#tech talk

“Zeigen Sie Ihre Papiere!” A Tech Talk column on driver licenses as papers, the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, and Social Security numbers as primary keys.

It’s hard to admit when I’m wrong. A Tech Talk column on ego over reason, from consumer debt and emacs vs. vi tribalism to the Microsoft antitrust case.

The GPL got its first test in court in MySQL AB v. NuSphere. A Tech Talk column on Richard Stallman, free as in freedom vs. free as in beer, and the case.

“How do we make money? Volume.” The SNL spoof described the dot-com bubble. A Tech Talk column on ad-supported sites and Google’s AdWords Select.

Kelly v. Arriba Soft: thumbnails are fair use, framing full-size images is not. A Tech Talk column on linking, inlining, and a fix on the server side.

AltaVista dazzled in 1995; Google got relevance right. A Tech Talk column on PageRank, paid keyword placement, and Google’s first programming contest.

After September 11th, the big stories of 2001 vanished, including the SSSCA. A Tech Talk column on what that bill would have required of PCs and gadgets.

What will new technology undo? A Tech Talk column puts Neil Postman’s question to Turnitin.com’s plagiarism detection and the errors its marketing omits.

A California appeals court lifted the DeCSS injunction against Andrew Bunner. A Tech Talk column on CSS, fair use, source code as speech, and DVD region codes.

NASA broke its Mars losing streak. A 2001 Tech Talk column on how Mars Odyssey nailed orbit insertion within a kilometer, its aerobraking, and its goals.

Would you still live in America if language were no barrier? A Tech Talk column on jurisdiction, the DMCA, and the arrest of Russian programmer Dmitry Sklyarov.

Want an easy way to get rich? Start young. A Tech Talk column working through compound interest, taxes, and inflation, and the future of Social Security.

Want to stick it to The Man and earn ten grand for the pleasure? A Tech Talk column on trivial software patents, prior art, and BountyQuest’s bounties.

Want to become rich and famous? Schedule UAH finals so no one has three in a day. A Tech Talk column on NP-complete problems such as graph coloring.

My new DVD player wouldn’t play through my VCR, thanks to copy protection. A Tech Talk column on King’s Quest, license servers, fair use, and Betamax.

Fun with mass nouns. Sands in the carpet and an awful traffic show why English is hard for programs and why word-processor grammar checkers miss so much.

Florida’s recount asked whether people or machines should count votes. A Tech Talk column on early computers, Gödel’s incompleteness, and trusting machines.

Napster went legit with Bertelsmann, and the doomsayers came out again. A Tech Talk column on why musicians, teachers, and hackers create without pay.

Bush and Gore both backed mandatory web filters in schools and libraries. This Tech Talk column asks what counts as harmful and who controls the list.

Would you mail your credit card number on a postcard? Email works that way. A Tech Talk column on Carnivore, subpoenaed email, and encryption with GPG.

The :CueCat promised to banish long, ugly URLs, then sent lawyers after a Linux hacker. A 2000 Tech Talk column on barcodes and trivial software patents.