The People Own Ideas!

By Lawrence Lessig, June 2005, Technology Review

We entered the youth camp that morning by passing down a long, white gravel road and under a wooden gate. Spread to one side, and for as far as you could see, were rows and rows of tents. In front were scores of showers, with hundreds of kids in swimsuits milling about, waiting to rinse. It felt like a refugee camp.

In a sense, it was. More than a hundred thousand had descended upon Porto Alegre, Brazil, to attend the World Social Forum, a conference intended to offer a progressive alternative to the much smaller, and much more famous, World Economic Forum meeting at Davos, Switzerland (see “Letter from Davos,” April 2005).
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Grandparents learn to surf and they like it

By ANN GIBBON, Wednesday, June 15, 2005 Updated at 9:34 PM EDT
From Thursday’s Globe and Mail

Grandma’s on the Net again, the kitchen’s not her home. She used to make us cherry pies, and call us on the phone. We miss her homemade biscuits, and I’ll make this little bet, If you want to contact Grandma, you’ll have to surf the Net. From an Internet chain letter
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A Sunday Afternoon House Call

By Brian Krebs, Washington Post, June 12, 2005.

I just spent nearly seven hours doing emergency surgery on a Windows PC that belongs to a dear, longtime friend. The experience was so harrowing that I decided to blog it.

So it’s 2 p.m. Sunday and after a cursory examination of my buddy’s two-year old Windows machine, it is clear that the thing is missing patches going back to mid- to late 2003, just months before Microsoft released Service Pack 2, a massive set of security fixes and operating system tweaks for Windows XP. Needless to say, the computer did not have Service Pack 2 installed.
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