This came today in Doug Casey's email newsletter What We Now Know.

Open-source licensing changed the tech world when Linux was released in the early 1990s. Now, it's threatening to shake things up again—only this time, it's targeting the biotech industry.

In the case of Linux, “open source

No, really. They are.

From 2007 it will be firing particles at speeds nearing that of light, before smashing them together to re-create the conditions scientists believe existed less than one billionth of a second after the Big Bang -- the birth of the cosmos some 14 billion years ago.

I hope they get rid of that nasty Big Bang that happened before the whole thing. I'd hate to think that the Universe was created by another society that was doing something similar...

...The Biological Innovation for Open Society (BIOS) initiative will seek to make information and technologies such as plant-breeding tools freely available. It will also provide scientists with better information about what they can access and, its founders hope, establish an international community of interested researchers.

Richard Jefferson is the initiative's leader and chairman of the Center for the Application for Molecular Biology to International Agriculture (CAMBIA), which is a non-profit research institute based in Canberra, Australia. He says BIOS could spur an "open source movement" in biotechnology, analogous to the one that has developed in the computer software industry.

Plant scientists in poor countries often complain that they are shut off from recent advances in agricultural biotechnology because they cannot afford licensing fees...

That's a quote from this article on Biological Innovation for Open Society. Considering how little genetically engineered crops are used in the developing world (guess who patents them in the West?), this is obviously a requirement in helping people grow crops more efficiently.

Sometime, some of you folks are going to have to explain to your children - probably before that talk - about where the internet came from.

We here at A42.com think it's important that you be able to explain this to your children. More importantly, we understand that sometimes pictures are worth a thousand words. So here's a few anatomically correct baby pictures of the internet, starting from 1969.

Look at that sucker grow.

Not 'glue users' as in 'glue sniffers', mind you. We're talking about Groups of Linux Users Everywhere. And it allows Linux User Groups to post information about their particular user group and region.

But the technical aspect is that it's done on a Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP Server (LAMP Server) with Drupal, and tweaked by Mitch Fraziers so that it all fits in your monitor at one time. Hats off to Mitch!

Always good to see technology working for community.

LinuxGazette has this story on how to make a file system from an ordinary file. Pretty interesting stuff, especially for Sys Admin types.

Tom Adelstein recently wrote an article on How to Build a Low Cost Linux Desktop Computer, and he sent me the the link at the tail end of my own adventures in installation of Mandrake 10 on a new system.

Few articles for people using the Linux kernel really go into depth on how a system is actually built, which is something I really didn't think about until yesterday. Most people who use computers these days don't know the hardware well enough, and because of the inconsistent support from hardware manufacturers it compounds the problems of Windows users moving to GNU/Linux.

According to this article from InfomationWeek.com, 92% of Linux developers are ignorant of what it's like to get a virus and have never been infected.

One of the largest issues with the GNU/Linux desktop has been a lack of training, or training materials, which are publicly available. There's a lot of information out there, though not always in the same place - and not necessarily in the order that a new user would need it.

It looks like things are changing. The User Guide to Using the Linux Desktop doesn't get into installation - assuming that it's already done - but it does walk the average person through using his or her GNU/Linux machine. It's all in one spot - 13 Chapters, ranging from 'Getting Started' to connecting to the internet to using OpenOffice.org.