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{ Monthly Archives } December 2006

Appeals to your sanity and your pocketbook.

Things to consider:

Eben Moglen’s appeal for the FSF touches on the recent Microsoft-Novell deal wherein Microsoft says they’ll license their patents to users of Novell’s SUSE GNU/Linux distribution and devices that resist our attempt to make them work for their owners.
The easiest time to give up Microsoft Windows Vista is before you can adopt it [...]

Using Glade and Python to build GUI applications, building websites

If you’re interested in writing GUI applications with Python, check out this beginner’s video guide to using Glade with Python and GTK+ (large video, small video, PDF slides, OpenDocument slides, code samples). Also interesting, a talk for beginners about doing work on websites.
The videos are distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 license.

Code v2.0 is out.

Code v2.0 is Stanford Law Professor’s revised version of “Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace“. This revision was started (in part) on a wiki (a website anyone is allowed to edit) and Prof. Lessig took a copy of the wiki text up through December 31, 2005 then added his own edits.
The Wiki text was [...]

Place your bets: Will Firefox retain its gains in popularity?

This isn’t a terribly important question, but it could be interesting to ask because Firefox’s recent gains across Europe are getting so much press. If you’ve seen any mainstream press recently, you’ve probably seen some reference to the Xiti Monitor survey which concluded that Firefox usage is on the rise in Europe—up to 23.2% [...]

Free software pressure creates more software freedom

Philip Langdale recently wrote about SD card readers and the Linux kernel. One of the conclusions he reaches seemed familiar to me (emphasis mine):
When it comes to hardware support, we often find ourselves confronted with statements that such-and-such a piece of hardware can’t be used to its full capability under linux or feature ‘X’ [...]

Nobody died when Clinton lied?

While having sex with Monica Lewinsky (and lying about it) didn’t directly cause anyone to die, former US President William Jefferson Clinton’s policies certainly condemned a lot of people to death as William Blum points out.

Two new defenses against copyright infringement emerge

In the past couple of weeks, two new defenses against copyright infringement have emerged:

Get a stern talking to by Edgar Bronfman, parent of 7 and Warner Music Group CEO who just admitted that he’s fairly certain that at least one of his kids have engaged in illicit downloading. As of yet, somehow these children [...]