The Bathroom Diaries

The Bathroom Diaries scours the globe to rate the worlds’ toilets. Few would visit a country without some advanced information, yet our tender bits are exposed to uncharted territories with no help or assistance. At our most vulnerable, we are blind. Well, no more.

http://www.thebathroomdiaries.com/

The Perception Laboratory's Face Transformer

You can use the Perception Laboratory's Face Transformer to change the age, race or sex of a facial image, to transform it to the style of a famous artist, to make an exagerated caricature or even make an ape of yourself!

http://morph.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/

flickrvision

http://flickrvision.com/

Japanese Government to Move to OSS

"The Japanese government wants to go open source, as a way to rely less on a single vendor IT software infrastructure. And plenty of vendors are lining up to help make this happen."

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/14/065239&from=rss

http://www.linuxworld.com/newsletters/linux/2007/0507linux2.html

Microsoft Says Free Software Violates 235 Patents

"(Fortune Magazine) -- Free software is great, and corporate America loves it. It's often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It's versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it's blessedly crash-resistant."

"But now there's a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it's being cast by Microsoft. The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft's patents."

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/14/0018242&from=rss

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/05/28/100033867/index.htm?section=money_latest

Carousing Drunken Yak Merchants

Even if one could know for sure that a text was the very words of the Buddha, it could be total nonsense. And if one could know for sure that a text was written 1000 years after the Buddha died by a gang of carousing drunken yak merchants, it might still make a great deal of sense. In short, we must always be wary of the genetic fallacy, that is, the fallacious view that one can know whether a statement is true if one can figure out who said it.

-- Richard Hayes

Norwegian Standards Council Recommends Mandatory use of ODF and PDF

"The standard must be mandatory, so that users are given access to public information, regardless of the software or software platform each person decides to use….An open standard is characterized by it being reputable and by its maintenance by a noncommercial organization, and by the ongoing development work being based on decision-making processes that are open to all interested parties. The standard is published and the documentation is available, either free of cost or for a negligible fee. It must be possible for everyone to copy, distribute and use the standard free of cost or for a negligible fee. The intellectual rights linked to the standard (e.g. patents) are irrevocably available, without any royalties attached. There are no reservations regarding reuse of the standard. "

http://www.consortiuminfo.org/standardsblog/article.php?story=20070513180219689