Did Firefox just update? I think it did. It's suddenly started making extra close buttons appear on my tabs when I hover over them, which makes the title of the tab jump to the right in a most distracting way. Is there any way of making it stop? I can't find anything that looks like it would stop it in either Options, Tab Mix Plus options or about:config, and Google isn't being much help either.

 A while back, I wrote a few posts in regards to the Pirate Party, BitTorrent, the Free Software Foundation, Richard Stallman, and the divide in understanding between the hacker culture and the P2P file-sharing culture. Thinking about the issue since then, I've thought about whether Stallman, Perens and the FSF are the standout representatives of the "first-wave copyleft", which relied upon licensing "hacks", programming know-how and a self-sufficiency sustained by autonomous collaboration, while TPB, the Pirate Party, and the file-sharing networks, trackers, search engines and clients are representative of the "second-wave copyleft", which is less self-sufficient, less fond of licenses, more reliant upon the assumption of the ubiquity of the Internet and the availability of the media which can be copy-distributed to every Internet-capable device, but much more visibly and explicitly challenging to the very nature of intellectual property licenses and structures.

What the second-wave copyleft, a movement which questions the very need for licenses, is seeking to accomplish (the softening of IP restrictiveness) may have a secondary impact upon most free culture licenses, since they also rely upon the same or similar levels of enforcement as the most restrictive EULAs. At least, that's what Stallman wrote in an Op-Ed not long after the PP took its seat(s) in the European Parliament. 

But, in the present, we have two sharp slopes of intellectual property regime which rely upon the same muscle of legal enforcement: the free/open source and the proprietary/closed source. If the PP (and, I assume, the entire second-wave) wants to reform or soften the underlying legal enforcement (and the longevity of such licenses), then it also means that the two slopes of IP conception will be lessened in their heights. But the main fear of the first-wave copyleft, which is currently dependent upon the more liberal of those two slopes of IP conception, is that the softening of the underbelly will result in a much more frenetic and frenzied re-proprietization of source code, production material and "innovative" mechanisms by those who desire a more restrictive regime for whatever convergence that they have managed to construct. It may be possible to gain a "default" licensing scheme whereby those who do seek to proprietarize source code are doing so on a commons-based "short leash" that doesn't prevent the same source code from being copied and modified by others, including competing proprietors, but no one from the Swedish PP has commented on such a possibility (as far as I've heard).

Anyway, I contend that both the first-wave and second-wave are part of a continuum towards the liberalization of intellectual property regimes for commons-based purposes and are far from being competing ideologies or ideological wings.

Holiday debuggery

We know there were a few kinks with the holiday promotion. We've been working very hard to get them ironed out. If you have a paid/permanent account, keep on sending those coupons. Here's an update:

• If you were unable to send out multiple coupons at a time, please perform a hard refresh, and you should be good to go.
• If you redeemed a coupon to upgrade your account and the balance at checkout was $0 instead of $9.95 or $15, this means your upgrade did not go through (nor were you charged). We've straightened this out, so you can now apply your holiday coupon toward the purchase of an annual paid account.
• If you tried to redeem a holiday coupon and had trouble using a gift certificate to cover the balance of an annual paid account, we identified the root problem. If this happened to you, you can now use your holiday coupon together with your gift certificate.
• If the number of holiday coupons you have available suddenly goes up (instead of down), this might be due to recipients declining the coupons, at which point your pool of available coupons will be replenished and, therefore, increase.
• If you need assistance with holiday coupons or pretty much anything else (well, LiveJournal related), please open a support request and we'll be more than happy to help!

Tweaks

• There were some initial glitches displaying results on My Guests, but we've worked them out. We hope you'll check out who's been checking you out!
• Some of you reported formatting issues using the Rich Text Editor (i.e., line breaks were being removed incorrectly). We've implemented a fix! Thanks so much for your patience.

Give a little extra!

We're pleased to report that we've already sold over 100 virtual red ribbons in honor of National AIDS Awareness month. Remember, for each charitable vgift you purchase for $2.99, we'll donate 100 percent of gross proceeds to IAVI.org (the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative) to fund the development of an HIV vaccine. Once again, we thank you for your generosity.

Celebrate with holiday vGifts!

Stop by the Virtual Gift Shop and share some holiday magic with your LiveJournal friends.

Photos of the week

We're back with more dazzling pictures from around the world. Congrats to marlenemcc, who has been awarded a virtual blue ribbon as the winner of our fourth photo contest. We hope you'll click over to LJ_Photophile poll and tell us your picks in pics!

For more fantastic user content, we'll meet you under the cut. ( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for reading. Here's wishing you the very merriest of holidays. We'll see you next year!

I've been working for the past few minutes on removing verses from Jefferson's Bible that can be construed as implicating the Jewish people or Jewish religious leadership in either opposition or conspiracy against the main figure of the Gospels.

What I realized, while whittling it down further, was just how much of a bitter dick (or a modern-day conspiracy-theorist) that Jesus sounded like (or was made to sound like by his biographers) when he started railing against the Pharisees and the religious leadership in Judaea. Furthermore, I can see how much easier it is to read Jefferson's mashup/remix of the Gospels when you remove all of the supernatural crap (as Jefferson already did), tone down the easily-misconstruable criticism of Judaism as a religion of the period, and especially mute much of the obviously-opinionated anecdotes inserted by Jesus' disciples. The latter two is exactly what I'm trying to do.

Basically, it's an attempt to reduce the number of accusations of propheticide (prophet murder, or motivations towards such ends) uttered by Jesus' earliest followers and biographers against the Jewish people's religiocultural leadership, although, when rid of the persecution complex, the story eventually reads as more of a biography of a short-lived would-be messiah claimant and vengeful reformer (and even the reforms proposed by him don't seem to be as significant in their severity as is claimed in normal versions and later appraisals of the New Testament).

I'll probably post my revision at a later date. Seems like it's still too big for Google Docs.

Get to know My Guests. Want to know who's checking you out? You can now view the 100 most recent, logged-in users who visited your journal during the past 30-day period with My Guests. For those who prefer to fly under the radar, you can update your My Guests privacy setting here.

Introducing My Stats. If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can now see detailed reports on how many people are visiting your journal, friends pages, and entries (wherever they're posted on LiveJournal). You can also view data on comments and RSS requests. My Stats is only available to Paid and Permanent account holders, but you can upgrade anytime. (FYI, an annual subscription costs less than a large pizza with everything on it, PLUS it's rumored to make you lose weight in your sleep!) For additional details on this feature, read this article in paidmembers.

Get ready to check your vital statistics!. To begin, mouse over Journal in the upper nav bar and select My Stats from the dropdown menu (Horizon) or select My Stats under Journal in the side bar (Vertigo). If you're using another design scheme, you can visit My Stats directly. You'll find My Guests on the My Stats tool bar.

Happy holiday promotion!

We're delighted to tell you about our holiday coupons, which will help you share the love with your LiveJournal friends! If you have a Paid or Permanent account, you can send up to 10 LiveJournal Basic/Plus users a $10 coupon for an annual paid subscription now through January 15th, 2010. Recipients can upgrade for $9.95 (instead of $19.95) for one year by enrolling in our automatic payment plan or make a manual payment of $15 (instead of $25). Please note that these coupons are not transferable and cannot be used to renew existing paid accounts. If you're a Paid/Permanent user, you can send out your holiday coupons now!

Tweaks and Enhancements

1. The search is on: We've replaced our default search tool with one from Yandex, a leader in search engine technology. This means you'll get smarter, more granular results! To get started, enter your search terms and click the Go button to the left of the Find box on the upper right of the LiveJournal header. This will take you to the search landing page where you can further refine by Entries, Comments, People & communities, and FAQs. You can also access the search page directly.
2. Whitelisting: We've released a new option to help you moderate your busy communities more efficiently. If an entry contains a link to a whitelisted (i.e., trusted) site, it will be posted automatically without need for moderator approval. If a post contains a link that is not on the whitelist, you'll be prompted to approve. To access this option, please visit settings for any community you maintain and select the third option in the Community Moderation box (located in the lower left-hand corner). Click the enable link to custom-edit your community's whitelist, which has been prepopulated with trusted domains. You can manually add or delete URLs in the text box. Please note: If you're the maintainer of an unmoderated community, you may see the radio button for this setting checked, even though it's not active. This is a known issue. Please select whichever option you prefer and click Save Changes at the bottom of the page. If you're happy with your current settings, then no need to do anything!
3. TMI, dude: We've added some fun FREE sponsored vgifts! You can send up to 50 TMI vgifts to mutual friends (btw, you cannot send free vgifts to communities). If you're a Paid/Permanent user and you want to view sponsored gifts, click Show sponsored gifts on your homepage or visit the sponsored gift page. These vgifts will only be available through Wednesday, December 23rd.

You can view more awesome user content after the jump!

( Read more... )

Curtains

Thanks, again, for joining us. Until next time, stay snug!