Posts from — May 2006

Putfile – HHO GAS:
HHO GAS

perhaps real….

Housing Boycott:
My wife and I are tired of the insanity of Bay Area housing prices, and want to fight back. Most of our friends — and we suspect, you — do too. So we created this website to start a grass roots movement to stop the insanity, through a synchronized boycott, and through education. We CAN make a difference. Read more here.
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when all else fails to bring rationality to the system, boycott works. social action does work to change the world, all you have to do is to organize the populace and change will occur.

F.A.Q.:
How can I help Free Creations?

1. You can release your artwork under Against DRM 2.0.
2. You can use our logos.
3. You can translate Against DRM 2.0 into a new language.

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this looks like another step in the right direction

The Urban Kunoichi » Elevator/Lift hacking:
When you need to get to your floor quickly, bypassing any requests along the way, hold your floor’s button and press the door close button at the same time. You should sail straight to your floor without stopping!

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don’t use these inappropriately.

Grating Cards:
‘Because nothing says I love you more than a hot cup of tea in the face.’

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honesty is the best policy after all…..

BBC mistakes cab driver for Net pundit on TV interview:
Mark Frauenfelder: The BBC wanted to interview Newswireless.net editor Guy Kewney about the Apple music / Apple computer decision but accidentally pulled his cab driver onto the set for a live TV interview. It makes for excellent viewing.
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this is great.

You scored as Existentialist. Existentialism emphasizes human capability. There is no greater power interfering with life and thus it is up to us to make things happen. Sometimes considered a negative and depressing world view, your optimism towards human accomplishment is immense. Mankind is condemned to be free and must accept the responsibility. Existentialist 88% Postmodernist 81% Modernist 69% Materialist 69% Romanticist 44% Cultural Creative 31% Fundamentalist 19% Idealist 0%

What is Your World View? (updated)
created with QuizFarm.com

An Open Letter to Google: Concepts for a Google Privacy Initiative:
Greetings. Of possible interest: An Open Letter to Google: Concepts for a Google Privacy Initiative Preface: The overall situation relating to U.S. and global privacy issues is deteriorating rapidly. Recent Congressional moves toward legislating broad, government-mandated data retention laws are…

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this seems like an excellent idea, but it falls prey of the same sort of ideology of icann. that is… that businesses can take over the role of government when government does not perform. I think that is worrisome because it privatizes a public function.

Decline and fall of the Roman myth – Newspaper Edition – Times Online:

The Celts’ use of metal even allowed them to invent a harvesting machine. Historians did not believe that it could be true until bas-relief sculptures were discovered that apparently show just such a contraption. It was a sort of comb on wheels that beat off the ears of corn and deposited them in a container rather like the grass box of a lawnmower. A replica was built and tested in the 1980s.

It has been easy to underestimate Celtic technological achievements because so much has vanished or been misunderstood. Of course, it was thoughtless of the Celts not to leave us anything much in the way of written records — they should have known that the lack of books putting forward their own propaganda would weight the evidence firmly in favour of the Romans.

Western society’s enthusiasm since the renaissance for all things Roman has persuaded us to see much of the past through Roman eyes, even when contrary evidence stares us in the face. Once we turn the picture upside-down and look at history from a non-Roman point of view, things start to look very, very different.

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Terry Jones Dismisses parts of the great tradition… parts of the mythos of modernity and the justification for power, and the inequality of laws. It is a nice short read.

Higher Learning in France Clings to Its Old Ways – New York Times:

In a speech at the Sorbonne in late April after the labor law was rescinded, Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin pledged “a new pact between the university and the French people.”

Mr. de Villepin, a graduate of the École Nationale d’Administration, the grandest of the grandes écoles, promised more money and more flexibility, saying that as in the United States, a student with a master’s degree in philosophy should be able to become a financial analyst.

When a student asked him to explain how he proposed to do that, Mr. de Villepin had no concrete answer. Instead he talked about the “happiness of the dog that leaves its kennel.”

But flexibility is not at all the tradition in France, where students are put on fixed career tracks at an early age.

“We are caught in a world of limits where there’s no such thing as the self-made man,” said Claire de la Vigne, a graduate of Nanterre who is now doing graduate work at the much more prestigious Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris. “We are never taught the idea of the American dream, where everything is possible. Our guide is fear.”

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old learning to reproduce the old social system. much like in the u.s.