterbook what it’s doing to copyright

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    Google has two prongs to its long-term strategy, but Wave, the “digital dashboard” it unveiled last week, casts light on a third. One strategy is to drive down the value of copyright material on the internet to zero. Google has a ruthless and calculating view of the real value of stuff. It reasons that if…

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  • Rescuing Nokia’s Ovi: a plan

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    It must be frustrating to sketch out a long-term technology roadmap in great depth, and see it come to fruition… only to goof on your own execution. But to do so repeatedly – as Nokia has – points to something seriously wrong. Nokia spent more than a decade preparing for Tuesday this week, when it…

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  • Breaking Bad: the joy of chemistry

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    Here’s a show with the perfect profile to be a huge cult British hit – black humour, suspense, all the stuff we love. But what’s puzzling is how the British public broadcasters dropped the ball by failing to notice the show – particularly the BBC. …Read more at The Register… Read More

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  • Elbonia: Your next (and only) music destination?

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    Suppose the “one stop shop” happened to be located in Elbonia – where the economy is primarily mud-based – and you could obtain a pan-European license for music (all the rights in the EU) priced in the nominal Elbonian currency of the grubnick. Suppose the Elbonian performing rights society decided to price this very low…

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  • BBC’s science: ‘Evangelical, shallow and sparse’

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    The BBC’s environmental coverage has come under fire from a former science correspondent. Award-winning author and journalist David Whitehouse says the corporation risks public ridicule – or worse – with what he calls “an evangelical, inconsistent climate change reporting and its narrow, shallow and sparse reporting on other scientific issues.” Whitehouse relates how he was…

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