Personal notes

IP Watch published a good article about a topic that the more I read about and the more I think it's an issue that we should address more carefully: privacy, data retention and data mining.
Ad hoc, the title of the main conference of Ars Electronica, held this year: "Goodbye Privacy". And from the conference [...]

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Having just followed a lecture about the economics of knowledge which, besides other things, also touched the problem of how the tension between protecting vs promoting knowledge, within a period in which mobility and access of information, is crucial, I happily welcome the announcement, made by the Executive Director of Science Commons, to start the [...]

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I've found a nice classification of (complex) systems, in Why things bite back by E. Tenner. The original 'definition' is from the sociologist Charles Perrow, and Tenner uses it quite extensively in his book.Perrow divided systems in tightly and loosely coupled and, taking the same examples used in the book, we might think of a [...]

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Some people don't like it, some do. Some hate it and some love it. Somebody don't know what it is useful for, some other don't even open their house door without checking the "door" entry in it.Whatsoever are your feelings about Wikipedia, i doubt you can honestly say "you can ignore it". The very existence [...]

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I'm against software patents since i'm pretty much sure they hinder progress and slow down market and technology development. I'm not sure yet whether patents, generally speaking, are as bad as software patents or not.What i believe anyway is that most of the patents (software or non-software) shouldn't have been granted, let's say because there's [...]

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There have been few noises and discussions recently about how media companies should release their content of public political debates.
As i see it, the issue is the following: Public political debates are , by definition, public and this means they should be accessible to all citizens with no discrimination. For example I guess they shouldn't [...]

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Ok! It's been a few days now that the rumours or news about the Bloggers' Code of Conduct raised up. Articles and different point of vies are now available, and even if didn't have the time the read everything, there's enough material to start making up my mind (i said 'start')
Kathy Sierra is a well [...]

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I don't know who is acquainted about IPRED2, i'm not, but i'm worried about it and i'm trying to make up my mind and get informed.
The Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive 2 (IPRED2) is the second version of the directive that some lobbyist would like to bring in the European legal environment regarding the enforcement [...]

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Reading some of my Liferea feeds it seemed to me that the beginning of this year is filled with some nice governing boards elections.
The GNOME Foundation closed its election period on the 30th December 2006, so it started 2007 with a freshly renovated Boards of Directors.
After GNOME it's Debian Project's time and the OpenSolaris Governing [...]

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Since a few weeks, Wikipedia started a new project: the Free Software WikiProject.
Since information about Free Software, and Free Software related topics are quite a lot, and they cover ample spectrum of topics, the project aims to raise the quality of the existing articles, build a starting point where to reach them from, starting missing [...]

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