Most Linux distributions have a neat little program that can be installed called fortune. It will give a short little inspirational quote, a saying, poetry, a joke, etc. The pool of fortunes is over 16,000 with a base install on Debian Etch.

Now the interesting thing is that there is another fortune package called fortunes-off. Offcolor, offbeat, offensive. Use your imagination. Being immune to all manner of inappropriate material, I of course installed it, and lo and behold, the first "offensive" (and randomly chosen) quote was as follows:

jamonation@scarab:~$ fortune -o
"Then there are those who really do believe, but take very good care to separate their religion off in a separate part of their mind. They don't let clashing thoughts ever literally clash. Either they do it by only thinking about religion on Sunday, or they somehow manage to keep their religious thoughts separate from their scientific ones. Those are the ones I find least easy to understand. And then, of course, there are those who just aren't very bright."
[Richard Dawkins, "A Trick of Light:
Richard Dawkins on Science and Religion"]

Here's one for you, Windows vs. Linux: The Patent Tax.

"While $20 might not sound like a lot, it adds up pretty quickly. A school with only 50 Windows machines — barely enough for one class of students — is paying $1,000 of its limited budget in patent tax"

"In the last three years, Microsoft has publicly paid out more than four billion dollars to plaintiffs claiming that Microsoft's Windows and Office products infringed their patents."

A neat little feature added to the linuxcaffe.ca website, and you can have one too ;)

Ubuntu Canada/Toronto reports that their counter-marketing campaign in front of the Microsoft Ice House was an absolute success, despite initial discouragement and words from Toronto Police. Link to pics included.

David gives an excellent post-mortem of the Friday/Saturday happenings at Ubuntu Toronto's visit to Microsoft's Ice House downtown Toronto.

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IMG_0466

Originally uploaded by jamonation.

The police made us take ten foot tux down after about 20 minutes, so with the time saved by not being at the square, I whipped up this image, to show tux in his rightfully superior place(s)

Posted over at linuxcaffe.ca, the various Davids and their respective teams have been organizing Operation Cold Comfort, an event ocurring today, Feb. 2, at the Microsoft Ice House/Castle, Yonge and Dundas Square from 4pm to 7pm.

There will be a very large and very cuddly 10 foot tall inflatable penguin. Photos will be taken :)

The event is "a promotional effort by Ubuntu Canada, designed to co-incide with the launch of Microsoft Vista (tm) and to tell as many people as possible about this great free alternative."

I hear whisperings that there may be a media outlet or two present, perhaps reminiscent of Network News week Feb. 2006 at the linuxcaffe. Who knows... my money's on CTV as the place to watch tonight or tomorrow night. Have to wait and see.

From http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000111 with my comments interspersed:

Richard Stallman

"Now, what we didn't have 15 years ago was the threat of making the program effectively non free by technical restrictions placed around it. That's what Tivoisation is. Tivoisation means taking a free program and distributing a binary of it, and also providing the source, because the GPL requires that. But when the user changes the source code and compiles it and then tries to install the changed program he discovers that that's impossible because the machine is designed not to let him."