Good rant by Riverbend on the Iraqi Governing Council ¹:
I think it’s safe to say that when you put a bunch of power-hungry people together on a single council (some who have been at war with each other), they’re going to try to promote their own interests. They are going to push forward their party members, militias and relatives in an attempt to root themselves in Iraq’s future.
The question is, of course: What is the solution? I’m not sure myself. Riverbend suggest a timetable for pulling out. There reason, she says, is that “normal” people don’t want to get involved, yet:
Prominent, popular politicians and public figures don’t want to be tied to American apron strings- this includes lawyers, political scientists, writers, and other well-known people. Not because they are American apron-strings per se, but because this is an occupation [...]
Oh and I found a translation tool for English-Arabic via HealingIraq! ² It translated “Hello” to “ﺎًﺒﺣﺮﻣ “ – now I just need to learn more Arabic to be able to check whether this is correct. ;)
My girlfriend spent four weeks in Cuba and loved it. Imagine my surprise when I found that PedramMoallemian blogs about his visit to Cuba! ³
On the topic of people, Cubans are perhaps one of the most warm, friendly and generous people on earth. Despite all the hardship they have faced over four decades of a brutal embargo that is essentially only supported by U.S. and Israel, they have managed to maintain a vibrant and flourishing culture while building a bright and healthy community. You must tip your hat to that.
Here in Switzerland, Salsa both Cubana and Puertoriqueña, Batchata from the Dominicans, as well as Merengue (and Son and Rumba to a lesser degree) are totally en-vogue. House music still rules Zürich, but it has been going down-hill for a year or two, and Salsa has been growing to a point where all the Salsa-schools in town are having major fights, here.
Anyway, I continued reading in Pedram’s blog and found some other good posts – such as the one ⁴ where he’s invited to a talk show talking about illegal immigration, and he has somebody he knows well at his side to represent the first nations. It seems they had good fun, but the show was never aired.
Also read some of the totally whacko xenophobic comments. And ponder for a moment what it means for a white man in the Americas to be xenophobic...
Since I picked up some posts from JoiIto’s blog, I’ve decided to take another look at his EmergentDemocracy paper and the discussion I was involved in at the time. And I’ve decided to post again. ⁵ ⁶ ⁷
It just never ends... 🙁
A long time ago I talked about the FreeDocumentationLicense on Meatball, saying that it was just too damn complicated. I then wrote the FreeWebsiteLicense, trying to just make it smaller and simpler by dropping anything that wasn’t needed.
Later, I’ve found that the CreativeCommons ShareAlike license might be just the thing I was looking for: Big following, CopyLeft, simple summary, understandable legal code.
When I started CommunityWiki, the decision was accompanied by draining copyright and licensing discussions as well.
And now, as things are finally cooling down, I’m having **yet another copyright/licensing discussion** with the XEmacs developpers that are interested in moving some stuff to the EmacsWiki. Which is cool. I love that.
But... Please... No more copyright and licenses... Why do I have to waste so much brain power on this? The cumulative damage of copyright, patents, and trademark laws in terms of brain damage must be stupifying!
Anyway, I looked at the GnuFreeDocumentationLicense again... And yes, it seems to be rather unfit. No anonymous contributions? And enough conditions that seem to effectively cancel the RightToFork. How sad.
I think the simple summary I wrote on CopyLeft actually says it all. The simplest copyleft license would be this:
As a bonus, you could add:
Maybe I should move my site to such a license.
→ Emacs Wiki Discussion Page
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Run it past a lawyer first. Anyway, I believe you forgot a term:
Otherwise after a generation of copying, the work becomes “public domain” (the right to copy, modify and/or distribute the work gets transferred, but the second term is not a right but a restriction), and then a generation later, copyrighted. – ChrisPurcell
I think you are right. The current proposal on EmacsWiki reads:
1. You have the right to copy, modify, and/or distribute the work.
2. You must grant recipients the same rights.
3. You must inform recipients of their rights.
4. You must make it easy for recipients to copy and modify the work.
5. Recipients must place identical restrictions on derivative works.
6. You may change the license to any other copyleft licsense such as the GPL, GFDL, CC SA, or the XEmacs manual license.