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Ebooks, the next revolution. But this time is BIG!

Another revolution is about to happen.

A revolution that is many times in size and importance bigger than the music revolution. I call it the e-book revolution.

In this moment a number of technologies are coming together:

On the one side OCR technologies are reaching a level of sophistication, where it is nearly as easy to photocopy a book as to make an ebook out of it. Do you remember when you would go to a photocopy shop, and ask them to make a copy of the book. Now it is that easy to have the ebook version of it, if you know how to do it. This means that more and more books are available in ebook format.

But the difference between the ebooks now, and the mp3, back then, is that when the mp3s came out, a song (5 minutes of fun) was about 5 MB. And since the internet was slower back then, it would take quite some time to download those 5 minutes of fun. Now a book, is often between 1 and 10 Mega Byte. And it can permit you to read it, study it, but also just to consult it.
More about this later.

I thought there were few ebooks around. That mostly you could find some old classics, but nothing really interesting. I was SO wrong.

Here is a collection available for download from pirate bay with more than 1000 ebooks, all on computer science. Here another with practically all of the ebooks from the “* for dummies” collection.

Those are not just some old classics. Those are good new books.

But why are users going through the whole work of digitalizing a single book to post it online? I guess this text will explain us: Continue reading Ebooks, the next revolution. But this time is BIG!

Dublin, Friday 13th of June, 2008

The problem is not that there are too many elections for Europe, but too few. And the people feel they are not controlling a process that is bigger than them.
When people vote No at the battlecry: when in doubt vote No, how else would You interprete it?

Now, it can be that the United States have given a help, under the table, to finance the advertisments against the treaty. After all they have all to gain from being the only superpower. But the advertisments found a fertile land to sprout.

When 95% of the irish parliament said to vote Yes, and the clear majority of people voted for No… something must mean.

Calderoli for one time (the only!) is right in noticing how from when Europe had to ratify its constitution have lost every time.

Now, here, they want to call again for a second referendum, and again, and again, until the Yes wins. Strange that the constitution permits it.

I am not against voting again, but I think it should be done right.

When there is a referendum, and the result expressed is more than 20% different from what the parliament has suggested, it is obvious that the parliament is no more reppresentative of the people. And so it should be considered automatically delegitimised. New elections should be called immediatly, to renew the parliament. And after this a new referendum should be called. Referendum at which the new parliament should give indications of vote. And again if the results are more than 20% different, we should vote again, and so on. Until the fracture between the people and its representatives has been healed.

This would mean that the power truly belongs to the people, and the parliamentaries truly represent the people.

With the new technologies we could have one new election every other day, and a new referendum in between. Within one week we would have a new parliament, and a result of the referendum, that agree with each other.