Space Babies » politics

Twelve minutes of your time

joost — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:50:31 +0000

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.

Twelve minutes of your time

joost — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:50:12 +0000

Twelve minutes of your time

joost — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 21:50:03 +0000

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.

Unlocking education, for growth without limits

joost — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 09:05:48 +0000

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.

They want to enable all citizens to have free access to education and all other publicly-funded institutions, both online and offline, by pushing for a mandatory use of Open Standards and a guaranteed platform-independent access to all online environments. This allows students and parents to use Free Software, and in that way being able to tap into their potential for growth and personal development.

To me it’s a no-brainer but apparently the minister is not supportive of the idea. This is the same minister that is telling us parents to ‘spend more time with our children, discussing, tutoring, helping out at school’ while she spent zero time on her own children, and had a fucking nanny doing that. I have to wonder how lying thugs like that can come to rule us. Oh wait, politics.

A few sane members of parliament are pushing back, but I think that’s not enough. A to-do list has been published, and I will cross off a few items of my own. If you can help, please consider it!

This is what happens when you screw people

joost — Thu, 06 May 2010 19:57:30 +0000

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.

First was of course Steve Jobs whose iPhone doesn’t run Flash at all. And whose iPad doesn’t either, and won’t in the future. He made this perfectly clear by refusing Flash apps in any way, shape and form. After Apple, big sites like ABC and Hulu announced they are dropping Flash in favor of HTML5. And now the pace is quickening. Scribd has dropped Flash too. Opera is speaking out against Flash. Heck even Microsoft has chosen HTML5 and H.264 over Flash.

I for one am pretty glad. Flash runs like a dog on OS X and the coding tools are a big mess. Every Flash developer I know has to work against the software, and hates Adobe for creating crap tools with a crap syntax and a crap object model. As they say, what goes around comes around and in my opinion Adobe has no one to blame but themselves.

Election special

joost — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 21:30:14 +0000

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.

Wikileaks needs your donation

joost — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 12:31:39 +0000

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.

Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents, leading to many front-page newspaper articles and political reforms.

Wikileaks has probably produced more scoops in its short life than the Washington Post has in the past 30 years.

— The National, 19 November 2009

I think it’s important that whistleblowers are given a stage and corruption is being fought. Twenty bucks means very little to me, but even a couple hundred times that amount allows Wikileaks to operate an entire server for a year. So if you are wondering what your good deed for this month will be, consider them.

Ai! Amsterdam

joost — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 08:02:40 +0000

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!

Meta parody

joost — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 12:02:59 +0000

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.

On peer 2 peer sharing

joost — Tue, 12 May 2009 21:32:21 +0000

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.

So every now and then I post a quote which rings true for me. I know, I am in the Intellectual Property business myself. That does not mean I like it when my fellow humans are bankrupted for sharing some music. To me, that’s wrong on all levels.
Choice quote of the day:

We’ve built a network designed to share information across vast distances very cheaply. This is a very good thing.

Being able to share your movies with people across a continent the same way you would in your living room is a feature.
Allowing people to share books with one another and learn from them is a feature.
Letting people remix content from artists and share it with the world is a feature.

Telling people they cannot speak, read, listen or watch because they’re part of the future and not part of the past is a bug.