Slashdot

Reporters sans frontières is organizing a 24-hour online demonstration against Internet censorship, starting next Tuesday, 7th of November, 11am Parisian time (that's 10am UTC and 5am EST for the Anglo-Americans out there).

You connect to their server and, if I understand the press release correctly, try and Slashdot sites belonging to oppressive governments. Or however else clicking can 'help to change the "Internet Black Holes" map and help to combat censorship'. I sure do hope they have enough server capacity themselves to withstand a Slashdot effect, but if not, someone will probably summarize what's going on in time.

With governments everywhere using terrorism as an excuse to crack down on civil liberty (China, United States, and starting November, Indonesia), it is up to the concerned among us to speak up while we still can. Make your voice heard!

This reminds me of those Yes (Prime) Minister episodes I have been watching for the past weekend, with the entire establishment playing rear-guard Humphrey-an style...

A woman architect, and from a minority culture/religion too... presumably she does not build the phallic-shaped monstrosities one requires to get a peerage in Britain.

From the Independent:

Spurned at home, British designer wins architecture's 'Nobel prize'

By James Burleigh

22 March 2004

A female architect who is based in Britain but has yet to win a commission in the UK has been awarded her profession's equivalent of the Nobel prize, it was announced yesterday.

Zaha Hadid, 53, is the first woman to win the coveted Pritzker Architecture Prize in its 25-year history. Now a British citizen, the Baghdad-born designer's relatively small collection of Modernist works has already vaulted her into the top league of a profession dominated by men. She is the third Briton to have been awarded the prize.

...

Ms Hadid has not had any of her projects completed in Britain and her career in her adopted country has been marked by several high-profile setbacks. Most notably, political in-fighting scuppered her radical design for the Cardiff Bay Opera House in Wales in 1995. In November last year she narrowly missed winning the chance to design a new classical-music headquarters for the
  BBC at its otherwise dreary White City complex.

In a recent interview Ms Hadid said that she had been stigmatised in Britain, where her firm won plenty of competitions, but rarely saw them into reality because of "dodgy" rules that allowed organisers to take a different course.

The citation from the Pritzker jury said Ms Hadid's path to worldwide recognition had been a "heroic struggle." Lord Rothschild, the chairman of the jury, referred to "the forces of conservatism" being responsible for her inability to complete a building in London.

...

Socialists took over the Lower House in Sunday's parliamentary election in Spain, after two terms in office for the People's Party, which was previously expected to win the election.

The PP was criticized by Basques for politicizing the bombing, for instance by immediately blaming the ETA even when evidence to the contrary mounting up, until the announcement that Moroccan terror suspects have been arrested in connection with the terrorist act. The PP-organized marches employed banners promoting the constitution, instead of democracy, which was perceived to be an attack on moderate Basques promoting peaceful means of achieving constitutional changes.

It should also be noted that the outgoing PP government sent troops to Iraq from the beginning, despite over 90% of the population being opposed to the invasion; Turkey, in a similar position, refused to allow US ground troops to invade from its territories. This might just be a delayed backlash; the socialists certainly ran on an anti-war platform, promising to pull out troops by June.

Regardless of whether war in Iraq is justified (I believe an invasion is justified, lying to get one is not, on the other hand), this election provides an inspiration to democratically-minded people everywhere: politicians, lie and ignore public opinion at your own perils.

If only I could be this optimistic about the upcoming Indonesian legislative elections...

I predict I'll be sleeping quite late tonight, for two reasons:

• The Democratic Super Primaries are on, my time zone is 12 hours ahead of EST, and the cable guy just tuned the family satellite receiver so I could watch C-SPAN :)
  
  Snicker away, but with my Internet connection being as it is, only a Zen monk could watch the Real stream.
  
  
• Dad's new PC has finally been troubleshot - a backhanded compliment to Asus for switching to AMI for its BIOS, and AMI for making such a flaky BIOS; the 'Legacy USB' feature that allows one to emulate PS/2 keyboard/mouse when using USB ones caused Memtest86+ and Linux to freeze.
  

It's a good thing I used Memtest; it froze consistently (double beep after 6 seconds with clock frozen for 1 second, another double beep at 9 seconds, one after 20 seconds or so, and a longer freeze at 3:20; if it does not stop here it'd stop at 5 minutes or so), pointing the finger at some mobo+BIOS+RAM combination, but while I thought of underclocking the CPU, RAM, and finally replacing CPU, RAM and motherboard, the idea that a mere USB mouse was behind this eluded my mind - and the guy at the hardware shop.

With that sorted, it's now time for various upgrades and burn testing - I'll probably just use Folding@Home though.

And that just reminded me of something. If anyone could recommend a chess program that runs under *n*x/BSD and supports openings, do let me know. Thought I might learn chess properly after years of amateurish stumblings. Thanks.

How's that for a catchy subject line? It's not that AMD is dead - Opteron/AMD64 is probably its best line of CPU ever. For the first time AMD does a big innovation (x86-64) and executes it well (show up hands if you were excited by pre-release K5 and K6 only to be disappointed when benchmarks came out).

But AMD has got to improve its distribution network in Asia! For the price of an Athlon64 3200+ in Malaysia and Indonesia you could get a dual-capable Opteron Stateside, representing a premium of about 100%, compared to the normal premium for Intel CPUs of about 10%.

Similar situation with motherboards, though less extreme: the MSI K8T retails at $175 here, as opposed to $128 in the States (37% premium).

At this price I could visit my friends in Singapore, do some tech shopping there, and came back!