Some days, a certainty of paranoia appears. Like a cold ghost from nowhere. It is a conspiracy of soulless, joyless fools, hell-bent on sucking the joy out of life. Wearing favourite socks is not armour enough from their clammy hands. Irrespective of the amount of struggle all that is left is the vague feeling of helplessness and hopelessness.
Like a fly bouncing ineffectively against the glass windowpane growing ever more tired, while life slowly evaporates.
The Complete Works of Charles Darwin are to be found online â?? for free. So OK you are hard to please and you have seen books online before. But wait! This site offers more. You can even download Charles Darwin audio books â?? for free.
An amazing collection of Darwinâ??s works are available in MP3 hits like the â??Fertilisation of Orchidsâ?? (1862) to the â??On the Origin of Speciesâ?? (1859) all iPod ready.
This site contains every Darwin publication as well as many of his handwritten manuscripts. All told there are more than 50,000 searchable text pages and 40,000 images. There is also the most comprehensive Darwin bibliography ever published and the largest manuscript catalogue ever assembled. More than 150 ancillary texts are also included, ranging from reference works to contemporary reviews, obituaries, descriptions of Darwin’s Beagle specimens and important works for understanding Darwin’s context. Free audio mp3 versions of his works are also available.
The site was launched on 19 October this year and is amazing. It is a testimony to the victory of content over web-design.
(via Markmedia)
Organised people plan ahead. They have pension schemes and stock portfolios. Itâ??s all very grown up. Its one of those things you know you should do â?? but somehow you donâ??t. When the topic comes up in conversation there is always someone who has prepared and planned while the rest fall ominously silent.
I wish I planned ahead, I wish I could find the interest to consider life in twenty, forty and maybe sixty (but that might be pushing itâ?¦) years. The only share I have is framed and hanging on my wall.
This Svensk-Dansk-Ryska Telefon Aktiebolaget was founded on November 14, 1901 in order to establish Ericsson in the Russian market and to provide telephony services. The original certificate was a copper engraving bearing the Swedish, Russian and Danish coats of arms and an Ericsson telephone. In 1917 all assets were sold to The Russian Telephone Company but following the revolution the telephone company was nationalized and the money was never paid.
Among the founders of the company were Henrik Cedergren, Wilhelm Montelius (Chairman of Telefon AB L M Ericsson 1905-1916), Knut A Wallenberg, Marcus Wallenberg Sr., Den Danske Landmandsbank and Stockholms Allmänna Telefon Aktiebolag. Other well-known founders were Arvid Lindman (Swedenâ??s Prime Minister 1906-1911 and 1928-1930), and Princess Marie of Denmark (related to the Tsar family).
Did the owners of these shares talk loudly of how they had planned their future? Did the people who were forced to listen become embarrassed and silent?
Yesterday in the rainy dark evening I came across this:
Its two shoes sticking out from under a box giving the impression that someone is squished underneath. The sign between the feet reads: get a painkiller that you can trust…
It’s advertising. But is it artful? Or just plain littering? It made me stop and smile and take a photo and write a blog post. But is it art?
Today I am in Stockholm for the IIS (Internet Infrastructure Foundation) Internet Days. Two days of presentations concerning issues of interest for the Internet. In addition to this they also present the list of stipends for the projects they will support. This year both Jonas Ã?berg (Free Software education project) and Henrik Sandklef (PGP project) both from FSFE have received money for individual projects. So we are all here in Stockholm to exhibit and present FSFE and they are here to accept their funding â?? Congratulations guys!
The FSFE stand at the IIS Internet Days
On the 11/11 I will be in Bolzano, Italy attending the First International Annual Meeting of the Fellows of the FSFE this will be an excellent opportunity to meet the fellows and the team. In addition to this there have been promises of new projects that will be announced at the meeting. The event also coincides with the South Tyrol Free Software Conference which is in Bolzano on the 10th – unfortunately I will miss a large part of this event since I shall be travelling to Bolzano.
If I have some spare time (which I doubt) I hope to be able to pop in to the South Tyrol Archeological Museum, which hosts the Ã?tzi the iceman.
Ã?tzi is the nickname of a well-preserved natural mummy of a man from about 3300 BC, found in 1991 in a glacier of the Ã?tztal Alps, near the border between Austria and Italy. The nickname comes from Ã?tztal, the region in which he was discovered. He is Europe’s oldest natural human mummy, and has offered an unprecedented view on the Chalcolithic (Copper-stone Age) Europeans (Wikipedia).
My research has been driven by two things. First I am, and want to be, an academic. This makes me interested in theories, methods and attempting to explore and explain the things I see around me. The second part of my driving force is my passion for what I do. I cannot work unless I feel what I do is important and may eventually bring about positive change. With this I do not mean a passion for academia but a passion for the subject matter.
This latter thing something that many people have pointed out during my thesis defence and the presentations I give. I secretly (not any more?) have difficulty with those who see their research as just another job. I donâ??t mean that they do lesser work â?? they do not. But I donâ??t understand where they find the energy to do things without passion.
This leads to the point of my announcement. I know what I want to do with the next part of my career life. I aim to continue working under the umbrella of digital rights and democracy, with a particular focus on the actions and perspectives of users.
As a part of this I have two major projects underway, both in collaboration with smart and exciting people. The first is the development of a base for Free Software research and activity at the IT-University of Göteborg. The second is the development of the Resistance Studies Network at the School of Global Studies. These two are both faculties at the University of Göteborg.
At the FSF I hope to develop my understanding of legal issues and technical limitations. While at the RSN I intend to focus on digital civil disobedience. These are both topics which I had in my thesis â?? so itâ??s more in depth work rather than breaking new ground personally.
Right now both these projects are in the planning phases and will result in lots of work. So I will keep you all informed as it progresses.
It nice to have a plan, so now you knowâ?¦
Oh, and I have a few odd morbid side-projects, not to mention this blog, which I fully intend to persue but they cannot become mainstream to my work…yet.
As a member of the Free Software Foundation Fellowship I have finally got around to beginning to work with attempting to get my membership cryptocard to work on my Mac. It is not as easy as I had hoped. The thing is that I have soon abused my tecchie friends to the point where they refuse to actually help me directly but tend to give me small hints. I feel like an illiterate person faced with a crossword…
This promotes the learning curve but frustrates the hell out of the desire for instant gratification! For those of you who are not yet members of the fellowship I can recommend getting involved. The FSF is a valuable and important resource organisation and it also creates a higher level of awareness of our technical abilities and vunerabilities. Join now.
Say ecosystem* and most of us will think of something delicate and finely balanced. We have been taught to understand that the environment is made up of systems which hang together and that disturbances in one part will created unintended and in our experience sad consequences.
Say Microsoft, Adobe or General Motors and we tend to think of corporate bohemoths hardly the delicate flowers in need of protection, but more often a cause of some destruction within their particular ecosystem.
A letter (pdf here) to the European Commission has recently come to light (it was leaked). The letter shows the extent which the anti-Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) lobby is prepared to go in order to maintain control of their dominant business model for the production of software.
The letter was sent in response to a recent EU report on the role of open-source software in the European economy. The letter warns of against encouraging the FOSS movement. The letter states that the actions taken by the European Commission could “disrupt the entire software eco-system” and the report itself was biased and looked “more like a marketing document than a serious survey”.
The letter comes from The Initiative for Software Choice (ISC). A name which inspires one to think of openness and freedom. Yet the group is a lobby group funded by proprietary software manufacturers – this, in itself, may be seen as a contradiction in terms.
According to Techworld the ISC was created to oppose government efforts to give preference to open-source or open standards-based systems. According to critics such as Bruce Perens, the ISC largely pursues a pro-Microsoft agenda, though the group itself emphasises that it has more than 300 members.
The letter is full of artful uses of language and leaves the unsuspecting reader with an impression that the writer is concerned about the welfare of the European Union and its development. At the same time the message is hammered home – with the subtly of a rhino with a headache – do not change anything. The system works as it is.
Naturally the concerns of the manufacturers of proprietary software should and must be taken into consideration but this letter is a masterful peice of dubbletalk and rhetoric (in the worst way).
Read the letter and LEARN from it.
—
* An ecosystem refers to the collection of components and processes that comprise, and govern the behavior of, some defined subset of the biosphere. The term is generally understood to refer to all biotic and abiotic components, and their interactions with each other, in some defined area, with no conceptual restrictions on how large or small that area can be. To many, ecosystems, like any other system, are governed by the rules of systems science and cybernetics, as applied specifically to collections of organisms and relevant abiotic components. To others, ecosystems are primarily governed by stochastic events, the reactions they provoke on non-living materials and the corresponding responses by organisms. (Wikipedia)
Yesterday President Bush signed the infamous Military Commissions Act of 2006 (fulltext pdf).
In case you have missed this one it is the law that grants the CIA legal right to continue operating torture facilities in undisclosed, foreign countries. It also allows individuals designated as â??enemy combatantsâ?? to be held without habeas corpus.
Habeas Corpus is basically the right that guarantees that the courts should decide whether a person is lawfully imprisoned. By removing this right the CIA now can legally detain people indefinitely without having to seek court permission.
The law also â??establishes military tribunals that would allow some use of evidence obtained by coercionâ?? â?? In the legal systems of most sane countries evidence obtained by torture is not considered good evidence. This is because the point of law is justice. Torture a person long enough and they will admit to anything just to make the torture stop. Only weak-minded incompetent fools can think that the use of torture is a good idea to obtain the truth.
So now the US has reached an all time low. It joins the company terror dictatorships like Stalin’s Soviet Union, Hitler’s Germany, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia where anyone deemed an enemy of the state can be picked up, hidden in a foreign jail, tortured until they admit to anything and then sentenced.
The point is, of course, that this move also removes any legitimate moral standpoint the US might have had. While the bill was being signed, protesters outside the White House shouted, â??Bush is the terroristâ?? and â??Torture is a crimeâ??. Those who refused to move were arrested by police. (Times).
To add a bit of the surreal to the event: the table where the president signed the bill had a notice with the words â??Protecting Americaâ?? written on it. If that were true then you wouldnâ??t need the sign would you?
Land of the free, home of the brave? Not likely. Nice one Georgeâ?¦