Another column of thousands of people are coming to their way to reinforce the peaceful demonstrators who are in confrontation with armed military troops.

A respectful old monk is in the vanguard of the column singing national anthem and holding flags of fighting peacock.

Despite peaceful demonstrators having been beaten to break up the crowd, the demonstrators are still together reciting “metta sutta”(A discourse on loving-kindness, about disseminating love to those who are aggressive)

source.

Please sign the Petition here to help the peaceful demonstrators. China and India, Canada and everywhere: Don’t let this happen! When people rise up peacefully and call for help, peacekeepers should respond! Wouldn’t this make more sense then going in where we’re unwanted? I’m just saying.

The plan to standardize the libraries first became public in May (…) “Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish religious books, many of them donated,” said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. “It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off the shelves.”

(…)

“Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons,” Mr. Laycock said. “But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.”

The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists indicate their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the selections.

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

Source.

To put it bluntly, software, really like all technologies, is inherently political. Even the most disruptive technologies, the innovations and ideas that can utterly transform society, carry with them the legacies of past decisions, the culture and history of the societies that spawned them. Code inevitably reflects the choices, biases and desires of its creators.

This will often be unambiguous and visible, as with digital rights management. It can also be quite subtle, as with operating system routines written to benefit one application over its competitors (I know some of you in this audience are old enough to remember “DOS isn’t done ’til Lotus won’t run” — if you have no idea what I’m talking about, ask the guy with gray hair closest to you). Sometimes, code may be written to reflect an even more dubious bias, as with the allegations of voting machines intentionally designed to make election-hacking easy for those in the know. Much of the time, however, the inclusion of software elements reflecting the choices, biases and desires of its creators will be utterly unconscious, the result of what the coders deem obviously right.

We can imagine parallel examples of the ways in which metaverse technologies could be shaped by deeply-embedded cultural and political forces: the obvious, such as lifelogging systems that know to not record digitally-watermarked background music and television; the subtle, such as augmented reality filters that give added visibility to sponsors, and make competitors harder to see; the malicious, such as mirror world networks that accelerate the rupture between the information haves and have-nots — or, perhaps more correctly, between the users and the used; and, again and again, the unintended-but-consequential, such as virtual world environments that make it impossible to build an avatar that reflects your real or desired appearance, offering only virtual bodies sprung from the fevered imagination of perpetual adolescents.

So too with what we today talk about as a “singularity.” The degree to which human software engineers actually get their hands dirty with the nuts & bolts of AI code is secondary to the basic condition that humans will guide the technology’s development, making the choices as to which characteristics should be encouraged, which should be suppressed or ignored, and which ones signify that “progress” has been made. Whatever the degree to which post-singularity intelligences would be able to reshape their own minds, we have to remember that the first generation will be our creations, built with interests and abilities based upon our choices, biases and desires.

This isn’t intrinsically bad; emerging digital minds that reflect the interests of their human creators is a lever that gives us a real chance to make sure that a “singularity” ultimately benefits us. But it holds a real risk. Not that people won’t know that there’s a bias: we’ve lived long enough with software bugs and so-called “computer errors” to know not to put complete trust in the pronouncements of what may seem to be digital oracles. The risk comes from not being able to see what that bias might be.

Many of us rightly worry about what might happen with “Metaverse” systems that analyze our life logs, that monitor our every step and word, that track our behavior online so as to offer us the safest possible society — or best possible spam. Imagine the risks associated with trusting that when the creators of emerging self-aware systems say that they have our best interests in mind, they mean the same thing by that phrase that we do.

For me, the solution is clear. Trust depends upon transparency. Transparency, in turn, requires openness.

If Pandora and other smart internet radio providers had their potential unleashed instead of squashed the global music industry could experience a boom as customers FINALLY begin to access the immeasurably vast wells of talent that are really out there. On the other hand, if the legitimate businesses trying to support artists are pushed out of existence by disturbingly undemocratic legislation, then the internet will face a longer term and more serious problem, another swelling in the ranks of those ancient irritable masses of the dispossessed. Bad news bears when those guys get pissed off, remember? … Can’t we do something fair and sustainable instead?

Hi, it’s Tim from Pandora,

I’m writing today to ask for your help. The survival of Pandora and all of Internet radio is in jeopardy because of a recent decision by the Copyright Royalty Board in Washington, DC to almost triple the licensing fees for Internet radio sites like Pandora. The new royalty rates are irrationally high, more than four times what satellite radio pays and broadcast radio doesn’t pay these at all. Left unchanged, these new royalties will kill every Internet radio site, including Pandora.

In response to these new and unfair fees, we have formed the SaveNetRadio Coalition, a group that includes listeners, artists, labels and webcasters. I hope that you will consider joining us.

Please sign our petition urging your Congressional representative to act to save Internet radio:

SIGN THE PETITION HERE

Please feel free to forward this link/email to your friends – the more petitioners we can get, the better.

Understand that we are fully supportive of paying royalties to the artists whose music we play, and have done so since our inception. As a former touring musician myself, I’m no stranger to the challenges facing working musicians. The issue we have with the recent ruling is that it puts the cost of streaming far out of the range of ANY webcaster’s business potential.

I hope you’ll take just a few minutes to sign our petition – it WILL make a difference. As a young industry, we do not have the lobbying power of the RIAA. You, our listeners, are by far our biggest and most influential allies.

As always, and now more than ever, thank you for your support.

I added some of the links and boldy action, but aside from that, this is the plea for help exactly as Tim sent it, please sign it if you see fit…

Cuba latest to endorse open source software

Cuba’s communist government has said that they are now considering adopting open source software to remove their reliance on the software giant Microsoft.

The government said that they are trying to wean state agencies from Microsoft’s proprietary Windows to the open-source Linux operating system.

Expert Hector Rodriguez said about this decision: “It’s basically a problem of technological sovereignty, a problem of ideology.”

Some other countries to have announced similar plans include: China, Brazil and Norway. Some Indian states too are increasingly moving to open source platform.

From Techwhack

Part video game, part real online community, Second Life is also getting attention from real-world companies that are beginning to stake out their own turf in Second Life communities. One U.S. House member, Rep. George Miller (D-Calif.), last week even joined the Second Life community to brief a group of invitees on the top priorities of the new majority party in Congress.

“We feel we have a responsibility to improve and to grow Second Life as rapidly as possible,” Philip Rosedale, CEO and founder of Linden Lab, said in a statement. “We were the first virtual world to enable content creators to own the rights to the intellectual property they create. That sparked exponential growth in the richness of the Second Life environment. Now, we’re placing the viewer’s development into the hands of residents and developers as well.”

The source code will be available from Second Life’s Web site. The initial open-source efforts are expected to include bug fixes, hardware compatibility improvements and user interface changes, according to the company.

The company decided to move the viewer client to open source because Second Life users are very creative and the move will allow developers to add their own creativity, said Cory Ondrejka, chief technology officer at Linden Lab. “We’ve said before that Second Life makes sense as a fully open-source project. It’s somewhere in the future.”

by todd r weiss

also, for more hmmmm…

John Law, an early member of the LLC that organized Burning Man who split off from the event in 1996, has sued co-founder and director Larry Harvey, as well as board member Michael Mikel and the LLC itself.

Law is claiming that the phrase “Burning Man” should be in the public domain, rather than a controlled trademark, and that Harvey, Mikel and the LLC, Black Rock City, LLC, have acted illegally in their control of the trademark.

In a 32-page filing (click for PDF), Law laid out his complaints.

Essentially, Law feels that Harvey and Black Rock City, LLC, are not acting in the best interest of the community that makes Burning Man possible.

“Burning Man is the sum of the efforts of the tens of thousands of people who have contributed to making Burning Man what it is,” Law wrote on the blog he has started to get the issues involved in the suit out in the open. “The name Burning Man and all attendant trademarks, logos and trade dress do not belong to Larry Harvey alone or to Black Rock City, LLC.”

For its part, the Burning Man organization was just finding out about the lawsuit and did not yet have any direct comment.

by daniel turdiman.

though these moves raise my eyebrows a bit, i do think and often argue that people and businesses will come at open source from countless different directions and motivations. open sourcing has never been purely generous- it works exactly because it can be beneficial for individuals and companies that do it and for the wider community who gets to partake of the code… or of the burning man.. as the case may be..

mistaking anger for political wisdom is a dangerous luxury in democracies. It can become an all-consuming fire that destroys rather than builds. For the power-hungry and opportunistic, anger is an especially attractive instrument of manipulation in the political toolbox.

The especially angry year of 1968 ended with the election of tricky Dick Nixon, not poet-philosopher Gene McCarthy. In 2002 in France, protest votes for racist candidate Jean-Marie Le Pen unexpectedly propelled him into a presidential runoff against incumbent Jacques Chirac. Chirac easily won the general election but then proved to be ineffectual in dealing with the ugly strain of national resentments that the campaign unleashed.

Protest votes are not consequence-free luxuries, in France or in Connecticut. The task for responsible politicians is to acknowledge the anger and to channel it into problem-solving rather than into pointless venting or an endless seeking of partisan advantage. Unfortunately, Bush and Rove show an inability or a lack of interest in the problem-solving approach. Increasingly, their critics do the same.

He awakened as a man awakens out of a drunk- hazy brained and foggy swimming slowly and painfully back toward reality. He awakened tapping with his head against the pillow. The tapping by now had become so much a part of awakening that the first glimmer of consciousness found him already tapping and later on when exhaustion overcame him and his mind began to grow dim and sleep crept over his body he was still tapping. He lay there not thinking of anything his brain aching and his head throbbing against the pillow. SOS. Help.

And then his mind sharpened and began to think instead of only to feel he stopped his tapping and lay still. Something very important was happening. He had a new day nurse.

He could tell the minute the door opened and she began to walk across the room. Her footsteps were light where those of his regular day nurse his old efficient fast-working day nurse were heavy. It took five steps to bring this new one to his bedside. That meant she was shorter than the regular nurse and probably younger toobecause the very vibration of her footsteps seemed gay and bouyant. It was the first time within his memory that the regular day nurse had not appeared to take care of him.

He lay very still very tense. This was like learning a new secret like opening a new world. Without a moment’s hesitation the new nurse threw back his covers. And then like all of the others before her she stood quietly for a moment beside his bed. He knew she must have been told what to expect. Yet the sight of him was probably so much worse than any description that she could do nothing for that first instant but stare. Then instead of hastily throwing the covers back over him as some of the others did or running out of the room or standing weeping and letting the tears fall against his chest she put her hand against his forehead. No one had ever done it before in just this way. Perhaps no one had been able to do it. It was like putting a hand near an open cancer something so terrible and sickening that no one could endure the thought much less the action. Yet this new nurse with the light happy step was not afraid.

this is a quote from Johnny Got His Gun by Dalton Trumbo. here’s some ressources on military injuries in Iraq, and on the state of war amputees in a few other times and places.

Here’s an article that shows the cartoons that have enraged many Muslims (and sypathetic members of other religions) in their original context. It also offers an English translation of the editorial that accompanied the offensive material. Some of the cartoons are, like much bad cartooing, offensive. Others are simple and respectful. Some are critical of the position Islamic law seems to put women into, and some suggest that the Prophet’s message of peace and loving kindness has been hijacked by people who turn his calls for peace into calls for violence

For me, this description of the Prophet is beautiful. Here he calls for pragmatic tactics, tactics that reappear at crucial moments in countless histories, tactics that are clearly oriented towards peace and prosperity for the entire human race:

The Prophet’s most important task was to bring peace to the world. To this end, he urged people to accept the fact that, regardless of skin colour, language, lifestyle or dwelling place, they were all blood brothers and sisters. Only if they saw each other in this light could there be mutual love and respect.

To his followers he would say, “You are all Adam’s children, and Adam was made of clay,” and, asking them to live in peace, would add, “A true believer is one with whom others feel secure – one who returns love for hatred.”

It is each individual’s primary responsibility to treat all others with kindness and compassion. Period. That’s the number 1 message from Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed. Anyone who twists this into a call for murder is missing the point of religion.

And yet, I can sympathize with the intense emotion these offensive cartoons elicit. Even aside from the intense love a Prophet of peace and hope and God is bound to elicit from followers, it’s always scary to embrace diversity. It’s hard to really stand by the belief that other people have also been put here by God. It’s equally hard to stand by the democratic principle that the sum of all our differences will really be greater than our parts. It is a major personal and political struggle to allow that others- gay folks, women, shap comics or people of another religion- might bring good into the world by thinking differently, or by loving different features of the same God one feels one knows. It’s scary to let other people think for themselves when you know they probably won’t think the way you want them to, but throughout the books of these 3 interconnected faiths God tells “His” followers to believe that “He” will be the one to choose who to smite. And interestingly, when we are challenged to react peacefully to other people’s offenses and to allow them to make their own mistakes, we face the exact same scary decision religious people believe God faced. The decision “He” made is the single great, generous act of faith that we are challenged to understand: “He” gave us our own free will.

Being part of a diverse, prosperous, mutually beneficial international community will be challenging, and it will probably require everyone (Muslims, Danes, Politicians) choosing to embrace the following good childhood motto: Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.

Neil:

In desiring some things to adhere to me: summation (with associated
words and diagrams), or the art of the elegant ergonomic shortcut,
(il)legible for you, I plead lame and guilty (that blockage on which we
thrive) and offer with the hope of any and all that I become what I
attempt to do. Be generous as I stand on the shoulders of one lumbering
giant and proceed to slide down his slippery back…
Remember, freedom is a relation.

“There are, you see, two ways of reading a book: you either see it as a box with something inside and start looking for what it signifies, and then if you’re even more perverse or depraved you set off after signifiers. And you treat the next book like a box contained in the first or containing it. And you annotate and interpret and question, and write a book about the book, and so on and on. Or there’s the other way: you see the book as a little non-signifying machine and the only question is “Does it work, and how does it work?’ How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing comes through, you try another
book. This second way of reading is intensive: something comes through or it doesn’t. There’s nothing to explain, nothing to understand, nothing to interpret. It’s like plugging in to an electric circuit.”

Gilles Deleuze, Letter to a Harsh Critic, 1977
(naively cited, mired, and admired)

“neil in turkey”, natalie kallio
“exmpire ii”, andrew zbihlyj
“collaborators”, margaux williamson