You want a custom license that fits your situation, and the quickest way to get one like that is to pay a lawyer to write one for you. Also, it's probably the best way. Don't try writing it yourself unless you are a lawyer, which I guess you aren't.
What it sounds like what you want to do is to offer an explicit "character/universe license". Which allows people to use your characters/universe as they see fit. That's an interesting idea. But yeah, there isn't anything like that that I know of. Probably because most free culture licenses are written for software generally. Other types of work haven't really gained a large following for licensing stuff under a free license.
Yeah, but the BSD licenses are not free 'cause they require you to attribute the original author/s and copy that long text all around the place. If you want real freedom you use the Do What the Fuck you Want License.
To quote:
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 2, December 2004
Copyright (C) 2004 Sam Hocevar
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim or modified copies of this license document, and changing it is allowed as long as the name is changed.
DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE
TERMS AND CONDITIONS FOR COPYING, DISTRIBUTION AND MODIFICATION
"Just to be clear, using BSD licensed code in a GPL'ed work is fine - re-licensing the whole file under a more restrictive license is not." Actually, you're wrong. The BSD license allows anyone to come along and relicense the entire file/program or whatever, under any other license, so long as the conditions of the BSD license are followed. Which mainly come down to attribution. The same 'freedom" which allows a propitiatory software developer (such as Microsoft) to take BSD licensed stuff and then say that others are not allowed to redistribute without their permission, is the same "freedom" which allows GPL advocates to take the same code and relicense under the GPL. Of course, if the attribution is done correctly there is nothing to stop you from going to the original source of the program and doing what you like.
Oh wait, relicensing BSD stuff is only OK when you can't see the source code for the end result, not when you can see the source code, but can't use it because of that nasty GPL virus! Oh the horror!
There are a few reasons why I don't like Creative Commons, one of which is that they encourage people not to read the actual license text (just to read the "human readable summary"). But have a look at some of the restrictions one day. A quotes from Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported:
Except as otherwise agreed in writing by the Licensor or as may be otherwise permitted by applicable law, if You Reproduce, Distribute or Publicly Perform the Work either by itself or as part of any Adaptations or Collections, You must not distort, mutilate, modify or take other derogatory action in relation to the Work which would be prejudicial to the Original Author's honor or reputation.
Bet you didn't know that was in there (no actual bet intended). Moreover, most of the CC licenses hardly the easiest of licenses to read, too full of legalese. And which license? There are umpteen different ones, depending on which jurisdiction you want to cover. Not to mention the various versions (Flickr only let's you use version 2.0 licenses, rather than the latest 3.0 versions). Too much choice, leads to confusion.
Personally, what I want is a simple, short, easy to understand, weak copyleft (like Lesser GPL) for non-software. Does anyone know of a license like that?
Why would you want to host your website on an MS OS anyway, let alone one you don't even know how to administer properly.
My advice, look around for a good hosting deal (with good backups etc.) on shared hosting. Buy a hosting plan that can easily be upgraded to something dedicated as and when (and if) needed. Use your machine as a developer machine with all that entails (backups, version control etc.).
Forget about "the cloud". You're dreaming at this point. "The cloud" is something for when you actually need to radically increase the number of visitors that the site can handle.
Are you sure it is a valid CC number though? I would be all like, umm, fuckers, 5151 9410 2489 or whatever, making sure the check bits matched of course. I.e. give a fake number. Just like if some random person on the street asked for my password in exchange for a pen or something. "Sure, it's 'fuckyoucunts', now can I have my pen?"
"A major function of the federal reserve is to prevent the infinite expansion of the M1/M2 money supply. I don't understand how Bitcoin prevents this. Is there a mechanism?"
Yes, only 21 million coins can be created. Dun dun dun.
The "value" given to gold is more than it's actual use value. Gold is given value because it is pretty, not because it is useful. It would be priced more like copper if it's use value was the sole value looked at.
Five years ago I couldn't drink green tea. However, I persisted, and can now, if not enjoy, accept, the taste. Five months ago, I couldn't eat natto. However, I persisted, and can now eat, and indeed enjoy the taste.
You have to eat a small amount every now and again until you get used to it. Similar food experiences can be had with yeast extract based spreads such as vegemite and marmite.
The first thought that came to mind was "fucking hard". The next was RPG (that standa for "role playing game", not a term from a FPS that starts with "rocket").
Someone asked if Diablo is a "roguelike". Well, Yes? No.
The "roguelike" that I've played the most of is Nethack. Even when cheating outrageously (save scumming, fiddling with bones files, all the tricks in the book), I still can't win. It's just too fucking hard! But, I've played a lot of other RPGs (e.g. Exile and Avernum from Spiderweb Software), which are winnable.
Then again, Dwarf Fortress isn't exactly an RPG.
Maybe we need to stop putting everything into little boxes?
I hope you told them to bugger off (politely of course). "Am I under-arrest?" "Am I free to go?" (if no, to the second question, you are under arrest no matter what they say). "I do not consent to any search" "I have the right to remain silent and I wish to exercise that right" "I want to speak to a lawyer".
You did nothing wrong, and therefore have no reason to speak to the police. Even if you did do something wrong, you shouldn't speak to the police because that will just give them evidence to use against you.
It's not your job to make the police's job easier, but it is your job to defend your rights, which include not giving the police the time of day.
Apparently I'm not the only one who dislikes the design. from here:
When Gawker Media launched a big redesign in February 2011, its traffic halved. That can happen because even when you do good things, people don’t like change. It can take them a while to adapt to the new environment. So, assuming for a moment the Gawker redesign was a good thing, have things picked up again?
“Turns out, according to Gawker’s public statistics, things are much, much worse than was originally reported,” The Atlantic Online states. “Yes, the redesign cut traffic in half almost instantly, but instead of coming back, even more readers left the site behind.”
I think it's more that Gawker uses a moronic JavaScript method of making pages, with no non-JavaScript fallback. I use NoScript, therefore, I'm not going to see the article. That's fine, as I'm sure that someone else will post all the interesting bits in the discussion thread.
I really wanted to see those animated gifs that take ages to make though. They must be awesome. But not enough to potentially open up my browser to an attack. If Gawker are too incompetent to make a non-JavaScript fallback,I don't thin they'd be able to protect themselves against someone taking over their site and inserting malicious JavaScript in it...
(Also, MNG and APNG, neither of which has any real support. Have the GIF patents expired yet?)
China is in no way communist. It's as capitalist as they come. They only thing "communist" about them is the name of the party in power. What's the similarity between the economic and political systems of the former USSR (along its 70 odd year life), Cuba (over the last 50 odd years), Vietnam since 1975, PRC since '49, North Korea since the '50s, and Romania, East Germany, and other Eastern European "Warsaw Bloc" countries when they were "communist"?
Oh wait, fuck all. Apart from, most of the time, the party in power having the word "communist" in its name.
Sure, there are many companies that are owned by the government in China. There are also a lot more that aren't. That's part of the reason you hear all these cases of people dying from contaminated milk products and the like. Capitalists making a killing. Saving money at any cost.
The only communist state which still traditionally follows Marxist-Leninist doctrine and maintains a largely planned economy is Cuba, which describes itself as "a socialist state guided by ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin and in transition to a communist society".
When they say ban, they mean IP ban presumably. As in, the robot doesn't follow robots.txt, and because of this, they get their ass kicked, and banned. That makes a lot more sense I think.
I don't know either (the site is "Watching the Watchers"), but considering the licence, they have every right as far as I can tell to republish the article in the way they did. The link you provide is linked to from the bottom of the article. The licence is Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). I cannot see anywhere on the Wikimedia blog how attribution should be given. My understanding is that in such cases how the WtW site referenced the original is sufficient. The relevant section of the licence is 4.b
If You Distribute, or Publicly Perform the Work or any Adaptations or Collections, You must, unless a request has been made pursuant to Section 4(a), keep intact all copyright notices for the Work and provide, reasonable to the medium or means You are utilizing: (i) the name of the Original Author (or pseudonym, if applicable) if supplied, and/or if the Original Author and/or Licensor designate another party or parties (e.g., a sponsor institute, publishing entity, journal) for attribution ("Attribution Parties") in Licensor's copyright notice, terms of service or by other reasonable means, the name of such party or parties; (ii) the title of the Work if supplied; (iii) to the extent reasonably practicable, the URI, if any, that Licensor specifies to be associated with the Work, unless such URI does not refer to the copyright notice or licensing information for the Work; and (iv) , consistent with Section 3(b), in the case of an Adaptation, a credit identifying the use of the Work in the Adaptation (e.g., "French translation of the Work by Original Author," or "Screenplay based on original Work by Original Author"). The credit required by this Section 4 (b) may be implemented in any reasonable manner; provided, however, that in the case of a Adaptation or Collection, at a minimum such credit will appear, if a credit for all...
---
And for the delitionists out there,
“I’ve written articles in many areas, and in many cases I could show my colleagues what I had done in their field,” Michel says. “I’d like to think that by now most of them have a favorable opinion of Wikipedia. Let’s face it: Guillaume de Dole, now a Good Article, there’s no database entry or encyclopedic article anywhere that compares to the Wikipedia article on that poem (and I realize that that says as much about Wikipedia as about the anywhere else).”
1.0 normally means feature complete for such projects. The programs will often be perfectly valid, bug-free, stable etc. However, because they don't yet implement all the features that the developers want, they aren't yet called 1.0. I believe with Inkscape that they want to have support for the full SVG 1.1 standard before they put the version number at 1.0. See the Inkscape Roadmap.
Also, numbers are the easiest way to distinguish between two different versions of a program. Unless you would rather switch to version control hashes?
Sooo, an adequate demonstration of the need for redundancy when it comes to telecommunication networks. Honestly, the only reason this is news is because it cut of 3.2 million people, and it was caused by an old lady. But telecommunication cables are cut all the time, both by people and accidents.
Yet, if I cut the phone line near my parents place, they'll still have Internet access (satellite). Indeed, I suspect they would still have phone access, because the cable would need to be cut on either side of their house to completely kill it.
I wonder what the Armenian response to this is going to be? Maybe make sure to get another outside link? (Perhaps via a country to the south, such as Iran or Turkey.)
Anyway, the article has very little to add to the summary, so I wouldn't bother reading it. (Or, so I was told by a neighbour who I get to read the articles so I don't have to.)
I read this story a few days ago. What strikes me is that I had invented better a encryption scheme when I was 16. See, I had read somewhere that certain letters (such as 'e') show up more times in English than other letters (such as 'x'). I also read that using frequency analysis is one way you can break single letter cipers. So, I did something that I was (was) rather proud of.
I found out the most frequent letters, and instead instead of having single letter ciper, I replaced each one with more than one other character. So, 'e' might have been '6', 'j' and 'q', while 's' in this scheme might have been '3', 'f' and 'o' (or whatever). I was attempting to foil any frequency analysis that someone (who I don't know) might have done on my secret messages.
Only trouble was, the first version of the program had a bug. I think it was underscore was replaced with the wrong character in the decryption phase. Once I caught that though, it was all good.
Of course, a couple of years latter I learnt about PGP and GPG and RSA and all that good stuff. I no longer rely on home-built faulty encryption that requires both parties to have the code to decrypted the message.
I use my own mail. I have a domain (or two) and I normally get my mail down via either POP or IMAP. I used to use Yahoo a lot, back in the day, but it seems the only people who email me there now are corporations I haven't given an email at one of my domains.
To settle its own antitrust suit back in 2002, Microsoft had to agree to new Windows licensing requirements and "a prohibition on retaliation against OEMs for promoting competing middleware and operating systems." Although roughly nine out of 10 desktops and laptops still run Windows, Department of Justice documents say "these provisions are working as planned," and note that "Dell has begun to ship PCs loaded with the Linux operating system in place of Windows."
--- I have to say, it's all part of the same systematic tactics to crush competition. By forcing Netscape out of the market, MS could potentially sell more copies of IIS, what with the MSIE only extensions. Netscape was not just competing for browser share. Not to mention another quote: "Microsoft's anticompetitive activities also affected Sun's Java technologies. "
Also, the article talks a lot about Google. Microsoft is basically being hypocritical. But that's not news. It's not news that a corporation wants to be able to screw over consumers and competitor, but objects to competitor doing the same.
Personally I use Google search because it seems to work the best for me. However, I never let 'em set cookies, and rarely let 'em run JavaScript. I don't use any other Google tool on a regular basis ('cept for Maps). I don't trust Google, but I don't trust any big corporation. Fuck 'em all.
The UK government also suggests staying outside 80KM from the nasty nasty nuke power plant. But I didn't know that at the time I posted, otherwise I would have put it down as well. Am I therefore also a British subject?
I'm sure you could find me easily enough if you really wanted to. Well, and enough time and money I guess. I have basically no footprint on this city. The government only knows that I'm in the country, not where I am. My name's not on any hotel documentation, lease or other paperwork. I'm not working. (As mentioned,) I have no friends.
You think I'm an Australian, and you think I'm "living in the outskirts of Tokyo". I think it'll take you more than that to find out who I am.
A link to the actual site for the program: http://ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy/. Also, this program has copyright notices for 2010. So... (Though admittedly the article is dated 30 March 2011.)
Anyway, yeah, the program is written in Python it seems. And it doesn't even run for me. Possibly because some dependencies aren't in the Ubuntu 9.10 universe. Bleh.
Anyway, I just wanted to say one other thing. I ain't worried, 'cause I don't use Social Networks! Hah! You crazy stalking types are going to have to try harder to find out about me than that. (Please help, I have no friends.)
Slashdot Mirror
Talk to your lawyer. Seriously.
You want a custom license that fits your situation, and the quickest way to get one like that is to pay a lawyer to write one for you. Also, it's probably the best way. Don't try writing it yourself unless you are a lawyer, which I guess you aren't.
What it sounds like what you want to do is to offer an explicit "character/universe license". Which allows people to use your characters/universe as they see fit. That's an interesting idea. But yeah, there isn't anything like that that I know of. Probably because most free culture licenses are written for software generally. Other types of work haven't really gained a large following for licensing stuff under a free license.
Yeah, but the BSD licenses are not free 'cause they require you to attribute the original author/s and copy that long text all around the place. If you want real freedom you use the Do What the Fuck you Want License.
To quote:
"Just to be clear, using BSD licensed code in a GPL'ed work is fine - re-licensing the whole file under a more restrictive license is not."
Actually, you're wrong. The BSD license allows anyone to come along and relicense the entire file/program or whatever, under any other license, so long as the conditions of the BSD license are followed. Which mainly come down to attribution.
The same 'freedom" which allows a propitiatory software developer (such as Microsoft) to take BSD licensed stuff and then say that others are not allowed to redistribute without their permission, is the same "freedom" which allows GPL advocates to take the same code and relicense under the GPL. Of course, if the attribution is done correctly there is nothing to stop you from going to the original source of the program and doing what you like.
Oh wait, relicensing BSD stuff is only OK when you can't see the source code for the end result, not when you can see the source code, but can't use it because of that nasty GPL virus! Oh the horror!
There are a few reasons why I don't like Creative Commons, one of which is that they encourage people not to read the actual license text (just to read the "human readable summary"). But have a look at some of the restrictions one day. A quotes from Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported:
Bet you didn't know that was in there (no actual bet intended).
Moreover, most of the CC licenses hardly the easiest of licenses to read, too full of legalese. And which license? There are umpteen different ones, depending on which jurisdiction you want to cover. Not to mention the various versions (Flickr only let's you use version 2.0 licenses, rather than the latest 3.0 versions). Too much choice, leads to confusion.
Personally, what I want is a simple, short, easy to understand, weak copyleft (like Lesser GPL) for non-software. Does anyone know of a license like that?
Why would you want to host your website on an MS OS anyway, let alone one you don't even know how to administer properly.
My advice, look around for a good hosting deal (with good backups etc.) on shared hosting. Buy a hosting plan that can easily be upgraded to something dedicated as and when (and if) needed. Use your machine as a developer machine with all that entails (backups, version control etc.).
Forget about "the cloud". You're dreaming at this point. "The cloud" is something for when you actually need to radically increase the number of visitors that the site can handle.
Are you sure it is a valid CC number though? I would be all like, umm, fuckers, 5151 9410 2489 or whatever, making sure the check bits matched of course. I.e. give a fake number. Just like if some random person on the street asked for my password in exchange for a pen or something. "Sure, it's 'fuckyoucunts', now can I have my pen?"
There is a JavaScript miner as well.
A simple Google search provides these links:
Bitcoin JavaScipt Miner on Github
Slush made one too
But what would be the point of actually using one? They'd be too slow.
"A major function of the federal reserve is to prevent the infinite expansion of the M1/M2 money supply. I don't understand how Bitcoin prevents this. Is there a mechanism?"
Yes, only 21 million coins can be created. Dun dun dun.
The "value" given to gold is more than it's actual use value. Gold is given value because it is pretty, not because it is useful. It would be priced more like copper if it's use value was the sole value looked at.
As for generating coins, you aren't going to.
Check out this bitcoin generation calculator. Use the old calculator as well.
You also won't see any transactions until you actually get someone to pay you something.
'Cause I live in a country where it's the national fucking drink! Often even just plain water isn't available.
Besides, I do actually like the stuff, well some of the stuff, now.
Five years ago I couldn't drink green tea. However, I persisted, and can now, if not enjoy, accept, the taste.
Five months ago, I couldn't eat natto. However, I persisted, and can now eat, and indeed enjoy the taste.
You have to eat a small amount every now and again until you get used to it. Similar food experiences can be had with yeast extract based spreads such as vegemite and marmite.
The first thought that came to mind was "fucking hard". The next was RPG (that standa for "role playing game", not a term from a FPS that starts with "rocket").
Someone asked if Diablo is a "roguelike". Well, Yes? No.
The "roguelike" that I've played the most of is Nethack. Even when cheating outrageously (save scumming, fiddling with bones files, all the tricks in the book), I still can't win. It's just too fucking hard! But, I've played a lot of other RPGs (e.g. Exile and Avernum from Spiderweb Software), which are winnable.
Then again, Dwarf Fortress isn't exactly an RPG.
Maybe we need to stop putting everything into little boxes?
I hope you told them to bugger off (politely of course). "Am I under-arrest?" "Am I free to go?" (if no, to the second question, you are under arrest no matter what they say). "I do not consent to any search" "I have the right to remain silent and I wish to exercise that right" "I want to speak to a lawyer".
You did nothing wrong, and therefore have no reason to speak to the police. Even if you did do something wrong, you shouldn't speak to the police because that will just give them evidence to use against you.
It's not your job to make the police's job easier, but it is your job to defend your rights, which include not giving the police the time of day.
Apparently I'm not the only one who dislikes the design. from here:
I think it's more that Gawker uses a moronic JavaScript method of making pages, with no non-JavaScript fallback. I use NoScript, therefore, I'm not going to see the article. That's fine, as I'm sure that someone else will post all the interesting bits in the discussion thread.
I really wanted to see those animated gifs that take ages to make though. They must be awesome. But not enough to potentially open up my browser to an attack. If Gawker are too incompetent to make a non-JavaScript fallback,I don't thin they'd be able to protect themselves against someone taking over their site and inserting malicious JavaScript in it...
(Also, MNG and APNG, neither of which has any real support. Have the GIF patents expired yet?)
China is in no way communist. It's as capitalist as they come. They only thing "communist" about them is the name of the party in power. What's the similarity between the economic and political systems of the former USSR (along its 70 odd year life), Cuba (over the last 50 odd years), Vietnam since 1975, PRC since '49, North Korea since the '50s, and Romania, East Germany, and other Eastern European "Warsaw Bloc" countries when they were "communist"?
Oh wait, fuck all. Apart from, most of the time, the party in power having the word "communist" in its name.
Sure, there are many companies that are owned by the government in China. There are also a lot more that aren't. That's part of the reason you hear all these cases of people dying from contaminated milk products and the like. Capitalists making a killing. Saving money at any cost.
Wikipedia (not a great source for most political ideas) says:
When they say ban, they mean IP ban presumably. As in, the robot doesn't follow robots.txt, and because of this, they get their ass kicked, and banned. That makes a lot more sense I think.
I don't know either (the site is "Watching the Watchers"), but considering the licence, they have every right as far as I can tell to republish the article in the way they did. The link you provide is linked to from the bottom of the article.
The licence is Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0). I cannot see anywhere on the Wikimedia blog how attribution should be given. My understanding is that in such cases how the WtW site referenced the original is sufficient. The relevant section of the licence is 4.b
---
And for the delitionists out there,
1.0 normally means feature complete for such projects. The programs will often be perfectly valid, bug-free, stable etc. However, because they don't yet implement all the features that the developers want, they aren't yet called 1.0. I believe with Inkscape that they want to have support for the full SVG 1.1 standard before they put the version number at 1.0. See the Inkscape Roadmap.
Also, numbers are the easiest way to distinguish between two different versions of a program. Unless you would rather switch to version control hashes?
Sooo, an adequate demonstration of the need for redundancy when it comes to telecommunication networks. Honestly, the only reason this is news is because it cut of 3.2 million people, and it was caused by an old lady. But telecommunication cables are cut all the time, both by people and accidents.
Yet, if I cut the phone line near my parents place, they'll still have Internet access (satellite). Indeed, I suspect they would still have phone access, because the cable would need to be cut on either side of their house to completely kill it.
I wonder what the Armenian response to this is going to be? Maybe make sure to get another outside link? (Perhaps via a country to the south, such as Iran or Turkey.)
Anyway, the article has very little to add to the summary, so I wouldn't bother reading it. (Or, so I was told by a neighbour who I get to read the articles so I don't have to.)
I read this story a few days ago. What strikes me is that I had invented better a encryption scheme when I was 16. See, I had read somewhere that certain letters (such as 'e') show up more times in English than other letters (such as 'x'). I also read that using frequency analysis is one way you can break single letter cipers. So, I did something that I was (was) rather proud of.
I found out the most frequent letters, and instead instead of having single letter ciper, I replaced each one with more than one other character. So, 'e' might have been '6', 'j' and 'q', while 's' in this scheme might have been '3', 'f' and 'o' (or whatever). I was attempting to foil any frequency analysis that someone (who I don't know) might have done on my secret messages.
Only trouble was, the first version of the program had a bug. I think it was underscore was replaced with the wrong character in the decryption phase. Once I caught that though, it was all good.
Of course, a couple of years latter I learnt about PGP and GPG and RSA and all that good stuff. I no longer rely on home-built faulty encryption that requires both parties to have the code to decrypted the message.
I use my own mail. I have a domain (or two) and I normally get my mail down via either POP or IMAP. I used to use Yahoo a lot, back in the day, but it seems the only people who email me there now are corporations I haven't given an email at one of my domains.
Yeah baby.
---
I have to say, it's all part of the same systematic tactics to crush competition. By forcing Netscape out of the market, MS could potentially sell more copies of IIS, what with the MSIE only extensions. Netscape was not just competing for browser share. Not to mention another quote: "Microsoft's anticompetitive activities also affected Sun's Java technologies. "
Also, the article talks a lot about Google. Microsoft is basically being hypocritical. But that's not news. It's not news that a corporation wants to be able to screw over consumers and competitor, but objects to competitor doing the same.
Personally I use Google search because it seems to work the best for me. However, I never let 'em set cookies, and rarely let 'em run JavaScript. I don't use any other Google tool on a regular basis ('cept for Maps). I don't trust Google, but I don't trust any big corporation. Fuck 'em all.
The UK government also suggests staying outside 80KM from the nasty nasty nuke power plant. But I didn't know that at the time I posted, otherwise I would have put it down as well. Am I therefore also a British subject?
I'm sure you could find me easily enough if you really wanted to. Well, and enough time and money I guess. I have basically no footprint on this city. The government only knows that I'm in the country, not where I am. My name's not on any hotel documentation, lease or other paperwork. I'm not working. (As mentioned,) I have no friends.
You think I'm an Australian, and you think I'm "living in the outskirts of Tokyo". I think it'll take you more than that to find out who I am.
A link to the actual site for the program: http://ilektrojohn.github.com/creepy/. Also, this program has copyright notices for 2010. So... (Though admittedly the article is dated 30 March 2011.)
Anyway, yeah, the program is written in Python it seems. And it doesn't even run for me.
Possibly because some dependencies aren't in the Ubuntu 9.10 universe. Bleh.
Anyway, I just wanted to say one other thing. I ain't worried, 'cause I don't use Social Networks! Hah! You crazy stalking types are going to have to try harder to find out about me than that. (Please help, I have no friends.)