A Django site.
July 3, 2008

Aaron Toponce
atoponce
Aaron Toponce
» Identi.ca

Goodbye Twitter and your buggy service. Goodbye Jaiku and your spammy bot. Goodbye Pownce and your 20 users. Hello Identi.ca and Free Software. Reasons for switching to Identi.ca for my microblogging service:

Wait a minute. Rehash that list. Free Software, OpenID, Jabber and an Open Network Service. Sense what I’m sensing? Identi.ca is all about openness and freedom\. Uh, yeah. Signed up, and ditched the other proprietary solutions. I would be surprised if RMS had issues with this service (actually, I probably wouldn’t be surprised, but you get my point).

However, Identi.ca is a bit wet behind the ears currently. Jabber interactivity with the bot is extremely limited. SMS is planned, but not currently implemented. Subscribing to other users is a bit of a pain currently. No search feature. Other shortcomings are listed as bugs and feature requests are welcomed.

You can subscribe to my posts at my page. Happy microblogging.

November 7, 2007

Jordan Gunderson
jordy
Jordy Blog
» A Moratorium on Reason

Well, they lied to us, and we believed them. Shame on them, and shame on us.

I’ve got a lot to say, but I’ll forbear for now.

Personally, I’m going to keep fighting for parents’ choice in education, although I don’t really know in what capacity. I hope you’re as angry as I am so that you will too. As a whole, we didn’t fight hard enough; but next time we’ll know better. We owe it to our children not to give up.

I’ll leave you for now with a selection of quotes, mostly from Conner’s blog.

“…A society that champions freedom of religion but at the same time countenances state regulation of education has a great deal of explaining to do.”

– James R. Otteson, professor of philosophy. - The Independent Review, Spring 2000, “Freedom of Religion and Public Schooling”

“If the only motive was to help people who could not afford education, advocates of government involvement would have simply proposed tuition subsidies.”

– Milton Friedman - Economist. Awarded 1976 Nobel Prize in economics.

“By preventing a free market in education, a handful of social engineers, backed by the industries that profit from compulsory schooling … has ensured that most of our children will not have an education, even though they may be thoroughly schooled.”

John Taylor Gatto, Source: Dumbing Us Down, p. 85

“In this matter of education, the law has only two alternatives: It can permit this transaction of teaching-and-learning to operate freely and without the use of force, or it can force human wills in this matter by taking from some of them enough to pay the teachers who are appointed by government to instruct others, without charge…In creating a monopoly of education, the government must answer to the hopes of the fathers of families who have thus been deprived of their liberty; and if these hopes are shattered whose fault is it? We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say we are opposed to any education.”

– Frederic Bastiat, The Law , 1850

“Here I encounter the most popular fallacy of our times. It is not considered sufficient that the law should be just; it must be philanthropic. Nor is it sufficient that the law should guarantee to every citizen the free and inoffensive use of his faculties for physical, intellectual, and moral self-improvement. Instead, it is demanded that the law should directly extend welfare, education, and morality throughout the nation.

“This is the seductive lure of socialism.”

Frederic Bastiat, Source: The Law, p. 25

“I am opposed to free education as much as I am opposed to taking property from one man and giving it to another who knows not how to take care of it… I do not believe in allowing my charities to go through the hands of robbers who pocket nine-tenths themselves and give one tenth to the poor… Would I encourage free schools by taxation? No!”

Brigham Young, Source: Journal of Discourses Vol. 18, p. 357

“The education of all children, from the moment that they can get along without a mother’s care, shall be in state institutions at state expense.”

– Karl Marx - Father of Communism (1848)

September 17, 2007

Aaron Toponce
atoponce
Aaron Toponce
» Use Free Fonts

I just caught up on my feeds, and read Carthik Sharma’s post, Installing Vista Fonts In Ubuntu. From a completely Free Software standpoint, I’m going to argue why you would not want to do this.

First, is the license itself, which should always be looked at when dealing with fonts, media, codecs or software. These fonts are not Free Software in the least, as the license is extremely restrictive. Directly from the mouth of Microsoft (emphasis mine):

Q. What can I do with the fonts supplied with Microsoft products?
A. The fonts are governed by the same restrictions as the products they are supplied with. You are not allowed to copy, redistribute or reverse engineer the font files. For full details see the license agreement supplied with the product.

Why would you want to intentionally install non-free software on your machine? Especially, when there is such a massive availability of Free Software fonts? Are these fonts really that great? I took a look over them (PDF), and I think not. These are just core fonts, and I personally think there are better ones out there.

To start, there are the Liberation fonts from Red Hat. These are also core fonts, which personally, I think have the upper hand on the ClearType fonts from Microsoft. Not only are they Free Software, licensed under the GPL, they are tight, clear and good looking. Next, I found a core font list from Fedora listed by license, most of which are very appealing. These can be found here. Finally, Debian only includes Free Software in their main distribution, including a great list of Free Software fonts.

Please don’t take this negatively, but promoting non-free software on Planet Ubuntu should be discouraged. We want to encourage the use of Free Software whenever possible. Of course, Free Software doesn’t meet everyone’s needs, but nevertheless, still should be advocated. We want to advocate the use of Free Software drivers, fonts, media, codecs and software at all costs. We want to encourage hardware vendors to open their specs. We are the GNU Generation- what message are we sending when we install and advocate the use of non-free software?

Carthik- thank you for your post, but I hope people do not install the Microsoft ClearType fonts, and choose Free alternatives instead.

Thanks for reading.

September 12, 2007

Phil Windley
pjw
Phil Windley's Technometria
» This Page Will Not Be Available in the Future

Richard Stiennon has a post about efforts by EU Justice and Security Commissioner Franco Frattini to make search engines block certain "dangerous words" like "bomb, kill, genocide or terrorism." So, since this post has those words in it, you may not be able to read it in the future. Or maybe Orrin Hatch will figure out a way to just have computers storing such dangerous words to be destroyed by lasers or something.

The most important question: who gets to decide which words are dangerous? I vote that we add "Frattini" to the list.

Tags: freedom