Thai elephants toilet trained
Sunday, January 23, 2005, 23:15 - Humor, The News


Diew, a five year-old Thai elephant, demonstrates how to use and flush a toilet at an elephant camp in Chiang Mai province, in northern Thailand. Having taught Thailand's elephants to paint, dance and play musical instruments, their Thai handlers are now toilet-training the beasts, media reported.

Source: AFP

Wife recovers from coma after husband's suicide
Sunday, January 23, 2005, 00:28 - The News
An Italian man committed suicide out of grief over his comatose wife. Several hours later the woman came out of the coma she had been in for four months after having had a stroke.

The man, 71, had visited his 67-year-old wife at least once a day. They had spent their whole lives together and had no children. He was very pessimistic about the chance of her recovery and finally took his own life in their garage. Some twelve hours later, the woman awoke and asked about her husband.

What a tragedy.


Software patents again
Saturday, January 22, 2005, 07:03 - The News
After the failed attempt in December, the European Commission tries again to sneak in the software patents directive. Thanks to Poland the decision was postponed last time. Now the EC added it again at the last moment to the agenda for the meeting on Monday of the Council of Ministers of Agriculture and Fisheries.

It is added again as a so-called 'A-item' that is normally not discussed or voted on, but accepted by acclamation. But there SHOULD be a discussion, as there are a lot of people that at least have doubts or are plainly against the patents.
Dutch minister Brinkhorst is in favor of the proposition, but the Parliament asked him to withold any further support. So far he has refused to comply.

Appearently there is a very big lobby active to get the patents directive approved. The big companies like to try to register a patent for everything they can think of. And then sit on the patents and/or sue anyone who might be violating it.
But small companies and individuals who come up with great pieces of software don't have the money to register patents or to buy licenses.

Obviously the big companies have a lot of cash to spend on persuading governments to accept the directive. I hope Poland or anyone else will put their foot down again to prevent this bad thing from getting accepted.

Something fishy going on at the fishery meeting?


Aid for tsunami victims
Monday, January 10, 2005, 00:08 - The News
Partly thanks to a large TV and radio action on Thursday, here in the Netherlands the amount of money donated by the public and raised through private initiatives has reached over 112 million euro (145 million dollar) which is about 9 dollar per capita.
The Dutch government had already donated 30 million euro (39 million dollar) for immediate aid and has reserved a couple of hundred million euro for rebuilding the areas in Asia and Africa that have suffered from the tsunami.

Nations all over the world have so far provided over 3 billion US dollars according to Wikipedia.
The European Commission will see to it that the EU countries will actually pay up the amounts of money that they have promised.

Why is so much money collected? Of course the enormous scope of the disaster and the sudden and direct cause play a role. But here in the Netherlands we've also had a rough time that started with the assassinations of Pim Fortuyn and recently Theo van Gogh. Those events have led to a hardening society and separation between natives and immigrants. Also the threats of terrorism fed the desire to do something positive together and it seems that raising funds has created some unity.
Hard as it may seem to those directly hurt this news is a diversion of all the negative news close at home. But money can't fix everything. A lot of labor is needed to rebuild completely destroyed villages. And a lot of time is needed to make the pain bearable of losing so many loved ones at once.
Long before that other news will have taken over the headlines in the West and this disaster will be almost forgotten.

And there are still other emergency situations elsewhere in the world, such as Congo and Sudan. The United Nations warns us that we should not forget that estimatedly 1000 people die per day in Congo. That's 365,000 deads per year.
Fighting in Darfur is escalating and the Sudanese region could face a new upsurge in violence despite efforts by the UN.

There is a lot of shit going on in this world!


150,000 dead and counting...
Tuesday, January 4, 2005, 05:29 - The News
Wikipedia has an excellent page about the 2004 Tsunami caused by a magnitude 9.0 undersea earthquake.
It explains the cause and effects in great detail.

These QuickBird satellite images at DigitalGlobe just don't do justice to the devastating effect of the tsunami. Footage shot on the ground and shown on TV, together with interviews with victims have much more impact.

There are many websites related to donations and relief initiatives for the millions of victims of this natural disaster.

No software patents in Europe yet!
Wednesday, December 22, 2004, 17:29 - The News
Thanks to a firm position of Poland, the European Union has not yet taken a decision on a software patent directive at their Agriculture and Fisheries council meetings. The Dutch Presidency has been using diplomatic pressure to bully Poland. It tried to push the much debated proposition really hard and tried to get it approved without discussion, against the will of a majority of Dutch Parliament.

Poland has many software developers and they want to have as much work as possible without worrying about patents or paying high licenses. Therefore neither the Polish government nor the Polish industry supports the directive text.

European Parliament earlier also expressed its doubts about the patents. It fears they will endanger the open operating systems like Linux and R&D in the computer branch.


Dutch government: Linspire or MS Windows?
Thursday, December 16, 2004, 03:05 - The News
Recently the Dutch government announced that it is about to close a deal with Microsoft for a 5 year software contract for 260.000 computers. As an amount of about 150 million euro is involved, some parties are protesting that there should have been an open-bid process, which is required by European guidelines.

Yesterday Michael Robertson, CEO of Linspire, published an open letter to the Dutch prime minister, offering software and support for a total price of about 6 million euro.

Of course quite an amount of effort would be needed to migrate away from MS Windows, the costs of which should be added to the 6 million, but the open letter is fun reading, especially about pretending that there was an open request for quotes that Robertson is reacting to.

And as someone responded in Dutch: it's nice of the open source community to publish open letters :)



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