Usually the end of FOSDEM is the occasion for newcomers to observe RMS in person and maybe get a true sample of a beautiful troll about Vi and GNU Emacs.

Hopefully, it did not happen this time. Instead, we got a talk from Georg Greve, president of the Free Software Foundation of Europe.

What a change!

Richard Stallman is very libertarian, in the American sense of the word. He advocates free software as a way to do what he wants to do, the way he wants. Richard Stallman deals mainly with defending freedom for the sake of itself and invites hacker to follow him in this fight because he believes that only freedom in software allows hackers to do what they like to do. That's very individualistic — centered on the well-being of the hacker as a single entity.

Goerg Greve, on the contrary, advocates free software at a political level. He appeals to the sense of community, and invites his followers to group together and fight against the evils that threaten our social future by restricting freedom and innovation. Moreover, he explains how to do that strategically.

I'm relieved: at least once in a while I could see someone standing up not for the sake of free software itself and individual freedom, but for the future of the community as a whole.

And last but certainly not least, Georg Greve is young, healthy, dresses carefully and shows a clear balance in his life. That's a far more effective model to follow than whatever RMS could ever dream to be.

Quote from ArticlesBase :

Bucket-wheel excavators are heavy equipment used in surface mining and civil engineering. The excavation component itself is a large rotating wheel mounted on an arm or boom. On the outer edge of the wheel is a series of scoops or buckets. As the wheel turns, the buckets remove soil or rock from the target area and carry it around to the backside of the wheel, where it falls onto a conveyor, which carries it up the arm toward the main body of the excavator. Additional conveyors then may carry it further; in some cases, several long conveyors are placed end-to-end, each supported by a large vehicular base.
Especially large bucket-wheel excavators, over 200 meters long and up to 100 meters in height, are used in German strip-mining operations, and are the largest earth-movers in the world. These tremendous machines can cost over $100 million, take 5 years to assemble, require 5 people to operate, weigh more than 13,000 tons, and have a theoretical capacity of more than 12,000m³/h. Specifically, the RB293 bucket wheel excavator manufactured by MAN Takraf is recognized by Guinness World Records as the largest land vehicle.

The Bagger 288 is built by another manufacturer (Krupp) and is nearly as large as the RB293. About the Bagger 288:

Over three weeks it made a 22 kilometer (14 mile) trip to the Garzweiler mine, traveling across Autobahn 61, the Erft, a railroad line, and several roads. The move cost nearly 15 million German marks and required a team of seventy workers. Rivers were crossed by placing large steel pipes for the water to flow through and providing a smooth surface over the pipes with rocks and gravel. Moving Bagger 288 in one piece was more economic than disassembling the excavator and moving it piece by piece.

See for yourself:

Look at the tiny dashes at the bottom right of the picture. These are people. The thing is huge!

There are plenty of them:

I had a bucket wheel excavator in my head since I was 10 or so. I discovered the name of the thing only today. What a relief!

During the proceedings of the Nuremberg Trials, the psychologist Gustave Gilbert visited Hermann Göring in his cell. He later reports the conversation in his book Nuremberg Diary published in 1947:

We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction. "Why, of course, the people don't want war," Goering shrugged. "Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship."
"There is one difference," I pointed out. "In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars."
"Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country."

Timeless words…

Theory: command officers on a war ship often operate from their desk with no visibility on the outside of the ship.

I believe this theory is true. Otherwise I could not explain this:

Theory: people without education are perfect material for dictatorship.

Proof:

This video was set as a decoration on the sidebar of a weblog I read every now and then: essaisconcepts. For the non-French-literate, the speaker on the video explains that some random idea is mistakenly considered as solid fact by most people, namely that work should be the basis for active life in society. The discourse — a sort of verbal essay — goes on explaining how building around this idea leads to misery and unhappiness, but unfortunately fails at presenting how to actually build otherwise. Or it may have been explained, but the explanation is not part of this recording.

Despite the missing (important) bits, I find this kind of energetic presentation refreshing. Witnessing this display of unconventional thinking in public is a relief, as it is symptomatic of shared hope for change in the future.

It is taking more than fifteen hours to my ears to recover from the trauma they experienced yesterday evening. That is already eight hours more than usual, although I stayed there for only three hours. I spent the whole morning brooding over whether I should attend Trance Energy next month or not, given my increased hearing sensitivity — depending on how I feel tonight, I may also consider taking an appointment with my doctor.

I guess that's what it takes to grow older.

Now, despite my hearing disability, I indulged myself in listening to a nearby conversation from my cubicle a few hours ago. The conversation involved my manager, some colleagues and someone I did not know who paid our office a visit together with his wife and baby. Although it strikes me that the only colleagues actually moving from their cubicle to join the group were those with newly born children (herd behavior?), I will not comment that part and rather focus on the part of the conversation where one participant warns the parents of the future they are facing.

In short, he was describing how his teenage girl (early teens) already asked him if she could sleep over at her boyfriend's; a request that he denied, of course.

The absence of additional comments from his part or any questions from the group left me wondering what was so obvious and commonly agreed that could justify denying the request. Many explanations started to grow in my fertile imagination, and unfortunately they were prematurely aborted. Here are samples:

• he fears that the she would become pregnant. That would be only if he think she's stupid, and if he didn't already take care of explaining to her how to use pills. Quite unlikely.
• he fears that she would have sex. I'm quite sure he's not naive. That couldn't be it.
• he fears that she would lose her virginity. The culture does not match.

That made me wonder what would happen if she asked him if she could sleep over at her girlfriend's instead. Or with clothes on.

The most likely reasons I could find were that:

• he thinks that letting her would be socially unacceptable.
• he wants to control her life.
• he does not like her boyfriend.

I am not sure I like the impression these possible explanations give me of the beliefs and value sytems of the people attending that conversation. I hope I'm wrong and I'm missing something.

Yesterday evening was a happy evening, because I realized that it has been one year since I arrived in Rotterdam and it feels like it happened last week.

Today the occasion was duly celebrated with pastries and champagne; tonight I added the luxury of spending a few hours at a local beach club, and I even indulged myself in being grateful for my current employer for enabling me to live here.

Tomorrow the new year starts. If I recall correctly, the first year is emotionally the most intense; the second year is where the relationship develops and builds common projects; and the third year is the end of the initial flame, and the end of the relationship if it fails to find a new basis for its existence. Let's see how it goes.

As usually, a long time elapsed between the moment I discovered the tune of Feel and the day I learned that Robbie Williams was singing it. In between, I also discovered Angels and Supreme, and not until this day did I know the relationship between those three.

The non-obvious relationship, that is. The obvious link was already clear: I love all three songs. I just did not know that they were sung by this beautiful person, from whom I did not know anything else until I acquired a “Greatest hits” album tonight on my way back from the train station.

Yeah, I know, I'm on easy listening. Those three hits have already grown old, and I'm simply lagging behind. But hey! “Better late than never.”

And while I'm at the easy thing, I also think there's a dark side to the hero. Maybe he has yet to come come to terms with his sexuality (dubious), or he's just haunted by ghosts and demons that he tries to escape by pushing forward. It seems to me that he's suffering and searching for something, and that's where his talent comes from.

And I must just be cruel on this one: his torments must stay, for they cast the shadow of his feelings onto the world.