Okay so maybe we aren’t mourning but we sure miss flickr. The amazing picture site Flickr recently passed 4 000 000 000 images. But today is unwell and is not available online. Here is news from the flickr blog post: Here thar be dragons…
10:05 AM PDT: We’re still here working on getting things up and serving to you, shouldn’t be too much longer!
9:18 AM, PDT: Hello! All hands are on deck over here and we’re still working on getting things back up for everyone. Apologies for the disruption!
8:51 AM, PDT: Ahoy everyone! Flickr is experiencing problems at the present time, and our engineers are all in the main engine room, working on resolving the issue. Please hang tight, and we’ll have things back for you as soon as possible. If we need to, we’ll post an update for you here.
Dead things don't have sex
Gunther von Hagens has lost an appeal to display his more sexually explicit plastinated corpses – the court in Augsburg, Germany, say the exhibit in his Body Worlds (freak) show would breach public decency. It’s not the fact that he displays dead people stripped of their skin in strange poses. The indecent part is that he has arranged the poses in sexual positions. (Austrian Times, Bild.com) The new Body Worlds exhibition (with corpses having sex) has already been displayed in other German cities.
Fascinating that the earlier exhibitions were not seen as indecent but placing dead things on top of each other in a particular order is indecent. If the courts accept the fact that bodies can be plastinated, stripped and displayed then I don’t really see what’s wrong with putting them in sexual positions.
Google patents its home page
Saw this on Slashdot
A week after new USPTO Director David Kappos pooh-poohed the idea that a lower patent allowance rate equals higher quality, Google was granted a patent on its Home Page. Subject to how the design patent is enforced, Google now owns the idea of having a giant search box in the middle of the page, with two big buttons underneath and several small links nearby. And you doubted Google’s commitment to patent reform, didn’t you?
Seriously!! A patent on a white background and two buttons? Forget that there is nothing innovative and nothing new about it, patenting a web page is counter intuitive. Just goes to show that software patents are become (have already become) a joke. Not very funny though.
I forgot to read the license
Recently the Norwegian browser released version 10, a nice slick browser and a good alternative. But I forgot to read the license. Thanks to Olav Torvund for reminding me by presenting the most important section on his blog:
By uploading Content to Opera’s site, you grant Opera an unrestricted, royalty-free, worldwide, irrevocable license to use, reproduce, display, perform, modify, transmit, and distribute such material in any manner, including in connection with Opera’s business, and you also agree that Opera is free to use any ideas, concepts, know-how, or techniques that you send Opera for any purpose. For the avoidance of doubt, this clause does not apply to the files you share as an End-User of the Opera Unite, as such files are never uploaded to Opera’s site. Opera will not make a claim to own or use those files.
This is not a totally unusual claim to rights but it should make you think. Any ideas or knowledge shared via Opera belong to Opera 🙂
Black day to remember
At 0445 Central European Time, the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein opens bombardment on the Westerplatte, a Polish military base outside Danzig, firing what are, according to many sources, the first shots of World War II. At the same time, regular Wehrmacht troops begin crossing the border into Poland. (wikipedia)
It is interesting to note that on the very same day Norway, Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland declare their neutrality. Spain and Ireland followed the next day. On the 3rd September The United Kingdom, France, New Zealand and Australia declare war on Germany. Obviously declaring war is a longer process than declaring neutrality.
But declaring neutrality on the very day of the attack, what does that say? No protest, no moral judgment simply a quick raising of the hands and a shout of “not my problem”?
Priorities health or war
I unbroke my ubuntu
I have a confession to make: IANAP (I am not a programmer) so when my technology breaks I struggle to fix it with a mixture of duct tape and google! Well ok, so no tape. Despite my lack of competence I have made several forrays into the wonderful world of linux, lulled by a mix of political correctness, can-do spirit and a philosophy I believe in. But, none of this helps when technology fails. No amount of feel-good philosophy can help me read my email which is the real reason for me having technology.
So last week when I was practicing with my new toy, a Samsung Notebook with Ubuntu, I came upon a wall of desperation when the menus disappeared. When turned on all I got was a background. Since I had not made any changes to the default it was still the brown boring background – and nothing else.
So I guessed, pushed and prodded the computer but it stubbornly refused to divulge any clues as to how it could be fixed. But never fear, the internet is here! The wonderful post:How to Reset Ubuntu/Gnome Settings to Defaults without Re-installing fixed everything.
Open terminal. Type
mv .config .old_config
hit return, then type
rm -rf .gnome .gnome2 .gconf .gconfd .metacity
restart the computer and it was as good as new. All the menus are back again and I am a happy ubuntu person ready to go out and rebreak my computer – frustration is, after all, a learning experience.
Twitter under attack
Twitter is struggling to overcome a denial-of-service attack, they wrote this five hours ago:
We are defending against a denial-of-service attack, and will update status again shortly.
Update: the site is back up, but we are continuing to defend against and recover from this attack.
Update (9:46a): As we recover, users will experience some longer load times and slowness. This includes timeouts to API clients. We’re working to get back to 100% as quickly as we can.
Fear as a business model
Moby has commented on the recent verdict against file-sharer Jammie Thomas has been found guilty and ordered to pay some $1.92 million in damages for illegally “making available” 24 songs in her KaZaA shared folder. That’s $80,000 per song!
Musician and electronica genius Moby (I only just found his blog/journal) writes:
punishing people for listening to music is exactly the wrong way to protect the music business. maybe the record companies have adopted the ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ approach to dealing with music fans. i don’t know, but ‘it’s better to be feared than respected’ doesn’t seem like such a sustainable business model when it comes to consumer choice. how about a new model of ‘it’s better to be loved for helping artists make good records and giving consumers great records at reasonable prices’?
i’m so sorry that any music fan anywhere is ever made to feel bad for making the effort to listen to music.
the riaa needs to be disbanded.
Like many others Moby has put his finger on the main weakness on protecting intellectual property through lawsuits. You are either suing and pissing off your best fans or beating up (relatively) innocent bystanders in order to scare others… Isn’t this jailhouse logic? Beat someone up to gain respect?
Playing Moby loudly in the office as a tribute to his good sense and taste… also I like the music…
Copyright in fossils
Some early morning copyright humor from Norway via Olav Torvund‘s blog. Apparently the researcher who found the fossil Ida, Jørn Hurum wants to hold copyright in the fossil (in Norwegian). A quick reminder of what we are talking about here, from the Guardian:
Ida is believed to be the most complete primate fossil ever discovered. She is 95% intact and so well preserved that her tissues, hair and even her stomach contents are visible. By comparison, the much more recent fossil “Lucy” from Ethiopia is only 40% complete.
And for what noble cause does this academic want copyright? Well he tells the newspaper that he wants the exclusive right to put the image on caps, t-shirts and childrens soft toys.
Statements like this should make us copyright speakers think! With all the noise about copyright in society today many people, even highly educated people, just don’t get copyright. They don’t understand how it works today even less why some groups argue that it does not work today.
Hopefully Jørn Hurum and the Museum of Natural history will read Olav blog or be informed by someone else that copyright expires 70 years after the creators death… and may be a tad difficult to apply to a 47 million year old corpse.