Yes, this! I work in bioinformatics, and while relational DBMSes are used by a large number of projects, the problem you face with experimental data is that its organisation is non-obvious and relationships between different bits of data are not apparent. This means that RDBMSes aren't a natural fit. One of my colleagues has been experimenting with graph oriented databases (specifically neo4j (http://neo4j.org/)), an approach which has interesting intersections with declarative programming. In the near future I think much of use will come from being a scientific "data geek", utilising the kind of skills described by Deepak Singh (blog: http://mndoci.com/).
I also thought that when I first looked at Buzz.... but then I realised that Buzz is actually working off a rather minimalist integration of different websites model. This is actually a good thing - so instead of Facebook's model of providing "albums" and "notes", etc, I can publish a "newsfeed" that features the pictures I upload to flickr, the videos I put on youtube, the blog items I post on blogger, etc. Done right this is much much more powerful than Facebook - and part of "done right" will have to be integrating good ways of finding people - both by attributes such as name and location, and also by "group" - organisational or interest-based affiliation.
Ok so then let's take sexualised violence, a staple of slasher films but also available as "snuff" porn. "Flower of Flesh and Blood" for example involves a woman being drugged and cut apart. Ok, so let's take this to its photorealistic conclusion - a computerised simulation of rape and murder. No problems yet? Is there any point where you'd have a problem? Virtual Nazi concentration camp?
I think the point of the article is simply this: a) take something you find disturbing b) imagination a perfectly realistic simulation of that thing and then imagine the effect on people. I don't agree with the author that a legal solution is correct in this instance but I do think there are psychological and social issues to be faced here.
iraqbodycount.org is based on news media reports and they themselves state that: "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence."
How much undercounting that IBC does no one knows. So your figures are, as you say, bunk.
And this is insightful?? I'm a Unix sysadmin... I learned from a Unix sysadmin who was a woman, the only female sysadmin I've ever met.
Guess what, sysadmin involves a pretty high degree of social interaction. As do many other jobs within the varied world of IT.
Even programming - you do it alone? That would be pretty rare. I've never had an IT job (and I've worked in programming, sysadmin, specialist consultancy) that does not require some social / people skills.
I've noticed something somewhat similar with my daughter and TV - when she was younger (about 2) she'd sometimes watch a lot of TV in the day. A lot of kiddie TV has similar visual properties to video games... engaging through bright colours, frequent picture changes ("flashing", etc), loud sounds...
This tends to be quite engaging and even exhausting to the senses while leaving the body idle. My guess is that there might also be some adrenaline or something built up this way too... in any event, the result of a too-much-TV schedule was to turn my toddler daughter into a grouch.
She's older now, and the games she plays (on the BBC website, for instance) tend to be fairly slow paced - painting, dress up, etc. I haven't seen much in the way of negative effects.....
You know, people who respond on/. sure like cliches. Last phone I got with a 1.3 megapixel camera was... 4 years ago? My Nokia 6500 slide comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera which takes pretty decent pics. I use it as my "happy snappy" camera to take photos of my kids (about an average of 5 per day;) ). I also use it to take landscape shots that I turn into panoramas with Hugin.
I know the Nokia phone software has had quality problems in the past - I used to use it on Windows with my old 6230i. My current setup, however, let's me plug my phone into its USB cable (which came with the phone), select "Photo sharing" on the phone and have f-spot (on Ubuntu) pick up the phone as a MTP device and import the pictures (which I can then tag and export to a web album).... I can also browse the phone's store from Bluetooth if I want.
The result is an easy way to keep a personal photo album. Decent software and integration between contexts (phone, PC, web) is key to this. In this regard open source has an advantage since integration (between different sources / services) is something that open source projects tend to do well. There's nothing stopping Nokia, etc. from improving their PC-side software, though - and integrating it with Flickr, etc. They manage to make a decent UI for the phone itself, so they've got one part of the puzzle right.
Of course, this is in South Africa where our mobile providers seem less insane than the descriptions I'm hearing of the USA ones.
I went through a similar experience - but for me it was realising how much time I was spending maintaining the spam filters on my home servers. I still have a home server, but Google Apps catches my mail. I then download from Google to home via getmail and access mail via IMAP. To the "outside world" it looks quite professional - my own domain, etc - and to me its easy to access mail from anywhere (I have Squirrelmail running on top of my IMAP for when I don't have an IMAP client nearby, and in the worst case, I can access my email at Google (although without the folder organisation I get on my home server)).
So you're telling me the Earth Liberation Front (anonymous and autonomous individuals or cells who do monkeywrenching) and Animal Liberation Front (a name used internationally by animal liberation activists who engage in direct action) are going to file a *lawsuit*?
And I have a single page which I used to keep track of my multiple email inboxes, my facebook account (which keeps me up to date with events I might be interested in) and multiple RSS feeds. Really, what's so tough? I have the most annoying apps on facebook blocked, and for now it fits into my world quite well as a way social-life-aggregator - letting me know when my favourite local band has a gig, for instance. Sure, the local bands could put me on their mailing lists, but with a specialised (web) application for keeping track of events, I can 'join' or 'leave' an event, be notified shortly before it happens, etc - its like having a notification service that slots straight into my calendar. My email tends not to do that automatically.
Two decades ago a friend of mine asked why we need multitasking on computers when he could only work in one app at a time.;) The world has moved on, new applications have appeared and some of us have learned to use them - same with social networking sites. I'm not quite sure why hating social networking sites seems to earn you automatic/. karma.
Yes, the fine article talks about privacy laws. It also states that because of "budget constraints" the state mental health system can't handle the number of patients it needs to handle, with month-long waiting lists for counselling and "local health agencies" that don't follow up on patients. So Cho was a mentally ill man, far away from home, with a possibly history of untreated mental illness for several years.
Also from the article, the state of Virginia never passed on the information that Cho had been "adjudicated as a mental defective" to the "National Instant Check System", but it seems the state was not funded for its part in keeping this system up to date - the proposal is now to fund this activity.
So... all of this in the article, and the resultant/. summary is basically the first paragraph about privacy laws? Congratulations in promoting the culture of knee-jerk response!
A lot of the books on filesharing networks are reference books - often the R 1000 for 100 pages type things you get in the IT business. In that case downloading the ebook makes a lot of sense, and in fact I can imagine certain publishing models being threatened by filesharing - for instance those of "high value" "standard" references like Effective C++.
An open standard for the validation process sounds like a really good thing. Who would police compliance with the process though? The reason I wonder about this is that if CAcert.org could adhere to some well known standard for validation, it would make its certificates much more believable.
This is a known problem with OpenDocument. From the sound of this article OpenDocument currently is not a solution for spreadsheet interchange due to the lack of a formula standard. The article talks about attempts to resolve that through OpenFormula, and more broadly states: "OpenDocument must only be about structure and how to represent content. It should define which standards are acceptable for each kind of data, not (re)create them all." While this sounds very neat and clean in an engineering kind of way, the fact is that formulas are only one kind of content for which a standard does not exist. What about macros? Imagine trying to work with a Word document with WordBasic macros embedded...
This is potentially quite a nightmare, and I think is the basis of some of the concerns alluded to by Microsoft. Of course, their framing of these concerns is self-serving - the point is to see where standards are lacking and define them in an open process. And of course, many many documents don't need things like macros. But the danger still remains: the early 1990s saw an attempt to 'standardize Unix' through a set of processes that simply became turf wars between different camps, with the result that 'the standard' was always standardizing significantly less functionality than users of the time had come to expect. OpenDocument could still fall into the same trap.
Any argument about these things that doesn't point to *specific* problems to be overcome is just FUD though.
Ok, then your wife might like OpenOffice 2. I'm playing with the beta now, and
1. tables - you just draw them
2. drawing tools - on hand (just like in MSWord)
3. mail merge - still not quite what i expect from MSWord. OpenOffice wants you to use a table from a database file for data, whereas with MSWord i can use an Excel spreadsheet as a datasource. and while OpenOffice Base seems fairly straightforward, small details (like lack of auto-increment for ID field in newly created table) will confuse Access users.
4. help - ok, but a bit obscure in places - for instance when looking for help on Mail Merge;) (its much better to look at the Mail Merge Wizard help than to look at the help entry for mail merge which just suggests a brief procedure which in my install didn't work)
5. loading speed - Writer starts in less than 4 seconds on my PC (that's without Quickstart). that's basically comparable to MSWord.
A bit of history here... I needed to do some technical writing a year or so back, and I found that MSWord beat OpenOffice by a long way for useability. Looking at the new beta for OpenOffice 2, I'd say they've caught up a lot. Of course, there are ways (e.g. scriptability) where OpenOffice is significantly better than MS Office, so this 'catch up' game isn't just about being 'as good', its about being better.;)
Peter who has better things to be zealous about that MSWord vs. Writer
What is CSI then besides a TV drama that glorifies a (particular kind of) scientist? Or even Detective Goren in Law & Order - Criminal Intent? His job at least approximates that of the scientist... and there are even hints that he has undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome!
And as to TV shows glorifying teachers - how about 'Head of the Class' (ok, that was an 80s show, but I still remember it)? I can't recall recent examples, but that's probably got more to do with my TV viewing habits than anything else...
Peter P.S. and Paris Hilton is a 'real person' how?
Maybe Steve Jobs could have fun and learn lots from sitting in on classes, but over here (South Africa) that is increasingly difficult to do. The university where I used to work (UWC) is surrounded by an electric fence for 'security reasons' and has card based access control. Its easier (most of the time) to get into classes at my old university (UCT), but the library is still impossible to enter (even for browsing) without a valid student card. And a friend of mine who teaches at the University of Guelph in Canada was told years ago that she could be fired for knowingly teaching a non-paid-up student in her class.
wxWindows will only fix your GUI. Have you actually read the article? As others have noted, it doesn't deal with GUI apps, but rather with the underlying operating system differences (such as fork() vs. CreateProcess()). Using wxWindows ain't gonna do anything to fix that!
Firstly, there are current 152 Indymedia websites, not 50 as reported. That means that the loss of ahimsa (the server that was taken down) caused 13% of the IMC (Indymedia Centre) sites to go down, not the "more than 40 percent" quoted.
Secondly, the article makes it sound as if there has been no progress on the cypherpunk front since 1996. While progress has been annoyingly slow, the growth of peer to peer technologies over the last few years has prompted a number of experiments - TOR, I2P, Freenet, etc. (see the I2P network comparisons page for a list), some of which seem to be getting pretty mature.
Thirdly, the bigger sites on ahimsa were up again in hours/days. They would have been up even quicker if a proper backup / mirror system had been in place, and in fact Indymedia techies have now been spurred into action by the ahimsa seizure to make sure the network is more robust. Think about this: the leftie scene is not particularly filled with technologically adept people. The Indymedia network runs on a shoestring budget (in terms of money / time). Despite this, the network was *still* able to respond and repair the damage fairly rapidly.
And finally, don't overestimate the competence of the FBI in this matter. Apparently when trying to do something about the picture of Swiss undercover cops on nantes.indymedia.org, one of the people they approached was from Seattle Indymedia, which has nothing to do with running either ahimsa or nantes.indymedia.org. And anyway, the disputed picture was quickly mirrored all over the place when it became "notorious" (just like the DeCSS code).
So, while I think Grossman's article is a good counterbalance to the mystical rants of people like John Perry Barlow, she leaves out a number of facts that show that the Internet can indeed be used to "route around censorship". Its all a matter of effort - in the 1970s and 80s, the ANC got around government censorship in South Africa by planting "pamphlet bombs" to scatter leaflets at busy rail stations (the cost: activists spending several years in jail). The Internet allows the subversion of censorship with far less effort, but of course it doesn't do it "by magic".
From the CNN article: "Polyakov told Interfax reporters that the 500 Days experiment will not include female volunteers."
I wonder if this is related to what happened last time they tried something like this. From space.com:
"Canadian physician, Dr. Judith Lapierre, tells a different tale. She was in the chamber for 110 days. "Somebody pulled me by my arm and tried to kiss me. Of course, we are not talking about [rape], but for me it was a high level of sexual harassment and if women don't stand up, the next thing that happens is usually that. I pushed the guy, but then I was told that in Russia I just should just give him a slap in the face. However, it is not my way of handling such things.""
If this (sexual harassment problems) is their reasoning behind the decision to exclude women, I think its a pretty poor reason. Why not rather exclude men?
Imagine the 'one-click' shopping patent - submitting an implementation hardly restricts the patent to a "specific algorithm".
And if you want to pin down patents to a "specific algorithm", how precise do you need to be? If you get too specific, patents effectively become almost identical to copyright. If you become too broad, you have... almost what we have now.
Imagine the code submitted along with a patent for a codec like MP3. Does your patent now cover just exactly that one way of encoding in MP3, or does it cover encoding in MP3 per-se? Or something in-between?
The RNC delegate info was never posted on the server in question (ahimsa). The suspicion within informed circles is that the FBI action might have been related to pictures of undercover Swiss police officers posted on the Nantes IMC site (which was hosted on ahimsa). The Swiss police had already questioned a volunteer from Nantes IMC about these photos. For more info, look at this summary.
For those who don't know / understand - Indymedia is a network, so this isn't "Indymedia's HD" but rather equipment run by a collective attached to one of the various IMCs (each IMC is autonomous according to Indymedia's Principles of Unity).
"whoever recieves that code can't redistribute it unless that test suite works".... not necessarily true. From the original email, "2. A derivative work in executable form that has passed the unmodified test suite can be distributed under a license of your choosing." and "3. Any other derivative work can only be distributed under this license.".
So my reading is that you only need to pass the test suite if you want to distribute executables. If you only want to distribute modified source, you can still do so under the original license.
If that is the case, I think this sounds like a decent idea. However, the information provided is rather vague.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this! I work in bioinformatics, and while relational DBMSes are used by a large number of projects, the problem you face with experimental data is that its organisation is non-obvious and relationships between different bits of data are not apparent. This means that RDBMSes aren't a natural fit. One of my colleagues has been experimenting with graph oriented databases (specifically neo4j (http://neo4j.org/)), an approach which has interesting intersections with declarative programming. In the near future I think much of use will come from being a scientific "data geek", utilising the kind of skills described by Deepak Singh (blog: http://mndoci.com/).
I also thought that when I first looked at Buzz.... but then I realised that Buzz is actually working off a rather minimalist integration of different websites model. This is actually a good thing - so instead of Facebook's model of providing "albums" and "notes", etc, I can publish a "newsfeed" that features the pictures I upload to flickr, the videos I put on youtube, the blog items I post on blogger, etc. Done right this is much much more powerful than Facebook - and part of "done right" will have to be integrating good ways of finding people - both by attributes such as name and location, and also by "group" - organisational or interest-based affiliation.
Ok so then let's take sexualised violence, a staple of slasher films but also available as "snuff" porn. "Flower of Flesh and Blood" for example involves a woman being drugged and cut apart. Ok, so let's take this to its photorealistic conclusion - a computerised simulation of rape and murder. No problems yet? Is there any point where you'd have a problem? Virtual Nazi concentration camp?
I think the point of the article is simply this: a) take something you find disturbing b) imagination a perfectly realistic simulation of that thing and then imagine the effect on people. I don't agree with the author that a legal solution is correct in this instance but I do think there are psychological and social issues to be faced here.
iraqbodycount.org is based on news media reports and they themselves state that: "Gaps in recording and reporting suggest that even our highest totals to date may be missing many civilian deaths from violence." How much undercounting that IBC does no one knows. So your figures are, as you say, bunk.
And this is insightful?? I'm a Unix sysadmin... I learned from a Unix sysadmin who was a woman, the only female sysadmin I've ever met.
Guess what, sysadmin involves a pretty high degree of social interaction. As do many other jobs within the varied world of IT.
Even programming - you do it alone? That would be pretty rare. I've never had an IT job (and I've worked in programming, sysadmin, specialist consultancy) that does not require some social / people skills.
I've noticed something somewhat similar with my daughter and TV - when she was younger (about 2) she'd sometimes watch a lot of TV in the day. A lot of kiddie TV has similar visual properties to video games... engaging through bright colours, frequent picture changes ("flashing", etc), loud sounds...
This tends to be quite engaging and even exhausting to the senses while leaving the body idle. My guess is that there might also be some adrenaline or something built up this way too... in any event, the result of a too-much-TV schedule was to turn my toddler daughter into a grouch.
She's older now, and the games she plays (on the BBC website, for instance) tend to be fairly slow paced - painting, dress up, etc. I haven't seen much in the way of negative effects.....
So then buy an entry level phone which is simply a phone. Its not like they don't exist.
You know, people who respond on /. sure like cliches. Last phone I got with a 1.3 megapixel camera was... 4 years ago? My Nokia 6500 slide comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera which takes pretty decent pics. I use it as my "happy snappy" camera to take photos of my kids (about an average of 5 per day ;) ). I also use it to take landscape shots that I turn into panoramas with Hugin.
I know the Nokia phone software has had quality problems in the past - I used to use it on Windows with my old 6230i. My current setup, however, let's me plug my phone into its USB cable (which came with the phone), select "Photo sharing" on the phone and have f-spot (on Ubuntu) pick up the phone as a MTP device and import the pictures (which I can then tag and export to a web album).... I can also browse the phone's store from Bluetooth if I want.
The result is an easy way to keep a personal photo album. Decent software and integration between contexts (phone, PC, web) is key to this. In this regard open source has an advantage since integration (between different sources / services) is something that open source projects tend to do well. There's nothing stopping Nokia, etc. from improving their PC-side software, though - and integrating it with Flickr, etc. They manage to make a decent UI for the phone itself, so they've got one part of the puzzle right.
Of course, this is in South Africa where our mobile providers seem less insane than the descriptions I'm hearing of the USA ones.
I went through a similar experience - but for me it was realising how much time I was spending maintaining the spam filters on my home servers. I still have a home server, but Google Apps catches my mail. I then download from Google to home via getmail and access mail via IMAP. To the "outside world" it looks quite professional - my own domain, etc - and to me its easy to access mail from anywhere (I have Squirrelmail running on top of my IMAP for when I don't have an IMAP client nearby, and in the worst case, I can access my email at Google (although without the folder organisation I get on my home server)).
So you're telling me the Earth Liberation Front (anonymous and autonomous individuals or cells who do monkeywrenching) and Animal Liberation Front (a name used internationally by animal liberation activists who engage in direct action) are going to file a *lawsuit*?
From TFA: "He has a young family that live in a seemingly normal home in suburban Melbourne." Sucks to make assumptions, doesn't it?
And I have a single page which I used to keep track of my multiple email inboxes, my facebook account (which keeps me up to date with events I might be interested in) and multiple RSS feeds. Really, what's so tough? I have the most annoying apps on facebook blocked, and for now it fits into my world quite well as a way social-life-aggregator - letting me know when my favourite local band has a gig, for instance. Sure, the local bands could put me on their mailing lists, but with a specialised (web) application for keeping track of events, I can 'join' or 'leave' an event, be notified shortly before it happens, etc - its like having a notification service that slots straight into my calendar. My email tends not to do that automatically.
;) The world has moved on, new applications have appeared and some of us have learned to use them - same with social networking sites. I'm not quite sure why hating social networking sites seems to earn you automatic /. karma.
Two decades ago a friend of mine asked why we need multitasking on computers when he could only work in one app at a time.
Yes, the fine article talks about privacy laws. It also states that because of "budget constraints" the state mental health system can't handle the number of patients it needs to handle, with month-long waiting lists for counselling and "local health agencies" that don't follow up on patients. So Cho was a mentally ill man, far away from home, with a possibly history of untreated mental illness for several years.
/. summary is basically the first paragraph about privacy laws? Congratulations in promoting the culture of knee-jerk response!
Also from the article, the state of Virginia never passed on the information that Cho had been "adjudicated as a mental defective" to the "National Instant Check System", but it seems the state was not funded for its part in keeping this system up to date - the proposal is now to fund this activity.
So... all of this in the article, and the resultant
A lot of the books on filesharing networks are reference books - often the R 1000 for 100 pages type things you get in the IT business. In that case downloading the ebook makes a lot of sense, and in fact I can imagine certain publishing models being threatened by filesharing - for instance those of "high value" "standard" references like Effective C++.
An open standard for the validation process sounds like a really good thing. Who would police compliance with the process though? The reason I wonder about this is that if CAcert.org could adhere to some well known standard for validation, it would make its certificates much more believable.
Peter
This is a known problem with OpenDocument. From the sound of this article OpenDocument currently is not a solution for spreadsheet interchange due to the lack of a formula standard. The article talks about attempts to resolve that through OpenFormula, and more broadly states: "OpenDocument must only be about structure and how to represent content. It should define which standards are acceptable for each kind of data, not (re)create them all." While this sounds very neat and clean in an engineering kind of way, the fact is that formulas are only one kind of content for which a standard does not exist. What about macros? Imagine trying to work with a Word document with WordBasic macros embedded...
This is potentially quite a nightmare, and I think is the basis of some of the concerns alluded to by Microsoft. Of course, their framing of these concerns is self-serving - the point is to see where standards are lacking and define them in an open process. And of course, many many documents don't need things like macros. But the danger still remains: the early 1990s saw an attempt to 'standardize Unix' through a set of processes that simply became turf wars between different camps, with the result that 'the standard' was always standardizing significantly less functionality than users of the time had come to expect. OpenDocument could still fall into the same trap.
Any argument about these things that doesn't point to *specific* problems to be overcome is just FUD though.
Ok, then your wife might like OpenOffice 2. I'm playing with the beta now, and
;) (its much better to look at the Mail Merge Wizard help than to look at the help entry for mail merge which just suggests a brief procedure which in my install didn't work)
;)
1. tables - you just draw them
2. drawing tools - on hand (just like in MSWord)
3. mail merge - still not quite what i expect from MSWord. OpenOffice wants you to use a table from a database file for data, whereas with MSWord i can use an Excel spreadsheet as a datasource. and while OpenOffice Base seems fairly straightforward, small details (like lack of auto-increment for ID field in newly created table) will confuse Access users.
4. help - ok, but a bit obscure in places - for instance when looking for help on Mail Merge
5. loading speed - Writer starts in less than 4 seconds on my PC (that's without Quickstart). that's basically comparable to MSWord.
A bit of history here... I needed to do some technical writing a year or so back, and I found that MSWord beat OpenOffice by a long way for useability. Looking at the new beta for OpenOffice 2, I'd say they've caught up a lot. Of course, there are ways (e.g. scriptability) where OpenOffice is significantly better than MS Office, so this 'catch up' game isn't just about being 'as good', its about being better.
Peter
who has better things to be zealous about that MSWord vs. Writer
What is CSI then besides a TV drama that glorifies a (particular kind of) scientist? Or even Detective Goren in Law & Order - Criminal Intent? His job at least approximates that of the scientist... and there are even hints that he has undiagnosed Asperger Syndrome!
And as to TV shows glorifying teachers - how about 'Head of the Class' (ok, that was an 80s show, but I still remember it)? I can't recall recent examples, but that's probably got more to do with my TV viewing habits than anything else...
Peter
P.S. and Paris Hilton is a 'real person' how?
Maybe Steve Jobs could have fun and learn lots from sitting in on classes, but over here (South Africa) that is increasingly difficult to do. The university where I used to work (UWC) is surrounded by an electric fence for 'security reasons' and has card based access control. Its easier (most of the time) to get into classes at my old university (UCT), but the library is still impossible to enter (even for browsing) without a valid student card. And a friend of mine who teaches at the University of Guelph in Canada was told years ago that she could be fired for knowingly teaching a non-paid-up student in her class.
wxWindows will only fix your GUI. Have you actually read the article? As others have noted, it doesn't deal with GUI apps, but rather with the underlying operating system differences (such as fork() vs. CreateProcess()). Using wxWindows ain't gonna do anything to fix that!
Firstly, there are current 152 Indymedia websites, not 50 as reported. That means that the loss of ahimsa (the server that was taken down) caused 13% of the IMC (Indymedia Centre) sites to go down, not the "more than 40 percent" quoted.
Secondly, the article makes it sound as if there has been no progress on the cypherpunk front since 1996. While progress has been annoyingly slow, the growth of peer to peer technologies over the last few years has prompted a number of experiments - TOR, I2P, Freenet, etc. (see the I2P network comparisons page for a list), some of which seem to be getting pretty mature.
Thirdly, the bigger sites on ahimsa were up again in hours/days. They would have been up even quicker if a proper backup / mirror system had been in place, and in fact Indymedia techies have now been spurred into action by the ahimsa seizure to make sure the network is more robust. Think about this: the leftie scene is not particularly filled with technologically adept people. The Indymedia network runs on a shoestring budget (in terms of money / time). Despite this, the network was *still* able to respond and repair the damage fairly rapidly.
And finally, don't overestimate the competence of the FBI in this matter. Apparently when trying to do something about the picture of Swiss undercover cops on nantes.indymedia.org, one of the people they approached was from Seattle Indymedia, which has nothing to do with running either ahimsa or nantes.indymedia.org. And anyway, the disputed picture was quickly mirrored all over the place when it became "notorious" (just like the DeCSS code).
So, while I think Grossman's article is a good counterbalance to the mystical rants of people like John Perry Barlow, she leaves out a number of facts that show that the Internet can indeed be used to "route around censorship". Its all a matter of effort - in the 1970s and 80s, the ANC got around government censorship in South Africa by planting "pamphlet bombs" to scatter leaflets at busy rail stations (the cost: activists spending several years in jail). The Internet allows the subversion of censorship with far less effort, but of course it doesn't do it "by magic".
From the CNN article: "Polyakov told Interfax reporters that the 500 Days experiment will not include female volunteers."
I wonder if this is related to what happened last time they tried something like this. From space.com:
"Canadian physician, Dr. Judith Lapierre, tells a different tale. She was in the chamber for 110 days. "Somebody pulled me by my arm and tried to kiss me. Of course, we are not talking about [rape], but for me it was a high level of sexual harassment and if women don't stand up, the next thing that happens is usually that. I pushed the guy, but then I was told that in Russia I just should just give him a slap in the face. However, it is not my way of handling such things.""
If this (sexual harassment problems) is their reasoning behind the decision to exclude women, I think its a pretty poor reason. Why not rather exclude men?
Imagine the 'one-click' shopping patent - submitting an implementation hardly restricts the patent to a "specific algorithm".
And if you want to pin down patents to a "specific algorithm", how precise do you need to be? If you get too specific, patents effectively become almost identical to copyright. If you become too broad, you have... almost what we have now.
Imagine the code submitted along with a patent for a codec like MP3. Does your patent now cover just exactly that one way of encoding in MP3, or does it cover encoding in MP3 per-se? Or something in-between?
The RNC delegate info was never posted on the server in question (ahimsa). The suspicion within informed circles is that the FBI action might have been related to pictures of undercover Swiss police officers posted on the Nantes IMC site (which was hosted on ahimsa). The Swiss police had already questioned a volunteer from Nantes IMC about these photos. For more info, look at this summary.
For those who don't know / understand - Indymedia is a network, so this isn't "Indymedia's HD" but rather equipment run by a collective attached to one of the various IMCs (each IMC is autonomous according to Indymedia's Principles of Unity).
So my reading is that you only need to pass the test suite if you want to distribute executables. If you only want to distribute modified source, you can still do so under the original license.
If that is the case, I think this sounds like a decent idea. However, the information provided is rather vague.