Jon Healey correctly points out that the debate over intellectual-property theft is complex because we are often dealing with "non-real properties." These properties cost nearly nothing to produce, and an infinite number of people can use the same property at the same time. And yet, we still want to treat them as if they were "real" property.

The end of the year is a self-indulgent time, when those who write about technology stop making lists of the best, worst, and most mind-numbingly mediocre applications they find and pause to make lists about tech trends in the upcoming year.

The following has been making the rounds on just about every internal email list I belong to in Microsoft. Here it is to share a little insight with the rest of the world. Microsoft is an amazingly transparent company. Google is not. Any peek is a good peek.

I just checked Planet Ubuntu (working late on some new articles, and expect to be in London by the end of the week) and i saw a link to Prude or Professional? (NSFW) and i thought it was another stupid article about the lame joke rms made some time ago with the dumb "stop sexism" stop sign.

HP selling Linux PCs? Surely this must be a mistake?

"On January 26th and 27th, 2009, the Sciences and Democracy World Forum will be held in Belém (Brazil).

I believe that if you pick up some of the most pressing world problems, like poverty, corruption, tyranny, most solutions will need some of the same basic needs: easy and free access to communication, information, collaboration, education and by giving power to anyone to record present facts, remember their history and broadcast their own voice.

As an administrator the major interest that you will have with the web interface is the ability to recognize and respond to problems. The quickest access to all of the recognized problems is the “Service Problems” page. This page provides a summary of all problems related to services that Nagios detects.

The traditional file permission model, where read, write, and execute permissions are set on each file for the user, group, and others (UGO) has one drawback: It can't be used to define per-user or per-group permissions. For that, you need to employ access control lists (ACL). Eiciel is a graphical tool that integrates with the Nautilus file manager and allows for easy ACL management.