Copyright protection should last only as long as necessary to achieve a reasonable compromise between protecting and rewarding the author for his intellectual labour and safeguarding the public interest in the dissemination of culture and knowledge. From neither the perspective of the author nor the general public do any valid arguments exist (whether historical, economic, social or otherwise) in support of an exceedingly long term of copyright protection. While the author should be able to reap the fruits of his intellectual labour, the general public should not be deprived for an overly long period of time of the benefits of freely using those works.

Source: http://www.publicdomainmanifesto.org/node/8

Just signed the Public Domain Manifesto. Please read it and consider signing the manifesto as well to show your support of the Public Domain.

I watched this movie on Boingboing about the “Sixth Sense” project by the MIT Media Lab and Pranav Mistry in particular. It shows a device which allows you to interact with your surroundings and gather meta / contextual information from it. You don’t have to interact with other people since you’ll carry your omnipotent device to ask questions. This is not so far from the way some people interact with their smartphone, which seems to become more and more powerful. The “sixth sense” prototype  is in my opinion ‘just’ an ubersmartphone. From a technical perspective I find it not quite as interesting as the questions it raises from a social, economical and environmental perspective.

Questions such as: how do we interact with our environment? Are we able to make more informed decisions if we have more information available? Will this have an impact on human-human relations and what kind of impact?  My ambivalent thoughts on this device thus far may be best summed up in these two quotes:

“The future is already here — it is just unevenly distributed”

William Gibson (science fiction author)

“Resistance is futile”

The Borg (a race of aliens in the fictional universe of Startrek)

We live in interesting times.

ps: I embedded the movie at the rear of this post.

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Due to an intensive workload more or less since december last year I still haven’t finished my new design for this site. So please bear with me and ‘enjoy’ the default Wordpress theme.

Stephen Fry celebrates GNU's 25th birthday

I just watched a small endorsement err, short film made by British multi-talented Stephen Fry on Free Software. Although I find his use of plumbing as a metaphor to compare software with a bit strange, it does seem to get the message across. Personally I like the analogy of science versus bad science better. In any case its a nice short clip to introduce Free Software to those not aware of its existence.

From the press release:

The GNU operating system is turning 25 this year, and the Free Software Foundation (FSF) has kicked off its month-long celebration of the anniversary by releasing “Happy Birthday to GNU,” a short film featuring the English humorist, actor, novelist and filmmaker Stephen Fry.

In the five-minute film, Fry compares the free software operating system to “good science” and contrasts it with the “kind of tyranny” imposed by the proprietary software produced by companies like Microsoft and Apple that it replaces. He encourages people to use free GNU/Linux distributions like gNewSense (http://gnewsense.org) and free software generally, for freedom’s sake.

Happy Birthday GNU!

I have a Wacom Graphire (2?), but did not use it anymore due to the fact that I could not reach the whole screen with the pen. This was due to the pen being set to absolute mode. So after a quick Google search I found this tutorial, followed the steps 8 till 12. Restarted the X-server and set the stylus to relative mode (can also be done in xorg.conf) using xsetwacom (installed the package using synaptic) like this:

xsetwacom set stylus mode relative

Et voila a Wacom stylus behaving like a mouse. Nice!

ps: Check my xorg.conf (more…)

I’m offline until the first of augustus. Its time to sleep, read and relax a bit. So if you send me an email….keep in mind it will take some time before I’ll answer…Now where did I put my swimming trunks?

Tezamen met enkele anderen maak ik sinds gisteren officieel deel uit van het bestuur van de vereniging Vrijbit. Vandaag vond ik onderstaande filmpje via via op de Vrij Nederland site. Lees ook het bijbehorende interessante artikel. Binnenkort meer over Vrijbit.

Vind meer video’s zoals deze op Privacy project

Next week I’ll be in San Francisco attending the first Creative Commons tech summit.The program looks interesting.
It seems I got some catching up to do with the way CC deals with meta data as I did not know about CCrel. Oh, and I’m really curious to see San Francisco and not looking forward to flying almost eleven hours.

Interesting movie about the web according to freespeech.org