Category: Politics

About .. us (but .. we are not important?!)

The Economist wrote in an article:

When a French-language television programme was interrupted last December with a spoof news flash announcing that the Flemish parliament had declared independence, the king had fled and Belgium had dissolved, it was widely believed.

Being a Flemish Belgian myself I’d like to correct the “it was widely believed” part of the article: this is absolutely not true. The vast majority of Flemish people immediately recognized it as a spoof. Not only was it not being reported by the Flemish television stations, radio nor news papers most Belgians understood that this would take months of (pointless) discussing at our government resulting in a “let’s not do it” conclusion.

Most Flemish people in stead of widely believing this, thought something in the lines of “No way, that’s too good to be true!”. But in a cynical or joking way rather than using a serious tone. We laughed with it the day after, when the Flemish media started reporting the spoof. Some Walloons might have been a bit scared, but I don’t think they actually widely believed this either.

They know it’s not that easy to get rid of them :-)

The book store

After I watched Krzysztof‘s lecture on API design, I decided to buy Framework Design Guidelines, which is a book he and Brad Abrams wrote.

I scanned through the first pages of the book and it indeed looks like a very interesting book full of material that I’ll in future use when designing and defining APIs and frameworks. I hope other people in the GNOME community, especially the ones working on infrastructure right now, will buy the same book and read it a few times.

I also bought myself The Transparent Society and started reading in my copy of Noam‘s Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance. I’m guessing these books will be influencing my blog content for the next few weeks. Maybe people who don’t like these subjects can filter me out? :-)

Finally

Finally, an American that I can respect. (edit: not that I don’t respect any other Americans, just pointing out that I think Moore is right here)

Time for the GPE team to seek legal counsel?

Although the GPE project authors and contributors recently moved their hosting needs to linuxtogo, some handhelds.org administrators believe that they personally own the projects that are or were hosted there. A person who goes by the name France George decided to trademark GPE, Opie ad IPKG.

Unluckily Mr. France started to work with these trademarks already even if they are not assigned yet:

  • The OpieII project had to change its name.
  • Contributors were threatened and urged to give up the name GPE
  • The GPE IRC channel (#gpe) at freenode.net was hijacked
  • Freenode staff members were threatened when they decided to give #gpe back

I hope free software supporters with legal knowledge from all over the world will offer their skills to the people who worked on the many excellent GPE components. Let’s not allow people to steal project names.

Florian Boor, one of the GPE developers, blogged in “Threatened, how do we protect our projects” the open question to all of you: How do we get the affected projects out of this situation? Or maybe even more important: How can we reduce the risk for something like this happening again?

In support for Kathy Sierra

Although Kathy‘s message is to be passionate and although I can (try to) imagine how ill people like psychopaths can easily translate her call for being passionate into an act of making what they see as a funny picture, but what normal people see as a death threat: I don’t believe this was Kathy’s intention and hers isn’t to be blamed for this.

Rather the fact that biology needs discrepancies to detect faulty designs within our genes. Differently put, the people who did these dead threats are simply tryouts or rather errors of nature. They are an error because it’s in the interest of our society to neither encourage nor have asocials.

A lot human-like societies (like baboons) would have responded to this asocial by things like not offering the specimen access to females. So, the nature of other species shows that the best technique is to ignore these people, to try to make sure that they don’t have access to females (or males, if the guilty are females) and by forcing them out of the group, etc etc. Right? Let us let nature do its work: ignore them, deny them access to females and let their erroneous genes get extinct.

Kathy’s attempt of teaching us, software developers & co., about how to be passionate people and all that, has been in my opinion exceptionally good. I hope Kathy understands that by stopping her work on this, she would let them win the battle. I’m sure that this is just a pause for Kathy though.

In our society we need more passionate people Kathy. Through your work you created a lot such people. We need passionate people to be successful. You have been teaching us, passionates, how to be successful.

It was your book on design patterns too that made me want to do the project that I am doing right now. Your work is precious and important.

Kathy, I hope you won’t stop. But do pause if that is what you need.

The Trap, a new documentary by Adam Curtis

I was just watching “The Trap, what happened to our dreams of freedom”, by Adam Curtis who did previous work like “The power of nightmares” and “The century of the self”.

Although I don’t know for how long it will stay there, you can at this moment find it at for example youtube: part 1, part 2, part 3,part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7

Its an interesting documentary that talks a little bit about things like Game theory. It looks like the second episode is online too, I haven’t yet looked at that one though.

Speeking of war crimes

I wonder why only one “leader” is soon going to hang for “war crimes”?

Warning: extremely violent footage (but nevertheless, the truth): fallujah_ING.wmv, (mirror)

What about the American leaders and (especially the non-puppet) war planners? Shouldn’t they be punished? Given they have permitted the usage of white phosphor and M77 (a napalm-like), which is clearly a violation of international law of war (in other words, they committed war crimes), which makes them directly and personally responsible for what you see in the movie.

I wonder when, or should I wonder “if”, these people will ever be judged for this?

And just to make sure it gets spread, Mr. Leverett explaining how he got silenced by the Bush administration.

The abuse of power and the assault on democracy

I finally finished reading Noam Chomsky’s book: The abuse of power and the assault on democracy.

I would like to quote some text from his book in my blog:

One commonly hears that carping critics complain about what is wrong, but do not present solutions. There is an accurate translation for that charge: “They present solutions, but I don’t like them.” In addition to the proposals that should be familiar about dealing with the crises that reach to the level of survival, a few simple suggestions for the United States have already been mentioned:

  • accept the jurisdiction of of the International Criminal Court and the world Court;
  • sign and carry forward the Kyoto protocols;
  • let the UN take the lead in international crises;
  • relay on diplomatic and economic measures rather than military ones in confronting terror;
  • keep to the traditional interpretation of the UN Charter;
  • give up the Security Council veto and have “a decent respect for the opinion of mankind,” as the Declaration of Independence advises, even if power centers disagree;
  • cut back sharply on military spending and sharply increase social spending.

For people who believe in democracy, these are very conservative suggestions: they appear to be the opinions of the majority of the US population, in most cases the overwhelming majority. They are radical in opposition to public policy.

Telling me what I should blog?

I dislike the trend of people whining what we should blog because we get on pgo. It’s our personal blog, pgo is just a user of our blogs.

If you are interested in filtered opinions and stories, I suggest you watch FOX news in stead of reading our blogs or create a derivative of pgo where you’ll filter on subject.

I hope this will stop people who piss about what we should be writing. Like telling us that we can’t write about Novell vs. Microsoft, that we can’t write about politics, that we can’t write about our opinion about Fedora, that we can’t … I have news for you guys: we can write about it. As much as we want and as often as we do.

Larry Flints lawyer once said it correct: it’s the price you have to pay for freedom. We will not stop exercising our freedoms.

Your friendly freedom of speech supporter.

Re: Provoked

Hey Michael, I would like to correct you in that I didn’t say people should be ashamed of their country. I wrote that they should be ashamed of their current politicians. There’s a very big difference (in my opinion).

About the NDA thingy. Yes, maybe you are right.

But Michael, it’s good that you let me know how you feel about what I write on my blog.