First - important - reactions to the NPD tirades in Saxony.
Archive 22. January 2005
heise online - High fine for student organization due to hyperlinks
High fine for student organization over hyperlinks - so students get used to societal censorship early on. Besides, it's really annoying when these students indulge in the luxury of having a political opinion. And so one learns very early that you only have to accept elected representatives and their actions when it suits you.
But silencing the victims of educational institutions has a tradition - school expulsions for expressing one's own political opinion I still remember from my school days (not from my school - we were fortunate to have a principal with a brain who actually used it).
The fact that in this case the lawsuit also comes from a fellow student who doesn't like the political opinions expressed by the AStA - and that the reaction is a lawsuit instead of a discussion - fits the picture perfectly. After all, the formation of one's own political opinion and engagement with general political topics only distracts from being bred into a specialized idiot in the education factory...
Subway is a Python implementation of the ideas behind Ruby on Rails. So if you're afraid of hurting yourself on all the sharp and curly brackets in Ruby ...
WordPress and rel="nofollow"
On the WordPress hackers list, as expected, there's a heated discussion about rel="nofollow". The trigger: Matt has built rel="nofollow" into WordPress. Part of it is a filter that could be easily disabled. But another part is hardcoded directly into the code (for example, every author link in comments is permanently tagged with rel="nofollow"). And Matt doesn't want to build in an option, but rather force everyone, so to speak, to implement this feature.
What really bothers me about the whole thing is the absurd reasoning. Sorry, but what happens to links in my system is something essential for me as a site operator — nobody tells me what to do there. Okay, fine, I can patch my software — but the attitude toward users on this point is pretty shitty.