The US administration is proposing a policy of first nuclear strike against enemies — both states and non-states — that are “intending to use WMD” against US or allied targets. Besides the immorality of such a policy, the fact is that the current administration has consistently misled the US public about other nations’ WMD capabilities. […]
The British government uses terrorism as an excuse to roll back civil rights by a century. The Home Office wants to be able to deport people to countries with strong torture records (apparently, following the lead of America — which has in several documented cases sent terror suspects captured in America straight to police torture […]
While browsing the July 23rd-27th edition of The Economist (I know, it’s pretty old), I noticed an interesting advertisement on page 87. Among all the ads offering MBA’s and offshore accounts, I noticed the following gem:
HM Ambassador to the Holy See
Salary range: £42,640-£60,405
Apparently, the British government paid Capita Resourcing to find them a replacement […]
The recent Hot Coffee mod controversy had inspired a number of (mostly Democrat) politicians, including Sen. Clinton, to attack the computer game industry. They call for federal studies on the effect of games on children’s mental development; they are trying to start Congressional inquiries; they are wooing the crowds with “think of the children”. In […]
Exams are over with; now, once again, I have some time to write.
First, A. Lebedev, greatest Russian web designer, author of the famous Ководство (translated into English as Mandership) has designed a keyboard. The ultimate keyboard. Optimus, the Ultimate Keyboard of Doom. I imagine writing a custom driver for the thing to use it with […]
A humorous but accurate (warning: pdf) explanation of why apache’s config files are not everyone’s cup of tea. (Not that I have a problem with them — but that is purely thanks to Gentoo and Debian providing sensible and self-documented default config files for their users to build on.)
One of deviantArt’s founders has been forced […]
Saw a little scene on the way to the University this morning. Two police cars in the right lane. Next to them, a Ford SUV — an Explorer or an Expedition, I think. A motorcycle — a new-looking yellow sportbike — on the ground, on its side, in front of the Ford. A person, in […]
First conviction under UK’s anti-modchip law. I personally found it to be very odd. The guy was selling XBoxes with a bigger hard driver full of pirated games — yet instead of nabbing him for massive copyright infringement, he is found guilty of installing modchips. Insane! There are a few cases where laws limit what […]
The US has decided to keep permanent control of the root DNS servers. Several years ago, it had announced that the root servers would be transferred to ICANN, the internet’s governing body; now, ICANN has been relegated to the role of a “technical manager”.
There are a number of aspects to this story. First, for […]
Interesting, and long, explanation for how to make teenagers love Linux. I mostly agree with Cacophony: the desktop needs to be a bit more useable, and multimedia (including semi- or completely illegal use thereof) really needs to be easier to set up.
Iran is implementing its own version of the Great Firewall of China. The most […]
In 1841, Thomas Babbington Macaulay made a speech in the British Parliament against an act that would have extended copyright terms to 60 years after an author’s death. In 2002, a kuro5hin member posted the speech online. Today, I’ve finally read it, and would make some comments.
Macaulay argued from three points. First, that a long […]
UF has a short and cute debunking of BSA’s methods for calculating world piracy levels.
I did not know that there is a gun on board every Soyuz spaceship. It has three barrels — two for shotgun ammunition and flares, one for rifle rounds — and apparently is very well-balanced. I suppose that if one misses […]
Another Supreme Court decision: today, the Supreme Court of the US ruled in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer v. Grokster. Grokster, a notorious for-profit p2p network, claimed that its right to produce p2p software was protected by the Betamax decision, because Grokster had some uses that did not involve copyright infringement. However, in a 9-0 decision, the Court ruled […]
Yadistclean is a very useful tool for Gentoo-lovers. It looks through /usr/portage/distfiles, and deletes the sources that you don’t need. Runs pretty fast, and saves lots of disk space.
A good tutorial for cracking wireless networks. I was impressed by the TCP/IP-over-ping method…
Finally, will free online porn disappear, or will it simply move to Europe and […]
The difinitive guide to sed one-liners. Good for showing off in front of Unix newbies.
Daniel Robbins, creator of Gentoo, joins the dark side. Is he being groomed as the new Sith Lord?
A good guide to performance measurement on Linux. Quick summary : vmstat, iostat, and netstat are your friends.
Finally, a good summary of X windows […]
I have no words: Rectal Impaction Following Enema with Concrete Mix. I have a suspicion that one day, the guy will be in the running for a Darwin Award.
The Dept. of Commerce wants to treat foreign researchers’ access to scientific technology as export to hostile nations. Which is to say, if you have the misfortune of being an Indian student or a Russian scientist, and you want to say, use a microscope, you will need to fill out a request (complete with your […]
These human interface guidelines should be required reading for all software developers. Very apt advice. And people wonder why there are so few women in open source…
More Gentoo bugzilla humor: xmms-1.2.9 goes down more often than a drunken whore. An apt description…
In the spirit of exam season in universities worldwide, here is a quiz for aspiring gentoo devs and ebuild contributors.
Here is complete, non-emotional, well-stated summary of the KHTML vs. WebCore debacle. Conclusion: WebCore is a defacto fork, and /. posters […]
Replaced my dying 19-inch Viewsonic CRT with a Samsung SyncMaster 730B. Looks nice, and no dead pixels. Complaints: doesn’t like plain old VGA mode, meaning BIOS display is partially cut off (this also happens to the default Linux text console, forcing me to finally set up a VESA framebuffer). Also, the colors aren’t quite right. […]