a beautiful and “important service announcement”

Flattr (or more precisely, the email I received from them today) now seems to say something like, “if you feel you contribute, then let people shower you…even pennies, if they are so generous”. If one (or a corporation of) artist(s) and/or engineer(s) believes they contribute, they’d be wise to allow themselves flattery. Hell, even if you make things you don’t believe contribute, you might as well with this change:

we decided to drop any rules that made the service restrictive or outright complicated

And “you“ want to put him and his helpers in jail?

p.s. I think one more restriction should be waived. Payment. It would be good to be able to flattr things for zero money and/or ideally, with an “appreciate” count (e.g. “like”, “+1″, etc.). What if we can’t afford even pennies at some time of our life, yet want to contribute by showing a way of support by tally?

p.p.s. If you (or “you”) liked this post, you can flattr it here. If you like this (more than 5 years now!) blog in general, you can flattr it here.

What’s it called when one repeatedly taunts another through encrypted messages?

Cipher-bullying.

“fascinating”?

Much Ado About Nothing:

Well, this is fascinating. ASUS hasn’t even released its Eee Pad Transformer yet, but it’s already put up for download the source code to the Linux kernel used in the Android Honeycomb operating system the machine runs.

The Linux kernel is under the GPL, which is a copyleft license. Asus is shipping Honeycomb which includes Linux. They have to “release” the Linux source code; as does every other vendor selling Honeycomb-based devices. I know licensing can get complicated at times, but this is pretty straightforward.

the nuclear “safety” distraction

There’s nothing special about this article in particular, but it’s an example of what the nuclear industry wants to see over the coming years. That is, a debate focused on the immediate “safety” of nuclear energy production.

The fact is however, that nuclear energy production is neither clean (uranium mining and waste storage) nor sustainable. But so long as the industry can convince us that the short-term “safety” of nuclear power production can improve (which is entirely plausible), then they could succeed in drawing our attention away from fundamental reasons to avoid it.