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Miro AKA DemocracyPlayer

www.ted.com is a premier partner for the Miro player [1]. This is a free player for free online content, the site www.getmiro.com has the player for download, it has binaries for Mac OS/X, Windows, and Ubuntu as well as the source (GPL licensed), it is in Debian/Unstable. It supports downloading in a number of ways […]

Preparing for a Collapse

Rick Falkvinge (leader of the Swedish Pirate Party) has written his predictions about an economic crash in the US [1]. Predicting that the US economy will crash is no great stretch, it’s gross failures seem obvious. The Pirate Party [2] is a one-issue political party that is based on reform of intellectual property laws. It […]

The Inevitability of Victory

I just read an interesting blog post about Montenegro [1]. Apparently a key to the process of becoming a country was acting like it was inevitable.

It seems that this method can be applied to many areas, one of which is the contest between Linux and some proprietary OSs.

For many years monopolists have convinced […]

Free Textbooks

I am going to make some suggestions to a company that might possibly sponsor development of free electronic text books for schools (suitable for running on an OLPC machine).

I would appreciate any suggestions for things I should include. I will make my suggestions as a blog post summarising all input I receive and send […]

Lentil as Anything

I just read an interesting post by Kylie Willison [1] which mentions the restaurant Lentil as Anything [2].

The restaurant chain is noteworthy for charging what people believe that the food is worth (poor people can eat for free). I think that there are cultural similarities with the Linux community, so we should have a […]

DMCA and Sci-Fi

My previous post about the SFWA falsely issuing DMCA take-down notices [1] has got some reactions, many of which indicate a lack of clear reading of my post.

I am not advocating boycotting sci-fi. I am merely changing the priorities for my reading list. There must be at least 10 sci-fi books on my shelf […]

Web-Scabs

I have just read an interesting post by Ted Ts’O about copyright protection on the net [1]. Ted is well known as a free software programmer, but it’s slightly less well known that he is an avid Science-Fiction fan. In the Free Software community most people seem to be interested in Sci-Fi, but Ted is […]

Photography and Censorship at APEC

World News Australia reports that Police forced three tourists to delete photos of a fence. Apparently the officers in question believed that such photos would be a threat to security.

It’s interesting to note that the first sentence of the World News Australia report is “Officials say police who forced three tourists to delete photos […]

License Fees for Music in Clubs

The Cyber Law Center has blogged about the Phonographic Performance Company of Australia Limited being permitted to charge night-club owners $1.05 per person per night for playing commercial music up from $0.07. The number of people is calculated on the maximum licensed capacity of the venue – not good if the venue isn’t full. Of […]

DMCA etc

A few days ago I wrote my first DMCA take-down notice, I followed the instructions on the Wikipedia page. The reason for this was that someone was mirroring my blog and putting google adverts on the copy. Before I started putting Google adverts on my web sites I wouldn’t have been bothered about this. But […]