Death to censorship

Yahoo reports that a group of record labels (UMG, Sony, RCA and Warner Brothers Records) are suing American back-bone providers because they allow end-users to download illegal music from Listen4ever.com. The preposterousness of this aside, should they succeed, a precedent for backbone-level censorship on the internet will be created. Personally, I don’t condone the illegal download of music (and I also don’t care if you do download your music like that), but I do feel very strongly about the current freedom of information flow.

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William Gibson knew it then…

This article in Wired documents the efforts of a scientist to restore sight with brain implants and external signal processing and optical acquisition equipment. It also mentions the work of one or two other scientists in the field. I read Neuromancer years ago and it was very good. I read it very recently again and suffered a severe attack of goose-flesh. Gibson’s visions of the future are super-naturally accurate: if you haven’t read this book yet, stop what you’re doing now and start.

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76

We went to Köln (Cologne, yeah?) this weekend. The Dom is incredible, but I guess that’s what you get if you spend a few hundred years constructing a masterpiece. The Cathedral and the Bazaar? The Cathedral wins, hands down… Sipping Kölsch on the bank of the Rhine in the summer sun is also an activity that I can highly recommend. :) I managed to update my laptop page as things have been moving quite fast on the DRI front.

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Too … much … water.

I have come to the conclusion that the Netherlands exist in a subtly alternate dimension. There are several observations which allude to this, but the most prominent and convincing is the physically impossible amount of water that can fall from the sky in a finite time. This would not be possible in the reality that we are used to… but in the twilight zone of NL it can happen and does, often.

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Whoohooo, XFree86 + DRI hacked to suspend/resume

Yes, dear reader(s), I have hacked the radeon drivers so that I can suspend from and resume to an XFree86 server running with active DRI. You can read the low-down here. There is probably going to be some resistance from the developers, as this is still a kludge. It’s quite a good kludge though, don’t you think? By the way, please read the posting carefully. Some people haven’t and got the wrong idea…

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Yet another jewel at emusic.com

Just for clarity: no, I don’t work for emusic, nor am I affiliated with them in any way. However, I would like the concept of affordable and legal on-line music to be proven viable. In anycase, if you have a taste for for the alternative/industrial (I hate to categorise), you should take a listen to the Evil Mothers. You could perhaps start with Pitchforks and Perverts or even I Love Fur.

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