What You Eat Affects Your Jeans

What You Eat Affects Your Jeans

Saw this on Slashdot:

What You Eat Affects Your Genes

But really we all know that:

What You Eat Affects Your Jeans

Dial Your Smart Phone

Dial Your Smart Phone


graphic from: http://www.openclipart.org/image/800px/svg_to_png/phone.png
http://www.openclipart.org/detail/74113/red-phone-by-pipeep
Drawn by: Benjamin Woodruff / pipeep

So here is a little idea, put an old style dial on a smart phone's touch enabled lcd. Allow the phone to be dialed complete with sound effects.

Hmm. Seems like someone already has one for the iPhone.

Begin And Persist

Begin And Persist

I get tired of hearing about people sending out Cease And Desist notices to others. Especially as it relates to music, the arts, culture, and software.

So I had this wacky idea. It might be fun to send out Begin And Persist notices. If you are doing the Free (Free Culture - Free Software) thing in some area why not send out a Begin And Persist notice to friends asking them to begin sharing your work with others and to persist in doing so.

Let me know if you like the idea and if you decide to send out some notices of your own?

Let me know if you have any ideas for making this even better.

all the best,

drew

Update May 22/2012

 Want to work with a graphic artist to design a logo etc, for this idea. Contact me to discuss / brainstorm  if you are interested.

I would also be interested in hearing from a lawyer interested in drawing up some letters for tongue in cheek use modeled off the real (anti)things. Pro bono of course.

ISP Suggestion

ISP Suggestion

OK, so I was just on hold for forever as a business cable modem was down this morning.

I was informed that it was a general problem with cable modem service for all areas and they did not have any idea yet as to when it might be fixed.

Fair enough.

The problem is that I might wait forever and not call back because I still have a problem when they think all is cured. Or, I may waste more hours calling back to check the situation when they are still working on it.

I suggested that they might want to give me a web page to check for status information. This seemed too much. I don't think it should be too much. Alternately, I could give an email address and they could email status updates.

They did let me leave a phone number and promised to call back when the fix was done but this seems to be sub-optimal for my case.

Perhaps they should consider offering all options to customers.

How does your ISP handle such issues? Telco? Other utility?

all the best,

drew

Online National Insurance Payments

Online National Insurance Payments

So here is the deal Bahamas Government. Allow people to make their National Insurance payments online.

Let them fill out the forms online. Remember what they last filled in an pre-fill the form for them. Let them pay directly from their bank account to you.

I have a feeling that if you do this, you will have a lot of the small guys at least being more up to date with their payments.

Here is another little thought. Let people pay up to a year in advance and fill in the forms for up to a year in advance. Then make change forms available to them if needed.

all the best,

drew

AudioTrackComments

AudioTrackComments

So I was reading this forum thread on Kompoz this morning and I had an idea.

I think there may be a non-SoundCloud way to get this done. On top of that, I think that besides being different, it may be better for what we would want it for on Kompoz.

So let's say we are listening to a particular track of Turn Off This Light and we can see that at the bottom we have a Add a Comment section with a Submit Comment button. All we would need is to add a radio button choice section:

[X] Entire Track [ ] Current location in track

We could default to Entire Track.

If we post a comment with the default, everything works as it currently does for Kompoz track comments. If we choose [X] Current location in track then a play button link gets added to the post which when clicked will begin playing at the spot where the posted had paused the track when making the post.

Is this explanation clear? Would this work for us?

all the best,

drew

Stronger Attribution-Share Alike For Photos & Illustrations

Stronger Attribution-Share Alike For Photos & Illustrations

I have tried having this discussion on the Creative Commons mailing lists before but feel I have never even gotten to the point of being properly understood.

At the urging of Mike Linksvayer in a discussion on Identica, I am trying again.

@zotz … http://wiki.creativecommons.org/CC_Attribution-ShareAlike_Intent (3) says scope of copyleft will only increase…

@zotz … so make sure you campaign incessantly for increase in copyleft scope in 4.0 discussion. :-)

The Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license works well to preserve the Freedoms of people with respect to many types of copyrighted works.

It does not work nearly as well for photos and illustrations however. To show the problem we will take two similar situations and see how they differ.

1. A BY-SA licensed recorded song that someone wants to use in a film or video.

2. A BY-SA licensed photo that someone wants to use as an illustration in a book or article.

There seems to be wide agreement that in order to use the song in a video, the video will have to be put under the BY-SA license as well. There is even special language in the license to make this clear.

There also seems to be wide agreement that the same would not hold in the case of the photo in the book.

I would like it to hold in the second case as well as the first.

Up until now, every time I bring up this desire, people indicate that it is impossible as the licenses reciprocal provision kick in on the making of a derivative and in the first case, the law stipulates that a derivative is made while in the second case, no derivative is make according to the law.

That reasoning is fine and makes sense if one thinks that the making of a derivative is the only tools we can use to activate the reciprocal provisions of the license. I think there may be another possibility.

I propose an additional trigger in the license. It would work like this.

You have a right to copy and / or distribute the work alone. If you want to copy and distribute the work along with other copyrighted works, we contemplate two possibilities.

1. The group of works will be distributed together in such a way that no extra copyright comes into existence. In this case you have permission to copy and / or distribute the work.

2. The group of works will be distributed together in such a way that the group or collection or "container" gets a copyright of its own. In this case you do not have permission to copy and / or distribute the work unless the "container" is also put under a BY-SA license and all of the other works in the "container" are also under "Free" licenses.

So, we are not constrained to requiring a BY-SA license in the case of a derivative. By using the restrictions in copyright law on copying and distribution, we can require it in non-derivative situations.

That is the bones of the thoughts at least. I am looking for input along several lines.

1. Is this possible from a legal point of view?

2. Is there a better way to do this?

3. Should this be done?

4. Benefits of doing this?

5. Problems with / dangers of doing this?

6. Am I missing anything?