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Boston College, though it lacks a graduate program in CS, is still doing some really interesting work in HCI. The CameraMouse and EagleEyes use computer vision and muscle eletric potential, respectively to control the mouse cursor. While this is mainly a user-assistive technology, they're continuing to develop the technology and at some point one of these could move into the mainstream of HCI.

Why not use numbers since they come before letters. Use 010101 The Binary Company or something. Then patent that technique. In fact, just patent numbers as names all together. Wait, didn't MS try to patent 1's and 0's already?

Nope, sound of Harley is not patented. Harley-Davidson tried to register the sound as a trademark in 1994. In 2000, they withdrew the application after much opposition. There's an interesting analysis of the registrability here, which also mentions successful trademarks on color and scent.

Due Process per the 5th amendment applies ONLY to CRIMINAL prosecution; it has absolutely nothing to do with CIVIL suits.

How in the world did this get modded to a 5, and why didn't anyone correct this person yet? See Hustler Magazine, Inc. et al. v. Jerry Falwell.

"Lets see, WWI, its illegal to hinder the war effort. One man was arrested for distrubiting flyers to draftees. Freedom of speech, apparently not. And now you say but that was then."

Out of curiousity, was he convicted? And if so, of what exactly?

He was convicted, the case is an amazingly famous one, Schenck vs. the United States , 1919. This is the case where the Supreme Court first came up with the term "clear and present danger" and first used the example of "shouting fire in a crowded theatre" to describe examples of speech which could indeed be suppressed.

My opinion is that the precedent that they created was reasonable, but that they misapplied it in this very first case! There is no way that distributing flyers advocating dodging the draft is at all comparable to shouting fire in a crowded theatre, nor does it constitute any sort of "clear and present danger." But they didn't ask me, did they...

Actually some constitutional experts are urging the Supreme Court to move away from the "clear and present danger" test because it is too vague and broad and subject to interpretation, and move to a test that more clearly delineates temporal proximity and causality of the speech to the action. Under these new tests only direct causal speech, such as intentionally inciting a crowd to lynch some tall person, would be illegal, while simply stating that tall people are inferior and should be euthanized would be legal.

The grey area is in the definition of safety.

True, but that's what we have courts for. The point was that not all speech is protected by the 1st amendment, as the posted was asserting.

More free speech stuff here: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/avp/cas/comm/free_speech/ update01.html

OK, something to see here, but not that much. The US Supreme Court decided this not long enough ago that the current Court could change it easily.

woof.

Yes, the movie was pretty accurate.

Yeah, CSS is often mangled by Netscape. It looks just fine in IE or Mozilla. But Netscape can't seem to handle it well.

I designed a Web site for my dorm, Hardey-Cushing. I used CSS throughout, and it looks great in Mozilla. Unfortunately, the vast majority of BC's undergraduate population (9000), as well as most of the people in my dorm, only use Netscape because it's bundled with the network software you buy at the bookstore. So my links don't light up when you hover your mouse over them, and anything under the LI tag is in the default browser font (Times New Roman, in my case) instead of the page font.

So CSS can be a bit of a problem at times. It works well for changing one thing over many pages, but cross-compatibility is a real hassle. That's why on my personal site, I've forgone all the fancy stuff and designed in a retro (circa 1996) look. The only "modern" thing on the page is the title image, which is in .PNG format.

If CSS were completely compatible with everything, I wouldn't mind using it. But seeing as it's not, I feel it's best to stick to simplicity.

It's been tried before; Harley tried to trademark their engine sound. There's a rather in-depth paper on it here.

____

>Well, I guess that the constitution really isn't
>worth much these days anyways. Remind me again
>why public-school students have no First
>Amendment rights?

Oh, because in 1988 the Supreme Court didn't think it was okay for a high school student newspaper to discuss birth control and divorce.
Remind me again why so many people in power are hypocrites?
Sigh.

...is here. Sorry, no pictures.

...is here. Sorry, no pictures.

I have a feeling that the physics needed to just go out and make your own nuclear bomb has got to be easier than that needed to make a quantum decryptor and then decode nuclear secrets. Especially when you can just photocopy the Feburary 1979 issue of the Progressive for a pretty good head start.

Your slippery slope argument doesn't hold, because all the other cases you mention (the elderly, blacks, etc.) are all full citizens under the law, unlike minors.

Minors *are* full citizens -- see Tinker vs. Des Moines. The ruling stated "First Amendment rights are available...students...Students in school as well as out of school are 'persons' under our Constitution. They are possessed of fundamental rights which the State must respect, just as they themselves must respect their obligations to the State."

That pretty well settles it for me. Where's James Tyre when you need him? :)

-Waldo

-------------------

Here's a few lines from the comments he made on May 4th (full text here)

• Defendant argues, however, that such copying is protected by the affirmative defense of "fair use." See
• 17 U.S.C. 107. In analyzing such a defense, the Copyright Act specifies four factors that must be considered...

  Regarding the first factor -- "the purpose and character of the use" -- ... involves inquiring into whether the new use essentially repeats the old or whether, instead, it "transforms" it by infusing it with new meaning, new understandings, or the like.

  • See, e.g.,
  • Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 579 (1994); Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 142; see also Pierre N. Leval, "Toward a Fair Use Standard," 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1111 (1990). Here, although defendant recites that My.MP3.com provides a transformative "space shift" by which subscribers can enjoy the sound recordings contained on their CDs without lugging around the physical discs themselves, this is simply another way of saying that the unauthorized copies are being retransmitted in another medium -- an insufficient basis for any legitimate claim of transformation. See, e.g., Infinity Broadcast Corp. v. Kirkwood, 150 F.3d 104, 108 (2d Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense by operator of a service that retransmitted copyrighted radio broadcasts over telephone lines); Los Angeles News Serv. v. Reuters Television Int'l Ltd.. 149 F.3d 987 (9th Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense where television news agencies copied copyrighted news footage and retransmitted it to news organizations), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1141 (1999); see also American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc., 60 F.3d 913, 923 (2d Cir.), cert. dismissed, 516 U.S. 1005 (1995); Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522, 1530-31 (S.D.N.Y. 1991); see generally Leval, supra, at 1111 (repetition of copyrighted material that "merely repackages or republishes the original" is unlikely to be deemed a fair use).

  Regarding the fourth factor -- "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" -- defendant's activities on their face invade plaintiffs' statutory right to license their copyrighted sound recordings to others for reproduction. See 17 U.S.C. 106. ... [The] defendant argues, its activities can only enhance plaintiffs' sales, since subscribers cannot gain access to particular recordings made available by MP3.com unless they have already "purchased" (actually or purportedly), or agreed to purchase, their own CD copies of those recordings.

  Such arguments ... are unpersuasive. Any allegedly positive impact of defendant's activities on plaintiffs' prior market in no way frees defendant to usurp a further market that directly derives from reproduction of the plaintiffs' copyrighted works. See Infinity Broadcast, 150 F.3d at 111. This would be so even if the copyrightholder had not yet entered the new market in issue, for a copyrightholder's "exclusive" rights, derived from the Constitution and the Copyright Act, include the right, within broad limits, to curb the development of such a derivative market by refusing to license a copyrighted work or by doing so only on terms the copyright owner finds acceptable.

Yes, this is where I'd like to work. Too bad I don't know anything about wax.

More photos available here and here. These pictures really don't do it justice, though.

Form and function are one.

Yes, this is where I'd like to work. Too bad I don't know anything about wax.

More photos available here and here. These pictures really don't do it justice, though.

Form and function are one.

Where in etoy were there adult images? I think the only "adult" issue was that the etoy site originally asked users to "download the fucking flash plugin" if they couldn't see their animations. To my knowledge there were no obscene or "adult" images on their site; that was just a red herring thrown up by etoys' liars^H^H^H^Hawyers to make people think etoy was some kind of pr0n site. Of course, IANASCJ (I am not a Supreme Court Justice); perhaps "fucking flash plugin" somehow falls under the Miller Standard.

For the past four years I've been working on a research project at Boston College called EagleEyes that was developed for exactly this purpose. EagleEyes is a mouse replacement technology that allows the user to control the mouse cursor just by moving his eyes or head

The technology is about 6 years in the making and we currently have over 35 students, most with cerebral palsy, using the sytsem on a regular basis (a couple of hours each week) for their learning. We also have five systems installed in homes around Massachusetts, three in special needs schools, and two systems in Birmingham and Manchester England.

The Hardware isn't free, but the system specifications and all of the necessary software (much of which I have written) are available for free as well as support for the system.

For details, check out http://www.bc.edu/eagleeyes

Obviously written by someone who has never been exposed to APL, Snobol, 90% of Forth code or any of these languages.

Believe me, there are bad languages. VB probably isn't one of them, though I'm not qualified to offer an opinion (having never used it).

Check these sites out to investigate variations in COS (Cost of Living). I work in expensive Boulder, CO and I still need to make $4400 more to live in Pasadena, CA. Ouch!

Salary Calculator (includes foreign countries)
Versus Year
Various Sources
Compare cities side-by-side
A short article with a cost of living index list



~afniv
"Man könnte froh sein, wenn die Luft so rein wäre wie das Bier"