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Futures

  • Notes From An Echo Chamber

    Words of wisdom from dotcom entrepreneur, billionaire, Ayn Rand fan etc Mark Cuban: You can find any type of discussion group across the Net that is finite enough to make you a hero. It might just be three people, but in that group, you’re your own David Koresh. And I think that gives people a >>>

  • Meta Blog

    A room where bloggers blog about blogging, the Bloggercon conference, San Francisco: The weird thing about live-blogging a conference is that you are multi-tasking on many levels. You are in a room with a laptop on your lap, typing away about what you hear and see. You might snap a digital photo of your fellow >>>

  • The New Game of Life

    Fancy joining in a consensual hallucination? Will Wright, creator of the Sims, joins the jostling for supremacy by the different tech and media sectors, their battle for the living room and every other space in which media consumers, producers, participants may soon find themselves. He argues that games have the potential for subsuming almost all >>>

  • Patent cupidity

    From the Economist’s latest survey of patents and technology: The granting [of] patents “inflames cupidity”, excites fraud, stimulates men to run after schemes that may enable them to levy a tax on the public, begets disputes and quarrels betwixt inventors, provokes endless lawsuits…The principle of the law from which such consequences flow cannot be just. >>>

  • Beating the Event Horizon

    Interviewed by Phillip Dodd for BBC Radio 3’s Nightwaves last night, novelist William Gibson talked about the difficulties of writing in an age in which history has its finger pressed down firmly on the fast-forward button – not a cliché in 1984 when it appeared in Neuromancer – with no letting up in sight. Gibson >>>

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    A Splice of Mice

    Mickey isn’t the only mouse trying to wriggle out of the clutches of the masters of code. – Animation World Network Canada last week refused to grant a patent for a genetically modified mouse. Unlike the US, EU and Japan, Canada denies that Harvard’s scientists invented anything when they manipulated mouse genes. Its Supreme Court >>>

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    Off Switch For Big Media

    It’s the beginning of the end of the big media monopoly, argues Robert X Cringely. The big media corporations may have succeeded in making copying illegal. But even Microsoft is starting to acknowledge that there’s been a total failure in stopping the growth of a culture of copying. Big media’s next step will be to >>>