Halliburton to pay $559 million to settle bribery probe
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/26/AR2009012601605.html
Doesn’t that seem a bit like paying a bribe to settle a bribery investigation. It seems unlikely that they’ll learn the right lessons from this.
A friend of mine from college is a few weeks into a literary contest to get her book published. She’s been working really hard on this for a long while so if you like historical romances or if you just want to help out a friend of mine, go to her livejournal, pass the word around… hey maybe even win a scarf.
Help promote the American Title contest and win a handknit gansey scarf! Visit contestant Jessica Darago’s blog at http://justjayj.livejournal.com/275687.html to find out how.
Apparently payola is alive and well in the publishing industry 
I keep hearing how we can’t negotiate with Hamas until they accept Israel’s right to exist, but my reading of recent history suggests that Gaza has been under existential threat due to siege. So how come no commentator says Hamas shouldn’t negotiate with Israel until they accept Gaza has a reasonable expectation not to be choked out of existence by Israel.
The cease fire that people keep telling me that Hamas violated seems to have based upon Israel opening up the border crossings. When Israel failed to keep up to thier end of the agreement, they violated the cease fire by continuing the aggression in the form of a siege.
I keep hearing something to the effect of what country wouldn’t respond to rocket fire. I ask what country wouldn’t respond to the existential threat of a choking siege.
Both sides have failed to pursue peace in a useful way. We need to stop pretending there isn’t 50 years of bad blood to work through.
President Obama’s inauguration is coming up in just a week. Soon after that inauguration the Boy Scouts of America will attempt to make him their honorary president.
Obama should decline.
The fact that the Boy Scouts of America discriminates is a decided question. They were sued and changed from being a quasi-public organization to a private religious organization so they could continue discriminating. They consider it a core function of their organization to expel members for no other reason than their religious or sexual orientation.
The fact that they discriminate against anyone should be sufficient for Obama to decline the “honor” of serving as their honorary president.
Instead he should choose to serve as the actual president of all Americans. He should begin delivering on his promises of change and inclusion. This small symbolic action would clearly telegraph that they he will not be party to discrimination against anyone.
It would be a welcome change.
There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
From London’s Atheist Buses
Carry on.
I recently was looking for Creative Commons images to put into some of my Nephilim Song stuff. This seemed like a perfect use for such work, I was producing freely distributed game supplements that had no budget and would be greatly enhanced with some images to break up walls of text and my art skills are limited at best.
One of the places I went looking for images was Deviant Art since they have a proper Creative Commons tag easily searchable using a google site search if not their built in search. What surprised me is the number of times I encountered something to the effect of:
Licensed under the Creative Commons attribution non-commercial license. You can not use my work ANYWHERE without my express written permission and if you do, you are a thief.
I also encountered something along the lines of:
This work protected by copyright and creative commons.
This led me to believe that a sizable part of the Deviant Art community that was releasing works under the creative commons license, simply didn’t know what they were doing.
My understanding without being a lawyer is that the creative commons licenses are just that licenses, not protections. When you license your work under creative commons you are giving your express written permission for your work to be used without further consultation under limited conditions laid out in the specific creative commons license.
The creative commons license does not offer any additional protections above straight copyright, in fact it is a formal release of some those rights so your work can be used by the culture. There are very good reasons for doing this, it is only with a rich public exchange that we stand on the shoulders of giants.
If you do not wish to participate in that exchange, I do not wish to use your work without your blessing which is why I found the mislabeling so distressing. Some people made it obvious despite releasing their work under the creative commons that they did not wish for others to use their works, others made it clear that they did wish for others to be able to build new things using their work as a building block.
The ones in between worry me. They licensed the work, but my survey doesn’t fill me with confidence that they knew what they were doing.
I messaged a few of the artists who’s comments made it clear they did not wish to license their work and tried to inform them of what the license meant and I wrote this trying to further the educate the Internet.