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Numa Numa

In December 2004, 19-year-old Gary Brolsma uploaded a webcam video titled “Numa Numa,” featuring himself lip-syncing to the Romanian song “Dragostea Din Tei” by O-Zone. Hosted initially on Newgrounds.com, Brolsma created the video after watching a cartoon about Japanese cats.

Even before the existence of YouTube, his video exploded one night after Newgrounds featured it on their front page. A couple days later, Brolsma woke up to find news vans from all the major networks parked outside his house, forcing him to explain his sudden Internet fame to his surprised mother.

International Internet Day

​International Internet Day is celebrated globally on October 29 every year. International Internet Day is celebrated to commemorate a momentous day in the history of telecommunications and technology. The day marks the sending of the first electronic message which was transferred from one computer to another in 1969.

Charley Kline, a student programmer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), transmitted the first-ever electronic message on 1969 October 29.

Kline, who was working under the supervision of Professor Leonard Kleinrock, transmitted a message from the computer housed at the UCLA to Bill Duvall who was using a computer positioned at the Stanford Research Institute’s computer.

The sender system at UCLA was the SDS Sigma 7 Host computer and the receiver was the SDS 940 Host at the Stanford Research Institute.

The message sent was the word “login”. Kline and Kleinrock managed to send “L” and “O” before the connection between the terminals crashed.

To celebrate, here’s the video of David Bowie talking about internet (courtesy of BBC):

David Bowie predicted in 1999 the impact of the Internet in BBC interview (video is courtesy of BBC)

William Faulkner: Fear and Tyranny

What threatens us today is fear.

Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it, because if the atom bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us, which is nothing, since in doing that, it would have robbed itself of its only power over us — which is fear of it, the being afraid of it.

Our danger is not that. Our danger is in the forces of the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery — giving him free food which he has not earned, easy and valueless money which he has not worked for.

That is what we must resist, if we are to change the world for man’s peace and security.

It is not men in the mass who can and will save Man; it is Man himself, created in the image of God so that he shall have the power and the will to choose right from wrong, and so be able to save himself because he is worth saving.

Man, the individual men and women, who will refuse always to be tricked or frightened or bribed into surrendering, not just the right but the duty too, to choose between justice and injustice, courage and cowardice, sacrifice and greed, pity and self — who will believe always not only in the right of man to be free of injustice and rapacity and deception, but the duty and responsibility of man to see that justice and truth and pity and compassion are done.

So never be afraid. Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion, against injustice and lying and greed.

If you, not just you in this room tonight but in all the thousands of other rooms like this one about the world today and tomorrow and next week, will do this, not as a class or classes, but as but individuals, men and women, you will change the earth.

In one generation, all the Napoleons and Hitlers and Caesars and Mussolinis and Stalins, and all the other tyrants who want power and aggrandizement, and all the simple politicians and time-servers who themselves are merely baffled or ignorant or afraid, who have used, or are using, or hope to use, man’s fear and greed for man’s enslavement, will have vanished from the face of it.