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TV tells CO2-emitting children to die early
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Andrew Orlowski
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Carbon Cult sickos are under fire for an interactive website that tells children they should die because they emit CO2. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Planet Slayer” site invites young children to take a “greenhouse gas quiz”, asking them “how big a pig are you?”. At the end of the quiz, the pig explodes, and ABC…
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Rationing: the UK’s parallel currency
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Andrew Orlowski
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Environment Minister Hilary Benn again rebuffed calls this week for WW2-style energy rationing to return to the UK. He was responding to a Select Committee report urging ministers to issue 45 million Britons with an energy trading “credit card” – a mammoth techno-bureaucratic exercise costing several billions of pounds a year to operate. What’s interesting…
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Microsoft hands Google the future of digital books
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Andrew Orlowski
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While Bill Gates now holds a lucrative monopoly on digital images, his successors don’t see the same prosperous future for the digital word. Microsoft is withdrawing from the Open Content Alliance digitisation project and will cease to scan books, the company said on Friday. It’s abandoning its Live Book Search venture – a curious decision,…
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Failing Web 2.0 stars pray for copyright abolition
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Andrew Orlowski
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Two articles were published today of some note, and if you can put them in context, you can begin see the true, scary picture of internet economics today. The one that’s usually too scary for the posh papers or broadcast media to describe. Exhibit One is a deadpan report in the Financial Times, bylined to…
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Technorati knocks itself out. Again
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Andrew Orlowski
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Technorati, the comically inept search engine, has redesigned itself again – knocking itself out in the process. The site was down when bloggers checked in yesterday. More importantly, the latest redesign is a tacit admission that it’s given up on its original mission – indexing the world’s weblogs. Technorati now claims to present “zillions of…
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How Free Press breaks the citizens’ network
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Andrew Orlowski
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In 2003 the journalist Ron Suskind captured one of the quotes of the decade when he cited an unnamed Bush administration official as saying: “When we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality, we’ll act again, creating other new realities.” On the web today, “political activism” has become a virtual…