We are seeking a sponsor for the printing and free distribution of 2,000 copies of Robert Steele's new book, THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust. Each book can contain a label on the inside front cover with whatever content the sponsor wishes to provide. The sponsor can specify the desired distribution, we recommend 1250 to Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) in NYC in July, 500 to Silicon Valley Hackers Conference in November, and 250 split between the Chaos Computer Club in Germany and Hac-Tic in The Netherlands. Cost per 1000 is $5,000. There is no other means on the planet by which to reach these specific populations at a cost of $5 each.
One copy of the book will be delivered to Tanya Pemberton, the ex-NRO ex-In-Q-Tel replacement for Doug Naquin. The idea that the NRO will be decommissioned and Tish Long will be the first Director of the Open Source Agency, with Tanya as her trusty side kick for gutting CIA, is most interesting.
ROBERT STEELE: I thought F/OSS had merged as a meme. Now I understand you to mean that while both have practical similarities in outcomes, the underlying ethics are completely different.
RICHARD STALLMAN:
Nothing has changed. The free software movement remains what it has always been since 1983: an ethical and political campaign for freedom for computer users.
Open source remains what it has been since 1998: a practical recommendation to let users change and redistribute source code.
I still champion free software, and disagree with the ideas of open source because they omit the most important idea.
INSERT: A program is free software if the program's users have the four essential freedoms:
The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).
The freedom to distribute copies of your modified versions to others (freedom 3). By doing this you can give the whole community a chance to benefit from your changes. Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
“FOSS” and “FLOSS” are ways of talking about both free software and open source without choosing between them. If you want to talk about the community's development practices, for instance, that sort of neutrality between the two philosophical camps may be useful.
Nearly all open source software is free software. The two terms describe almost the same category of software, but they stand for views based on fundamentally different values. Open source is a development methodology; free software is a social movement. For the free software movement, free software is an ethical imperative, because only free software respects the users' freedom. By contrast, the philosophy of open source considers issues in terms of how to make software “better”—in a practical sense only. It says that nonfree software is an inferior solution to the practical problem at hand. For the free software movement, however, nonfree software is a social problem, and the solution is to stop using it and move to free software.
“Free software.” “Open source.” If it's the same software, does it matter which name you use? Yes, because different words convey different ideas. While a free program by any other name would give you the same freedom today, establishing freedom in a lasting way depends above all on teaching people to value freedom. If you want to help do this, it is essential to speak of “free software.”
We in the free software movement don't think of the open source camp as an enemy; the enemy is proprietary (nonfree) software. But we want people to know we stand for freedom, so we do not accept being mislabeled as open source supporters.
INSERT: Beyond Software
Software manuals must be free, for the same reasons that software must be free, and because the manuals are in effect part of the software.
The same arguments also make sense for other kinds of works of practical use — that is to say, works that embody useful knowledge, such as educational works and reference works. Wikipedia is the best-known example.
Any kind of work can be free, and the definition of free software has been extended to a definition of free cultural works applicable to any kind of works.
Phi Beta Iota: Proprietary may be powerful in isolation, but it does not scale. Only infinite human intelligence applied as an open (free) collective is capable for creating infinitely scalable software. Those who suggest that machine intelligence will scale faster than we can imagine are missing the difference between linear and non-linear / intuitive scaling. IOHO.
Thanks for posting that. I have one small correction to suggest, though. That Guardian article from 2008 does not represent my latest thinking. Shortly after that, I realized that the term “cloud computing” is too broad — it includes many totally different practices. So I concluded that it is a mistake to formulate any statement using that term. Some of those practices are bad, and some are ok. So I do not say, “cloud computing is bad”. Rather, I say “the term ‘cloud computing' is too broad — let's talk about a specific topic.”
DENVER – New standards for air pollution caused by natural gas development – including standards for the process known as hydraulic fracturing (fracking) – are scheduled to be released next week by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The industry claims fracking has minimal environmental impacts, but a study by the Colorado School of Public Health has found that health risks from cancers and asthma are higher than normal for people living near fracking sites in the state.
According to an attorney with Earthjustice, Robin Cooley, it has been 25 years since the EPA last reviewed some of these standards. The industry has changed significantly since then, she says.
In early 1976 the National Enquirer published a story that shocked the elite political class in Washington, D.C. The story disclosed that a woman named Mary Pinchot Meyer, who was a divorced spouse of a high CIA official named Cord Meyer, had been engaged in a two-year sexual affair with President John F. Kennedy. By the time the article was published, JFK had been assassinated, and Mary Pinchot Meyer herself was dead, a victim of a murder that took place in Washington on October 12, 1964.<
The murder of Mary Pinchot Meyer is the subject of a fascinating and gripping new book by Peter Janney, who was childhood friends with Mary Meyer’s three sons and whose father himself was a high CIA official. Janney’s father and mother socialized in the 1950s with the Meyers and other high-level CIA officials.
Amazon Page
Janney’s book, Mary’s Mosaic, is one of those books that you just can’t put down once you start reading it. It has everything a reader could ever want in a work of nonfiction – politics, love, sex, war, intrigue, history, culture, murder, spies, racism, and perhaps the biggest criminal trial in the history of our nation’s capital.
Just past noon on the day of the murder, Mary Meyer was on her daily walk on the C&O Canal Trail near the Key Bridge in Washington, D.C. Someone grabbed her and shot a .38-caliber bullet into the left side of her head. Meyer continued struggling despite the almost certainly fatal wound, so the murderer shot her again, this time downward through her right shoulder. The second bullet struck directly into her heart, killing her instantly.
A 21-year-old black man named Raymond Crump Jr., who lived in one of the poorest sections of D.C., was arrested near the site of the crime and charged with the murder. Crump denied committing the crime.
There were two eyewitnesses, neither of whom, however, personally identified Crump. One witness, Henry Wiggins Jr., said that he saw a black man standing over the body and that the man wore a beige jacket, a dark cap, dark pants, and dark shoes. Another witness, William L. Mitchell, said that prior to the murder, he had been jogging on the trail when he saw a black man dressed in the same manner following Meyer a short time before she was killed.
Robin Good: If you are curating a specific topic you may find yourself often wading through tons of useless content and wondering where you can find some good stuff.
One option is to start using some good news discovery tools which can greatly help you filter out some of the useless spammy content that fills in most unfiltered searches and feed streams.
Here is my mindmap on news discovery tools which can help you in finding your best crop of interesting stories on the specific topic you are interested in.
It contains over 30 news discovery tools and services all with a direct link.
Cyclone Power Technologies, a Pompano Beach, Florida company, focuses on solving our dependence on fossil fuels with its heat regenerative external combustion engines.
“This engine works when steam enters the top of each of the six radially arranged cylinders (20) and pushs the pistons (54) downward in sequence.”
“The rotating action of the pistons connected through the spyder bearing (60) turns the crank shaft (24) in an orbiting motion around the central longitudinal axis of the crankshaft (24).”
“The engine does not use motor oil as water is both the working fluid and the lubricant.”
“The engine can run on any source of heat, including waste heat from industrial sources.”
Sepp Comments:
This could enable distributed, backyard concentrated solar power generation applications. Now we just need good storage technology for the electricity.
Groofer makes finding and sharing online information easier.
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