A page in the Appropriate Technology Wiki for sharing various off grid technologies like bicycle generators, solar cells, sewerage and water that might be useful to OWS crowds.
I don't share the articles pessimism about adoption or see any kind of drama when both PNG and WebP are both free software.
We will start building Beethoven's open repository by taking 10,000 of these (especially review articles)[100,000 CC research articles], convert them into a common format, interlink them like topics are linked on Wikipedia, and update them with fresh information as new research findings become available. This will turn the original 10,000 articles into Evolving Review Articles - in other contexts called Living Reviews - available under that same Creative Commons license.
The article does not mention OS or any other technical details but we can be sure that this is just another Windows problem.
At least one person sprayed was hospitalized from the burns. A faculty member, who only makes half as much as the policeman who pepper sprayed the students, called for the resignation of the Chancellor over the event and the faculty association has now made the same demand. We can only hope such common sense demands will come for Berkeley, Oakland, Denver, Atlanta, New York and other places where peaceful protesters have been violated instead of protected by police. In the long run, the US should dismantle the police state established under the Bush administration.
Without any provocation whatsoever, other than the bodies of these students sitting where they were on the ground, with their arms linked, police pepper-sprayed students. Students remained on the ground, now writhing in pain, with their arms linked. ... Police used batons to try to push the students apart. Those they could separate, they arrested, kneeling on their bodies and pushing their heads into the ground. Those they could not separate, they pepper-sprayed directly in the face, holding these students as they did so. When students covered their eyes with their clothing, police forced open their mouths and pepper-sprayed down their throats. Several of these students were hospitalized. Others are seriously injured. One of them, forty-five minutes after being pepper-sprayed down his throat, was still coughing up blood.
This event is powerfully symbolic. It is about contempt from those in power and the wanton use of force against the powerless. ... We have seen it in banks lobbying for public handouts and then denying relief to millions of exploited homeowners. We have seen it in tax breaks and bonuses for the rich while millions of Americans are out of work. ... We are seeing the beginning of a worldwide movement to fight for dignity and intelligent, collective governance. It is remarkable, the parallels between what we see in Tunisia, in Cairo, in Rome, in Zucotti Park, in Oakland, California, and now at UC Davis. ...
I am very proud of the students at UC Davis, both the ones who remained seated, heads down, and the ones in the crowd surrounding them. They vastly outnumbered the police officers. They could have torn them apart. I have no doubt that many of them wanted to. I wanted to. ... nonviolent resistance is extraordinarily powerful. It shows who holds the moral high ground. It reveals the thugs and bullies in high places for who they are. It creates sympathy and evokes principled action.
"I am appalled by images of University of California students being doused with pepper spray and jabbed with police batons on our campuses. I intend to do everything in my power as president of this university to protect the rights of our students, faculty and staff to engage in non-violent protest." ... Yudof added that he would take “immediate” action to convene all UC chancellors in order to “ensure proportional law enforcement response to non-violent protest,”
Leaked emails reveal Burson-Marsteller attempted to get USA Today and other titles to write about Google's privacy policies ... The explosive revelation ... came to light in leaked emails late on Wednesday. Facebook later confirmed to the Daily Beast that it had hired Burson-Marsteller.
... the overall takeaway from this appears to be that paying for Microsoft software is bad for business, puts you at a competitive disadvantage and is going to cost you millions. ... couldn't this also be interpreted as a massive promotional campaign for free and open source software?
The tyranny of non free software costs us all billions of dollars and jobs that could be used for things that people actually want. Microsoft is dumb enough to point out that money not spent on software licenses goes towards hiring people to deliver goods and services, "Indian manufacturers experience $505 million per year in competitive harm. Their pirating competitors could use this money to hire more than 215,000 new employees." People should not use propaganda terms like "piracy" and will remain confused as long as they do.
An aide to the House Judiciary committee -- chaired by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.), SOPA's principal sponsor -- did not dispute that IP address blocking and deep packet inspection could be required. It would be up to a judge to determine the nature of the court order that would be needed to block the site, the aide told CNET this afternoon.
This would mandate the worst ISP practices of deep packet inspection and the expensive equipment associated with but then give control to a government blacklist created by big publishers. In the US, there would be no circumventing such a system.
See also Techrights write up about this.
Do, you still use Microsoft technologies? Should you?
Muktware is not surprised by Microsoft's backing of SOPA because of the company's many other unforgivable abuses, especially those in China.
Things that can't survive without stripping people of their rights should be allowed to fail. She says, "I always start with the enforcement issues online because if there isn't effective enforcement possibility, then there is no meaningful exclusive right and then copyright doesn't work." There has never been an effective enforcement possibility for copyright because it violates people's natural right to free speech for created rights that made sense in the paper publishing world. Suppression of natural rights is always impossible. SOPA won't stop copyright infringement, it will just turn official US networks into a blackhole like the one US companies built in China.
As predicted, these laws threaten and harass everyone but the governor won't be calling to get everyone out of jail.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, for instance, found that the number of patents per capita was the most important factor for determining redistribution of wealth towards the top. To put how big these effects can be, consider, as Baker puts it, that “as a result of patent protection, we pay almost $300 billion a year for prescription drugs that would sell for about $30 billion a year in a free market. The difference of $270 billion is more than 5 times as large as the amount at stake with the Bush tax cuts.”