SocInfo

Playing my last 6 hours in Divinity II: Ego Draconis again. Apparently I'm a prisoner of my moral values even in the realm of a harmless video game.

I kept regretting siding with the bandits on the "Daylight Robbery" quest, assisting the robbery and killing of innocent travelers instead of fighting with and for them. But mostly I regretted not finding the solution to the "Couple Trouble" quest allowing the young couple of bandits in love and expecting a baby to leave the Bandit Camp before we raided it. I found the solution too late, after we killed everyone.

But now that I know where it is, I'm retracing my steps starting again from an early save of the game and making it right this time.

It turns out, the "right decisions" are those you are comfortable with, and not those that will get you most points or extra bonuses. There is no bigger and better bonus than peace of mind. 

I just spent 10 hours straight (in addition to 15hr in the past week) building my skills as a Dragon Slayer in Divinity II: Ego Draconis to hunt and kill the last Dragon Knight only to end up transformed into a Dragon, the thing my character hates the most, by the final breath of the last Dragon before I put her to rest (the Knight turned out to be female). She reveals to me that only a Dragon will be able to stop and defeat the true evil being we all fear, enemy of both humans and dragons.

I am now a Dragon Knight myself walking among Dragon Slayers forced to maintain my new nature in secrecy and most confident that I will have to fight my fellow slayers some time down the storyline.

After reading Alan P. Lightman's "The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith" article published on Harper's Magazine on December 2011, I couldn't help but relate to many of the arguments and at the same time feel repelled by or completely distant from many others. It is a good read, although a bit long and a bit thick at some points although he did try to make it as potable as he could. The spirit and message of the article is expressed in these two paragraphs at the beginning:

These days the world seems to be occupied with occupying and occupations. Parks, streets, iconic landmarks all over the planet are being flooded with young blood protesting against social injustice and economic inequalities, against the use and abuse of the planet by an illusory 1%. “We are the 99%” is their call, while they sit around and protest for the “1%” to fix things for them.

Although there definitely is value in protesting against the economic crisis that is the real reason of this “social” awakening, there is no more productive way of disagreeing and showing our dissent than in creating solutions and doing things in a different way, the way we think they should be.

If we want a change, why not go out and do something, create a change, add some value, rather than just sit and protest.

That is of course the way of the entrepreneur, to see a problem and fix it by competing against it, offering a better alternative way and make it available at a price that guarantees sustainability.

Initially regarded by many as a dead-end revival of the anti-globalization protests dating back to 1999, the global Occupy Movement may prove to be more resilient and virulent this time around.

Fueled by the global economic crisis, ignited by the “Indignez-vous” 13-page pamphlet published in October 2010 by 93-year old French Resistance veteran and diplomat Stéphane Hessel and taken to the streets in Spain in early 2011 at the same time as the “Arab spring” of citizen protests against authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, a global phenomenon has sprung organically around the world.

Greatly amplified and articulated by Social Media, as economic hardships became more severe and felt by the general population in the so-called developed nations, unexpected protests popped-up in Wall Street, New York and in an increasing number of cities across the Americas and the world, testing the in-house tolerance of judgmental governments everywhere and calling the bluff of our modern civil liberties.

The "Social Entrepreneurship - The Power of Profit for Social Good" workshop on board the Peace Boat was a success. An engaged audience of social workers, business executives, young students, volunteers, educators and entrepreneurs from around the world provided great feedback and their own perspectives enriching the discussion and the models presented.

Attached is the Japanese presentation presented with notes and also the English presentation (slightly longer). They are both in Powerpoint and PDF versions.

The first public words by a Macintosh at the demo of the first Apple Macintosh by Steve Jobs, January 1984, in front of 3000 people.

"Hello, I'm Macintosh. It sure is great to get out of that bag.

Unaccostumed as I am to public speaking. I'd like to share with you a maxim I thought of the first time I met an IBM mainframe: NEVER TRUST A COMPUTER YOU CAN'T LIFT!

Obviously I can talk, but right now I'd like to sit back and listen. So, it is with considerable pride that I introduce a man who's been like a father to me... STEVE JOBS"

Recorded in January 1984 and preserved for the world by Scott Knaster (www.papercar.com)

We need to protect the Universal Right to Access Knowledge, Culture and Content from the limitations imposed by today's restrictive intellectual property system and at the same time protect the rights and roles of authors, creators and innovators, which are not well served either by the existing system.

Please endorse The Washington Declaration on Intellectual Property and the Public Interest, signing it on-line here...

Most open source popular projects, such as Drupal, offer direct download links from their community sites to their installation packages and extension modules.

If you are working from a Linux shell console, you are probably used to download those files into the server by copyng the link and pasting it on a wget statement, such as the usual...

wget ftp.drupal.org/files/projects/drupal-7.2.tar.gz

But as some small projects grow in size, the maintainers often choose to host the files on independent hosting services such as sourceforge.net. But downloading from these sites is often a two step process where you click on the download link and then the site redirects you to a different page where the file is downloaded via your browser without providing a direct link for the file to download.

This proves to be incovenient for those used to follow the copy link and then paste in a wget statement approach to download files directly from and to the server. The solution is very simple, just add "--trust-server-name" to the wget statement and your download should take place as expected. Here is an example:

Its always inspiring when someone from our technopreneurship artificial beliefs system takes one step back and, instead of being brainwas