Tag Archives: read-the-rest

The poor don’t care about broadband? Of course they do

By now most Ars readers have been saturated with statistical data about broadband adoption in the United States: who has access, who doesn't, where, why, and how we compare with the rest of the world. One of the conundrums with which all these surveys grapple is that allegedly stubborn portion of the population—mostly poor, rural, and older—who don't use the Internet at all, because they supposedly don't care to do so. But a new study suggests that this community of broadband outsiders is rapidly disappearing from the landscape, particularly among low income Americans.
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Weird Science wonders whether or not it was sex

Hoosiers don't always agree on what constitutes sex: Indiana University's Kinsey Institute tracks (among other things) the public's attitude towards sex, and recently published the results of a survey that asked a fairly simple question: would you say you "had sex" if you engaged in activity X? As the title—"Misclassification bias: diversity in conceptualisations about having 'had sex'"—implies, there's anything but universal agreement. The numbers generally go down as you move from plain old intercourse through anal and oral sex, but there are some surprising results in subpopulations. "A surprising number of older men did not consider penile-vaginal intercourse to be sex," as the press material indicates. I'd personally consider any number greater than zero to be surprising, but apparently at least 25 Indiana residents fell into that category.
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Week in gaming: Activision goes to war, God of War 3

Activision Blizzard has become an immensely successful company with three large franchises under its belt. So what's the only thing to do? Begin burning one down! The drama between Activision and Infinity Ward has lead to lawsuits, stories in the press, and rampant speculation about what's really going on. What's clear is that the people who were the driving force behind the series have left the company, and Activision is looking to release as many Call of Duty games in as short of time as possible
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It’s Time For Microsoft To Turn Itself Upside-Down

There was recently a little skirmish on the web regarding the question of whether or not Microsoft has stopped innovating — whether the internal corporate culture there has thwarted new ideas, and so on. Well, I think we can all agree that Microsoft hasn’t exactly been an innovation machine in recent years; although, with as little currency as the word “innovation” has these days, that’s not saying much — but the fact is that its products haven’t shown as much ingenuity as its competitors in nearly every arena. And like a dragon guarding its hoard, it has striven primarily to maintain its stranglehold on enterprise, which makes up the vast majority of Microsoft’s treasure intake. Who can blame them
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DOIs and their discontents

Those of you who are regular readers of Ars' science content are probably aware of our use of Digital Object Identifiers , or DOIs, which act as online reference information, taking readers directly to the papers being discussed. Readers almost never comment about that feature, except when it fails, in which case we invariably hear about it—and it fails at least once a month. We've tried explaining both our reasons for using them and the reasons they break in the forums, and have recently linked to Ed Yong's excellent discussion of the system and its problems. Within a week, we were dealing with complaints due to a broken DOI. So, this is an attempt to provide a comprehensive description of the DOI system, why we use it, and why it doesn't always work smoothly.
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Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love

Did you know that blocking ads truly hurts the websites you visit? We recently learned that many of our readers did not know this, so I'm going to explain why. There is an oft-stated misconception that if a user never clicks on ads, then blocking them won't hurt a site financially. This is wrong.
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Week in Microsoft: browser ballot arrives, to go global?

Let's look back at the week that was in Microsoft news. Here were the top stories: Coding error leads to uneven EU browser ballot distribution : The distribution of browser choices on the EU browser ballot released this month to Windows users is uneven. Internet Explorer shows up in the right-most position 50 percent of the time for current IE users, an outcome that's due to Microsoft attempting to shuffle the browsers using JavaScript's sort function. Microsoft rivals push to send browser ballot on world tour : The lobbying group European Committee for Interoperable Systems (ECIS), which is composed of many Microsoft rivals including Opera, is urging the rest of the world to push Microsoft into offering the browser ballot screen
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TwitCasting Lets You Stream Live Video And Tweet Simultaneously From Your iPhone

Late last year, Ustream and qik launched iPhone applications that let you stream videos from the iPhone to the web and allow others to watch them as they’re being recorded. And now there is an iPhone app called TwitCasting Live ( iTunes link ), which offers the same basic functionality, but is – as the name suggests – much more deeply integrated into Twitter. The free app is essentially a live streaming app and Twitter client rolled into one.
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The challenge, opportunity of PS3: God of War III interview

God of War III is coming, and it's huge—even in comparison to the previous games in the series, which were pretty epic in size and scope themselves. So how do you top them? Ars sat down with John Palamarchuk, the lead cinematic artist on the game, to find out.
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Public radio remakes itself by entering the iPhone age

When Public Radio Exchange (PRX) developed the free
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