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• Desktop Porn

  
  
  Mon Jun 15

• Propaganda

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  
  Protect your freedom!

  
  
  
  

• Small print in big fat letters

  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
  
  Cartoon artwork created with Stripgenerator; dialogue copy/pasted from #ubuntu-offtopic on Freenode.
  

  ---

I stumbled upon an idea by Judge Richard Posner on how to save the newspaper industry: let’s extend the copyright law to “bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. Therefore, I’m linking to his blog while I can! There are a couple of benefits for him in this.

• His blog gets traffic via my blog. Not much but hey, someone might click. Now they can.
• He is properly referenced so that my readers can check what I’m disagreeing with, and also read his point of view.

It seems (at least the under the current legislation) also appropriate to mention that I found Posner’s blog via TechCrunch. Therefore, I’ll also link to their article.

Neither copyright owner was asked for consent before I linked to their content. That’s how the Web works. If someone doesn’t like the Web and the way it works, maybe they shouldn’t use it to publish their copyrighted content in the first place.

In the very same sentence, Posner also suggests we should extend copyright law to “bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder’s consent”. I don’t understand why a copyright law extension would be necessary for this.  As one of Posner’s readers notes (in case this isn’t obvious enough), we already need the copyright holder’s consent. The thing is, if you upload your materials onto the Internet and make it freely available to Web surfers, certainly everyone already has your consent to access it.

How time flies when you’re having fun instead of fighting with unfixable annoyances in proprietary software! It has been three years since the birth of gNewSense, the FSF-blessed, all-free Ubuntu derivative.

In his anniversary message to the gnewsense-users mailing list, project co-founder Paul O’Malley had a look at both the past and the future of the distribution. As for the future, the message broke news that the original project leaders Brian Brazil and Paul think they have taken the project as far as they think they can, and plan to hand over maintenance to other community members. Thankfully, interested people have replied, and I’m fairly certain that the future of gNewSense is not in danger. It is well supported by the FSF, who provide hardware and bandwidth among other things, and of course benefits from the solid Ubuntu base distribution on which to build on.

How far, then, has gNewSense come? According to Paul’s message, one of the main goals of the project was to prove two points:

1. That Free software works
2. That non-free software “can bite you hard and should not be run”

It is fairly safe to say that on both accounts gNewSense has been a success. They provide a complete, free operating system with all the proprietary binary blobs removed and only ships with free software, and the system works well on lots and lots of hardware, thereby demonstrating the first point. Furthermore, their insistence on the second point has made a noticeable difference by making people focus on delivering more crucial pieces of software as free.

Most notably, they were instrumental in liberating GLX, which brings accelerated 3D graphics to free software. They also helped in building 100% free Linux kernels: their builder script pushed the linux-libre project forward and removing binary blobs from Linux is now easy.

Linux distributions and their users benefit from gNewSense even if they do not run it on their own machines. gNewsense is kind of a litmus test of software freedom. It is easy to check the level of freedom of your Ubuntu system for example: how much of your installed software is free enough for gNewSense? How free is your favorite distribution? For the tasks you do on your computer, do you actually need any non-free software, or would you even be able to do all the same things on gNewSense?

Hats off to the success of gNewSense so far, and may the project thrive until obsoleted by a future software status of complete freedom!

In a group effort of humanist logic, I’m pretty sure our team made everyone on #ubuntu-offtopic feel a bit less insecure and much more comfortable about ourselves. Bugs in our logic are not welcome, but we accept donations. Beer, cookies and hugs would be nice.

This intellectual achievement brought to you by magnetron, pantsman, netyire, aprilhare and topyli.

As seen on #ubuntu-offtopic today:

12:02 <rww> It strikes me that installing World of Warcraft is remarkably similar to playing World of Warcraft. Huge spans of time spent getting a progress bar from 0 to 100%, with the expectation of shiny things at the end that never really materializes.

I was hoping that my latest Wordpress upgrade would be the last manual one, and what do you know, it was! Today I saw a notification on my Dashboard about a new WP version being out, so I proceeded to click the “Upgrade automatically” button. Lo and behold:

Downloading update from http://wordpress.org/wordpress-2.7.1.zip
Unpacking the core update
Verifying the unpacked files
Installing the latest version
Upgrading database
WordPress upgraded successfully

That’s the way I like it. Thanks to the wonderful Wordpress hackers for making my life so much easier again!

In real life, is the chase really better than the catch? Fortunately we have cartoon art that mirrors real life! I know there’s a gord around, which may break the spirit of a few international treaties, but I assure you no snuxolls were seriously harmed.

I suggest everyone makes up their own mind :-)

Traditionally, people in Finland (and elsewhere too, I would imagine) are pretty stupid about handling of fireworks on New Year’s Eve. It’s not ignorance - we all know how that blowing up stuff in your face can be hazardous to your health. We simply have enormous amounts of faith in nothing bad ever possibly happening to our own person. We set a new record of sadness this year by having two (documented) accidents even the day before :-(

We on #ubuntu-offtopic naturally care a lot about the welfare of our youth. After all, they are the future of #ubuntu-offtopic! Our discussion started off on a rather pessimistic tone, but perhaps there is something to learn here.

Then again, perhaps not. Who knows! Featuring topyli and zaapiel:

Have fun but keep your head, kids. Happy New Year!

I have just upgraded “the standard” to WordPress 2.7.  I like the new admin interface, and was particularly delighted with the possibility of rearranging everything on the admin pages, for example to better fit on my EeePC’s tiny screen.

As always, the upgrade was very smooth and uneventful, but I’m still very excited to learn that manual upgrades are no longer necessary in the future. Therefore, I hereby announce that this years Friends of topyli virtual smiley medal goes to the WP hackers!

:-)

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