Bruce Perens' Weblog

Mullet Prosecution Doesn't Go Far Enough

Fri, 8 Feb 2013 23:52:54 +0000

The news is full of the prosecution of cult leader Sam Mullet, who cut the beards and hair of Amish people who disobeyed him. Having received 15 years imprisonment for the hair-cutting, shouldn't he be prosecuted for the rapes he's alleged to have committed?

The Dreamliner and Its Battery

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:03:21 +0000

Here's how I expect the Dreamliner to be fixed and restored to airworthiness.

I'd Take Away All Of The Guns

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 00:43:47 +0000

I just wanted to put this on record. I will do what I can to support "gun control" but I don't believe it goes far enough. I do not believe in private ownership of firearms.

Bruce Perens' Services Available to Law Firms and Corporations

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 06:36:40 +0000

Perens LLC, my services firm, is looking for law firms that wish to develop their Open Source practice, and corporations that need strategic and technical consulting regarding Open Source. Most of you are aware of my qualifications, but you can refer others to Wikipedia, perens.com, or any search engine. Write to me at bruce at perens dot com .

My Submission to FCC to Modernize Ham Radio Rules

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:26:02 +0000

Here's my submission to FCC to modernize ham radio rules regarding digital communication. You may remember that I was the founder of No-Code International and worked (successfully) to get the Morse Code test removed as a requirement for the Amateur Radio license in almost all nations.

This filing is because FCC rules for digial ham communications in the US aren't able to cope with Open Source and Software-Defined Radio. FCC currently individually authorizes each modulation type in a months-long proceeding - that's obviously not going to work when modulation types are changed by editing a few lines of software, and I ask them to authorize an exhaustive list of digital modulation types or to switch to bandwidth-based regulation. FCC currently authorizes 4 digital codes, all of which are obsolete. I asked for them to authorize any code that's publicly disclosed sufficiently that a knowledgable programmer could write a program to encode and decode it. And there's a lot of discussion of our recent work on Codec2 and FreeDV.

Java Security Madness

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 23:02:11 +0000

It seems that Oracle has seriously botched Java security. But who really believes that, as H.D. Moore of Rapid7 claims, it could take them two years to solve all of the problems?

On the Death of Aaron Swartz

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 01:48:05 +0000

I didn't know Aaron Swartz. But I'd like to talk about what drove him to create, and to end his life.

Generators for Use in Disasters

Mon, 3 Dec 2012 18:33:30 +0000

An electric generator is useful for communications, to keep the 'fridge cold, and other purposes in an emergency. Here is discussion of the ones I recommend.

The Day I Blundered Into The Nuclear Facility

Wed, 3 Oct 2012 04:20:51 +0000

I found myself alone in a room, in front of a deep square or rectangular pool of impressively clear, still water. There was a pile of material at the bottom of the pool, and a blue glow of Cherenkov radiation in the water around it.

My Formal Abandonment of Race

Tue, 25 Sep 2012 06:30:00 +0000

It started with our visit to Manzanar, the camp in California where thousands of U.S. Citizens of Japenese ethnicity were held prisoner in the desert. And it ends with the American Community Survey of 2012.