Public Secrets

01/06/200801/06/2008

Bird Feeder

Bird feeder

Bird Feeder

First of June 2008.

29/05/2008

Europe: Germany has to reconsider its position

Peter Gauweiler, member of the German Bundestag has asked the German Bundesverfassungsgericht (the highest legal council in Germany) to review the Lisbon treaty and decide whether it is legal yes or no. Peter Gauweiler thinks the treaty is not in line with German democratic principles. Experts think he has a good chance on success.

link to article in NRC.

18/05/2008

How narrow minded can you be?

This week their were two ‘interesting’ items in the Dutch news.

Some top executives warned that they they would move the company headquarter to another country if the upheaval in the Dutch society, the Dutch press and Dutch politics about the level of their salary would continue,
A Dutch cartoonist was picked up by ten men of the Dutch police and was held in custody for almost two days. In 2005 somebody complained about some cartoons which were published on his website. Now, after almost three years, the Dutch police decided to act on the complains. The cartoonist was ‘asked’ to remove eight cartoons from his website. Rather strange when you consider that no judge has ruled on the case up to now.

sigh.

16/05/2008

No respect for privacy

Read this article by Robert Scoble. It is about the import and export of your personal data which you place on ‘social’ websites/services like Facebook, Plaxo, Hyves, Google Friend Connect, etc.
Again it shows that US based companies have a very different view on the privacy of information compared with European companies and the European ‘governments’. Can they keep up this attitude if they want this services to be a global service? What if e.g. China forbids them, will they change the service like Google is doing for their search engine? I wonder, will these companies at a certain point change their service or will they remain on their island and e.g. ban non-US customers?

09/05/2008

Twitter spam filtering

Scoble wrote about “the beautiful noise of Twitter and FeedFriend” in a reaction to a blog entry from David Risley who complains about the noise these systems produce.

I wrote about the Twitter service before. Twitter is like standing in an overcrowded bar where everybody is talking loudly, not listening to anybody but everybody has an opinion about something. Oops, isn’t that just like a blog!