And lo’ they shared the files, and ’twas good. Anti-piracy efforts may soon be labeled as religious persecution as the Swedish government has apparently recognized file sharing as an official religion.
Meet Philosophy student Isak Gerson, who is the mind behind the Church of Kopimism. Gerson founded the Missionary Church of Kopimism in 2010, and filed a request with authorities to officially accept his belief system in order for Kopimism to avoid persecution.
It took three request over the past year to finally convince the Administrative Services Agency to recognize the church. According to Torrent Freak, after the first two attempts, the Church was asked to formalize its way of prayer in order to be recognized.
Koptimism roughly translates to ‘copy me’. The tenets are simple: Control-C and Control-V are sacred symbols. Kopimists believe that the copying and sharing information is ethically right, and knowledge should not be hoarded. Information’s value increases as it is shared. Remixing content is a sacred kind of copying the Church terms ‘Remix Spirit’.
The religion has a priest class called the Oparnas, who exemplify Kopimist virtues and assist others to follow the Kopimist path. Those that wish to become part of the Kopimist faith must undergo a rite of disclosing their personal data to the organization, profess faith in information and copying and download the logo from the site.
Currently, the Church has around 3,000 official members, tripling from 1,0000 in the last half of the year. Though the Swedish state has recognized Kopimism, copyright infringement is still not legally permitted. Isak Gerson said in an interview, “there’s still a legal stigma around copying for many. A lot of people still worry about going to jail when copying and remixing. I hope in the name of Kopimi that this will change.”
Tip of the Hat to Super-Blogger David Ing in Google Circles.
Stephanie Hamilton is part of something larger than herself. She's part of a computer program.
The 38-year-old resident of Kingston, Jamaica, recently began performing small tasks assigned to her by an algorithm running on a computer in Berkeley, California. That software, developed by a startup called MobileWorks, represents the latest trend in crowdsourcing: organizing foreign workers on a mass scale to do routine jobs that computers aren't yet good at, like checking spreadsheets or reading receipts.
By assigning such tasks to people in emerging economies, MobileWorks hopes to get good work for low prices. It uses software to closely control the process, increasing accuracy by having multiple workers perform every task. According to company cofounder Anand Kulkarni, the aim is to get the crowd of workers to “behave much more like an automatic resource than like individual and unreliable human beings.”
These days, WordPress acts more like a development framework or a PaaS (Platform as a Service), says WooThemes CEO Adii Pienaar. And in the last year, several new services have sprung up to help make WordPress a platform in the truest sense of the word.
The call for a “Heroku for WordPress” is by now a common refrain. WordPress, if you’re not aware, powers half of the top 100 blogs and 14.7 percent of the top one million websites in the world. In the U.S., 22 out of every 100 new domains run on WordPress today.
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These days, WordPress acts a lot more like a development framework or a PaaS (Platform as a Service). The full WordPress stack is not just integrated, it’s mature. And in the last year, several new services have sprung up to provide the missing pieces that today make WordPress a platform in the truest sense of the word.
Networked individualism is reshaping social interaction as we renegotiate the balance between the one and the many
OUR social relationships are changing and technology is at the centre of this unfolding story.
Take stock of your own world. You probably have a few family members and friends who mean the world to you. Then there are the many acquaintances, contacts, “followers” and “consequential strangers” who you only interact with occasionally but who serve useful purposes when you have questions, need to make decisions or require a helping hand.
Your ties to all of them, especially those in the outer reaches of your network, are increasingly mediated through digital technology – from email to Facebook to Skype calls.
This new social operating system has been emerging for several generations but has accelerated in growth thanks to the recent triple revolution: the widespread adoption of broadband, ubiquitous mobile connectivity and the move from bounded groups – largely closed circles of interlinked contacts – to multiple social networks.
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With such a fundamental social shift linked to still-developing technology, how it unfolds needs to be considered. We think there are two possible scenarios.
Dr Meno's Predictions for the Olympics, WW 3, Which will include the Multitude of Civil Wars. Obama canceling the elections, AND he kicks in all of his EXECUTIVE SECRET ORDERS, and Martial law is ordered, after a Domestic False Flag Terrorist attacks.
Follow the Money. An Attack at the beginning of the Olympics will be real terrorist. AND that didn't happen. An Attack at the end of the Olympics will be a false flag attack, Because the corporations want to make their Money first.
“IT IS TIME TO QUIT BEING THE UNITED STATES, AND START BECOMING THE STATES UNITED” , dr Meno
Flash floods in Beijing have killed over 70 people and forced the evacuation of more than 50,000 after destroying over 8,000 homes and causing $1.6 billion in damages. In total, some 1.5 million people have been affected by the floods after Beijing recorded the heaviest rainfall the city has seen in more than 60 years.
The heavy rains began on July 21. Within hours, users of the Guokr.com social network launched a campaign to create a live crisis map of the flood’s impact using Google Maps. According to TechPresident, “the result was not only more accurate than the government output—it was available almost a day earlier. According to People’s Daily Online, these crowd-sourced maps were widely circulated on Weibo [China's version of Twitter] the Monday and Tuesday after the flooding.” The crowdsourced, citizen-generated flood map of Beijing is available here and looks like this:
