I think you mean the Harlem Shake, not The Harlem Shuffle...

I can't speak for everyone else, but I was answering questions and testing bugs until 11am. Then I was very tired and got a couple of hours of sleep.

The Infrastructure team was trying to migrate several of the websites over to a new server about the same time as 4.0 was released. After some brief downtime, everything pulled through. Due to a perfect storm of problems during the previous two days, the server upgrades were delayed all the way until release day (oops!)

If you grabbed 3.6.5 this morning, you didn't miss a new release on that branch -- 3.6.5 came out on Jan 30th, and 3.6.6 won't come out until the 2nd week of April. The 4.0.0.3 release is working pretty well, running into a few bugs and issues, but we're working to iron those out as quickly as possible.

Feel free to Ask questions or Report a bug if and when the fancy strikes you.

First $699 to SCO back in 2003, now £140lbs to Microsoft for Windows Write..I mean MS-Office for GNU/Linux.

What did we say about impulse purchases with your allowance?

Please do enlighten us!

Sure, writing new papers is one possibliity. But it's not the only way to collaborate.

Fair use is a defense, not a right. It's not perfect, and it can be messy to defend in court (or so the lawyers tell me). Why wouldn't some scientists want to make their research and their ideas *even more* accessible to those who wish to remix them and/or use short/long excerpts?

What are the "relevant parts"? And are you certain that no useful science can come from borrowing data/charts/text from an existing paper beyond what Fair use would allow?

Example: I write a 100 page paper about monkey butts. Let's say it's about hair color and distribution. I include a lot of really useful pictures of monkey butts and graphs of the statistics thereof.

Someone else wants to write a new paper about monkey butts and realizes that they could use all of my existing charts and pictures as their data and come to some new and very interesting conclusions. Their paper is about cancerous growths, and it's not a critique of my paper, so they can't just suck up my data, pictures, and prepared charts and claim Fair use.

If my paper were under CC-BY-ND, they would probably be SOL. Let's say that I had since died (bad monkey stew), so they couldn't ask me for permission.

If, however, my paper were under CC-BY-SA, then they would be able to re-use all of my lovely scientific shit.

Or maybe the original scientist missed something? Or maybe there's a new, novel way to use his reasearch and copyrighted materials? (see above)

When someone talks about "value-added" in terms of science, it raises a red flag for me. Why does science have to be about "adding value"? Sure, there are a lot of people and a lot of companies that do a lot of hard science, and bully for them. But I don't have to argue that all of them should eschew the ND clause, I just have to show that some scientists have valid reasons for avoiding it.

Any half-open or half-closed position seems like a very hard position to argue. Bright lines, as any lawyer will tell you, are easy: Everything falls neatly to one side or the other. As I stated above in my answer, perhaps the "No Derivatives" clause actually legally accomplishes something quite different from its generic meaning in everyday English, and so some classes of "derivative works" of a paper marked ND are actually allowed. My point is that it is sad that the term is named "No Derivatives" when a scientist seems interested (if not intent) upon sharing their work with the world at large via an "Open Access" site.

What is sounds like everyone wants is a "No Defamation" clause, but that's just too darn hard to write in legal terms, so they just ratcheted down the rights and ended up with "No Derivs".

Whaaa? I'm not following your logic at all. Who is "publish[ing] everything" ? And (perhaps more importantly) who is listening to the quacks/frauds who republish "utter BS" ?

Are you thinking of a different type of peer-review process? Peer review, as I understand it, has absolutely nothing to do with licensing, copyright, patents, or any legal standing. Under a peer-review process, works such as papers, research, (possibly art/music, too?) are evaluated by one's peers and judged for their correctness or competency. Things such as language and originallity may also be judged.

Wikipedia describes peer review: "Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility. In academia peer review is often used to determine an academic paper's suitability for publication."

I don't get it: What magical sauce is embedded in scientific papers? Why should authors of these works use the ND clause, while authors of software, art, novels, etc... allow derivatives? Is there something special about having a doctorate? Something about the way in which the scientific community can't think up any mechanism to vette or review each other's papers and provide structure and confirmation when they run across a paper written by someone they haven't met?

But we have that system already: Peer review (and, perhaps, a sprinkling of some trust algorithms)

Anyhow, I return to my central point: I am ready to be convinced that scienticsts need the ND clause to protect their work -- I just haven't seen or heard of any cases in which this kind of clause is necessary. Please show me an example of the harm that not having an ND clause has wrought, and I will certainly rethink my position! :-)

Why shouldn't a peer of yours re-use some of your paper, if some of it (maybe some words...maybe some paragraphs) support their theses as well? With correct attribution, can't you share in his work/glory, just as derivative patents do?

I can understand that if there's a specific assignment for a class or some specific degree program in which the purpose of the exercise is for people to compose their own work from scratch then re-using excerpts or pieces from other's works might be contrary to those specific goals. But just because we've followed certain (non-)collaborative paths in science for centuries doesn't mean that we need to continue in that fashion.

I understand the argument, but can someone please provide concrete examples of what is okay and what is nokay? What does it mean for someone to "build on your work" ? How much of your paper, data, or ideas may they quote?

I don't understand how someone can take someone else's work and turn it into something that "makes no sense" and "is completely wrong", unless they fundamentally misattribute or misquote the person. Can someone please provide an example of a paper that X wrote that was then perverted by Y until it was "completely wrong" ?

If ND is so important for content creators, why don't we see random programmers out there taking the Linux kernel, "jumbling it around until it makes no sense," and then publishing a derivative work in some fashion that defames/harms Linus and the rest of the kernel devs?

And just think about public domain works! What if someone were to take a paper written by my grandfather pre-1923 and twist its words into something "completely wrong" -- what recourse would his heirs have from that?

Sure, CC-BY-ND might be an improvement over the draconian control exercised by the publishers in the past. But so would nearly any license change. Your statement doesn't say anything about whether CC-BY-ND is any better or worse than CC-BY-SA.

Why must Share-Alike be tied to the No-Commercial and No-Derivatives clauses?

CC-BY-SA seems like a fair compromise in a world in which some scientists don't share.

Maybe ND doesn't actually prevent any scientists from building on top of one's research, but I think the idea of labeling your research as "ND" is pretty anti-social. If you don't want other people to use your stuff, then fine, don't show it to anyone. Why would anyone submit a paper to an "Open Access" journal, and then label their paper as "No Derivatives." Newton saw as far as he could because he was standing on the shoulders of Derivatives...or giants. You know, derivative giants.

The arguments I've heard in favor of ND go something along the lines of "If people can create derivative works of mine, then they'll twist my work around and make me look like Hitler."

Sure. But imagine if I wrote a paper with the following paragraph:

Humans around the age of two will eat anything they can find on the ground. Dirt, rocks, garbage -- even bugs.

Someone can easily mis-paraphrase that sentence as "Humans..will eat anything... Dirt, rocks, garbage -- even bugs." So I really don't see a big draw for the ND clause. It just seems like a cop-out.

Okay, sure, but do both of those groups have suffrage? (I can see the get-out-the-vote campaigns for the babies....free teething rings for all!)

Sure, if it was aimed at a useful result like "Don't let the telcos off the hook for helping the NSA violate the 4th Ammendment," or "Reform copyright law so it doesn't last forever minus a day". To be honest, a fair number of the petitions on the Whitehouse's petition site (that have passed the required bar to receive a response) concern issues that are interesting and relevant to most Americans. It's just that 5 or 500 petitions to legalize marijuana aren't going to do a damn thing, because the President doesn't have the political clout or the personal motivation to "make it so".

It sounds like this petition mechanism might actually effect real change -- the kind of change that political parties over on this side of the Atlantic promise up and down the campaign trail, but which, if it ever materializes, doesn't pack quite the same punch as promised -- and for that, I am quite envious of you Finns.

let us be the judge... :-)

Oy! Right where it hurts!

Don't ask me why I remember the name.....why can't I remember useful information, like my girlfriend's phone number?

< insert witty song about geeky stuff here >

Or something like that. Although online, it's probably more like "don't look a goatse in the..."

Well, you get the picture.

OP wrote (and I quote) "there are rules preventing 18+ games from being sown on TV before 22:30"

Given that your nick translates as "crazy" I didn't expect such a serious reply, but it's possible the humor is an English nuance that doesn't translate well. I'm sorry if English is not your first language.

No, no, no -- you're confusing that rule with the one about adult movies -- you know, "no sowing of seed before 22:30". With the 18+ games, they're just concerned about people downloading them. Or as the Internet Buckaneers call it, "reaping what is sown on TV."

(also, what 18+ games are shown on TV? is that like naked soccer or something?)

Here it is: http://content.dell.com/us/en/enterprise/d/campaigns/xps-linux-laptop.aspx

Heh... that space-related url says "Enterprise D" :-)

This one works, too: http://dell.com/sputnik

Also: http://linux.dell.com/ currently redirects to their non-user-editable Linux Engineering wiki. They really should make it easy to get from there to the page selling the Sputnik laptop. Because yes, hackers often just guess urls for common services instead of bothering with a search engine.