Idiocracy
No one can have missed the outrageous idiocracy in Italy which simply left me with a single question:
If they had warned, and panic had ensued, and people had gotten killed while trying to escape, and no quake would have hit… then what?
… Seems like a case of “damned if you do, damned if you don’t”…
The US is implementing a “six strikes” type of deal (similar to the ?now defunct? French HADOPI) and apparently the “independent expert” used to draft a “reasonable” law might not have been so independent as they should have… being a former RIAA lobbying firm… The corruption surrounding the copyright industry is truly sickening.
I am probably waaaay to paranoid, but this reeks of false flag operation. Gotta keep the populus scared of them terrorists now don’t we?
Shut up and play nice: How the Western world is limiting free speech.
More and more I am beginning to think that the correct course of action is to completely boycott anyone who use the DMCA since it is used as a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. I think this comment sums it up pretty well.
Surveillance / Privacy
Outsource government and corporate surveillance to people themselves… great…
Wait! Wait! Wait! You mean to say that geo-tagging can compromise ones privacy and security?!?! Nooo, who’d have thought?
Cool stuff
A distributed twitter thingy I think it’s cool and all, really cool, but I’d still go for identi.ca.
Sleipnir is a small proxy which you run, to intercept requests and serve local files instead. Not sure when or where I’d find use for it, but interesting concept none the less.
A rather good run-through of various tools for UNIX-like systems
Jeff Atwood wrote a post about the future of Markdown, and much have since been written and people have had opinions but from one of those discussions, what I found most interesting was Pandoc.
Stuff I learned
Great answer on how to better control node placement in a graphviz diagram.
And another answer on a similar question, although this should probably be considered an ugly-hack. Then again, there’s a time and place for everything.
Last week I prodded in some Perl code, and found myself unable to visualize just what the heck the internal structure of a variable looked like, and thought to myself Had this been PHP, I would have used var_dump(); I wonder if Perl have something similar?
Of course Perl has something similar.
use Data::Dumper; print Dumper $my_mystery_var;
Source: Perl Mongers
Race-condition-free deployment with the “symlink replacement” trick
Food for thought
Why we can’t solve big problems.
Here’s a peculiar productivity hack: Hire a person to slap you in the face.
Compliance: The boring adult at the security party.
Why we buy into ideas: how to convince others of our thoughts
