In a story that appeared Monday in The Guardian, writer Danny Yadron projects a hypothetical, but not technically unrealistic, future scenario in which we imagine our driverless car hijacks a run to the grocery store, transporting us instead to a police station because face-recognition software resulted in our being wanted for questioning in an investigation. The eerie itself, Yadron reports, ...
The February nomination of Dr. Carla Hayden by President Obama to the position of Librarian of Congress was apparently cause for excitement among many of the usual suspects who write in opposition to copyright. Because the Copyright Office operates within the purview of the Library of Congress, and the Librarian has final say in key proceedings, some pundits are anticipating ...
If a man overhears two women at the local coffee house advocating some point of view he doesn’t like and he then announces out loud that he hopes someone rapes and kills them, the management will toss him out on the street. In such a scenario, patrons will applaud the ejection, and nobody in his right mind will suggest that ...
So, this week, the Electronic Frontier Foundation launched its new infographic (stress on graphic) still pitching the idea that it is the IP provisions in the Trans Pacific Partnership agreement that are of the gravest concern. The EFF states on their site that the infographics are covered by a Creative Commons license* and that anyone is free to use or remix the assets with ...
The father of modern chemistry Antoine-Laurent Lavoisier was beheaded in 1793 in what is now the Place de la Concorde. A victim of France’s post-revolutionary Reign of Terror, he was specifically marked for execution by one vengeful, lesser scientist named Jean-Paul Marat, whose incorrect theory about combustion had been publicly scorned by Lavoisier at the royal academy. It’s rare when revolutions ...
