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GNU is Not Unix

Richard Stallman Is Still Head of the GNU Project (gnu.org) 140

Posted by EditorDavid from the free-as-in-time dept.
On Thursday, Richard Stallman reminded the GNU Project mailing list that "On September 16 I resigned as president of the Free Software Foundation, but the GNU Project and the FSF are not the same. I am still the head of the GNU Project (the Chief GNUisance), and I intend to continue as such."

The next day, with no explanation, a one-sentence update appeared on his personal blog at Stallman.org announcing that "I hereby step down as head of the GNU Project, effective immediately." But a few commenters on social media speculated that the post could have come from someone who'd hijacked Stallman's site -- and sure enough, that sentence had been removed by Sunday morning. In addition, for what it's worth Techrights.org posted an unconfirmed claim Sunday from "a generally reliable source" that "Stallman.org was defaced by an FSF employee. The deface has been reverted, and the domain appears to now be operating on non-FSF infrastructure..."

But whatever's happening, Richard Stallman is still living the life of Richard Stallman. Friday he also posted that he's looking for a room in a shared house or apartment for at least two months.

"There should not be a cat (unless hypoallergenic), or a dog that jumps up excitedly on people (unless quite small), or a digital listening device such as Echo, Siri or 'Hello Google', or a card lock that records who opens the door. I will ask about cameras."

Comment Re: Permanent DST is a mistake as well. (Score 1) 220

by dafdaf (#58336388) Attached to: EU Parliament Votes To End Daylight Savings

Permanent DST sucks for Spain in the winter.

Agreed. Permanent DST makes no sense.

I always thought Spain would be in WET ? Maybe it's just is in the wrong time zone ? Why not take the opportunity and fix that too by switching from CET to WET and enjoy noon at midday ?

Btw: I just recently had the pleasure to try to fit the tzdata file into an embedded system with 1MB flash. I nearly went crazy sifting through the data. We couldn't do it anyway and had to settle for a compromise.

Every person that has to do with software has to encourage any attempt to get rid of DST switching. Look into the source files at https://www.iana.org/time-zone... and bee blown away. :-)

Comment Re:Increasing its nuclear capacity? Good. (Score 1) 176

by dafdaf (#55135395) Attached to: Finland To Introduce Law Next Year Phasing Out Coal

There is no proper way to dispose of highly radioactive nuclear waste. Only ways that are less dangerous than others, statistically speaking. What convinced you that the situation in Finland is significantly better than in, say, Germany?

Well, for one thing, they have no Germans.

Well, the Germans temporarily store the nasty stuff in abandoned salt mines while the people of finland to my knowledge are the only ones working on a long term solution: the Onkalo nuclear waste repository. There is a very beautiful documentary about this endeavor (building time >100 Years !). It's called: Towards the end of Time. Worth watching !
Businesses

Interviews: Ask Martin Shkreli a Question 410

Posted by whipslash from the this-should-be-interesting dept.
Martin Shkreli has agreed to answer your questions. Shkreli is the co-founder of the hedge fund MSMB Capital Management, the co-founder and former chief executive officer (CEO) of the biotechnology firm Retrophin, and the founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals. Shkreli has been active on Twitter about a wide range of topics, including the 2016 presidential election. Most recently, he expressed interest in buying 4chan.

Ask him your questions here, and we'll post the full interview with Shkreli's answers in the near future.

Submission + - Statues of Assange, Snowden And Manning Go Up in Berlin

Submitted by HughPickens.com
HughPickens.com writes: RT Times reports that Alexanderplatz square in Berlin has become the stage for a provocative art piece which celebrates whistleblowers and encourages ordinary citizens to speak out. "They have lost their freedom for the truth, so they remind us how important it is to know the truth,” says sculptor Davide Dormino. The life-sized statues of the three whistleblowers stand upon three chairs, as if speaking in an impromptu public meeting. Next to them is a fourth, empty chair. "The fourth chair is open to anyone here in Berlin who wants to get up and say anything they want," says the artist. Dormino, who came up with the idea together with the US journalist Charles Glass, specifically chose a classical bronze statue for his depiction – and not an installation or abstract piece – since statues are usually made of establishment figures. According to Domino while men who order others to their deaths get immortalized, those who resist are often forgotten, so “the statue pays homage to three who said no to war, to the lies that lead to war and to the intrusion into private life that helps to perpetuate war.” Activists and members of Germany’s Green party unveiled the life-size bronze statues on May Day.

Submission + - Court overturns Dutch data retention law, privacy more important (dutchnews.nl) 1

Submitted by wabrandsma
wabrandsma writes: DutchNews.nl writes:
Internet providers no longer have to keep their clients phone, internet and email details because privacy is more important, a Dutch court ruled on Wednesday.

Digital Rights organisation Bits of Freedom writes in a Blog:
The law’s underlying European directive was meant as a tool in the fight against serious crimes. The Dutch law, however, is much more expansive, including everything from terrorism to bike theft. During the hearing, the state’s attorneys avowed that the Public Prosecution does not take the law lightly, and would not call on the law to request data in case of a bicycle theft. The judge’s response: it doesn’t matter if you exploit the possibility or not, the fact that the possibility exists is already reason enough to conclude that the current safeguards are unsatisfactory.

Submission + - Ask Slashdot: What can Distrubuted Software Development Teams Learn from FLOSS?

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: As a long time free software proponent and team lead of a small development team (10+ ppl) in a midsized company I always try to intercorporate my experiences from both worlds. Lately I was confronted with the need to accept new team members from abroad working on the same codebase and I expect to have even more telecommuting people in my team in the future. All this while research suggests that the failure rate of virtual teams could be as high as 70%. On the other hand FLOSS does not seem to suffer from the same problems, despite being developed in a distributed manner more often than not. What can corporations and managers learn from FLOSS to make their distributed teams more successful? Consequently, what FLOSS tools, methods, rules and policies can and should be incorporated into the software development process in a company more often? I'm interested in the opinion of others especially regarding technical issues like source code ownership and revision control system, but also ways of communication, dealing with cultural differences, ...
Earth

Meat Makes Our Planet Thirsty 545

Posted by samzenpus from the water-dissolving-and-water-removing dept.
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Mames McWilliams writes in the NYT that with California experiencing one of its worst droughts on record, attention has naturally focused on the water required to grow popular foods such as walnuts, broccoli, lettuce, tomatoes, strawberries, almonds and grapes. 'Who knew, for example, that it took 5.4 gallons to produce a head of broccoli, or 3.3 gallons to grow a single tomato? This information about the water footprint of food products — that is, the amount of water required to produce them — is important to understand, especially for a state that dedicates about 80 percent of its water to agriculture.' But for those truly interested in lowering their water footprint, those numbers pale next to the water required to fatten livestock. Beef turns out to have an overall water footprint of roughly four million gallons per ton produced (PDF). By contrast, the water footprint for "sugar crops" like sugar beets is about 52,000 gallons per ton; for vegetables it's 85,000 gallons per ton; and for starchy roots it's about 102,200 gallons per ton.

There's also one single plant that's leading California's water consumption and it's one that's not generally cultivated for humans: alfalfa. Grown on over a million acres in California, alfalfa sucks up more water than any other crop in the state. And it has one primary destination: cattle. 'If Californians were eating all the beef they produced, one might write off alfalfa's water footprint as the cost of nurturing local food systems. But that's not what's happening. Californians are sending their alfalfa, and thus their water, to Asia.' Alfalfa growers are now exporting some 100 billion gallons of water a year from this drought-ridden region to the other side of the world in the form of alfalfa.

Beef eaters are already paying more. Water-starved ranches are devoid of natural grasses that cattle need to fatten up so ranchers have been buying supplemental feed at escalating prices or thinning their herds to stretch their feed dollars. But McWilliams says that in the case of agriculture and drought, there's a clear and accessible actions most citizens can take: Changing one's diet to replace 50 percent of animal products with edible plants like legumes, nuts and tubers results in a 30 percent reduction in an individual's food-related water footprint. Going vegetarian reduces that water footprint by almost 60 percent. 'It's seductive to think that we can continue along our carnivorous route, even in this era of climate instability. The environmental impact of cattle in California, however, reminds us how mistaken this idea is coming to seem.'"

Comment Working on a boat (Score 1) 167

by dafdaf (#45252837) Attached to: I've done my current job in X time zones ...
...while cruising around the world with my two kids and wife. We get in and out of different timezones without even noticing. Heck, we crossed the dateline a few weeks ago and were completely surprised to arrive in Tonga on a sunday with the immigration closed. But - who cares anyway ? Timezones... pfff. Some weird concept of land people. UTC rules ! ;-)

Comment Re:How about they improve the Finder instead? (Score 3, Interesting) 90

by value_added (#40799799) Attached to: Apple Reportedly Considering Huge Investment In Twitter

And they could add some preference options for people who come from normal computing backgrounds -i.e., ones where the Home and End keys actually move to the beginning and end of the current line.

My computing background has taught me that Home and End keys are represented by CTRL-A and CTRL-E, respectively. When I bought my first Mac, I was pleased to discover that what I learned was still valid and Just Worked as promised. ;-)

Granted, what you say about some of Finder's behaviour is valid, and similarly valid (but often less annoying) for replacement file managers like Path Finder, but I reckon few really care or notice. And of those that do, they probably have trivial needs. File management is important to me so instead of maintaining A Really Big List of why Finder, Path Finder et al suck, I opted for the CMS route, dropping to a terminal as needed and relying on a mix of AppleScript + Bash for routine chores.

If it helps. Option + Up Arrow can take you to Home where Home is the top of a list.

Comment Re:And it sucks for some of us... (Score 1) 209

by value_added (#40777497) Attached to: Comcast Launches Superfast Internet To Fight FiOS

Some of us do not live in markets that Verizon serves. And Verizon is not rolling out any new fiber (I could be wrong).

Someone is paying attention.

From a randomly selected source

[Posted at 02:58 PM ET, 12/08/2011] And even though [Verizon Chief Executive Lowell McAdam] insisted that Verizon will rigorously promote its FiOS video and Internet service in areas that compete with cable, the company said it doesn't have plans to expand the expensive fiber network beyond what's already been announced and scheduled for buildout over the next couple years.

Comment Re:Believe it or not... (Score 2) 101

by value_added (#40774253) Attached to: City Council Ordered To Stop CCTV In Taxi Cabs

Southampton Council is a Unitary Authority; they sit at district level, which is one up from the lowest level, which is Parish Councils.

Ah, but you've neglected to include what's most pertinent. District level councils report directly to the Ministry of Information, yes? That means if you're a cabbie, or a passenger, you'll end up dealing with the folks at Information Retrieval.

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