DrWeb's Domain

ResourceShelf » Blog Archive » Resource of the Week — Fast Facts Anyone? A Brief Users Guide to Wolfram|Alpha

ResourceShelf » Blog Archive » Resource of the Week — Fast Facts Anyone? A Brief Users Guide to Wolfram|Alpha.

Resource of the Week — Fast Facts Anyone? A Brief Users Guide to Wolfram|Alpha
By Gary Price, Chief/Founding Editor

As of 10:34 PM EDST on Friday, May 15, 2009 the site is live.

Since Wolfram|Alpha, (W|A) — a new fact/answer engine (the company calls it a “computational knowledge engine”) — was preparing to go live over the weekend of May 15-17, we decided to give it a try. Thanks to the Wolfram team for the the early access. Here’s our brief report and hopefully some other useful information for future W|A users.

With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books - NYTimes.com

With E-Readers Comes Wider Piracy of Books - NYTimes.com.

Print Books Are Target of Pirates on the Web
By MOTOKO RICH, Published: May 11, 2009

Ursula K. Le Guin, the science fiction writer, was perusing the Web site Scribd last month when she came across digital copies of some books that seemed quite familiar to her. No wonder. She wrote them, including a free-for-the-taking copy of one of her most enduring novels, “The Left Hand of Darkness.”

Neither Ms. Le Guin nor her publisher had authorized the electronic editions. To Ms. Le Guin, it was a rude introduction to the quietly proliferating problem of digital piracy in the literary world. “I thought, who do these people think they are?” Ms. Le Guin said. “Why do they think they can violate my copyright and get away with it?”

This would all sound familiar to filmmakers and musicians who fought similar battles — with varying degrees of success — over the last decade. But to authors and their publishers in the age of Kindle, it’s new and frightening territory.