(Image source by kentoh) Remember Clippy? He was the animated paper-clip assistant, who lived several years ago amid the code of Microsoft Office. He would pop up rather suddenly on your desktop and interrupt your work to offer unsolicited advice as to how the work might be improved. He was so annoying that Bill Gates reportedly sent an email memo to ...
“I hate Illinois Nazis.” – Jake Blues, The Blues Brothers (1980) I think my first introduction to the complexities of living in a nation with a constitutional right like the First Amendment was in the 7th Grade. Our teacher had the class watch and discuss the film Skokie (1981), a dramatization of the circumstances surrounding the 1977 legal case National ...
When it comes to enterprise-scale piracy, it would be great if those who advocate its existence would just make simple declarations like, “I want free media and don’t care how I get it.” Sure, that would be a childish thing to say, but still less offensive than all the pretense to rationale that accompanies piracy—the absurd legal arguments, the mystical ...
Image by nicholashan This week, the Wall Street Journal reports that Google has been funding academic research papers worldwide and, unsurprisingly, the conclusions in these papers tend to support Google’s policy interests. This is familiar territory of course. Most obviously, we remember that Big Tobacco funded all manner of “research” that produced alternative facts about the health hazards of smoking. This ...
When Napster appeared in 1999, it was a bit of a perfect storm situation for fans to rationalize music piracy. Granted, people would have used the file-sharing app no matter what, but the music industry had indeed become demonstrably bloated; and one chronic complaint among consumers was that we were required to buy a $15 CD just to get two ...
