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HOWEVER, if you follow the "free" links on the site, you can read it, here.

Here.

Here are a couple more articles about this:

• The Chronicle
• The Detroit News

The part of this that I find most disturbing is that the RIAA didn't even bother contacting the university to take action (i.e. taking disciplinary action, turning off his network port) before they filed the lawsuit. In several previous cases, MTU has cooperated with the RIAA to limit "piracy".

Please note that according to this article at The Chronicle of Higher Education that a lot of the colleges are surprised and upset that the RIAA did not contact them or try to work with them on this. My guess is that it's because the institutions have lawyers who can defend in court the fact that a search engine is not illegal. So skip the lawyers by skipping the college. Oh, and don't tell the students until after the lawsuits are filed.

However, your view of infrastructure is twaddle. This isn't "Field of Dreams" - just because you build it, doesn't mean shit. That's the idea of infrastructure - a foundation supporting the functioning of society. Wait, I have an idea - let's pave all the roads in Afghanistan and make them 8-lane highways! Yeah - those Afghani citizens would love to have good roads to tool around on in their BMWs and Maseratis. Let's build powerstations all over the country so they can use all those wonderful consumer products they're so keen on. Dammit - it's been almost a year and a half! Why haven't we done this already?

As to the pros and cons of empire, read this. Perhaps it'll inspire some deeper thought on the whole topic.

(I'll say this now. This is Slashdot, where anything the questions American actions, and especially Republican actions, can only be flamebait and/or trolling. Moderators, do yourselves and others a favour: don't moderate down other people's opinions just because you don't agree with them. Instead, respond logically and rationally with your own opinions. This is called debate. It's democracy in action.)

However, there has been an interesting exchange (with comment and reply) in Physical Review Letters refuting such claims. (These are subscription journals but should be available in most academic and research institutions).

Finally, read the Seven Warning Signs of Bogus Science by Bob Park (even though rule 1 does not apply here).

There's no scarcity of spectrum any more than there's a scarcity of the color green....

I can't believe Salon published the article, or that it got picked up by Slashdot. This is bogus science, and the guy is clearly a nut. Perhaps the editors should read their own articles?

Article here: http://chronicle.com/free/v45/i47/47a02101.htm.

On a related note, as a followup to their article on Palladium which was posted to slashdot, the Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting an online discussion today at 2 ET with Brian LaMacchia, one of Palladium's designers. It should be an interesting chance to answers straight from one of the horses' mouths.

On a related note, as a followup to their article on Palladium which was posted to slashdot, the Chronicle of Higher Education is hosting an online discussion today at 2 ET with Brian LaMacchia, one of Palladium's designers. It should be an interesting chance to answers straight from one of the horses' mouths.

Since you own this IP address, we request that you immediately do the following:
1) Disable access to the individual who has engaged in the conduct described above; and 2) Terminate any and all accounts that this individual has through you.

It's not clear whether Baez meant this as a literal statement of his belief, or if he was looking for a newsworthy way to say the Bogdonovs' theories are crap.
Of course, if Baez had simply said the papers were crap, we would not be reading about it in the NYT, let alone Slashdot.

The Bogdonovs say their papers are not a hoax--they are simply very theoretical and "daring."

The New York Times article is a disjointed mishmash of quotes from good physicists who have been asked to assess the physics theories of two French TV stars with toilet-paper PhDs. There is no indication--none--that their work is a Sokal-like hoax.

If you care, you can read a clearer account of the incident in the November 5 online edition of the Chronicle of Higher Education.

If this suit passes in the favor of the RIAA, then you can kiss your fair use rights good-bye.

Providing complete copies of copyrighted recordings is by no means fair use. Fair use would be providing short sections for critical discussion and analysis.

Take a look at this excellent article on real threats to fair use. It defines fair use as follows: "If you are accused of infringing, you can make an argument that your use of the protected works is 'fair' because of some combination of these factors: The nature of the original work makes it important that it be publicly discussed; the nature of your use of it is important because of teaching, research, or commentary; you do not use very much of the original work; your use does not significantly affect the market for the original work." All of these four criteria fail in the case of pirated popular music.

--
Tim Maroney tim@maroney.org

Mr. Olman was speaking in favor of the Sonny Bono Public Domain Pillage Act (also known as the "Copyright Term Extension Act"). He bewailed the loss of revenues such Communists and anarchists as the Boy Scouts cost the poor, abused Content Cartel every year. (Blatant plug: The Post published my reply. Like a schlub, I've lost the actual WashPost link.)

I guess you didn't try hard to find it... the WashPost link was right there on the page you did link to!

$82.50 per year you too can subscribe to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and read articles about how the greedy content industries are screwing us into the ground.

I suspect that industry would be more receptive to these online libraries if goverments extended such programs into this area.

In the DMCA hearings, who was just about the only group looking out for anything close to what we might call the average citizen? The librarians' group.

Doubt me? Ask a former Registrar of Copyright, Ralph Oman, who in a letter to The Washington Post bewhined that

"A long list of special pleaders now gets free use of copyrighted works, including small businesses, veterans' groups, bars, scholars, restaurants, fraternal groups, marching bands, Boy Scout troops, nursing homes, libraries, radio broadcasters and home tapers" (emphasis added)

The evidence is, the Content Cartel would prefer to see libraries go gently into that dark night of perpetual copyright extension, indefinite "access controls", and a denuded public domain.

From the recent interview with Gould (conducted March 15, 2002):

Now, Mr. Gould is trying to write himself into the illustrious annals of scientific history. This month, Harvard University Press is publishing his 1,464-page magnum opus, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, a work 20 years in the making that seeks nothing less than to reformulate Darwin's theory of evolution.

Have you seen this ?

Microsoft Pays $200 for Mentioning Its Tools

Now I get the Idea of what actually happened:

Prof: You mean you won't give me money if I mention other OS's ?

M$: Yep !

Prof: Alright, I will mention KDE and GNOME, money is what I want, who cares about some news reports and /. trolls ?

I am Anonymous Coward. I am silenced, ignored, modded down without being read. I write to organize my thoughts. Sharing them with you is but a side effect.

I remember when Microsoft used to pay college professors only $200 to talk about them.

The above is a great idea...except for one thing. Private, "charter," for-profit schools are certainly not going to help educate the disenfranchised, especially not online. Contrary to popular belief (and you can see a little evidence for it in the C-Net article where they mention the number of people with whom the child is interacting online), online education is often more capital-intensive, and expensive than classroom education.

Online education is definitely more labour-intensive for the teachers and the institutions, and has much higher maintenance costs than many people suspect. That's why, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Live Colloquy, Dr. David Noble suggested that most online education is really only for the rich, at least at this point.

For more information, see Hara & Kling on student frustration with technology
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html
and LaRose, Gregg, & Eastin on "low-tech high-tech"
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html ;
Mason on online education at http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/GlobalEdu.h tml ;
Morgan on online learning economics at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distanc elearning.pdf (you will need a PDF reader for this one!);
and Noble's famous and justifiably critical "Digital Diploma Mills" series -- One--The Automation of Higher Education, Two--The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Three--The Bloom Is Off The Rose, and Four--Rehearsal For the Revolution.

In any case, charter schools are just a bad idea whose time has come. They take money and authority away from the state, whose job it is to provide education and some sort of societal standard...which is why Canadian universities don't have entrance exams. Canadian schools are strictly enforced by a centralized, federal government, so school in one place is much like school in any other. Don't you wish you could say the same thing about US schools?

The above is a great idea...except for one thing. Private, "charter," for-profit schools are certainly not going to help educate the disenfranchised, especially not online. Contrary to popular belief (and you can see a little evidence for it in the C-Net article where they mention the number of people with whom the child is interacting online), online education is often more capital-intensive, and expensive than classroom education.

Online education is definitely more labour-intensive for the teachers and the institutions, and has much higher maintenance costs than many people suspect. That's why, in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education Live Colloquy, Dr. David Noble suggested that most online education is really only for the rich, at least at this point.

For more information, see Hara & Kling on student frustration with technology
http://www.slis.indiana.edu/CSI/wp00-01.html
and LaRose, Gregg, & Eastin on "low-tech high-tech"
http://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol4/issue2/larose.html ;
Mason on online education at http://www-iet.open.ac.uk/pp/r.d.mason/GlobalEdu.h tml ;
Morgan on online learning economics at http://multimedia.marshall.edu/onlinecosts/distanc elearning.pdf (you will need a PDF reader for this one!);
and Noble's famous and justifiably critical "Digital Diploma Mills" series -- One--The Automation of Higher Education, Two--The Coming Battle Over Online Instruction, Three--The Bloom Is Off The Rose, and Four--Rehearsal For the Revolution.

In any case, charter schools are just a bad idea whose time has come. They take money and authority away from the state, whose job it is to provide education and some sort of societal standard...which is why Canadian universities don't have entrance exams. Canadian schools are strictly enforced by a centralized, federal government, so school in one place is much like school in any other. Don't you wish you could say the same thing about US schools?

How very true. I work in education (tertiary), and I just read an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education saying how good schools increase their selectivity rates by taking lots of applications from what the author called "Bright Well-Rounded Kids"--and rejecting them, while accepting students who are "more interestingly lopsided." Apparently we interestingly lopsided folks have more potential to go on and do important research later on. Just a thought for all of the college/university (where I'm from, there is a difference) -bound /.ers.

what we aim for is quite different from UofA, a place i was glad to help become a sunsite several years back. our goal is a contributor-run library using what we have learned from the linux archives (since 1992), the LSMs, advogato, even slashdot and sourceforge and of course successful projects like apache.

this article in Chronicle of Higher Education mostly gets it right.

first the gift/collaboration is with the red hat center, a private foundation founded by marc ewing and bob young. not from red hat inc.

second, the new library idea is that we hope to use tools and experience familiar to those of us in open source development in other areas. we've done shared metadata, for example, for years in the LSMs and in the software archive on metalab/ibiblio sunsite (you pick).

This article in the Chronicle of High Education gets it pretty much right. i have an article forthcoming in CACM which tells more and can post to folks who are interested.

we last changed our name, from sunsite.unc.edu, because sunsite was owned by sun. when we went to enter into a collaboration with red hat center, they thought that a new name that showed something of a larger direction would be appropriate. i agree. i can't type it yet either, but then i typed meatbal for metalab for the past three years too

it's is our hope to create a library as noisy and democratic as slashdot itself. it will take us a while to combine, develop and implement the great ideas from the LSMs, slashdot, advogato, apache, sourceforge and the multitude of projects on sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. and we want your help.

peace love and sharing

first the gift/collaboration is with the red hat center, a private foundation founded by marc ewing and bob young. not from red hat inc.

second, the new library idea is that we hope to use tools and experience familiar to those of us in open source development in other areas. we've done shared metadata, for example, for years in the LSMs and in the software archive on metalab/ibiblio/sunsite (you pick). This article in the Chronicle of High Education gets it pretty much right. i have an article forthcoming in CACM which tells more and can post to folks who are interested.

we last changed our name, from sunsite.unc.edu, because sunsite was owned by sun. when we went to enter into a collaboration with red hat center, they thought that a new name that showed something of a larger direction would be appropriate. i agree. i can't type it yet either, but then i typed meatbal for metalab for the past three years too

it's is our hope to create a library as noisy and democratic as slashdot itself. it will take us a while to combine, develop and implement the great ideas from the LSMs, slashdot, advogato, apache, sourceforge and the multitude of projects on sunsite/metalab/ibiblio. and we want your help.

peace love and sharing

Paul

The article mentioned by /. says the software is free, but doesn't mention that you need to buy a pretty expensive Solaris box to run it on. And I guess university IT departments have plenty of available manhours to administrater the system, huh?

Campus Pipeline appears to promise the world to everyone. They say they can tie existing university systems together (with Java). They say they will be coming out with a version that runs on Linux. I think they are simply a company spin-off that was aiming at a big bucks IPO (before that bubble burst).

Faculty on many campuses don't like it and are putting up a fuss. That, plus the fact that the IRS is looking at taxing income unrelated to an educational institutions "primary mission", may be putting the brakes on Campus Pipeline implimentation.

Yes, Campus Pipeline is (at best) tacky but the fact that many institutions are hopping in bed with them is a result of the financial pressure that many universities are under in the face of State government funding cutbacks.

Curious George

I've already sworn to build my first and only house based entirely upon solar power, possibly with a wind backup. While it is possible to connect a solar home to the grid - and even push out your excess energy in return for monthly payments - dependency is something I'm determined to avoid.

However, solar is not only vastly expensive - the typical home can run you as much as $20,000 at building time, enough to pay for about 80 years of coal power - it is also unreliable. A solar panel captures 28% of sunlight's energy at theoretical maximum. In reality, your home's position on the globe and the variability of weather mean that you will probably need a backup system of some kind, such as wind.

Try fitting a system that requires vast, immobile panels onto a car. The Sunrayce Competition promotes the idea of solar powered vehicles, but so far the machines lag behind in reliability and power - and even are deficient in such exotic concepts as "passenger seats".

Solar power is the way to go. It's free, it's unlimited from a practical standpoint, and it's clean. But we aren't there yet.
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!

disks, tape, cds... they all have a relatively short lifespan. picture storing data in mice, just feed them and keep them warm. ev en if th e parents die the children will have the artificial chromosomes... (that is unless they recombine, in which case all of your documents or whatever are worthless....)

In short, is Clinton wittingly or unwittingly loading people into a channel that Microsoft has surreptitiously bought outright? Maybe it would be better if computer education got _less_ money so people would be forced to think about theory and write their own stuff instead of taking how-to courses on commercial products. The world doesn't start and end with programmers- huge percentages of the computer courses of the world are really "Using Microsoft Works" and the like. Do we want that to become federally subsidized?

There is a difference between borrowing a book from the library which you have to return and making a copy of it that you keep and can reproduce at will. Librarys don't cause publishers to lose any money, and in general don't have the most recent texts anyway.

Uh... no. Read the article... it says the university only looked at files that were publically shared out in the students' computers. Also, files that were placed on the Web from CMUs servers were checked.

If you don't want to get busted, don't publically share out illegal material. And for God's sake, don't put it on the Net.

The real humor, though, is that for these students to get their accounts back, they have "to attend a 90-minute class on copyright rules." Hehe, that is funny. :)

"There was a good bit of uproar," Mr. Fowler acknowledged. "The fact that the university had not actively enforced these policies up to this point caught a lot of students off guard."

Because I care:

GUID

Win98 profiling

Professor Spokesman

Astroturf

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