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"Just by knowing the birth date and ZIP code of the governor of Massachusetts, Latanya Sweeney, a computer-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, was able to retrieve his health records from a supposedly anonymous database of state employee health-insurance claims. Sweeney also demonstrated that she could do the same for 69 percent of the 54,805 people on the voting list of Cambridge, Mass."

"...don't get complacent: anonymity is hard to achieve. Where once a company needed a name, address, phone number, or Social Security number to identify a person, database technology has made that unnecessary. "Eighty-seven percent of the population of the US can be uniquely identified [only] by their date of birth, gender, and five-digit zip code," says Latanya Sweeney, ALB '95 assistant professor of computer science and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh."

"Recent work includes:

* Identifiability server -- a computational system that determines the identifiability of given data sets and/or of individuals in the United States based on either field descriptions of the data set or on actual data values. For example, combinations of values such as {date of birth, gender, 5-digit ZIP} combine to uniquely identify 87% of the population in the United States."

Man, that's way bigger than I thought it was... amazing what your brain can do when it has no near objects to compare something to.

if its is the driest place on the planet - why does it look like its been raining ?

Is is just me, or does this thing bear a strong resemblance to our good friend Johnny 5 from the movie Short Circuit?

Now I understand why such a thing would go as to track "the position of virtually everything in the solar system," input Stephanie!

My wife is a professional translator and has absolutely no respect for machine translatations.

Most of them suck, but I worked on a system that was actually quite good. It was designed for technical documentation in the heavy equipment domain, and because of this limited use, we were able to constrain the input grammar and vocabulary, which made it easier to make very good translations.

We worked with some of the best human translators around to make it as accurate and natural-sounding as possible, but we made the mistake of allowing the human translators at our customer's company to evaluate the system. They felt threatened by it and decided they didn't like it, even when they had to criticize sentences the system generated which were word-for-word what they asked us to make the system do.

They've had the same technology at CMU's LTI for years now, called EBMT. This officially stands for Example-Based Machine Translation, but those of us who worked with it called it Extremely Bad Machine Translation because it took millions of example sentences before it started to not suck, and even then it required manual tweaking and the addition of primitive grammar rules.

So yeah, this method learns fast, but it generally learns to a useless level for anything other than a rough assessment of some of the phrases that were in the original text.

They've had the same technology at CMU's LTI for years now, called EBMT. This officially stands for Example-Based Machine Translation, but those of us who worked with it called it Extremely Bad Machine Translation because it took millions of example sentences before it started to not suck, and even then it required manual tweaking and the addition of primitive grammar rules.

So yeah, this method learns fast, but it generally learns to a useless level for anything other than a rough assessment of some of the phrases that were in the original text.

Try this link to the home page. Unfortunately, many of the links are broken -- perhaps they're reworking the page.

IBM tried this statistical technique years ago, it's not a new approach. They used the texts of Canadian parliamentary discussion, which is kept in both English and French. See here or just search Google for "IBM tranlslation canadian parliament" or the like.

Kodak used to sell a GPS receiver/adapter for the DC260/265/290 series of cameras, several years ago. I don't know how the location data was stored, perhaps in the EXIF information. I never had one, but the DC260/265/290 series sounded like some funky cameras. DigitOS and enough CPU/memory to run MAME. Apart from that, the ability to write scripts for a camera sure sounds cool.

How can anyone talk about robots taking over the economy without mentioning Hans Moravec? After all, he's only been doing work in robotic vision and navigaton for the past thirty years or so, and has been on record predicting human-equivalent intelligent machines by 2050 since the mid-1980's.

He's even got a start-up company that wants to manufacture control heads - basketball-sized sensor+computer units that could be used to run forklifts in warehouses.

My personal prediction is that within ten years, we'll see the first automated tractor-trailer truck. It'll have a Moravec-like brain that will run the truck for the 95% of the time the truck is rolling cross-country, and a satellite link for a driver to help direct it for the last 5%.

How can anyone talk about robots taking over the economy without mentioning Hans Moravec? After all, he's only been doing work in robotic vision and navigaton for the past thirty years or so, and has been on record predicting human-equivalent intelligent machines by 2050 since the mid-1980's.

He's even got a start-up company that wants to manufacture control heads - basketball-sized sensor+computer units that could be used to run forklifts in warehouses.

My personal prediction is that within ten years, we'll see the first automated tractor-trailer truck. It'll have a Moravec-like brain that will run the truck for the 95% of the time the truck is rolling cross-country, and a satellite link for a driver to help direct it for the last 5%.

How can anyone talk about robots taking over the economy without mentioning Hans Moravec? After all, he's only been doing work in robotic vision and navigaton for the past thirty years or so, and has been on record predicting human-equivalent intelligent machines by 2050 since the mid-1980's.

He's even got a start-up company that wants to manufacture control heads - basketball-sized sensor+computer units that could be used to run forklifts in warehouses.

My personal prediction is that within ten years, we'll see the first automated tractor-trailer truck. It'll have a Moravec-like brain that will run the truck for the 95% of the time the truck is rolling cross-country, and a satellite link for a driver to help direct it for the last 5%.

A very well attended symposium was held at Stanford in 1999 that covered this very topic (in even more optimistic depth, in the case of the majority of the speakers). Entitled, Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity By 2100?, the symposium was organized by Doug Hofstadter and was themed around two books that expoused very similar views and were written independently of each other around that time: Ray Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines and Hans Moravec's Robot.

Kurzweil has actually been preaching about this for quite a while now, and the details of Marshall Brain's article are eerily reminiscent of both of the above mentioned books.

The quality of the image could be better.
I mean attempting to actually study this
(granted you have the need/desire to, and have polished latin abilities) you couldn't. This should be done in a methond similar to that of the MILLION BOOK PROJECT, using something like DJVU, which yes I know is proprietary, but has true readable digital document capabilites and is highly optimized (file size) for web based documents.

This kinda reminds me of the DVD-CSS trail and the DeCSS Gallery (i dunno if linking that is illigal or not). An mp3 file is just a load of bits is it not? a mathematical expression of a song is just a load of equations right? If you code an mp3 file into some sort of graphic file (it would look like noise) you could claim that it was a work of art that you had created? You could even print it on a t-shirt. I can see how maybe a raw dump of the CD track could be a violation (but really i dont care) but if you code it - eg by mp3 then your going to end up with something that bit-for-bit is NOT the original. Ok so if that argument stood then you could just alter the raw dump by one bit and you would have the same effect, but thats pushing it. Why is the mp3 codec not an illigal circumnavigation device? How do you define what a copyright violation is? What if P2P networks become fully encrypted end-to-end?

There have been patches out for the confirm-on-close bug for a while, but they were difficult to apply - especially under windows if you don't have a real "patch" tool available. Here are the various files for 1.4 with the patch applied.

NASA was unaware of the booster issues with the freezing weather. the ones that didn't listen were the top brass at the contracted company that didn't listen to their own engineers

No, the ones that didn't listen to the NASA engineers were NASA officials in charge of giving the go ahead for the launch.

See this page.

Quote from page:

On January 27, 1986, the day before the flight of STS 51-L, the Florida overnight low temperature was predicted to be about 18 Fahrenheit. Because Roger Boisjoly and the other engineers involved with the seal design believed that low temperatures increased the risk of seal failure, they strongly recommended against launching. Morton Thiokol management, mostly engineers, agreed with the recommendation and conveyed this message to NASA in a teleconference.

...

Although no one would ever admit political pressure, the decision to launch Challenger was made against the backdrop of many delays, as well as the highly publicized "Teacher in Space" program, and was scheduled for the morning of President Reagan's State of the Union address. It was in this atmosphere that Jerald Mason, Senior Vice-President of the Morton Thiokol Wasatch Operations made the now famous, "take off your engineering hat and put on your management hat," statement to Robert Lund, Vice President of Engineering, and Morton Thiokol reversed their decision and advised NASA to launch.

Yes, you are totally right. How dare I be so politically incorrect. I apologize.

you mean the Mars Climate Oribter that was lost due to one team using miles and the other using kilmometers? um, that was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, not NASA.

JPL is a subsidiary of NASA.

wow, you are seriously deluded.

Ad hominem. Try using a real argument.

I worked there in 2000 and the best part was the big red button on the front. it was a little odd having my computer space 20 feet from a tractor with gizmos.

My former boss worked on something like this years ago, although if I recall correctly, it was based on dead reckoning and computer vision, not GPS.

There is no open source grammar checking library! At least none robust enough to provide any useful information.

Grammar checking is notoriously difficult...hell, back in the day there used to be companies like Casady & Greene (sniff...I liked their stuff) that made standalone grammer checkers like Grammarian. Many other companies with standalones went under, but their source code is now relegated to the sands of time.

The cloest thing I've seen to what may become a viable grammar checking library for open source is the Link grammar parser. It seems pretty good and has a online sample of what it can do, including some automated translation!

You can use this project for free in non-commercial applications. Alas, this runs afoul of the SISSL license used for OpenOffice.org since it explicitly allows for commercial products to be derived from the OOo source code (like StarOffice). It's also incompatible with LGPL and GPL, too, since it would place an additional restriction on how LGPL/GPL software is used. AbiWord has some bindings for the link grammar parser in its code, but they're not activated due to licensing restrictions.

About a year ago when I contacted the team, they said they were going to do a rereleas under an MIT style license or a GPL-compatible license, although thus far I've not heard anything since. Anyone know them and want to help set a few wheels in motion?

The other alternative is to add in a bridge to communicate with a separate process from a GPL licensed project, where the separate project is never loaded into the same address space and is under a non-commercial non-GPL license only. I've wanted to do this for NeoOffice and have sketched out rough APIs, but I haven't had the time to sit down and actually code it.

There is no open source grammar checking library! At least none robust enough to provide any useful information.

Grammar checking is notoriously difficult...hell, back in the day there used to be companies like Casady & Greene (sniff...I liked their stuff) that made standalone grammer checkers like Grammarian. Many other companies with standalones went under, but their source code is now relegated to the sands of time.

The cloest thing I've seen to what may become a viable grammar checking library for open source is the Link grammar parser. It seems pretty good and has a online sample of what it can do, including some automated translation!

You can use this project for free in non-commercial applications. Alas, this runs afoul of the SISSL license used for OpenOffice.org since it explicitly allows for commercial products to be derived from the OOo source code (like StarOffice). It's also incompatible with LGPL and GPL, too, since it would place an additional restriction on how LGPL/GPL software is used. AbiWord has some bindings for the link grammar parser in its code, but they're not activated due to licensing restrictions.

About a year ago when I contacted the team, they said they were going to do a rereleas under an MIT style license or a GPL-compatible license, although thus far I've not heard anything since. Anyone know them and want to help set a few wheels in motion?

The other alternative is to add in a bridge to communicate with a separate process from a GPL licensed project, where the separate project is never loaded into the same address space and is under a non-commercial non-GPL license only. I've wanted to do this for NeoOffice and have sketched out rough APIs, but I haven't had the time to sit down and actually code it.

There is no open source grammar checking library! At least none robust enough to provide any useful information.

Grammar checking is notoriously difficult...hell, back in the day there used to be companies like Casady & Greene (sniff...I liked their stuff) that made standalone grammer checkers like Grammarian. Many other companies with standalones went under, but their source code is now relegated to the sands of time.

The cloest thing I've seen to what may become a viable grammar checking library for open source is the Link grammar parser. It seems pretty good and has a online sample of what it can do, including some automated translation!

You can use this project for free in non-commercial applications. Alas, this runs afoul of the SISSL license used for OpenOffice.org since it explicitly allows for commercial products to be derived from the OOo source code (like StarOffice). It's also incompatible with LGPL and GPL, too, since it would place an additional restriction on how LGPL/GPL software is used. AbiWord has some bindings for the link grammar parser in its code, but they're not activated due to licensing restrictions.

About a year ago when I contacted the team, they said they were going to do a rereleas under an MIT style license or a GPL-compatible license, although thus far I've not heard anything since. Anyone know them and want to help set a few wheels in motion?

The other alternative is to add in a bridge to communicate with a separate process from a GPL licensed project, where the separate project is never loaded into the same address space and is under a non-commercial non-GPL license only. I've wanted to do this for NeoOffice and have sketched out rough APIs, but I haven't had the time to sit down and actually code it.

What has Battlefield Earth got to do with Scientology,

It IS scientology. Scientology is based on space aliens attacking earth and cave men flying space ships to fight them.

Read about their nonsense here: http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/

The solution to this is to fix the process, not the people. In this case your "quick and dirty" approach has been shown to work and needs to be integrated with the official processes. Write down the criteria for projects where this process should or should not be used. State the limitations, costs and risks clearly. In particular, it sounds like you have difficulty getting resources to go back and do it right, so put that into the process. Then get your shiny new process approved by the process police and inserted into the official manual.

There are two kinds of organisations that have process manuals and make sure they are followed. One is a mature organisation of CMM level 2 or above. The other is an immature organisation at level -1 or below, in which counterproductive processes are rigidly enforced. The test that distinguishes them is what happens when someone proposes an improvement to the process.

Good luck,

Paul.

Dave Touretzky's Gallery of Adobe Remedies contains several solutions for bypassing PDF security. The XPDF modification is quite handy for printing 'printing impaired' PDFs.

Its a BSD kernel, its a BSD kernel, its a BSD kernel, its a BSD kernel.

And its nearly impossible to say 'cocoa' without smiling? Seriously, try it.

Let's look at this piece by piece...

"You've just given a prime example of what's wrong with most debates about education. It's all idealogy, and no facts"

Okay, let's see your "facts"...

"You've got a lot of half-assed generalizations and pet theories. My lack of interest in these is extreme. Let's talk about real-world teachers. I've known good ones and bad ones. Good ones don't care about distractions -- they even use them. Bad ones blame their failures on distractions, immoral influences, "human nature" -- everything except their own lack of skill."

So, you're making a personal narrative on your own experiences. You reference teachers that you've known without even mentioning classes or names. Granted, I was a little vague, but the class that I mentioned was at least a Collegiate English class. It took place at ASU, in the fall of 1998, and was surprisingly taught by one of the more established professors, not by a graduate student.

You cite good teachers not caring about distractions, but I've not seen this myself, and you provide no data to back that up. So, again, it's your word against mine. I've found that good teachers do care about distractions, for they want to get the best out of every student in the class, and since different people have different attention spans, some teachers work to minimize the distractions.

And you're a bloody fool if you don't think about human nature. I, being a pessimist, prepare to be able to handle the worst-case scenario, even though the odds of it occurring are small, because sometimes those odds are met. In this instance, a teacher who goes in thinking that everything is bubbly great is going to be sorely disappointed when she or he has to curve a significant number of grades due to problems of low marks due to student distraction.

And as for "lack of skill", have you ever tried to teach a class? I sure as hell don't want to. I work in educational environments, and I see what teachers go through on a daily basis. I've seen teachers that are terrible, but by and large, they have a very tough job, especially in schools where students haven't been brought up to properly function in education.

"But I am grateful to you for one thing: you've made me invent a new epigram: Fascism is the last refuge of the inept."

You're truly amusing. I see that you've read "How to Win Arguments," by Dave Barry, but taken it a bit too literally. It was supposed to be a joke, after all.

State mandated education, for K-12, is facist, or at least dictatorial, since it is required. If you are required to do something, it may not be pleasant. Additionally, many colleges and universities are state funded, and have guidelines that they must follow from government to remain in operation. Private institutions, believe it or not, often have even stricter rules, and a student has little choice but to follow such rules if he or she wishes to remain enrolled.

Don't argue facts with me if you aren't going to produce any yourself.

So how do you explian this?

You are using the term "abstract data type" in a dynamic language, and this doesn't make very much sense. The original idea of a user-defined abstract data type is that one can define a new type that works just like the built-in types "integer", "char" in Pascal. The idea is that the type is abstract in that the implementation is hidden.

Now I agree that your idea of "secure abstract data type" is in effect very similar to the traditional ADT in, for example, CLU. But it bothers me that the "type", which is a key part of the "abstract data type" concept is not explicit. You are not using "type abstraction" to enforce representation hiding. The commonly-accepted analysis of this form of abstraction is with existential types (see ADT1 or ADT2 for example)

Instead, you have created a form of "abstract data value" that can only be operated upon via the associated operations.

Basically I think that you should replace the word "abstract data type" with the word "data abstraction" everywhere. Then things would make much more sense. What you are talking about is various forms of data abstraction. Abstract data types are one very specific kind of data abstraction.

p 470-481

I actually like the basic idea behind this discussion. I hadn't read it when I started critiquing the OOP chapter. However, there are some issues hidden here that are important.

Most of the content in this section should be in the object-oriented chapter if you ask me. Your development of "bundled" data abstractions is basically an explication of objects.

I think the most important one is hinted at in your comment on page 474: "This version is secure, declarative, and bundled. Note that it does not use wrapping, since wrapping is only needed for unbundled ADTs."

This is one of the key difference between objects and ADTs: objects don't need type abstraction or any kind of explicit data hiding. Instead, objects use procedural abstraction alone. This calls into question the orthogonality of your attributes: In particular, bundled+open doesn't make sense.

To me, the difference between unbundled and bundled is the difference between ADTs and Objects. Either ADTs or Objects can be declarative or state-based. The open/secure distinction is not interesting because objects are always secure, and ADTs are only really useful if they are secure.

As a result, I would say that Figure 6.2 incorrectly classifies {Secure, Stateful, Unbundled} as a "unbundled variant of the object-oriented style". Instead, it is simply the normal stateful ADT.

The section "comparing two popular versions" should be better.

• I don't agree that "The implementations of both versions have to do actions when entering and exiting an operation. The calls of Unwrap and Wrap correspond to calls of @ and :=, respectively."
• The interface for the stateful bundled version is not clear. You should not list Push Pop and Empty as operations, since they are methods. The type should be
• fun {NewStack}: < op(push:proc {$ T}, pop:fun {$}: T, isEmpty:fun {$}: Bool)>

This is the clearest illustration that this object version is not an ADT. The type of the return value is completely visible; it is not an abstract type <Stack T>. Note that declarative bundled versions require recursive types.

It is very telling that you completely miss a very important difference between the two versions: this is that anybody can create their own implementation of stack in the object paradigm, and all these dif

Um.. no.

Actually the kernel is based on Mach. Mach was a project at CMU, not a part of FreeBSD. Other OS that decided to use Mach are Encore's Multimax, Omron's Luna, DEC's OSF/1 for the DEC Alpha and IBM's OS/2 for the RS6000 based machines. Mach, and thus the OS X kernel, didn't come from FreeBSD.

Um.. no. Actually the kernel is based on Mach. Mach was a project at CMU, not a part of FreeBSD. Other OS that decided to use Mach are Encore's Multimax, Omron's Luna, DEC's OSF/1 for the DEC Alpha and

...the Court held that you must present strong evidence of serious harm before you can sue for trademark infringement over a similar-sounding name.

That's not quite accurate. One can pretty much always sue, it is a question of whether or not one can win a suit. There is always a risk when bringing a lawsuit against an entity (being contersued, running into anti-SLAPP laws, creating bad publicity, creating a court record that could be used against the plantiff in the future, developing bad relations in the court system, losing court and attorney fees with no return on investment, etc.). Even sending out a cease and desist order carries the risk that the recepient might drag everything into court by seeking a declaratory judgement.

However, if the recipient of the cease and desist order rolls over, then the sender has won, no matter what would happen in the courts. It is probably a good idea to do a little research and actually call when if it is likely that the threat is a bluff. That way, all these "big-bad-corporations" will not have the power to enforce rights that go beyond those guaranteed by law.

A good example of someone calling a bluff is "Tom 7," writer of embed. Information about this can be found at http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/dmca.html.

Somebody has already done that ;) I linked the .torrent on http://f.scarywater.net/ , the original location is http://fnord.andrew.cmu.edu/nwn/index.html ... Have fun ! :)

BitTorrent link with the resources and the client. I've not even unpacked it, let alone tested it. I'm just hoping that Fileshack gave me a good copy.

I'll probably piss-off the red-bloded Americans here, but man, I can't wait to not drive my car. I want to have fully automated driving. I want to finish work on a Friday afternoon, go home, grab my stuff, go to my car and say "Miami Beach, Please!". I want to watch movies for a couple of hours or finish reading Dune, and when I wake up, I'm parked right at my favorite beach. Same thing for the reverse trip Sunday night and Monday mornings wouldn't be half as bad. Paint fuel-cells into that picture and it wouldn't even tweak the greens.

CMU's robotics program has been working on automated driving systems for years. When I was there I heard one of the professors had outfitted his normal home car with about $1500 of equipment and "drove" to school and back every day mostly hands-off. All based on neural-nets and some snazzy control systems.

And that was like 6 years ago. I'm sure there's wisdom in not rushing into something like this, but I also get the feeling there will be some hard lobbying against it. Like, what happens to truckers, cabbies, UPS/Fed-Ex drivers, etc. etc.? Will the (perhaps undeserved) reputation of dangerous speed-freak truckers come home to roost?

I wonder how Detroit would feel. At first, it's a shinny new feature == more margin. But beyond that, I can't help but see cars become even more commodity. All you really end up caring about is your comfort/ammenities.. there won't be as much attention to "performance".. ahhh.. Detroit will ~love~ it, BMW won't.

You could even share these kind of cars, like the Zip cars, but instead of you going to the cars, they come to you. Or perhaps just the under-carriage comes to you and connects to your personal travel cabin. Then, you pull out of the driveway and merge into a long train of like-designed cabins-on-wheels, all virtually-linked together via 802.11z. The road/car system routes you shortest-dijkstra-path to your destination and then your car parks itself once it's dropped you off. There's traffic density that would make clog up modern highways for years, but its all flow-controlled, so you go 120MpH with only inches between cars, so your trip takes half the time.

The moving sidewalk (armchair) of the future? :)

We did this a couple years ago in my kitchen (photo here). It works great, I highly recommend it. Just make a regular ice cream recipe and stir in an equal amount of nitrogen.

The leftover LN is fun to play with too... one of my favorites is dipping balloons in it so they shrink down to nothing. Then put them in a cup. After a minute, balloons start coming out of the cup, much to the amazement of anyone who didn't see you put them in.

The Survivable Network Technology program at the Software Engineering Institute (part of Carnegie Mellon University) describes in detail what "survivable network" actually means. The author [of the book in the /. review] seems to have missed some key points. Nutshell version: a survivable network keeps going despite disasters, etc; moving to a different network to continue business does not mean you have a survivable network.

In fact, a quick google on "survivable network" turns up several hits (on the first page) from the SEI.

(Disclaimer: I used to work at the SEI, but in a different area.)

If you want the full version movie, go here for the torrent file.

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~gch/Aqua.mpg.torrent

From what I know of squeak, it sounds like a good environment, but AFAIK it wasn't designed specifically for kids.

There's quite a bit of science behind programming systems for children and novices, and a few good solutions as well. I'm understandably partial to Alice, which is free and provides a structured, drag-and-drop syntax editor which prevents all type and syntax errors. I'm currently working on a Ph.D. centered around making Alice even easier for novices by designing highly integrated, error-preventing programming and debugging tools.

But regarding age, keep in mind that most children don't even have the cognitive abilities to create and manipulate social and communicative abstractions, let alone programming abstractions, until 5 or 6. But no one's proven that no programming system exists that can't lower that threshold.

I've been using clamav for virus scanning since it appeared in Debian unstable. It is used by amavisd-new for virus scanning and with spamassassin for spam scanning of my incoming (and outgoing) email. Amavisd-new is then integrated with postfix and cyrus-imapd (2.1.x) for my mail server. Works like a champ on a Power Mac 8600/200 with 512MB RAM!

The only problem with using clamav is that it needs more mirrors to distribute the virus definitions. The main virus definition download site was down over this past weekend, I'm guessing because of the BugBear.B worm.

Basically UCITA tries to say that software makers aren't liable for their software. Then it extends to also the platform its running on.
If UCITA passes some things that could be legal:
1.) If the winword box says it has a spell checker in it, but the program doesn't, you still can't return it.
2.) If you car has a computer the manufactor isn't responsible if it malfunctions. In fact some interpretations are that the manufactor isn't responsible for anything because it has a computer in it so they can do safety cts.

Here is some wonderful information about
UCITA

Cool, thanks. I found this neat paragraph:

I'm not sure you can make such a strong statement about anything as messy as lunar orbits. In any case, even if you can, the result is a stable semimajor axis with constantly changing eccentricity, and sooner or later the eccentricity will rise far enough to bring the perilune into the surface. Time-reversing that orbit will get you back to the original and then off into another set of wanderings ending in a "thump". Lunar orbits intersect the surface at both ends, so to speak.

Dude, and I'm a space-guy, too! *Blush* I was thinking geosync around the earth because people aren't usualy at that altitude, but then thought that the moon would be more appealing.

The sale of this book without its cover is unauthorized. If you purchased this book without a cover, you should be aware that it was reported to the publisher as "unsold and destroyed." Neither the author nor the publisher has received payment for the sale of this "stripped book."

It's just the same in this case: the hobby store probably had an agreement to destroy unsold patterns, and violated that agreement by simply discarding the patterns. As a result of that violation, anyone who wanted to could legally take ownership of the discarded patterns - and this company did.

That's the copyright case. The paracopyright (DMCA) case has no leg to stand on, because there was no actual copyright infringement. The right answer, before running off to court, is to send a DMCA counter-notice stating that McCall's does not own the copyright to the web pages in question. These pages are copyrighted, not by McCall's, but by Monsterpatterns; they do not themselves contain the copyrighted patterns. (If Monsterpatterns were disseminating the patterns themselves on their website, then this would constitute copyright infringement, since digitial distribution implies that a copy is made. The same is not true of distribution of envelopes that are not copied.)

Well, this was probably a small-scale victory but it was significant to me. ;)

Almost a year ago lawyers from Agfa Monotype threatened me with the DMCA about a program I wrote that changes the embedding permissions on fonts. (slashdot article) I presented my defense via e-mail, they got a lot of bad press, and eventually they gave up (?). The program is still up today. Hopefully other developers who receive cease-and-desist letters will recognize that it is not always costly to fight them...

Well, this was probably a small-scale victory but it was significant to me. ;)

Almost a year ago lawyers from Agfa Monotype threatened me with the DMCA about a program I wrote that changes the embedding permissions on fonts. (slashdot article) I presented my defense via e-mail, they got a lot of bad press, and eventually they gave up (?). The program is still up today. Hopefully other developers who receive cease-and-desist letters will recognize that it is not always costly to fight them...

If you have what it takes, attending a place like Carnegie Mellon University's Entertainment Technology Center will get you much further.

It will be interesting to see how long this case survives now that Mr. Max has legal representation.

In order to keep track of what I had to do, I threw together a PHP HomeworkTracker that I used until I learned the patterns for each class (e.g. homeworks due Tuesday, next one out Thursday). The interface is crude, but it does support multiple users on the same server. Maybe someone can take this and improve on it.

Obviously some people will not remember to put their stuff into the tracker, but for me, that was not really a problem.