Some of us want to be able to release high-definition video (possibly even 3D) without evil copy protection schemes. I've been avoiding Blu-Ray as a consumer since it came out, mostly because Richard Stallman said it has an evil and oppressive DRM scheme. After my first serious investigation, I can confirm his opinion, and frankly, it's a pretty bleak situation. What can we do about it? Here's five ideas for how we might release high definition video.

Very often recently I find myself explaining why Postgres is so great. In an effort to save myself a bit of time in repeating this, I though it best to consolidate why Postgres is so great and dispel some of the historical arguments against it.

Name me an Arab country, and I'll recite a litany of abuses fueled by a toxic mix of culture and religion that few seem willing or able to disentangle lest they blaspheme or offend.

Not a single Arab country ranks in the top 100 in the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap Report, putting the region as a whole solidly at the planet's rock bottom. Poor or rich, we all hate our women.

Ms Sandler is a lawyer, a programmer and a passionate advocate of open source software. That ideological bent meant she was keen to find out about the computer code running on any device that might be inserted in her body.

Unfortunately, she told the BBC, the implant's maker would not reveal its software. Its reassurances about the code's integrity did not help.

"Knowing what I know about software I'm sure it'll have bugs," she said.

There are three obvious classes of randomness: things about the particular machine we’re on, things about the particular boot of the machine we’re on, and things which will vary every time we ask.

Sharing information in phatic posts is normal and expected – it’s just the translation of life in atom-space into life in bit-space. What’s new is the super-public, the exposure of life to scrutiny by triangulation and data-mining. So far, no privacy legislation takes it into proper account. Companies, however are now actively mining the super-public.

It’s not because I don’t like you, it’s not because I want to steal your ideas, it’s not because what you’re up to isn’t important.

It’s because the ideas you are likely to share with me over coffee or in a phone conversation are otherwise plentiful, worthless in isolation, and, to some degree, completely unoriginal and already known to the world.

Remember, no matter what the self-help books say, the research suggests that willpower isn’t a skill. If it was, there would be some consistency from one task to the next. Instead, every time you exert control over the giant system that is you, that control gets weaker.

Girls Around Me isn’t an app you should use to pick up girls, or guys for that matter. This is an app you should download to teach the people you care about that privacy issues are real, that social networks like Facebook and Foursquare expose you and the ones you love, and that if you do not know exactly how much you are sharing, you are as easily preyed upon as if you were naked. I can think of no better way to get a person to realize that they should understand their Facebook privacy settings then pulling out this app.

The idea, and the term, come out of 1970s and 1980s debates over whether companies could get around pesky privacy protections by shipping their magnetic tape reels to a country with laxer privacy laws. What started off as a pejorative term flipped to a positive in the eyes of the cypherpunks. They saw governmental restrictions on the free flow of information—privacy, copyright, sedition, drug-making instructions, or whatever—as grave threats to personal freedom. Cypherpunks hoped a borderless Internet, together with strong cryptography and a friendly data haven or two for their servers, would destroy the government's ability to snoop on and censor online speech. It would all lead to a new age of genuine liberty.

The world is in the midst of a global extinction crisis primarily driven by illegal hunting for highly valuable animal body parts. Having largely emptied its own jungles of furry, scaly, and feathery creatures, Asia’s thirst for exotic blood, bile, and bones has turned to the African continent. The Far East’s middle class is becoming more affluent; it is no coincidence that poaching on the African continent has spiked in recent years, as more and more people are able to afford luxury goods like ivory or exotic pets.

the free software definition reads like a revolutionary manifesto, partly because it is. The people behind it often eschew the pragmatism of the term "open source" and focus on liberty alone. It's worth looking behind their philosophy, though. I paraphrase the free software definition as guaranteeing the liberty to use, study, modify, and distribute software without interference. Those four liberties create value for business

From the satisfying click of its keys to its no-nonsense layout and solid steel underpinnings, IBM's 24-year-old Model M is the standard by which all other keyboards must be judged.

When I look at those numbers, I have a hard time believing what Chris Dodd, Hilary Rosen and Stanislas Mettra have to say. Didn't Warner Bros. just set a company record for quarterly profits? I'm confused. My guess is that these industries really aren't losing money, but they are losing control. And maybe to them, control is more valuable than profits?

“I don’t want to have to do this at all,” I told her. “I’m doing this to prevent my baby’s suffering. I don’t want another sonogram when I’ve already had two today. I don’t want to hear a description of the life I’m about to end. Please,” I said, “I can’t take any more pain.” I confess that I don’t know why I said that. I knew it was fait accompli. The counselor could no more change the government requirement than I could. Yet here was a superfluous layer of torment piled upon an already horrific day, and I wanted this woman to know it.

“We have no choice but to comply with the law,” she said, adding that these requirements were not what Planned Parenthood would choose. Then, with a warmth that belied the materials in her hand, she took me through the rules.

We only had unit tests, no integration tests, so there was no guarantee that once I was done coding, that the integration work would actually solve the problem at hand. In Testing (i.e., the academic discipline that studies testing), this is referred to as a validation problem: we may have a repeatable, accurate measure, but it's measuring the wrong thing.

I'm sorry for US sites and users. Your government is hell-bent on turning the internet into a read-only device like TV, easily regulated and controlled. The population will be required to sit quietly and keep their eyes glued on the screen so they don't miss the ads, with any infringers deemed terrorists and pedophiles and thus deserving of summary punishment by DHS squads.

Hopefully the internet will route around the damaged segment, and the rest of us can continue to enjoy the amazing interactivity it has brought our society.

After all these years of speaking about, writing about, and doing GPL enforcement, I'm occasionally surprised at how much confusion still exists about how and why it's done. I've focused solely on doing GPL enforcement via 501(c)(3) not-for-profit entities, which means I do it only in the public good. I hope this blog post will give a sense of how it works and why I do it.

It took a bit of extra futzing around to get it working under Linux (Fedora 14 in my case), but I got there in the end. Amazingly it supports all my devices (TV, PVR, DVD, RX) despite some of them being ancient and obscure.

It was never obvious what exactly they wanted from me, when they advised that I “try to complete my family”. My condition – especially given what was happening at the time – made it unlikely that my body could sustain a pregnancy beyond the first trimester. And if I could manage to carry a pregnancy to term, it would be very dangerous for me, and would likely cause me permanent harm. It seemed that I was being told to undergo a series of frustrating miscarriages in pursuit of a dangerous pregnancy I didn’t want. When I asked my primary care physician why this was happening, she sighed, rolled her eyes, and said “They want to be able to say that they told you to try.”

The root of the color management problem is that no two devices have exactly the same color reproduction characteristics: monitors and printers vary wildly in the tonal range and gamut that they can reproduce; similarly cameras and scanners vary wildly in what they can pick up. As a practical matter, when a user makes a printout and finds it too dark, or orders a piece of clothing online and is surprised at its color when it arrives, lack of color management is the problem.

But color management is essentially a solved problem that has yet to be implemented system-wide on Linux.

Transcendence properly understood—a naturalistic transcendence—embraces the non-rational, not the irrational.

For the good of individuals and society, irrationality must be confronted and kept out of public policy. Non-rational transcendent emotions, on the other hand, are harmonious with reason, evidence, and naturalism. They can be cherished as supreme human experiences.

You know, that amazing thing where all our stuff is stored so we can get to it from anywhere? The Cloud where everything is moving towards, that utopian future where there's no DRM and unlimited storage. Freedom, commerce, and media for all. Except I can't access the cloud. And I have no idea how to fix it.

Protect your neck, Dear Readers. For now, today, I am here and my things are in the cloud and never the twain shall meet.

Liaison officers and teachers contribute countless hours to professional development and extra-curricular activities. While there are always exceptions to the rule, in my 14 years of teaching, I am not aware of a single Chaplain who has contributed any time to either PD or extra-curricular activites. Nor am I aware of a Chaplain completing a 4 year degree as we do. Yet, Chaplains are afforded all the priveleges of a teacher without the responsibilities.

These responsibilities include the Child Protection Policy. As a male teacher I am not permitted to sit with a female student one-on-one with the door closed to my office/room. I must keep the door open and must be in clear sight of other students or staff. School Chaplains do most of their 'counselling' one-on-one, out-of-sight and behind closed doors. This implies that while teachers cannot be trusted, those attached to a Christian church can be, despite the mounting number of sexual assaults on children perpetrated by the clergy.

"We're at a point in the state of intellectual property where existing patents probably cover every behavior that's happening on the Internet or our mobile phones today," says Chris Sacca, the venture capitalist. "[T]he average Silicon Valley start-up or even medium sized company, no matter how truly innovative they are, I have no doubt that aspects of what they're doing violate patents right now. And that's what's fundamentally broken about this system right now."

It’s a fact of neuroscience that everything we experience is actually a figment of our imagination. Although our sensations feel accurate and truthful, they do not necessarily reproduce the physical reality of the outside world. Of course, many experiences in daily life reflect the physical stimuli that enter the brain. But the same neural machinery that interprets actual sensory inputs is also responsible for our dreams, delusions and failings of memory. In other words, the real and the imagined share a physical source in the brain. So take a lesson from Socrates: “All I know is that I know nothing.”

For many believers, faith is all that matters, shielding them from arguments and evidence which they would rather not have to consider. These are the ones who oppose the Critical Thinking of science and prefer the Critical of Thinking inherent in their faith.

But if you rely on blind faith, what are the chances that you're going to see the light?

Chances are, you know someone who has lost a laptop or smartphone, or had one stolen outright. Although preventing the theft itself would be the most satisfying outcome, there is little a software developer can do on that front (although one might consider proximity-monitoring over Bluetooth to be a step in the right direction). Full-disk encryption and password-protection for the BIOS are common strategies, but another approach — device tracking — has never enjoyed a high level of popularity in open source. The Prey project offers one open source device tracking solution, with a small range of options — including self-hosting or using the company's online monitoring service.

However, a rather inconvenient truth needs to be borne in mind: recent research shows that ''facts'' alone rarely persuade us to change our minds on anything significant. In fact, they frequently entrench a contrary view.

Numerous studies underline how impervious to evidence our strongly held convictions are. Whether on political, religious or ethical issues, it seems our minds have an unusual power to reorganise contrary facts in order to support our beliefs.

The challenge with estimating non-functional requirements is that there are really two costs. First is the cost of initial compliance. Second is the cost of ongoing compliance.

How do we estimate this type of work? Well, estimate both parts separately. Estimate the cost of initial compliance just like any other user story or product backlog item. The team and product owner will need to incorporate an estimate of when they’ll do this. Adding performance testing after five sprints is different than adding it after 20 sprints. For the tax portion, the team and product owner need to agree on when they will do the work: every sprint or after every n sprints. The team can then estimate how much work will be involved over the planned number of sprints and allocate that amount of work to each.

Religionists often try to claim meaning and morality as their own private property. The standard secularist will reply that this is so far from the truth that religion cannot even claim a proper share of them.

Faced with the night sky, Darwin’s entangled bank, or the newborn baby, the secularist’s feelings of awe or wonder are directed where they should be: at the sky, the bank, or the baby. His attention does not stray to thinking about his own soul, or the purposes of providence, although he may entertain thoughts about our small place in the vast deserts of space and time. If someone cannot find meaning in the baby’s smile because it is so small in comparison with the cosmos, or because it is not going to last forever, then he is to be pitied, not admired as especially spiritual.

Morality is a natural phenomenon. Its roots lie in our needs and our capacities for sympathetically imagining the feelings of others, for inventing co-operative principles, for being able to take an impersonal view of our own doings. We have what Adam Smith called a “man within the breast” monitoring our feelings and actions in the name of those with whom we live. Imagining their admiration, we feel pride; imagining their anger, guilt, their contempt, shame.

Now, for someone who had already sold himself to the government in the form of federal student loans for film school, the prospect of an extra $2.5 million was pretty frightening. He gave up the pirate DVD business and started selling weed instead, as there were fewer risks involved. That was how we met. Last I heard, he was in jail for selling drugs, but he’ll be out sooner than if he had been caught selling $2 DVDs of “I Know Who Killed Me” to his friends.

Thomas Jefferson would have been appalled at this story. And not just because I think he would have liked trashy Lindsay Lohan movies. But because Thomas Jefferson believed that all art should belong to the public. For him, public domain was a large, thriving democracy, while copyright was a fat king thousands of miles away eating puddings and meat pies.

The forces arrayed against the believer who dares to question, dares to challenge, are formidable indeed. Small wonder that many believers never truly stop to reflect on their beliefs from the perspective of asking whether they are really true.

And yet an increasing number of us are doing just that. Increasingly we are shaking off the hobgoblins of belief, and in so doing we are discovering the joys of a life where no question is off-limits and where we no longer have to make do with pseudo-answers based in faith, authority or threats.

Abandoning religious faith is like waking after a deep sleep. Good morning! It’s a beautiful day…

The first time I heard about the practice of Vipassana was about four years ago, when a friend told me that he was going to attend a course that involved meditating for eleven hours daily. Intrigued, I began to question these people: what was this Vipassana? What happens in these courses? Why did they feel compelled to do them? I heard overwhelmingly positive stories, and the general line: ‘It’s hell for the first five or six days, but then it becomes bliss.’ Slowly, a seed began to grow in my mind that I might want to try this Vipassana one day, in the distant future. But not just yet.

This spring, with a tremendous amount of trepidation, I finally bite the bullet and enrol for the course, wanting to find out for myself how to attain this elusive nirvanic bliss that Vipassana meditators talk about. Mind you, I still try to get out of it. Two days before the course, I develop a bad cold and hope that the Vipassana people might either prohibit me from attending due to health reasons, or cancel the course. Neither happens. I have no more excuses. My teacher Tony takes me to the train station in Swansea.

What was striking about these observations was that those of us whose personalities led us to embrace the world and other people in a spirit of openness, generosity, warmth and tolerance “knew” that God did the same. And those who lacked the confidence for that, and consequently saw the world as threatening and evil and bad, “knew” that God saw it that way, too.

This is why subjective experience cannot tell us anything about God. Knowing what kind of god someone believes in tells us a great deal about that person – but nothing whatsoever about the truth or otherwise of the existence of any god at all.

"My life's an open book," people might say. "I've got nothing to hide." But now the government has large dossiers of everyone's activities, interests, reading habits, finances, and health. What if the government leaks the information to the public? What if the government mistakenly determines that based on your pattern of activities, you're likely to engage in a criminal act? What if it denies you the right to fly? What if the government thinks your financial transactions look odd—even if you've done nothing wrong—and freezes your accounts? What if the government doesn't protect your information with adequate security, and an identity thief obtains it and uses it to defraud you? Even if you have nothing to hide, the government can cause you a lot of harm.

"But the government doesn't want to hurt me," some might argue. In many cases, that's true, but the government can also harm people inadvertently, due to errors or carelessness.

When the nothing-to-hide argument is unpacked, and its underlying assumptions examined and challenged, we can see how it shifts the debate to its terms, then draws power from its unfair advantage. The nothing-to-hide argument speaks to some problems but not to others. It represents a singular and narrow way of conceiving of privacy, and it wins by excluding consideration of the other problems often raised with government security measures. When engaged directly, the nothing-to-hide argument can ensnare, for it forces the debate to focus on its narrow understanding of privacy. But when confronted with the plurality of privacy problems implicated by government data collection and use beyond surveillance and disclosure, the nothing-to-hide argument, in the end, has nothing to say.

The worst case scenario would be that they wouldn’t use the art and wouldn’t pay me. I was more concerned about the art than the money. I like money too, of course. The best-case scenario would be that they would use the art and pay me. But if they didn’t pay me, I planned to release the art myself, so anyone could use it, including them. They would be free to use the art even if they didn’t pay me.

The happy fact is that once I realized saying “no” was an option, any budding resentment at their requests evaporated. They were just trying to get what they wanted, which is what everyone does. It fell on me to set boundaries. It’s not wrong to try to get what you want; it’s also not wrong to say no.

I’m really glad that I specified a Free license from the very beginning. If I had granted them a restrictive copyright, then when they axed the art, no one would be able to use it. So here’s yet another benefit to Free Culture: a client can’t kill it.

I’ve been practicing Vipassana for a year and expected that this retreat would be more of the same that I had already been doing, albeit on a more intense scale.

That was not what happened at all. This retreat was like no other meditation I had ever done. I think it’s possible (though I wouldn’t like to declare firmly either way) that perhaps Goenka is using legitimate Vipassana practice as a veil to conceal something entirely different that goes on at some of his retreats. So I decided to leave my retreat early, for my own emotional well-being, and I took a few days afterward to collect my thoughts and write them down.

A growing body of social science research reveals that atheists, and non-religious people in general, are far from the unsavory beings many assume them to be. On basic questions of morality and human decency — issues such as governmental use of torture, the death penalty, punitive hitting of children, racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-Semitism, environmental degradation or human rights — the irreligious tend to be more ethical than their religious peers, particularly compared with those who describe themselves as very religious.

As individuals, atheists tend to score high on measures of intelligence, especially verbal ability and scientific literacy. They tend to raise their children to solve problems rationally, to make up their own minds when it comes to existential questions and to obey the golden rule. They are more likely to practice safe sex than the strongly religious are, and are less likely to be nationalistic or ethnocentric. They value freedom of thought.

But more important to me than the possibility of re-licensing, is the chilling effect copyright re-assignment agreements have on communities. The intent can be to be to hedge a company’s bets against contributor interference, and ultimately be able to assert complete control over a codebase. If we agree that the collaborative production of software is a social good, this type of hedging can only be seen as anti-social, and ultimately, destructive to a software community.

Emacs has integrated version control support for numerous VC backends, including Git and Perforce. It gives a set of generic commands that you can use to interact with each version control system the same way.

Java is not a first-class citizen in Linux distributions. We generally have decent coverage for Java libraries, but lots of Java software is not packaged at all, or packaged in alternate repositories. Some consider that it’s because Linux distribution developers dislike Java and prefer other languages, like C or Python. The reality is slightly different.

It is a sad fact of human relations that unqualified adulation often produces from the adored one contempt and a kick in the chops, rather than gratitude and kindness. Apparently, the same applies to human-divine relations.