Please spend twelve minutes of your time and watch this video. It is a very important video to watch, certainly this decade, maybe further back than that. It explains a new proposed law in the US called SOPA and it explains very, very well why technology people and companies are opposed to this law.
Please spend twelve minutes of your time and watch this video. It is a very important video to watch, certainly this decade, maybe further back than that. It explains a new proposed law in the US called SOPA and it explains very, very well why technology people and companies are opposed to this law.
Please spend twelve minutes of your time and watch this video. It is a very important video to watch, certainly one of the most significant videos of this decade, maybe further back than that. It explains a new proposed law in the US called SOPA and it explains very, very well why technology people and companies are opposed to this law.
Recently a new movement has sprang up in the Netherlands pushing education towards Open Source. In education, proprietary software is the norm. I think that’s bad since this locks children into using a particular vendor’s software basically for ever. Unlocking Education aims to change this and I fully support their work.
When you screw people, eventually they are going to screw you back. This is exactly what is happening with Adobe right now. They have been hurting their customers with expensive software, forced upgrades, hideous product activation and most of all crappy, slow, bug-infested software. These days a viable alternative to Flash is available, and companies are dropping Flash like the smelly turd it is.
Seems like the crisis in our parliament has become global news. Guess “our boys” did some fine things in Uruzgan. Too bad the majority of the country wants to end the war. Anyway. I recently built the election special for www.radio1.nl. I just love how fast I can whip up specials like this in Ruby on Rails, and integrate it into the core of the app without making the code any dirtier.
I just donated €20 to Wikileaks. Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors.
As an Amsterdammer, and soon to be living-in-the-center-of-Amsterdammer, a trend of our city’s municipality worries me. This is the trend to make Amsterdam squeeky clean, disallow anything fun, noisy and dirty and turn this old town into an amusement park. This is why I endorse Ai! Amsterdam which aims to change some of the absurd local laws recently passed. i.e. a law forbidding anyone to consume a beverage while standing up. (Yes! Actually true!) If Amsterdam is dear to you, please visit the site and register. I don’t want to live in Disneyland!
I love parodies. I especially love parodies where big, slow and dying industries are mocked. So I saw this Downfall subtitle-parody. See it, it’s hilarious. The real kicker is that Apple, one of the companies briefly featured in the parody, has refused to publish a link (!) to a blog post showing this video in their App Store. Alledgedly because of the word ‘Fuck’ in a subtitle. Sheesh.
I have never made it a secret that I am pro copyright reform. Human culture got where it is now because of people freely sharing ideas and feeding off each other intellectually. The current media cartels are restricting this natural desire and every day, more laws are passed that might land ordinary people in jail for doing something that is natural for us humans.
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