if you're in the US (or a country that respects US patent law), can you download and commercially use an open source implementation of h.264 (eg, x264)?
Sure you can. However you're using patented technology without holding a license, so there is a theoretical risk that you could get sued.
And I do reject the CC-BY-SA in favor of the GFDL.
In what respect do you think GFDL is better than CC-BY-SA, specifically?
I still don't see why this is even necessary.
Two reasons: First, it is very hard to fulfill all the requirements of the GFDL to the letter; not even Wikipedia does it completely, and downstream distributors are a lot worse. The license is simply not written with a wiki in mind. Second, it is impossible to mix GFDL and CC-BY-SA code, even though the two licenses are identical in spirit. The free content world simply shouldn't have to deal with artificial hurdles like that.
What are the differences between Creative Commons and their current GFDL?
GFDL requires that so-called "Invariant Sections" (talking about the author and their relationship to the subject matter) be carried forward into future versions unchanged. Wikipedia articles don't have Invariant Sections, but you could take a Wikipedia article, change it, and then add an invariant section; everybody who wanted to use your changes would then have to keep the invariant section intact.
GFDL also requires that the title of the work be changed after every modification, and that sections titled "Acknowledgment" and "Dedication" be kept intact. Nobody really cares about these clauses, and Wikipedia has long ignored them.
If you want to redistribute a (modified) version of a work, the GFDL also requires that you accompany it with a copy of the GFDL and list at least five of the principal authors of the work on its title page. That's also widely ignored, by Wikipedia and others.
A work licensed under CC-BY-SA can be relicensed under any later version of CC-BY-SA and also under any license deemed equivalent by Creative Commons (since CC-BY-SA 3.0). A work licensed under GFDL can only be relicensed under a later version if the licensor explicitly added a clause to that effect; the Wikipedia license agreement contains such a clause, but a downstream distributor could remove it.
That's also why a helluvalot of people are going to see this as a bait & switch.
I doubt that very much. CC-BY-SA and GFDL are identical in spirit and intent; GFDL just has lots of clauses that are designed for software documentation and very awkward for a wiki. I don't believe that any good-faith Wikipedia contributor who has read and understood both licenses will reject CC-BY-SA in favor of GFDL.
However, I also don't doubt that many disgruntled former Wikipedia contributors will claim that they disagree with this license change, just to troll and cause trouble. Since they have no legal standing, they can be safely ignored.
what is a human deserving of human rights. We consider it a unique being with DNA, post-fertilization.
How about a cell taken from your skin, sitting in a petri dish? Human or not? Does the UN Declaration of Human Rights apply? Pretty soon we will be able to take that cell, put it into just the right soup of nutrients and chemicals, and it will grow into a copy of you. Do you now count it as a human, just because of this possibility?
An individual human life either has value, or it does not. If it does, then any point after a new set of genetics is formed and has a viable chance to grow into an intelligent being is an arbitrary line.
Does "viable chance" mean "if left to its own devices", or does it mean "if helped along just right"?
In the former case, embryos created by cloning clearly don't have a viable chance; they need to be surrounded by exactly the right nutrients and implanted into a receptive female at the exact right time or they will die.
In the latter case, consider this: Pretty soon, it will be possible to take a cell out of your ass, put it into a petri dish, treat it with some chemicals and some electricity, feed it and keep it warm, and it will grow into a copy of you. That means every single one of your ass's cells has "a viable chance to grow into an (intelligent) being". Do your ass's cells therefore have value?
It's just not true that "every human life" has value. That's a distortion for rhetorical effect. The correct statement is much simpler: Every human has value.
Insurance companies, as private enterprises, should have the right to charge whatever they want to whomever they want,
They do not now have that right, nor should they have that right in the future. Just because they are private enterprises does not mean that they should be exempt of regulation; in fact, the whole point of regulation is to make the profit motive of private enterprises work in parallel with the public interest.
It's in the public interest that people have access to affordable health insurance, in particular if their genes show that they may need it in the future. If insurers were allowed to cherry-pick, then ultimately the taxpayers would have to pay for the treatment of these people, unless you want to let them rot homelessly in the streets.
solves the problem of clean, renewable energy for the world
We're talking 5-10MW here. That's the energy need of 5000 households; it's nothing. A typical nuclear reactor gives you 200 times that power. It's clearly a military project and has nothing to do with solving the world's energy problems.
It works well for popular articles, but very poorly for marginal ones.
If you have an issue like that, where a determined editor tries to keep an obscure article in a biased state, you can try to elicit support in the Wikiproject that's responsible for the topic area, or you can file a Request for comment to get outside opinions. It's best to do all this as a logged-in user; anonymous users don't have much standing in Wikipedia.
I don't see why logged-in users should not be allowed to connect through TOR (just like they are allowed to connect through anonymous coffee shop wifi connections). That would allow Chinese users to contribute, as well as all others who face local restrictions. If a logged-in user vandalizes, just block their account.
You don't like Wikipedia; we get it. But rather than simply dismiss it and read something else, you have clearly expended a tremendous amount of energy and obsessively researched it in detail, and have developed a deep-seated hatred for the project.
People like you usually started out with trying to add their favorite person, business, music band or political or pseudo-scientific theory to Wikipedia, only to be rebuffed, repeatedly. Did that happen to you? If so, ask yourself: is your pet topic covered more neutrally and in more detail in Encyclopedia Britannica than in Wikipedia? In all likelihood, your pet topic isn't covered at all in any encyclopedia; so why don't you complain about the bias and rotten structure of all the other encyclopedias? Because with the other encyclopedias you would never even have dared to try to get your pet topic covered: deep down you know it to be uncencyclopedic.
when I edit articles in subjects I am knowledgeable about, I try to REMOVE 'jargon' when at all possible.
I'm all for explaining important jargon in layman's terms, and to link to more detailed explanations, but a big reason why people turn to an encyclopedia is that they need to learn the jargon relevant to the field; removing it won't do them any good. Furthermore, jargon is invented for a reason; to speak precisely you need precisely defined terms.
The majority of the world lives outside the US and therefore should not feel intimidated by its laws.
Except that the U.S. is demanding DMCA-like laws with every bilateral trade agreement they negotiate. The DMCA is soon coming to a law book near you, trust me.
when taken in its normal form it requires activation by UV in the skin.
That is crap. You can either take in D2 (from plants or fungi) or D3 (from animal sources) or you can produce your own D3 from sunlight and cholesterol. All these are converted by the liver into the active from of vitamin D, Calcitriol.
If you are about to publish a scientific paper, please read this call to action by the ever wonderful John Baez first and make your choice accordingly.
another reason why content owners like it is that it's very difficult to capture a stream
In fact capturing a FLV stream is easy; UnPlug works in 90% of the cases, and the remaining 10% are reliably captured by Tamper Data without exception.
Any ad-infested content will quickly be cleaned up and uploaded to other sites, as it should be.
I work for one of the largest school districts in the country. Wikipedia is blocked, along with a whole lot of other things. Nobody fucking cares.
It boggles the mind. Can you appreciate that in this information age the single most important skill that schools have to teach is the ability to critically evaluate information on the internet? Nothing is as crucial as this; nobody will be able to function in 10 year's time without this ability. And not a single teacher in your school district complaints about being prevented from teaching this skill?
Slashdot Mirror
Sure you can. However you're using patented technology without holding a license, so there is a theoretical risk that you could get sued.
What's the name of the chatbot that uses Wikipedia? I'd like to play with it.
In what respect do you think GFDL is better than CC-BY-SA, specifically?
Two reasons: First, it is very hard to fulfill all the requirements of the GFDL to the letter; not even Wikipedia does it completely, and downstream distributors are a lot worse. The license is simply not written with a wiki in mind. Second, it is impossible to mix GFDL and CC-BY-SA code, even though the two licenses are identical in spirit. The free content world simply shouldn't have to deal with artificial hurdles like that.GFDL requires that so-called "Invariant Sections" (talking about the author and their relationship to the subject matter) be carried forward into future versions unchanged. Wikipedia articles don't have Invariant Sections, but you could take a Wikipedia article, change it, and then add an invariant section; everybody who wanted to use your changes would then have to keep the invariant section intact.
GFDL also requires that the title of the work be changed after every modification, and that sections titled "Acknowledgment" and "Dedication" be kept intact. Nobody really cares about these clauses, and Wikipedia has long ignored them.
If you want to redistribute a (modified) version of a work, the GFDL also requires that you accompany it with a copy of the GFDL and list at least five of the principal authors of the work on its title page. That's also widely ignored, by Wikipedia and others.
A work licensed under CC-BY-SA can be relicensed under any later version of CC-BY-SA and also under any license deemed equivalent by Creative Commons (since CC-BY-SA 3.0). A work licensed under GFDL can only be relicensed under a later version if the licensor explicitly added a clause to that effect; the Wikipedia license agreement contains such a clause, but a downstream distributor could remove it.
I doubt that very much. CC-BY-SA and GFDL are identical in spirit and intent; GFDL just has lots of clauses that are designed for software documentation and very awkward for a wiki. I don't believe that any good-faith Wikipedia contributor who has read and understood both licenses will reject CC-BY-SA in favor of GFDL.
However, I also don't doubt that many disgruntled former Wikipedia contributors will claim that they disagree with this license change, just to troll and cause trouble. Since they have no legal standing, they can be safely ignored.
How about a cell taken from your skin, sitting in a petri dish? Human or not? Does the UN Declaration of Human Rights apply? Pretty soon we will be able to take that cell, put it into just the right soup of nutrients and chemicals, and it will grow into a copy of you. Do you now count it as a human, just because of this possibility?
Does "viable chance" mean "if left to its own devices", or does it mean "if helped along just right"?
In the former case, embryos created by cloning clearly don't have a viable chance; they need to be surrounded by exactly the right nutrients and implanted into a receptive female at the exact right time or they will die.
In the latter case, consider this: Pretty soon, it will be possible to take a cell out of your ass, put it into a petri dish, treat it with some chemicals and some electricity, feed it and keep it warm, and it will grow into a copy of you. That means every single one of your ass's cells has "a viable chance to grow into an (intelligent) being". Do your ass's cells therefore have value?
It's just not true that "every human life" has value. That's a distortion for rhetorical effect. The correct statement is much simpler: Every human has value.
They do not now have that right, nor should they have that right in the future. Just because they are private enterprises does not mean that they should be exempt of regulation; in fact, the whole point of regulation is to make the profit motive of private enterprises work in parallel with the public interest.
It's in the public interest that people have access to affordable health insurance, in particular if their genes show that they may need it in the future. If insurers were allowed to cherry-pick, then ultimately the taxpayers would have to pay for the treatment of these people, unless you want to let them rot homelessly in the streets.
Check this out.
We're talking 5-10MW here. That's the energy need of 5000 households; it's nothing. A typical nuclear reactor gives you 200 times that power. It's clearly a military project and has nothing to do with solving the world's energy problems.
Yes, it's here: Wikipedia:Requested articles.
Why not just jump in and fix that typo? It's really pretty simple.
Is that so? Lending a book to a friend is a crime now? The magazine I bought I cannot show to my son? What interesting times we live in.
If you have an issue like that, where a determined editor tries to keep an obscure article in a biased state, you can try to elicit support in the Wikiproject that's responsible for the topic area, or you can file a Request for comment to get outside opinions. It's best to do all this as a logged-in user; anonymous users don't have much standing in Wikipedia.
I don't see why logged-in users should not be allowed to connect through TOR (just like they are allowed to connect through anonymous coffee shop wifi connections). That would allow Chinese users to contribute, as well as all others who face local restrictions. If a logged-in user vandalizes, just block their account.
People like you usually started out with trying to add their favorite person, business, music band or political or pseudo-scientific theory to Wikipedia, only to be rebuffed, repeatedly. Did that happen to you? If so, ask yourself: is your pet topic covered more neutrally and in more detail in Encyclopedia Britannica than in Wikipedia? In all likelihood, your pet topic isn't covered at all in any encyclopedia; so why don't you complain about the bias and rotten structure of all the other encyclopedias? Because with the other encyclopedias you would never even have dared to try to get your pet topic covered: deep down you know it to be uncencyclopedic.
You got it! Wikipedia Popups
I'm all for explaining important jargon in layman's terms, and to link to more detailed explanations, but a big reason why people turn to an encyclopedia is that they need to learn the jargon relevant to the field; removing it won't do them any good. Furthermore, jargon is invented for a reason; to speak precisely you need precisely defined terms.
If you are about to publish a scientific paper, please read this call to action by the ever wonderful John Baez first and make your choice accordingly.
Any ad-infested content will quickly be cleaned up and uploaded to other sites, as it should be.
Why would the bank hand my money from my account if I didn't authorize it? If the bank is being defrauded I can't see that as being my problem.