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Chris Anderson makes me a bet
by
Andrew Orlowski
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“Or the arrival of the Web browser, which blew millions of minds, making a mouseclick feel like teleportation.” Chris Anderson, Wired I was really calling the editor of Wired magazine, Chris Anderson, to check up on which weird and interesting drugs he was taking when he wrote the sentence you see above you. [* answer…
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Anti-war slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed … in 42 days
by
Andrew Orlowski
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This year marks the 100th anniversary of George Orwell’s birth, and the writer who best explained the power of language on politics would be amazed what can be done with the Internet. On February 17 [2003] a front page news analysis in the New York Times bylined by Patrick Tyler described the global anti-war protests…
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“This MS Antitrust story was created by a computer program”
by
Andrew Orlowski
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Google’s News service is remarkable: and the most astonishing thing about it is that it is generated automatically. ” The selection and placement of stories on this page were determined automatically by a computer program,” says a note at the foot of each page. But why stop there? Why not use Perl scripts to generate…
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Physics hoaxers discover Quantum Bogosity?
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Andrew Orlowski
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The physics establishment appears to be unable to decide whether papers submitted by two former French TV presenters are a scientific breakthrough or an elaborate hoax. The debunking to date has been done on Usenet groups and informally, over the Internet. The pranksters evaded the rigorous peer review process employed by scientific journals, and have…
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Ex ICANN chief spotted in Low Earth Orbit
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Andrew Orlowski
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Esther Dyson has made one of her occasional swings past Earth, with Salon.com’s Farhad Manjoo making radio contact as her low earth orbit took her over San Francisco. The former ICANN chief has lost none of eccentricity on her on her voyage through the galaxy. “Let’s get real!,” she proclaims – an alert for regular…
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Miracle cures Berkeley man of Itanic wickedness
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Andrew Orlowski
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Praise the Lord! A miracle has taken place in nearby Berkeley. A fortnight ago UCB grad student Nick Weaver explained to us in some detail the deficiencies of the IA-64 architecture. He’s teaching some classes, and one caught our eye: entitled “Voyage of the Itanic”. “Itanic describes the architecture very well,” he told us. The…