The front line of politics.

Many people are unhappy with the effectiveness of the political process, but just accept government by corrupt elected officials and inflexible, antiquated bureaucracy.  Others are trying to change the way we do things.  Like marches for civil  rights, they facilitate speech on the internet when strong arm tactics are trying to quite the voices of …
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ACTA is more dangerous than PIPA or SOPA

ACTA — a global treaty — could allow corporations to censor the Internet. Negotiated in secret by a small number of rich countries and corporate powers, it would set up a shadowy new anti-counterfeiting body to allow private interests to police everything that we do online and impose massive penalties – even prison sentences – against …
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Protest US “anti-piracy” moves

The US Stop Online Piracy Act (Sopa) and Protect Intellectual Property Act (Pipa) are proposed to be debated by Congress in a week.  The legislation would allow the Justice Department and content owners to seek court orders requiring search engines to block results associated with piracy. The bill is too broad and so badly written …
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LibreOffice, OpenOffice and Oracle

Once upon a time OpenOffice, or Ooo (OpenOffice.Org) as it became known was the leader in open source office productivity software.  I loved it.  It was loved. Then one day a cunning suitor, Oracle, offered to give gold to the very attractive, but not rich, Ooo.  Ooo agreed to become part of Oracle.  But Oracle …
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Facebook has joined Microsoft and Google: ogres of the internet

A couple of months ago the Austrian law student Max Schrems asked Facebook to send him all their data stored about him. All Europeans have a right to do this because Facebook is based in the EU in Dublin, Ireland. It took a while and then Facebook sent Max a CD with 1222 PDF files. What …
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Yahoo.src for seamonkey

Seamonkey users might find this useful till 2.1 comes out.  Copy the text below to a text editor and save as yahoo.src in searchplugins in your profile directory.  Restart seamonkey. # Yahoo Search Plug-in for Mozilla # # Created by Robert Fernandes (e-mail address removed by casey1992), Matthew A. McGuigan (e-mail address removed by casey1992), …
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Ricoh r5u870 webcam

For debian (Ubuntu etc) packages go here: http://download.tuxfamily.org/arakhne/pool/universe/r/ricoh-webcam-r5u870/ Once you’ve installed the two files, check your home directory for a directory r5u87x and read the readme … 🙂 For rpm go to: http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/11802631/dir/opensuse/com/r5u87x-loader-0.2.0-11.3.x86_64.rpm.html

What Is the Meaning Of Life? 1 or 0?

So, I’m in the middle of resurrecting my computer after it suffered a fatal bout of Windowsitis, and while letting off steam to my dad have some unexpected insights based on an IT metaphor. I was testing three operating systems (OpenSuse, Kubuntu, Vista) and a virtualisation tool.  It was glitching at the multiboot setup – …
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