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"Would you be better off paying for online newspapers like this one? Should you feel guilty about downloading free music? Is the Web's "information-wants-to-free" culture hurting writers, musicians and the rest of the "digital peasants," as Jaron Lanier calls us, now providing unpaid content to be exploited by the "lords of the clouds" like Google? In my Findings column, I discuss Mr. Lanier's new book, "You Are Not A Gadget," a manifesto decrying the Web's effect on individual creativity. (You can see excerpts of his criticism at Edge and at Cato Unbound.) Mr. Lanier mentions this newspaper as one of the victims as well as the promoters of the Web's ideology. "The New York Times," he writes, "promotes so-called open digital politics on a daily basis even though that ideal and the movement behind it are destroying the newspaper and all other newspapers. It seems to be a case of journalistic Stockholm syndrome." Mr. Lanier also faults himself: "

""This is a deeply thought-provoking book about the dramatic changes we must make to save the planet from financial madness" - Naomi Klein. Opening with Oscar Wilde's observation that "nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing," Patel shows how our faith in prices as a way of valuing the world is misplaced. He reveals the hidden ecological and social costs of a hamburger (as much as $200), and asks how we came to have markets in the first place. Both the corporate capture of government and our current financial crisis, Patel argues, are a result of our democratically bankrupt political system. If part one asks how we can rebalance society and limit markets, part two answers by showing how social organizations, in America and around the globe, are finding new ways to describe the world's worth. If we don't want the market to price every aspect of our lives, we need to learn how such organizations have discovered democratic ways in which people, and not simply governments, can play a crucial role in deciding how we might share our world and its resources in common. This short, timely and inspiring book reveals that our current crisis is not simply the result of too much of the wrong kind of economics. While we need to rethink our economic model, Patel argues that the larger failure beneath the food, climate and economic crises is a political one. If economics is about choices, Patel writes, it isn't often said who gets to make them. The Value of Nothing offers a fresh and accessible way to think about economics and the choices we will all need to make in order to create a sustainable economy and society."

"Taking their cue from social media, educators at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a social networking application called Classroom Salon that engages students in online learning communities that effectively tap the collective intelligence of groups. Thousands of high school and university students used Classroom Salon (CLS), http://www.classroomsalon.org/, this past academic year to share their ideas about texts, news articles and other reading materials or their critiques of each others' writings. With the support of the Next Generation Learning Challenges initiative, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, CLS will be used in an innovative experiment at the University of Baltimore to see if it can help students who are in danger of failing introductory courses or otherwise dropping out of college. "Sites such as Facebook and Twitter have captured the attention of young people in a way that blogs and online discussion forums have not," said Ananda Gunawardena, associate teaching professor in the Computer Science Department, who developed CLS with David S. Kaufer, professor of English. "With Classroom Salon, we've tried to capture the sense of connectedness that makes social media sites so appealing, but within a framework that that allows groups to explore texts deeply. So it's not just social networking for the sake of socializing but enhancing the student experience as readers and writers.""

"In open source software, if you contribute enough patches to the code base, most projects will make you a committer. I guess I shouldn't be surprised then that when you write enough articles for Opensource.com, they give you your own column."

" Las negociaciones en curso sobre el tratado comercial EEUU-UE, conocido como Asociación Transatlántica de Comercio e Inversión (TTIP, por sus siglas en inglés), se están realizando a puerta cerrada, codo con codo con los grupos de presión de las grandes multinacionales. La influencia que ejercen estos grupos es tan grande, que su colaboración con los negociadores merece especial atención. Nuestra contribución: ¡conceder un premio al grupo empresarial más resultón!"

"Benjamin Mako Hill mako@atdot.cc This is revision 0.2.1 of this file and was published on November 20, 2012. Revision 0.2 was published on June 10, 2005. Revision 0.1 was published on May 15, 2005 and was written was presented as a talk at Linuxtag 2005 given in Karlsruhe, Germany. Revision 0 was published on May 2004 is based in part of the research and work done for a presentation on the subject given at the International Free Software Forum (FISL) given in Porto Alegre, Brazil."

Apple's tax benefits in Ireland are illegal, and the company will have to pay up to €13 billion (US$14.5 billion) in back taxes, plus interest.

Apple's tax benefits in Ireland are illegal, and the company will have to pay up to €13 billion (US$14.5 billion) in back taxes, plus interest.

"Talking to developers and reading about open source I often get the feeling that the general notion is that open source is just about code and commits. Put another way, "If you don't make commits for a project you are not contributing to it." Or so they say. That notion is far from the truth in my eyes. Let me tell you why."

"Talking to developers and reading about open source I often get the feeling that the general notion is that open source is just about code and commits. Put another way, "If you don't make commits for a project you are not contributing to it." Or so they say. That notion is far from the truth in my eyes. Let me tell you why."

"While I was putting together slides for my lightning talk at Great Wide Open (happening March 16-17), Not that Weird: Open Source Tools for Creatives, I remembered that in the last half of 2015 we had a bit of a loss from our open source creative toolbox. I think I was little"