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all we need is one single DVD which should be public domain on which DeCSS can be used for the whole thing to be made legal.

Mickey Mouse may already have entered the public domain due to lack of proper copyright notice. Your single DVD may be "Mickey's Early Years."

The retail box model is horribly broken and will likely never be fixed.

Signed JerryMeander
5 years w/o an account

I find it rather laughable that Jack Valenti says "...because making movies is so expensive, only two in 10 films ever retrieve their production and marketing investment from domestic theatrical exhibition." The problem I have is that Hollywood is notorious for cooking the books... take for instance the concept of "Net Profit". Take a look at here for a page that shows how Hollywood calculates "net profit" so that a movie like Coming to America can show no profit.

Don't stop at those two pages... look here or here or here... or if you don't mind reading a PDF file, try here

Gods, I knew this day would come.

See, once upon a time, back in the ancient days, before the existance of slashcode.com, there was a group of people who attempted to use the 0.2 and 0.3 releases of Slash.

This was BEFORE the Andover acquisition, before the IPO, before the VAOLinux assimilation.

Someone managed to a) make slash 0.3pre work b) provide a patch to do so, and c) PROVIDE DOCUMENTATION.

A list sprung up for those of us interested.
http://projects.is.asu.edu/mailman/listinfo/slash- help. A FAQ was written: http://www.zevils.com/programs/files/slash-faq2.tx t. Patches were given to Mr. Malda, who promptly either ignored or failed to acknowledge them. Pleas were made for Malda to link the list or FAQ to the slashcode page. They went unheeded. People who had spent months unsucccessfully trying to make Slash work discovered the FAQ, mailing list, and patch, and managed to make slash work. And *they* were unhappy that Malda and /. blew us off and refused to point to us as a help source.

I'm really p*ssed off here. OUR work was blown off by Malda and never ever acknowledged on /. and then we got to be insulted later by the appearance of a 0.9 release without any acknowledgement of our effort, followed by the appearance of slashcode.com, and now finally there's a nice book about it posted on /. itself, which kicks money back to /. not to mention the authors of the book whom are likely largely ignorant of the early history of /.

Yeah, I'm real bitter that all this isn't even a footnote in history. I think though that a) there should be credit given where it is due and b) the truth should be made public about what Malda was up to with slash at the time ("slash was made public as a joke as an entry for obfuscated perl contest and we will never support it" IIRC yet he through Andover/VAOLinux did later).

So come on, let's see if we get some acknowledgement from /. and the book authors etc. about these issues. Or perhaps I ought to buy one share of stock and ask at the stockholder's meeting! Yeah, that's it, they gotta answer to the stockholders...

Email: (slash) [at] (underwaterbasketweaving [dot] (com)

The way I see it, some parts of Mars are a *lot* hotter *now* than where I live gets during summer (they're consistenly up at ~20 ***centigrade***!) and *I've* got liquid water :)

Seriously, it's not like it's too cold for water all over the planet, and from looking at the hubble pics I'm pretty convinced those clouds have got liquid in them. More stuff for your perusal though...

Big image, sorry... Look at the bottom though - this is by *far* the most convincing pic of a lake I've found yet.

More lakes, this time cropped appropriately :) (original nasa image is here

Oh look, a waterfall... I suppose that's not really liquid either :) (taken from same nasa image as above)

I had a link to the tech specs for the ships they were putting up too and I'm pissed that I've lost it because it had some pretty incriminating stuff on it (the colour cameras they've got up there just now don't 'do' blue IIRC) - I'm convinced there's liquid water up there right now and they're holding back on telling us...

And I can't believe those damn martians get hotter weather than me :/

Even if Disney loses their copyright to Mickey Mouse, they surely must hold a trademark on Mickey Mouse.

In summary, under the 1909 Act [which covers Mickey Mouse, first appearing in 1928], fictional characters are copyrightable if they are original components of larger copyrighted works with sufficiently delineated traits and characteristics. This is true so long as the larger work is covered under a valid copyright. Silverman v. CBS, Inc., 870 F.2d 40, 50 (1988). But what happens when that is no longer the case? Federal copyright protection extends to a fictional character only so long as the preexisting work containing the character's origin is in fact copyrighted. When a work containing the original appearance of a character enters the public domain, that character is inextricably pulled along. Silverman v. CBS, Inc. ... So while new copyrightable works including the character are still being created, the character in those works is no longer protected by a copyright once the original work enters the public domain.

I find that sleeping for 10 hours and then staying awake for 20 hours works best for me.

Sounds like you might be interested in the 28-hour day.

It seemed like an interesting proposition to me, but I never dared try it out, mostly because of the synchronisation problems I imagined this would cause (what you called "getting everyone else to work around your schedule").

Enough Megadeth, I'm gonna vomit.

can be found here. This dates from spring 2001 and describes the possible linkage between the algae and modern plants, based on fossil similarities.

Guess the genetics are just confirming an older theory. Now if they could only find the missing link between men and geeks... ;-)

Neat.. Health Canada actually has something useful. and... I somehow feel like I'm in a session of parliament, because you should probably quote more of the Health Canada page you linked to:

The power of light emitted by these battery-operated lasers used to be less than one milliwatt (Class 2 lasers). But now the power has increased to between 1 and 5 mW (Class 3a laser) to obtain a brighter beam. Unfortunately, it also makes the laser more dangerous to the eye.

Below 1 mW, even in the worst case situation at night, the eye directly exposed to the laser light has time to activate the blink reflex, approximately 0.25 seconds, before injury occurs. But at levels between 1 and 5 mW, so much light rushes into the eye that it suffers a temporary condition called flashblindness. It is similar to the effect that occurs during flash photography where the image of the flash source remains in the eyes for a few seconds and then fades away.

There is no long-term effect from flashblindness. Normal vision usually recovers after a few seconds. But if one forces oneself to look directly into the beam, then permanent blindness might occur depending on exposure duration. This would be equivalent to looking directly at the sun for a few seconds.

One thing I did forget about is the blinking part. Since 650nm is actually red, the physiological response is to blink. This is one of the reasons class 4 lasers so dangerous: you may be looking directly into the beam and not blink until pain is induced, but by that time it's likely too late and dammage has been done.

There's no doubt that at the Rx end significant attenuation will have occured and it will be harmless. But it's not exactly bright (bad pun) to be looking at the Tx end close-up for more than a second or so. After all, we're talking about 5mW here.

[Disclaimer, I haven't read Tim O'Reilly's web log, it is slashdotted]

Michael writes:

...all licensing, including the GPL, is an expression of power over what other people can do with the software.

I disagree. Copyright Law is an expression of power of the copyright holder over the users of the media. Many licenses (eg, the typical Microsoft EULA) make use of the power of Copyright and Contract Law to claim even more power over the users. It makes sense to say that these licenses are an expression of power.

The GPL, and other Free Software licenses take no additional power over users beyond those already exerted by copyright laws. In fact, they give users additional freedoms that they would not otherwise have. I would call these licenses expressions of freedom, not power.

I take issue with O'Reilly's description of copyright law as a compromise between creators and users. There's absolutely no evidence that the rights of users are considered when copyright laws are made.

Historically, yes, copyright law has had much more to do with balancing the rights of creators with the rights of publishers. In the US, the rights of users are brought into the equation by the doctorine of Fair Use, which is a matter of legal precident in the court system, not by creation of laws.

Fundamentally, however, any law is an agreement between "The People" (being those who permit the government to exist by following the rules and refraining from revolting), and those particular people governed by the law. Copyright law is no exception.

The basis of Copyright Law in the US is in the US Constitution, Article I, Section 8: "The Congress shall have the power ... To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;" Congress is supposed to legislate according to the will of the people, or at least the people who voted for them.

So basically, Copyright Law as it now stands in the US is a compromise between the users (via their representatives in Congress), and the creators (via their lobbyists in Washington). Yes, it is a one-sided compromse (observe that the lengths of copyright have always been set so that Mickey Mouse stays out of the public domain).

If you want a different balance, make sure your will is known to your representatives. If your representatives ignore your will, vote for someone else. If enough people get involved, our government still won't be perfect, but at least it will better represent the will of people, and look less like the will of lobbyists.

For those of you in other nations, the basic theory is the same, the mechanisms are different.

If you are mechanically inclined and ambitious, you CAN make your own car that runs on grease if you like. Here are some good links on converting a gas cars into pure electrics or hybrids like the Insight. More links here.

On a tangentially related topic, for the slightly eccentric there's info on "performance" electric vehicles here. The world record holder's page is here. 8.801 seconds in the quarter on batteries, and the baby pulls 1200 amps. Amazing.

- Freed

But, there are hypodermic needles this size! Maybe that's what he meant.

0.9mm=19 gauge. You can get 18 and 22 gauge needles.

But, there are hypodermic needles this size! Maybe that's what he meant.

0.9mm=19 gauge. You can get 18 and 22 gauge needles.

Hmm.. instrinsic domain name on that first url. Works on my machine, but probably not on yours.
Lets try again.

No significant dust storms.

First, there are no significant dust storms on Mars right now. It hasn't been very dusty for a month now.

Second, that image was taken during aerobraking from an altitude of 22,000 kilometers, as opposed to MGS's 400km orbit.

Third, it's a thermal infra-red image, showing surface temperature. Half of the image is being taken on the night-time side of the planet, in the dark. It doesn't show bright and dark regions like most images because it is measuring surface temperature, not brightness.

The interesting parts are how much thermal variation there is in the polar cap, considering it's a solid sheet of CO2 ice, and the temperature variations between the bottoms and tops of some of the craters.

The original image is here. The space.com copy has been shrunk and doesn't show any detail.

The actual data rate varies, and as others have pointed out, a very low data rate would initially used to make sure telemetry is received. The data rate to Earth can go upto 110 kbps (Pdf of Odyssey FAQ).

A while ago /. posted a simalar story. Two months ago storm was extreamly active ans seems much quieter now. You can always check out the current conditions by going to here. In San Diego the weather never changes so this gives me something to look at. Every one talks about the weather but no one does anything about it. Mark Twain

The current term of copyright for corporations after the passage of the Sunny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is up to 95 years. That's right, if these copyright terms had been in place in the 19th century, both Santa Claus and Uncle Sam would have gone into the public domain only in 1973!

It's been going on for ages, albeit with posters and drinks machines. What's the big deal about screensavers? See http://www.asu.edu/educ/epsl/Archives/cace-00-02.h tm. However, if they were creating pop-up ads partway through lectures / exams, that would be pretty bad. A couple of years before that happens I guess.

Well, the microsats sent out from my home state were fairly well one-purpose, one-use machines (amateur radio for webersat, rotation/attitude manipulation with tracking for the JAWSAT)- see here for an optimistic description. See here for other previous microsats. NASA's microsats, according to their page, "carry a wide range of spacecraft services including guidance, navigation and control, attitude control, propulsion, high bandwidth and complex communication functions," some of which are diagrammed on that page and its successor. With the previous story and the other ways in which NASA has exceeded expectations on almost all of their craft in mind, I think this is an idea whose time has come.

• I write software for stuff going to Mars.
• I work in one of the most relaxed offices on the planet.
• I work on a college campus (Can you say 'coeds'?).
• I even make a reasonable salary for where I live.

Best of all... We're looking for more programmers.

So, the end result: The jobs exist, you're just not looking in the right places.

• I write software for stuff going to Mars.
• I work in one of the most relaxed offices on the planet.
• I work on a college campus (Can you say 'coeds'?).
• I even make a reasonable salary for where I live.

Best of all... We're looking for more programmers.

So, the end result: The jobs exist, you're just not looking in the right places.

Here is a list of many application frameworks, many of which are cross-platform, and many of which are free software.

My favorite is ZooLib, a multithreaded C++ framework.

Read about the importance of cross-platform application development.

Public data on the low energy electron microscope was first published (as far as i know) in late 1995.

So...my question is: what the hell took these people so long!? i'm happy to finally see results from the

LEEM, a versatile tool that can be used in everything from cancer research to advanced molecular physics

with good effect. Hopefully this is just one of the many breakthroughs we'll see slashdotted as a result of the LEEM.

here:

https://author1.asu.edu/DHCP-doc/dhcp-help.html

The method is a straightforward application of the doppler effect. Conceptually simple, but it did require the development of new technology to achieve the amazing velocity reslolution quoted in the article.

It is a lot like the Free-Net movement of the early 1990's ( see AzTeC Free-Net ).

There is an association of these free WLAN Networks. That group and several of the free systems are members of the Top Wireless LAN Related Web Sites List.

Bill Austin
Wireless LAN News and Discussion.

copyright lasts for (IIRC) 50 years from the death of the creator (although I have a funny feeling that it is longer now)

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act[?], passed under the same conditions as DMCA (double cover of Kosovo and Lewinsky, lots of corporate bribes, unaccountable voice vote), extended copyright to life + 71 for freelance works written after 1978 and 96 years for all other works. It pretty much amounts to welfare for GGM[?] companies.

US gov wanting to protect Micky Mouse

I'm not sure that's even possible anymore, as Mickey Mouse has fallen into PD because Disney screwed up the copyright notice on the first couple films with Mickey Mouse.

Keep extending the application as long as you can. This allows you to Extend the life of your patent. You can have an application in for 20 years but the clock doesn't start ticking until it's awarded ... This is now no more

New U.S. patents now expire 20 years after filing (instead of 17 years after they're granted) to prevent just this type of abuse. Our lawmakers aren't completely clueless.

grandfathered

This is what bugs me about another GGM[?] issue: copyright term extension. The Walt Disney Company was able to grandfather its old works into the new 96-year copyright terms when there was no good reason to except for greed, as extending the term of an existing work's monopoly does nothing "To promote the progress of science and useful arts." However, some doubts have been cast as to whether Mickey Mouse's likeness is under copyright at all because of an oversight in the copyright notices for the first two Mickey Mouse films.

See what gets used and invented in the industry during that time. Amend your patent to include these technologies.

Outright fraud. A patent application includes an affidavit to the effect: "I/we invented everything described in the claims." This type of fraud can get the applicant thrown in prison for the life of the patent.

hidden in the links is a url for the current days weather for mars. Liveing in San Diego I have no need for the weather at all (its the fucking same every day all year long to the point that the local weather men joke about job security while on the air) but knowing i can get daily reports about mars is kind of nice.

I can't imagine why they chose the animated GIF to distribute this image. It may have more platform independance that using mpegs, but other video formats have the advantages of being able to freeze and rewind.

Did anyone else notice the amount of error pixels that were apparent? Particularly the Jul 8th image at 90W. Surely that's transmission noise? Could the weather pattern really be that fine?

According to this link, Pluto and Charon are (were?) considered to be the largest of the objects in the Kuiper Belt. There's actually many objects in this belt and more information can be found here and here. And, IMO, the best site for information about this, and the most complete is this site at NASA.

This suggests that Pluto and Charon are simply bodies within another asteriod belt and shouldn't have been classified as planets. And thus we shouldn't make the mistake of classifying this, too, as a planet, even though it is larger.

Expire, maybe not. But this paper argues that the Mickey Mouse copyright isn't valid to begin with.

Hardly the first time Disney has poached earlier works for their animated films. What irks me is that at the same time they're making millions retelling other people's stories (and here I'm thinking more of Aladdin and Snow White and other renditions of classic stories) they're doing their damndest to prevent anyone else from doing the same with their classic stories.

I'm not so bullheaded as to refuse to ever see a Disney film, but when I'm deciding what to go see I definitely take into account the fact that Disney's lobbying is a big reason there won't be any significant American contribution to the public domain for years to come.

Hardly the first time Disney has poached earlier works for their animated films. What irks me is that at the same time they're making millions retelling other people's stories (and here I'm thinking more of Aladdin and Snow White and other renditions of classic stories) they're doing their damndest to prevent anyone else from doing the same with their classic stories.

I'm not so bullheaded as to refuse to ever see a Disney film, but when I'm deciding what to go see I definitely take into account the fact that Disney's lobbying is a big reason there won't be any significant American contribution to the public domain for years to come.

The Italians are facing the same problem, as Venezia (Venice to us Anglos) is sinking. The water level is so high that moderate springtime rain will cause Piazza San Marco to flood.

As millennia pass, I hope that humankind buys in to the notion that a coastal area just isn't a good place to build--great place to visit, though....

As a member of the University of Colorado based hardware team for this flying rock and having personally researched this matter I can say that radiation should be too much of a problem. This sat will be launched from a low orbit (lower than the ISS) leaving plenty of atmosphere to absorb most of the radiation, protecting the PPC on the industrial RPX lite SPC from being damaged (of course high energy particles are still a problem). Additionally circuitry is protected in heavy aluminum shielding. Because of the short design life of 3CS, hard errors are should not be too much of an issue. Of great concern are soft errors in the kernel memory space in the onboard flash memory - if the kernel is damaged, the sat is useless as it will not even be able to be issued a new copy from the ground. Our team attempted to use Reed-Solomon encoding to correct bit-flips, but we had no driver for writing to flash during the boot sequence.

A good place to look for detailed information of this sat can be found here.

---
May the sacred call of the dogcow guide you down the path toward nerdvana. MOOOOOF!

There is a huge amount of information on the net about the increasing corporatization of America. From the WTO protests (and presidential primary demonstrations), to activism around Biotechnology, copyright extensions, trademark and trade secrets litigation, patents on software, and on DNA.

I think that this will be the predominant political issue in the coming decade or two (and I think John McCain's showing in the republican presidential primary was in large part an effect of his stance on campaign finance reform, which is closely tied to all of these issues.)

However, the character copyright expires when the first copyrighted work containing that character expires.

In other words, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" would still have decades left of Disney ownership, but anyone in the world would have been free to create new Mickey Mouse cartoons, because the character would be out of copyright. That's what Disney was so desperate to prevent.

BTW, Here is an interesting article that makes the argument that Mickey Mouse is already in the public domain, due to a defective copyright notice on the first Mickey Mouse film!

Buy Internet? What is that?

We were giving away Internet for free by 1994. We are still doing it today.

People ask me "Why is it free?" and I tell them (really slowly) ... "Because it doesn't cost anything." (source)

First the Degree: CSE is much harder than CS. You end up taking a lot of math and physics. As a result your study of purely computer based things is less than CS. You generally take the same basic class's (algorithms/datastructures) but CS takes more in depth programming class's. CSE will teach you how a computer works, from the electrons up. CS will teach you all the funky cool things you can do with those computers.

The program diffrences vary from school to school. ASU for example had a CS department that was not clearly led, with no real sense of direction. Each student chose the electives they wanted and went with no real thought from the administration about how the program should be set up. CSE had several excellent teachers (Dr. Pheanis being in the forefront, if you are at ASU take CSE421 it will make you a programmer), and a well laid out plan that brought you through with a comprehensive set of knowledge. You should talk to students and professors and get an idea of how their program works.

I personally am glad I took CSE, the extra math and physics helped shaped my thinking. Plus I learned computers from the silicon up. At the time though I was jealous of my friends who were doing AI and Encryption codeing while I solved Differential Equations.

If you can force yourself to code take CSE, you'll learn a lot. If you don't code much take CS it will force you to learn to code.

Hope that helps.

The copyright law was changed in 1992 to protect the trickle of income from movies made in the 1930s.

Of course, as this article states, this copyright law's unfortuante consequence is the literal decomposition of a portion of our culture before it can be preserved for future generations.

Imagine if great, but not world famous oil paintings now hanging in local museums, courthouses, etc. were left in humid cellars for a hundred years to crack and peel.

The films on this site are not "great", but taken collectively, they are great cultural and historical repository like any of our libraries or government archives.

Many plants do indeed consume oxygen. They simply produce more through photosynthesis than they consume through respiration.

both the Berne Convention and the EU directive have accepted the standard that copyright should protect the author and two succeeding generations. Based on the numerous viewpoints presented to the Committee as it has considered these issues, the Committee concludes that the majority of American creators anticipate that their copyrights will serve as important sources of income for their children and through them into the succeeding generation. The Committee believes that this general anticipation of familial benefit is consistent with both the role of copyrights in promoting creativity and the constitutionally based constraint that such rights be conferred for "limited times."

Among the primary justifications asserted for the adoption of the life-plus-70 term under the EU Directive was the conclusion that the life-plus-50 term is no longer sufficient to protect two generations of an author's heirs.

The Register of Copyrights informed the Committee that even for post-1978 works, which are afforded the basic life-plus-50 term of protection, the current term has proven insufficient in many cases to protect a single generation of heirs. For example, Walter Donaldson, who will forever be linked via his songs to the extraordinary success of the 1927 film "The Jazz Singer," composed many of his most famous works when he was in his twenties and died in 1947 while in his fifties. Were the current life-plus-50 term applied at that time, all of his works would fall into the public domain at the end of 1997. Nevertheless, Ellen Donaldson, the composer's daughter, remains extremely active in publishing and exploiting her father's music and in protecting his copyrights. Like the children of composers such as Richard Rogers, Irving Berlin, Richard Whiting, Hoagy Carmichael, and many others, her legitimate interest in her father's copyrights can be expected to continue for decades, and most certainly for the next 20 years.

In order to reflect more accurately Congress' intent and the expectation of America's creators that the copyright term will provide protection for the lifetime of the author and at least one generation of heirs, the bill extends copyright protection for an additional 20 years for both existing and future works.

The Committee is aware of the criticism of the proposed extension by those who suggest that it marks a step down the road of perpetual copyright protection. The Committee is unswayed by this argument for three reasons. First, the greatest obstacle to a perpetual term of copyright protection is the U.S. Constitution, which clearly precludes Congress from granting unlimited protection for copyrighted works. Second, the emerging international standard, to which the bill purports to adhere, and the movement of international copyright law in general are not toward perpetual protection, but to a fixed term of protection based on the death of the author. Third, the principle behind the U.S. copyright term--that it protect the author and at least one generation of heirs--remains unchanged by the bill. The 20-year extension proposed by the bill merely modifies the length of protection in nominal terms to reflect the scientific and demographic changes that have rendered the life-plus-50 term insufficient to meet this aim.
--

As a side question: What was the reasoning behind making the bootloader only turn the carrier on? We decided to make ASUSat1 transmit sensor readings after booting from the ROM. We never got in contact with it long enough to transmit new software, but two other hams received telemetry packets which they forwarded to us. This provided invaluable information when we were trying to figure out what went wrong.

Was the bootloader made as minimal as possible to make software verification easier?

... a 'virtual community' is possible. There's one here in the Phoenix area, and it has many unique characters. There are people in the circles of the Phoenix Linux Users Group, the Arizona chapter of SAGE, the the ASU Linux Users Group, the various BBSes (yes, there are some BBSes with even Fidonet nodes and Tradewars 2002, Legend of the Red Dragon, BarneySplat!, etc still running), and freenets that do have 'community' feel, where many of the technically minded people know each other. These spill over into the Sci-Fi realm with The United Federation of Phoenix, Tardis, and the Central Arizona Speculative Fiction Society. All of these groups contribute.

also, when one uses protocols like SSH and FTP and older text-mode IRC clients and such, the "dotcom" world doesn't really invade. As far as I am concerned, because of how it's implemented the web just sucks.

"Titanic was 3hr and 17min long. They could have lost 3hr and 17min from that."

• Single address space operating systems (SASOS).
• Mapping huge files into your application space.
• Implementing distributed shared memory (as in sharing humongous amounts of memory).
• Using a separate memory region for each created process (i.e., implementing the PID in the MSB of the address), ensuring that the address of all created objects are unique in both space and time.
• Mapping the whole contents of Slashdot into your virtual address space. ;-)