Miscellanea:

• C’est de l’impensable. José Bové et Daniel Cohn-Bendit : Pour une relance démocratique de l’Europe : «Malgré ses évidentes imperfections, l’Europe est aujourd’hui le seul embryon fonctionnel d’une démocratie supranationale.»
• Wikipedia bans Church of Scientology: «In an unprecedented effort to crack down on self-serving edits, the Wikipedia supreme court has banned contributions from all IP addresses owned or operated by the Church of Scientology and its associates.»
• Fast-food society, guaranteed ADHD: Beaten Into Submission.
• Succinct letter, striking message: The Health Insurance Labyrinth.
• SJVN’s Fedora 11’s best five features has raised a grammatical debate over which of the following is correct: «This is one of those changes that are invisible to most users…» or «This is one of those changes that is invisible to most users…». What do you think? If I translate the phrase into Romanian, the usage is to put it the first way (the plural for the verb), and I guess the same goes for French («Il s’agit d’un de ces changements qui sont invisibles pour la plupart des utilisateurs…»). Eh?!
• Naegleria fowleri and Dr. House: what kind of developed society is that of Homo Sapiens in the 21st century, if a bloody amoeba can kill you, and they usually find what was all about… post-mortem?!

Secţiunea “sloboz românesc”:

• Ministerul Educaţiei, Cercetării şi Inovării consideră religia drept materie obligatorie! Ministerul sulei răspunde: «religia fiind parte a trunchiului comun nu poate avea în nici un caz caracter opţional».
• Subscriu: trăim într-un căcat imens numit România: Asta-i tzara, mancatzash! A se citi cu atenţie şi pe inima goală.
• L-am ascultat şi eu o dată pe Boc, iar individul grăia: «Statul preia toate riscurile în limita a 60 de mii de euro, prin fondul de garantare.» Păi şi-atunci care mai este rolul băncilor în faimoasele împrumuturi cu dobândă redusă, pentru prima locuinţă? Dacă nu e vorba de nici un risc (deci nici de analiza de risc), la ce dracu’ mai iau băncile dobânda? Nu poa’ să dea Statul direct împrumuturile astea super-garantate, de pildă prin Trezorerie or something?

Software section:

• Some of the Blambot Comic Fonts are 100% free: Digital Strip; Letter-O-Matic; Creative Block;
  10¢ Soviet; etc.
• Windows users who dislike the latest SnagIt 9.0 can have a free SnagIt 7.25 with a legal key! Download — free key — via.

P.S. — Plans for Sunday: As I’ll be unavailable this Saturday, I hope I’ll be in the mood to decide whether I’ll move or not my Acer from Jaunty to CentOS on Sunday.

In the last 23 years, I tried to like smoking and I failed repeatedly. People try to quit smoking and fail—I tried to start smoking and I failed. In the last 3 or 4 years, I tried to like Sudoku and I failed repeatedly. People try to get rid of an addiction, I fail to fall for it.

I must be defective.
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Frédéric Lemaître, dans Le Monde :

Pour la première fois depuis 1945, la consommation mondiale d’électricité devrait même diminuer cette année. Dans tous les ports du monde, des pétroliers pleins à craquer attendent même que les prix remontent encore pour livrer leurs millions de tonnes dont ils ne savent que faire. Alors, pourquoi le prix du pétrole a-t-il doublé en quelques mois ?

Le reste, dans son article : La prochaine crise économique a déjà commencé. En bref, c’est la faute à l’opacité et à la cupidité.

Analiză şi comentarii pe româneşte, pe blogul liberalului de stânga: O veste proastă.

Quite a strange mix, I’d say:

• Kraftwerk
• Walter Wanderley
• Oscar Peterson with Stéphane Grappelli in Copenhagen, 1979

Je m’explique.
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That was funny: a 280 year-old building, with a width of 2.5 metres, a floor space of 20 square metres and a total living space of only 53 square metres! That’s das Eh’häusl (“Little Wedding House”) in Amberg (Bavaria), bookable for a maximum of 2 persons!
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OSOR.EU: RO: Proprietary licence deal draws ire open source proponents:

The Romanian government announced its renewal of a framework software licence with Microsoft in the middle of May. The framework licence deal is worth 100 million euro in software licences to be used by government agencies between 2010 and 2012. Romania will also pay the software giant another 58 million euro this fall, as the final payment for the 2004 - 2009 framework licence agreement that expired last month.

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FYI: I am not a fan of WinAmp, and even less a fan of skinning the applications. However, a friend has recommended me the cPro - cMP12 WinAmp skin, which looks surprisingly Vista-ish even on XP!

Not that bad, eh? What would be the Linux/BSD media player to offer a similar look and feel?
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Found in KDE 4.3 Beta 1: A Short Preview:

This is huge. Basically what this allows you to do is browse your files without clicking anything. If you have a Folder View plasmoid on your desktop, just point your mouse to one of the icons. As soon as your mouse cursor touches a folder icon, a context window opens up showing you its contents. Hover your mouse over any of the folders that come up in the popup window to show another popup window with the contents of that folder. You can keep drilling down into your folders this way until you find the file you are looking for. This feature is just plain genius.

Yeah, sure. Genius? “Recursive Dynamic Spatial View”… maybe. Designed for morons… most likely. Bad taste Sci-Fi, that’s what it is. (Or is it Poltergeist?!)

Normally, I consider Windows Explorer to be marginally more usable than GNOME’s Nautilus, except that it can’t handle SFTP/SSH and it can’t build thumbnails for SVG files. With one important exception: sorting the files in a music or pictures folder.

Take the case of a folder with audio files. The sorting options don’t include sorting by the file modification date, but only by the “album’s release year”:
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Un mystérieux comité invisible a publié en 2007 une brochure qui rêve d’une « insurrection qui vient » (ouais, et la marmotte met le petit chocolat dans le papier d’alu). Le texte est un peu bizarre, mais la bonne nouvelle est qu’il est légalement disponible en tant que fichier PDF sur le site de l’éditeur, ici ou encore ici.

An English full translation is available here.
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Apparently, there is a chance for a minimal appearance of common sense in the 21st century: Is France on the Verge of Banning Scientology? (Hopefully.) In French: Scientologie : «C’est un procès en hérésie»; Un ex-adepte : «On m’a menti et j’ai aussi menti». There are 45,000 trous de cul members of the Church of Scientology in France. (Of course, there are much many idiots in the United States, but Americans are not known for their rational thinking anyway.)

Mais les bonnes nouvelles s’arrêtent ici. La police va pouvoir pirater les ordinateurs des voyous: “La loi d’orientation pour la sécurité, dite Lospi 2, présentée par Michèle Alliot-Marie en Conseil des ministres mercredi prochain, va donner à la police le droit de pirater, le plus légalement du monde, les données informatiques pour lutter contre le crime organisé.” FUCK.
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Without the prominence of the Internet, people would not have become so illiterate as to create 26,000,000 publicly-visible pages that read «it’s» instead of «its»!

Last time read here: «would not be possible without the tireless and dedicated efforts of it’s community members». Each and every time I read such an idiocy, my life shortens by 10 minutes.

Reading printed books that have passed through a traditional editing and proofreading process helps people learn what’s right and what’s wrong; reading the whole crap that’s on the Internet makes them believe that nothing matters anymore.

When I think that some people are still denying the fact that the Internet is making people stupid…

One of the best supporting proofs is that public libraries in Central and Eastern Europe are decaying. Books are not having the same value as before the Internet age.

Multilingual post:

• The newest financial “innovation”: borrowing from one’s own 401(k)! Caught in a credit crunch? Try borrowing from yourself.
• Women and Nerves (Nov, 1934)
• Eloge de la dénatalité
• Despre criză, altfel + «The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991» by Eric Hobsbawm, on Scribd.com (PDF) — deci papa Djuvara a plagiat niţeluş…
• Comment on Caitlyn’s review of Mandriva 2009.1, here, towards the end.

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Mon premier sort le 11 juin, mon deuxième se lit plus facilement que votre facture télécom, mon troisième s’adresse à tous, et mon tout est un bouquin qui vous guide dans votre prochaine aventure avec… non, pas avec Ubuntu, mais avec… CentOS 5.3 !

« Linux aux petits oignons », par Niki Kovacs alias Kiki Novak, chez Eyrolles, sur Amazon.fr et dans les bonnes librairies. Plus de 500 de pages pour vous faire comprendre et apprendre qu’il faut cesser de rouler en Trabant (surprise) !

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With their fucking style of making everything aggressive, fast-paced, macho, spectacular, “dynamic” and shallow, these “people of our times” managed to completely screw Sherlock Holmes (2009), with Robert Downey Jr.

At least, the trailer makes me sick — find it here, here or here. What a shit. Screw Guy Ritchie: he betrayed the old British common sense. Screw Warner Bros: Hollywood is like brain cancer. Screw America: I’ll visit Utah between June 21 and July 2, and I feel I already hate it.

Wisdom and wisdom only:

• Science Daily: For Your Health, Pick A Mate Who Is Conscientious And, Perhaps, Also Neurotic. (“Their study, of adults over age 50, also found that women, but not men, get an added health benefit when paired with someone who is conscientious and neurotic.”)
• Science rocks: Rx vs. XXX - What Fixes Low Testosterone Best: Meds or Porn?
• 12 Baffling Medical Conditions include music-induced seizures, persistent sexual arousal syndrome, foreign accent syndrome and much more.
• 10 Truths About Weight Loss: “You Can Eat After 8 P.M.” This is all I needed to know.
• Daydream away — it’s a workout for your brain. Really?
• Vitamins Found to Curb Exercise Benefit. What exercise?
• What You Don’t Know Makes You Nervous. That was news. Yeah.
• Cities: How Long a Wait to See a Doctor? Between 7 and 60 days or more.

Pe forumul de la Atei.ro, thread-ul început de TLP asigură o oră de agrement plăcut pe 22 de pagini (cu link-uri): Creştinii spun lucruri trăznite.

In the process, aflai cât valorează o persoană, cum ies copiii desfrânaţi dacă părinţii nu s-au abţinut în timpul sarcinii (“Deci, iată o mare cheie a lucrurilor: precum au fost purtările şi toate simţămintele mamei, în vremea celor nouă luni, aşa va fi şi moştenirea copilului ce se va naşte, pe toată viaţa sa. Dacă părinţii i-au tulburat tocmirea cu fărădelegea desfrânării, aceasta se va întipări într-însul cu tărie mare. Iar când se va naşte, până nu ajunge să priceapă, se va juca cu sora de-a mirele şi mireasa, şi încă de la 7 ani. Mai târziu, va cerca la dobitoace, sau se va deda la curvie cu mâna, pe urmă curvie în regulă, patimi care îi vor omorî milioane de celule nervoase. Şi de nu se va întâlni cu cineva care să-i cunoască boala, pe la vârsta căsătoriei va ajunge în doaga nebuniei.”), dar şi parolele de la Florent Pagny - Ma liberté de penser.

Vorba lui Mogre, sunt profund impresionat de consecinţele malahiei, mai cu seamă de partea cu “Li se întâmplă dambla” şi de aia cu “Îmbătrânesc curând şi mor rău şi cu ticăloşie”.

Trouvé ici :

Vous avez déjà vu ces spots d’une débilité inouïe où on vous montre des “maîtres chocolatiers” en train de fabriquer des pièces, une à une, avec toute la patience, la sagesse et l’expérience du monde? On les montre avec tout l’attirail, toque, blouse, atelier expérimental, ils tirent la langue en effectuant des gestes extrêmement précis, comme disposer savamment une amande avec une minuscule pince. Délicat, le posage d’amande. Le moindre tremblement, et l’amande est perdue à jamais. Il faut alors tout reprendre à zéro, avec une autre amande.

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