(a break)

after some days without finding a good reason to write, i have decided to take a break from blogging. nothing serious, no trauma or anything, just a break. see you soon.

New blog on the kids

With this ridiculous play on words, I announce you that I have just finished designing the draft of my second blog, des[h]uso (which is also a play on words, this one quite decent) It's a blog in Spanish (you have to learn Spanish! :) mainly focused on Sustainable Human Development. It's part of a project I proposed to my PhD classmates at the end of the last academic year, so we all would be able to post about events, articles, thoughts, pieces of news, etc. related to the topic above mentioned. Therefore, it will hopefully be an enriching, collective blog.
(on the superficial side of the thing, what do you think of the design? i didn't use a single table, everything is semantic markup!)

Developing Nations Creative Commons license

So today I learnt about this new and stupid Civil Code that is soon to be approved in Spanin, but I also learnt about the Creative Commons license for Developing Nations. The CC Developing Nations license allows you to invite a wide range of royalty-free uses of your work in developing nations while retaining your full copyright in the developed world. A developing nation is any nation which is not in this World-Bank list of high-income economies. For example, you might be a musician, writer, photographer or researcher that wants to maintain full copyright in North America and Western Europe, but welcome use by others in the country of Brazil.
To mark your work with the CC Developing Nations license, just go here.
To learn about Creative Commons, go here
Funny PS: CC licenses are protected by a CC license as well.
Serious PS: it's still not very clear how CC licenses work outside the US, though there are several projects to adapt them to as many countries as possible, and eventually the whole world.
Naughty Fruitman PS: i still haven't taken the time to copyleft my blog with a CC license.

They are getting there

So now it turns out that it is illegal to make your own copies or remixes of CDs for personal use, according to the new Civil Code of Spanish Law. The thing is: it is illegal to break any anti-copy mechanism of a CD. Therefore, since all CDs are nowadays protected in some way, any copy of a CD is illegal.
Paradoxically, the SGAE (the Spanish equivalent to the RIAA in America, the organism responsible of protecting the rights of authors) introduced last year a tax on every virgin CD sold on Spain, no matter whether you used it to store your drawings or to copy music, to "compensate for the loss of money due to CD piracy". Ever since last year, they've made 36 million euros. Now they think this tax is compatible with the new civil code, which makes it illegal to copy any protected CD. What do they want, law or market? You cannot have control over both. You cannot make people pay a tax to compensate for an illegal activity. It would be like charging a tax for guns, to compensate for the victims of murders (which is actually quite a good idea, by the way ... just that is screws my reasoning. anyway, you know what i mean)

Back to Woody Allen

I am now heading off to read an interview with Woody Allen. Every year, Woody comes to Europe to present his new movie, and gives an interview to El Pais, the best spanish newspaper. This year, he presented the movie at San Sebastian instead of Venice, something which has made all the Spanish film lovers very proud of their country.
It's a tradition that I particularly like to follow: on wednesday, Woody presents the movie. On Friday, you have the comments about his new movie (always the good ones) And to finish the week, the Sunday newspaper has an interview with Allen on the magazine. He will have a couple of sentences to make me think and laugh. I love him, I love the people who make me think and laugh, and don't ask for anything but thoughts and laughters in exchange.