Tag Archives: Sci/Tech

BuyMusic.com, which opens with a seductive female voice purring “get loaded,” offers PC owners digital pay music service: Although online retailer BuyMusic.com will offer more than 300,000 songs from the five major recording labels, users of the service will not necessarily have the freedom afforded customers of Apple’s iTunes service. …

We recently mentioned software that finds, chops and recombines parts of spoken word into odd pastiches. Now a Northeast Ohio contrarian has assembled a collection of TV and radio ads “remixed” to subvert their original message: The commercial’s banjo melody is instantly familiar, but the words are different. “Armour hot …

Our buds at Amazon are creating a searchable database of thousands of nonfiction books: Executives at Amazon.com are negotiating with several of the largest book publishers about an ambitious and expensive plan to assemble a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction, according …

ReplayTV caves to content industry: new model will drop two key features – it will no longer be able to skip entire commercials automatically, or send recorded programming over the Internet. Sonicblue Inc., the former owner of ReplayTV, was considered the company in the digital video recording industry that most …

Apple’s Wozniak is doing it for the children and dogs: The co-founder of Apple Computer, Stephen Wozniak, recalls that it began with a series of lost dogs – a runaway husky, a roving Shar-Pei, a wayward bichon frisé. The problem led inexorably to a Wozniak solution: wireless location-monitoring technology that …

Copyright has to be radically changed to reflect the realities of the brave new digital world. You may not like it, but the only way to compensate creators, to give the average creator the incentive to continue to create, is some form of copyright tax, as I have mentioned many …

Jon Pareles looks at the status of albums in the download age: The pop album made its way through the 20th century by staying adaptable, transforming itself from analog grooves to digital bits. But can the notion of an album – a collection of songs sold as a single unit, …

This item is rather astonishing – note the year: Telephony, December 18, 1909 Distributing Music Over Telephone Lines Wilmington, Delaware, is enjoying a novel service through the telephone exchange. Phonograph music is supplied over the wires to those subscribers who sign up for the service. Attached to the wall near …

Bush, Niger, uranium, those all-caps emails from African widows and former government officials ……

First it was reported six file sharers had been subpoenaed by the RIAA, then it was 150. Yesterday AP reported the number is closer to 900, with 75 coming each day: Subpoenas reviewed by The Associated Press show the industry compelling some of the largest Internet providers, such as Verizon …