When I looked at the sites that refer to this blog, I discovered the following one.
http://www.general-game-playing.de/literature.html
It is very helpful if you wants to know the current research on General Game Playing.
Just received this message from Lessig. As last year, I am going to give my support to CC. Ji
Dear Creative Commoner:
It has been an exciting week in America. Many of us had been focused on this presidential election. Few have had the time to think about the other projects we have that are working hard to do good.
I’m writing today to ask you to think again about one of those projects that will always be important to me — Creative Commons. We’re in the middle of our annual drive. The success of this drive is essential to our ability to run. The vast majority of CC’s supporters, including of course its Board, and current CEO, are volunteers. But the organization depends upon a small number of wildly underpaid staffers, as well as modest infrastructure to keep the system alive.
This is a tough year to ask for support, I know. All of us are facing difficult decisions about what we can really afford to do. But as I looked out at the packed audiences in Hong Kong celebrating the launch of the 50th Creative Commons jurisdiction, I saw again just how critical it is to keep this movement growing. We have made important progress over the year, including most importantly for me, winning the confidence of the Free Software Foundation so that they will permit FSF licensed wikis (including Wikipedia) to relicense to a CC license. But there is an enormous amount of work left to be done.
Please help us in this. Whatever you can give is important. And if you’d like something tangible in return for your gift, I’m happy to send you a signed copy of my latest (and last in this field) book, REMIX, inscribed however you like. (I’m only going to sign a limited number for this purpose, and we’re going to charge an insanely high price, but if you’re interested, visit http://support.creativecommons.org/join. And if you’re ordering from outside the United States, you’ll get the Bloomsbury Academic version of the book, with the CC license explicit inside.)
I’ve not pestered you much this year. It has been important to me to see this organization thrive when I’ve not been at the center of its work. But Creative Commons remains the work I’m most proud of. And like any parent, it still keeps me awake with worry at night. Please help us make this year another success. Do what you can. Get 6 friends to do the same. We’ve been depending on small donations long before America could spell “Obama.” And we depend upon those donations still.
Please visit http://support.creativecommons.org/join and support Creative Commons today.
Thank you.
—–
Lessig
Stanford Law School
559 Nathan Abbott Way
Stanford, CA 94305-8610
Here is a detailed report on how the Internet was controlled by the Chinese government.
Journey to the heart of Internet in China (Download pdf version).
Since I believe that in order to build a better society, it is extremely important to let my fellow citizens to have free access of information, I will spend a big portion of my spare time to do research on this topic and take some concrete actions as well.
One thing my friends and I am doing is to crack the Internet Censorship in China by launching a class-action lawsuit(or group lawsuit). Here is a website we created for this.
Just managed to do it right before the foundation building was closed. 
Next, the Bonfire Night in Liverpool.
I am glad that Obama won the election in a big way.
Now the real challenge just begins.
Congratulations!
The U.S. election ends soon. If McCain would win, then the U.S. people would surprise me again. Lessig is really quite worried at the moment, and he gives his reasons and his urgent plea.
I want Obama be elected. Let us wait and see.
This piece is submitted to the Knight News Challenge 08. We have an extended version here:
http://www.icuihua.org/wiki/index.php/Knight_08_Application.
Project Title:
iCuihua - a wiki-based Chinese community for class-action lawsuits
项目名称：
爱翠花 － 一个基于维基的集体诉讼中文社区
Describe your project
The purpose of our iCuihua project is to develop a wiki-based community that helps ordinary Chinese people come together to file class-action lawsuits in China. Class-action lawsuits are particularly meaningful in China as our legal system is quite distorted, and the powerful companies and the governments have a strong influence on courts. For example, in the recent “Chinese milk power scandal”, tens of thousands babies got kidney stones due to the tainted milk powder; parents were angry and some tried to file lawsuits but the courts dismissed these cases. Our project is intended to help people like these parents with our platform, and subsequently improve the human rights conditions in China. We have three core tasks.
(1) Develop a wiki-based website: “iCuihua.org”. This site is created in September 2008. We use the mediawiki as the foundation of our website. We plan to build modules that help aggregate information from three groups of people: the victims who are willing to participate class-action lawsuits, the lawyers, and the general public who care about such lawsuits for the sake of public good. All software we develop will use GNU license.
(2) Build strong relationships with multiple non-profit legal organizations. We have been working with the Open Constitution Initiative, an influential non-profit organization that promotes the public interests and provides volunteering legal services in China. We currently focus on two cases: a class-action lawsuit against the Internet Censorship in China, and a class-action lawsuit against the companies that produced contaminant baby milk powers.
(3) Maintain an active discussion group to promote the public awareness of our project and the use of our platform. We have more than 300 members so far.
How will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
Our project will facilitate the information flow among the three groups of people (victims, lawyers and the public). We focus on the class-action lawsuits and pull all kinds of relevant information together. For example, for the recent tainted milk powder problem, we have set a wiki-page, and we have been in touch with more than 100 families who are willing to share their stories and fight for their own rights. By focusing on the issues directly related to people’s welfare, our project is attracting more and more attention from the people. To encourage people to contribute information, we will improve the user interface of our website so that people could do it easily on their own.
How is your idea innovative? (new or different from what already exists)
We are probably the first group in China to propose a wiki-based approach combined with class-action lawsuits to improve the human rights conditions in China. We believe this approach has a great potential to help our fellow Chinese citizens to fight for their own rights. The experiences we gain for developing this project will be shared with all people around the world.
What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
Mr. Dong Jin Du has been worked as project manager in SAP company for more than 5 years. He sued an ISP called China Telecom for its Internet censorship, in April 2007 [7][8]. The case was lost but he has been supporting and promoting the freedom of network in China since then. He is the creator of Cuihua Discussion group, hosted in Google Groups service, and the group has attracted more than 300 remembers so far, including top-tier bloggers, media journalists, and lawyers across China. In July 2008, he made a call to initiate a class-action case to against the two largest ISP in China for their Internet censorship.
Dr. Biao Teng is a lawyer and a lecturer at the University of Politics and Law in Beijing. He has been a vocal supporter of human rights activists such as Chen Guangcheng and Hu Jia. He is also a board member of the Open Constitution Initiative (Gongmeng.cn).
Mr. Ji Ruan is currently a PhD student in the University of Liverpool, UK. While he is doing research on artificial intelligence, he is also very interested in using the information technologies to help the people to speak for their own rights. A blog-based citizen website was created by him and his friends in early 2008, and it had been attracting many visitors from Zhuji before it was blocked from the mainland of China during the Beijing Olympic Games started. He also helped to build a website for the class-action lawsuit against Internet censorship.
The dichotomy paradox leads to the following mathematical joke. A mathematician, a physicist and an engineer were asked to answer the following question. A group of boys are lined up on one wall of a dance hall, and an equal number of girls are lined up on the opposite wall. Both groups are then instructed to advance toward each other by one quarter the distance separating them every ten seconds (i.e., if they are distance
apart at time 0, they are
at
,
at
,
at
, and so on.) When do they meet at the center of the dance hall? The mathematician said they would never actually meet because the series is infinite. The physicist said they would meet when time equals infinity. The engineer said that within one minute they would be close enough for all practical purposes.
From the source.
The dichotomy paradox is:
“That which is in locomotion must arrive at the half-way stage before it arrives at the goal.”
—Aristotle, Physics VI:9, 239b10
Two month ago in August, I signed a petition for Hu jia, urging our Chinese government to release Hu jia as soon as possible. He was jailed because he wrote several articles to criticize the ill behaviors of our government. Before that, he was already one of the leading figures of promoting human rights in China, and was under constent survalliance, (see his home-made documentary, “Prisoners in Freedom City” on Youtube).
A good news came today from the European Union that Hu jia was awarded the Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, Europe’s most prestigious human rights prize.
I am very happy for him. While he is still in a jail in Beijing, I believe that he won’t hear this news until very late, but he will know it and be happy eventually. It is interesting to see how will the highest Chinese leaders react on this news. Will they be upset or be happy?
This is what I heard so far about a lower official’s comment:
Behind the scenes, China had lobbied against Mr. Hu’s candidacy for the Sakharov Prize. On Oct. 16, Song Zhe, the Chinese ambassador to the European Union, wrote a critical letter to Mr. Pöttering.
“If the European Parliament should award this prize to Hu Jia, that would inevitably hurt the Chinese people once again and bring serious damage to China-E.U. relations,” Mr. Song wrote, according to The Associated Press.
In China, the government officials always claim that they have the right to represent all Chinese people, even people’s feelings. So when they, the officials, got hurt, they would say that all Chinese’s feeling got hurt. But apparently I am still a Chinese, holding a Chinese passport, and my feeling does not get hurt at all; instead, I am feeling so good. Maybe those officials are so numb that they could not even feel the real Chinese’s feelings.
Read this if you wants to know how crap the Chinese legal system is, and how hopeless a Chinese can be:
