With the exception of certain processes in chemistry and maybe even medicine, all so called ‘intellectual property” should ultimately become void. Even in medicine there’s an in-between because people are dying due to patents that lead to heavy levy.

Intellectual property — no such thing. There is property. There is intellect. What society/industry calls “intellectual property” is neither an intellectual thing to do, nor can it be owned.

Intellectual property — no such thing. It’s a man-made concept intended to gain personal advantage at the expense of communal/mutual benefit.

(shown on the left is John Von Neumann — a man of science, not a man of money-making)

Never underestimate the forces of nature, geology, and climate. Picture from the BBC (2004).

HE article “Disappearing world: Global warming claims tropical island” caught my eye during Christmas (or “holiday period”, if you prefer). As a reminder, there are/were serious floods that cost lives over Christmas—a trend that seems repeatable, especially around Christmas time. This year was no exception. But what happens when a once-vibrant island becomes an underwater site for diver historians? What will the impact of refuge be? Can man battle climate? Does the world intend to take action at all? Or, as my father would say, is it just “busy making money”?

Rising seas, caused by global warming, have for the first time washed an inhabited island off the face of the Earth. The obliteration of Lohachara island, in India’s part of the Sundarbans where the Ganges and the Brahmaputra rivers empty into the Bay of Bengal, marks the moment when one of the most apocalyptic predictions of environmentalists and climate scientists has started coming true.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

Sidling with Open Source software development is sidling with science. To use a parable, people in conferences don’t just show the end products. They often have papers explaining methods, without being restricited by patents, and increasingly some source code is available too. They want to make a difference, not (necessarily just) money.

Linux (and Open Source software) protects its users, which it does not perceive as customer, from technology that only benefits greedy companies. Avoidance of brainwash, abuse and abomination is not only an important factor to so-called technocrats. As more people grasp the value of liberty, accentuated by corporate-centirc products such as Vista, the stampede to vendor-neutral solutions will begin.

Season of the playful penguins from Oyonale

I finally found justification and backing for my long-time temperatural preferences.

Cool down – you may live longer

11:20 03 November 2006
NewScientist.com news service
Roxanne Khamsi

The refrigerator is used to lengthen the life of your food, and a new study suggests a similar principle could prolong your life, too.

OMPUTER skills and competence with them is a subjective thing. It very much depends on the area of expertise which is judged, as well as the way it is judged (e.g. average level of skill versus number of gurus). Regardless, I have found the following study rather interesting.

In some areas, such as security and Windows desktop administration, the United States remained dominant, the study showed; in others, such as LAN/WAN communications, we’re facing stiff competition from newcomers Romania and Ukraine. India continued to dominate database development and most programming-language categories — except C#. Latin American countries didn’t crack the top 10 but showed strong growth in new certifications, with Cuba up 125 percent, Chile up 163 percent, and Mexico up 73 percent…

In a survey conducted last year, Holland was shown to be the most tech-savvy country in the world. Whether that holds under the conditions imposed above, who knows…?

IKIS and research are a funny dou. As I recently pointed out, Wikis are an excellent tools for improving researched-on, peer-reviewed content. On the other hand, as this new article with some general background and criticism suggests, a Wiki is susceptible to abuse if it’s too open to a wide audience.

Brent Freccia, a social studies teacher at Newark High School in Delaware and a self-proclaimed “avid wiki-person,” created an entry for his school on Wikipedia, the oft-visited online encyclopedia and go-to source for students writing research papers.

An example where things can go terribly wrong:

When Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was elected as pope last year, some Internet users who logged onto Wikipedia to see what he looked like found a rather different image: that of the evil emperor from “Star Wars.”

The Public Wiki section on this domain

Some good news with regards to collaboration with tomorrow’s technology (pardon the pun).

“The collaborative editorial process of wikis often results in a stunning degree of accuracy. A study by the science journal Nature found Wikipedia nearly as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. In fact, for summaries on niche issues and emerging interests, the biggest wiki of them all — Wikipedia — is often the best available source of information.”

It’s about time. I have been doing this for over a year, but people whom I work with refuse to embrace the concept of collaborative editing. They just toss 2 MB E-mail attachments back and fourth, bloating/clogging each other’s inboxes, still unable to spot the actual changes made.

Here is one example . The page is currently locked for editing because it’s a year and a half old, which expires its ‘shelf life’ and justifies guarading against Wiki SPAM.