rc3.org

Derek Lowe, a drug researcher, says that popular drugs like aspirin, acetaminpphen, and penicillin probably wouldn’t even make it out of the lab today, much less be approved by the FDA. (Via Marginal Revolution.)

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You can defeat the XCP copy protection that got Sony on so much trouble or any other copy protection system on an audio CD by covering up the data track with a piece of opaque tape before inserting the CD in your computer.

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OnJava.com interviews a number of developers to ask them what they think about the idea that Ruby will, at some point, replace Java as the enterprise language of choice. They didn’t ask me, but I’ll do the interview as if they did. (I should do this for more interviews.) They asked all of the [...]

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When the Sony DRM scandal broke, I pointed to a weblog entry arguing that the DRM wasn’t there to prevent customers from pirating music but rather to keep the music off of iPods in order to punish Apple for not supporting competing DRM schemes in its software. Today Joel Spolsky argues that record companies want [...]

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Mark Schmitt on whether President Bush might have been deceived by his advisors when it came to intelligence on Iraq:

We’re asking very traditional questions: Was information withheld? Was there deceit about the information? Those are the familiar Watergate/Iran-contra questions. But they overlook the Ideology of Information that the administration created. By this I [...]

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Bruce Schneier has published a solid wrapup of the controversy over Sony’s rootkit, from its original discovery by Mark Russinovich to Sony’s meandering attempts to respond. He also asks a pointed question — why haven’t antivirus software makers done a better job of responding to this problem? He points out that Symantec’s response has been [...]

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I read a piece this morning about using Google Base for personal profiles, and how it’s already works as a social software platform. You can enter the same kinds of information about yourself that you can on most other dating/social networking sites, and of course the theory is that once you’ve done so you’ll be [...]

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Yesterday I mentioned that consumers face new trade offs when choosing whether to buy music CDs or DRM-protected tracks from the Internet. Now I read that some companies and government agencies are banning Sony music CDs or even all music CDs as a response to the security problems created by Sony’s copy protection. This copy [...]

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It sure seems like there’s a nascent trend that involves moving away from relational databases for storage, at least for stuff that will be exposed on the Web. First, Ning released their Web application platform that basically supports PHP and a

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If you’re trying to keep up with the latest on the Sony DRM/copy protection debacle, I’d recommend reading Ed Felten’sFreedom to Tinker, Bruce Schneier, or Boing Boing. What I wanted to talk about a little bit is the implications of this scandal.

I like the convenience of the iTunes Music Store and the prices are fine [...]

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