April Reign

Speak your mind even if your voice shakes

internet

Once more with feeling

by

Psychols has a post today wondering if PB members are willing to put the progressive where their mouth is, so to speak.

I’ve been wondering the same thing.

PB membership is well over 300. I’ve posted about the petition to save the Community Access Program and currently sigs stand at 73. This is from a wide range of places.

So do people like to talk about progressive more than they like to act upon it?

Perhaps you need a reason to vote. Well if you are a social democratic (philosophy not party) you can go to the site and read about the success stories of various CAPS centers. Then vote so there can be more.

If you are a partisan of any party other than the conservatives you can consider it a vote against Harper.

If you are a partisan Liberal consider it a vote to save a Liberal program from the ravages of Harper government.

I’m putting my faith in you to act upon your progressive values and help save a low cost, extremely important program.

Website here

Petition here

Please pass this link on to all your contacts!

Lets build upon the momentum of success through perseverance that Verbena and liberal catnip have shown us.

Digital Inheritance

by

Interesting article on AlterNet

According to articles in Forbes and Foreign Policy magazine, estate planners are advising their clients to include emails and online passwords in their wills. Without these provisions, online service providers will not grant family or friends access to digital property, some of which could be valuable.

The Foreign Policy article states that, more and more, these cases are landing in court:

In 2005, a Michigan judge ordered Yahoo! to release the emails of a U.S. soldier killed in Iraq to his family after they filed suit. Chris Sprigman, a University of Virginia law professor, says that’s just the beginning. “There will be a flood of these cases cropping up,” he says.

These cases can be sticky because unlike traditional assets, digital property does not have laws to point to, only agreements.

[Read more…] about Digital Inheritance

Microsoft willing to pay for Wikipedia edits

by

(AP) — Microsoft Corp. has landed in the Wikipedia doghouse after it offered to pay a blogger to change technical articles on the community-produced Web encyclopedia site.

While Wikipedia is known as the encyclopedia that anyone can tweak, founder Jimmy Wales and his cadre of volunteer editors, writers and moderators have blocked public-relations firms, campaign workers and anyone else perceived as having a conflict of interest from posting fluff or slanting entries. So paying for Wikipedia copy is considered a definite no-no.

“We were very disappointed to hear that Microsoft was taking that approach,” Wales said Tuesday.

Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

and the osCAR goes to…

by

The open-source movement responsible for software like Linux and Mozilla’s Web browser, Firefox, is proving contagious: A German entrepreneur is applying the same approach to automobile design.

Former BMW employee Markus Merz, who now owns an automobile consulting firm in Dingolfing, Germany, calls his project Oscar, shorthand for Open Source Car.

The idea behind open source development is to allow anyone to copy, modify and redistribute ordinarily secret information about a technology without paying royalties to the original developers.

What a fantastic idea!

Now you can combine your inner geek and inner car girl/guy.

Great things could happen with this, a car could be designed that works for people and the environment.

Worth keeping an eye on.