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The Apple Tablet
If you’re thinking The Tablet is just a big iPhone, or just Apple’s take on the e-reader, or just a media player, or *just* anything, I say you’re thinking too small.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 318 posts.
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Doctorow, How to Destroy the Book
Cory Doctorow, my former EFF colleague, now novelist and all-around-inspiration, gave a stirring speech entitled "How to Destroy the Book" in November at a Canadian conference dedicated to literacy. Fittingly, it was spontaneously transcribed and posted online at The Varsity.ca. The whole thing is...
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Phil Greenspun debunks Malcolm Gladwell on airline safety
This article explores an alternative explanation: foreign airlines do comparatively poorly because their first officers have almost no pilot-in-command experience.
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Trust Science
Well, of course we all do trust science. We trust Bernoulli's Principle every time we get on a plane; we trust celestial mechanics when we take the kids outside to watch a scheduled lunar eclipse ; we trust subatomic physics when we relax with an iPod; we trust the laws of chemistry every time we strike a match; we…
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Intercepting Predator Video
Sometimes mediocre encryption is better than strong encryption, and sometimes no encryption is better still. The Wall Street Journal reported this week that Iraqi, and possibly also Afghan, militants are using commercial software to eavesdrop on U.S. Predators, other unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs, and even piloted…
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Google’s ‘Meaning of Open’
Link to: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/12/meaning-of-open.html
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SF author Greg Egan reviews Avatar
Avatar Review by Greg Egan
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Some highlights of Na’vi
December 19, 2009 @ 12:43 am · Filed by Ben Zimmer under Language and the movies
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Lessons I learned building an MPs' expenses crowdsourcing app for the Guardian
As you may have heard, the UK government released a fresh batch of MP expenses documents a week ago on Thursday. I spent that week working with a small team …
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How to destroy the earth
Preamble Destroying the Earth is harder than you may have been led to believe. You've seen the action movies where the bad guy threatens to destroy the Earth. You've heard people on the news claiming that the next nuclear war or cutting down rainforests or persisting in releasing...
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The U.S. Civil Rights Movement as an Insurgency
This is interesting: Most Americans fail to appreciate that the Civil Rights movement was about the overthrow of an entrenched political order in each of the Southern states, that the segregationists who controlled this order did not hesitate to employ violence (law enforcement, paramilitary, mob) to preserve it, and…
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Googling for Sociopaths
One of the best things about capitalism is the way it handles sociopaths. Major executives look up to Alexander the Great and apparently try to follow in his footsteps. But instead of leading a murderous campaign across Asia, they decide to make something people want: newspapers and movies and television shows. True…
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The impact of language choice on github projects
Although I spend a lot of my play-time fooling about with other languages, my professional and released code consists of Python, C, C++ and, alas, Javascript. I've lived in this tiny corner of the magic garden of modern software development for 10 years, and I'm itching to strike out in a different direction for my…
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Who Do You Believe, Randall Stross or Your Own Lying Eyes?
Regarding Randall Stross’s piece in The New York Times claiming the problem isn’t AT&T’s network, but rather the iPhone’s hardware.
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Schneier: The Value of Privacy
Last week, revelation of yet another NSA surveillance effort against the American people has rekindled the privacy debate. Those in favor of these programs have trotted out the same rhetorical question we hear every time privacy advocates oppose ID checks, video cameras, massive databases, data mining, and other…