Tag: media
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‘Use me as a mouthpiece’, pleads Guardian hack
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Andrew Orlowski
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Ben Goldacre, The Guardian‘s Mr “Bad Science” writes witheringly about sloppy science journalists. Many of them are simply “juggling words about on a page, without having the first clue what they mean, pretending they’ve got a proper job, their pens all lined up neatly on the desk,” he writes. They trade on scare stories, and…
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Google’s founders are less humble (and jetless) than you think
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Andrew Orlowski
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Casting around for an example of the simple life to use in an Arab-bashing column, veteran columnist and editor Alexander Chancellor alighted on what he must have thought was the perfect foil to the free-spending Saudis. It appeared right there in front of him, on his PC, nestling between some coloured balls. Unlike Prince Alwaleed…
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Amazon’s Kindle: a $399 folly
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Andrew Orlowski
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Reading has never been cheaper, and for most of us, requires no additional machinery – only the source material itself. So why do we need to pay the online retailer Amazon.com $399 to read books?… Read More
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Braindead obituarists hoaxed by Wikipedia
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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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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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The Canonization of St.Bill
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Andrew Orlowski
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If William Henry Gates the Third’s philanthropic work leads to him being canonized one day as the first secular saint of our times, I won’t stand in the way of the celebrations. Geeks get things very out of proportion, and the value of saving even one life should be more apparent to everyone than the…