Found via Linux Outlaws 257. Yes, I really do have two months worth of podcasts to catch up on.

Zuckerberg obviously needed a lot of luck to get Facebook where it is today. But when I met him for the first time in 2007, it was clear he’d already become a student of what made entrepreneurs like Bill Gates at Microsoft, and Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Google, so successful. They all created businesses with powerful network effects — businesses, as Zuckerberg explained it to me, that at a certain point attracted new users simply so they could interact with existing users. “I think that network effects shouldn’t be underestimated with what we do as well,” he said.

Zuckerberg understood that people began using Microsoft Office because they didn’t want to risk being unable to open documents, spreadsheets, and presentations passed along by colleagues. There were other word processing or spreadsheet programs that were often better, but Office was good enough to keep people from taking a risk on them.

This is why open standards matter.

As soon as we accept de facto proprietary standards, we allow inertia to benefit the biggest player in the market. This will allow the dominant company to keep out competitors and thus stifle innovation – at least until they become so awful that we become willing to accept the pain of shifting to some other locked in proprietary monopoly.

Open standards, by definition, ensure a level of commonality between applications and – significantly – ensures data can be freely passed from one to another. This ensures that our data continues to belong to us, rather than being owned by whoever happened to encode it.

Proprietary standards are inconvenient, offer little long term security for our data and are a barrier to sharing data with others. They should be avoided.

Via WEIT

Only seven days to go.

[H]ere’s an experiment you can try at home: go to any porn site that ranks its most popular clips, and have a look at the top 100 clips that people actually pay for – the range of outfits, body types, situations, ages and skin colours far exceeds anything you’ll find in FHM’s list. When it comes to what people find sexy, there’s a truth in porn considerably purer than the sterile, manufactured consent of glossy magazines.

Sexual correctness is a fundamental failure of journalism, and not just in the moralistic right-wing end of the press. I can’t remember the last time I saw an informed discussion of porn in a mainstream news publication. Many of those touted as ‘sexperts’ simply aren’t; a situation not helped by the craven attitude of bodies like the British Psychological Society. Features on alternative sexual choices, lifestyles or fetishes invariably resort to cheap smirks at the expense of its subjects; while journalists interviewing figures in the adult entertainment industry seem compelled to demand that they justify their ‘aberrant’ behaviour.

Both quotes come from Martin Robbins

One bit I do want to draw some attention to, though, is a remark near the bottom of the cartoon mentioning that July 10th is Nikola Tesla Day. This is the date of his birth and a date worth celebrating.

So geek out on July 10th and make something awesome.

Or, just keep an eye on Wikipedia.

If people who understand technology don’t claim positions that defend the positive uses of technology, if we don’t operate within the realm of traditional power and politics, if we don’t speak out for the rights of our technically unsophisticated friends and neighbours, then we will also be lost. Technology lets us organise and work together in new ways, and to build new kinds of institutions and groups, but these will always be in the wider world, not above it.

- Cory Doctorow

offer educational and entertaining video content, in addition to high-quality apparel and promotional items for RichardDawkins.net, The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science, and The Out Campaign.

They even have a handy bag that you can use to store your swag.

Via Pharyngula

In the 1930s, he moved to Hollywood where he was hired by Twentieth Century Fox to paint pastel portraits of their stars. By 1935 Vargas was working for Warner Brothers and, before the decade was over, for MGM.

In December 1939 he was invited to an interview with David Smart, the publisher of Esquire Magazine, to discuss the possibility of his replacing George Petty, whose contract was to expire in December 1941. Agreeing to drop the “s” from his last name in all his work for the magazine, his first painting was published in the October 1940 edition.

The Varga Girl was born.

The rest, as they say, is history.