Friday Links

200 years later, he is still annoying anti-science folk

Why is anyone surprised about this incident? I've heard about Wordpress being blocked so this incident is a minor bump on that very long road to censorship. Tragic but hardly surprising.

The incident in question is the removal of a Darwin-related story from the Bilim ve Teknik magazine in Turkey.

Excerpt from RT:
The removal of an article devoted to Darwin from a Turkish scientific journal just before publication, as well as the dismissal of its chief editor, has sparked criticism over ‘censorship’ and ‘politization’.

Again, why is anyone surprised?


Happy Birthday WWW

Guess what else is celebrating its birthday? The world wide web, apparently. I found this interesting article about some of the geniuses behind the development of www.

Well, for a more descriptive version of the birth of www let me refer to another group of unsung heroes - the good folks at Opera. Their little web curriculum package is fantastic and an absolute must for any self-respecting web developer. Point is, they also had a little bit about the history of the internet.

And yes, CERN did save the day. Apparently some folks, in true American style, wanted to charge royalties and the guys in CERN saved the day. Hurrah for open source!


Linux to the rescue

Speaking of open source (boy, the stories are just flowing into one another today), seems like the good folks in France have seen the light. And they just ran for it. Towards it, with the sound of a Windows software package breaking into pieces behind them. Or just hanging there, waiting for the Ctrl-Alt-Del motion.

Alright. Story is that the French police adopted Ubuntu and found that they saved tons of money. No more blue screen nonsense for them, no sir.

Surely it makes more sense to open source stuff now that expenses are shooting through the roof?