What is your dangerous idea? from the Edge.
Answers to that question from 120 thinkers. Warning, it is quite long but very interesting.
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Author Archives: Dan Siemon
Conservative party MPs not immune to lobbying
The Conservative party of Canada has been making a big deal out of accountability during this election campaign. The following quote is from Harper Makes Commitment to Clean Up Government.
Stephen Harper said today his first piece of legislation as Prime Minister will be to introduce a new Federal Accountability Act designed to end the influence of big money in Ottawa and crack down on a lobbying culture that has thrived under Paul Martin.
To their credit, the Conservatives do outline some good ideas for dealing with this problem in the quoted article.
However, it would appear that at least one current Conservative MP is not a stranger to accepting money from lobby groups. From The Sad Reality of Copyright Policy in Canada:
In fact, notwithstanding the Conservatives’ claims of accountability, new research indicates that Oda is no stranger to funding support. According to her 2004 riding association data, she accepted thousands of dollars in contributions from the broadcast lobby. Corporate supporters included Alliance Atlantis, Astral Media, Canwest, and CHUM.
TV News in a Postmodern World
Doc Searls has been writing about markets being a conversation for quite a while now. Despite reading a lot of his stuff, (minus the Cluetrain Manifesto which I have been meaning to buy) I never really understood what he was talking about until I read TV News in a Postmodern World which Doc recently linked to.
Wikipedia needs your help
The Wikipedia Foundation is having trouble meeting its fundraising goals.
Do you use Wikipedia? Then why not give them a little bit of money. It’s easy.
Bash fork() bomb
Today, I stumbled onto the following nasty bit of shell code in SECURITY Limit User Processes over on the Gentoo Wiki. No, I haven’t switched to Gentoo.
:(){ :|:& };:
Warning, this will cause your shell to create processes as fast as it can; most likely grinding your computer to a halt if you don’t have the appropriate limits set.
After spending some time trying to figure out what this command was doing assuming the colon was functioning as a no-op, I did a quick Google search and found this nice explanation of what it actually does. So, today I learned that Bash allows functions to be defined which override built-in commands.
Comment on hospital funding
Searching for stuff on Technorati is quite interesting.
I discovered an article in the Globe and Mail written by a London doctor. He discusses how hospitals are funded in Ontario. The post that led me to the article is called More on a rational view for healthcare and wait times.
Saving the Net (more)
A Flash of the Gatekeeper’s Sword provides another comment on Saving the Net: How to Keep the Carriers from Flushing the Net Down the Tubes which I also discussed a few weeks ago.
The Perils of JavaSchools
The Perils of JavaSchools, read it.
Lobbying Canadian MPs
Like a lot of Canadians, I would like to believe that somehow our elected officials are immune to being overly influenced by special interest groups.
Unfortunately, I now know of one example where this is not the case. I find it incredibly hard to believe that Ms. Bulte thinks this is acceptable behavior.