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Martin Carel

Martin Carel's Public Library

07 Aug 09

A special report on the Arab world: : The fever under the surface | The Economist

  • And in neighbouring Lebanon, which Syria had long treated as a vassal, the assassination of Rafik Hariri, a popular former prime minister, had triggered massive protests. Many Lebanese blamed Syria for Mr Hariri’s murder. Their spontaneous protests—one of the biggest manifestations of “people’s power” the Arab world had witnessed—came to be known as the “cedar revolution”. Within months (and with the prodding of France and America) the cedar revolution forced Mr Assad to withdraw his army from Lebanon, after a stay of 30 years.

Local newspapers in peril: The town without news | The Economist

  • As local newspapers fail, we may learn that their real value was less as a check on politicians than simply as a forum for casual conversation—a place where a town can talk to itself.
  • The internet is undermining local newspapers much more effectively than it is supporting alternatives.
04 Aug 09

Monetising social networks: Tweeting all the way to the bank | The Economist

  • Twitter is now thought to have around 23m users.
  • Facebook, one of the biggest networks along with News Corporation’s MySpace, has seen membership leap from 100m in August 2008 to some 250m today.
02 Aug 09

Spotify v illegal downloads: Free but legal | The Economist

  • Firms such as Spotify, founded by Swedish programmers, and we7, based in Britain, stream music on demand to European computers in return for nothing more burdensome than the odd advertisement. Together they have quickly amassed 8m users.
  • Worldwide sales of music in the form of CDs and DVDs fell by 15% last year, according to the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).
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14 Jul 09

A cyber-warfare mystery: Ghost in the machine | The Economist

  • The South Korean Defence Security Command reported an average of 95,000 daily attacks.
  • In a speech in May, President Barack Obama called cyber-security one of America’s “most serious economic and national security challenges.”

Google v Microsoft: Clash of the titans | The Economist

  • It plans to do what the now-defunct Netscape attempted when it launched its first browser in the mid-1990s: to make Windows obsolete and turn the browser into the dominant computing platform. Eventually Chrome OS will be used to power full-fledged PCs. All applications written for the software will be web-based and will work with other browsers that are compliant with the latest web standards (even those running on Windows). Chrome OS would also allow users to work offline and synchronise changes later.
  • Yet it is much too early to count Microsoft out. It recently launched Bing, a new search service, which has taken some market share from Google. In October, roughly when Google will make Chrome OS available, Microsoft will release the next iteration of its operating system, Windows 7, a version of which is supposed to run well on netbooks. And the firm is spending billions on a “cloud”, a global network of huge data centres, which will rival Google’s infrastructure and allow Microsoft to offer all kinds of web-based applications.
20 Jun 09

Iran and the world: Iran rises up | The Economist

  • a million-odd demonstrators on the streets of Tehran, the like of which has not been seen since the revolution that unseated the shah in 1979
  • The eagerness of Iran’s rulers for a nuclear capability, which they swear is only for civilian use but which most outsiders reckon would lead inexorably to a bomb, is shared by nearly all Iranians, even those on the streets, as a national birthright in a hostile world.
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18 Jun 09

Mobile telecoms: Tempting fruit | The Economist

  • And it unveiled a new operating system for its phones that, among other things, lets users encrypt data and delete data remotely if a device is lost.
08 May 09

France's unpopular president | Super-Sarkozy falls to earth | The Economist

  • There is outrage that ordinary workers are paying with their jobs even as France has its own fat-cat pay scandals, such as the 180% salary rise, to an annual €1.3m, enjoyed by Jean-François Cirelli, a former government adviser who is now vice-president of GDF-Suez, an energy giant.
  • Even now, polls show that voters approve of the way Mr Sarkozy defends French interests abroad, though most remain doubtful that he can do much to save jobs at home.
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Europe's new pecking order | A new pecking order | The Economist

  • But the global economic meltdown has given them the satisfying triple whammy of exposing the risks in deregulation, giving the state a more important role and (best of all) laying low les Anglo-Saxons.
  • Generous welfare states have protected those who are always the first to suffer in a downturn from an immediate sharp drop in their incomes and acted as part of the “automatic stabilisers” that expand budget deficits when consumer spending shrinks. In Britain, and to an even greater extent in America, people have felt more exposed.
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04 May 09

2009-05-01/optimism.md at master from raganwald's homoiconic - GitHub

  • First, we decide something is personal or impersonal.
  • The second axis or binary property was general vs. specific.
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30 Apr 09

Capitalism and democracy | open Democracy News Analysis

  • what is most needed today - especially since the world recession has raised older and newer doubts about the nature and value of capitalism - is greater recognition of how capitalism both permits and restricts such empowerment. 
  • A globalising world where different country elites (despite competition) develop a stronger common interest in maintaining an iniquitous world capitalist order against their own subordinate classes can see real value in the "spread of democracy". The key issue here is stability of dominant class rule.
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29 Apr 09

Oracle's surprising takeover of Sun | Mr Ellison helps himself | The Economist

  • Mr Ellison is keen on two bits of Sun’s software portfolio in particular. One is Java, a programming language that is the underlying technology both for many business applications and for software that runs on mobile phones.
  • Sun’s other crown jewel is Solaris, its highly reliable operating system, which is often used as the platform for Oracle’s databases.
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Cyberwar and scare-mongering | Battle is joined | The Economist

  • In recent years such concerns have been heightened by the first real examples of large-scale cyber-attacks—on Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008. In each case, government websites were brought down by a deluge of traffic, apparently from Russia. The actual damage done was minimal, but it has all added to the sense of urgency, in America in particular, about the need to protect critical infrastructure from such an attack.
  • In one corner is the Department of Homeland Security, which operates the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a body set up to co-ordinate America’s various cyber-security efforts. In the other corner is the National Security Agency (NSA), which thinks it ought to be in charge.

A Swedish court jails the founders of the Pirate Bay, a file-sharing website | Online pirates at bay | The Economist

  • As it is the four Swedes have promised to appeal to Sweden’s highest courts. Moreover, they claim that the Pirate Bay will carry on much as before using the servers located beyond the reach of Swedish or European Union law enforcers.
  • The Pirate Bay is the latest in a long list of illegal file-sharing services, such as Napster, Grokster and Kazaa, that have sunk under the assault of the media giants. Despite a sustained global legal campaign against such services and against the individuals who are the origin of the illegal files, the popularity of illegal file-sharing has not waned.
24 Apr 09

Politics and the internet | Today, Strasbourg; next, the world | The Economist

  • Still, Mr Hannan’s triumph was a mixed blessing for the Conservatives themselves. Despite his mere 37 years, Mr Hannan is a more old-fashioned conservative than those who lead his party. Not only was his speech dominated by support for laissez-faire economics and hostility to the EU—two positions the Tories have spent recent years striving to moderate and play down respectively—but it was also delivered in the pugnacious style that failed to impress voters when William Hague, the shadow foreign secretary, tried it in his previous life as Tory leader.
21 Apr 09

France and file-sharing | Trois strikes and you're out | The Economist

  • It would force internet-service providers (ISPs) to reveal the identities of users downloading copyrighted material, and would send them two warnings: the first by e-mail, the second by registered letter. If users continued to download such material, the ISP would cut off their broadband access for up to a year and put them on a blacklist to stop them subscribing elsewhere.
  • According to Libération, a French newspaper, the Socialists had hidden behind heavy curtains in the entrance to the parliamentary chamber.
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The link between autism and extraordinary ability | Genius locus | The Economist

  • A study published this week by Patricia Howlin of King’s College, London, reinforces this point. It suggests that as many as 30% of autistic people have some sort of savant-like capability in areas such as calculation or music.
  • A standard diagnosis of autism requires three things to be present in an individual. Two of these three, impairments in social interaction and in communication with other people, are the results of autists lacking empathy or, in technical jargon, a “theory of mind”.
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03 Apr 09

Computer security | Browser wars are back | The Economist

  • Internet Explorer has 67% of the browser market precisely because it comes ready-installed as the default browser on nine out of ten personal computers.
  • One of the main reasons why a Windows machine is harder to crack than a Mac is because of the way Microsoft randomises the memory locations of code inserted into processes.
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