I hear this a lot but about gay people I've never seen any firm evidence to back it up. Just asserting the "math and logic is sound" is not a convincing argument. Gay people suffer from poverty, unemployment and recession like anyone else.
I think even the powerful lobbies of Sony and BMG would struggle to get copyright infringement re-defined as a serious crime on par with terrorism and organised crime in even the most corrupt EU nations, much as they would like to. Not impossible, but hopefully very unlikely.
Could you also provide a link to the text of the directive that you got the above quote from?
"However, despite being touted as an anti-terrorist measure, the record industry has already admitted interest in aquiring such data."
According to this article the directive as it stands only allows access to data for the purposes of prosecuting certain, specified serious crimes which hopefylly won't include copyright infringement. This was part of the compromise agreed with the European Parliament. Of course, this may change with further legislation
The statements, which had been inserted anonymously, had been removed by the time he wrote the article.
It's irrelevant the article is correct now or at the time the article was written, the incorrect version was up for 132 days before Jimbo himself had to correct it and only after he had been contacted by the subject of the article himself. From this who can say what other bias and inaccuracy lurks in other articles.
I think the stuff about making carriers liable for the content their users distribute is just fluff: users will always be able to switch to a carrier outside of any jurisdiction. What is important to note here is that once again we have clear evidence that Wikipedia process, noble as it is, is clearly not scaling with it's exponential popularity. Regardless of what you think about Wikipedia, it is becomming clear that it has a non-trivial problem with bias and accuracy. To be taken seriously it needs to start living up to the claim that it is an encyclopaedia, rather than just a scrapbook.
What I'd really like to see in a new version of the GPL is a transparency clause, as in the GNU FDL: i.e. clarify the part of the GPL that defines the source to be the "preferred form of the work for making modifications" so that it is restricted to open formats, such as plain text or XML. I can see a trend in modern computing to distribute "source" in proprietary formats and I think such a clause would head this off. Not only that, but it would make it easier to apply the GPL to non-software works.
Wikipedia - controversial, contradictory, sometimes extreme points of view on current politics.
I would politely argue that "sometimes" is too weak a word: as I noted before, Wikipedia has a wide-spread, highly distributed and non-trivial problem with bias in it's articles. From my own sampling of controversial articles, I would say that most, if not all, of these pages contain at least one or two paragraphs that state opinion as undisputed fact. That doesn't cover the numerous stubs and "hidden" articles (sub-sub and sub-sub-sub-etc articles that hide amidst the forest of articles in Wikipedia). Short of a complete slash-and-burn approach I don't see a solution to this.
I guess it does not matter too much to me since I don't think I would ever use wikipedia as a source for political information. I think most of the people concerned about politics are concerned with the information provided to posterity. I just want facts and some popular hypothesis.
But, as the article states, the average reader probably does not have the means to resolve factual errors (nor should he/she be expected to). Similarly, he/she has no means to recognise the the polical bias. Whilst you may not go to Wikipedia for political information, others may do so and that is my concern.
Finally, bias may not simply extend to controversial articles. I noticed "bias creep", where particularly dedicated authors modify any and all articles even loosely related to a controversial topic so as to better push their agenda.
I won't argue with you over which is better in terms of factual correctness - I haven't investigated the factual correctness of Wikipedia myself and I think the author of the article above makes a pretty good case against it.
My main point of concern with Wikipedia is it's political biases. It's true other encyclopaedias have bias, but Wikipedia seems to openly invite it, covering controversial, non-encyclopaedic topics that normal encyclopaedias wouldn't dream of covering for precisely this reason. Most encyclopedia author would keep neutrality in mind, and would have editors to moderate articles. Most authors of controversial articles don't even pretend to have neutrality in mind, merely adding their screed and leaving it for others to moderate later (leading to more edit wars).
Another reason for this is that the "debate" method of reaching neutrality in Wikipedia seems to work in reverse: rather than starting from a moderate position, most authors tend to start from an extreme position so as to better "negotiate" a neutral position. This inevitably leads to more edit wars.
I think one of the most serious problems with Wikipedia, and one that is dealt with extremely poorly by the site admins, is bias. Whilst most articles are relatively free of bias (if not other factual errors) those that are in anyway controversial act as a magnet for those individuals with strong opinions.
The Wikipedia admins and sysops make a blanket assertion that "neutrality is non-negotiable" but then simply abidcate all responsibility for maintaining neutrality, relying on individuals to exercise their common sense (always a recipe for disaster IMHO) on what is and isn't "neutral" (frequently a controversial subject itself) and only resorting to "dispute arbitration" as a last resort which seems to amount to locking for the page and putting a plaster over the article until the next time someone comes along and starts an edit war.
The result is that Wikipedia contains a vast amount of bias, both concious and unconcious. Possibly, more than any group of individuals can possibly hope to go through and resolve, nevermind the constant fire-fighting required to maintain the existing neutrality of articles. Whenever Wikipedia release another public announcement that they've reached X number of articles I shudder: all that additional mess, who is going to tidy it up?
What frighens me even more is that more and more google searches return links from Wikipedia, or articles reproduced from there.
I think the problem with Wikipedia is that, for many, it has become the "mind of the Internet" - that is, it is the final, authorative source of information. The reasons edit wars are so frequent is that people read an article, see something they don't like and think "now everyone will think that!" (and for some people this seems to be correct).
A way of fixing this is to "break" the authorativeness of individual articles. The problem is that the namespace itself is a "scarce resource" which is why we see so many edit wars break out and this gives Wikipedia its authorative nature. A better solution, one previously proposed, would be to have multiple versions of articles existing in parallel, possibly even a version for each user. There could exist some method of then "voting", although this might create as many problems as the present system: see E2. Perhaps, a group of experts could be appointed to review versions of articles that don't have time to write themselves and selection could be based on this.
Certainly the present system isn't working: I know this because when I ask myself who do I trust more, Wikipedia or a commercial encyclopedia, the answer is always to pay for my information.
I really do not understand this current obsession with science fiction being about future prediction - from my perspective, science fiction is not about predicting the future - surely it would be called "future faction" instead. Science fiction is about science, about it's impact upon us, about our hopes and fears of progress and about, more than anything else, history and society itself and how technology affects them.
For evidence of this look no further than the fact the old science fiction tends to age so badly - (original) Star Trek, Dr. Who - they all seem so dated now, but I'm sure at they time they must have seemed realistic because they reflected the hopes and expectations of the time. There are some exceptions - Clarke predicted satelites... but then, he did come up with the idea in the first place so this is less an example of future prediction than future creation.
What is more, I think making predictions about the future is lazy thinking. The universe has a sneaky way of subverting everyone's expectations. Everyone whose tried it - from Marx to Fukuyama - has ended up with egg on their face. Trying to predict the future is a just a really good way of giving your critics and open field to dismiss you.
I think that's a good idea... the commentary I imagine would act as a let-off valve for the sort of opinionated discourse that doesn't really belong in the "factual" part of the document and by limited the size you constrain its influence. However, I can see two problems with this:
a) People would then begin to focus on the controversial commentary rather than the content and this could simply turn Wikipedia into another rant site.
b) The arguments would simply shift to what constitutes commentary and real content. After all, the "entry despots" already consider their biased opinions to be fact, not commentary.
c) What happens when you use up the quota in the commentary space? Does new commentary simply "bump" the old commentary, or does the first contributor get first say? I can see problems with both approaches.
I thinks it interesting to see how too much un-constrained freedom can create a power vacuum all-to-easily filled by those who seek to force their own views on others.
Tthe "entry despots" you talk about get away with it mainly because the entirety of Wikipedia is now too large for any single group of individuals to police, so they can enforce their will by making multiple reversions, thereby making the cost of altering "their" page so much more higher. Everyone else finds the exercise so annoying they can no longer be bothered.
In which case, the process becomes less of a dialogue to reach a mutual agreement and more of a battle of wills to see who is the most rabid.
I agree: most editors try their best to practice a NPOV policy but Wikipedia still contains many articles of dubious nature, inlcuding the GNAA, and one rather spitefully entitled "Gay Disease". As already stated, it does not in fact have a "democratic" process, but a rather despotic one where those who revert the most without attracting the attention of more moderate editors win. Editing an essay to increase its "neutrality" can often involve becomming embroiled in a pointless edit/flame war and I for one have too little time in my life to be bothered trying to reason with "article kings" who refuse to accept any other version of the "truth" than their own. It's easy to be neutral, but with Wikipedia whose definition of "neutral" are we talking about?
Right! People who can can really predict future trends--like the development of satellite-based communications, for example--wouldn't waste their time writing science fiction.
I hate to pedantic but Clarke didn't predict the development of satellite-based communications, he actually invented and patented the idea himself thereby creating the future. This smacks of cheating, somewhat.
Well, I guess that makes the fact that he was hounded to his death, OK? I suppose it must be, as long as it's done under the remit of national security, not that I would feel particularly secure under such a regime.
To be honest, you remarks put the blame back onto Turing: he was gay and the CIA were just protecting themselves. What this ignores is that there is nothing wrong in and off being gay, except for the pressure applied by society. The CIA's and British Governments handling of Turing only cyclically contribute to this.
But, it's nice to see that 50 years on from the death of the great figure who gave the world so much people's attitudes have moved on.
I have read the CCPL in detail. Section 4 does deal with part of the problem (I assume it is some sort of anti-DRM/DMCA clause). In fact, this section is repeated in various clauses of the CCPL, not just section 4, although that particular section does refer to modifications.
However, it does not deal with the situation where an author publishes a work in a proprietary format that requires expensive software to edit/modify. In this way, you can make it prohibitively expensive to modify your content by publishing in closed formats whose editors have no free software counterparts.
Similarly, if, say, you publish your text in image form to preserve the formatting this satisfies the above: it is not a technical measure that controls access to the content. It just makes the task of obtaining the actual text non-trivial. It's possible, but only in the same way it is possible to obtain a version of the source code from a binary executable using a decompiler, which is why we have free software/open source in the first place.
I don't think defining modifiable and transparent copy for multiple media is a problem: to produce all computer media you require software to open data files and modify them. The condition that you make such data files publicly available and ensure such a copy is published in a open standard format would not be all that difficult to define. The FDL already goes some way to doing this for documents and images.
for many is a moot point.
Hey, I'm sure it is a moot point for you, just as open source was a moot point for many commercial before Linux. That doesn't mean that it's not an important point, just that you don't realise its relevance and importance.
Anyway, while I can see why the GPL is appropriate for you if you're insisting on "source code", but in my opinion it doesn't make a license for non-software that doesn't have this requirement non-free.
I suppose it depends on how you define 'free': our experience of the Open Gaming License used by Wizard's of the Coast to publish their d20 system demonstrates that merely making content 'open' is not enough. What use is open content if it is only distributed in a closed format with DMCA-protected copy protection on it, for example? That's not free at all because it restricts the basic freedom to modify the work.
We crafted this particular freedom particularly because of this issue and, in our humble opinion, it's no different to the freedom that the source code must be provided with free software.
I run my own "free content" site for a series of roleplaying games, the FRPGC. We publish material for roleplaying games in a manner consistant with the "four freedoms" of the FSF. Unfortunately, the FSF doesn't share our view that the freedoms they apply to software should apply to other media.
With that in mind we've had a real struggle trying to find a license that is compatible with our philosophy. The FDL has "closed" Invariant Sections, is GPL-incompatible and is otherwise far too complicated, the CCPL is really and open source license for content, not a free content license and is GPL-incompatible.
In the end we settled upon using the GPL for our content: primarily because it does most things other content licenses do (copyleft, require modifiable copy, attribution) with the bonus that it has a vast wealth of material already published under it. For a roleplaying game publisher this is perfect especially when we decide to write computer games/PC generators/whatever for our material.
"Whoever proposed this absolute ban on cookies clearly has never done any kind of web development. Sheesh."
The question is have you ever done any kind of web development with cookies? The best thing that could ever happen to web developers is the abolishment of those pesky little cookies. No more cross-browser problems, no more fiddling with JavaScript because some browsers (you know who you are) don't support Cookie headers. DiE CooKieS DiE!
Is it me, or is JBuilder30 a Windows NT only app because the JBUILDER.BAT file uses directory/file names of characters longer than 8 characters (which can be resolved if you install the IDE to a safe directory name like C:\JBUILD30\) and the fact that the batch file runner cannot handle long strings of characters to store in its environment variables. Couldn't it be the simplest thing to do to write a small program in C++ say that does all that for you? Or does anyone know any betteer
I concur with anthonyclark: we need to act and we need to act now. Rather than post ourselves to death about this we should be collecting the email addresses of the MEPs and swamping them with letters of objection. Amnesty International has a history of success with this approach.
Your Rights Online could become a Internet Freedom of Speech resource, with a repository for contact details for people involved in Internet Content Regulation. Perhaps such details could be included as part of the course in the headers of YRO stories. There would of course have to be some guidelines, for example:
a) Offensive postings have a negative effect and should be avoided.
b) Merely posting several emails repeatedly will reduce the idea of overwhelming objection to such content policies.
Again, AI has extensive guidelines for this and I'm sure we can modify these for the Internet.
anthonyclark is right that with Big Business Big Money the odds are against us, but if we can demonstrate that this is a hugely unpopular move from the point of view of the online community (and I don't just mean slashdot) then we hit them where it hurts the most: popularity polls.
I think this thread has gone completely off topic. My original observation, as gig pointed out, was that there was a distinct lack of of homosexuals in Star Trek despite the programs history of inclusive casting. Star Trek TM betrays Gene Rodneburys ideals of the Star Trek TV Series.
What I did not expect when I mentioned homosexuality in this context was discusions about whether homosexuality was acceptable or not. The fact that the majority of the replies to my original post are of the nature that homosexuality is somehow disdainful says something very bad about the people who use slashdot.
Not only are they widely off topic but they are irrelevant: no one cares what they think, especially any self-respecting homosexuals. I only mentioned homosexuality in passing as an example of the moral relavatism of Star Trek. Some of you just heard the word homosexual and went on a posting frenzy: I think this is the true definition of homophobia.
Finally, I would just like to point out that if I had mentioned the fact that Star Trek had never used a mixed-race relationship (which is has) no-one would have flamed on about how appauling it was. 10 or 20 years ago they might have. I only hope that in 10 or 20 years from now people (and especially the supposedly forward-looking members of slashdot) will be more open minded.
Slashdot Mirror
I hear this a lot but about gay people I've never seen any firm evidence to back it up. Just asserting the "math and logic is sound" is not a convincing argument. Gay people suffer from poverty, unemployment and recession like anyone else.
...more likely to attract the ire of young people and Occupy movement.
I think even the powerful lobbies of Sony and BMG would struggle to get copyright infringement re-defined as a serious crime on par with terrorism and organised crime in even the most corrupt EU nations, much as they would like to. Not impossible, but hopefully very unlikely.
Could you also provide a link to the text of the directive that you got the above quote from?
According to this article the directive as it stands only allows access to data for the purposes of prosecuting certain, specified serious crimes which hopefylly won't include copyright infringement. This was part of the compromise agreed with the European Parliament. Of course, this may change with further legislation
It's irrelevant the article is correct now or at the time the article was written, the incorrect version was up for 132 days before Jimbo himself had to correct it and only after he had been contacted by the subject of the article himself. From this who can say what other bias and inaccuracy lurks in other articles.
I think the stuff about making carriers liable for the content their users distribute is just fluff: users will always be able to switch to a carrier outside of any jurisdiction. What is important to note here is that once again we have clear evidence that Wikipedia process, noble as it is, is clearly not scaling with it's exponential popularity. Regardless of what you think about Wikipedia, it is becomming clear that it has a non-trivial problem with bias and accuracy. To be taken seriously it needs to start living up to the claim that it is an encyclopaedia, rather than just a scrapbook.
What I'd really like to see in a new version of the GPL is a transparency clause, as in the GNU FDL: i.e. clarify the part of the GPL that defines the source to be the "preferred form of the work for making modifications" so that it is restricted to open formats, such as plain text or XML. I can see a trend in modern computing to distribute "source" in proprietary formats and I think such a clause would head this off. Not only that, but it would make it easier to apply the GPL to non-software works.
Wikipedia - controversial, contradictory, sometimes extreme points of view on current politics.
I would politely argue that "sometimes" is too weak a word: as I noted before, Wikipedia has a wide-spread, highly distributed and non-trivial problem with bias in it's articles. From my own sampling of controversial articles, I would say that most, if not all, of these pages contain at least one or two paragraphs that state opinion as undisputed fact. That doesn't cover the numerous stubs and "hidden" articles (sub-sub and sub-sub-sub-etc articles that hide amidst the forest of articles in Wikipedia). Short of a complete slash-and-burn approach I don't see a solution to this.
I guess it does not matter too much to me since I don't think I would ever use wikipedia as a source for political information. I think most of the people concerned about politics are concerned with the information provided to posterity. I just want facts and some popular hypothesis.
But, as the article states, the average reader probably does not have the means to resolve factual errors (nor should he/she be expected to). Similarly, he/she has no means to recognise the the polical bias. Whilst you may not go to Wikipedia for political information, others may do so and that is my concern.
Finally, bias may not simply extend to controversial articles. I noticed "bias creep", where particularly dedicated authors modify any and all articles even loosely related to a controversial topic so as to better push their agenda.
I won't argue with you over which is better in terms of factual correctness - I haven't investigated the factual correctness of Wikipedia myself and I think the author of the article above makes a pretty good case against it.
My main point of concern with Wikipedia is it's political biases. It's true other encyclopaedias have bias, but Wikipedia seems to openly invite it, covering controversial, non-encyclopaedic topics that normal encyclopaedias wouldn't dream of covering for precisely this reason. Most encyclopedia author would keep neutrality in mind, and would have editors to moderate articles. Most authors of controversial articles don't even pretend to have neutrality in mind, merely adding their screed and leaving it for others to moderate later (leading to more edit wars).
Another reason for this is that the "debate" method of reaching neutrality in Wikipedia seems to work in reverse: rather than starting from a moderate position, most authors tend to start from an extreme position so as to better "negotiate" a neutral position. This inevitably leads to more edit wars.
I think one of the most serious problems with Wikipedia, and one that is dealt with extremely poorly by the site admins, is bias. Whilst most articles are relatively free of bias (if not other factual errors) those that are in anyway controversial act as a magnet for those individuals with strong opinions.
The Wikipedia admins and sysops make a blanket assertion that "neutrality is non-negotiable" but then simply abidcate all responsibility for maintaining neutrality, relying on individuals to exercise their common sense (always a recipe for disaster IMHO) on what is and isn't "neutral" (frequently a controversial subject itself) and only resorting to "dispute arbitration" as a last resort which seems to amount to locking for the page and putting a plaster over the article until the next time someone comes along and starts an edit war.
The result is that Wikipedia contains a vast amount of bias, both concious and unconcious. Possibly, more than any group of individuals can possibly hope to go through and resolve, nevermind the constant fire-fighting required to maintain the existing neutrality of articles. Whenever Wikipedia release another public announcement that they've reached X number of articles I shudder: all that additional mess, who is going to tidy it up?
What frighens me even more is that more and more google searches return links from Wikipedia, or articles reproduced from there.
I think the problem with Wikipedia is that, for many, it has become the "mind of the Internet" - that is, it is the final, authorative source of information. The reasons edit wars are so frequent is that people read an article, see something they don't like and think "now everyone will think that!" (and for some people this seems to be correct).
A way of fixing this is to "break" the authorativeness of individual articles. The problem is that the namespace itself is a "scarce resource" which is why we see so many edit wars break out and this gives Wikipedia its authorative nature. A better solution, one previously proposed, would be to have multiple versions of articles existing in parallel, possibly even a version for each user. There could exist some method of then "voting", although this might create as many problems as the present system: see E2. Perhaps, a group of experts could be appointed to review versions of articles that don't have time to write themselves and selection could be based on this.
Certainly the present system isn't working: I know this because when I ask myself who do I trust more, Wikipedia or a commercial encyclopedia, the answer is always to pay for my information.
His whole point is that the article started off reasonably good and through haphazard editing sounds like a highschool student wrote it.
Ahem, sort of like the average Wikipedia article.
I really do not understand this current obsession with science fiction being about future prediction - from my perspective, science fiction is not about predicting the future - surely it would be called "future faction" instead. Science fiction is about science, about it's impact upon us, about our hopes and fears of progress and about, more than anything else, history and society itself and how technology affects them.
For evidence of this look no further than the fact the old science fiction tends to age so badly - (original) Star Trek, Dr. Who - they all seem so dated now, but I'm sure at they time they must have seemed realistic because they reflected the hopes and expectations of the time. There are some exceptions - Clarke predicted satelites... but then, he did come up with the idea in the first place so this is less an example of future prediction than future creation.
What is more, I think making predictions about the future is lazy thinking. The universe has a sneaky way of subverting everyone's expectations. Everyone whose tried it - from Marx to Fukuyama - has ended up with egg on their face. Trying to predict the future is a just a really good way of giving your critics and open field to dismiss you.
I think that's a good idea... the commentary I imagine would act as a let-off valve for the sort of opinionated discourse that doesn't really belong in the "factual" part of the document and by limited the size you constrain its influence. However, I can see two problems with this:
a) People would then begin to focus on the controversial commentary rather than the content and this could simply turn Wikipedia into another rant site.
b) The arguments would simply shift to what constitutes commentary and real content. After all, the "entry despots" already consider their biased opinions to be fact, not commentary.
c) What happens when you use up the quota in the commentary space? Does new commentary simply "bump" the old commentary, or does the first contributor get first say? I can see problems with both approaches.
I thinks it interesting to see how too much un-constrained freedom can create a power vacuum all-to-easily filled by those who seek to force their own views on others.
Tthe "entry despots" you talk about get away with it mainly because the entirety of Wikipedia is now too large for any single group of individuals to police, so they can enforce their will by making multiple reversions, thereby making the cost of altering "their" page so much more higher. Everyone else finds the exercise so annoying they can no longer be bothered.
In which case, the process becomes less of a dialogue to reach a mutual agreement and more of a battle of wills to see who is the most rabid.
I agree: most editors try their best to practice a NPOV policy but Wikipedia still contains many articles of dubious nature, inlcuding the GNAA, and one rather spitefully entitled "Gay Disease". As already stated, it does not in fact have a "democratic" process, but a rather despotic one where those who revert the most without attracting the attention of more moderate editors win. Editing an essay to increase its "neutrality" can often involve becomming embroiled in a pointless edit/flame war and I for one have too little time in my life to be bothered trying to reason with "article kings" who refuse to accept any other version of the "truth" than their own. It's easy to be neutral, but with Wikipedia whose definition of "neutral" are we talking about?
Right! People who can can really predict future trends--like the development of satellite-based communications, for example--wouldn't waste their time writing science fiction.
I hate to pedantic but Clarke didn't predict the development of satellite-based communications, he actually invented and patented the idea himself thereby creating the future. This smacks of cheating, somewhat.
Well, I guess that makes the fact that he was hounded to his death, OK? I suppose it must be, as long as it's done under the remit of national security, not that I would feel particularly secure under such a regime.
To be honest, you remarks put the blame back onto Turing: he was gay and the CIA were just protecting themselves. What this ignores is that there is nothing wrong in and off being gay, except for the pressure applied by society. The CIA's and British Governments handling of Turing only cyclically contribute to this.
But, it's nice to see that 50 years on from the death of the great figure who gave the world so much people's attitudes have moved on.
I have read the CCPL in detail. Section 4 does deal with part of the problem (I assume it is some sort of anti-DRM/DMCA clause). In fact, this section is repeated in various clauses of the CCPL, not just section 4, although that particular section does refer to modifications.
However, it does not deal with the situation where an author publishes a work in a proprietary format that requires expensive software to edit/modify. In this way, you can make it prohibitively expensive to modify your content by publishing in closed formats whose editors have no free software counterparts.
Similarly, if, say, you publish your text in image form to preserve the formatting this satisfies the above: it is not a technical measure that controls access to the content. It just makes the task of obtaining the actual text non-trivial. It's possible, but only in the same way it is possible to obtain a version of the source code from a binary executable using a decompiler, which is why we have free software/open source in the first place.
I don't think defining modifiable and transparent copy for multiple media is a problem: to produce all computer media you require software to open data files and modify them. The condition that you make such data files publicly available and ensure such a copy is published in a open standard format would not be all that difficult to define. The FDL already goes some way to doing this for documents and images.
for many is a moot point.
Hey, I'm sure it is a moot point for you, just as open source was a moot point for many commercial before Linux. That doesn't mean that it's not an important point, just that you don't realise its relevance and importance.
Anyway, while I can see why the GPL is appropriate for you if you're insisting on "source code", but in my opinion it doesn't make a license for non-software that doesn't have this requirement non-free.
I suppose it depends on how you define 'free': our experience of the Open Gaming License used by Wizard's of the Coast to publish their d20 system demonstrates that merely making content 'open' is not enough. What use is open content if it is only distributed in a closed format with DMCA-protected copy protection on it, for example? That's not free at all because it restricts the basic freedom to modify the work.
We crafted this particular freedom particularly because of this issue and, in our humble opinion, it's no different to the freedom that the source code must be provided with free software.
I run my own "free content" site for a series of roleplaying games, the FRPGC. We publish material for roleplaying games in a manner consistant with the "four freedoms" of the FSF. Unfortunately, the FSF doesn't share our view that the freedoms they apply to software should apply to other media.
With that in mind we've had a real struggle trying to find a license that is compatible with our philosophy. The FDL has "closed" Invariant Sections, is GPL-incompatible and is otherwise far too complicated, the CCPL is really and open source license for content, not a free content license and is GPL-incompatible.
In the end we settled upon using the GPL for our content: primarily because it does most things other content licenses do (copyleft, require modifiable copy, attribution) with the bonus that it has a vast wealth of material already published under it. For a roleplaying game publisher this is perfect especially when we decide to write computer games/PC generators/whatever for our material.
"Whoever proposed this absolute ban on cookies clearly has never done any kind of web development. Sheesh."
The question is have you ever done any kind of web development with cookies? The best thing that could ever happen to web developers is the abolishment of those pesky little cookies. No more cross-browser problems, no more fiddling with JavaScript because some browsers (you know who you are) don't support Cookie headers. DiE CooKieS DiE!
Just out of interest, how do you do you increase the default environment size?
Is it me, or is JBuilder30 a Windows NT only app because the JBUILDER.BAT file uses directory/file names of characters longer than 8 characters (which can be resolved if you install the IDE to a safe directory name like C:\JBUILD30\) and the fact that the batch file runner cannot handle long strings of characters to store in its environment variables. Couldn't it be the simplest thing to do to write a small program in C++ say that does all that for you? Or does anyone know any betteer
Oh, and the Odean site uses Flash, not javascript!
Your Rights Online could become a Internet Freedom of Speech resource, with a repository for contact details for people involved in Internet Content Regulation. Perhaps such details could be included as part of the course in the headers of YRO stories. There would of course have to be some guidelines, for example:
b) Merely posting several emails repeatedly will reduce the idea of overwhelming objection to such content policies.
Again, AI has extensive guidelines for this and I'm sure we can modify these for the Internet.
anthonyclark is right that with Big Business Big Money the odds are against us, but if we can demonstrate that this is a hugely unpopular move from the point of view of the online community (and I don't just mean slashdot) then we hit them where it hurts the most: popularity polls.
I think this thread has gone completely off topic. My original observation, as gig pointed out, was that there was a distinct lack of of homosexuals in Star Trek despite the programs history of inclusive casting. Star Trek TM betrays Gene Rodneburys ideals of the Star Trek TV Series.
What I did not expect when I mentioned homosexuality in this context was discusions about whether homosexuality was acceptable or not. The fact that the majority of the replies to my original post are of the nature that homosexuality is somehow disdainful says something very bad about the people who use slashdot.
Not only are they widely off topic but they are irrelevant: no one cares what they think, especially any self-respecting homosexuals. I only mentioned homosexuality in passing as an example of the moral relavatism of Star Trek. Some of you just heard the word homosexual and went on a posting frenzy: I think this is the true definition of homophobia.
Finally, I would just like to point out that if I had mentioned the fact that Star Trek had never used a mixed-race relationship (which is has) no-one would have flamed on about how appauling it was. 10 or 20 years ago they might have. I only hope that in 10 or 20 years from now people (and especially the supposedly forward-looking members of slashdot) will be more open minded.