Creative Commons "share creative works" cartoon

Creative Commons has a new cartoon that offers an explanation of why a creator would want to license their work under a Creative Commons license. It's a great explanation for both kids and adults
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MIT Open Courseware: take MIT complete courses for free!

MIT's Open Courseware website offers over 1800 complete MIT courses for free to the public. Most courses have lecture notes, exams, etc., and there are a number that have a substantial amount of audio, video, and multimedia content as well.

From the Site:

"MIT OpenCourseWare is an idea - and an ideal - developed by the MIT faculty who share the Institute's mission to advance knowledge and educate students in science, technology, and other areas of scholarship to best serve the world. In 1999, the Faculty considered how to use the Internet in pursuit of this goal, and in 2000 proposed OCW. MIT published the first proof-of-concept site in 2002, containing 50 courses. By November 2007, MIT completed the initial publication of virtually the entire curriculum, over 1,800 courses in 33 academic disciplines. Going forward, the OCW team is updating existing courses and adding new content and services to the site."

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OpenEducation.net

Openeducation.net has blogs, podcasts, and other information regarding the free and open source availability of education on the web.  The potential for vast resources of free, online education are tremendous.

From the Site:

OpenEducation.net is a site dedicated to tracking the changes occurring in education today. In an era where it is possible to photoshop images, facebook people, and access an endless stream of knowledge by googling, the Internet Age offers both great promise and enormous challenges for educators. At OpenEducation.net, readers will be exposed to both an objective and subjective look at the many issues facing the profession today.

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Open source compressed earth block machine

The Liberator project aims to make an "open source" compressed earth block machine that can turn out 3-5 blocks per minute for a total cost of $1,000-$1,350. That's enough blocks to build a new house every day, turning dirt into shelter. The project page does a good job of making the case for the efficiency of compressed earth blocks, challenging some of the conventional wisdom on the subject.

This page is an introduction to the collaborative development of a high performance Compressed Earth Block (CEB) press, The Liberator. We aim to provide a low-cost, ecological, ergonomical, and economically-significant press. The design process and final plans will be "Open Source"-- part of the public domain, with free access to anyone. The press is designed through voluntary efforts. Funding for parts, labor, testing, and development are procured via donations from interested parties (ie. builders, buyers, producers of CEB presses; community developers; general supporters of our work). At the same time, we are developing an open source enterprise, according to the principles of neocommercialization If you are interested in helping the development process in any way, please feel free to contact us.
Link (via Beyond the Beyond)

(Image: Cebhomes.jpg, by Dan Powell, from Wikimedia Commons)

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Lessig08.org - Lawrence Lessig launches a "Change Congress" movement and considers a run for Congress!

Lessig08.org has been launched by Lawrence Lessig, champion of a free culture and a free and open Internet. Lessig's website covers two topics

1. The launch of a "Change Congress" movement, with emphasis on Lessig's new focus on the effect of lobbyists in Washington.

2. Lessig is contemplating a run for Congress! I can't think of anyone more suited to actually support and effect change. As he says, whatever candidate makes it to the White House, they will need allies for change in the Congress and throughout this country.

Go Lessig 08!

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Wikileaks.org shutdown by California court; how a webhost can hijack your url

Update: The Wikileaks.org injunction has been dissolved after intervention by the EFF and ACLU.

The U.S. District Court for Northern California has sanctioned a broad agreement allowing the takedown of the wikileaks.org. Wikileaks is a site dedicated to providing an open forum for whistleblowers to expose corporate and government misdeeds. It has been a source for documents regarding prisons in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, is claimed to have altered politics and elections in Kenya due to claims of corruption about President Moi, and recently allowed the disputed posting of documents regarding claims of money laundering and tax evasion by a Cayman Islands bank.

According to wired.com:

"The Julius Baer Bank, a Swiss bank with a division in the Cayman Islands, took issue with documents that were published on Wikileaks by an unidentified whistleblower, whom the bank claims is the former vice president of its Cayman Islands operation, Rudolf Elmer. The documents purport to provide evidence that the Cayman Islands bank helps customers hide assets and wash funds.

After failing to convince Wikileaks to take down the documents, the bank went after its U.S. hosting service, which responded by agreeing not only to remove the Wikileaks account from Dyndadot's server but also to help prevent Wikileaks from moving its site to a different host."

Believe it or not, the fact that attorneys chose to pursue a bold forum for free speech like wikileaks.org is not the worst part of the story. The worst part of the story is that Judge White, a Bush appointee to the Northern District of California, sanctioned an ex parte agreement(meaning Wikilinks had no say) between The Julius Baer Bank and Dynadot, Wikilinks' webhost, whereby not only does Dynadot have to take Wikilinks down, but the webhost also agrees to "lock the wikileaks.org domain name to prevent transfer of the domain name to a different domain registrar."

Some webhosts already hold domain names hostage, making it difficult in some circumstances, like the death of a family member, to get the domain names transferred to a new owner or another webhost. This kind of case suggests that even if you build up good will in a url and have much of your reputation and website traffic dependent on that url, third parties, namely your webhost and someone whose unhappy at what you have on your site, can agree to shut you down and freeze your url at their will.

The concept of allowing the shutting down of an entire wiki or other social media website, and then allowing freezing and confiscation of its url, due to one possibly offending post, is absurd. It is akin to stopping production of the network news entirely for one possibly questionable two minute segment. It is like confiscating an entire issue of a newspaper or magazine based on one disputed story, and then shutting down the presses. You get the idea, its justice at its worst. It's a knee jerk reaction that weighs against free speech and doesn't allow proper representation for the party most affected, wikileaks.org. Oh wait, there's someone else likely more affected, the public who used the wikileaks.org resource.

So for the time being wikileaks.org is wrongfully disabled. However, it just so happens there is a direct IP and site based in Christmas Island mirroring the site.

http://88.80.13.160/wiki/Wikileaks

http://wikileaks.cx/wiki/Main_Page

You can also get the story direct from wikileaks.

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Elmo doll says "Kill!"

Melissa Bowman of Lithia, Florida claims that her two-year-old son James's Elmo Knows Your Name doll kept repeating the phrase "Kill James." The doll can be programmed with new names and certain phrases via PC. The toy's manufacturer, Fisher-Price, has offered to replace the doll and will check into the alleged malfunction. From TBO.com:
With a squeeze of its fuzzy belly, the Sesame Street character now says, in a sing-song voice, "Kill James." "It's not something that really you would think would ever come out of a toy," said Melissa Bowman, James' mother. "But once I heard, I was just kind of distraught."

The Elmo Knows Your Name doll, which connects to a computer to learn certain phases and names, recently ran out of battery power, Bowman said.

About an hour after she put new ones in, "I noticed exactly what it was saying," Bowman said. "And my son was repeating exactly what it was saying."
Link (via Fortean Times)

Previously on BB:
• More from Evil Elmo Link
• Immolate Me Elmo Link
• Tickle Me Elmo fur coats Link

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Record company profits aren't more important than privacy and free speech

John Naughton's Observer column last Sunday lit into the music industry, chasing the statement by the head of the British Phonographic Institute (the UK's RIAA) that "For years, ISPs have built a business on other people's music." This is part of the music industry's blustering demands for ISPs to censor and monitor the Internet to protect the record companies' business-model (because protecting a couple of multinationals is more important than the free speech and privacy of every Internet user in the world).
An analogy may help to illustrate the point. Millions of people use the telephone network for questionable, illegal or unethical purposes. But we would regard it as unthinkable to impose on phone companies a legal obligation to monitor every conversation.

Any legislation in this area has to reflect the broad public interest - which is in ensuring the widest possible internet access by facilitating competition between ISPs without shackling them with undue regulatory obligations. The government must not be allowed to cave in to the special pleading of the music business. The green paper should be subjected to intense scrutiny, and a good place to start would be the public meeting on 19 March organised by the Foundation for Information Policy Research (see tinyurl.com/2d9u4y for details).

Link

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Manga Bible -- Genesis to Revelation with giant killer robots

The Mecha Manga Bible Stories comix I blogged earlier today's got competition from another manga Bible called "The Manga Bible: From Genesis to Revelation," a single volume from Ajinbayo Akinsiku, who is training to become an Anglican priest.
In a blurb for the Manga Bible, which is published by Doubleday, the archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, is quoted as saying, “It will convey the shock and freshness of the Bible in a unique way.”

No doubt. In the Manga Bible, whose heroes look and sound like skateboarders in Bedouin gear, Noah gets tripped up counting the animals in the Ark: “That’s 11,344 animals? Arggh! I’ve lost count again. I’m going to have to start from scratch!”

Abraham rides a horse out of an explosion to save Lot. Og, king of Bashan, looms like an early Darth Vader. The Sermon on the Mount did not make the book, though, because there was not enough action to it.

Link, Link to the Manga Bible on Amazon

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Giant fossilized frog named after Satan

Paleontologists have discovered a giant frog in Madagascar that lived 65-70 milllion years ago. My favorite part of the story is that they named the frog Beelzebufo. This devil of a frog measured around 20 centimeters across and was 40 centimeters long. From Nature News:
 News 2008 080218 Images News.2008.607-1 The team couldn’t piece together a complete skeleton, but did get a nearly complete picture of the skull, which was “short and fat with a huge mouth", says (University College London scientist Susan) Evans.

Similarly-shaped South American frogs have a strong bite and can feast on small vertebrate such as mice and lizards: “Basically, they eat anything smaller that walks by,” Evans says.
Link (Thanks, Vann Hall and Kirsten Anderson!)

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