53604067
submission
revealingheart writes:
Creative Commons has launched new versions of their flexible copyright licenses, after 2 years of input. Changes include waiving database and moral rights where possible, adjustments to attribution requirements, and licenses are now designed to work internationally by default.
32488549
submission
revealingheart writes:
ScienceDaily reports that on 5 and 6 June this year, millions of people around the world will be able to see Venus pass across the face of the Sun in what will be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It will take Venus about six hours to complete its transit, appearing as a small black dot on the Sun's surface, in an event that will not happen again until 2117.
Transits of Venus occur only on the very rare occasions when Venus and Earth are in a line with the Sun. At other times Venus passes below or above the Sun because the two orbits are at a slight angle to each other. Transits occur in pairs separated by eight years, with the gap between pairs of transits alternating between 105.5 and 121.5 years — the last transit was in 2004.
"We are fortunate in that we are truly living in a golden period of planetary transits and it is one of which I hope astronomers can take full advantage," writes Jay M Pasachoff, an astronomer at Williams College, Massachusetts.
28188156
submission
revealingheart writes:
BBC reports that Sweden are allowing one citizen per week to take control of their official Twitter feed, in what's been described as "the world's most democratic Twitter experiment". Adam Arnesson, 21, an organic sheep farmer, is said to the biggest star of the project so far, including uploading photos and videos of life on his family's farm; while a female minister in the Church of Sweden and a Bosnian immigrant have also posted on the feed. The Swedish Institute and VisitSweden launched the experiment in December, which has helped to double Sweden's Twitter followers in the past month.
27918012
submission
revealingheart writes:
ZDNet reports that Mozilla have announced the release of the Mozilla Public License 2.0. The new version provides for compatibility with the Apache and GPL licenses, improved patent protections and recent changes in copyright law. The full license text is available here.
Mozilla have updated their wiki with plans to upgrade their codebase; Bugzilla have also said that they will update (with an exemption to keep the project MPL only).
The MPL was previously incompatible with other copyleft licenses like GPL. The new version is compatible (unless exempted) and doesn't require multiple licenses (as currently stands with Firefox and Thunderbird). This will allow Mozilla to incorporate Apache licensed code; but will mean that their software becomes incompatible with GPL2 code.
19153184
submission
revealingheart writes:
The BBC is set to close down 200 of its websites in the near future as part of cost-cutting measures. Hearing that 172 of these sites would be deleted from the Web entirely, an anonymous individual has taken matters into his or her own hands.
The result is a BitTorrent file that anyone can download to store a backup of these “lost” websites forever. The cost of the project? Apparently no more that $3.99 for a VPS server to crawl and retrieve all the sites.
18999332
submission
revealingheart writes:
On Thursday, 3 February 2011, at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) [14:30 UTC/GMT], the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) will be holding a ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses. We invite all interested community members to view the webcast of this event.
18225782
submission
revealingheart writes:
As the 2010 comes to a close, this could be remembered as the year that pay-what-you-want pricing reached the mainstream. Along with the two Humble Indie Bundles, YAWMA offer a game and music bundle, and Rock, Paper and Shotgun reports on the curiously named Bundle of Wrong, made to help fund a developer who contracted pneumonia.
More examples include Reddit briefly offered their users to choose what to pay when they were in financial difficulties; the Indie Music Cancer Drive launched Songs for the Cure for cancer research; and Mavaru launched an online store where users can buy albums for any amount. Can pay-what-you-want become a sustainable mainstream business model? — or destined to be a continued experiment for smaller groups?
4586463
submission
revealingheart writes:
Mozilla Labs have released a prototype extension called Jetpack: An API for allowing you to write Firefox add-ons using existing web technologies technologies to enhance the browser (e.g. HTML, CSS and Javascript), with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play. Example add-ons are included on the Jetpack website.
While currently only a prototype, this could lead to a simpler and easier to develop add-on system, which all browsers could potentially implement.
3569965
submission
revealingheart writes:
Plagiarism Today reports on the release of the Creative Commons Zero license, which allows you to waive copyright and related rights to your works, improving on the existing public domain dedication. This follows-on from their original announcement on CC0.
PT: "The CC0 waiver system is a major step forward for the Creative Commons Organization in terms of their public domain efforts. Even though it isn't a true public domain dedication, it only waives the rights as far as they can be waived (Note: Moral rights, in many countries, can not be outright waived), it opens up what is likely as close to a public domain option as practical under the current legal climate.
