Some notes on what I saw during the recent SEIU health care forum held at UNLV which was rebroadcast on C-SPAN:
The host claimed that Sen. John Edwards‘ health care plan is the only one that features details on how it will be paid for. This is not true. HR 676 has been around [...]
One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) is an important project which makes and distributes inexpensive laptop computers for children in poor countries. The machines run a GNU/Linux operating system and use free software for almost everything. The machines require very little power (no more than a child can generate through a crank, as I [...]
The Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) is a proxy for its members—mostly corporate record labels. The RIAA has launched more lawsuits against everyday people than I can count. They aim their lawsuits at people like your neighbor and your neighbor’s children. The defendant is encouraged to settle out of court and [...]
On Sunday, 25 March 2007, actor Sean Penn said
Let’s unite not only in stopping this war, but in holding this administration accountable.
Stopping the war
Before the invasion and occupation of Iraq, there was a very well-organized and well-publicized march across many countries. Of course, the mainstream media did their best to misrepresent the protesters, but [...]
The most recent edition of “Questions please…” features an interview with Mark Shuttleworth, head and chief sponsor of Canonical and the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. The license for the recording is as follows:
Verbatim copying and redistribution of these entire recordings is permitted worldwide and without royalty provided this notice is preserved.
Thanks to Questions Please… for [...]
McDonalds wants “McJob” taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Boing Boing’s rebuttal is worth reading, not just for reasserting the point about McJobs—”an unstimulating, low-paid job with few prospects, esp. one created by the expansion of the service sector”—but why you shouldn’t fear trademark law stopping you from using “McJob”.
A mild example of one way [...]
Gervase Markham’s blog has a post about OpenOffice.org and OpenDocument format which I found interesting.
A few of the respondants make points I tried to rebut, but my response (below) doesn’t appear in the list of followups there.
“My least favourite feature is that you can’t open a word document without it bugging you to save it [...]
Those proprietary video card drivers are dropping “support” for older video cards again.
They made you believe they’d “support” your video card more, but that’s so typically them.
It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.
At least some people realize what a trap that is.
Ultra-groovy Lizzie pointed me to the BBC article on RFID’s march through Europe. It is a rather one-sided article; it reads more like an advertisement for RFID. If you haven’t already thought of the social consequences of increased tracking, you might benefit from a piece which educates readers on multiple frames of debate [...]
GNOME (the free software desktop project) is working with Google’s Summer of Code again this year. Starting today, students can apply to work on GNOME desktop projects and get paid by Google. Visit GNOME’s Summer of Code 2007 and Google’s Summer of Code pages for more information.
To advertise this project in your campus, [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley