Practical Technology

There is nothing wrong with your Internet. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. The reason you won’t be able to use Wikipedia, Reddit, or numerous other Web sites on January 18th is that these Web sites have decided to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA). Here’s my [...]

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here’s nothing like getting kicked in the teeth by your customers to make a company see reason. When Internet registry and Web site hosting company Go Daddy first realized that supporting the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), a misguided Internet copyright and censorship bill, wasn’t a smart idea, Go Daddy CEO Warren Adelman did a [...]

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It must have seemed like just another day for Verizon Wireless executives. “I know,” someone in the CFO’s office said, “We’ll charge people who make one-time credit or debit card payments on the phone or online $2 to pay their bill.” It must have seen like another fine way to nickel and dime their customers [...]

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Everyone likes personal cloud services, like Apple’s iCloud, Google Music, and Dropbox. But, many of aren’t crazy about the fact that our files, music, and whatever are sitting on someone else’s servers without our control. That’s where ownCloud comes in. OwnCloud is an open-source cloud program. You use it to set up your own cloud [...]

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Some fools still have this delusion that software patent and product design wars have something to do with some mythological real value of intellectual property (IP). While there are indeed cases involving a better mouse-trap, most such cases are about nothing but extorting cash from people who create real products, or, in the case of [...]

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