Aigarius Blog

Lately following the US elections (and lately the finance collapse) is an interesting thing, I have been watching the following (in the order of importance):

1. NBC Nightly News
2. NBC Meet the Press
3. NBC Countdown
4. The Daily Show/The Colbert Report

Additionally, if you watch it in this order, the fear and maybe even panic that sets in watching the news is slightly relived by the common sense and a bit of humor.

And to the people that say that that the above is very anti-Republican leaning - I admit, it is a bit, but when Democrats fail, they cover it as well. It just does not happen as much lately. I mean, Republicans manage to contradict themselves inside one sentence, entertainment TV loves that and Democrats actually have hard time competing for air time. A Democrat gets an oral relief from his secretary? A bunch Republicans are selling government oil-rich lands for sex! Beat that! Poor Democrats

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According to the Slashdot article and the StopSoftwarePatents.org website itself and on Digg, the anti-software-patent activists are attempting a world-wide event on the 24th of September as a world-wide day against software patents. USA has them via a weird court ruling, Japan has them as well (not sure why), there have been efforts to force software patents on EU, India, Australia and many other countries either by Microsoft lobbies or even via US trade treaty pressure.

While lobbying by local Microsoft branches and their pet companies can be countered locally, like I and many others did in EU a couple years ago (mostly thanks to FFII), trade negotiations are very secretive affairs and it is very hard to lobby there directly. The public needs to be aware of the issue, otherwise the politicians will not be aware of its importance to their voters.

Software patents are a threat to free software as it circumvents the power of GPL and other copyright licenses if enough money is thrown at the lawyers. If a software patent is generic enough, it can easily stop development of a whole class of free software applications on a whim of the patent holder. And there are plenty of granted software patents with a very broad scope (progress bar, anyone?).

I am aware that to get Debian support for such an initiative, a GR is needed, but how about a personal word of support from the DPL or support from the SPI? It is in direct area of interest for SPI - software patents create an ever present threat of legal action against any and all software in Debian (in USA and Japan, at least) and, as the legal umbrella of Debian in the USA, SPI would be a prime target.

What do others think about this?

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… I find that I am actually respecting her after this.

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As soon as my laptop came back from repairs, I started to feel better - being back with 1920×1200 resolution is great! NVidia is much more stable than ATi and Intel wireless is just great!

And then last weekend I was in Berlin for the FFII board meeting and used the opportunity to see the city with my girlfriend. I must say that there is a lot of interesting things to see in Berlin.The things I would recommend everyone are: go to the Zoo (5-7 hours of superb fun), then take bus 100 to Alexander Platz (driving by all the main landmarks), go up on the TV tower, then come down and sometime late in the night go to ‘Weekend’ dance club.

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Personal-life rant follows after a break.

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This is highly unofficial, but if you want to upload your World of Warcraft statistics to WoWHead in Linux, then you might be able to do so by using the following script. You will need curl and wget installed.

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Please help set a world record of most downloads in 24 hours by downloading a copy of Firefox 3.0 in the next 24 hours starting at 18:00 GMT today. Download yourself and get all your friends to do so as well. Only one download per computer is counted towards the record. More info on the record attempt.

Firefox 3.0 Download record countdown timers.

P.S. The SpreadFirefox web page is down at the moment. Overloaded less than 2 hours before the go time.

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“Thou shalt not whine” was written under his desk. I just discovered him recently and was presently surprised by his directness in questioning politicians and challenging them to explain things that they have said before. Like a Howard Stern of politics. Not shy to respectfully question the existing assumptions, but (unlike Howard) still remaining neutral and not drawing conclusions himself. He will be missed.

P.S. I do however feel the NBC could have included some other news in the Nightly News of the day as well. Dropping everything and just covering one man seams a bit excessive to me.

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With the cost of plane tickets approaching 2000 USD it is rather hard to sell me going to the Debconf 8 as that can be approximated as 3-4 months of my income. I did apply for travel sponsorship, but due to some kind of brainfart I misread “Amount I am unable to fund myself” as “Amount I am able to fund myself” and thus asked for far less money than I actually need. Therefore, after the Debconf team strictly stated that the requested amount can not be changed at this point, it has become clear that I cann’t come to Debconf 8.

/sadpanda

I would still love to come if there was sponsorship money to cover my fare and even suggested putting me to the end of the sponsorship priority list, but apparently that is not happening. Have fun, and see you all in Spain in 2009.

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