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Society, Policy & Culture
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Craigslist now asks for exclusive license when posting
I don't remember seeing this before at the bottom of the Craigslist posting form. I'm guessing this is the result of the Padmapper debacle?...
The future of GNOME
Having just returned from GUADEC and now having the desktop as my job focus I been thinking about where we are going and what to do next. Benjamin managed to get quite a bit of press for his abysmally negative post, but I think his mis-stated the situation quite badly. As Dave Mason said during...
And then the music stopped
Remember way back to, oh, six months ago when champagne was popping and markets were roaring? Back when companies with no or few profits could premiere on the world stage to grand applause by merely converting a dollar into fifty cents? Those were the good times of boom, boom, pow. It’s am…
The illusion of progress lights a fire
Psychologists have longed talked about ‘goal gradient’ which describes how we work harder to achieve a goal as we get closer to it. I just came across a fantastic study published in the…
iBookstore rejects Holly Lisle's writing course because she mentions Amazon
Lesson 6 includes my “Amazon River” technique, in which I show students how I use a couple of useful bits of Amazon’s website software and the Amazon database to figure out how to find alternative genres for their books if they aren’t having any luck selling it in the genre they wrote it for. I’ve successfully used…
The Disappointing Surprise From Apple
Fully custom responsive WordPress development using semantic and accessibility coding practices for web developments agencies and designers.
Gnome: Staring into the abyss
I suppose I can't just leave my last post standing there as-is. I'll start by listing a bunch of things I consider facts about the GNOME project. I don't want to talk about solutions here, I just want to list them, because I don't think they are common knowledge. People certainly don't seem to talk...
Congress Must Act After US Government Admits To Warrantless Wiretapping
As Congress and the President rush to re-authorize the dangerous FISA Amendments Act (FAA)—the law shamefully passed after pressure to legalize certain portions of the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program—EFF has been sounding the alarm that Americans’ communications are still being...
How the Norwegians Reacted to Terrorism
An antidote to the American cycle of threat, fear, and overspending in response to terrorism is this, about Norway on the first anniversary of its terrorist massacre: And at the political level, the Prime Minister Jens Stoltenberg pledged to do everything to ensure the country’s core values were not undermined. “The…
Jack Daniels writes the politest cease and desist notice ever.
Learn why professors appreciate storytelling in essays and how students can use narrative techniques to write stronger academic papers. Practical tips and examples included.
EFF Challenges National Security Letter Statute in Landmark Lawsuit
Since the first national security letter statute was passed in 1986, the FBI has issued hundreds of thousands of such letters seeking private telecommunications and financial records of Americans without any prior approval from courts. Indeed, for the period between 2003 and 2006 alone, almost 200,...
The Latest On Intelligence
You may remember The Bell Curve. The book was published in 1994 by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, and it argued that IQ is largely determined by genetics and little by the environment. It...