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If the government thinks your patent-pending invention has national security implications, it can slap a secrecy order on it that prevents you from developing it. More than 5,300 such orders have been issued, with some of them in effect for decades.
A judge has issued a stinging rebuke against a Chicago law firm that claims to fight copyright piracy, saying it ran a fraudulent scheme to extort millions of dollars from people who shared pornographic videos. In a ruling inexplicably laced with Star Trek references, judge Otis D Wright II said Prenda Law "boldly probe the outskirts of the law", ordered it to pay $80,000 and referred it to federal authorities for racketeering. The judge said the firm in effect controlled the copyrights of several pornographic videos, monitored how they were shared online and aggressively pursued people who downloaded them in breach of copyright. Victims would often settle the cases rather than experience the embarrassment of litigation. Trust us, just read it
About two years ago, news reports described the State Department-funded project of Sascha Meinrath as a way for overseas dissidents to overcome repressive regimes that try to censor them by shutting down the internet. This week a variation on the software he helped design will launch here in the United States. It is called Commotion Wireless. You can download the program on your cellphone or laptop computer in order to create what is called a "mesh" network that allows you to share Internet access with other devices on the network. "It challenges this business model that everyone has to buy their own Internet connection, and it really puts forth this notion of, 'Why don't we share resources?' We can share them across our neighbors, we can share them within our offices, we can share them across entire cities," says Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute.
On the slopes of Mount Telaithrion on the island of Evia, a group of young Greeks have left the busy city and created a self-reliant rural community.
Their goal is to eat only the organic produce they grow themselves, to free themselves from the national electricity grid, and to exchange what they grow or make instead of using money.
The project, whose ultimate goal is to create a school for sustainable living, was the idea of four Athenians who met online back in 2008 and bonded over their dissatisfaction with the daily grind of city life...
Recent rulings in India may make it harder for big pharmaceutical companies to maintain their monopolies and very high prices, especially in the Third World - Do drugs really have to be as expensive as they are? Do pharmaceutical companies have to make such large profits and do their marketing budgets have to be so large? Does the system provide incentives for the industry to produce the drugs we most need or is too much research being devoted to the development of “me-too” drugs and to evergreening? Would unethical behaviour in pharmaceutical companies ... be so common if there were not the same massive pressure to seek potential blockbusters and maintain them at all costs?
“Most assessments of the Internet fail to ground it in political economy; they fail to understand the importance of capitalism in shaping and, for lack of a better term, domesticating the Internet,” says Robert W. McChesney in his illuminating new book, Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Against Democracy. “The profit motive, commercialism, public relations, marketing, and advertising -- all defining features of contemporary corporate capitalism -- are foundational to any assessment of how the Internet has developed and is likely to develop.”
India’s average yield of wheat in 2011 was significantly below the yield from its best lands in 1890. Increasing wheat yield has been the Indian scientists’ focus of effort, which implies that they have consistently short-changed the farmers and wasted public money without showing any results; While the non-performing scientists lived off public money, India’s farmers continued to feed the nation. Many radical farmers achieved record breaking yields from moderately good lands and many marginal hill farmers achieved huge yield gains yet their innovations neither discussed during national planning exercises nor properly studied.
On any given night, up to 60,000 people stay in places they found on Airbnb. One of them is always the guy who co-founded the fast-growing online travel lodging service. "In June 2010, I moved out of my apartment and I have been mostly homeless ever since, off and on," Brian Chesky said at the South by Southwest (SXSW) interactive, film and music festival. "I just live in Airbnb apartments and I check in every week in different homes in San Francisco," where the company is based, he said. "It's the best way to take the pulse... The key is to always use your product."
(Get the whole article by clicking on the headline here)
"Desertification is a fancy word for land that is turning to desert," begins Allan Savory in this quietly powerful talk. And terrifyingly, it's happening to about two-thirds of the world's grasslands, accelerating climate change and causing traditional grazing societies to descend into social chaos. Savory has devoted his life to stopping it. He now believes -- and his work so far shows -- that a surprising factor can protect grasslands and even reclaim degraded land that was once desert."
To understand how we will feed a growing population with decreasing resources and a changing climate, we must shift our mindset to understanding that the food system is a living system.
Open Garden shares an internet connection with other devices, using Wi-Fi or Bluetooth. The goal of Open Garden is to share the last mile and promote the openness of wireless networks. It automatically creates a mesh network between all the Open Garden-enabled devices and picks the fastest connection to route traffic. Their Open Garden Mesh Protocol enables people to create their own network.
In an emergency situation where mobile networks are either down or overloaded and there’s no WiFi, cell phones are useless. Unlike land mobile radios, used by police and fire departments, they don’t have the ability to communicate directly with each other. Until now. The Better Approach To Mobile Adhoc Networks (BATMAN) joins smartphones together in an ad-hoc, mesh network, capable of device to device communication. You can share files and even send messages with the right application.
Our current situation is conducive to revolutionary thinking, if not yet in politics, then maybe in economics. The BoE has spent £50 billion over the past six months to support bond prices. That could instead have financed a cash handout of £830 for every man, woman and child in Britain, or £3,300 for a typical family of four. In the United States, the $40 billion the Fed has promised to transfer monthly, with no time limit, to banks and bond funds, could instead finance a monthly cash payment of $500 per family – to be continued indefinitely until full employment is restored.
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While the U.S. federal government continues to consider marijuana illegal, even for medical purposes, Colorado and Washington recently passed laws legalizing the sale of marijuana in their states. The states are trying to formulate regulations before sales begin. And, as can be seen by the headline story on a mainstream media website, some are in a near panic over the idea of marijuana coming into the market with no federal oversight, publishing stories that seem designed to scare the public over the “dangers” of unregulated marijuana. Let’s compare marijuana, which is by far the most consumed illegal drug in America, used by an estimated 9% of the population (approximately 23 million people), with drugs and food that are legal and regulated by the federal government. Here is a graph comparing deaths by FDA approved prescription drugs, and deaths due to food-borne illnesses by USDA approved foods, over a 10 year period from 1998 to 2008
Creative Commons isn't just some arbitrary legalese: it was a way the world could build on creatives’ work. Re-use it. Re-mix it. It’s what made the web a place where individuals were not just creators, but part of communities that valued sharing.
Government needs to completely change. Yes, technology is involved, but the way governments use technology also needs to change. It's not just about using social media. It's about decentralizing. It's about instituting agile processes. It's about delivering benefits to citizens rather than adhering to bureaucracy. Governments -- slow, lumbering and unresponsive -- must adopt a startup culture. Old way: command and control. New way: decentralized collaboration on shared goals. Political factors and life in a fish bowl discourage government staffers from engaging in experiments with any risk. After all, if their experiments don't work out, they'll be derided...
We don't have to "wait until" anything. We have everything we need, right now, to create the future we want for our world. For decades the prevailing wisdom has been that strong organizations are a necessary prerequisite to addressing the large-scale issues facing our communities and our world. However, history has repeatedly shown us just the opposite. And when we consider the recent decades of history specifically within the nonprofit sector, we find that an emphasis on building strong organizations has been, in fact, an inwardly-focused distraction to creating the kinds of real change the outside world needs from us.
gribiotech giants are tightening their grip on agriculture worldwide. Rather than trying to fight them directly, Urbsly will help create an alternative system that builds on open standards and data, enabling farmers and gardeners to compete on a level playing field, and ensuring that the technology is available to all.
Collectivists have a favorite target. Big bad corporations. This is a complete scam. Why did Goldman Sachs turn out to be the biggest funder of Obama’s 2008 election bid? Why weren’t the corporate banksters who demanded and received those enormous bailouts, under both Bush and Obama, prosecuted for crimes? Collectivists actually love big corporations. Collectivists just want to distract us from their real goals. And in order to enact those goals, they need banks, they need the military-industrial complex, they need Big Pharma and Big Oil...
Ben Gilroy explains the fundamental difference between his Direct Democracy Ireland Party and the other main stream parties... And why a vote for him will RETURN real democratic power to the people of Ireland.
The internet providers and copyright holders have begun using peer-to-peer (P2P) surveillance methods to try to sniff out when copyrighted content is uploaded or shared illegally. A company called MarkMonitor has been contracted to join BitTorrent networks (the most common way to illegally share files) and search for the names of copyright-protected movies, music, and TV shows. The list of those names is provided by the MPAA, RIAA, and NCTA. When MarkMonitor finds a file in violation, they snag the IP address of the user who's sharing the file and send it off to that user's internet provider, who issues a series of escalating warnings.
LAST night 40,000 people rented accommodation from a service that offers 250,000 rooms in 30,000 cities in 192 countries. They chose their rooms and paid for everything online. But their beds were provided by private individuals, rather than a hotel chain. Hosts and guests were matched up by Airbnb, a firm based in San Francisco. Since its launch in 2008 more than 4m people have used it—2.5m of them in 2012 alone. It is the most prominent example of a huge new “sharing economy”, in which people rent beds, cars, boats and other assets directly from each other, co-ordinated via the internet.
Built entirely using HTML5 and other open Web standards, Firefox OS is a Linux-based open source operating system for smartphones and tablet computers. It has been demonstrated on Android smartphones and the Raspberry Pi. Samsung and Intel are cooperating on the development of Tizen, another open source phone project situated within the Linux Foundation. The first embodyment of the system in phones will be Bada.
Media that spy on and data-mine the public are capable of destroying humanity's most precious freedom: freedom of thought. Ensuring that media remain structured to support rather than suppress individual freedom and civic virtue requires us to achieve specific free technology and free culture goals. In this talk, Eben Moglen offers suggestions about how the Free World should meet the challenges of the next decade.
A rural community in Lancashire has decided to fit their own cables for a better broadband connection.
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