Group items tagged

Tech giants unite against Google By Maggie Shiels Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley Not everyone in the coalition wants the deal blocked, some want revisions Three technology heavyweights are joining a coalition to fight Google's attempt to create what could be the world's largest virtual library.Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo will sign up to the Open Book Alliance being spearheaded by the Internet Archive. They oppose a legal settlement that could make Google the main source for many online works. "Google is trying to monopolise the library system," the Internet Archive's founder Brewster Kahle told BBC News.

Critics have claimed the settlement will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books. The Internet Archive scans around 1000 books a day at 10 cents a page "The techniques we have built up since the enlightenment of having open access, public support for libraries, lots of different organisational structures, lots of distributed ownership of books that can be exchanged, resold and repackaged in different ways - all of that is being thrown out in this particular approach," warned Mr Kahle. The non-profit Internet Archive has long been a vocal opponent of this agreement. It is also in the business of scanning books and has digitised over half a million of them to date. All are available free. As the 4 September deadline approaches, the number of groups and organisations voicing their opposition is growing. But with three of the world's best-known technology companies joining the chorus, the Open Book Alliance can expect to make headlines the world over.

In its defence, Google has argued that the deal brings great benefits to authors and will make millions of out-of-print books widely available online and in libraries. In a statement, the company said: "The Google Books settlement is injecting more competition into the digital books space, so it's understandable why our competitors might fight hard to prevent more competition."

1. Klingon Perhaps the most fully realized science fiction language, Klingon has a complete grammar and vocabulary, permitting countless nerds to learn it like it was high school Spanish. Fans have translated Shakespeare, Sun Tzu and the Bible into the language. There’s a Klingon Language Institute, the purpose of which is to promote the language and culture of this nonexistent people. You can even select Klingon as your language of choice in Google.

it has become almost de rigueur for fiction writers and moviemakers to include a constructed language (conlang) when crafting a new universe. Here are some of the best:

"People really want to do stuff real time and I think they (Twitter) have done a great job.

"FriendFeed is well known for having some powerful and intelligent technology that allows users to aggregate everything they do online and do it all in real time.

bility for users to import activities from third parties services like YouTube and Flickr to letting users comment or say they "like" something in another user's feed.

We think that our technology will create a new way of tagging

can be interrogated from far away by a standard mobile phone camera

However, the team also thinks they could be used in consumer applications, such as supermarkets, where products could be interrogated with a shopper's mobile phone

Sorry, I don't use the word media. I don't use the word news. I don't think that those words mean anything anymore

But the problem is not that the traditional way of writing articles isn't valuable anymore. The problem is that this is now in the minority. It used to be a monopoly, it used to be the only way to distribute news

Newspapers are not important. It may be that their physical, printed form no longer works.

out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media

Generation Y and Z consider e-mail passé…In 2009 Boston College stopped distributing e-mail addresses to incoming freshme

News that Germany and France have, with a mini-bound, escaped recession must be the most ominous development of the week.

For those within this system, Germany had been an extremely comfortable place until the downturn. But the apparent failure of its export-driven social model changed all that. As a result, Germans had begun to campaign for a responsive political system.

In all sorts of ways,  Germans had begun to realise that the economy - and thence German society - had reached the end of the post-war path. The worry is that today’s GDP figures will drive them back to the old, familiar way of thinking.