Samwise rides again

From the Star Bulletin …

A marketing campaign to bring Japanese tourists back to Hawaii seeks to boost declines by luring tourists with shiny, portable ashtrays. The state-backed campaign, which began in June, seeks to correct misconceptions among Japanese tourists that you can’t smoke at all in Hawaii.

The portable ashtrays, which are white on the outside and silver inside, are branded with a flower logo and the words “Keep Hawaii Clean.” HTJ said it has had about 40,000 of the ashtrays made at a cost of about $1 each.

Since Hawaii adopted a more restrictive law on smoking late last year, travel industry professionals and tourists have blamed the restrictions in part for the depressed Japan visitor market. While the drop cannot be blamed entirely on the new smoking policy, many Japanese smokers, especially those on reward trips, and meeting planners have complained. Still, nonsmoking Japanese visitors — a slight majority in one recent survey — have said they love the new law.

The Smoke-Free Hawaii law, which went into effect in December, requires clear designation of areas where smoking is permitted, and bans smoking within 20 feet of doorways, windows and ventilation intakes in order to prevent secondhand smoke drifting into enclosed areas.

While many locations have adopted smoking restrictions, Hawaii’s use of the term “smoke-free” might be sending a false message that this state is tougher on smokers than other destinations, said Dave Erdman, president of PacRim Marketing, a firm specializing in Asian markets.

Japan tourists have been confused about Hawaii’s smoking legislation since an inaccurate news story in Japan on the topic last year

the Coalition for a Tobacco-Free Hawaii, said encouraging Japanese tourists to come to Hawaii and smoke seems to be counterintuitive.

“We shouldn’t give the message that aloha means smoking,”

Even some smokers have said that they are frustrated with HTJ’s new campaign.

“It’s like putting a Band-Aid on somebody that just got hit by a grenade,”

Maybe the tourism board should start stocking the Kaua’i Kolada cigarettes that offended Kaua’i residents a couple of years ago.

http://publish.uwo.ca/~akope/camelsummerblendsad2.jpg

Back in the 1970’s, Douglas Adams penned a couple of episodes for the BBC TV series Doctor Who.

One of the episodes “Shada” was incomplete and never aired, however the Beeb have put together a “webcast”, which is an audio-only Real file, or as an embedded Flash animation.

With some messing around I managed to watch some of it on my Wii using the Opera based Internet channel, and it was actually quite watchable. To save myself time, and in case any of you are interested in watching on your Wii, or Flash-enabled device ( or on your desktop computer I guess, ) I’ve posted direct links for the full-size animations. These are the high-quality versions as they streamed perfectly to my Wii.

You will have to click the link on the bottom left whenever it goes black as the episodes are divided into parts, and you will need, at the end of each episode, to click back to take you to this page ( or the button, bottom center, to be taken to the episode guide. )

For fans of the classic Doctor Who, this story was supposed to be a part of the same season as Douglas Adam’s other episodes, starring Tom Baker, and centered around “The Key of Time”, Series 17. The webcast features the 8th Doctor, Paul McGann.

Licensing is the “East coast, West coast” feud of the free open source community.

Nearly everyone is completly full of it, IANAL, or “I anal”, I’m not going to even link that as you probably know what it means already. BSD till I die. How long before Stallman gets shot ? Pimp my kernel. Give my UNIX a bit of shiney lickable bling-bling.

OK, ok, I jest, but if you have been around any open free sauce software project you will have seen something not too dissimiler. Using the Hiphop industry as a metaphor is fairly apt in many ways, but I digress.

Actually I will have to mention the zealots, who really do take it to religious proportions. I guess the more idealistic your goals, the more extreme your devotion.

Given the now obvious anti-Christian and cultish nature of Apple Computers, is it any wonder that they have decided to base their newest operating system on Darwinism? This just reaffirms the position that Darwinism is an inherently anti-Christian philosophy spread through propaganda and subliminal trickery, not a science as its brainwashed followers would have us believe.

It’s true. Computer Science may be an oxymoron. Take for example, Software Engineer.

Anyway, until it’s proven that I am not typing this, I will continue.

Oh go on, one more …

At the end of the appendix he even encourages the reader to switch from IBM compatible computers to Macintoshes, saying that “you can exult in something of the feeling of liberation that may have attended evolution’s great watershed events.” What a ringing endorsement for Apple computers that is!

As you can see, The problem is much worse than we had originally thought as Apple has been aiding and abetting ardent Evolutionists like Dawkins since at least the mid 1980’s.

Well they were hacker back then.

Anyway …

As reported on Undeadly …

After years of encouragement from the OpenBSD community for others to use Reyk Floeter’s free atheros wireless driver, it seems that the Linux world is finally listening. Unfortunately, they seem to think that they can strip the BSD license right out of it.

As Felix explains …

The openbsd atheros (ath(4)) driver made it into the linux kernel. This is good news as apparently the linux people finally see again, that its good to have free drivers around. However, as undeadly reports, they also “changed” the license to GPLv2, while they were at it. (commit message). Oh wait, right, they can’t.

The bit that matters is this bit here …

* Copyright (c) 2004-2007 Reyk Floeter
* Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Nick Kossifidis
*
- * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software for any
- * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
- * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

You see the last three lines have a “-” at the beginning ?

Those are lines being deleted from the file as it is checked into the software code tree. The really important bit is the bit that goes …

- * purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above
- * copyright notice and this permission notice appear in all copies.

- * provided that the above copyright notice

which is …

* Copyright (c) 2004-2007 Reyk Floeter
* Copyright (c) 2006-2007 Nick Kossifidis

… which remains …

and this permission notice appear in all copies.

… which has been removed. Ouch !

He also reminds us that it wasn’t that long ago that the Linux community were accusing them of license violations.

We believe that you might have directly copied code out of bcm43xx (licensed under GPL v2), without our explicit permission, into bcw (licensed under BSD license).

…

We always try to make our stuff as clean as possible too. In fact, I think no other code base out there is as clear of violations as ours.
This is a major problem in our code base.

Yes, this driver has other problems though. To begin with, it does not even run yet, in any sense. Since it is not actual using code, there will be those who argue that the full impact of the GPL does not come to bear yet — noone is “using” the code yet. But beyond that, these types of problem should not exist in our tree. It will be resolved.

Sounds ammicable ?

Don’t you beleive it, it all went downhill from there.

That was actually quite nasty, and I don’t really think anything good came out of that, not for anyone, on either side.

It is interesting to note the simplicity of the BSD license compared to the GNU licenses, ( most notably that the entire BSD license can fit within a Wikipedia article, where as the changes between one GNU license and another takes up more space, ) and that the BSD license has been tested in a court of law. I don’t think this will end up going to court, but the first time the GNU licenses are tested will gain a lot of attention, because really most of it is upheld by goodwill.

There is a degree of pettiness that goes on admittedly, I know few invloved which are immune to some.

Personally I’ve never respected the law enough to care that much, I grew up programming in a time when people talked about releasing software into the public domain, and source code was often available if you asked for it, ( though it might take up several floppies. )

It isn’t just about one license or another though, NetBSD, who also use the BSD license ( and codebase, ) have kept the propriotry version of the same driver, making horrible workarounds to get it in. This has also prompted plenty of discussion of licenses and the like, but I’m hungry, so I’m going to leave it here for now.

UPDATE : I just wanted to say that big endian is the one true byte ordering.

UPDATE : Theo de Raadt passed comment on the dual-licensing issue …

Well, there are two parts to the Atheros driver.

Reyk’s code is *NOT* dual-licensed under the GPL. So there is no issue with Reyk’s code. He has explicitly stated that his code is not dual-licenced. The file have no GPL on them. He’s the author, he said so. None else can add a GPL to it. (No matter how much Luis begs and pleads and whines).

The other part of the driver was written by Sam Leffler. Sam’s code, though, is dual-licenced with a 4-term BSD’ish license (it has only 3 terms, but the wrong term was deleted, and the attribution term was actually strengthened — read the license). The GPL annotation in the licenses says specifically –

* Alternatively, this software may be distributed under the terms of the
* GNU General Public License (”GPL”) version 2 as published by the Free
* Software Foundation.

Note that word “Alternatively”.

That means “or”.

That means that if anyone makes changes to that file and distributes it, after their changes are in the file then EITHER license will apply.

Since it says “Alternatively” / “Or”, we can simply take any of those new changes UNDER THE LICENSE WE PREFER, and commit them to our file which is NOT dual licensed. If they want to use the GPL to restrict our use — that is us, the original authors, see — they should work on seperate files.

Note there are some files out there that don’t use words like “or” or “alternatively” when they mix licenses. One must read what the license says very carefully. Trying to brush everything into the same simple catagories will get you nowhere.

As a commentary, it seems as if many people have tired of the “make my own license” game, and now are playing the “mix licenses in my own way” game. And the “interpret it in the way that is most beneficial to me” game.

UPDATE : There is a good follow up email from Constantine Murenin …

people might be interested to know about the history of the licensing terms of ath(4) in OpenBSD.

OpenBSD’s ath(4) consists of two parts:

1. a driver, copyrighted by Sam Leffler of FreeBSD

2. a HAL, copyrighted by Reyk Floeter of OpenBSD

What Theo explained above concerns the OpenHAL code. OpenHAL is the Linux name for madwifi driver connected with reyk’s entirely free and open source ath(4) HAL code.

Sam originally put a dual BSD/GPL licence onto his driver code.

Reyk always put a BSD-style licence onto his HAL code.

At the time OpenHAL was forked from OpenBSD, OpenBSD’s ath(4) _driver_, but _not the HAL_, was dual licensed.

As already mentioned, OpenBSD’s ath(4) HAL, written by Reyk, was _never_ dual licensed. See the history on /sys/dev/ic/{ar52{10,11,12}{.c,{reg,var}.h},ar5xxx.{c,h}}.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/ic/#ar5210.c

Few months ago, Sam changed the licence of _his_ code to a 2-clause BSD licence. Sam had every right to do so, because he was and is the only copyright holder of that code, as the licence header of the driver file indicates, in FreeBSD, OpenBSD etc.

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/ath/if_ath.c#rev1.170
http://www.freshbsd.org/2007/06/06?project=freebsd&committer=sam

Reyk committed Sam’s changes to OpenBSD the same day, so now, OpenBSD’s ath(4) is _entirely_ BSD-licensed, with no alternative licensing available.

http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/ic/ath.c#rev1.64
http://www.freshbsd.org/2007/06/06?project=openbsd&committer=reyk

However, what Jiri Slaby does in his diff is simply outrageous. He changes the licensing terms of the code _he does not own_ _at his own will_. A clear copyright violation.

As I can see from that diff on LKML, Jiri Slaby doesn’t even have his name as the copyright holder in many of the ath5k files that he tries to change the licensing terms of. In other files, he is not the only author, so he can’t change the terms unless _all_ other copyright holders agree to the new terms.

You are from Yorkshire!

Aye lad.

How Yorkshire are you ?

via.

the way software actually gets used, especially by the people who pay the most for it, is not at all what you might expect. For example, the stated purpose of Powerpoint is to present ideas. Its real role is to overcome people’s fear of public speaking. It allows you to give an impressive-looking talk about nothing, and it causes the audience to sit in a dark room looking at slides, instead of a bright one looking at you.

From Townhall.com …

Researchers have figured out how to give an entire community a drug test using just a teaspoon of wastewater from a city’s sewer plant.

The test wouldn’t be used to finger any single person as a drug user. But it would help federal law enforcement and other agencies track the spread of dangerous drugs, like methamphetamines, across the country.

Oregon State University scientists tested 10 unnamed American cities for remnants of drugs, both legal and illegal, from wastewater streams. They were able to show that they could get a good snapshot of what people are taking.

One of the early results of the new study showed big differences in methamphetamine use city to city. One urban area with a gambling industry had meth levels more than five times higher than other cities. Yet methamphetamine levels were virtually nonexistent in some smaller Midwestern locales

The ingredient Americans consume and excrete the most was caffeine

Cities in the experiment ranged from 17,000 to 600,000 in population, but Field declined to identify them, saying that could harm her relationship with the sewage plant operators.

The science behind the testing is simple. Nearly every drug _ legal and illicit _ that people take leaves the body. That waste goes into toilets and then into wastewater treatment plants.

“Wastewater facilities are wonderful places to understand what humans consume and excrete,”

in the study presented Tuesday, one teaspoon of untreated sewage water from each of the cities was tested for 15 different drugs. Field said researchers can’t calculate how many people in a town are using drugs.

She said that one fairly affluent community scored low for illicit drugs except for cocaine. Cocaine and ecstasy tended to peak on weekends and drop on weekdays, she said, while methamphetamine and prescription drugs were steady throughout the week.

Field said her study suggests that a key tool currently used by drug abuse researchers _ self-reported drug questionnaires _ underestimates drug use.

“We have so few indicators of current use,”

The idea of testing on a citywide basis for drugs makes sense, as long as it doesn’t violate people’s privacy, said Tom Angell of the Students for Sensible Drug Policy, a Washington-based group that wants looser drug laws.

“This seems to be less offensive than individualized testing,”

UPDATE : I can understand why this may protect an individuals privacy at present, though obviously they are showing how easy it is to test anyone, at the city or state level it could be used to support policy which could actually be very damaging if not handled responsibly, unfortunatly when it comes to drugs, the powers that be rarely know the meaning of the word.

Alasdair got interviewed for the Guardian Science Podcast this week. He is talking about Google Sky and what it will mean to researchers. I am looking to talk to Alasdair over a couple of beers when I see him next month at ADASS about similar things as he has been hacking Google Sky to work with PLASTIC.

.mp3

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx-NLPH8JeM

My apologies if this is one of those virals everyone has already seen.

Cheers Nate.

UPDATE : Another from my boy …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hv2uVEVSJKs

From Aunty …

A troop of vervet monkeys is giving Kenyan villagers long days and sleepless nights, destroying crops and causing a food crisis.

Earlier this month, local MP Paul Muite urged the Kenyan Wildlife Service to help contain their aggressive behaviour.

But Mr Muite caused laughter when he told parliament that the monkeys had taken to harassing and mocking women in a village.

But this is exactly what the women in the village of Nachu, just south-west of Kikuyu, are complaining about.

They estimate there are close to 300 monkeys invading the farms at dawn. They eat the village’s maize, potatoes, beans and other crops.

And because women are primarily responsible for the farms, they have borne the brunt of the problem, as they try to guard their crops.

They say the monkeys are more afraid of young men than women and children, and the bolder ones throw stones and chase the women from their farms.

Nachu’s women have tried wearing their husbands’ clothes in an attempt to trick the monkeys into thinking they are men - but this has failed, they say.

“The monkeys grab their breasts, and gesture at us while pointing at their private parts. We are afraid that they will sexually harass us,”

The Kenyan Wildlife Service told the BBC that it was not unusual for monkeys to harass women and be less afraid of them than men, but they had not heard of monkeys in Kenya making sexually explicit gestures as a form of communication to humans.

The predominantly farming community is now having to receive famine relief food.

The residents report that the monkeys have killed livestock and guard dogs, which has also left the villagers living in fear, especially for the safety of their babies and children.

All the villagers’ attempts to control the monkeys have failed - the monkeys evade traps, have lookouts to warn the others of impending attacks and snub poisoned food put out by the residents.

The town has been warned by the Kenya Wildlife Service not to harm or kill any of the monkeys, as it is a criminal offence.

Running out of options, residents are harvesting their crops early in an attempt to salvage what they can of this year’s crop.

Unfortunately, this only invites the monkeys to break into their homes and steal the harvested crops out of their granaries.

Even the formation of a “monkey squad” to keep track of the monkeys’ movements and keep them out has failed.

The area is simply too large for the few volunteers to cover, they say.

Obviously the Kenyans should take their queue from what the British Government do and issue the monkeys with ASBOs.