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Is Facebook The World's Largest Open Source Company?

Red Hat used to wear the open source crown. Then Google. But Facebook and other web giants now contribute the most to open source.

Matt Asay

ReadWrite, October 17, 2013

Quick question: which is the largest open source company on Earth? That's easy, right? It's clearly Red Hat. After all, the company pulls in over $1 billion each year selling services around open-source software like Linux and JBoss.

But as I've argued before, such a distinction fits a very old-school understanding of open source business. Back in 2009, I suggested that Google was the world's biggest open source company, given the copious quantities of code it contributes, not to mention its source code repository, inspiration of massive projects like Hadoop and other contributions. While some took exception to my classification of Google as an open source company, I still think it was accurate.

Except that Google is no longer the biggest open source company. Facebook is.

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2013/10/182013/10/18

David Isenberg: Protecting Victims of the Privatization of War

09 Justice, Commerce, Corruption, Government, Law Enforcement, Military, Officers Call

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Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire

Protecting the Victims of the Privatization of War

Over the years we have seen numerous cases of various abuses and outright crimes by private military and security contractors (PMSC). True, they don’t happen every day, and don’t reflect the actions of the vast majority of the contractors working overseas but it would be foolish to say it is just the actions of a few bad apples either. Why these crimes happen says as much about the overall framework of accountability that various governments have set up and, with varying degrees of effort and resources, have enforced. But that is not the point of this post.

What is the point is this. When, in the past, crimes have become public, governments have brought cases against the accused offenders with varying degrees of success. To name a few:

the killings of Iraqi civilians by Blackwater contractors at Nisoor Square in 2007, the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq by Titan reportedly aided by Titan and CACI contractors, DynCorp contractors, being accused of rape and running underage prostitution networks in association with their security duties under contract with the US military in Bosnia; PMSCs accused of killing Ecuadorian peasants by spraying their villages with toxic defoliants and accidentally shooting down a missionary plane incorrectly suspected of drug trafficking.

But it is still fairly rare for the perpetrators to get convicted and go to prison. Why is that?

The paper Protecting the Victims of the Privatization of War by Willem van Genugten, Marie-José van der Heijden, and Nicola Jägers, published earlier this year by the Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands offers some answers.

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2013/10/182013/10/20

Review: Lee Camp Moment of Clarity – The rantings of a stark raving sane man

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Education (General), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

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Lee Camp

5.0 out of 5 stars SIX Stars — A National Enema with Champagne, October 17, 2013

Ten percent of the books I have reviewed here at Amazon make it into my six star group. This is such a book. I have been a fan of Lee Camp's outrageously spirited, funny, and profane social commentaries for years, through his videos. This book was given to me as a gift, and I have been laughing all morning with occasional tears of sadness for society.

Amazon's Look Inside the Book provides the Table of Contents, look at that if you have any doubt.

HUGE PLUS: Each short chapter has the YouTube URL at the top. Amazon also sells two audios for Lee, great for the car, but personally I value the combination of Lee's face and live delivery with his words, for now found only on YouTube.

The subtitle says it all: Lee is a stark raving sane man. Others have compared him to Carlin, I would go a step further, Lee is Carlin with class (smile). He's like a giant-sized Irish elf armed with an intelligence flame thrower capable of skewering any lie, any pretense, any crime against humanity — his book covers most of them.

I would certainly like to see a Lee Camp: The Movie but until that comes available, this book is a sane person's salvation. We who are sane are labeled crazy by the 1% and the sheep that listen to the 1%, this book is life-affirming, mind-altering, soul-strengthening righteous good stuff.

God Bless Lee, God Bless America, and as Winston Churchill once said, NEVER GIVE UP.

Radical idea: buy as many of these books as you can, and either put the books in toilets where the willing might still be saved, or cut the spine off and sprinkle Lee's individual stories around. This book is pixie dust for humanity.

Ten books, none funny, that reinforce Lee's sanity parade:

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2013/10/182013/10/20

LtCol X: CSA Sends – Strategic Priorities for the Army – with Phi Beta Iota Comments

10 Security, 11 Society, Corruption, Cultural Intelligence, Director of National Intelligence et al (IC), DoD, Ethics, Ineptitude, IO Deeds of War, IO Impotency, Lessons, Military, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence, Strategy

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Please note Army Chief of Staff General Raymond T. Odierno‘s updated strategic priorities for the US Army, arranged in five (5) categories. PDF Slide Show: CSA Strategic Priorities vFinal 16Oct13

From those, here is an extract .

EXTRACTS:

[DOWNSIZED ARMY; EXPEDITIONARY]

– Downsize, transition, and then sustain a smaller, but ready and capable Total Army that provides Joint and Combined forces with expeditionary and enduring landpower for the range of military operations and features unique competencies such as operational leadership, mobility, command and control, and theater logistics at all echelons.

Phi Beta Iota: To downsize effectively you have to have ethical evidence-based decision-support immediately applicable to strategy, policy, acquisitions, and operations. This does not exist. NGIC once upon a time had Tim Hendrickson and GRAND VIEW but they never made the leap to holistic analytics and true cost economics. Army flags — including the very best of them — simply do not know what they need to know to demand of the intelligence “professionals” what the latter have no clue how to produce. We have not seen a single useful strategic, policy, or acquisition document come out of DIA in the past twenty years…nor CIA. All these people are still in the cut and paste fluff mode that Col Mike Pheneger, USA (SOF) blew the whistle on in 1988. Nothing has changed in substance — just more people, more money, more (retarded) technology, and much less useful thinking.

[ENABLERS; EXPEDITIONARY; UNIFIED ACTION PARTNERS (UAPs)] – Support the Joint Force with critical enablers such as aviation, intelligence, engineers, logistics, medical, signal, and special operations, both while enroute to, and operating within, expeditionary environments alongside Unified Action Partners.

Phi Beta Iota: The Marine Corps led the way with Planning and Programming Factors for Expeditionary Operations in the Third World, and then lost its integrity and started chasing money instead of producing ethical evidence-based decision-support relevant to what General Al Gray wanted in the first place, compelling support for honest light-footprint low-cost acquisition (something the other four services need but refuse) along with strategic and operational support to what he called “peaceful preventive measures.” The Navy has imploded — as many Admirals as ships, and the whole lot of them are not worth anything in terms of rapid precision response, this leaves the Marine Corps both 4-6 days away from anywhere, and totally exposed (e.g. no Naval Gunfire, rotten CAP) once they get there. Army cannot do what it wants to do without an honest long-haul Air Force and a complete make-over of close air support (to include transfer of CAS to the Army) as well as reconnecting to reality at the geospatial, cyber, and cultural levels.

Continue reading “LtCol X: CSA Sends – Strategic Priorities for the Army – with Phi Beta Iota Comments”

2013/10/18

Berto Jongman: Russia’s Illegals and “Day X” Behind the Lines General War Plan

04 Inter-State Conflict, 06 Russia, 07 Other Atrocities, 08 Proliferation, Cultural Intelligence, Government, Officers Call, Peace Intelligence

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An inside look into Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service – mysterious Directorate “S”, Department “12″

EXTRACT:

“The formula Day X in our documents meant the beginning of a large scale war against the west. Our department 12 (together with department 8) was in charge of perpetrating acts of sabotage and terror on the enemy territory…to participate in so called: direct actions, which are clandestine acts of biological sabotage and terrorism against potential strike targets. These included: “Army targets and classified biological warfare ammunition, stockpiles, military garrisons, bases and military (and other) defense commands, like those which surveillance of biological weapons activities. Civil targets included public drinking water systems, food stores and pharmaceutical and biotechnological plants, also the economy.”

He concluded by saying: “our tools for these actions included, first and foremost our illegals, whom we had planted in the target country. These were the most reliable, well trusted special agents.”

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2013/10/17

Berto Jongman: Richard Yonck on Connecting with Our Connected World — the Coming Explosion of Human Consicousness in Context of an Internet of Things

Cultural Intelligence, Earth Intelligence

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Connecting with Our Connected World

Richard Yonck

The Futurist, November-December 2013

We can only really communicate with a tiny fraction of our personal and global environment. But our world and our experience of it are poised to change dramatically as everything becomes increasingly interconnected. Here’s what we can expect in the coming era of the “Internet of Things.”

Whether it’s biological cells, electronic systems, or communities of people, networks increase in value as the number of nodes and connections grow. As Metcalfe’s law suggests, increased connectedness can lead to increased value and usefulness.

For many millennia, our ability to communicate was limited to those people with whom we could physically meet and interact. Writing and the ability to create records transcended this limitation, allowing us to communicate with others separated from us by physical space and even time. With the telegraph and telephone, near real-time two-way communication with nearly anyone, anywhere on the planet, became possible.

Our growing interconnectivity has allowed us to share knowledge and ideas, which in turn has advanced society even further. But it was the development of the Internet that really accelerated this process.

Perhaps equally important, our inventions made it possible to improve our communication with the physical world in the form of remote sensors and other telemetry. As computers process more input from satellites, sensors, radio-tagged devices, and so on, it’s been estimated more than 40% of all data will be entirely machine-generated by 2020; that is up from 11% in 2005, according to the 2012 IDC Digital Universe report. This trend will likely continue for some time.

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2013/10/17

David Swanson: Malala to Obama – What You Are Doing Is Not Helping

Cultural Intelligence, Peace Intelligence

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Awkwardest and Most Authoritative Ever Comments on Drones

The comments come from Malala and the U.N. respectively.

President Obama invited Malala Yousafzai, a 16-year-old Pakistani advocate for girls' education, to meet with his family. And she promptly explained that what he is doing works against her agenda and fuels terrorism.

Malala is a victim of violence in Pakistan, having been attacked by religious fanatics opposed to her work. But Obama may not have expected her to speak up against other forms of violence in her country.

Malala recounted: “I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism. Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education, it will make a big impact.”

President Obama may also have not expected most people to notice or care. The corporate media have virtually ignored this part of a widely-reported meeting.

It's up to us to surprise everyone with the depth of our interest and concern. Almost 100,000 have thus far signed a petition to ban weaponized drones, soon to be delivered to the U.N., the I.C.C., the State Department, the White House, Congress, and embassies.

The United Nations has released a report on “armed drones and the right to life” (PDF). The report begins by noting that, as of now, weaponized drones are legal:

“Although drones are not illegal weapons, they can make it easier for States to deploy deadly and targeted force on the territories of other States. As such, they risk undermining the protection of life in the immediate and longer terms. If the right to life is to be secured, it is imperative that the limitations posed by international law on the use of force are not weakened by broad justifications of drone strikes.”

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Public Intelligence Blog

Matt Asay: Is Facebook The World’s Largest Open Source Company?

David Isenberg: Protecting Victims of the Privatization of War

Isenberg Institute of Strategic Satire

Review: Lee Camp Moment of Clarity – The rantings of a stark raving sane man

LtCol X: CSA Sends – Strategic Priorities for the Army – with Phi Beta Iota Comments

Berto Jongman: Russia’s Illegals and “Day X” Behind the Lines General War Plan

Berto Jongman: Richard Yonck on Connecting with Our Connected World — the Coming Explosion of Human Consicousness in Context of an Internet of Things

David Swanson: Malala to Obama – What You Are Doing Is Not Helping