[Quote:]

Software developers are angry that Microsoft has been granted a patent for the conversion of objects into XML files.

The patent, which was granted by the US patent office on Tuesday, is for XML serialisation and deserialisation — the conversion of a programming object into an XML file and vice versa.

XML, an open standard developed by the W3C, is commonly used for representing data structures in applications that exchange data. As applications will often need to convert between programming objects and XML files, this patent could cover virtually any application that uses XML to transfer data.

Wookey, a developer on the free Linux distribution Debian, said the patent should not have been granted and could be used by Microsoft to discourage competition.

“It’s an abomination to anyone who does programming that the concept of every possible way of converting between a programming object and an XML file (and vice versa) can be owned by one company,” said Wookey to ZDNet UK. “Should someone else want to save a programming object in the form of an XML file, Microsoft can now charge them for the privilege or simply refuse them permission to do it at all in the US.”

Michael Tortolano, a senior software manager at Home Media Networks, agreed that the patent should not have been granted.

“Interoperability is the life blood of the computer industry yet we keep seeing software patents being granted which directly threaten the ability of computers to their basic job, to share and manipulate data,” said Tortolano.

[Quote:]

. Het eerste nationale referendum in Nederland vond plaats in 1797, en het resultaat daarvan zou degenen te denken moeten geven die van een referendum een duidelijk mandaat voor de Europese Grondwet verwachten.

Het onderwerp van het referendum van 1797 was de grondwet, niet die van Europa maar van de jonge Bataafse Republiek. Maar verder is de overeenkomst treffend. Gaat het er nu om, of Europa het karakter van een federatieve staat moet krijgen of een samenwerkingsverband van soevereine staten moet blijven, toen was de vraag of de Bataafse Republiek een eenheidsstaat moest worden of dat de gewesten hun historische soevereiniteit moesten behouden. Daar was twee jaar over vergaderd door de in 1795 gekozen Nationale Vergadering, voordat op 10 mei 1797 een compromistekst werd vastgesteld. Op 8 augustus werd die echter met 108 761 tegen 27 955 stemmen verworpen.

Noch de voorstanders van de eenheidsstaat, noch de voorstanders van de gewestelijke souvereiniteit kon de uiteindelijke tekst bekoren. De unitarist Valckenaer schreef over de nieuwe staatsregeling: “Als minister en openbaar ambtsdrager hoop ik dat zij wordt aangenomen, in het besef van de politieke noodzaak dat wij eindelijk georganiseerd raken. Als burger, die moet leven onder deze constitutie, wijs ik haar af en verwerp ik haar.�?

[Quote:]

Grahame Lock en Hans Venema hebben het recent in De Groene helder opgeschreven: de huidige EU beweegt in de richting van de post-democratie.

“De nieuwe anti-politiek van Europa” (De Groene Amsterdammer, Europa-bijlage mei 2005)

Tegenstellingen die voorheen door vrije burgers in het publieke domein werden uitgevochten, worden door de huidige “politieke” elite het liefst geharmoniseerd en ge�nstitutionaliseerd.

Nederlanders noemen dat “pacificatie”; een beproefd recept voor een elite die door middel van verdeel en heers aan de macht wil blijven.

Een belangrijk instrument om de republikeinse vrijheden definitief te begraven is de zgn. Europese Grondwet. Hierin worden de 3 grote democratische vraagstukken met name genoemd (vrije markt, sociale zorg en ecologische verantwoordelijkheid) en vervolgens tot onderwerp gemaakt van een bureaucratische afweging in Brussel.

De politieke strijdbijl wordt daarmee definitief begraven; v��r de burgers, niet d��r de burgers. Wat overblijft zijn de goedbedoelde, postmoderne en postdemocratische richtlijnen en regelingen ten behoeve van de “laatste mens”.

Ieder verzet daartegen wordt in de toekomst “ongrondwettelijk”.

De ideale mens voor de regelaars is niet de kritische burger, maar de infantiele, vrijgestelde consument die streeft naar zekerheden en gemak. Gehoorzaamheid aan de Grondwet verzekert de Europeaan van allerlei van bovenaf verleende rechten.

De elite gaat daarmee voorbij aan de rusteloze, ambitieuze menselijke natuur. In een republiek is ruimte voor confrontaties en strijd. Daarin leren burgers elkaar en de vrijheid te respecteren. Dat kost moeite, emotie, drukte en onrust. Voor de decadente burgers niet meer op te brengen – die zijn slechts in staat tot nijd en ressentiment.

De aloude Romeinse Republiek bracht voor de burger grotere lasten mee dan het Romeinse Rijk van het principaat. Het zorgde voor spanningen, onrust en conflicten en eiste van de burger opoffering en standvastigheid in de verdediging van de vrijheid.

De keizers brachten met hun bureaucratie rust en harmonie en gaven de burgers de veiligheid die ze soms tijdens de Republiek moesten ontberen. De oude instituties werden bewaard, maar geleidelijk uitgehold. De Romeinse burger werd monddood gemaakt en de politieke cultuur raakte in verval.

De EU is ons nieuwe Rijk. Het expandeert – zoals elk imperium – omdat het anders moet imploderen. In 2007 worden Roemeni� en Bulgarije toegevoegd aan het Rijk en later kunnen Turkije en Noord-Afrikaanse landen volgen.

De burger wordt welvaart, sociale rechtvaardigheid en ecologische duurzaamheid beloofd. Maar geen vrijheid, politieke invloed of democratie.

De Republiek van de vrije burgerij die zichzelf regeert (desnoods door middel van volksvertegenwoordigers) wordt opgeheven en Europa treedt het tijdperk binnen van de anti-politiek van het Postmoderne Rijk der Vrijheid.

De angst voor de massa, die nog steeds verantwoordelijk wordt gehouden voor de gruwelen van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, inspireert de huidige Grondwet. Het is een echo van de 20ste eeuw; een reliek uit het verleden.

De 21ste eeuwse burger is opstandig. In Frankrijk en Nederland dreigt een revolte tegen de nieuwe Caesars. Net nu de elite de politiek achter zich wil laten, keert deze in verhevigde vorm weer terug.

De “democratie” in Nederland kampt met een legitimiteitsprobleem en is zeer instabiel geworden. De postpolitieke elite probeert de spanningen te managen (“governance” is het toverwoord), maar faalt jammerlijk. Nederlanders lijken uitgepolderd.

Hopelijk wordt na morgen en as. woensdag het imperiale project van de postdemocraten weggestemd. Laten we eerst onze eigen politiek hervormen en de burgerlijke vrijheden opnieuw verankeren en dan nog eens nadenken over de koers die Europa moet varen.

Ons moet iets gevraagd worden en als de elite straks niet anders meer kan, zullen we een antwoord moet geven.

Nu is dat antwoord – voorlopig – NEE!

In case all you English-language readers have been wondering what all the Dutch-language ramblings have been about on this weblog:

[Quote:]

The Dutch voted in their first national referendum on Wednesday, choosing whether to accept a proposed European Union constitution. Polls indicated the Netherlands would be the second country in four days to reject the idea.

Recent surveys have shown almost 60 percent of voters will say no to the proposal. Following France’s rejection of the charter on Sunday, a Dutch repudiation would leave Europe’s leaders with no clear backup plan for what to do when two of the 25-nation union’s members say they won’t approve the new ground rules.

“Let’s not let ourselves be led by polls,” Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende said Tuesday in a last-minute plea for a yes vote. “Let’s hope that when they’re in the voting booth, people think about all the people that say this constitution would be a positive development.”

Dutch supporters � including both Balkenende’s conservative government and the main opposition Labor Party � say the constitution would streamline decision making in the union and create a single foreign minister to give Europe more sway in international affairs.

The referendum is nonbinding, but Dutch leaders have pledged to accept it as long as the result is clear and turnout is above 30 percent.

“I think it’s a good thing if there’s a strong Europe,” said Jaena Padberg, an early yes voter outside a busy voting station at a community school in Amsterdam. “It’s good that our rights will be secured.”

Opponents fear that the Netherlands, a nation of just 16 million, will be engulfed by a superstate headquartered in Brussels and dominated by Germany, France and Britain.

That could mean the end of liberal Dutch policies such as tolerating marijuana use, prostitution and euthanasia.

Still other voters will say no to voice their discontent with the unpopular Dutch government. Many here are angry about price increases that followed the introduction of the euro in 2002, and some fear that Turkey will soon be admitted to the union, worsening tensions between Dutch Muslims and the non-Muslim majority.

“In other countries that are going to join human rights are not as well protected as they are here,” said no voter Mika Gruschke.

“Things are going too fast,” said no voter Maarten Pijnenburg. “There’s not enough control over the power of European politicians” under the new constitution, he said.

Jort Kelder, editor of the Dutch business and style magazine Quote, said politicians were reaping what they have sown.

“People see that they were bamboozled” by the price rises after the introduction of the euro, he said. A no vote “will be a success for democracy, but a drama for the constitution.”

Balkenende repeated that a Dutch no would not mean that politicians would resign. In France, Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin resigned and was replaced by interior minister Dominique de Villepin in the aftermath of the rejection.

Some analysts expect Dutch “no” voters to be emboldened by the outcome in France, since the Dutch will avoid the stigma of casting a lone veto.

But Peter Kanne, of the TNS Nipo polling agency, said the French “won’t be a decisive factor” on the turnout. “Mainly, people will do what they intended to do anyway,” he said in a telephone interview. TNS predicted 59 percent of Dutch will vote no, versus 55 percent in France.

Turnout was expected to be far below the 70 percent seen in France, and several Dutch walking past the voting station in Amsterdam said they wouldn’t vote.

“I don’t understand the contents of the constitution and I promise you I’m not the only one,” said Mohammed Sali.

Aurore Wanlin, an analyst with the London-based Center for European Reform, said the EU leaders meeting in Brussels in mid-June are unlikely to pronounce the treaty dead.

But “when two member founding states vote no, it looks like a big crisis,” she said.

So far, nine countries have ratified the constitution: Austria, Hungary, Italy, Germany, Greece, Lithuania, Slovakia, and Slovenia by votes of their parliaments; and Spain by a referendum.

Efforts to ratify the treaty will continue, in the hope that the French and Dutch remain the only members to shun the treaty by the time the process ends in October 2006.

[Quote:]

De opkomst bij het referendum over de Europese grondwet was woensdagochtend tot elf uur 12 procent. Dat is 3 procent meer dan bij de verkiezingen voor het Europees Parlement juni vorig jaar. Dit blijkt uit een representatieve telling van onderzoekbureau Interview/NSS in 23 stembureaus. Uiteindelijk was de opkomst bij de verkiezingen vorig jaar 39,1 procent.

[..]

Sommige stemmers raken enigszins in verwarring bij het zien van het stemformulier. Daar staan uiteraard niet zoals gebruikelijk lange lijsten met partijen en namen op, maar zowel in Nijmegen als in Tiel is al gebleken dat enkele oudere mensen dat kennelijk wel verwachtten. Ook denken enkelen dat zij hun mening met redenen kunnen omkleden, wat niet mogelijk is.

[Quote:]

Vice President Dick Cheney says he’s offended by a human rights group’s report criticizing conditions at the prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay.

The report Amnesty International released last week said prisoners at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba had been mistreated and called for the prison to be shut down. Cheney derided the London-based group in an interview set to be broadcast Monday night on CNN’s “Larry King Live.”

“Frankly, I was offended by it,” Cheney said in the videotaped interview. “For Amnesty International to suggest that somehow the United States is a violator of human rights, I frankly just don’t take them seriously.”

Two years ago:

[Quote:]

Rumsfeld: Yeah, well, as far as I’m concerned, it seems to me a careful reading of Amnesty International or the record of Saddam Hussein, having used chemical weapons on his own people as well as his neighbors, and the viciousness of that regime, which is well known and documented by human rights organizations, ought not to be surprised.

and:

[Quote:]

In terms of the modern period, it seems to me that Iraq clearly is up towards the top of the list. This is a regime that has prided itself on eliminating, brutally eliminating any dissent or opposition. We’ll know an awful lot more when we get on the ground and have a chance to talk to the people and see more precisely exactly the techniques they’ve used. But we do — if you read the various human rights groups and Amnesty International’s description of what they know has gone on, it’s not a happy picture.

I guess “cherry picking” reports is fine, then.

[Quote:]

“The moment we first sentenced German service members for not disobeying orders that they �should have known were illegal� we accepted that the responsibility to determine which orders are legal and which illegal rests in the conscience of the service member.

It also, therefore, holds true that to punish service members who acted on their conscience-with plausible backing from documents and prominent figures in international law-is not only unjustifiable and an injustice to those individuals, but sends a dangerous message to our military: that when given an order they believe to be illegal they are in a catch-22- they can be prosecuted if they obey; and they can be prosecuted if they don�t .

Do we really mean to have the armed foot soldier obey orders blindly in our name�..and be the fall-guy too?

Do we really trust our government more than the moral compass of our sons and daughters in uniform?”

– excerpt from an essay by Pablo Paredes

Judge Klant kept a tight rein on the Defense’s questioning of Marjorie Cohn; allowing only that which spoke to the reasonableness of Pablo’s belief that the Iraq war is illegal. But when the attorney for the government began his cross-examination, the judge gave him plenty of rope with which to hang himself – and hang himself he did.

First he carefully elicited from Marjorie the legal basis, grounded in both international and domestic law, of her conclusion that not only is the war in Iraq illegal and Pablo’s conclusions to that effect thereby reasonable, but that Pablo was actually duty bound to refuse to board his ship. Next he extrapolated out to “any seaman recruit’s” ability to draw the same conclusions. Clearly of the belief that Marjorie’s agreement was conjuring up visions of mass mutiny in the judge’s mind, and assuming that such visions would convince the judge that harsher, rather than lighter, sentencing was in order; the prosecutor did not stop with the example of Iraq. He triumphantly referenced other published works of Marjorie’s concerning the illegality of the wars on Afghanistan and Yugoslavia and again demanded that she specify if she believed that any seaman recruit would be justified in refusing orders due to his/her belief that these wars were illegal as well. In all three cases, Marjorie complied with a detailed explanation of why the war in question was illegal and why the seaman recruit would be obligated to refuse to participate in them once he found them as such.

After a 20-30 minute eternity that left us all in a stupor of disbelief that the war’s legality had just been debated in a military court, on the record, and had lost, badly, the attorney for the prosecution sat down.

And then the judge said, “I believe the government has just successfully proved that any seaman recruit has reasonable cause to believe that the wars in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan and Iraq were illegal.”

Pablo Paredes refused to board the USS Bonhomme Richard as it was preparing to sail from San Diego with 2,000 Marines in December. He surrendered to military authorities a few days later and applied for conscientious objector status.

[Fantasy:]

The insurgency in Iraq is “in the last throes,” Vice President Dick Cheney says, and he predicts that the fighting will end before the Bush administration leaves office.

In a wide-ranging interview Monday on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Cheney cited the recent push by Iraqi forces to crack down on insurgent activity in Baghdad and reports that the most-wanted terrorist leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, had been wounded.

The vice president said he expected the war would end during President Bush’s second term, which ends in 2009.

[Reality:]

The death toll for American troops in Iraq rose in May to the highest level since January, with the U.S. military saying Tuesday that insurgents have doubled their number of daily attacks since April.

This latest spree of violence by insurgents, who rose up after the American-led invasion in 2003 toppled President Saddam Hussein, put a dramatic end to a period when attacks on U.S. forces had waned after the historic Jan. 30 elections.

At least 77 U.S. troops were killed in May, according to a count of deaths announced by the military. That is the highest toll since 107 Americans were killed in January. It marked the second straight monthly increase since 36 U.S. troops died in March, among the lowest tolls of the war.

Lt. Col. Steve Boylan, a U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, said insurgents are staging about 70 attacks nationwide per day.

[Quote:]

In its short lifespan, blogging has largely been a freewheeling exercise in online self-expression. Now it is also becoming a corporate job.

A small but growing number of businesses are hiring people to write blogs, otherwise known as Web logs, or frequently updated online journals. Companies are looking for candidates who can write in a conversational style about timely topics that would appeal to customers, clients and potential recruits.

In other words, blogvertising. Do marketeers really have to fuck up everything there is?

Voor geval u het nog niet weet, hier is een stemwijzer. Deze is waarschijnlijk zo mogelijk nog relevanter dan de TV uitzendingen van de afgelopen dagen… en dat wil wat zeggen!

[Quote:]

It’s long been known that Intel run a little hot, so Zalman have gone extreme with a cooling solution that finally does the biz.

Pumping an impressive 25 cubic metres of air per second Zalman are confident that the ‘Big Boy Turbo Mega Fan 2′ will be able to keep any Intel CPU, up to and including the Pentium 4 670 3.8GHz, running cool in even the warmest conditions.

Developed with the help of the British Aerospace wind tunnel engineers, the BBTMF can pump enough air to pop you double glazing out, so it comes with several precautionary notes, mainly involving the suction and loss of small pets whilst in the vicinity of your machine.

Drawing an impressive 1400Watts of power, Zalman include a full instruction booklet on how to daisy chain 5 300W PSU’s together to power the fan, and you get 50 starter cartridges free to get it spinning in the first place. Of course, you’ll need a serious case upgrade too, and we would recommend the CoolerMaster 821 Garage, which comes with a tasteful variety of electronic doors and leaves enough room for even the largest GFX cards in SLI and a Nissan Micra too.

here is a picture of the booth where the above picture was taken..