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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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"Richard_Stallman_at_LibrePlanet_2019" by Ruben Rodriguez
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This is the personal web site of Richard Stallman.
The views expressed here are my personal views, not those of
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the GNU Project.
For the sake of separation, this site has always been
hosted elsewhere and managed separately.
If you want to send me GPG-encrypted mail, do not trust key servers! Some of them have phony keys under my name and email address, made by someone else as a trick. See gpg.html for my real key.
Richard Stallman has cancer. Fortunately it is slow-growing and manageable follicular lymphoma. Treatment put it into remission, and he can expect to live many more years. However, he now has to be even more careful not to catch Covid-19.
I urge you to vote in Democratic primaries for the progressive candidate, if there is one. And in the final election I urge you to vote for Democrats, unless a liberal independent had a good chance of winning.
The largest part of the site is the political notes, and they are typically updated every day.
I'm looking for people to![[America Means Civil Liberties / Patriotism Means Protecting
Them / www.aclu.org/safefree ]](flag_set_vectorized.png)
Conférence à Paris France, Logiciel libre et liberté dans une société numérique à Centrale Supélec à Saclay.
Boycott Chevron, in the name of Steven Donziger.
It is exciting that SB 976 turns towards restricting recommendation algorithms. But these options should not be limited to minors — every user should have this choice. (Please do not refer to teenagers as "children"; that feeds the US tendency to treat them like children and retard their development.)
However, I suggest taking a step beyond just choosing to use or not use the platform's addiction system. Recommendation algorithms should be completely separated from platforms!
If you want to use a nontrivial recommendation algorithm, you should be able to choose it yourself and use it anonymously. You could send it the URLs you want it to base its choices on. These might be some of the pages you had visited, and perhaps pages you had not visited.
Then it should send you its recommendations. You could pass all, or just some, or none of those recommendations to the platform to look at them.
AB 1949 is admirable because it gives a small boost to privacy for users of all ages, not only for children. It isn't enough, though — users should also be guaranteed the right and possibility to access through the Tor network and to use aliases. And collection of a user's data by the state should require a warrant against the user.
The door plug that blew out of a Boeing 737 Max 9 airplane was missing four bolts meant to hold it in place. They were missing because Boeing maintenance removed them and did not put them back in again.
Some workers actually made the mistake, but they were working as part of a work system that Boeing management was responsible for setting up and running. That's where the real fault is.
I suggest passing a law to require aircraft manufacturing and repair companies to have a certain fraction of licensed commercial pilots on their boards. Perhaps 66%.
Private equity is gobbling up large parts of the US nursing home business. This puts patients in danger since private equity can amass lots of money, create an oligopoly, and get away with abuses.
The study suggests that "regulation may be needed." I will take a stronger stand and call for firm limits — perhaps even prohibiting private equity combinations from owning home nursing businesses.
I'v also proposed prohibiting private equity from buying up lots of rental housing.
It should be illegal for a store to charge different prices to customers depending on whether they identify themselves and/or hand over demanded personal data.
Here are some quotations that I particularly like.
You can now read the political notes on Mastodon.
* Two powerful politicians and Rio de Janeiro’s former chief of police have been arrested* in connection with the 2018 murder of city councilor Marielle Franco.*
At the University of Mississippi, a provocateur who harassed a protest on behalf of Palestine is being investigated over violence.
*Noem book contains threat against Biden dog: "Commander, say hello to Cricket."*
This is a hint at a threat of violence — a standard right wing tactic, popularized by the wrecker. It is designed to fill his opponents with helpless rage, because it is too vague for any legal action. Meanwhile it sends right-wing supporters on a power trip imagining violence against whoever does not support them.
All in all, it demonstrates the vicious hate right-wingers display towards their chosen targets and scapegoats. But this is mild compared with what they usually do and threaten. Usually they target human beings.
Palestinians who have left east Rafah and tried to go to the "safe area" Israel recommended say it is difficult to get there, it is not a good place for inhabitance, and it is already filled with people who fled there first.
NYPD thugs beat up and injured some of the students they arrested. They put several in solitary for hours, and they denied water (and food) to one for 16 hours. This while fabricating accusations to smear the protesters.
*[Uniformed thugs] let violent mobs attack UCLA students. This is what lawlessness looks like.* A large mob attacked the protesters with firecrackers and sprayed gas, then attacked with fists and poles. 25 of the protester/victims were hospitalized. The thugs did nothing to protect them. The next day, thugs arrested 200 of the protesters.
Major news media disregarded the facts and pretended that the protesters and the mob were equally to blame.
A generation of American students is learning the old lessons: that cops are cruel, violent liars when they deal with members of groups they despise, and that the mainstream media work hard to create false justifications.
Biden endorsed that same injustice of blaming the protesters for the violence that was done to them.
I will vote for Biden anyway, because the corrupter hatefully proclaims that he will be even worse.
Meanwhile, the UCLA administration condemned the thugs failure to protect the protesters and said they will investigate what happened.
If this is sincere, if that investigation is honest and unbiased, it could be an important step forward. But I am skeptical of that. If the UCLA administration really feels this way about the attack on the protesters, why did it tell LA thugs to arrest them?
Two Columbia graduates who are journalists went back to campus to cover the student protest, and their mother, Nahla Al-Arian, came along for an hour. Night-Mayor Adams cited her as an example of an "outside agitator", fictitiously responsible for organizing the protest.
Their father, Professor Sami Al-Arian, was smeared as a terrorist by Dubya's men. The jury found him innocent on most of the charges, but there were some minor charges that the jury could not decide on. He was pressured into a plea bargain which is now being used by New York's thug department as an excuse to smear Nahla Al-Arian as an "outside organizer" of the protests, as if that would justify their violence.
*Venomous snakes likely to [move substantial distances to new habitats] en masse amid global heating, says study. Researchers find many countries unprepared for influx of new species and will be vulnerable to bites*
In medieval England, leprosy was transmitted between humans and red squirrels. It may have reached England on squirrels' furs.
Richard Stallman will give a talk, in French, Free Software and Freedom in a Digital Society at Centrale Supelec in Saclay, on May 15.
Israel has attacked part of Rafah, after calling on civilians there to move to another zone.
Has Israel come up with a way to attack HAMAS while not endangering civilians by the hundreds or thousands? I hope so, but I won't take that for granted. Israel has repeatedly failed to care about killing thousands of civilians.
The text suggests that the new "safe" zone is close to Rafah, but does not clearly say so, or how far one has to walk to get there.
For civilians weakened by hunger, and by untreated sickness and wounds, to carry their own bodies plus meager remaining belongings there may be beyond them. They also have reasons to distrust Israel's promise that it won't attack that zone. It has falsified such commitments before.
Let's not lose sight of where we want to end up.
A court ruled that the Tories "climate action plan" is illegal because it would be more properly called the "climate inaction plan".
Breakthroughs in reading text in ancient scrolls that were toasted by an eruption of Mt Vesuvius are giving us a way to read copies of books believed lost.
How great that would be — many mysteries of history could be understood.
* Job losses [in US journalism], declining circulations and local newspaper closures could mean spread of misinformation in pivotal election year.*
The drug diclofenac is poisonous to vultures. They eat dead cattle that were given diclofenac, and eventually they die from it. This has mostly wiped out vultures in India. As a result, Parsis cannot practice any more their religious duty to give corpses to the vultures.
I know a computing professor who told me he was a Parsi. I asked him, "Did you have a bad interaction with a Parser?" He collapsed in irresistible laughter — it was a delight.
Global heating leads to temperatures that exceed the capacity of bumblebees to cool their hive.
When Fawlty Towers was made, it was possible to have a character use a racial insult as a way of presenting that character as racist. John Cleese reports that this has become impossible, and *said some people "don't understand metaphor, irony or comedy exaggeration."*
I suggest that their deficiency is in "theory of mind": the faculty of distinguishing between what you think, what your interlocutor thinks, and what some other persons think.
Surgeon Ghassan Abu-Sitta volunteered to work in Gaza, and has testified about Israeli attacks he has seen. French senators invited him to speak to them, but Germany has banned him from entering anywhere in the Schengen zone.
Did Germany present any basis claimed to justify this, or is it purely arbitrary?
*The US universities that allow protest encampments — and even negotiate.*
A university president who rushes to call the thug department is not fit for the office.
The Columbia College Student Council accuses the university administration of imposing a policy of arbitrary repression ever since October, and become ever more cruel, arbitrary and unjust in the past weeks.
The university directed violent uniformed thugs at students it was falsely accusing of violence, all the while interfering with video recording of their violence. While claiming it was striving to "keep all members of our community physically safe", it opened the door to physical danger to them. This is part of a broad pattern of thugs committing violence against nonviolent protesters.
Some protesters were not entirely nonviolent — throwing things at thugs is aggressive, as well as self-defeating since it gives thugs an excuse to commit violence against those protesters and others too. It may also provoke them to the point that they lose self-control. That is not an excuse for their violence, but it is a reason not to provoke them.
The protest movement needs to develop nonviolence discipline, and marshals to enforce it, just as the civil rights movement and Vietnam peace movement did.
A general heat wave in south-east Asia, stretching from Bangladesh to the Philippines, is killing people and destroying crops.
It is clear that our global heating activities are part of the cause. Even worse, they are sure to make it hotter in the future. People can't survive if farming does not work.
The four factors of the apocalypse:
global heating, global hating,
global eating, global mating.
Copy this button (courtesy of R.Siddharth) to express your rejection of Facebook.
Non-oppressive Commercial E-books
Facebook's face recognition demonstrates a threat to everyone's privacy. I therefore ask people not to put photos of me on Facebook; you can do likewise.
Of course, Facebook is bad for many other reasons as well.
I'd like to make a list of countries that do not require a national identity card, and have no plans to adopt one. If you live in or have confirmed knowledge of such a country, please send email to rms at gnu.org.
Here's my list of countries with no national ID cards and no plans for one: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, UK. Australia's previous government tried to institute national ID cards, but the Labor government dropped the plan.
India has mostly finished imposing a national biometric ID number in a grand act of oppression.
Switzerland has national ID cards which are optional, but they or some other government ID card are needed for some purposes.
Iceland doesn't have ID cards as such, but they have ID numbers that citizens are forced to use frequently. For example, the national ID number is often required to rent a video or use a gym.
Denmark issues non-photo ID cards with a "person number", and many services use this card to identify people.
Norway will impose a national biometric ID card.
Ireland - national ID card by stealth.
ACLU: the five dangers of national ID cards.
Wikipedia has a list of identity card policies by country.
Stay away from certain countries because of their bad immigration policies.
Avoid flight connections in these airports because of their treatment of passengers.
People often ask how I manage to continue devoting myself to progressive activism (such as the free software movement) for years without burning out. The best way I can answer is by recommending a book, The Lifelong Activist by Hillary Rettig.
I disagree with the book on one theoretical point in the last part of the book: we shouldn't think of political activism as being marketing and sales, because those terms refer to business, and politics is something much more important than mere business. However, this doesn't diminish the value of the book's practical advice about borrowing techniques from marketing and sales.
Disclosure: I am friends with the author.
Personal Declaration of Richard Stallman and Euclides Mance on Solidarity Economy and Free Software.
I have reposted some of Rick Falkvinge's articles. As posted on his site, you can't see them in a browser without running some nonfree Javascript code which is apparently non-free. These versions show the same text, without the obstacle.
These are my political articles that are not related to the GNU operating system or free software. For GNU-related articles, see the GNU philosophy directory. You can also download copies of my book, Free Software, Free Society, 3rd edition'.
"Those who profess to favor freedom, yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical; but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will."Frederick Douglass, American Abolitionist, Letter to an associate, 1849
Here are notes about various issues I care about, usually with links to
more information. The current notes are
here. For all previous
notes, see this page.
See this page for information on efforts to maintain links in the political notes.
Political notes about the 2001 G8 summit in Genoa, Italy are being archived on their own page.
Richard Stallman's bio and publicity photos, and other things of interest to the press, have been moved to a separate page.
The Free Software Song, by Richard M. Stallman. You can listen to a performance of the song: Free Software Song performed by Thor Here is a variant of this song called "The Free Firmware Song".
A song parody, Colors of the Lisp, by Jefferson Carpenter.
Earth under attack from planet Koch.
On doxing, and how to spell it.
A Spanish cartoon: La Ruleta
Española. 
Here I am wearing my "power tie".
Wine snobs get their comeuppance.
Here I am struggling to open a bottle of water.
My application to an join Marian Henley's ex-boyfriends list.
My funny poetry and song parodies.
My Puns in English (Little Leaguer, August 2019).
My Puns in Spanish (New pun: Apostasía April 2019)
My Puns in French (New pun: Microsoft à l'école July 2019)
My Puns in Italian (New pun: Quale pesce fa starnutire? New 10/2018)
My Puns in German (New 02/2016)
Linguistic Swifties (Now with: Wintu, Penutian, Cochiti, Taos, and Towa.)
--Saint
IGNUcius-- The Church of Emacs will soon
be officially listed by at least one person as his religion for
census purposes.
There are no godfathers in the Church of Emacs, since there are no gods, but you can be someone's editorfather.
Stallman Does Dallas: "I have to warn you that Texans have been known to have an adverse reaction to my personality…"
The Dalai Lama today announced the official release of Yellow Hat GNU/Linux.
I found a funny song about the Mickey Mouse Copyright Act (officially the Sonny Bono Copyright Act) which extended copyright retroactively by 20 years on works made as early as the 1920s.
If you are a geek and read Spanish, you will love Raulito el Friki, who said "Hello, world!" immediately after he was born. Here's an archive of this now-defunct comic strip.
Sleeping with Stallman at MIT.
ESR's favorite programming language: Objectivist C.
No Kludges in Cluj (June 2014)
Made for You (December 2012) (local copy) Esperanto translation
A science fiction story: Jinnetic Engineering (in Portuguese, Farsi, Spanish, Armenian, Russian, French, and Italian).My book of essays about the philosophy of Software Freedom, is available from the GNU Press.
Avec des chapeaux French song parody.
My radio program of Music from Georgia, originally broadcast on WUOG in Athens, Georgia on Oct 13, 2014.
Quantum Theory and Abortion Rights
A proposal for gender neutrality in Spanish, suitable for both speech and writing.
On Hacking: In June 2000, while visiting Korea, I did a fun hack that clearly illustrates the original and true meaning of the word "hacker".
Predicting the attack on Pearl Harbor
I would like to thank:
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