I take an occasional peek on Flickr. Every now and then you see a picture that makes you go “Wow”

Like this one:

And check the pictures with the Star Wars tag…

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De toename van het aantal tegenstemmers is volgens De Hond toe te schrijven aan de ja-campagne, die een slecht oordeel krijgt. Het optreden van de regering in de campagne heeft een negatieve invloed gehad, zegt 59 procent van de ondervraagden. Ook de discussie over de overwaardering van de gulden bij de invoering van de euro heeft geen goed gedaan.

Alleen onder D66-stemmers bestaat nog een meerderheid voor de grondwet. De SP spint duidelijk garen bij de campagne en staat inmiddels op twintig zetels.

De opiniepeiler is somber over een eventuele ommekeer in het sentiment. “Alle signalen lijken inmiddels op rood te staan en de kans dat uiteindelijk nog een meerderheid op 1 juni voor stemt is heel klein geworden. Wat er maar gebeurt lijkt ten voordele te werken van het tegenstemmen.”

Een goed voorbeeld lijkt het resultaat van Nederland in de voorronde van het Eurovisie Songfestival. Meer dan 70 procent van de ondervraagden noemt het feit dat beduidend meer landen uit Oost-Europa naar de finale gaan een voorbeeld van een verschuiving van de macht binnen de EU.

“Het is de wereld op zijn kop dat nu ook de uitschakeling van Glennis Grace in het songfestival in verband wordt gebracht met het referendum over de Europese grondwet”, aldus Balkenende.

Het gebeurt niet veel dat ik het met Balkje eens ben… maar het geeft wel een diepe euro-scepsis aan bij de bevolking.

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The second one (fig.2), which Tim showed strong interest, represents the skill map of major technologies. The vertical line (Desired skill) shows the ratio of engineers who wants to learn them. The horizontal line (Acquired skill) shows the ratio of engineers who already have skills of them. Most of the new technologies start from left-upper corner and going down to left-lower corner via right-upper and right-lower corner. You can see how XML and Web Service technologies are hot in the field.

Hmm… I’d love to see a chart like this for every year of the past two decades. Looks like I’m stuck int he top-left corner most of the time…

A Doctor was addressing a large audience in Tampa. “The material we put into our stomachs is enough to have killed most of us sitting here, years ago.

Red meat is awful. Soft drinks corrode your stomach lining. Chinese food is loaded with MSG. High fat diets can be disastrous, and none of us realizes the long-term harm caused by the germs in our drinking water. But there is one thing that is the most dangerous of all and we all have, or will, eat it. Can anyone here tell me what food it is that causes the most grief and suffering for years after eating it?”

After several seconds of quiet, a 75-year-old man in the front row raised his hand, and softly said, “Wedding Cake.”

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Photographed through the periscope, Dutch Royal Marines launch from the deck of HRMS Bruinvis during the tactical sea phase, 2003.

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If you are an elite programmer who can write sophisticated code under tight deadlines, someone who makes impossible projects possible; or a Silver Web Surfer your colleagues turn to when they need IT advice: this keyboard is for you.

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Staff at the British Museum have been left with red faces after discovering a hoax exhibit on display – a cave painting of a primitive man pushing a supermarket trolley.

The “rock painting”, entitled Early Man Goes to Market, depicts the outline of a spear-wielding caveman pushing a trolley, next to the outline of a pig.

The work was planted by anonymous “art terrorist” Banksy, whose creation failed to raise eyebrows at one of London’s most famous museums.

This is not the first time Banksy has stuck fake objects to gallery walls and waited to see how long it takes before curators notice.

Museum staff were alerted yesterday after Banksy put a message on his website, saying that the 25cm-by-15cm rock, “had remained in the collection for quite some time”.

Museum staff discovered the rock, stuck to a wall with double-sided tape in a gallery of artefacts from Roman Britain.

It was placed beneath a limestone statue, a 1st Century tombstone found in Tower Hill and a case full of statuettes from Roman Britain in Gallery 49.

Banksy had placed it alongside a caption, stating: “This finely preserved example of primitive art dates from the Post-Catatonic era and is thought to depict early man venturing towards the out-of-town hunting grounds.”

Marine Lt. Col. Gary Jackson of Naperville, Ill. shakes hands with an Iraqi boy in a poor neighborhood in Ramadi, 115 kilometers (70 miles) west of Baghdad, Iraq, Friday May 20, 2005. Jackson, a Civil Affairs officer, handed out leaflets advertising reconstruction projects funded by the U.S. military. (AP Photo/Jacob Silberberg)

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Jorge teaches “Intellectual Property” in the Masters program at the Polytechnic University of Valencia UPV. He proposed to give a talk on the benefits of P2P and talk about the law relating to P2P and copyright in Spain. He proposed to demo what sort of legal uses one could make of copyrighted works from P2P networks, and informed the Spanish collecting society, the national police and the attorney general to let them know what he was up to.

They responded by leaning on the Dean, who cancelled Jorge’s venue. Jorge booked another venue, and the Dean cancelled it. So Jorge moved his talk to the cafeteria, and delivered a five hour session to a packed house.

On May 4, the Dean ordered the director of Jorge’s program to demand his resignation, which he tendered. The Vice-Dean then added insult to injury by issuing a statement saying that Jorge had never taught at the university (!), in a surreal, Stalinist purge (Jorge has taught at the University for five years).

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Lycos DSL in Germany says it will no longer store dynamic IP addresses of its customers, now that a specialist on data privacy laws from Frankfurt University has threatened to sue the company.

Jonas Breyer had asked Lycos what data was kept on him and whether that information was shared with backbone providers, but the ISP refused to co-operate. Probably to avoid further law suits, Lycos has now decided to ditch IP storage altogether.

Deutsche Telekom tentacle T-Online faces similar threats from German subscriber Holger Voss, who this week in court argued that dynamic IP addresses are irrelevant for book keeping and shouldn’t be stored. According to the German Tele Services Data Protection and Telecommunications Act, ISPs are only allowed to store communications data for accounting purposes. Apparently, there is no requirement for German ISPs to keep a record of IP addresses.

A decision by German ISPs not to keep logs on IP addresses would be extremely controversial as the entertainment industry is increasingly demanding from ISPs to disclose the names of suspected file sharers.

It is quite a sad state of affairs when a company does something that is popular with the people, and yet there is “controversy” because another company doesn’t want it to be done.