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and the world of creativity coming to an end, where it is not possible to write a program without every line infringing somebody's copyright or patent

For an interesting perspective on this phenomenon, please read "Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson. And yes, it has actually begun, in fact involving a late Beatle.

Since you mention the Communist Manifesto, I want to post a link to the The dotCommunist Manifesto.

And just so my comment is ontopic: ESR is a jackass.

I forgot to post that Columbia has a website where you can compare Harrison's song My Sweet Lord with the 'original' Ronald Mack song He's So Fine and judge for yourself if Harrison infringed on Mack - it is here.

Subconscious copying is actionable infringement. A Beatle got sued and lost.

Can't you get stem cells from liposuction...

Yeah, but the result would look a bit like this..

without record labels or the RIAA, there would still be artists.

Without songwriters, there would not be artists. Without major publishers, there would not be songwriters because songwriters have no way of checking on their own whether their compositions violate copyright, as subconscious copying is actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976).

The copyright holder has given you the ultimate legal weapon to copy those CDs - the fabled explicit written permission :)

How can the purported copyright owner be completely sure that he is, in fact, the copyright owner, that his work was original and not a subconscious derivative of an existing copyrighted musical work? Subconscious copying is actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976).

It's music I've written, I've recorded, I hold copyright over

Are you sure? What way have you of knowing that you didn't just subconsciously copy substantial portions of someone else's copyrighted work? George Harrison got in trouble for that.

clincal informatics or biomedical informatics. Both of these fields are in dire need of people with a combination of medical and cs backgrounds. My suggestions would be to look at Vanderbilt's biomedical informatics program . You would only need a few pre-reqs and it leads to a M.S. or Ph.D in the field. Further, they have a program that is specifically tailored for a M.D. getting into the field. Stanford, Utah, and Columbia round out the top schools in this field. Further, there is no shortage of jobs as it is still in its infancy!

Copyright doesn't prevent anyone from building on many sources, just from basically taking something and trying to say it's yours.

I don't "take" copyrighted musical works as much as they are forced on me through radio, for example, as I walk into places of business to work or to shop. Still, if I unwittingly incorporate a few notes from one of those works into one of my own, I'm guilty, because subconscious copying is still actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976).

if there was no protection, there would be no reason for at least 90% of the information being published to be published.

If I want to make a derivative work, would it benefit society more if I paid the author or if the author just denied me the rights? See, copyright leans too much on "you may not" rather than "you may as long as you pay"; there's not enough provision for compulsory license.

Dr. Lessig doesn't want to abolish copyright. He merely wants to find some way around the draconian restrictions on derivative works. Such restrictions lead to injustices such as Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976), which held that subconscious copying of a copyrighted work is actionable infringement.

Or do you claim that authors create works in a vacuum?

No plate tectonics?

Science News Online and others may disagree.

For example, absolutely nothing stops me from recording my wife singing, encoding it in the MP3 format, and sharing it.

Wrong. Songwriters own copyrights too. Even if your wife claims to have written the song herself, she may in fact have copied substantial portions of an existing copyrighted musical work. Given the ratio of people with actual musical talent to the general population on which commercial music is forced through Muzak and similar services, it's highly likely that the subconsciously copied it. And guess what: subconscious copying is still actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (SDNY 1976).

The faster I ran on this thing, the faster my compile would go. I'd buy it.

Come on people! It wasn't that long ago that most computing devices were hand cranked. Take this example from the 1920s. Possibly the world's finest mechanical calculator, the Curta, was sold from 1947 to 1973.

About thirty years ago my father worked a summer job as a cashier in a liquor store. The cash register was electromechanical--under normal circumstances, it ran off ordinary wall current. This was a rural community and power outages were not uncommon. When the electricity was off, cashiers could crank a handle for each addition operation. My dad asserts that the mechanism was rather stiff, and a few hours of cranking through purchases was quite a workout.

Of course, if you really want a hand-cranked computer, you should talk to this guy.

Printer? Pff indeed. I think you mispeled "Teletype ASR"

From the article:

Please note, not only are you responsible for obtaining all necessary permissions, licenses and consents prior to submitting any songs, you may be held liable for any and all costs and expenses (including legal fees) incurred by TruSonic as a result of your unauthorized use of copyrighted materials.

Subconscious copying of a copyrighted work into a new work is actionable infringement. Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music, 420 F. Supp. 177 (S.D.N.Y. 1976). Given this precedent, what steps can a recording artist (call him "George") who writes his own songs take (a) to avoid subconsciously copying copyrighted songs, or (b) to minimize potential damages to George should another copyright holder discover that George had subconsciously misappropriated his copyrighted song?

There is a widespread misconception about the legal status and enforceability of the GPL. The *fact* of the matter is, that the GPL has been enforced *many* times, and the FSF has *always* won. The reason is quite simple.

In any copyright infringement case, the infringing party must either:
a. Have a license, or,
b. Not have a license, or,
c. Not be infringing (i.e., the defendant's code is *not* copied from GPLed code, nor a derivative of GPLed code).

In the FSF's cases, the only possible license is the GPL. The defendant must either:
a. Admit they were using GPL code without a license or,
b. Admit that the license they used the code under is the GPL, or,
c. Claim that their code is not copied from, nor derivative of, GPLed code.

The result of this enforcement strategy has been that the defendant *always* complies with the GPL. The alternative is to come into court and admit that you have been redistributing copyrighted material without a license! Courts frown on that mightily. So, *all* defendants have chosen compliance with the GPL.

Note that if the defendant claims c., that they are not infringing (i.e, they claim that their code does *not* contain any code licensed under the GPL, nor any derivative of code so licensed) then the GPL is *not* tested. This becomes a separate issue of fact (i.e., *is* the code in question actually copied from code licensed under the GPL, or is it not?), *not* a test of the GPL itself.

If KISS's code is copied from, or derivative of GPLed code, they are screwed, because they must either admit to redistributing someone else's copyrighted material without a license, or they must admit that the license they distributed the code under is the GPL. Ether way, they lose.

See Eben Moglen's keynote address to the University of Maine Law School's Fourth Annual Technology and Law Conference for the FSF's counsel's description of how he's done this enforcement, all by his lonesome, while teaching full time at Columbia Law School, for years.

There have been violations of the GPL, but they've been dealt with quietly and have not gone to court. See Eben Moglen's Article about GPL enforcement.

First of all, I'm assuming you mean any digitized audio is lossy
Actually though, it is possible to sample analog signals to digital, and then recover the analog input perfectly. This is tough (at least for me) to conceptualize, but those EE profs really seemed to believe the Nyquist-Shannon sampling theorem and at some point I was convinced ;-)
The basic idea is that if the sampling frequency is double the frequency of the analog input, then there is no loss of signal.
I think it's the average human that can hear from 20-20KHz. So, CD's 44.1KHz sampling frequency is 2x 20KHz + a little extra.
With my admittedly non-professional understanding level, I would suggest that more "loss" occurs during the capture of the analog signal(mics and recording equipment), than during the actual conversion from that analog signal to a 96KHz 24bit sample. And then of course, before a comparison can then be made between a live performance and a replayed digital version, there is the reproduction equipment quality to take into account (amps, speakers, etc)...

What to do? I confess I don't know. It'd be nice for Linux/FOSS to maybe have an associated legal entity tasked with promoting Linux/FOSS in the market and protecting Linux/FOSS in the law. Ideally, a not-for profit organization. (A honest to goodness charity would be better, at least your legal defense contributions would be a tax deduction...)

I think we all know of a couple of organizations that when put together sorta fit your description: first the Free Software Foundation. Eben Moglen in fact has been enforcing the GPL quietly for quite some time. As for promoting Linux/FOSS in the market, that's done by another organization, the the Open Source Initiative. The only problem is that the philosophical differences between the two camps make it difficult for them to collaborate at the level you hope they could... Yes, they can collaborate on writing software, but promoting FOSS in the market and defending it from messes like SCO requires that they find a philosophical middle ground of some kind. :(

The OSI is a non-profit corporation, while the FSF is actually an honest to goodness charity. Both of them, if they could work together at a deeper philosophical level, could be just the type of organization you describe.

Look, the fact is that the GPL is so solid that no sane lawyer has dared challenge it. Linux isn't vulnerable. Heck, it's on some of the most solid legal ground ever devised. I'm personally convinced that RMS must have been Hammurabi or King Solomon in one of his past lives. No way a mere mortal could come up with such a brilliant document without divine inspiration.

Don't believe me? How about an entire site filled with lawyers? Or how about a law professor at Columbia Law School?

Look, the fact is that the GPL is so solid that no sane lawyer has dared challenge it. Linux isn't vulnerable. Heck, it's on some of the most solid legal ground ever devised. I'm personally convinced that RMS must have been Hammurabi or King Solomon in one of his past lives. No way a mere mortal could come up with such a brilliant document without divine inspiration.

Don't believe me? How about an entire site filled with lawyers? Or how about a law professor at Columbia Law School?

Look, the fact is that the GPL is so solid that no sane lawyer has dared challenge it. Linux isn't vulnerable. Heck, it's on some of the most solid legal ground ever devised. I'm personally convinced that RMS must have been Hammurabi or King Solomon in one of his past lives. No way a mere mortal could come up with such a brilliant document without divine inspiration.

Don't believe me? How about an entire site filled with lawyers? Or how about a law professor at Columbia Law School?

Are you sure of this? I don't know the original license, but it seems to me the revocation clause(s) would be critical.

A revokation clause isn't critical, as any contract can be declared null and void if one party doesn't fulfill their end. Many contracts include specific revokation clauses because having them reduces the difficulty and expense of nullifying the contract, but they are by no means necessary.

However, that isn't what I meant. The contract already has a revokation clause, so that wouldn't be added. However, once a contract is signed, it cannot be modified without the agreement of both parties. That includes adding a clause that says "we can revoke your Unix license if you run Linux without first proving that Linux improperly includes some of our Unix code" (which is, as I understand, what we are discussing here.

If the origional license didn't include such a clause, they can't just add it in whenever they want. That's basic contract law. Additionally, if they do manage to add it in and the licensee agrees to it, it still is on very shaky legal ground if there isn't some quid pro quo; in otherwords, they have to give something to the licensee in exchange for the rights they're taking away. Having read the letter I can definately say that isn't the case here.

(Remember a licence is a special form of contract that allows you to do something you're normally not allowed to do, so it's much easier to revoke licences than it is to break up contracts.)

You seem to be under some misconceptions about the nature of licenses. Let me explain:

1) No, licenses are not special. A contract is a contract is a contract, and they are all governed by the same laws.

2) Most licenses do NOT allow you to do something you're normally not allowed to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. Most licenses PREVENT you from doing things you normally WOULD be able to do. It's all explained here.

3) The only thing that makes most licenses easier to revoke/nullify is that they contain specific clauses describing the conditions under which that would happen. However, as I've stated above, any contract can have such a clause, and most well-written ones do.

I live in the Third World, and what I can say is that the use of proprietary software IS a form of oppression indeed. For the first time in human history the advance of technology has practically removed all barriers to accessing useful information, but corporations like Microsoft are using the same technology to erect artificial barriers in the name of their profits. They would condemn whole nations and peoples into ignorance and backwardness because these nations and peoples cannot afford to get around their exclusionary measures. As FSF General Counsel Eben Moglen said: "If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay?" (original article Freeing The Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture).

Free Software is not just a "method of software methodology", though open source is, and that I believe is the pons asinorum that most people here on Slashdot cannot seem to get past whenever there's an article about Stallman or the GNU Project. The kinds of arguments I see here whenever such an article comes up always seem to misunderstand the difference in philosophy between the two movements. On the other hand, Free Software believes that the right to share and change software are inalienable rights that no one should be allowed to take away. The fact that it also turns out to be a good methodology for software development is a side issue for people like RMS. The moral courage of a man like RMS to stand up for these principles indeed can be compared to the moral courage that eliminated slavery. Indeed, it is but a different sort of slavery that RMS is standing up against, and yes, there is a war being fought for it right now, and we all are at its forefront. One of the major battles is SCO v. IBM...

though I'm not sure that the damage awards at .25 a song would be crippling.

Try up to $30,000 per work accidentally infringed.

setting up a searchable place where you could "verify" your lyrics by phrase and chorus to make sure you weren't completely trampling someone else's idea

Google makes lyrics searching easy. However, the precedent-setting case involved subconscious copying of musical notes, which Google does not index.

I'm having a hard time understanding the difficulty. Libraries around the country can do it, why can't yours?

And did not make yourself

Then explain how writing your own song is stealing, even if you don't recognize that you are using a few notes from an existing song.

More information about Neumann:

http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html
http://www.neumann.com/
http://www.mbi.ufl.edu/~vetneumann
http://www-gap.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/Mathemati cians/Von_Neumann.html
http://www.math.columbia.edu/~neumann/
http://www.zyvex.com/nanotech/vonNeumann.html
http://www.karto.ethz.ch/neumann/
http://www.rit.edu/~drk4633/vonNeumann/
http://www.fsm-a.org/neumann

It blew my mind that you could represent things with punched holes, like they showed me. Years later, the Atari and the PC came out. That old 7090 was the one that blew my mind, but the Atari was the first one that I could actually use myself.

BTW, I'm the rugrat who dumped the pencil sharpener into the card reader... sorry 'bout that.

The first commercial computer I used, in high school, was an IBM 402 accounting machine, along with an IBM 82 card sorter, an IBM 77 tabulator, and, of course IBM 26 keypunches. (Unfortunately, no IBM 514 summary punch or 602A multiplier.) I was able to get that gear to generate poetry.

It is reasonable to expect that sites will spring up soon enough to provide the infrastructure that independent artists need to distribute their music and collect on the sales with a reasonable overhead.

Wouldn't such infrastructure have to include a way to pay the songwriter? And if a service allows artists to claim that they wrote their own songs, then wouldn't it have to include access to musicology services so that artists can be sure that they aren't making the same mistake that George Harrison made?

Nobody actually uses ASCII any more. It's not adquate for internationalizable applications. It only contains a simple non-accented Latin alphabet, arabic numerals, space, and 33 other characters. Oh, and 33 non-graphic control characters, only 2 of which are relatively safe to use in text files and streams. That's just not enough for any application that isn't specific to the U.S.

You say you use ASCII every day? No you don't. You probably use some variation of Latin 1 and/or UTF-8. Both have the same values as ASCII for their first 127 characters, so the difference is usually transparent. Not always.

Now you're saying, "All right, ASCII, Latin 1, whatever. What I mean is plain text. That's the universal format." No it's not. There isn't even a single Latin 1. Aside from ISO Latin 1 (which is supposed to be the default for web pages, but no widely-used browser makes that assumption), there's Microsoft Latin 1 and Macintosh Latin. Add in UTF-8 (which Slashdot supposedly uses, though most of their pages actually use ISO Latin1), and you have four different "plain text" encodings in wide use. The results when files are shared between these platforms are often pretty gross. And these are just the encodings used in the Americas and Western Europe!

Even if there was a text encoding that absolutely everybody used, you wouldn't want to store all your books in it. You're throwing away too much data! That's why I gave up on Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders. When I downloaded a Gutenberg text, things like italics and boldface all appeared at ALLCAPS. VERY VERY IRRITATING! And when I helped proof DP's text scans, I wasn't given any proper way to enter to record all the subtle typography that was in those old texts. One particular omission was the absence of any clear separation between encylopedia articles. I found this particularly frustrating, because I joined DP to help bring the classic Britannica 11th Edition online. What's the point if you can't browse individual articles easily, or the Greek words are a mess, etc., etc.

What's the solution? Not HTML -- it's not general enough. Somebody needs to sit down and design a markup (probably an XML document type) that expresses the stuff you find in various kinds of books. I doubt of if this "Open EBook" thing will do, because it will have very narrow objectives -- find a way to distribute the next Steven King with proper DRM support. Not interesting to those of us who want to share a lot of public domain and Creative Commons stuff, and are mainly concerned with preserving the original character of the text. Maybe when I know more about writing DTDs and Schemas, I'll take a stab.

But doesn't that create files that aren't accesible to a lot of people? No, because you don't distribute the XML version isn't for distribution (except to those who really want it). Mostly you transform the XML into formats suitable for distribution: HTML, WML, ebook formats, and yes, "plain text".

All other "encrypting remote filesystems" encrypt only the filetransfer, not the filestorage (AFS or - if i understood the FAQ correctly - SFS). So the fileserver admin (or an intruder or trojan) is able to read served files cleartext.

What's required is a remote filesystem where the clients do not need to trust the service nodes for data integrity and privacy. If i did not miss something (please tell me!), the only option nowadays is stacking a local crypting fs on top of a remote fs, e.g. NCryptfs on top of NFS or AFS.

/graf0z.

Yeah, I just noticed that. His curriculum vitae bears that observation out. Among other things, he's worked in some kind of programming job with IBM (1979-84, IBM Corporation, San Jose, California, Programmer/Analyst, Programming Language Research & Development; in 1983 he also served as corporate counsel with IBM).

I expected an ancient greybeard but the guy appears to be younger than I am (mid-40s, I'd guess).

He looks more like a beardy unix dude then a hippy..

Picture: Eben Moglen.

The Kermit protocol and software are named after Kermit the Frog, star of the television series, The Muppet Show; the name Kermit is used by permission of Henson Associates, Inc.

The problem is, the files he was trying to share were of his band

Actually, he might not have the right to distribute those files. He needs the songwriter's OK to distribute a recording of a song. And if he is the songwriter, he needs a professional musicologist's OK, or else what happened to George Harrison might happen to him.

eg. "The very foundation of the free software movement no longer exists."

i didn't know kermit was scriptable. I like scriptable (Kermit scripting language is a programming language similar to Perl, but with different syntax ... predates perl) things.

i didn't know kermit was scriptable. I like scriptable (Kermit scripting language is a programming language similar to Perl, but with different syntax ... predates perl) things.

Quantity Discount Unit Price
100-249 84.38% 10.00
250-499 86.72% 8.50
500-999 88.75% 7.20
1000-2499 90.63% 6.00
2500-4999 92.19% 5.00
5000-9999 93.75% 4.00
10000-19999 94.84% 3.30
20000-39999 95.23% 3.05

Kermit is an extensible file transfer protocol first developed at Columbia University in New York City in 1981 for transferring text and binary files without errors between diverse types of computers over potentially hostile communication links, and it is a suite of communications software programs from the Kermit Project at Columbia University. The Kermit protocol and software are named after Kermit the Frog, star of the television series, The Muppet Show; the name Kermit is used by permission of Henson Associates, Inc.

Over the years, the Kermit Project has grown into a worldwide cooperative nonprofit software development effort, headquartered at and coordinated from Columbia University. The Kermit Project is dedicated to production of cross-platform, long-lasting, standards-conformant, interoperable communications software, and is actively engaged in the standards process.

Since its inception in 1981, the Kermit protocol has developed into a sophisticated and powerful transport-independent tool for file transfer and management, incorporating, among other things:

KERMIT PROTOCOL

The feature that distinguishes Kermit protocol from most others is its wide range of settings to allow adaptation to any kind of connection between any two kinds of computers. Most other protocols are designed to work only on certain kinds or qualities of connections, and/or between certain kinds of computers, and therefore work poorly (or not at all) elsewhere and offer few if any methods to adapt to unplanned-for situations. Kermit, on the other hand, allows you to achieve successful file transfer and the highest possible performance on any given connection.

Unlike FTP or X-, Y-, and ZMODEM (the other protocols with which Kermit is most often compared) Kermit protocol does not assume or require:

• a connection that is transparent to control characters;
• an 8-bit connection;
• a clean connection;
• big buffers all along the communication path;
• physical-link-layer flow control.

(although Kermit does not require any of these conditions, it can take advantage of them when they are available). A feature article on Kermit protocol by Tim Kientzle in the February 1996 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal noted that "Kermit's windowing approach is faster than protocols such as XModem and YModem . . . What many people don't realize is that under less-than-ideal conditions, Kermit's windowing approach is significantly faster than ZModem, a protocol with a well-deserved reputation for fast transfers over good-quality lines."

Thus Kermit transfers work "out of the box" almost every time.

I haven't turned on the radio in several years.

Do you eat? Yes. Do you buy your food in a retail establishment that plays music over its PA system whenever the announcer doesn't need help in aisle 12? Is there any appreciable difference between retail background music and radio?

Formed networks of people who spread by word of mouth

Problem is that the adolescents who control much of the CD buying in America aren't willing to do this. Rather, they'll get their parents to buy whatever they hear on the school bus's radio, feeding the machine.

(in my case: by helping form and maintain and support alternative methods of distribution and promotion)

I could "support" them with my dollars, but I don't see how I could directly help "form and maintain" them because I can't afford formal training in marketing.

There's more to music than RADIO

Other than radio, what method of promotion works in a moving motor vehicle?

People write good/great music all the time ... And why do you need "formal training" in songwriting? Some of the world's greatest songs and composers didn't have "formal training" in songwriting.

When an idea pops into a would-be songwriter's head, how can he make sure that the idea isn't in fact "substantially similar" to an already published and copyrighted song? George Harrison got in seven-figure trouble for this on his first solo album.

Imagine if Linus had sat around saying "Gee whiz. I can't use anything but Microsoft and Andrew won't let me play with his Minix."

The situation would better resemble that of music had you added "and if I were to write and publish a competing operating system, Microsoft or Andrew would probably sue my ass off for copyright infringement."

i swear, joseph stiglitz should be required reading before posting any thing on adam smith.

I'm curious as to whether Google News, since it draws from various news sources and groups articles by topic (similar to paraphrasing, perhaps), uses any of the same techniques.

No, but Regina Barzilay, who is the researcher featured in the article, worked (with me) on the Newsblaster project at Columbia University, where she indeed applied these techniques to multidocument summarization. Newsblaster gathers and clusters news like Google News, but produces more sophisticated summaries.

That is where IBM tries to go: BlueGene's design is based on a system-on-a-chip - everything (except memory) is integrated on a single chip. In the long run, this allows them to build systems much larger than you could with a Beowulf. They are basically aiming for a system where you can easily add computing power by simply putting in a few more chips, and the thing will scale. They are doing the same thing for storage with this brick

BlueGene is a also the first supercomputer marketed to the life sciences. It's interesting to see that it developed from a project at Columbia University called QCDOC for "Quantum Chromodynamics on-a-chip" which did research in computational high-energy physics, and QCDSP before, which used DSP processors to build a supercomputer about ten years ago. Both an instructive example how academic research in the long run becomes industrially relevant, and how science changes.

What better title can you have than that?

I too think that Prof. Moglen's article's title "SCO: Without Fear and Without Research" is a fine title.

But the Slashdot thread title "OSDL Releases New Paper on SCO's Claims" steers the reader's attention to the wrong movement. I find it interesting that in this instance, the chief counsel for the Free Software Foundation is writing about the GNU General Public License (which both predate the Open Source movement by many years) and yet his work is credited to the so-called "Open Source Development Labs" (OSDL).

The Open Source movement stands for a different philosophy than the Free Software movement. Perhaps people who submit articles for Slashdot don't commonly know who Eben Moglen is, what he does, or what movement's interests he represents.

Anyway the point is that the guy pointed out that most pop tunes were rehashes of older pop hits.

And this is how the situation perpetuates itself. If somebody new to the scene comes in and tries to write an original song, he will undoubtedly get bit by an earworm of a song that was popular decades ago but is still copyrighted. Then the older song's publisher will sue the rookie.

Yes, it could happen, and yes, it did happen: Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music .

and then of course, there's those who say that Classical music tried every combination possible

The established songwriters' counsel will do everything in their power to downplay this theory so that they can prevail in a copyright infringement case. The argument might go a little something like this: if the rookie has heard the established songwriter's song even once on the radio, and the two songs are "substantially similar," then the rookie has infringed copyright.

Apparently, the only way to avoid a lawsuit entirely is to cover songs from the public domain.

Everyone knows that ships in the Trek universe are powered by something called 'technobabble', and that they travel at the speed of 'plot' (Which coincidentally, is the accelleration rate of the "excalibur" from B5 Crusade)