Tag: hive mind
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“The Government wants to copyright my thoughts!”
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Andrew Orlowski
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“They’re coming to take me away – ha haa!” – Napoleon XIV The Patient A student, Robert Soave writing in The Michigan, the student paper at the University of Michigan. Clinical Symptoms The patient is fearful: “The idea that information can be owned is quite terrifying” He also fears a loss of identity. Once something…
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Ursula le Guin dings surly Boing Boing
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Andrew Orlowski
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Science Fiction author Ursula K. Le Guin has given the anti-copyright fanatics at the Boing Boing weblog a quick refresher in authors’ rights. The blog posted a short piece by Le Guin, erroneously slapping a Creative Commons license on it. “This is incorrect,” wrote her representative. “Ms. Le Guin has not placed this work under…
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Braindead obituarists hoaxed by Wikipedia
by
Andrew Orlowski
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The veteran BBC TV composer and arranger Ronnie Hazlehurst died on Monday night. His long career at the corporation produced some of the most (irritatingly) memorable theme tunes: including The Two Ronnies, Reggie Perrin, Last Of The Summer Wine, Blankety Blank and the Morse Code theme for Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em. But when his…
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Parliament must listen to the blogger in his pyjamas
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Andrew Orlowski
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Parliament may soon be debating whether to legalise incest, reclassify insomnia as a mental illness, microchip all children at birth … or give pantomime actor Richard Griffiths a Knighthood. That’s if opposition leader David Cameron has his way. A Conservative Party task force examining democratic participation proposes that online petitions should help set the parliamentary…
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John Doe blogger is ‘Person of the Year’
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Andrew Orlowski
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Few publications in the world take themselves as seriously as Time magazine, and Christmas each year finds it at its most unctuous and self-important, as Time chooses its “Person of the Year”. This year, the award for newsmaker of 2006 is given to “You” – the internet user. But perhaps not you or me. The…
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10% of US net users ‘addicted, needing therapy’ (other 90% too burned out to respond)
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Interesting quotes here. But why the social pressure? The American obsession with therapy may almost be considered as a neurosis in its own right. But quacks see promising material in a growing number of internet addicts. “6 percent to 10 percent of the approximately 189 million Internet users in this country have a dependency that…