sharealike.org

Why is this category, which used to contain 50 sites, now missing from Google? Spooky.

Update: It looks like the category has been moved here, but if you didn’t know to look for it, you’d never know it was there.

For now anyway, I’m calling this blog “Share Alike”. What’s that supposed to mean? Well, it comes from the common bit of advice, “Share and share alike”. When people say this, they mean two things. The first part of that phrase is an imperative. It, like your kindergarten teacher, is saying: Share. The second part too is an imperative. It suggests that you “share alike” or “share as you have been shared with” or maybe even “share in the manner in which you have been shared with”.

These are both good advice.

The first piece of advice, “Share” is good advice because sharing makes the world a nicer place to live. It’s not a notion that economists can understand, as they tend to falsely assume that everything that humans do is driven by a profit motive. I think they just had bad kindergarten teachers.

The second piece of advice, “Share alike” is also good advice, and maybe even more important. Once someone shares with you, you ought to take it to be your duty to share with others in the same way that you have been shared with. This amplifies the good done by sharing and makes the world even nicer. Let me give you a simple example:

Yesterday I went to fix my wife’s computer at the University where she studies. (Release,Renew,I’m done.–Another story.) As I was sitting in my car in the short-term metered parking area waiting for a spot to become available, a guy who was leaving took the little parking meter slip out of his car, walked over to my car, and said, “Here. It’s good for all day.” He shared. It made my world much nicer.

As I was leaving, I saw a woman in her truck waiting for my spot. I took the parking meter slip out of my car, walked over to her truck, and said, “Here. It’s good for all day.” I shared alike. She smiled a really big smile. I am confident it made her world much nicer. (Now, it may even be against the University’s parking policies to do that, but don’t get me started on the parking nazis.)

Now, if I were merely driven by a profit motive, I could have told her, “Hey! I’ve got this parking pass good for all day that I’ll sell to you for a dollar. It would normally cost you $6!” I am a walking counter-example to classical economic assumptions. There are lots more just like me.

This “Share Alike” notion has also caught on within certain licensing practices. Free Software licenses, like the GNU General Public License, have a “share alike” provision. They encourage you to share the software with others, but require you to share the software on the same terms that you received it. You cannot place additional restrictions on the use of the software. This keeps the software maximally shareable, and makes the world a much nicer place.

The Creative Commons has a license that they actually call “Share Alike” which this very blog is licensed under. (See sidebar.) It means that you can re-use what you find here, under certain specified conditions, so long as you also allow others to use it under those same conditions. This keeps my random musings here shareable, and I hope, makes the world a nicer place.

A link in the prior entry reminded me of the great quotations Senator Robert Byrd chose when arguing that the Congress was wrong to give up the authority to declare war and to hand over their constitutional duty to the executive branch.

Representative Abraham Lincoln, in a letter to William H. Herndon, stated: “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose – - and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose. If, to-day, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us’ but he will say to you ‘be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’

“The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood.”

and then later Byrd said…

James Madison wrote in 1793, “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man….”

I think someone should found a new third party, The Constitutional Party, that actually believes we should do what our own constitution says we should do. It’s stunning that such a suggestion would need to be made.

To anyone who reads this message:

Please send help! The U.S. has been overrun by a treacherous dictator. This un-elected “leader” is now waging an undeclared war against another country. The formerly democratic United States of America has been toppled! This tyrant rules with an iron fist. He has imprisoned United States citizens indefinitely without charging them with a crime. He holds prisoners for years at foreign military bases and refuses to give them access to legal counsel, charge them with crimes, or afford them due process of law. He spies on both U.S. citizens and foreign diplomats without seeking constitutionally required warrants. He seeks “total information awareness” about everything his citizens do. Our freedom of travel has been revoked. He can track what we read. His army photographs and video tapes those who oppose him. He has the largest number of weapons of mass destruction in the world, the most powerful military in the world, and now is increasing the money spent on the military when just two years ago more was spent by the U.S. on its military alone than was spent on the militaries of the rest of the world combined. He runs the only country to have used atomic bombs in war. He recently tested the largest conventional weapon ever detonated. He is clearly a threat to the safety of all people in the world and has made this clearly known by beginning to kill people in a foreign land. He is no stranger to killing. He has sanctioned the executions of more prisoners than anyone in the history of the United States. He ignores the constitution this country was founded on, which requires him to uphold our treaties made, by breaking the treaty we signed when we joined the United Nations. He ignores the diplomatic efforts of our allies and chooses his own path bent on destruction and death. This, even after his ambassador assured world leaders that he would work with them rather than automatically pursue his own course of war. Obviously, such a situation makes most in government afraid to disagree with the dictator. We need whatever support you who read this can offer to restore democracy to the United States. Please help!

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article describing the efforts of educators to resolve whether provisions of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) conflict with the recently passed Technology Education and Copyright Harmonization Act (TEACH).

TEACH became law in November 2002 and was intended to “allow college instructors to use nondramatic works, such as news articles and novels, and portions of dramatic works, such as movies, in online courses without paying fees and without seeking the copyright holder’s permission”. The DMCA has a provision which prohibits circumvention of technologies that block access to copyrighted material.

Educators are concerned that in order to exercise their rights under TEACH (and indeed their fair-use rights) that it may be necessary to circumvent such blocking technologies and thus to run afoul of the DMCA. They would like a clear ruling from the Copyright Office indicating that either the DMCA’s provision does not apply to such cases or to expressly create an exception to the DMCA for such cases.

Educators would sometimes need to bypass copying protections to use materials from CDs and DVDs for distance education, as permitted by the Teach Act. “The problem arises when digital materials are not also released in non-digital formats that the colleges can fall back on, such as print.” Read the whole article for more.

Well, what we all knew was coming now has a definitive time-table. Here’s the kicker: America is no longer a Republic. I don’t know of a time in history when this country has had stronger opposition to something their president was doing and were still powerless to do anything about it. One might argue: “But your elected representatives overwhelmingly supported the president’s bid for war just months ago! They authorized this, hence the American people authorized this.” Actually, that just shows the root of the problem. Our elected representatives no longer represent us. I have almost never in my voting life had a representative do what I thought was right. They don’t do what their constituents want. They do what their party wants. And their parties are controlled by the money they receive from corporate donors. So, in a surprising way, what this war shows me is that the most important issue facing this country today is, of all things, campaign finance reform. Until the people take back the congress from the corporations we will have no check on the president and hence no balance of power.

I just read Cory Doctorow’s book Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom for free online. I have not read a Sci-Fi novel in years, but I burned through this one in two sittings. Now that I’m done I suppose the main reason I would recommend the book is because the world it is premised on is so interesting and so seemingly possible. You’ll have the world mostly figured out in a couple chapters, but for me, the story-line was intriguing enough too that I wanted to see how it ended up. The NYTimes review of it has some valid criticisms, but I’d suggest reading the book before reading the review. I like how Doctorow introduces us to his world piece by piece without much explanation, and reading a review like that one spoils all the surprises.

Check out these images of the leaflets the U.S. is dropping on Iraq right now. They are on a .mil site, so I believe they are authentic.

The ones that catch my eye are the numerous ones urging Iraqis not to blow up oil wells. Generally, I’ve been skeptical of the argument that this is a war solely about oil. So much attention has been paid to this aspect of the situtation that if GW tried to commandeer Iraqi oil for his own purposes there would be a gigantic stink. (At least I’d hope so, but who knows, nobody seems to care when he wants to drill in national parks and people keep on driving their SUVs, so what do I know?) But, now that I look at these leaflets, it becomes a little harder to say. If all GW cares about is making sure Saddam doesn’t provide WMD to terrorists, then there’s no reason to care whether he blows up the oil wells or not. If you care that much about the preservation of the oil wells, then your motivations for going in there are more complicated than is being let on.

I’ve been happily using SuSE 8.0 on both my desktop and laptop for about a year now. I think I will upgrade to 8.2 merely to support SuSE.

Sometimes I feel like I should give Red Hat a whirl since it is so widely used. I feel like I may be missing things that thousands of other Linux users take for granted since they use Red Hat every day.

Or I’d like try to get Debian running. I tried 2.2 (potato) a year ago and never really got a functioning desktop running. I was online and even had Samba sharing the internet, but I could never get the Gnome panel to run and so it was wacky. I’d like to use Debian because I could more carefully ensure that everything I installed was truly free software. Problem is no modern graphics cards have GPL’d drivers. No BIOS that actually works is free software, etc. So, trying to be a purist about free software right now is doomed to failure. Nonetheless, I did enjoy Debian’s apt-get until I messed it up.

Right now I can’t figure out how to compile a new GTK and so can’t use the latest GAIM messenger. I’ve tried and tried. Hopefully 8.2 will just come with the latest version.

This is an entertaining quiz that will tell you what political stereotype you fall in.