Technology

UID and Cellphone Numbers – a benign start?

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India’s Unique Identity Number is all set to ride on the country’s large cell phone database which has around 500 million subscribes. It’ll be a challenge to collect the subscriber’s biometric data and prevent duplicates. But most importantly, will it be misused by the government to create a police state as has happened in so many other countries?

How Patents stifle and go against Human nature

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Coming to the US has introduced me full force to the Patent system prevalent in the country. “Intellectual Property” as it is called rules large aspects of America’s legal system. Almost anything can be patented – right from software, to hairstyles (as my wife told me), to business practices. Coming from a country where such things don’t enter most people’s minds, I’ve been able to observe it from outside, and have realized that it’s contrary to the very thing that makes humans special.

It’s a travesty and an insult to the natural behavior of humans and goes against the very impulse that has propelled humanity to the top of the food chain. Don’t believe me? Read on!

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Converting WordPress Tags into Categories

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It took me a little while to figure out how to convert tags into categories in my WordPress blog, and here’s hoping that someone else doesn’t need to search as much. Basically I found that too many of my tags were long term “slots” and I wished that some were categories instead (poor planning I … Read more

Patents standing in the way of Combating Climate Change

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As we approach the Copenhagen conference in December 2009, we’re finding a divide between developed countries like the US and developing countries like India and China. This is because rich nations want poorer countries to commit to drastic carbon emission cuts that the latter are unwilling to do without assistance. Clean Technology and Intellectual Property … Read more

Firefox Ubiquity – Character Count Command

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Now that Ubiquity 0.5 is out, Erik’s Character Count Command no longer works. So I have updated it and if you have Ubiquity Firefox, the command bar should have appeared on top for you. Here is the code: CmdUtils.CreateCommand({ names: [‘char-count’], arguments: [ {role: ‘object’, nountype: noun_arb_text, label: ‘text to count chars in’}], preview: function( … Read more