Back in 2001, there was “a storm of protest over a move by the World Wide Web Consortium to bless fee-bearing patents as official web standards.”
If you started using the Internet with Facebook and other social networks, this may be the first time you meet this kind of problem. However, people willing to create them still exist, and you can’t afford to ignore the issue, as the result would be an Internet where “everybody will get screwed, even if they’ll get screwed equally”.
miscellanea
- Common myths about renewable energy include that it’s expensive, unreliable and that there just isn’t enough of it. But as technological advances and plummeting costs drive explosive growth, real-world experience is shattering long-held assumptions every day, mainly because: Since the fuel cost of renewable resources like wind and solar is zero, adding renewable resources always pulls down the market price of all the electricity sold in the market whenever it is available.
Here are a few factoids you should think about the next time you’re under the shower:
- A. Swartz rightly points out that: The way a typical US transparency project works is pretty simple. You find a government database, work hard to get or parse a copy, and then put it online with some nice visualizations. The problem is that reality doesn’t live in the databases. Right. So we need more information. Why give up? Then he says: For too long we’ve been funding transparency projects on the model of if-we-build-it-they-will-come: that we don’t know what transparency will be useful for, but once it’s done it will lead to all sorts of exciting possibilities.
(the italian version has many more links)
If they can make you ask the wrong questions, the answers don’t matter. The new Ponte della Scafa (Scafa Bridge) over which Via della Scafa (Scafa Road) crosses the Tiber River is, I think, one of these cases.
Italian newspaper Repubblica reports that Italy really is in dire economic crisis. How dire? Well, it turns out that both proving spouse infidelity as preparation to divorce, and tolerating absent employees have become stuff that only the richest can afford. A representative of a federation of italian private investigators said:
The first entry for 2012 of my copyright madness gallery may be just behind (or below…) you in this very moment, in your own living room.
Every now and then, people find in their inbox some email that would have been much better not to send. I’m not talking about spam. I refer to those “urgent warnings” about some danger, or to all those wonderful or scandalous “news” that some well meaning friend sends or forward to everybody in his address book because it only takes one click and “this is big, everybody gotta know it!”
Whenever you have one of these messages in your hands, do yourself and the whole human race a favour
Once upon a time there was a country. Year after year, that country funded the wrong projects, built the wrong infrastructure and bought the wrong things. Eventually, the accumulation of bad investment made that country so fragile that even the smallest shock could topple it.
The reason for this failure was
Jonathan Angel recently explained very well, in a piece about the IBM PC’s birthday’, something I realized the first time I saw a tablet computer, that is the main reason why I will not limit myself to any device like that, and suggest nobody does. Here’s that reason, expressed with two quotes from Jonathan’s piece, which I do suggest you read in its entirety: