technology

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The Dark Side of Technology

“One ought never to turn one’s back on a threatened danger and try to run away from it. If you do that, you will double the danger. But if you meet it promptly and without flinching, you will reduce the danger by half. Never run away from anything. Never!” — Winston Churchill It’s with the …

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Be Your Own Manufacturer

I’ve noticed a trend with the writings of Chris Anderson, former editor of Wired magazine and the author of a new book on 3-D printing called Makers: The New Industrial Revolution. It goes like this. He comes out with a book, and the highbrow experts say it’s crazy, that this time he has gone too …

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A Meeting at 30,000 Feet

I’m looking out the airplane window, marveling that the clouds are below me. My computer is out and I’m surfing online. As usual, I inhale a big intake of air, still dazzled that this is possible. A notification pops up that there is a meeting taking place in Austin, Texas, a digital Meetup sponsored by …

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Progress, Despite Every Attempt to Stop It

The typical libertarian sees the world’s glass of water as half-empty. No wonder people avoid freedom lovers. While they tend to be smart and well-informed, they’re often socially inept, ill-tempered, underemployed, and overeducated. While they can explain the functions and evils of the Federal Reserve, their version of dress for success is a trip to …

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Which E-book Reader Should You Buy?

We are still in the early stages of a literature revolution, a migration from physical to digital, and it is tremendously exciting to see the number of options that have become available. I still remember when, not too many years ago, people were saying that computers would destroy books and therefore authors and therefore the …

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Why Facebook Works, and Democracy Does Not

We can learn from Facebook and all other social networks that the Internet has brought us. These are more than websites; they are models of social organization that transcend old forms. Make the rest of life more like a social network and we will begin to see real progress in the course of civilization. Persist in the old model of forced democratic community and we will continue to see decline.

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How Change Happens

My brother is teaching a semester in London, and he casually video Skyped me last week to show me around his apartment, which is small but charming. I reciprocated by hauling up the cover of the e-book I am reading, and shared my desktop to show a YouTube performance of Renaissance music I thought he …

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