Today is Buy Nothing Day, a day when many around the world encourage you to understand how restrictive it is to be a consumer. A consumer-driven economy weakens people by reducing us to purchasing machines that earn money in order to spend it mostly on things we don’t need. We become defined by [...]
In a discussion of Defective by Design’s DRM boycott on Boing Boing, David Mershon asks, “I understand why they feel the need to do this, they consider phrases like “Digital Rights Management” to be Orwellian doublespeak, but I think this kind of private language prevents effective outreach. Why not just say “DRM” and be done [...]
Recently the FDA issued an import alert which allows detainment without inspection of “all milk products, milk derived ingredients and finished food products containing milk from China due to the presence of melamine and/or melamine analogs”. The FDA notes that this is a a recurring problem: “In 2007, bulk vegetable protein products imported from [...]
Apparently a lot of you have given the Democrats your votes, your time, and your money. What will you do if President-elect Obama continues President Bush’s high crimes and misdemeanors thus making Obama as multiply impeachable as Bush already is? Ralph Nader succinctly lays out the problem for Obama continuing the crimes of [...]
After reading “Begging the Software Gods“, I read a response that seemed genuine. This post is a follow-up to that response.
Nothing is “special about software” and nobody said that you deserve certain freedoms for software but not freedoms for your food, clothing, and other things.
There are other groups of people working on other freedoms: [...]
Risto H. Kurppa recently posted about a bad experience with a free software hacker when Kurppa tried to get access to the most recent revisions of an unpublished program’s source code. We aren’t told what program this is, except that source code is published with certain versions (called “release” versions, ostensibly versions the developers [...]
Congratulations to Randall Cotton for his well-deserved article about his anti-war and local tax policy activism. I voted for the local property tax increase (aimed to help the poor) due to his activism. I don’t mind spending more money in taxes when the money will go to help those in need. Governments [...]
Ralph Nader on Democracy Now! put President-elect Obama’s victory into perspective for Americans:
Well, obviously we all congratulate Barack Obama. We wish him well. But the precursor to his election has not been very encouraging, and he has repeatedly taken up the positions of the corporate supremacists, not just his latest vote for the $700 billion [...]
GNU Software Freedom Law Center FSF blogs Electronic Frontier Foundation Nina Paley