Category: open source

Liberty and Love

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Maria Popova on Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mills via Adam Gopnik‘s A Thousand Small Sanities:The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.

“With an eye to the perilous erasures with which history is often rewritten — history, I continue to insist, is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance” – Popova

“Recognizing that intimate life is an accommodation of contradictions, they understood that political and social life must be an accommodation of contradictions too. The accommodation was their romance. That meant that social accommodation could be romantic, too. Love, like liberty, tugs us in different directions as much as it leads us in one. Love, like liberty, asks us to be only ourselves, and it also asks us to find our self in others’ eyes.” – Gopnik

There are echoes of blackness’s moral underpinnings, here, as found in Moten and in Glissant.

Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series

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Via Forum, Spring 2018.

The LibraryPress@UF, an imprint of the University of Florida Press and the University of Florida George A. Smathers Libraries, is proud to announce the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series.  This series makes available for free 39 books related to Florida and the Caribbean that are regarded as “classics.” It is made possible by
the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as part of the Humanities Open Book Program.  Books in the series highlight the many connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. They show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers throughout the region. They examine topics important to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, urban development, and tourism.

Read books in the series for free at http://ufdc.ufl.edu/openbooks

 

Roses for the home

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60d77337-3ad7-414b-80f6-7d99d245b2be

Roses for the home
by United States.: Dept. of Agriculture

Publication date 1963
Topics Roses.
Publisher Washington, D.C. : U.S. Dept. of Agriculture
Collection ufgdp; univ_florida_smathers; americana
Digitizing sponsor University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries with support from LYRASIS and the Sloan Foundation
Contributor University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries
Language English
http://uf.catalog.fcla.edu/uf.jsp?st=UF004953185&ix=nu&I=0&V=D&pm=1
Bookplateleaf 0003
Call number A 1.77:25/4
Camera Canon 5D
Identifier rosesforhome00unit
Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1cj9gn54
Ocr ABBYY FineReader 8.0
Page-progression lr
Pages 26
Ppi 300
Scandate 20120313160424
Scanner scribe8.nj.archive.org
Scanningcenter nj
via archive.org

Reitiration of USDA Farmer’s Bulletin Volume no.750, 1932. Roses for the home by Mulford, Furman Lloyd.

Police

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We need better and more open statistics, in order to improve the police. This story underlines the gap.

After Ferguson, it became apparent that the official government count of the number of people killed by police was low; it was off by about 50 percent. So journalists started counting. The Washington Post counted 990 people shot dead last year, a quarter of them black. This year is on about the same pace. But Klinger says we need more details about every instance of deadly force, even when no one dies.

The Washington Post : 2015 database – 990 people shot dead by police. 2016 database – 707, so far. Methodology. On Github.

Black Lives Matter calls to defund (which does not mean to eliminate) and to prioritize the use of police departments.

Save Firefox(open standards for web browsers)

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drm-firefox2

Cory Doctorow explains :

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), once the force for open standards that kept browsers from locking publishers to their proprietary capabilities, has changed its mission. Since 2013, the organization has provided a forum where today’s dominant browser companies and the dominant entertainment companies can collaborate on a system to let our browsers control our behavior, rather than the other way.

This system, “Encrypted Media Extensions” (EME) uses standards-defined code to funnel video into a proprietary container called a “Content Decryption Module.” For a new browser to support this new video streaming standard — which major studios and cable operators are pushing for — it would have to convince those entertainment companies or one of their partners to let them have a CDM, or this part of the “open” Web would not display in their new browser.

This is the opposite of every W3C standard to date: once, all you needed to do to render content sent by a server was follow the standard, not get permission. If browsers had needed permission to render a page at the launch of Mozilla, the publishers would have frozen out this new, pop-up-blocking upstart. Kiss Firefox goodbye, in other words.

The W3C didn’t have to do this. No copyright law says that making a video gives you the right to tell people who legally watch it how they must configure their equipment. But because of the design of EME, copyright holders will be able to use the law to shut down any new browser that tries to render the video without their permission.

This W3C emphasis of Section 1201 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act also threatens Netflix-like services.

via eff.

EFF proposes a solution.