Wired Opinion

Things are better when they’re looped, as the GIF has so deftly demonstrated. Things are also better when they have swag, as the swashbucklers have proved through fancy murder.

It’s actually rather ironic that the biopharmaceutical industry, traditionally seen as different from software, can now offer the software industry some lessons.

Technology companies like Google, Facebook, HP, and Amazon face hundreds of troll lawsuits. Yet these are the companies that know from first-hand, in-the-trenches experience that great products depend as much on great execution as on great ideas.

But every computer program is itself an abstraction at some level, and computer scientists can use all kinds of abstractions to describe their programs and how they work. We need a concreteness standard for software inventions.

As is often the case when seeking an elegant solution rather than an ad hoc kludge, prior kludges are to blame for the current trouble. The Supreme Court correctly identified the basic goal of the non-obviousness requirement, but have endorsed …

“Google and Twitter make their money by selling ads — not software. Software is an enormously important part of their operations, but most of this software is hidden inside a data center. Microsoft ships software to the world at large.”

This week on Footnotes: the butterfly effect (sans Ashton Kutcher) and dodo birds battle pigs (sans slingshots).

Without those assurances, there would arguably be no incentive to innovate; why invest money and effort on a breakthrough that anyone could then take and sell? … But over the years patents became much more than just protection. They were …

“IBM’s Chief Patent Counsel, Manny Schecter, has one of the most ridiculous defenses of the patent system you’ll ever see … especially when the actual evidence tells a completely different story.”

Toshiba has discovered a new way to enforce such planned obsolescence by cutting the repair market off from critical service information. But the cost to society is significant: The e-waste problem is growing; we’re losing thousands of domestic jobs as …

Patent disputes are a natural characteristic of a vigorously competitive industry. And they’re nothing new: similar skirmishes have historically occurred in areas as diverse as sewing machines, winged flight, agriculture, and telegraph technology. Each marked the emergence of incredible technological …

This week on Footnotes: a special episode on alcohol, which just so happens to come right after the election.

The sole focus of the World Conference on International Telecommunications in Dubai next month, hosted by the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, is making regulations valuable to all stakeholders to support future growth in global communications. There has already been much …

It now costs more than $70 billion a year to keep 7 million people behind bars, on parole, or on probation. The best way to address this problem is not with ad hoc political negotiations or by rehashing the age-old …

David Brooks is mistaken and Joe Scarborough is wrong about Nate Silver. Because while pollsters can’t project, statistical models can, and do, and they do some predictions very well. We rely on statistical models for many decisions every single day; …

There’s often a side effect to new technologies: moral panic. Facebook causes narcissism! Texting is making us illiterate! But the funny thing is, other technologies don’t provoke such alarm. What’s the difference? Why do we freak out at some technologies …

Patents threaten every software developer, and the patent wars we have long feared have broken out. Software developers and software users – which in our society, is most people – need software to be free of patents. The patents that threaten us may be called …

We already know the patent system is broken. And it desperately needs to be fixed: Patents affect and will continue to affect nearly every technology business or product we use. So for the next few weeks, Wired is running a …

This week on Footnotes: Chuck Norris kicks your doppelgänger in the face — twice. And we set to drifting with the hobos, and Pee-wee Herman.

Will there be more cartoonish characters like those fury-inducing Ewoks and the ultimate insult to sci-fi integrity, Jar Jar Binks? Disney knows how to make good movies, and we all know this is where Star Wars has faltered recently — …