Ugh. I take it all back.
France has just passed a new copyright law which essentially makes it impossible for anyone to safely develop open source software there.
Someone needs to smack the pro-DRM lobby upside the head and make them realise that their approach is totally short-sighted and counterproductive. Or just forcibly disestablish it.
P.S. I swear, the next thing I post about will have nothing to do with politics.
The Bush doctrine views the rule of law as our enemy, and claims it is allied with terrorism.
Ubuntu is an ancient African word meaning “can’t install Debian”.
— Mark Pilgrim (from his blog).
From Groklaw, an extract from the Free Software Foundation Europe’s statement on Microsoft’s recent fine:
“If we are to believe Microsoft’s numbers, it appears that 120.000 person days are not enough to document its own software. ... For users, this should be a shock: Microsoft apparently does not know the software that controls 95% of all desktop computers on this planet. Imagine General Motors releasing a press statement to the extent that even though they had 300 of their best engineers work on this for two years, they cannot provide specifications for the cars they built.”
It’s long been my opinion that closed “standards” (including protocols and file formats) are an unmitigated loss for many reasons, though most especially because they lock the user into the first vendor’s solution. It’s gratifying that the European Commission has the intelligence to realise this, though given the trend in European (and other) governments towards open standards, perhaps not too surprising.
You throw the cockatrice corpse with your bare hands. You turn to stone... Do you want your posessions identified? [yn]
In this case I was fiddling about with my inventory and a stash. Having gone around the level, killed a cockatrice and picked up its corpse to wield as a weapon, I went back to the stash. I’d set things up nicely so that the only things on the square I was standing on were the things I wanted to identify, plus a few blessed scrolls of identify, a chest with my stash in it and my bag of holding. So I took off my armour and was about to stash it when I noticed I still had the cockatrice corpse, which I didn’t need to identify (it would rot away soon anyway). So I threw it away... forgetting that I’d just taken my gloves off.
Pity the scoring doesn’t count stuff on the same square as you, ‘cause there was a nice pile of gems in the chest.
Having discovered that Liferea displays web pages using Firefox’s engine (and so you don’t have to open all links in a separate program), I decided to re-add all the web comic feeds which don’t embed the comics.
The last entry in the User Friendly feed was a feedback item about the “AJ in Nethack” story arc. Apparently someone has actually come up with a patch that implements the “Turbonerd” class which AJ played. Bizarre. No prizes for guessing what the deities are called :)
There was also a link to a server where you could play Nethack with this patch over telnet (nuclearwombats.net, port 20040). It’s not all that mind-blowing (your starting weapon is a +0 cluebat :), but you can connect over IPv6. So now there are two useful (*cough*) things I can do with IPv6 (the other being connecting to the Freenode IRC network). Yay.
Edit: Damn, you can’t connect over IPv6 after all. Seems I was just confused by it trying to connect, and didn’t notice that it fails.