Gypsies have an interesting tale to tell to. They are the European underclass. As much as we in Europe like to scoll the US for having an underclass, this is worse.

What percentage of the population do you need to be bad, in order to start something like the holocaust? This of course depends a lot on the society and is (therefore) a measure for the stability of this society.
I read somewhere that 3% of the people is rather unstable. Probably another 7% would run after these 3%. so any society that could be dominated if 10% of the population suddenly went in certain direction, is at risk.
Probably all societies could, if only the other 90% are scared enough. They usually are too sensible to give their lives for a society that isn't quite right anymore. Give your life for your family, okay, but for society. How much does the economy have to shrink before the 10% win?

Knuth's most famous book is called The Art of Programming, but is it? Is programming an Art. What is Art? To people from the Middle Ages it probably would be, because it is for sure a Craft and any Craft done in an Artfull way was Art, but nowadays, most people see programming as a way of making money, not as art, and there is a strong suspicion against making money by way of Art.
A good program is the best way to write down how something works and can be very beautifull and give a real insight into how things work. It shows a hidden piece of reality in a much clearer way then before. Programmers have their own style and their are eternal wars raging about how really things should be done. The only thing is that some people would say that art should be about emotion too. Source code just isn't very emotional.

Information Socialism (see below) is not so much about copyright on CDs and Books, but on materials that can be used for further information processing, like research, databases of all kinds. If these information raw materials are copyrighted, then this will inhibit economic development that could be based on these raw materials. It is like the industrial revolution and monopolies. But if these databases and such would be free, nobody would have the incentive to produce them.
A good example of this is the CDDB now called gracenote and run by Escient. CDDB started out as volunteer program to gather data about all cd's in the world, so that your computer cd player could connect over the internet to the CDDataBase and retrieve the name of the artist, songs etc. This worked great and a lot of great applications were build on top of this. However, somebody at Escient realised that CDDB was valuable, so they changed the terms of license, disallowing people to use the new database format and not giving out more licenses to the old ones etc. A lot of volunteers complained that this wasn't fair and this wasn't why they put in all the time, but for the time being this is the fact.
FreeDB is an opensource variant, which is claimed to be illegal by Escient, but that doesn't matter for the point. It would be better for everybody if there was one, free database for CD information that everybody could use. However, there is no percentage in that, so we'll either end up with a lot of companies all doing the same thing or with a monopolist terrorizing the market.

John Rawls theory of justice says that inequality only should be allowed to grow if it makes the poorest people richer. Did that happen in the Netherlands the last ten years, when, as in a lot of other countries, a more liberal economic aproach was taken.
I had a look at world bank data query which usually has some nice statistics, but to no avail. At the volkskrant I found a graph indicating that the percentage of GNP spent went down from 18% to 16%. Economic growth was about 2.9% in the last ten years, so actually spending on social security grew in absolute amount by 18.3%, which is quite a bit. If the growth had been 1.18%, spending would have stayed the same. It does not seem very likely. But then how much of the 2% points cut pas paid by the fact that there were less unemployed?
Another thing, the average dutch person worked 567 hours a year. That is 1.5 hour a day!

Anti-Americanism is growing in Europe. I wonder why. The new president and his way of acting tough don't help. He comes out for being conservative, way more conservative then most people in Europe think reasonable. On the other hand it might have to do with the fact that the US seems to be more succesfull the last ten years and that people don't like that. People used to be unhappy with the Japanese and the Germans, now it is more the Americans.

Last thought for today, or rather find: Macromedias Flash SDK has a description of the flash file format, probably opening the door for dynamic stuff.

Production Socialism, ie collective industrial production like they tried in the Soviet Union would never work, because like the Godfather would say, there is no percentage in it for the individual. I gain nothing from the fact that production is collective other then that I profit from your work and thus have an incentive not to work myself.
In a society where information becomes the main production factor, things change. Suddenly collective production makes sense, because I get unlimited access to your information and if I use your information, you lose nothing. These leads to more production. Still, it's not easy to construe a society where information is free and the society is still productive. Closed Information is counter productive, but there is still has to be a percentage in production, else nobody will. The Linux code of honour for programmers is just not going to work society wide.

Well, there is more. LibSWF is an open source library to generate Flash movies and it can be incorporated in PHP. ASP Flash Turbine has an implementation for Windows NT, not quite free at USD 500 a machine, but it does beat the Enterprise edition of Macromedia by a long shot. Seems like a good plan though, porting the open source components to ActiveX and charging the poor VB men for it. Not very ethical maybe.

extra fast has some nice hosting options like flash generator hosting. Dynamically generating flash for the masses, ie not 3000 usd per processor, but 50 a month. Reliance of Macromedia on Generator is a thread on the long run for this promising company. A lot of things you need generator for now, would better have been implemented in flash directly, like dynamically loading .gifs into a movie. Now Macromedia has a strong incentive not to implement these features in Flash6, making the product less strong.
But then again, Flash is open in a way. Perl::Flash is an implementation in Flash. Somebody will probably create a flash generator object in ActiveX for use in asp, or even better server side java or C#.