Archive for November, 2011

Tiresome rearguard actions

Wednesday, November 16th, 2011

Watch out 2024!


Incorporates North Korea Mass Games by Peter Crowcroft and Hollywood Sign by Oreos, available under BY-SA (questionably in former case), but I’m claiming fair use. Result dedicated to the public domain.

No more child veterans

Saturday, November 12th, 2011

Yesterday was Veteran’s Day. In support of that, I donated to the Coalition to Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.

In the U.S. (as in most jurisdictions), people have an odd attitude toward military veterans. Even those who generally condemn the activities and costs of the (especially U.S.) military as stupid and counterproductive, or much worse, fall into the grip of nationalist religion and “honor” people who directly participated in mass murder. Those who generally support the activities and costs of nationalist armies go out of their way to signal how much they honor and support mass murderers. But, apart for the most compassionate of the former, most zealous of the latter, and some veterans and their lobbyists, generally military veterans are kicked the the curb — thanks for murdering for the nation-state; good luck on the streets and in our fine institutions!

Fortunately, there is a way out of this hero/murderer/reject paradox (other than ceasing U.S. military interventions; yes I want that, but I’m not that ambitious today) — recognize that most U.S. soldiers are children. As such, they should be pitied and rehabilitated. Furthermore, the minimum age for joining the U.S. military ought be raised to at least 21, and a 4 year college degree required (up from 17 and high school, with caveats). Never again should a child be forced to choose between murder and no money for college.

Commons experts to develop version 4.0 of the CC licenses

Thursday, November 3rd, 2011

As described on the Creative Commons blog some initial discussions were had at the CC Global Summit about 6 weeks ago in Warsaw. I’m looking forward to the start of in depth discovery, analysis, and debate of pertinent issues on the cc-licenses list, the CC wiki, and elsewhere over the coming months. Please join in, commons experts.☺

I gave a brief presentation on one of those issues at the summit, on the “NonCommercial” term of some CC licenses (odp, pdf, slideshare). [Addendum 20111104: This talk was not recorded. Only slides are available. Don’t watch the videos below if you’re only looking for a talk on NC!]

More relevantly (to 4.0; yes, NC is pretty relevant, becoming less so, the commons is super relevant, indeed all important) though more abstractly, I also organized a session on “CC’s role in the global commons movement”. I’m very happy with how that turned out, but it is only a tentative beginning, about which I will write further. For now you can read Silke Helfrich’s summary post and slides, Tyng-Ruey Chuang’s presentation text, Leonhard Dobusch’s slides, and Kat Walsh’s presentation text and download or watch at archive.org or YouTube:

Because I may never get around to blogging it separately, I also gave a presentation on “what’s happened in Creative Commons and the open community over the last 3 years.” You may recognize one slide from an earlier post. View slides (odp, pdf, slideshare) or video at archive.org or YouTube: