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>who the fsck are you going to call with an IP phone without the POTS people to terminate your call? Your'e going to call a SIP address (like sip:joe_user@somewhere.com). SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) is rapidly becoming THE big thing in IP telephony. Everybody's working on it. You can get more info about SIP here.

I currently develop a (better) IP phone for 3Com. We also have a several orders of magnitude larger market share with our NBX phones which can also talk IP.

You are correct that latency is important. I wish more people would cite a latency (measured in units of time) when I ask about a DSL/cable-modem speed instead of a throughput (measured in bits per time). With TCP and congested conditions, bandwidth is allocated by latency anyway. Also, for the TCP ramp-up (where most web pages are loaded) latency is a big governor.

In Internet Telephony (not counting that unusable crap over dialup modems) everyone basically uses G711 (PCMU) with 20ms packetization, so the inherent round-trip packetization delay is only 40ms. My typical ping times across the Internet backbone are less than 80ms making a total of 120ms + a little jitter buffer which is as good as a cell phone. For perspective, sound travels about a foot per millisecond anyway.

A big problem is trying to make the phones autonomous. So many people implement a master slave protocol like MGCP/SGCP which allows for dumb phones. Strangely when you use this approach, you usually want the phones totally dumb, and the protocol specialized to the specific plastics, so everyone uses a proprietary one. The phones don't even know what their buttons mean. The have to tell the server. Yuck.

My phone uses SIP an IETF standard. The phones can make direct phone calls without any server assistance. SIP has features for PGP, and the next phones will support strong encryption, like 3DES and blowfish. They currently already use MD5 digest authentication.

Internet telephony will happen. The voice infrastructure grows at 7% per year, but the Internet at 300 to 1000% depending on how you measure it. As bandwidth becomes free (finally a commodity which really is too cheap to meter), people will naturally migrate to Internet telephony for the services.

Now, if only 3Com could build DSL & cable modems fast enough to satisfy demand. :-) -- Rick Dean

Voice over IP isn't really mature yet, but there are usable implementations (both commercial and free). The main competing protocols are the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) created by the IETF, and H.323, created by ISO. SIP is much simpler and easier to understand, but H.323 has a lead in deployment.
Take a look at:
Internet Telephony for a very good overview of the issues and technology,
The Session Initiation Protocol page for SIP info and comparisons with H.323,
The OpenH323 Project for a free implementation of H.323, and
Vovida for a set of free implementations under development for both protocols. On the commercial side, Computer Telephony magazine has loads of information about VoIP and related topics, including a feature article this month about SIP.

To lift a quote from Anarchism Triumphant by Eben Moglen,

Now, in my role as a legal historian concerned with the secular (that is, very long term) development of legal thought, I claim that legal regimes based on sharp but unpredictable distinctions among similar objects are radically unstable.

Each new technology pushes the envelope, but that doesn't mean we should give up trying.

Give up trying to do what? Gain total control over digital files? Check my .sig for the feasability of that. If you don't believe me, I guess we could argue some more, but accepting the situation at face value is the first thing you need to do (and the RIAA harbors the same illusion that they can still control us). Once you see the situation as it is, you can then expoit it. That's a fundamental rule.

Let the court draw a line in the sand this year, and in 2 or 5 years, they'll adjust it as necessary.

But the problem is that the RIAA has spent loads of money lobbying for the laws we now have to deal with. Give them 2-5 more years with the same records profits and soon they'll have even people (in Congress) convinced that they are right. (sidenote: profits aren't bad. When they are used to lobby Congress to limit artists rights.....)

The whole point of civil disobedience was to put yourself *in* the way of the law and make an example of how it is unjust. Otherwise, you are just protesting from the sidelines -- and anyone can do that.

I run Napster, anything else I need to do to put myself in the way of the law? Maybe speak out against it, perhaps? Maybe talk to a congressman? This is all stuff I am doing or have done, any more (serious) suggestions?

Are you advocating that people tell Metallica that they are pirating the music so that they can be prosecuted?

Fuck Metallica. At this point I wouldn't even touch one of their MP3's with a ten foot RJ-45.

Copyright violation is a civil matter, and certainly not a felony.

It used to be like that. You ever hear about the DMCA?

from here

Prof. Jane Ginsburg was quoted in an article titled "Battle Brews on Rights to Web Content, Those Who Think Material Should Be Free Are at Odds with Owners, Current Law." Referring to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 (DMCA), a federal law that, according to the article, made it a felony for someone to even attempt circumvention of protective code, Prof. Ginsburg said that she worries about the inability of code to identify motives behind the copying of a film in the wake of the DMCA. "The same device that could stop me from copying a whole movie could also stop me from copying a small amount of the movie to show to my class," she said. "In that case, the copy would be locked up and I couldn't circumvent the lock because of the DMCA. Here is where the existence of an alternative copy is very important." The Boston Globe,
March 26, 2000

You were saying....?

This isn't a distant battle between 2 faceless giants, but affects you too.

This a simple battle between us and them. Which side are you on? And why?

--

Certainly you have the right to produce software. The FSF vigorously defends that right. You also have every right to keep your source closed. You're even permitted to keep your modifications of copylefted code private, unless you decide to distribute it. Any software you do legally distribute, though, you have every right to charge money for. However, I reccommend that you read Anarchism Triumphant by Eben Moglen -- essentially, RMS would not have your right to produce and sell proprietary software denied. He also would not have our right to copy that software and other media denied, whether the originator likes it or not. You probably couldn't make money selling proprietary software in such a world, but you would be perfectly free to try. This issue makes both proprietary software developers and the RIAA angry, but that unfortunately cannot be helped. This is the critical issue for which you have not indicated your stance.

You might want to read this excellent essay.

is at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~ezk/research/software/ cryptfs/

CFS is a solution, but not the best solution. It runs in user space (if I remember correctly), so a skilled script kiddie could read the memory contents and discover the key. Furthermore, it is pretty slow, especially if you are considering using large files (i.e. MP3 files). A better solution was posed by some Columbia grad students, called Cryptfs. Cryptfs builds on CFS and the later implementation TCFS. For an overview on the weaknesses of other encrypted file systems check out the Cryptfs home page. Unfortunately, I cannot find the implementation of Cryptfs.

Another solution is to use a loop-back encrypted file system. There is a how-to at linuxdoc.org.

As long as we're plugging events that are only of interest to the small fraction of Slashdot readers who live in or near a particular city, i'd like to announce that

Richard Stallman will be speaking in NYC next Monday.
--

This sounds a lot like what Irving Langmuir described as "pathological science". It's well worth reading the transcript of his original lecture on the subject:

Langmuir, I (transcribed by Hall, R), Physics Today, October 1989, p36-48.

I'm not aware of an online version of Langmuir's lecture, but Nick Turro has a nice article on the subject here, which has a sidebar listing Langmuir's key points.

• RTcmix - a real time sound synthesis/processing language/library. RTcmix is dope. I don't think the newest version (2.1), which adds really good Linux support, is publicly available yet, but it should be out the door real soon if it isn't yet. RTcmix can be easily interfaced with applications, because it can listen for commands on a TCP/IP socket. Trust me, it's very cool, and much easier to use/learn than CSOUND. Dave Topper (topper@virginia.edu) is the primary maintainer or RTcmix, as far as I know.
• Max - jMax was released by IRCAM under the GPL recently, but it needs crazy work in order to get to the state that the Mac version is in. Max is probably the coolest music application ever written. For those of you who don't know, it is a visual programming environment for real time control of anything MIDI controllable. Work is underway, as far as I know, to hook up RTcmix to Max as a signal processing engine (similar to MSP).
• Rt - Paul Lansky's real-time digital mixing program is a fabulous tool for mixing sounds. I haven't used it for performances yet, but it is damn good for constructing certain kinds of pieces. Several attempts at porting to Linux are in progress, but none of them are terribly stable yet. Check out Dave Phillips' page for more info.

Also, I hear nice things about Columbia's RTCMix.

As far as stability goes, it doesn't matter. Linux will crash just as bad as Windows or Powerbooks will. Oh, it happens. Unless you built the entire system to be fault tolerant to a medical spec, you're not getting anywhere. Digital Audio is still damn tricky.

At columbia university the os course was taught using vmware and linux 6.0. It was great, I got graded for making modifications to the kernel. The course website is at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~w4118/ That has the 5 projects that we did.

Vmware just had a press release about it, it was pretty fun....

• Add a pinfo() system call that returns parent pid, child pid, average cpu slice, etc
  
• Add a new weighted-round-robin scheduler and use pinfo() to see how well it works
  
• Implemented a new memory management policy
  
• Modified the FS' block allocation policy
  
• Added a new device, /dev/clock that lets anyone read and set the time (this caused some cool panicking when we set the clock back five minutes and the kernel noticed that some processes were "born" in the "future"
  

Here at Columbia there is a course exactly like that where they study operating systems and all the programming projects involve modifying a linux kernel. The book even discusses linux as one of its case studies. The book is:
Operating System Concepts, 5th edition, Abraham Silberschatz and Peter Baer Galvin, Addison Wesley,Reading, MA, 1998.
You can check out the course website at http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~w4118/. Just so you know I haven't taken the course yet. I'm taking it next semester, but I knew about it through friends and the professor. I hope this is useful.

Also check out Magnus.

Actually, you can tell from the suerscript-one's that Jon doesn't use a Unix box either. He in fact typed the text on a Mac.

The oldest Mac-charset to ISO-charset converters will turn Macintosh curly-quotes into ISO-8859-1 superscript-one characters, because the ISO encoding doesn't contain curly-quote entities. (For more information, read these Guidelines to use 8-bit character codes.)

As for speculation about which product might be doint this to his writing: I have Microsoft Office 98 for Macintosh, and Word does not do this when I save curly-quotes either as text or as html. This is a guess, but a more likely culprit is the Fetch FTP application, which has a setting that controls whether Fetch does ISO-charset to Macintosh-charset conversion of data in text file transfers. The default setting of this option is "on", which would lead to the corruption in Jon's posted answers.

For more reading, see

• ISO-8859-1 and the Mac platform
• A tutorial on character code issues
• A list of Jukka Korpela's documents

I can't say more. Join some people who are fighting this sort of thing.

• Students for Sensible Drug Policy
• American Civil Liberties Union
• Drug Reform Coordination Network

There are many more. You can always get in touch with Columbia University NORML for more information. That is my current vehicle for my activist tendencies. We are also in the process of changing into an SSDP chapter.

Stay strong.

This Goner posting this by the way... I thought I knew my password...

Synthesis takes performance to a level that's impossible to match with code written statically, by using things like address information that's known only at execution time, as well as knowledge of how multiple reusable components are dynamically connected.

Check it out (gzipped PostScript file): Synthesis: An Efficient Implementation of Fundamental Operating System Services.

On the subject of Robber Barons, you might want to check out

The Invisible Barbecue by Eben Moglen.

It draws parallels between the present and the RailRoad Land Grab era after reconstruction. (the greatest flourishing of Robber Barony before the internet came along)

By the way, this guy serves as counsel for the FSF and has argued on the EFF side in the California DVD-CCA case.

On the subject of Robber Barons, you might want to check out

The Invisible Barbecue by Eben Moglen.

It draws parallels between the present and the RailRoad Land Grab era after reconstruction. (the greatest flourishing of Robber Barony before the internet came along)

By the way, this guy serves as counsel for the FSF and has argued on the EFF side in the California DVD-CCA case.

Here are some photos from times square, in the middle of things...

Not too exciting, but hey, maybe someone will get a kick out of them. And maybe someday I will thumbnail'em and stuff...

-Rich

Think of a simple system, like a round-bottomed bowl turned curved side up. Put a marble on the top and record its path. The get the marble and put it close to the original starting point. It could, if you're sufficiently close to the centre of the bowl, end up going in any direction. That's the butterfly effect.

Since measuring instruments can't measure every contributing factor to the weather (temperature, pressure, moisture, wind) to arbitrary levels at a sufficient number of points to form an accurate and complete initial condition from which to predict the weather, it'll go close for a while (the better the measurements, the closer), but within a couple of weeks the values just diverge.

If people are interested in reading a bit more about this stuff, there are a few good books of introduction, like "Chaos" by James Gleich or "Does God play dice?" by an author I can't remember. A good article as a lead-in is here.

Dave Neary.

Today, the DVD Copy Control Association and the EFF once again met in court, this time to argue for and against the ordering of a Preliminary Injunction against, basically, the entire Internet, forbidding further dissemination of DeCSS, the source code module that decrypts DVD MPEG streams. After today's hearing, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that shrinkwrap license "agreements" are monsterously unethical and should on no account be allowed to stand.

It is worth noting up front that I am an adamant, vociferous opponent of these so-called "agreements", so I hope the reader will excuse some editorial bias. (Individuals interested in my editorial on the subject can find it here.) Also, events in court did not occur strictly in the order I will present; I will be grouping together related concepts to make them easier to compare.

Court began promptly at 13:30, and counsel for plaintiff and defendant introduced themselves (the names went by too quickly for me to get most of them). Judge Elfving indicated that he would not render his decision today, but would rather consider the arguments and filings before him and render a decision at a future time. He was unwilling to commit to a specific date, but indicated that it would not be overlong. Judge Elfving then invited plaintiff's counsel to present their argument.

Jeffrey Kessler began his argument with the following question: Can a user extract trade secrets in violation of a shrinkwrap agreement? A lot of other arguments were presented, but it seemed to me that the DVD CCA's entire case proceeds from this single precept.

In order to prevail in a trade secret violation, the plaintiff must show:

• That a trade secret exists. Trade secrets must posess information, must derive value from their secrecy, and that the secret's owner must employ reasonable measures to protect that secret.
• The secret was misappropriated. CCA argues that "improper means" were employed to create DeCSS.

CCA's contention is that the reverse engineering employed to discover the CSS algorithm was prohibited by Xing's shrinkwrap license "agreement". (Kessler reiterated this point with some force throughout the proceeding.) Since the reverse engineering violated this contract provision, the algorithm discovered within was improperly obtained due to breach of contract, and is therefore a trade secret violation. DVD CCA therefore argues that they are entitled to a Preliminary Injuction forbidding further dissemination.

Kessler went to a lot of trouble establishing that the original source of DeCSS was Xing's player. An expert's affadivit asserts that the original DeCSS release contained only Xing's key, suggesting that it was the Xing player that had been reverse engineered. Presumably, by establishing Xing to be the original source, they can invoke Xing's "license" that prohibits inspection.

Kessler made the assertion that, even if the "clickwrap" license had somehow been avoided, it still applies and is in force, since the license stipulates that assent to the contract is made, not by clicking on "OK", but by installing and using the software.

Kessler also seemed to go to some lengths to attempt to establish when DeCSS made its first appearance, which appears to have been the binary-only release on 6 October, 1999 from the group M.O.R.E. (Masters Of Reverse Engineering). Subsequent to that, Stevenson's work (where he attacks the hash rather than the keys) appeared around 25 October, 1999. I presume he did this in an attempt to establish that any release subsequent to these dates "must" have come from the "improperly obtained" algorithms.

DVD CCA cited several court cases supporting their petition for a Preliminary Injuction, which were granted forbidding further dissemination of materials under dispute (notably, the Religious Technology Center (Scientology) vs. Netcom). Kessler further asserted that no court case has ever held reverse engineering to be proper.

Kessler also cited the recently effected Digital Millennium Copyright Act which, as a matter of "public policy", forbids reverse engineering. However, he went on to state that DVD CCA is not bringing suit under the DMCA; they are bringing suit under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

The plaintiffs also asserted that the "hacker community" clearly knew that DeCSS was obtained improperly, and proceeded to quote from postings in Slashdot discussion fora made back in July where random people opined that a DVD player for Linux might not be legal to develop. (There were no in-court mentions of Natalie Portman or hot grits.) Kessler asserts that this public discussion validates their claim that the defendants "should have known" DeCSS is illegal.

The plaintiff also stated that the fact people may have been trying to develop a DVD player for Linux is entirely beside the point. Moreover, he stated that DVD CCA was not discriminating against Linux, that they were more than willing to license CSS to any "credible party" who wanted to develop a DVD player.

Finally -- and I think this is fairly significant -- DVD CCA made the observation that, if this were a copyright case, there might be a provision for reverse engineering under the Fair Use doctrine. However, there is no such provision in Trade Secret law, and the reverse engineering is therefore improper.

Kessler then turned the floor over to Robert Sugarman, who proceeded to disparage the EFF's First Amendment arguments. He repudiated the assertion that the defendants were news sources, and that they should not be accorded the protections available to newspapers. He asserted that the defendants are doing much more than engaging in First Amendment-protected discussion on this issue.

He repudiated EFF's citation of the Bernstein case. Copyright was at issue in Bernstein; this is a Trade Secret issue.

He also likened the obtaining of the DeCSS algorithm to breaking into Coca Cola's inner sanctum and stealing a copy of their secret formula. (In fact, the analogy of Coke's secret formula figured prominently in the plaintiff's arguments.)

Then he dropped a small bomb and stated outright, in open court, that they seek to enjoin not only hosting of the DeCSS code, but links to the DeCSS code. He asserted that, because links provide "instant access" to the disputed material, they should be forbidden as well.

He attempted to discredit the Open Source (nee "Hacker") community's motives by bringing to the court's attention the DeCSS Distribution Contest, and Copyleft's new DeCSS t-shirts, painting it as juvenile and irresponsible.

For some reason, he also called attention to the recent cracking of PacBell's ISP accounts, and CDUniverse's credit card database. Presumably, he was trying to associate the criminal activities of these individuals with the activities of the defendants in the case, both of which "clearly" demand decisive action from the court.

Finally, Mr. Sugarman asserted that, if a Preliminary Injunction is not granted, the message it will send is:

• Theft of trade secrets is OK,
• IP law is no longer viable,
• It is "not safe" to publish in digital media.

These remarks by the plaintiff's counsel consumed about an hour and a half. Judge Elfving called a 15 minute recess, after which counsel for the defense began.

The first guy (whose name I did not catch) seemed to rely more on bombast and specious details than on concrete questions of ethics and law. Nevertheless, he did raise some interesting points.

The Scientology case was raised again, this time to point out that the Preliminary Injunction granted and affirmed in that case applied only to one person, not to the entire Internet. He went on to cite the cases of Sega vs. Accolade and Vault vs. Quaid, cases in which reverse engineering was upheld as permissible.

He asserted there was only one real defendant in this case, the one who allegedly did the "dirty deed": Mr. Johansen of Norway who originally developed and published DeCSS. If there is indeed a legitimate action that can be taken, it is solely against this individual.

He turned the plaintiff's Coca Cola analogy on its head by stating that one could buy a can of Coke, take it to a chemical analysis lab, figure out what it was made of, and publish the results. Such an act would be entirely proper under the Trade Secret Act under which DVD CCA is suing.

The defense also argued that trade secret law is a "relational tort," enabling an action of one party against another. It does not protect the secret itself.

He asked, "Where is Xing in this case?" If, as submitted, DVD CCA's license requires licensees to take reasonable measures to protect their trade secrets, then Xing has clearly failed in this obligation. Further, he asserted the DVD CCA does not provide code itself, but expects the individual licensees to develop compliant code. Therefore, any misappropriated technology belongs to Xing, not to DVD CCA.

Finally, he made a highly dubious assertion that there was no evidence submitted to establish that DVD CCA were the legitimately assigned licensors of CSS (which has been developed by Matsushita and Toshiba), and therefore were not empowered to bring this action. (This was readily debunked by the plaintiff during rebuttal.)

After he finished, Eben Moglen, Professor of Law from Columbia Law School took over. I don't think I overstate the issue when I say this guy absolutely kicked ass. Besides being a good orator, the man clearly understands technology as well as law. He's written a treatise on the issues of intellectual property in the digital age entitled Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright.

Mr. Moglen basically proceeded to shred the plaintiff's arguments. He pointed out that DeCSS has nothing to do with wholesale copying; DVDs may be bit-for-bit duplicated and will play in any player without the use of DeCSS. He debunked the assertion of "irreparable harm" to the movie industry by doing some basic bandwidth math showing that downloading a 5.1 gigabyte movie will take you 30 hours (DSL speeds), and if you have a direct backbone connection, it'll take ten hours. Wholesale copying of movies in this manner is therefore not a realistic concern.

He raised the plaintiff's assertion that, while it may not be economically viable to copy movies today, these technologies will become cheaper and more available in the future. However, such theoretical future damages are not at issue; the court need only concern itself with what is happening now.

Mr. Moglen went on to describe CSS as extremely weak, and outlined Stevenson's novel attack against the cipher, which involves attacking the hash value to reconstruct the "title key" by which the MPEG stream may be decoded. In such a case, none of DVD CCA's keys are employed. The title key for any disc can be cracked on a Pentium-III in about 18 seconds. He drove home CSS's weakness by mentioning that Mr. Johansen of Norway is 15 years of age. Thus, the trade secret at issue must not have have been very secret, as it was literally child's play to discover it.

With all this, Moglen asserted that no cause of action remains because no trade secret remains. The "secret" in question was obtained by legitimate means, and Stevenson's subsequent work illustrates that none of DVD CCA's alleged secrets need be involved in decrypting a DVD. Had the DVD CCA acted more swiftly in restraining Mr. Johansen, they might have a cause for action. As it is, they've waited too long.

When he concluded, Moglen received light applause from the gallery as Judge Elfving asked for rebuttal from the plaintiffs.

Mr. Kessler assailed the work of Stevenson, saying that it proceeded from the improper DeCSS code by Johansen. Therefore, Stevenson's work, though novel, is "contaminated" by Johansen's alleged breach of the Xing "license", and the trade secret is still protected.

He argued against defense assertions that no license was in force, saying basically, "Yes, there was!" He attacked EFF's citation of the Sega case, stating that it was a copyright case, and that reverse engineering was held to be proper under Fair Use. This is a trade secret issue.

However, he went on to call attention to the DMCA again, stating that, as a matter of "public policy", reverse engineering is held to be improper. Then he flips again, and says they're not citing DMCA, only the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (which has no provisions for fair use).

Finally, the floor was turned over to Mr. Sugarman who (under pressure of time) characterized Professor Moglen's arguments as entertaining but irrelevant. All DVD CCA seeks, says Sugarman, is to take down the DeCSS code and all links to the DeCSS code. They are not seeking damages, nor are they seeking to quash discussion of the merits of the algorithm; only the trade secret itself.

Judge Elfving then thanked counsels, said there was a lot to think about, and would render his decision as soon as possible. Court was then adjourned at around 16:50.

My Analysis and Opinion:

We may readily concede that CSS was a trade secret, developed in secret, and made available under a comprehensive contract that obligated licensees to maintain the secrecy of the techniques used. It also seems fairly certain that the initial cracking of the CSS involved taking apart the Xing player and seeing how it worked. In order for this action to be a trade secret violation, Johansen's disassembly would have to be an improper use.

In order for it to have been improper, Johansen would have to be laboring under an obligation to maintain the secrecy of the Xing code and the CSS algorithm. The DVD CCA asserts that this obligation existed in the form of the shrinkwrap "agreement" which restricted, among other things, reverse engineering. So the DVD CCA's entire case hinges on whether shrinkwrap "licenses" are enforceable.

Let us put aside the fact that Johansen is Norwegian, where different laws and standards apply; and let us also put aside the fact that he is a minor, who likely can't be bound to contracts without parental consent (again, Norwegian law may differ on this point). Let us concentrate instead on this contract that, by the most tenuous forms of assent, may be considered in force and remove from the licensee a litany of valuable rights, including reverse engineering.

As I stated earlier, it is my adamant position that such documents are pure fiction; that they are not and should not be taken seriously. These instruments have little basis in law, and no basis whatsoever in simple ethics. They run counter to the real and reasonable expectations of consumers when they purchase software; that a sale has taken place, and they hold title to that particular copy of the software, subject to copyright restrictions. The "agreements" seek to alter the terms of the sale after the fact.

Further, these contracts attempt to escape vendors from the provisions of consumer protection laws, "lemon" laws, and remove from consumers their rights under Fair Use provisions of copyright law and, in some cases, the First Amendment (by forbidding discussion of benchmarks). And all one needs to do to assent to such onerous conditions is to, "install and use the software."

If A.H.Robins had attached such a license to its Dalkon Sheild, would it have been upheld? Would thousands of women around the country have found themselves unable to seek damages because they had "agreed" to hold A.H.Robins harmless? If Black&Decker attached such a license to its power saws saying you could only use Black&Decker saw blades, could it be enforced? We might concede they could cancel the warranty, but could they sue you for breach of contract, as DVD CCA has done over CSS?

Even if we were to presume such licenses are enforceable, how could they be said to apply to minors, who cannot be bound to contracts without parental consent? Must we then require that computer stores not sell software of any kind to anyone under age 18?

The idea is worse than ludicrous, it is offensive. No credible argument can be brought to bear that shrinkwrap licenses have any constructive use or benefit -- for consumers or publishers -- much less any foundation in ethics and basic human decency.

Some suggest that the "parade of horribles" that shrinkwraps enable has not happened, and is not likely to happen. I submit that a California corporation seeking a broad injunction, reaching beyond the borders of the state and even the country, to constrain domestic and foreign nationals from engaging in legitimate, ethical behavior to be a "horrible" that even the most paranoid among us could not have anticipated. There can be no further doubt that shrinkwrap licenses are a big, fat, ugly problem, and must not under any circumstances be allowed to stand.

Those who might suggest the GPL is weakened by such a position need not worry. While most commercial software "licenses" purport to constrain use, the GPL constrains copying. Absent a license of any kind, you still have the right to use your lawfully obtained software. You would not, however, have the right to make and distribute copies; the default conditions of copyright law apply. (This is true even if you're a minor.) Right to Use is concomitant with purchase; right to copy is not.

It is difficult to predict how the Judge will rule. Unlike the TRO hearing, the plaintiff was very well prepared. Both sides presented their arguments well. Judge Elfving stated that he wishes to be thorough, and will doubtless spend a good deal of effort considering the arguments. Still, both sides were articulate, and it will depend on who Judge Elfving chooses to believe, so the decision could go either way. Cross your fingers...

Schwab

Today, the DVD Copy Control Association and the EFF once again met in court, this time to argue for and against the ordering of a Preliminary Injunction against, basically, the entire Internet, forbidding further dissemination of DeCSS, the source code module that decrypts DVD MPEG streams. After today's hearing, there should be no doubt in anyone's mind that shrinkwrap license "agreements" are monsterously unethical and should on no account be allowed to stand.

It is worth noting up front that I am an adamant, vociferous opponent of these so-called "agreements", so I hope the reader will excuse some editorial bias. (Individuals interested in my editorial on the subject can find it here.) Also, events in court did not occur strictly in the order I will present; I will be grouping together related concepts to make them easier to compare.

Court began promptly at 13:30, and counsel for plaintiff and defendant introduced themselves (the names went by too quickly for me to get most of them). Judge Elfving indicated that he would not render his decision today, but would rather consider the arguments and filings before him and render a decision at a future time. He was unwilling to commit to a specific date, but indicated that it would not be overlong. Judge Elfving then invited plaintiff's counsel to present their argument.

Jeffrey Kessler began his argument with the following question: Can a user extract trade secrets in violation of a shrinkwrap agreement? A lot of other arguments were presented, but it seemed to me that the DVD CCA's entire case proceeds from this single precept.

In order to prevail in a trade secret violation, the plaintiff must show:

• That a trade secret exists. Trade secrets must posess information, must derive value from their secrecy, and that the secret's owner must employ reasonable measures to protect that secret.
• The secret was misappropriated. CCA argues that "improper means" were employed to create DeCSS.

CCA's contention is that the reverse engineering employed to discover the CSS algorithm was prohibited by Xing's shrinkwrap license "agreement". (Kessler reiterated this point with some force throughout the proceeding.) Since the reverse engineering violated this contract provision, the algorithm discovered within was improperly obtained due to breach of contract, and is therefore a trade secret violation. DVD CCA therefore argues that they are entitled to a Preliminary Injuction forbidding further dissemination.

Kessler went to a lot of trouble establishing that the original source of DeCSS was Xing's player. An expert's affadivit asserts that the original DeCSS release contained only Xing's key, suggesting that it was the Xing player that had been reverse engineered. Presumably, by establishing Xing to be the original source, they can invoke Xing's "license" that prohibits inspection.

Kessler made the assertion that, even if the "clickwrap" license had somehow been avoided, it still applies and is in force, since the license stipulates that assent to the contract is made, not by clicking on "OK", but by installing and using the software.

Kessler also seemed to go to some lengths to attempt to establish when DeCSS made its first appearance, which appears to have been the binary-only release on 6 October, 1999 from the group M.O.R.E. (Masters Of Reverse Engineering). Subsequent to that, Stevenson's work (where he attacks the hash rather than the keys) appeared around 25 October, 1999. I presume he did this in an attempt to establish that any release subsequent to these dates "must" have come from the "improperly obtained" algorithms.

DVD CCA cited several court cases supporting their petition for a Preliminary Injuction, which were granted forbidding further dissemination of materials under dispute (notably, the Religious Technology Center (Scientology) vs. Netcom). Kessler further asserted that no court case has ever held reverse engineering to be proper.

Kessler also cited the recently effected Digital Millennium Copyright Act which, as a matter of "public policy", forbids reverse engineering. However, he went on to state that DVD CCA is not bringing suit under the DMCA; they are bringing suit under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.

The plaintiffs also asserted that the "hacker community" clearly knew that DeCSS was obtained improperly, and proceeded to quote from postings in Slashdot discussion fora made back in July where random people opined that a DVD player for Linux might not be legal to develop. (There were no in-court mentions of Natalie Portman or hot grits.) Kessler asserts that this public discussion validates their claim that the defendants "should have known" DeCSS is illegal.

The plaintiff also stated that the fact people may have been trying to develop a DVD player for Linux is entirely beside the point. Moreover, he stated that DVD CCA was not discriminating against Linux, that they were more than willing to license CSS to any "credible party" who wanted to develop a DVD player.

Finally -- and I think this is fairly significant -- DVD CCA made the observation that, if this were a copyright case, there might be a provision for reverse engineering under the Fair Use doctrine. However, there is no such provision in Trade Secret law, and the reverse engineering is therefore improper.

Kessler then turned the floor over to Robert Sugarman, who proceeded to disparage the EFF's First Amendment arguments. He repudiated the assertion that the defendants were news sources, and that they should not be accorded the protections available to newspapers. He asserted that the defendants are doing much more than engaging in First Amendment-protected discussion on this issue.

He repudiated EFF's citation of the Bernstein case. Copyright was at issue in Bernstein; this is a Trade Secret issue.

He also likened the obtaining of the DeCSS algorithm to breaking into Coca Cola's inner sanctum and stealing a copy of their secret formula. (In fact, the analogy of Coke's secret formula figured prominently in the plaintiff's arguments.)

Then he dropped a small bomb and stated outright, in open court, that they seek to enjoin not only hosting of the DeCSS code, but links to the DeCSS code. He asserted that, because links provide "instant access" to the disputed material, they should be forbidden as well.

He attempted to discredit the Open Source (nee "Hacker") community's motives by bringing to the court's attention the DeCSS Distribution Contest, and Copyleft's new DeCSS t-shirts, painting it as juvenile and irresponsible.

For some reason, he also called attention to the recent cracking of PacBell's ISP accounts, and CDUniverse's credit card database. Presumably, he was trying to associate the criminal activities of these individuals with the activities of the defendants in the case, both of which "clearly" demand decisive action from the court.

Finally, Mr. Sugarman asserted that, if a Preliminary Injunction is not granted, the message it will send is:

• Theft of trade secrets is OK,
• IP law is no longer viable,
• It is "not safe" to publish in digital media.

These remarks by the plaintiff's counsel consumed about an hour and a half. Judge Elfving called a 15 minute recess, after which counsel for the defense began.

The first guy (whose name I did not catch) seemed to rely more on bombast and specious details than on concrete questions of ethics and law. Nevertheless, he did raise some interesting points.

The Scientology case was raised again, this time to point out that the Preliminary Injunction granted and affirmed in that case applied only to one person, not to the entire Internet. He went on to cite the cases of Sega vs. Accolade and Vault vs. Quaid, cases in which reverse engineering was upheld as permissible.

He asserted there was only one real defendant in this case, the one who allegedly did the "dirty deed": Mr. Johansen of Norway who originally developed and published DeCSS. If there is indeed a legitimate action that can be taken, it is solely against this individual.

He turned the plaintiff's Coca Cola analogy on its head by stating that one could buy a can of Coke, take it to a chemical analysis lab, figure out what it was made of, and publish the results. Such an act would be entirely proper under the Trade Secret Act under which DVD CCA is suing.

The defense also argued that trade secret law is a "relational tort," enabling an action of one party against another. It does not protect the secret itself.

He asked, "Where is Xing in this case?" If, as submitted, DVD CCA's license requires licensees to take reasonable measures to protect their trade secrets, then Xing has clearly failed in this obligation. Further, he asserted the DVD CCA does not provide code itself, but expects the individual licensees to develop compliant code. Therefore, any misappropriated technology belongs to Xing, not to DVD CCA.

Finally, he made a highly dubious assertion that there was no evidence submitted to establish that DVD CCA were the legitimately assigned licensors of CSS (which has been developed by Matsushita and Toshiba), and therefore were not empowered to bring this action. (This was readily debunked by the plaintiff during rebuttal.)

After he finished, Eben Moglen, Professor of Law from Columbia Law School took over. I don't think I overstate the issue when I say this guy absolutely kicked ass. Besides being a good orator, the man clearly understands technology as well as law. He's written a treatise on the issues of intellectual property in the digital age entitled Anarchism Triumphant: Free Software and the Death of Copyright.

Mr. Moglen basically proceeded to shred the plaintiff's arguments. He pointed out that DeCSS has nothing to do with wholesale copying; DVDs may be bit-for-bit duplicated and will play in any player without the use of DeCSS. He debunked the assertion of "irreparable harm" to the movie industry by doing some basic bandwidth math showing that downloading a 5.1 gigabyte movie will take you 30 hours (DSL speeds), and if you have a direct backbone connection, it'll take ten hours. Wholesale copying of movies in this manner is therefore not a realistic concern.

He raised the plaintiff's assertion that, while it may not be economically viable to copy movies today, these technologies will become cheaper and more available in the future. However, such theoretical future damages are not at issue; the court need only concern itself with what is happening now.

Mr. Moglen went on to describe CSS as extremely weak, and outlined Stevenson's novel attack against the cipher, which involves attacking the hash value to reconstruct the "title key" by which the MPEG stream may be decoded. In such a case, none of DVD CCA's keys are employed. The title key for any disc can be cracked on a Pentium-III in about 18 seconds. He drove home CSS's weakness by mentioning that Mr. Johansen of Norway is 15 years of age. Thus, the trade secret at issue must not have have been very secret, as it was literally child's play to discover it.

With all this, Moglen asserted that no cause of action remains because no trade secret remains. The "secret" in question was obtained by legitimate means, and Stevenson's subsequent work illustrates that none of DVD CCA's alleged secrets need be involved in decrypting a DVD. Had the DVD CCA acted more swiftly in restraining Mr. Johansen, they might have a cause for action. As it is, they've waited too long.

When he concluded, Moglen received light applause from the gallery as Judge Elfving asked for rebuttal from the plaintiffs.

Mr. Kessler assailed the work of Stevenson, saying that it proceeded from the improper DeCSS code by Johansen. Therefore, Stevenson's work, though novel, is "contaminated" by Johansen's alleged breach of the Xing "license", and the trade secret is still protected.

He argued against defense assertions that no license was in force, saying basically, "Yes, there was!" He attacked EFF's citation of the Sega case, stating that it was a copyright case, and that reverse engineering was held to be proper under Fair Use. This is a trade secret issue.

However, he went on to call attention to the DMCA again, stating that, as a matter of "public policy", reverse engineering is held to be improper. Then he flips again, and says they're not citing DMCA, only the Uniform Trade Secrets Act (which has no provisions for fair use).

Finally, the floor was turned over to Mr. Sugarman who (under pressure of time) characterized Professor Moglen's arguments as entertaining but irrelevant. All DVD CCA seeks, says Sugarman, is to take down the DeCSS code and all links to the DeCSS code. They are not seeking damages, nor are they seeking to quash discussion of the merits of the algorithm; only the trade secret itself.

Judge Elfving then thanked counsels, said there was a lot to think about, and would render his decision as soon as possible. Court was then adjourned at around 16:50.

My Analysis and Opinion:

We may readily concede that CSS was a trade secret, developed in secret, and made available under a comprehensive contract that obligated licensees to maintain the secrecy of the techniques used. It also seems fairly certain that the initial cracking of the CSS involved taking apart the Xing player and seeing how it worked. In order for this action to be a trade secret violation, Johansen's disassembly would have to be an improper use.

In order for it to have been improper, Johansen would have to be laboring under an obligation to maintain the secrecy of the Xing code and the CSS algorithm. The DVD CCA asserts that this obligation existed in the form of the shrinkwrap "agreement" which restricted, among other things, reverse engineering. So the DVD CCA's entire case hinges on whether shrinkwrap "licenses" are enforceable.

Let us put aside the fact that Johansen is Norwegian, where different laws and standards apply; and let us also put aside the fact that he is a minor, who likely can't be bound to contracts without parental consent (again, Norwegian law may differ on this point). Let us concentrate instead on this contract that, by the most tenuous forms of assent, may be considered in force and remove from the licensee a litany of valuable rights, including reverse engineering.

As I stated earlier, it is my adamant position that such documents are pure fiction; that they are not and should not be taken seriously. These instruments have little basis in law, and no basis whatsoever in simple ethics. They run counter to the real and reasonable expectations of consumers when they purchase software; that a sale has taken place, and they hold title to that particular copy of the software, subject to copyright restrictions. The "agreements" seek to alter the terms of the sale after the fact.

Further, these contracts attempt to escape vendors from the provisions of consumer protection laws, "lemon" laws, and remove from consumers their rights under Fair Use provisions of copyright law and, in some cases, the First Amendment (by forbidding discussion of benchmarks). And all one needs to do to assent to such onerous conditions is to, "install and use the software."

If A.H.Robins had attached such a license to its Dalkon Sheild, would it have been upheld? Would thousands of women around the country have found themselves unable to seek damages because they had "agreed" to hold A.H.Robins harmless? If Black&Decker attached such a license to its power saws saying you could only use Black&Decker saw blades, could it be enforced? We might concede they could cancel the warranty, but could they sue you for breach of contract, as DVD CCA has done over CSS?

Even if we were to presume such licenses are enforceable, how could they be said to apply to minors, who cannot be bound to contracts without parental consent? Must we then require that computer stores not sell software of any kind to anyone under age 18?

The idea is worse than ludicrous, it is offensive. No credible argument can be brought to bear that shrinkwrap licenses have any constructive use or benefit -- for consumers or publishers -- much less any foundation in ethics and basic human decency.

Some suggest that the "parade of horribles" that shrinkwraps enable has not happened, and is not likely to happen. I submit that a California corporation seeking a broad injunction, reaching beyond the borders of the state and even the country, to constrain domestic and foreign nationals from engaging in legitimate, ethical behavior to be a "horrible" that even the most paranoid among us could not have anticipated. There can be no further doubt that shrinkwrap licenses are a big, fat, ugly problem, and must not under any circumstances be allowed to stand.

Those who might suggest the GPL is weakened by such a position need not worry. While most commercial software "licenses" purport to constrain use, the GPL constrains copying. Absent a license of any kind, you still have the right to use your lawfully obtained software. You would not, however, have the right to make and distribute copies; the default conditions of copyright law apply. (This is true even if you're a minor.) Right to Use is concomitant with purchase; right to copy is not.

It is difficult to predict how the Judge will rule. Unlike the TRO hearing, the plaintiff was very well prepared. Both sides presented their arguments well. Judge Elfving stated that he wishes to be thorough, and will doubtless spend a good deal of effort considering the arguments. Still, both sides were articulate, and it will depend on who Judge Elfving chooses to believe, so the decision could go either way. Cross your fingers...

Schwab

The Free Software Foundation does have lawyers who work (at no charge) to help defend free software against license violations. One of them happens to be my one of my professors. :)

I love the Web. I hate the Web. I love information, interactivity, communication. I hate banner ads, slow loads, and animated gifs. I've conquered most of these with three tools which work under Linux/xBSD and even legacy OSs:

• Junkbuster. It kills junk -- banner ads, sites you don't want to see, cookies. Do it. It's good.
• Squid. Caching proxy server. Stuff you hit often stays cached. Really good for static graphics, not so good for CGIs. Also good. You may also want to look at wwwoffle, an offline/online caching browser.
• gat, the Gif Animation Toggle. Works for Netscape or Opera, Linux or 'Doze. Prevents animated gif looping. You see one cycle of animation, then everything freezes. Very cool.

I feel like my browser is mine again. Or, as the ads say: the Web is once again your friend.

What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand?

For years, Kermit Project leaders Frank da Cruz and Jeffrey Altman have tirelessly answered questions from users on comp.protocols.kermit.misc, for free, just about every day. They sure as heck deserve some kind of award.

With all that said, the relevant FreeBSD position almost assuredly has nothing whatever to do with porting Word or anything else. It's a HotMail admin position, and it says so right in the linked document.

Some solutions with source can be seen in the Erez Zadok's Research web pages.

A society based on your give-back principle would be a very gray society... No one would bother producing anything new.

Why, look! There it is, in its natural habitat! The elusive econodwarf!

You can't say "give me" without giving back- in this case, paying the people who produce for you the things you enjoy.

How much of the purchase price of a new CD do you think the artist gets? And how much goes to the record company and the various middle-men?

Ok, I can't really say a lot that wasn't already here. However, I have an old 16" Sun (Sony) monitor that I wanted to use. I did much research and came to a final decision. I'll start at the beginning.

Google was great for giving me the information I needed. One big problem is that there is no one page that tells you everything or has links to everything.

So here's some stuff:

Special video cards (good ones, recent acceleration technology) are available. They're more expensive than regular cards, but you're pretty much guaranteed that they'll work. They are specially designed to display text modes on those monitors, which is a huge plus.

Here's a link:

http://www.si87.com/

There are more companies. A search will find them quickly. I remember seeing one that used S3 chipsets. A good thing because they're very supported. Many of these companies explicitly state Linux support. That's another good thing.

If you want to use a regular video card, be mindful of the specs on your monitor. I found an exellent source of monitor data here. There are DEC fixed frequency monitors in there, among many, many more.

If you have sync-on-green, you probably have 3 BNC connectors on the back of your monitor. Any Matrox card will drive this. There's a "sync-on-green" option in the XF86Config file for that. VGA-to-BNC cables can be bought fairly cheaply.

If you have composite sync, you probably have either four BNC connectors or a 13W3 connector (3 large coax pins and 10 regular pins). Don't bother looking for a bare connector to make a cable with. It's a very special kind of cable due to the mixture of coax and regular multiconductor cable. If you want to hack an existing cable (or just buy one to go straight) IBM sells them for US$27.00 compared to everyone else (including Sun) that sells them for ~US$80.00.

ATI cards support composite sync. It's an option in the XF86Config file.

To do composite sync on any other card, you can build a little logic circuit, but I *really* don't recommend that because 13W3 cables are relatively hard to hack, plus you'll get a lot of signal loss. For the price of a card you don't have to screw with, it's worth it.

Having looked at these options, I looked at what came with the monitor: a very old pizzabox Sun 3/80. I only wanted an Xterminal anyway and there is some software called XKernel that turns an old Sun into one. Get it here.

This is the option I'm going with. No major screwing around, plus I get what I want. I bought a cheap ethernet transceiver from D-Link (I had to slice off some of the plastic on the back of my Sun to get it to fit), and I am now waiting for my 13W3 cable to come in from IBM Canada (It *is* a special order, after all).

These old Sun's are easy to find, and tend to have very nice monitors on them. I saw a couple of old Sparcs here for sale for ~CAN$50 each. You can't beat that. They had monitor cables too. :-)*

So that's my little experience. It's not exactly tuned to the question, but I'm sure there are many others (I *KNOW* there are) that are watching this question with interest.

Your comments reminded me of Eben Moglen's excellent essay Anarchism Triumphant. If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend it.

Most of the Earth's carbon has been locked up in the mantle by the Carbon Cycle. That's a good thing, since there it has no opportunity to recombine and eliminate the atmospheric oxygen.

From the article, you'd think that the only people who care about politics are "Tech Bosses" who have enough money to lobby politicians with. Perhaps its just that The Economist think its perfectly acceptable that politics is only who can buy which politicians and why... thats not democracy, its an indictment against the corruption in our political system.

The competing interests they talk about are the competing interests of corporations. How it could ever seriously talk about small nimble companies and the death of big business has got to be some kind of joke. Faster than the Federal government (with continually increasing powers and budget) can bust trusts and monopolies, are they not combining into larger and larger corporations.

About the only thing Big that they were right about getting small is Big Unions. This is largely their own damn fault, becaused they stopped being unions that fought on the job and became political machines, lobbying groups and pension/insurance plans. And, suprise, they never have the money to buy politicians like corporations can. Which is ultimately why efforts like Washtech are doomed as long as they try and compete with corporate money in electoral politics. Ofcourse, anti-democratic practices, corruption, organized crime, capital flight to the third world (GATT, NAFTA and the WTO), and being outmoded by new technology have heart Big Labor alot.

If unions are to ever work for geeks, they've got to be portable, decentralized, democratic, focus on direct action (instead of electoral lobbying), free (like in speech, not beer) and of a generally anti-authoritarian/libertarian culture. They've got to be willing to fight over issues like censorship (remember when the Web turned black against the CDC?), privacy, spam, standards, accessiblity, etc... I only know of couple humble attempts at that.

The complete cyberpunk fake book has a better hold on geek politics than the Economist. Fringe parties... if geeks are in parties are all... are like the Libertarians and the Greens. The number of out right anarchists growing in the industry is pretty astounding.

Most geeks don't identify themselves with any particularly ideology (and certainly not any party). They have a patchwork of issues they care about, if they vote registere independent or which ever party has dominance so they'll have a better choice during primaries. Political geeks would rather take action, or support their local communities, in the streets. If geeks want to get rid of propietary software, they out evolve it, they don't try and lobby it away; Anarchism Triumphant! If they think corporations have bought up to much radio spectrum, they help people take the airwaves back from FCC sellout. Or take out satellites.

But none of these things are politics, as far as The Economist is concerned. But then, civil disobedience is pretty hard to buy off.

When geeks start applying what they are already doing on other issues to work... then you'll really begin to see something. Syndicalism might get a rebirth for the new millenium yet.

Demand the Impossible!

Organic food in the US (at least in south eastern Michigan) is available, but it's not really common.
Some big grocery stores (VG's, of Spartan stores chain) have organic sections, but they're rather small, and you can't buy all your staples there. The best bet is Food Co-ops, such as my local People's Food Co-op which a lot of college towns have. Mainstream america, removed from places like that, generally don't have access or information on organic foods.

He ought to read Strunk's The Elements of Style.

Erik

Has it ever occurred to you that God might be a committee?

Marijuana or any drug, when used with heavy machinery can be dangerous. Marijuana, though, does not kill brain cells. Besides huffing (or other "recreational" activities which deprive the brain of oxygen) the only drug which kills brain cells is alcohol. Ask your doctor.

Cirrhosis of the liver, fetal alcohol syndrom, etc. are all dangers from drinking.

Essentially the only danger from smoking marijuana is lung irritation, and so far no studies have shown an increase in risk of lung cancer or emphysema, but bronchitis is still a danger.

The biggest problem with drugs (and a lot of other things) is ignorance, on the part of users and law enforcement. For example, an average cigar contains enough nicotine to kill several people, but I could still get one. The U.S. sends billions to Cuba, Peru, and Bolivia to eradicate their coca fields using firepower and herbicides. And still I could get as much coke as I want in a matter of minutes with just a phone call (in NYC). What a collassal waste of manpower, tax payer dollars, and lives.

Users are of course no better. Children romanticize drug use, and get far to caught up in catching highs and spending their parents money. All of our prohibitive laws regarding naturally occuring drugs (and now designer drugs) are based on the idea of protect the children, but have the effect of arresting minorities and adults while kids can pick up whatever they want in school. Except of course alcohol, you have to go outside of school to get that.

For people interested in learning more about drug laws and the problems they cause, check out the following URLs.

• National NORML
• The Lindesmith Center
• The Partnersip for Responsible Drug Information
• Columbia University NORML Shameless plug.
• Marijana Myths/Marijuana Facts a great book as well.
• Dmoz on drugs for everything I can't put in this post

Please people stay informed and don't hurt yourself with drugs or anything. Fun comes with moderation. Anyone who has gone to college (or probably high school) has seen people who have taken things a bit too far. Don't do that, but also don't castigate people for seeing things differently than you. I am a firm believer in an open market in drugs, but I know that in reality a comprimise must be reached that takes into consideration all points of view, not just my own.

Sorry for the long post, but I felt the record needed to be set straight. Carl Sagan smoked herb, cool, too bad he wasn't able to stand up for it while he was alive.

maybe release a patch to /usr/bin/whois so that we can stop before receiving the data itself, in case we don't agree?

i'm not an anonymous coward, but my passwd is not working. Anyway, anyone who has read nietsche would know that there are two ways to define good. there is good as it opposes evil and good as it opposes bad. The two meanings are ultimately different and by only searching one of their counterparts (evil). If i wanted to say that i had a bad trip, for example, i would not say that it was evil. but to describe the opposite i would certainly use good. But an interesting statistic nonetheless.

-Sara
sjs87@columbia.edu

I don't think this is a Universal Truth about technology today. How about the Pavoni Europiccola, or the TacT Millennium (Although it DOES have LEDs, both its design and technology is still quite impressive) Morgan +8 (These are still made today, and they are VERY fun to drive) Even though there's a lot of crap around, one can still find technological excellence today. It's just like the music industry - the fact that Spice Girls and Backstreet Boys are selling huge amounts of records, doesn't neccesarily mean that there is no good music being made out there. Hmm? -K

No, it's CMIX. Most of you probably haven't heard of CMIX. It's a simple language for the processing and production of sound. It was written by a guy named Paul Lansky way back in the day, and the place where CMIX got its first real break was under the NeXTSTEP OS.

And we all know what happened to NeXTSTEP. It died. It died hard, to the point that just about the only people still using NeXTs were CMIX hackers.

So what happened then? A guy named Brad Garton (a former student of Paul Lansky; now currently a professor at the Columbia Computer Music Center) decided to port the entire CMIX source to another technically promising fledgling OS called IRIX.

And we all know what's happening to IRIX. It's on the way out. No one can use it for anything (partially because IRIX and network security are mutually exclusive terms).

And what have the CMIX people done now? They've ported CMIX to Linux, and several other promising operating systems! Run! Hide your favorite OS!

For those of you who couldn't tell, this is a joke.

-k

You write: "it's Bruce not Pruce, and when used with an apostrophe its Perens' not Peren's" But you're wrong about a zillion times. Your second "its" is wrong. And it's "Perens's" in the genitive form according to Strunk and White. An exception is made for forms such as "in Jesus' name", but I wasn't aware that you were apotheosis had completed enough for you to take such forms as your own.

• Kooks and quacks of the roman empire: a look into the world of the gospels
  
  
• Why I don't buy the 'Ressurection of Jesus' story
  
  
• A fish did not write this essay
  

• Kooks and quacks of the roman empire: a look into the world of the gospels
  
  
• Why I don't buy the 'Ressurection of Jesus' story
  
  
• A fish did not write this essay
  

• Kooks and quacks of the roman empire: a look into the world of the gospels
  
  
• Why I don't buy the 'Ressurection of Jesus' story
  
  
• A fish did not write this essay
  

There are also some other essays he's written in the same directory.

chris

Hmm... I don't understand why slashdot only updated with one page with screenshots from the q3test when there are like 5+ of them up now. That server is probably going to get slashdotted and everyone will get mad, etc etc. Anyhow, here some other pages with q3test screenshots...

http://astrotek.realtime.no/quake3/

http://hope.res.cmu.edu/

http://www.columbia.edu/~gks4/

http://linux.alphacomp.com/

I'm sorry -- explain again please, in small words, what's wrong with health information? See, I happen to be a big fan of it.

(For the other poster: the site in question is Go Ask Alice -- you may be joking but I'm not.)