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First off intellectual property has no "rich history". It pratically has no history past a few hundred years, and the original copyrights were granted by kings to publishers in return for not badmouthing the monarchy - hardly a lofty foundation. Infact, note that copyrights came after periods like the renissance rahter than before.

You're partly right, partly wrong. As the Britannica article on copyright law points out, copyright did develop the way you said, and only became "modern" in 1710. It is striking, of course, that the spread of a specific technology (the printing press) and its eventual ubiquity was what drove copyright law to develop as it did - just as new technologies are forcing us to evaluate it anew.

But you're incorrect if you believe that the only intellectual property law is copyright. In fact, the Amazon dispute is about patents, not copyright. And patent laws go back at least to 1421 (again, read the appropriate Britannica article for yourself). I think a tradition at least 5.8 centuries old deserves some respect, but that may be just a personal blemish on my part.

It's sorta like arguing that slavery was a great thing because of all the wealthy plantations it created, but it was other forces driving America into the future.

I usually hate it when people use slavery as a metaphor, but you make an interesting argument. I see what your saying; my argument is a little circular. (So, too, is part of Katz's argument, where he says that "Corporations... exclude ... 'non-commercial' voices." Well, of course, because once they bring on a new "voice" it becomes, by definition, commercial.)

I suppose in some sense my argument about the rich history of invention and creation we have had under intellectual property protections is unknowable (at best) or circular (at worst). Yet I think I'll stick with it, having had firsthand experience with a publishing firm that worried every day about the integrity of the databases it published. If those databases were pirated (as they have been, on occasion), without strong copyright protection, the company lost money. If it happens again, the company will probably stop making the databases - and everyone, including the pirate, loses out in the end.

Also, copying is not theft - it might be illegal, but it is just not theft in the true sense of the word. The people who created are not deprived of their original work in any way. They may be deprived of a monopoly over other prople's purchasing habits...

That's pretty much the point Katz was trying to get across in that passage where he quoted Lessig ("If I tell you an idea, you have not deprived me of it"). But, unfortunately, it is incomplete. When you illegally copy a copyrighted work, you have deprived someone of something other than a mere monopoly. (In fact, it is the technology, not the "pirate" or "thief," which is responsible for revoking the monopoly.) The thing you have deprived the creator of is the potential to earn profit. We have to balance creators' needs against consumers', and Katz (and you) seem to tip the scale unfairly toward consumers.

For them copying may be good as it "gets the word out" and provides free advertizing.

There is certainly some truth in that. However, it is too narrow. Musicians are not the only people protected by intellectual property laws. If Stephen King's new book, which is to be published at midnight tonight over the Internet, is pirated and passed around freely by e-mail and mirrored on dozens of web sites, the copying will certainly be free "advertising" for King, but he will lose money. Maybe he would stop publishing online. If that happened, everyone would lose out in the end, including the people who got to read it for free.

I do agree with you that "theft" is too strong a word; as someone may or may not have hundreds of illicit MP3s stored on his computer (shhhh! the RIAA might be listening!) I certainly don't like considering myself a thief or pirate. (Actually, I kind of would like to be a pirate, although without the trite patch or the fruity parrot.) But we are living in an age when the pace of technological change makes us all accept a degree of uncertainty, ambiguity and fuzziness of terminology. So I don't mind all that much.

A. Keiper

I repost the appropriate, learnèd and interesting post from our fellow A.C. I'll probably get moderated down, but anyway.

A Hint:

It is obviously a multiply interleaved boustrophe donic text. If you don't know what that means, you have no hope of solving it. I could probably solve the problem given a week or so of hard work, its fairly obvious just from looking at the typesetting as to how it should be solved. But alas, I don't have the time at the moment. The solution is fairly trivial.

I worry that today's markets faithfully mirror the 1929 boom. Then, stocks bought on margin were used as collateral to buy more stocks. Investors were buying with fake money.

Today, corporations are buying corporations with stocks with infinite price to earnings ratios - using fake money to make more fake money. If Amazon bought GM for all-stock, say, would that provoke a crunch where real value has to be produced to cover multiplied value?

A non-conspiracy, non-Marxist web site on the 1929 crash eludes me at present. For the simple history, see the Britt anica article on the origins of WWII. That suggests a contraction of international credit - a crunch to produce real money, to pay all the margin. That's more useful than the actual article on the Stock Market Crash.

The Dismal Scientist looks like an interesting site to explore.

Thanks for the explanation. I 've found a picture of SCALPEL (the competing Bell Labs effort) here. As an electron spectroscopist in a previous life, I found your reply to be the most informative article in this topic so far.

That said, a couple of questions:

• What's their electron source? Surely not a heated filament, as you imply. Thermal noise from even a low amperage filament overwhelms space-charge effects, e.g., about 1.5 eV for heating v.s. about 0.5 eV for space-charge in a microamp beam. Are they using field-emission sources?
• Secondly, is the limitation on "brightness" a space-charge/energy effect or simply low-flux sources?

Well, I don't know about atheism being a religion, although it has seemed to be one for some atheists I have known personally. If atheism is not a religion it is most definitely a belief --

a mental attitude of acceptance or assent toward a proposition without the full intellectual knowledge required to guarantee its truth. ... Belief in someone or something is basically different from belief that a proposition is true.

Belief, britannica.com

Here's an example from physics. For more than a thousand years, the accepted "laws of physics" were understood to be the body of Greek and Hellenistic theories about the natural world that is often referred to as Aristotelean physics. Based on the experience of phenomena that was available, these theories worked just fine. Much later on, observations from astronomy, coupled with much better mathematical tools, allowed Newton to rework physics completely once again, based on a wider base of experience. And, incidentally, the Newtonian theories still work just fine for the phenomena they were intended. Starting in the 19th century, new phenomena such as radioactivity led theorists such as Planck, Maxwell, Einstein, Bohr, Dirac, et. al. to construct brand new "laws of physics", some of which seemed, and seem nonsense, unless you understand the domain of phenomena they were intended to make sense of. But they are very practical -- the computers that you and I are using depend on a knowledge of quantum mechanics.

To us, God is a person outside the natural world, and is the person who created it. This set of theories or beliefs are what we use to make certain phenomena -- our experence of our own human experience, of values such a truth or beauty or justice, make sense. Can we "prove" the existence of God? Well, to some extent, it is a meaningless question, if you mean can I prove the existence of God the same way I prove the existence of Peoria or Phobos. If God is outside the frame of natural experience in the manner I state above, I can no more "prove" his existence than Einstein could have meaningfully discussed the truth of Special Relativity before such experiments as the Michaelson-Morley demonstration.

In the very same way, you cannot disprove the existence of God either, you can just choose whether or not it makes sense for you to believe that there is a God. The issue is not whether or not religious persons use reason or logic (I would say about the same percentage do as non-religious persons - too few) but the body of experience that religious persons apply logic and reason to in evaluating their beliefs.

Why do I believe? Because when I consider all of my life's experiences, I can make more sense of what I know by believing in God. In making the important decisions of my life, I believe that those decisons made in light of that belief have been good decisions. But comfort has little to do with it. As you move from simple theistic belief to true religion, you move from simple intellectual assent, to a relationship that involves trust, accountability, and cost. I am a Christian, and a Roman Catholic, both by choice. I would be much more comfortable (in some ways) as the agnostic I once was, than having to face up to the responsibilities that result from confronting what I see as the truth.

BTW, I can honor Jon's attitude, even if I don't share it.

Claude

from encyclopedia britannica:

feudalism: a social system of rights and duties based on land tenure and personal relationships in which land (and to a much lesser degree other sources of income) is held in fief by vassals from lords to whom they owe specific services and with whom they are bound by personal loyalty. In a broader sense, the term denotes "feudal society," a form of civilization that flourishes especially in a closed agricultural economy and has certain general characteristics besides the mere presence of lords, vassals, and fiefs. In such a society, those who fulfill official duties, whether civil or military, do so not for the sake of an abstract notion of "the state" or of public service but because of personal and freely accepted links with their overlord, receiving remuneration in the form of fiefs, which they hold hereditarily. Because various public functions are closely associated with the fief rather than with the person who holds it, public authority becomes fragmented and decentralized. Another aspect of feudalism is the manorial or seignorial system in which landlords exercise over the unfree peasantry a wide variety of police, judicial, fiscal, and other rights.

Hey look, "personal and freely accepted links". I think the first part is very clearly what we've got today. And the "another aspect" mentioned is becoming more and more true, as this story demonstrates.

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Yes, the smithsonian is not a bastion of truth.

Blatantly false! The honour belongs to Clément Ader's Éole , which flew as far back as 1890, in France.

The fact is that the Wright Brothers would not give the Smithsonian their (still) historic Flyer unless the Smithsonian claimed it was the FIRST "heavier-than-air" aircraft.

--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "

Yes, the smithsonian is not a bastion of truth.

Blatantly false! The honour belongs to Clément Ader's Éole , which flew as far back as 1890, in France.

The fact is that the Wright Brothers would not give the Smithsonian their (still) historic Flyer unless the Smithsonian claimed it was the FIRST "heavier-than-air" aircraft.

--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "

The first automobile was invented in 1769 (Yup! 6 years before the US Revolution) by Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot who built a crude front-wheel drive steam-powered tractor, primarly intended to haul cannons.

Unfortunately, the limitations of the technology of the times did not enable him to address the problems inherent in developping a compact-enough steam engines.
--
" It's a ligne Maginot-in-the-sky "

Well, we (or NSW at least) had the Rum Rebellion.

Rum used to be considered better than British currency in New South Wales. Due to all those convicts, I guess.

If you're still interested, checkout Encyclopedia Brittanica's article on the frequency of solar and lunar eclipses. Also, they have a rather technical, but very interesting article on the predictions and uses of both solar and lunar eclipses - including methods to prove General Relativity. I realize this is slightly offtopic, as some of it pertains to Solar eclipses, but its something Im interested in:)
signature smigmature

If you're still interested, checkout Encyclopedia Brittanica's article on the frequency of solar and lunar eclipses. Also, they have a rather technical, but very interesting article on the predictions and uses of both solar and lunar eclipses - including methods to prove General Relativity. I realize this is slightly offtopic, as some of it pertains to Solar eclipses, but its something Im interested in:)
signature smigmature

Academia is mired in fear. The nail that stands up gets hammered. The researcher who discovered that ulcers could be cured is ridiculed. I have had researchers at Fermi and two universities candidly talk about areas they cannot explore; e.g., checking if Saint Einstein's theories would be sufficient with time dialation limited to gravity effects. One had a clear warning that this would put them on "the radical fringe, clearly not tenure material".

So how do we get back to courage?

The obvious part of K-12 science education to cut is the teaching of evolution. Fundamentally, we need more roboticists, computer scientists, physchologists, and geneticists than folks who study evolution, so it is better to cut this class than any math, chemistry, or physics. Let's gut this class in one fell swoop and blow the minds of a couple students. Here's what I propose...

A class that starts with Creationism, Theory of Evolution, and the Prachet giant turtle theory. Compare and contrast the beliefs, examine the evidence and consistency, look at the scientific method and places it falls down, study some famous mistakes and some radical breakthroughs. Explore the accidental discoveries and the effect on society. Get students to think about where they get their information.

Maybe we could get our courage back.

here

Boojum

The French republican calendar was short-lived, for while it was satisfactory enough internally, it clearly made for difficulties in communication abroad because its months continually changed their relationship to dates in the Gregorian calendar. In September 1805, under the Napoleonic regime, the calendar was virtually abandoned, and on January 1, 1806, it was replaced by the Gregorian calendar.

Here's a hint: don't put up with their colors. Make your browser ignore their colors and fonts, using only yours. If that's not good enough, there are proxies that will edit these out.

And now for something completely different...

When are Encyclopædia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary going to make their data available to those of us who run Unix variants? Right now, you can only use their CDs if you're running some kind of crippled PC O/S from Microsoft or Apple. This is incredibly frustrating. I imagine the OED would be easier to write your own software to view, but I wouldn't want to handle the Britannica. And even the OED probably has IPA fonts that could prove a challenge.

Does anyone know whether these two products are accessible under emulation? Has anyone sent them a letter (preferably by post) about this? Did you get an answer? Was it favorable?

Here's a hint: don't put up with their colors. Make your browser ignore their colors and fonts, using only yours. If that's not good enough, there are proxies that will edit these out.

And now for something completely different...

When are Encyclopædia Britannica and the Oxford English Dictionary going to make their data available to those of us who run Unix variants? Right now, you can only use their CDs if you're running some kind of crippled PC O/S from Microsoft or Apple. This is incredibly frustrating. I imagine the OED would be easier to write your own software to view, but I wouldn't want to handle the Britannica. And even the OED probably has IPA fonts that could prove a challenge.

Does anyone know whether these two products are accessible under emulation? Has anyone sent them a letter (preferably by post) about this? Did you get an answer? Was it favorable?

The error occurred in the 6th Century. Calendar research was done by the Church to solve the practical problem of calculating the beginning (and end) of Lent. Easter was celebrated on the first Sunday following the first full moon following the equinox. Because the season of Lent began 45 days before Easter, they needed to know this in advance. This mixing of solar and lunar calendars makes the calculation difficult. A 532 year cycle made the calculation easier. The year 532 A.D. was set at the end of such a cycle and the year 1 A.D. was inferred. It took several hundred years before the system was widely adopted. The Venerable Bede (8th c.) knew that the system did not give the right date for the birth of Christ, but thought that trying to fix it wold cause more problems than letting it slide.

There is more in the Brittanica article on the calendar.

The true end of "the millennium" really depends on which millennium is "the" millennium. Any period of 1,000 years is a millennium. The 2nd millennium A.D. ends on 12/31/2000. The millennium of four year dates beginning with 1 ends on 12/31/1999.

See this link or this one for a terrific discussion of all this. The Encylopædia Britannica also has a long article. Here's a less technical bit on monotremes in general plus specific links for the echidnas and platypus. Lastly, here's a brief write-up on the sleep of the platypus.

Informatively yours, :-)

The major factor that prevents a science teacher or computer teacher from being totally up to date is time. At my school, I teach honors physics for two periods, basic chemistry for two periods, and some web design/programming during the two periods that I'm the unofficial technical coordinator for the high school, where I maintain a large writing & research computer lab, a FirstClass server, a linux web/cgi server, and the hundreds of PCs and Macs strewn about the school. I have a prep period where I'm supposed to have time to eat lunch and grade papers, but I'm usually running an errand or fixing a machine or trying to resolve a network problem, so I usually eat some stuff from the teachers' lounge vending machine while working on something unrelated to teaching. During the day, I have no time to prepare lessons or grade papers, so I do it after school or at night like most teachers. Usually, I'm still working on computer stuff after school, so I save the evening for grading/planning.

Realize that while our school day runs from 7:25 to 2:25, I never leave before 4pm at the very earliest, so when I get home, it's time to run quick errands before the bank/post office/any business except Meijer's closes, and then make dinner. It's 6 or 7pm before you're done with everything, and if I don't have an evening meeting for something, I can start working on school stuff.

Does anyone else see the problem here? Like lots of teachers, I'm heavily involved in the school; I advise National Honor Society, I'm on at least 3 committees that I can think of offhand, and I'm developing curricula for two new courses next year (one of which is A+ certification). When do I have time to stay current? It's nearly impossible to get everything done as it is, but to try to stay current while grading papers, making lessons, filling out the typical paperwork involved with education, dealing with students, dealing with parents, and maybe somehow in some way have a normal life... that's even more difficult.

There are solutions, however. I read lots of news web sites every day (CNN, Artigen, BBC, Yahoo, and of course good ol' Slashdot), and I turn around and bring that information into my classes. I've been teaching nuclear reactions in chemistry, which means you have to talk about The Bomb, and so I used the new Encyclopedia Britannica web site for lots of reference material that isn't in the book. More importantly, I make my chemistry and physics classes go out and find news articles related to the class, read them, and write a summary and response to them. Physics has to do it EVERY week, and even though they largely whine about the assignment, at least one student every week gets really excited about what they found. One student brought in an opinion article from a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who believes there may be a Grand-Unified Theorem by 2050, and the kid actually read the article and understood some of it. Not all of it, of course, but the effort and the exposure were very important. I think this is a realtively easy assignment that nets great results (especially if your school has internet access like ours; the stuff they find online blows my mind, and I love reading the articles I hadn't seen yet).

Another thing I do for physics is introduce them to "new" physics by teaching them relativity, a very tiny amount of quantum mechanics, and some cosmology. I also have them read the Feynman book that someone mentioned earlier, Surely You're Joking Mr. Feynman , because it's important that they learn to see scientists not as all-knowing demigods, but real people with real lives similar to their own. I think this year we might also read about another scientist, but I haven't had time to research another book. Any suggestions would be welcome! Anyway, it's extremely important for all physics students to have a basic understanding of mechanics, but to leave out the most important discoveries of this century really disgusts me. Do you know when I first learned about relativity? The very end of the second semester of first-year physics in college; we spent 3 days on it. Of course, it was covered in-depth in second-year physics, but there's no reason every high school physics student shouldn't graduate without the basic knowledge that makes up general and special relativity.

I apologize for rambling, but I hope people realize that we science teachers (most of us, at least) really do care that students get an up-to-date, appropriate education. We're just bogged down by all the other stuff that makes it very, very difficult to supplement the course of study. Hiring more teachers to reduce class size, providing money for teachers to attend workshops or take appropriate college classes, or even training the head of the science department to keep track of recent science developments to pass out appropriate information - this things will all help. Ultimately, it requires a sacrifice of free time by the teacher in order to improve their course. Doing this during the summer isn't always the answer, either; lots of stuff pops up during the year and then slips back into obscurity, and it's more difficult than you'd imagine to accomplish changes while you're off and you have a job just to keep paying the bills.

The Chinese block-printing technique is supposed to have originated around the 6th century A.D. Hand-copied books written on papyrus rolls or clay tablets date back to 3000 B.C. See the Britannica entry on books.

Even the earliest form of copyright law didn't exist until the 15th century A.D., so it's not exactly surprising that any book published before then would be freely distributable.

So where did the idea of panic in the year 1000 come from? Mostly it came from Enlightenment-era historians, who were often anti-religious; ISTR that Stearns points at Jules Michelet as originating the story in his history of France, Because it agreed with their prejudices, other historians gave Michelet's stories wide exposure, but there doesn't seem to be any actual historical evidence for them.

The easy answer is "Because it's Linux". But, I find that unsatisfying.

Someone asked this recently in an "Ask Slashdot". What do you do to prevent the Slashdot effect? The concensus opinion was that the #1 thing to avoid being Slashdotted was bandwidth.

Seems funny though. Sometimes it seems like even major media gets Slashdotted although I can't think of any good examples at the moment. Some media never seems to suffer, like the New York Times site.

Is the Slashdot effect oftentimes blamed when it's really something big going on and a lot of people, even a lot of people who've never heard of Slashdot, are hitting the site?

Just yesterday people were saying that Britannica was Slashdotted, but someone reported that it was inaccessible even before the story appeared here. This seems like they simply underestimated the demand for their service. I just tried to connect there and it's still reaaal slow.

I was quite impressed awhile back when the world's smallest webserver was featured here and I could still connect to it. It was slow, and sometimes timed out, but generally I could connect. It's at a University, so they probably have a huge fat pipe, which backs up the theory that the best way to avoid the Slashdot effect is with bandwidth. Of course, the world's smallest webserver may actually be pretty fast. No scheduling overhead, very little file system overhead. Wouldn't it be ironic if this tiny terror was actually faster at serving this simple set of pages than just about anything available? If that's the case, this makes a good argument for Webserving appliances for a lot of applications. (Duh - slaps forehead - that's probably exactly what they were trying to demonstrate. It wasn't just a Guiness Book entry. Nobody goes for the world's biggest Web Server, after all...)

It seems to me that the Slashdot effect is actually a complex thing.