I'm not sure whether it's just that I hadn't spotted it before, but the
US-Aus FTA (and the danger of a US Digital Millenium Copyright import) has made
Linux Australia campaign.
I think many Aussies drank the "technical advantages will be enough"
juice of some OSS-hardcores far too deeply.
Some time ago, I was told that Australia was an example of FSF's failure to
campaign convincingly. When I looked, Australia had no real FSF presence!
I've
been worried for some time that the lack of an FSF-sympathetic body meant
the Aussies were going to get squished by the proprietary publisher
political (P3) lobbyists, but I can't do everything and Aus is a long
way from here.
Fortunately, as the P3 guys attack, the freedom fighters there
have got organised. I wish them success. If you are in Australia,
please help their campaign. Freedom to hack may depend on it.
More locally, FFII are holding another
on- and off-line protest .
I'm not participating online this time because the last one took a site
I used offline for weeks.
I had to hunt for mirrors and backups.
It is not good to waste free software supporter time like that.
When FFII stop talking about "close" and "block access", I will support
their protests again.
Nearly had a bad thing happen to mabloss, as I confused > with
| when moving blog entries around. Fortunately, I had the newly-clobbered
script open in an editor, so no harm done. I uploaded a new tarball of
mabloss to stop that
happening again.
I guess a release was needed if I was worried about losing my edit.
Music sales are down. Aren't we surprised? No.
I agree with most of
richdawe's comment on music
-
additionally, when vendors start suing their target market, it puts me
off buying from them.
Living in a crap FM/AM coverage area, I probably bought
more recorded music before getting ADSL and satellite and getting
access to a decent selection of radio stations.
That reminds me to describe the fun hardware hack.
I want to be able to listen to sat radio without the tv on, so
I hooked up some PC speakers (into the VCR, because the sat box's
audio sockets seem to be an odd size).
No power points available, so solder a 99p DC plug onto a 89p 4-AA
battery holder and we have music!
I am really out of practice at soldering: took 3 goes to get a good joint.
Sounds good now, but I wonder how long the batteries will live.
Time to read the speaker specs and do some maths.