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Richard Stallman: “FRAND” is a FRAUD Call for Action in UK on Software Patent Study

Commerce, Corruption, Government, IO Impotency
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Richard Stallman

UPDATE: Submission deadline is now June 4th

The UK government is holding a consultation about what sort of patent licenses an “open” standard should require. Anyone that develops free software (free as in freedom, not a matter of price) and would like it to be used in the UK has reason to be concerned with this, along with anyone that uses or distributes free software in the UK.

One option under consideration is to demand the patent holder give everyone a royalty-free patent license for implementing the standard. That at least permits free software to support the standard.

The other option is a criterion called “FRAND”, which claims to mean “Fair, Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory”. What it really means is that the patent holder must publish terms and allow anyone to buy a license on those terms. The terms are often such as to exclude free software entirely from implementing the standard.

For instance, these terms can (and in many cases do) require anyone distributing the software to pay a license fee per copy of the program distributed. If you receive a program with a requirement to pay someone if you redistribute it, you do not have freedom #2, so the program is not free software. In effect, these terms discriminate against free software, which is neither fair nor reasonable.

The term “FRAND” is a FRAUD.

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Review: The Lessons of History (First Edition)

6 Star Top 10%, History, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy
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Will and Ariel Durant

When I donated by 2500 volume library to George Mason University (down from 5000 in earlier years), this is one of a tiny handful of books I held back, along with Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure.

This edition is the FIRST edition. The reprinted currently in stock version The Lessons of History is more readily available, but if you can get the first edition, it is priceless at multiple levels.

This is the first book that I discuss in my national security lecture on the literature relevant to strategy & force structure. It is a once-in-a-lifetime gem of a book that sums up their much larger ten volume collection which itself is brilliant but time consuming. This is the “executive briefing.”

Geography matters. Inequality is natural. Famine, pestilence, and war are Nature's way of balancing the population.

Birth control (or not) has *strategic* implications (e.g. see Catholic strategy versus US and Russian neglect of its replenishment among the higher social and economic classes).

History is color-blind. Morality is strength. Worth saying again: morality is strength.

They end with “the only lasting revolution is in the mind of man.” In other words, technology is not a substitute for thinking by humans.

See my various lists. Other books I recommend:

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Howard Rheingold: Ann Blair on The History of Information

Cultural Intelligence, IO History
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Howard Rheingold

Ann Blair on The History of Information

The history professor and author of Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information before the Modern Age tells us what researchers have been discovering about how earlier human societies collected, organised and used information…

Amazing read and historical perspective about transmission. Knowledge and information are actually very different concept :

“This book doesn’t actually focus on the term information but it talks about the institutions that made knowledge possible. Its first volume runs “From Gutenberg to Diderot” – in other words, mid-15th to mid-18th century. A second volume stretches “From the Encyclopédie to Wikipedia”, from the mid-18th century to the 21st century.

Peter Burke is a great cultural historian who has worked on many different aspects of the transmission of knowledge – including, for example, how historians worked, or how ideas about good behaviour at court were transmitted. In this synthetic pair of books he explores the question: What were the institutions that were collecting, classifying, sorting and disseminating information?”

In our world now where information is everywhere, how you make sure that knowledge is still accessible ?  Curation is now not only a great means to express yourself but also an obvious path to become a gatekeeper and a qualitative filter.  This article gives an awesome perspective on an universal and eternal inspiring mission : transmission.

Read full interview (three screens).

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Winslow Wheeler: The Jet That Ate the Pentagon (and the Integrity of Everyone Serving in The Pentagon, in OMB and GAO, in Congress, and in the White House)

Corruption, Government, Military
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Winslow Wheeler

This new commentary on the F-35 appears at the website for Foreign Policy at .  It is a short piece that does not need to be summarized by me.  The editors at Foreign Policy gave it a wonderfully insightful title:

The Jet That Ate the Pentagon

BY WINSLOW WHEELER | APRIL 26, 2012

The United States is making a gigantic investment in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, billed by its advocates as the next — by their count the fifth — generation of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat aircraft. Claimed to be near invisible to radar and able to dominate any future battlefield, the F-35 will replace most of the air-combat aircraft in the inventories of the U.S. Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, and at least nine foreign allies, and it will be in those inventories for the next 55 years. It's no secret, however, that the program — the most expensive in American history — is a calamity.

This month, we learned that the Pentagon has increased the price tag for the F-35 by another $289 million — just the latest in a long string of cost increases — and that the program is expected to account for a whopping 38 percent of Pentagon procurement for defense programs, assuming its cost will grow no more. Its many problems are acknowledged by its listing in proposals for Pentagon spending reductions by leaders from across the political spectrum, including Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), President Barack Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, and budget gurus such as former Sen. Pete Domenici (R-N.M.) and Alice Rivlin, former director of the Congressional Budget Office and Office of Management and Budget.

How bad is it? A review of the F-35's cost, schedule, and performance — three essential measures of any Pentagon program — shows the problems are fundamental and still growing.

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NIGHTWATCH: China Builds Economic-Tourism Bridge to Taiwan, Puts PLA Into a Box – US Will Continue to Demonize China for Unethical Reasons

02 China, 02 Diplomacy, 03 Economy, 10 Security, 11 Society, Commerce, Ethics, Government, Peace Intelligence
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Sixteen years ago, Pingtan Island, just north west of Taiwan, was the center of Chinese military energies to intimidate Taiwanese voters against electing a pro-independence president. Major amphibious operations were staged, some with catastrophic loss of life by military personnel because of bad weather. This also was the first time China attempted to maintain continuous air operations over the Taiwan Strait. That also proved beyond Chinese capabilities.

These complemented the dramatic and sensational Chinese short range ballistic missile shots into Taiwan's two main ports. The missile launches might be compared to the US launching missiles into Pearl Harbor to prevent Hawaii from seceding from the US.

A key difference was that the Chinese missiles were so inaccurate, that no one knew whether they would launch much less whether they would stay on target. The danger was that a ballistic missile might veer off course and strike Taiwan, rather than the ocean. The missiles were so unreliable that the risk of a stray missile was very real. With only luck, they did not hit land or ships in the harbor which would have sparked general war in 1996.

The US sent two aircraft carrier task groups to defend Taiwan in 1996, forcing the Chinese to back down and inflicting a humiliating political defeat on the communist mandarins in Beijing. At one point, during turnover, three carriers were present to defend Taiwan. The Chinese intimidation effort failed on every level. Even the weather was hostile to the Chinese.

This week China published details of its plans for the Pingtan Comprehensive Economic Zone (CEZ) through the approval and promulgation of the General Development Plan for the Pingtan CEZ. Mainland China officials have emphasized the “importance” of the plan and the CEZ.

The Chinese military fiasco during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis ensured that the communist party leaders would never again allow the People's Liberation Army leaders to have their way in solving any national security problems.

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Reference: Online Public Information and Data Sources

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30 Resources to Find the Data You Need

Let's say you have this idea for a visualization or application, or you're just curious about some trend. But you have a problem. You can't find the data, and without the data, you can't even start. This is a guide and a list of sources for where you can find that data you're looking for. There's a lot out there.

Continue reading “Reference: Online Public Information and Data Sources”