I’ve finally finished creating and updating the liblicense packages for Debian and Ubuntu.
For Debian, just make sure your system is set to pull from Debian sid (”unstable”) - the packages are in the official archives; take a look at http://packages.debian.org/liblicense ! (Thanks to Mako for sponsoring my upload.)
I’ve used pbuilder to build .deb packages of wordpress 2.5.1-4 (current in debian Sid) for Ubuntu 8.04 (hardy heron), along with its dependencies that aren’t available from the standard repos. Find the .deb packages here or use pbuilder to build your own.
Credit for this joke goes to my friend and fellow student… who shall remain nameless because he insists he didn’t tell me this joke.
UPDATING: So apparently it’s been too long, and I need some help with this…. So. The value for math could be 3i or 3, but the value for physics is zero, period. This joke makes fun of physics students. Please feel free to correct me again if I still don’t get it.
UPDATE2: The version that makes fun of math students (yaaaaay not being totally stupid):
I’ve recorded ~7 minutes of ambient noise out on Polk Place. Note that the bell tower rings half past at 4:12 in the recording. You can find multiple file formats here. Please note that this audio is free to use under a Creative Commons license:
We owe the next generation so many things, one them being a society where following the law is natural and easy, where trust in our Democracy is reinforced in the way we engage in creative expression. Do yourself a favor and watch this talk by Lessig. In it he makes the case for why you and I should take a leadership role in building a society where the new literacy of YouTube remixes is obviously legal and unencumbered by lawyers. Lessig starts talking around 6:30.
Don’t be complacent; don’t be satisfied. The current system of copyright law is badly broken if it prevents professors from engaging their students using the same modes of creative expression, the media that students use natively. It’s not that professors are old fogies who don’t know what youtube is. The problem is that the professors rightly perceive the legal risks associated with using digital works, which by their very nature entails making copies of the works. If the current remix/mashup/RW culture is always or even mostly “piracy” in the eyes of the law, then all those wishing to take part in the digital participatory cultures are pirates. “Piracy” by a student can be chalked up to youthful naïveté, and punishment is, in most cases, brief revocation of network privileges or some honor court process–something or some process that in the long term only damages the student’s trust in the system. For a professor a piracy incident could do significantly more short-term damage.
We need to fix it. If not us, then who? It starts by seeing the network as the classroom. Stop trying to integrate wikis into classrooms and start seeing that youtube and wikipedia are classrooms where you can step in and take part. Don’t write a letter to your congressman. Make an elevator pitch to your congressman and put it on youtube. Recruit 12 good friends to send a personal note to your congressman asking him to watch the video. Get it?
On Thursday I rode with my good friend Travis from Chapel Hill to High Point. Got a bit of a sunburn, but otherwise enjoyed the road. We had a stretch of about six miles after we turned off of Greensboro Chapel Hill Road where we only saw one car. It was sublime.
Travis left on Friday for Paris, and he’ll be spending the summer biking around Europe. I’m supremely jealous. I’ve resolved to bike around some continent other than North America in the next five years. I’m thinking I should start a savings account for that now.
