I started watching this film three times. Half an hour into the third time, I noticed something odd. A quick look at the DVD box confirmed my suspicions: this is a comedy. A man takes the train to the big city, where he gets mugged by thugs. They leave him to die in a puddle … Read More

Last week Paul Biegel died at the age of 81. He was and is my favourite Dutch author. He is mainly known for his children’s books, but luckily he was one of those authors that don’t talk down to their audience. Perhaps his biggest gift was that he could make the mystical exciting. In “De … Read More

If you wish to report a bug to a FOSS project (FOSS = Free and Open Source Software), you may run into a couple of snags. One is that some of the developers are zitfaced asshats who consider the slightest mention of the possibility of maybe something being wrong with their software as a direct … Read More

It started at Maciej’s. He’s leaving China (and looking for work): He was not the first Western guy to treat China as his own personal sexual buffet. To put it in the D&D terms that many of the guys who benefit most from the effect will readily understand, living in China gives you +4 attractiveness. … Read More

With the increasing attention being paid to conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks, the Studium Generale at the University of Delft decided to have students research some of the claims made by the makers of the Loose Change documentary, which is the flagship of the conspiracy theorists. This drew the attention of the makers of … Read More

A little under a year ago Joost Smiers and Marijke van Schijndel published an article in the International Herald Tribune called Imagine a World Without Copyright. In it they explore what would happen if works were burdened by only a very short copyright (one year, for instance), or no copyright at all. The reactions to … Read More

While reading up on Richard Stallman, the subject of my previous entry, I came across an article he wrote in 2001 for Nature in which he sums up the reasons why science must “push copyright aside”. I was struck by a pragmatic pre-emptive counter-argument to the argument that scientists need income from licensing to off-set … Read More

There are very few people who consistently say smart things about copyright. Actually, I only know one such person, and his name is Richard Stallman. Stallman’s arguments about copyright center on copyright for software. Basically, he doesn’t want it and would like it to go away. Since that wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, he … Read More

Once upon a time there was a fairytale that yet had to be told.

A while ago, one of my brothers explained that he had not only made the switch from making pots of coffee using the traditional method of Putting the Kettle On to making cups of coffee using a Philips Senseo coffee maker, but that he actually liked the switch for practical reasons. As it turned out, … Read More