uctpjac - Slashdot User

Submission + - Are engineers natural libertarians or technocrats? (opendemocracy.net)

Submitted by

uctpjac

on Tuesday January 03, 2012 @01:01PM

uctpjac writes: "This openDemocracy article uses Scott Adams' presidential bid to argue that however much engineers — especially Silicon Valley types — like to think that they're libertarians, they are in fact much more likely to be control-freak technocrats. Is this a fair account? Has the author wrongly read Dilbert, or wrongly interpreted the relationship between the engineering mindset and Adams' representation of it in the cartoon strip?"

Submission + - UK libel law is a global threat to web free speech (opendemocracy.net)

Submitted by uctpjac on Sunday March 29, 2009 @09:39AM

uctpjac writes: London media lawyer Emily MacManus argues that UK libel law has three features which make it the "defamation tourism" capital of the world and a serious threat to web free speech. First, there is no free speech presumption in the UK as there is, for example, in the US. Second, every access of a web page is considered to be a separate act of publication in the UK (unlike the US, where "original publication" holds). Third, "no-win-no-fee" libel litigation is now allowed in the UK. If any blog, anywhere, publishes something you'd like taken down, threaten libel action in the UK: no one except the super-rich can afford to even take these cases to court, so media lawyers advise publishers to "take it down, take it down quickly, take it down again". There's not much chance that the judges will move the law any time soon because they are just not seeing the cases to make precedent over.

Submission + - $55Tr question: is open source answer to giving? (opendemocracy.net)

Submitted by

uctpjac

on Saturday April 19, 2008 @02:09PM

uctpjac writes: "Mark Surman, Shuttleworth Foundation fellow, guru on all things open, writes that open source is the answer to philanthropy's $55 Trillion question: how to spend the money it expects to flow into foundations over the next 25 years? Whereas others have slashed out at "Philanthro-Capitalism" — claiming that the charitable giving of Gates and others simply extends power in the market to power over society — Surman believes that open source shows the way to the harmonious yin-yang of business and not-for-profit. Sun, Microsoft, Cisco, IBM, Yahoo, Facebook are the big backers of Creative Commons; Ubuntu is a for-profit company and Mozilla has spawned two for-profits. Open source shows that philanthropy and business can co-habit and mutually thrive. Indeed, philanthropy might learn from open source to find new ways to organise itself to spend those $55Tr."

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