(issues h/551)

Hypothes.is

The digital market is awash with millions of barely edited titles, most of it dreck, while readers are being conditioned to think that books are worth as little as a sandwich. “Amazon has successfully fostered the idea that a book is a thing of minimal value,”

Amazon constitutes a third of one major house’s retail sales on a given week, with the growth chart pointing toward fifty per cent

fifty to sixty per cent of the list price of a book goes to Amazon or to another retailer. When he was starting out, in the eighties, that figure was more like thirty or forty per cent.

A few brand names at the top, a mass of unwashed titles down below, the middle hollowed out: the book business in the age of Amazon mirrors the widening inequality of the broader economy.

At the moment, those people are obsessed with how they read books—whether it’s on a Kindle or an iPad or on printed pages. This conversation, though important, takes place in the shallows and misses the deeper currents that, in the digital age, are pushing American culture under the control of ever fewer and more powerful corporations.

Computers used to teach other computers to play Pac-Man, StarCraft

TorrentFreak

The slickly designed torrenting app Popcorn Time had barely begun to live, but its creators have already pulled it down from their website, along with the supporting infrastructure. The creators posted an explanation to the app's (former) website, saying that despite their certainty that the app was legal, it had become entrenched in a conversation they didn't want to have.

int edition

stumble upon some random wandering player who's running through the map, completely unaware of my presence. I take advantage of my surprise position and let loose a spray of bullets toward him. I get in a few hits, but my general lack of fine aiming control means he survives the first volley an

"Ownership" was assured those with the nastiest tools, whether fists or armies, and the most resolute will to use them. Property was the divine right of thugs.

True, I don't get any royalties on the millions of copies of my songs which have been extracted from concerts, but I see no reason to complain. The fact is, no one but the Grateful Dead can perform a Grateful Dead song, so if you want the experience and not its thin projection, you have to buy a ticket from us. In other words, our intellectual property protection derives from our being the only real-time source of it.

In any case, without our old methods, based on physically defining the expression of ideas, and in the absence of successful new models for nonphysical transaction, we simply don't know how to assure reliable payment for mental works. To make matters worse, this comes at a time when the human mind is replacing sunlight and mineral deposits as the principal source of new wealth.

But, as a member of ASCAP, I can assure you this is not a model that we should emulate. The monitoring methods are wildly approximate.

If our property can be infinitely reproduced and instantaneously distributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And, if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and distribution of such work?

Consumer Electronics Show—CES to us in the biz—has come to an end. We've wrapped up a week of running around Vegas like crazy people, forsaking sleep and eating in taxis or while hunched over vendor-provided buffet tables in product demo rooms.

がついたりした木を、路ばたに つみ重ねて薪の料（しろ）に売っていたと云

wn PCs, but who also want something that's as small as possible. It gives up much of the expandabi

The idea of oral insulin has been around since the 1930s, but the difficulties of making it have previously seemed too large to overcome. First, insulin is a protein—when it comes in contact with stomach enzymes, it is quickly destroyed. Second, if insulin can pass through the stomach safely, it is too big a molecule (about 30 times the size of aspirin) to be absorbed into the bloodstream, where it needs to be in order to regulate blood-sugar levels.

“ON BACKGROUND, I can confirm there was a handshake.”

[1]

By Lawrence Freedman. Oxford University Press USA; 751 pages; $34.95. Buy from Amazon.com EVERYONE, it seems, is in need of a strategy.

Mr Bloomberg is sometimes called a centrist, but that is not quite right.

The guilty plea and fine paid by SAC, which is owned by the billionaire investor Steven A. Cohen, are part of a broader plea deal that federal prosecutors in Manhattan announced on Monday.

Two features that I think I’ll need (and which I believe the fabulously open-sourced Hypothes.is lacks) are verified accounts (for authoritative, trusted sources) and a rating system for annotations.

-Charlie Chaplin

frontispiece2.jpg (72K)

picking

These poor applications compounded Windows 8's problems because they meant that there was no real incentive to learn one's way around the new operating system. The three issues above could probably be overlooked if there were a rich family of must-have Metro applications to run. But there weren't. The Windows apps that people want to use were desktop apps anyway.

Windows 8 worked. It was a viable operating system, and in broad strokes, it fulfilled Microsoft's dream of one operating system for tablets and PCs. But Windows 8 was far from perfect. Its problems were in three main areas.

After the customary six months of incubation, Ubuntu 13.10—codenamed Saucy Salamander—has hatched. The new version of the popular Linux distribution brings updated applications and several new features, including augmented search capabilities in the Unity desktop shell.

s exactly; yet, now that I recall all the circumstances, I think I can see a little into the springs and motives which being cunningly presented to me under various disguises, induced me to set about performing the part I did, besides cajoling me into the delusion that it was a cho

The 5 creepiest things about how the Koch brothers engineered the shutdown

Oh, well, it’s really both parties at fault here!” line of reasoning that some people have been trying to take.

Heading

A few years and missions later, Hubble’s glimpse into what is known as the deep field has revealed that we are just one tin

Since the if clause of the statement is satisfied, Python never tries to evaluate the elif clause, so we never get to print out 2. By contrast, if we replaced the elif by an if, then we would print out both 1 and 2. So an elif clause potentially gives us more information than a bare if clause; when it evaluates to true, it tells us not only that the condition is sati

Dynamic languages such as JavaScript are more difficult to com-pile than statically typed ones. Since no concrete type informationis available, traditional compilers need to emit generic code that canhandle all possible type combinations at runtime.

In the "computing with language" sections we will take on some linguistically motivated programming tasks without necessarily explaining how they work. In the "closer look at Python" sections we will systematically review key programming concepts.

LEAVING Microsoft quietly was never on the cards for Steve Ballmer (pictured, right). Only a week after the surprise announcement that he would retire within a year from the post of chief executive he has held since January 2000,

On August 29, 2003, Skype went live for the first time. By 2012, according to Telegeography, Skype accounted for a whopping 167 billion minutes of cross-border voice and video calling in a year—which itself was a stunning 44 percent growth over 2011. That increase in minutes was "more than twice that achieved by

クルト-ユルゲン・マース博士講演会 「文化外交：外交におけるソフトパワーの可能性と限界」

Change happens in IT whether you want it to or not. But even with all the talk of the "post-PC" era and the rise of the horrifically named "bring your own device" hype, change has happened in a patchwork.

Robert J. Glushko et al

I've been involved in professional IT since 2000, when I graduated from university and joined an Internet startup company called Questia. B

According to McLuhan, the “sheer inclusiveness” of information as a medium and as a concept expands both the field of battle and the semantic field of war. “Real, total war has become information war,” notes McLuhan in The Medium is the Massage, “it is being fought by subtle electric informational media—under cold conditions, and constantly” (138). Building on The Mechanical Bride and its critique of advertising as a declaration of war on human subjectivity, McLuhan traces the emergence of a new species of war that makes civil society itself the target of a covert, unceasing “guerilla information war with no division between military and civilian participation” (Culture is Our Business 66).

Info War, however, makes civil society itself the center of gravity. Info War targets not only the physical infrastructure of information (nodes, cables, links, servers, towers, routers, electricity grids) but also the decision makers, “human or automated,” plugged into the grid.