[Quote:]

Owning an iPod, camera phone or a DVD recorder might be enough to land you in jail or lumbered with a large fine under the Federal Government’s proposed new changes to the copyright laws, experts warn.

Dale Clapperton, vice-chairman of the non-profit organisation Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) said the changes proposed in the Copyright Amendment Bill 2006 greatly “lower the standard of proof” required to charge someone with copyright infringement.

Professor Brian Fitzgerald, head of the Queensland University of Technology’s school of law, agreed. He noted in an article submitted to the Online Opinion journal: “These new provisions have the potential to make everyday Australians in homes and businesses across the country into criminals on a scale that we have not witnessed before.”

Obey, Citizen!

[Quote:]

“Microsoft says that consumers don’t understand the risks of running virtual machines, and they only want enterprises that understand the risks to run Vista on a VM,” Silver said.

So if I understand this correctly, Microsoft thinks average users are too stupid to use virtualization, so they need to pay significantly more to… wait, what? Who’s stupid here?

Seriously, these days virtualization of an Home Edition install is vital to debug your application, if you’re an application developer. So this means that you either get a legal department to figure out the licensing deals, or decrease the quality of your testing. Or, to summarize: if you’re a small developer, you either get out of Windows development, spend way more, or release substandard software.

Since a legal department isn’t free, the choice is between increasing your costs, or decreasing your quality of product. Either way Microsoft is reducing your ability to effectively compete with them in the free market. They are undercutting competition by manipulating the legal rules, as opposed to using direct head to head competition in the free market.

I’ve been saying this for well over a decade: if you decide to develop for the Microsoft platform, sooner or later you will be fucked by Microsoft. So, don’t compete with them. Develop only for Open Source platforms, and don’t try to do things they are doing. For example, Mono is often quoted as an example of interoperatebility, but I won’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Anything endorsed and promoted by Microsoft is off-limits for anything I develop.

[Quote:]

The FSF’s general counsel, Eben Moglen, is currently evaluating the Novell Microsoft patent deal to see if it is valid under the terms of the current GPL v2. He has not announced his conclusion but has already publicly stated that changes will be made to the forthcoming GPL v3 to ensure that such a selective patent peace deal cannot be repeated.

“It will surely violate GPL version 3,” he told CNNmoney.com. “GPL version 3 will be adjusted so the effect of the current deal is that Microsoft will by giving away access to the very patents Microsoft is trying to assert.”

While Linux creator Linus Torvalds has previously stated that the Linux kernel will remain on the GPL v2 license, much of the code that makes up a complete Linux distribution is owned by the FSF, which intends to re-license all its code to GPL v3 as soon as it is completed in early 2007.

“In the face of these changes, Novell will probably be stuck with old versions of the software, under old licenses, with Novell sustaining the entire cost and burden of maintaining that software,” Perens wrote, adding that Novell faces a choice of sticking with Microsoft and being left behind, or turning its back on the patent deal.

[Quote:]

It sounds like a late-night parody of President Bush’s bad habit of filling key posts with extreme ideologues and incompetents. To head family planning programs at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Bush has tapped Eric Keroack, a doctor affiliated with a group vehemently opposed to birth control and someone nationally known for his wacky theory about reproductive health.

Before his appointment, Dr. Keroack served as the medical director of A Woman’s Concern, a network of pregnancy counseling clinics across Massachusetts whose method of trying to dissuade women from having an abortion includes spreading the scary and medically inaccurate myth that having an abortion steeply increases the risk of breast cancer. The group also has a policy against dispensing contraception even to married women. It has stated on its Web site that the distribution of contraceptive drugs or devices is “demeaning to women, degrading of human sexuality and adverse to human health and happiness.�? Dr. Keroack now claims that he disagrees with these approaches, a repositioning that seems very belated.

When speaking at abstinence conferences across the country, and in his writings, Dr. Keroack has promoted the novel argument that sex with multiple partners alters brain chemistry in a way that makes it harder for women to form bonding relationships. One of the researchers cited by Dr. Keroack has called the claim “complete pseudoscience�? unsupported by her findings.

I’m sure he’ll do a heck-of-a-job!

[Quote:]

When the final case design of the Playstation 3 was released, it was widely critsised as looking exactly like a George Foreman Grill. A few months later, Photoshopped pictures started emerging on the internet of the Playstation 3 with a grill built into it.

So, after seeing these pictures, we decided this would be a great project and challenge to actually build the Real PS3 Grill. After much support and advice from the X-S forums we decided to dedicate a site to update everyone about The Real PS3 grill. The main reason of building this grill, apart from the fame and glory (Id like to think so lol is to make everyone laugh and make those damn Sony fanboys angry!!

Sony sells their PS3 at a huge loss. If more people bought the system just to smash it, turn it into a waffle iron, use it to accelerate atoms at a high velocity, whatever… as long as you’re not buying licensed games (or Blu-Ray discs), Sony is losing money.

[Quote:]

Sweden is the world’s most democratic nation while Italy, a member of the Group of Seven industrialized nations, ranks as a “flawed” democracy and fails to make the top category of countries, the Economist said.

Countries are split into four regime types determined by their democratic credentials, according to a list e-mailed late yesterday by the magazine. The classifications are: full democracies, flawed democracies, hybrid regimes and authoritarian regimes. The U.S. at 17th, and U.K., 23rd, ranked in the bottom half of the full democracies.

“A decline in civil liberties and malfunctioning of government accounts for the U.S. position,” the Economist said. “In the U.K., a shocking decline in political participation, alongside some erosion of civil liberties, is the main reason for the comparatively modest ranking.”

The Economist Intelligence Unit awarded 167 countries and territories marks from 1 to 10 for 60 indicators across five broad categories: electoral process, functioning of government, political participation, political culture, and civil liberties.

The top level, full democracies, comprises 28 countries and is dominated by members of the Paris-based Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Sweden beats Iceland and the Netherlands into first place, while France is ranked lower than the U.K., at 24th, and Italy, 34th, doesn’t make the top level, falling among the “flawed democracies.”

[..]

Rank      Country             Score
1.        Sweden              9.88
2.        Iceland             9.71
3.        Netherlands         9.66
4.        Norway              9.55
5.        Denmark             9.52

16.       Spain               8.34
17.       U.S.                8.22
20.       Japan               8.15
23.       U.K.                8.08
24.       France              8.07
29.       South Africa        7.91
34.       Italy               7.73
35.       India               7.68

102.      Russia              5.02

112.      Iraq                4.01

138.      China               2.97

167.      North Korea         1.03

[Quote:]

Teaching a child not to step on a caterpillar is as valuable to the child as it is to the caterpillar.

~ Bradley Millar

The dutch articles on this weblog the past week were about local elections. Here’s a nice article in English about it, click through for the full monty:

[Quote:]

As expected, no party won enough seats for a majority in the lower house of parliament. The erratic voting patterns shifted significant numbers of seats to parties with extremist views and robbed moderate parties of influence — a result that stunned government officials and political analysts.

“It’s a new signal from the voters,” said Jan Marijnissen, leader of the Socialist Party, which won the third-highest number of seats in one of the biggest upsets of the day. The party promotes an anti-globalization, anti-European platform and advocates greater public spending on the poor and elderly.

But officials said the new signals are so mixed that it will be difficult for parties with similar ideologies to gather enough support to form a stable government. Balkenende said Wednesday night that his party would “build on the foundation we laid” but conceded that the election returns were “complicated” and that coalition negotiations, which could take months, would demand “a level head and perseverance.”

And if you want to know what party you would have voted for, try this.

[Quote:]

Since its discovery in 1902, the Antikythera Mechanism — with its intricate and baffling system of about 30 geared wheels — has been an enigma. Our knowledge of its functions has increased as computer-based imaging, analysis and X-ray technologies have evolved. During the last 50 years, researchers have identified various astronomical and calendar functions, including gears that mimic the movement of the sun and moon.

But it has taken some of the most advanced technology of the 21st century to decipher during the past year the most advanced technology of the 1st century B.C.

No artifact this complex has been recovered from the ancient world, though there are numerous written references, by Greek and later by Arab writers, to different types of geared mechanisms. The level of mechanical sophistication found in the Antikythera Mechanism was not to be seen again until the rise of European clock-making during the Middle Ages, more than a millennium later.

[Quote:]

Mark Goldberg pointed me to the press release of “Project Cleanfeed Canada�?. Canadian carriers Bell Aliant, Bell Canada, MTS Allstream, Rogers, SaskTel, Shaw, TELUS, and Videotron have all opted in to a blacklist provided by Cybertip.ca, the Canadian tip-line against child exploitation. Mark is an advocate of putting censorship in place against websites that would be deemed illegal by Canadian Law (such as those promoting hate speech or sexually exploiting children).

I first came across Mark’s website when he was filing an application requesting the CRTC to authorize Canadian carriers to block internet content. I morally support blocking hate speech and child porn (who wouldn’t?), but the idea of having a national blacklist sends shivers down my spine. I would always prefer that illegal websites be shutdown rather than putting into power national filters that have the potential to be abused. I’m a pessimist, I believe that any form of censorship will eventually be abused despite its good intentions.

And when they block your website – are you going to sue them? Because, you know, that immediately brands you a child-exploiter. You wouldn’t want that, now, would you, Citizen?

This furniture rocks!