In the West we take having clean, running water so much for granted that when we can’t drench our gardens in the stuff we complain like the world is about to end. And this is in the London area where most people don’t even have gardens!
Maybe it takes something like World Water Day to make us realise how lucky we are.
This is a big subject and one where I’m increasingly of the opinion that we’re going too far in the wrong direction. ID Cards and imprisonment without trial are bad enough but things seem to be going even worse on the other side of the Atlantic (or the UK Government is better at hiding their nefarious plans).
Last weekend I came across an article in the Washington Post that says that the Bush administration is trying to pass a law which would restrict the rights of the press. It would, for example, make it possible to prosecute reporters who found that the President did something illegal or to publish information about a wiretap.
I was sad to see the passing of Linda Smith. I never saw any of her stand up work but I heard her frequently on Just a Minute and The News Quiz, where she was always sharp and funny.
Jeremy Hardy called her “the wittiest and brightest person working on TV or radio panel games” which really isn’t very far from the mark.
Guardian Unlimited | Obituaries | Linda Smith (Jeremy Hardy)
I came across this article in the dead-tree edition of Computer Weekly: it discusses how to avoid open source licensing pitfalls. It’s an interesting but flawed piece.
What did he get right? I think it’s fair to say that people should assess the risks of installing free software. Free software is still new to a lot of people making the details of these risk somewhat unknown. He’s right to say that many people do not understand what obligations using some of the various free software licences put them under. I work for a very technically-focused company yet even we have had some internal problems with this.
Apparently web users judge sites in the blink of an eye — potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds. I hope you took just a little longer checking out my websites!
So much of my favourite music only exists because of this man…
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Music | Obituary: Dr Robert Moog
CNN.com – Synthesizer innovator Moog dies at 71 – Aug 22, 2005
It is now two days after Microsoft’s official release of ‘the next generation’ of their premier operating system, Windows 2000 (n?e, NT5). We’re now at a safe distance to be able to assess the impact it has had on people and the press.
The first interesting thing to note is that on Slashdot, the Internet’s favorite site for hacker-oriented hi-tech news, did not make any announcement. One argument is that Slashdot is Linux, or at least Unix, biased making Windows news irrelevant. I don’t buy that. What Microsoft is doing is important if Linux is to achieve world domination.