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Paying for music
Streaming services rely on a weird conceit, but it’s not a new one. Like record labels, these companies can’t exist—they literally have no product—without musicians. Yet hardly any musicians are pleased with the advent of digital streaming, and understandably so—they were already screwed by greedy record labels back when people went into actual brick-and-mortar stores…
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the terrible effect of Krohn-Rhodes
One of the most interesting theorems in computer science is the Krohn-Rhodes theorem that shows a strong link between basic computer science and group theory. Crudely, the KR theorem extends Jordan-Holder \( (H_1 \triangleleft H_2 … \triangleleft H_n=G)\) to state machines, but it does it in a way that doesn’t get us very far in…
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What are patents for
Mr. R.J. Hall designed a new product known as a “Towel Tote” that is basically an absorbent scarf with pockets on the ends. [See one here]. After filing his design patent application, Hall e-mailed with Mr. Farley Nachemin at Bed Bath & Beyond (BB&B) to see whether the company would retail his product. Nachemin is a VP…
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Big Data and politics
For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the…
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Samsung’s trial brief in the Apple patent lawsuit
http://assets.sbnation.com/assets/1257891/Samsung_unredacted_trial_brief.pdf Contrary to the image it has cultivated in the popular press, Apple has admitted in internal documents that its strength is not in developing new technologies first, but in successfully commercializing them. When Apple was developing its campaign to promote the first iPhone, it considered – and rejected – advertisements that touted alleged Apple ?firsts? with…
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Free software and newspapers
Folks who decry the idea of subscriber fees argue that paywalls won’t work, and that those who advocate for them, don’t understand the Internet. The opposite is true. These folks don’t understand the first thing about actual journalism. It costs money to cover a metro region, or a nation, or the world comprehensively, to place…
