In the wake of the Rav Moti Alon scandal, I reach the conclusion that homosexual Jewish rabbis and Moslem religious leaders are in the same risk category as Catholic priests. The common difficulty, which all of them encounter is the lack of a legal (from their religion’s perspective) means to satisfy their desires.
After 2nd Lebanon War at Jul-August 2006, the government of Israel set up a committee of inquiry - the Winograd Committee. A domain has been registered in behalf of this committee - http://vaadatwino.co.il/ (the contents are in Hebrew).
Fast forward three years. The Israeli government is trying to build a biometric database with data about all Israeli citizens, and concerned people are protesting this plan. The strongest argument against the database is the risk of data leak, which may lead to rather adverse consequences.
To prove that the government does not know to protect its digital assets, the above domain was hijacked when its registration expired because someone in the government forgot to renew the domain registration. The Website now contains a statement against the biometric database.
The other day I stumbled upon the Website http://copyfree.org/, which advocates a software licensing model somewhat similar to LGPL.
See the Website for arguments in favor of this licensing model.
I would, however, stick with GPL/LGPL due to the following reasons:
The current law in Israel is that women are not automatically entitled to have abortions. They must apply for approval by a committee. Unmarried women and women below and above certain range of ages get automatic approval. Married women are allowed to have abortion only if there is a medical or another legally recognized reason for this.
In the wake of the recent tragedies, in which 4 year old children were murdered by their mothers and/or grandfathers, the politicians are clamoring for something to be done. A plan was indeed put together to improve monitoring of families having children at those ages.
May I suggest another solution to the problem: allow any pregnant woman, regardless of her marital, health or sociological status, to have an abortion, no questions asked, if she does not feel like having the baby. Since the goal is that only women, who really want babies, would have them, there should be no stigma attached to having an abortion. At least not beyond the existing stigma of not wanting to have children.
Abortion is better than killing a child or raising him, like an unwanted child, to be a criminal.
Gordon Bell has captured a lifetime’s worth of articles, books, cards, CDs, letters, memos, papers, photos, pictures, presentations, home movies, videotaped lectures, and voice recordings and stored them digitally. Phil Libin does something somewhat similar.
When I read about them, I wonder about the times they do something not accordance with law and norms prevailing around them, such as going to call girls, smoking marijuana, shoplifting, meeting with one’s employer’s competitors, having a luscious phone call with one’s mistress, wanking in public restroom, getting a syphilis treatment, farting, peeping into forbidden windows, eating food forbidden by one’s religion, reading subversive books, etc.
For me personally, this is not a rant, because I use neither hearing aids nor MP3 players.
Recently, the Israeli police began issuing citations to people, who cross roads while listening to music using MP3 players.
The news item about this subject (written in Hebrew) has several talkbacks asking what about deaf people, how will the policemen tell hearing aids apart from MP3 players, and generally complaining about the screwed up law enforcement priorities of the Israeli police.
One possible consequence of the new policy is that MP3 players, which look like hearing aids, and earpiece, which look like hearing aid earpieces, will become popular - as people will try to impersonate as hard of hearing in order to evade the 100 NIS fines associated with being cited for crossing a road while listening to music.
The httpshare.com P2P Web site was blocked by the three largest Israeli ISPs, yet this fact received no publicity in Israel and I found out about this only from Slashdot.
More details - in: IFPI gets Israeli ISPs to block Hebrew peer-to-peer site.
I found that technically, the blocking was accomplished by directing httpshare.com to 127.0.0.1.
My biggest shock is from the lack of publicity this blockage received inside Israel - none of the Internet news Web sites and no blogs, which I follow, mentioned this.
If you live in a country like Sweden or USA, in which people who buy sex from prostitutes can be persecuted, then do not be a good samaritan if you see a woman in apparent distress on road:
Good Samaritan Sex Offender
Chicago Man Sues after Prostitution Arrest
In Israel, if you drive a car and a policeman asks you to submit yourself to test by breathanalyzer to determine whether you are drunk or not, you must submit to test. Otherwise, you will be deemed to have driven under influence.
What if the instrument wrongly determines that you have blood concentration of ethanol above the legal limit?
At least one breathanalyzer used in USA was proven to have criminally unreliable software. For example, “the software takes an airflow measurement at power-up, and presumes this value is the “zero line” or baseline measurement for subsequent calculations. No quality check or reasonableness test is done on this measurement.”
Based upon past experience with car speed measurement radar guns in Israel, I am skeptical whether Israeli courts would accept such information as defense by people wrongly accused of drunk driving.
Software-driven instruments used for medical diagnosis are subjected to stringent quality requirements and strict regulations (see, for example, U.S. Food and Drug Administration Premarket Notification 510(k)) before the manufacturer is allowed to sell the instrument. Currently, no similar legal framework exists for regulating instruments used for law enforcement.
I was prompted to write this by a request, which I received today.
Some background information: large part of the contents of my DEAF-INFO Web site is material, which was posted to the DEAF-L mailing list by various subscribers over the years. When the mailing list was active, I saved the best posts and put them in the Web site, with attribution to the original contributor.
The request, which I received today, was to remove the attributions to a particular contributor.
In the past I received similar requests. Upon further questioning, it turned out that most of those requests were made by people, who expressed their strong opinions about various deafness related issues, while they were students. Few years later, they were to get jobs as teachers in schools of the deaf. Then they were concerned that they’ll get into trouble because of the opinions, which they expressed in the past.
I asked someone, who teaches in a regular primary school, about this. She explained to me that teachers are forbidden to publicly express their opinions. The teachers are usually state or county employees. The only people authorized to publicize opinions are the employer’s public relations specialists.
I believe that this state of affairs is rather unfortunate. Teachers work “in the trenches” - they deal with pupils with learning disabilities, they deal with non-working educational methodologies, they deal with poorly-designed materials. They should be able to criticize non-working methods of instruction. If their school principal does not improve the methods, the teachers should be free to publicize their criticism. This would allow parents to ultimately have a say in improving the quality of instruction their children receive.
This is important especially in the area of deaf education, which is especially rife with conflict among different goals (integration vs. separate identity), philosophies (oral vs. Sign Language) and a bewildering choice of communication methods.
