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Martin Fowler on Software Patents
a bliki entry for Software Patent
Topics /
Society, Policy & Culture
The most popular blog posts about society, policy & culture on Hacker News. 453 posts.
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End artificial scarcities to increase productivity
My colleagues and I realized this over beer: dry erase markers cost almost nothing, yet a lecture hall never contains functioning dry erase markers.
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Richard Feynman on education in Brazil
From Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!:
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Tech journalists who make no sense
I’m sure all fields have terrible reporting, but the shit that’s coming out of the tech world must be eligible for some sort of cake. Taste this slice of delicious nonsense that made the Forbes site today in Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: We’ve Moved Past The Cloud: Salesforce.com remai…
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Why we need an Open Wireless movement
If you sometimes find yourself needing an open wireless network in order to check your email from a car, a street corner, or a park, you may have noticed that they're getting harder to find. Stories like the one over the weekend about a bunch of police breaking down an innocent man's door because...
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Apple is professional, the web is amateur
It’s common knowledge that Apple doesn’t get the web in general and social in particular. I’ve been thinking a lot about the social part recently and I think Apple’s failure to execute there can shed some light on their failure with the web in general.
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EFF and Bitcoin
EFF's position on Bitcoin donations in 2011. For an update, see https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/05/eff-will-accept-bitcoins-support-digital-liberty and https://www.eff.org/pages/other-ways-give-and-donor-support.
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Sony uses DMCA to silence speech that reveals its security flaws
Co-authored by Corynne McSherry and Marcia Hofmann For years, EFF has been warning that the anti-circumvention provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act can be used to chill speech, particularly security research, because legitimate researchers will be afraid to publish their results lest...
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Dear Record Labels: Focus on Buyers, Not Thieves
Watch streaming video, find interesting podcasts, and discover classic music and new songs from independent artists.
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Facebook's Three New Products
Learn about Meta: our mission, principles, leadership, who owns the company, apps (Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads) and products like Quest.
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Dr. Stallman responded to my open letter
Whoa. Thanks for all the attention and feedback, everybody! In case you're curious: I ended up emailing the letter to RMS and got a reply earlier today. I am skeptical of advice from people who disagree with what I stand for. --Dr Richard Stallman Overall, commenters seem to have had fairly positive things to say, but…
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The daily lunch delivery of India's dabbawallahs
Every day, approximately 4,000 dabbawallahs deliver 160,000 home-cooked lunches from the kitchens of suburban wives and mothers direct to Mumbai’s workers in “the world’s most ingenious meal distribution system.” (Hey UPS, how’s that for logistics?) Dabbawallahs p…
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The Tragic Death of the Flip
The creators of the Flip resisted the urge to gunk it up with complexity. It was a wonderful device and getting better. Then Cisco killed it the day before a new one was supposed to ship.
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When hard books disappear
[Translations: Japanese] Hard books are on their way to extinction. Biologists maintain a concept call a “type specimen.” Every species of living organism has many individuals of noticeable variety. There are millions of Robins in America, for instance, all of … Continue reading →