Slashdot Mirror

jonnystiles2 writes: "Duke University and the Center for the Public Domain are holding a conference from November 9 to 11 on intellectual property and the the public domain. The conference has a web-site with the papers to be delivered. There is also a discussion board about the conference. You will need to create an account to access the boards. Or, you can view them read-only. Of particular interest to readers of this site will be a paper by Yochai Benkler titled "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm." The people at the conference are some of the leading legal minds in the field of intellectual property. If you are interested in the different debates concerning the ecology of networks, meanings of the First Amendment as related to the Copyright Clause of the Constitution and more, definitely check this out. While this is an legal and academic conference, most of papers require only a rudimentary familiarity with the issues and arguments regarding intellectual property."

KappDogg writes: "On March 23, 2001, Lawrence Lessig spoke at Duke University Law School regarding free vs. controlled resources, should resources be controlled at all, and the direction the internet is moving in that respect. I thought it was a pretty interesting approach the whole spectrum of IP issues. They finally made the talk available in RealVideo format."

KappDogg writes: "On March 23, 2001, Lawrence Lessig spoke at Duke University Law School regarding free vs. controlled resources, should resources be controlled at all, and the direction the internet is moving in that respect. I thought it was a pretty interesting approach the whole spectrum of IP issues. They finally made the talk available in RealVideo format."

bsletten writes "Researchers at the Duke University Medical Center have successfully grown fat cells into cartilage, that they hope to use to repair/create new joints for patients. Normal cartilage does not repair itself well so this should be a boon to people with knee and hip problems." Cartilage doesn't repair at all, and there aren't any good replacements for it. I think teflon disks are the state of the art now, and they wear out eventually, which necessitates more surgery. Creating real cartilage replacements would be a major advance.

sachsmachine writes: "The Harvard Crimson is reporting that MIT, Stanford, Duke, and UNC are refusing a Metallica request to block Napster, and that Harvard will likely do the same. Nice to see our institutions of higher learning sticking up for online freedom ..."

[Updated 14:07 GMT by timothy:] fredder adds another small evidence of persistent sanity: "I received this email from the powers that be at Duke University this morning:

'Duke has declined a request from the attorney representing several music performers to ban access to napster.

I do wish to remind all students that your license to use Duke's computing networks is predicated on legal use only, and that copyright infringement is not a permitted use.

Tallman Trask III'"

Finally home long enough to compile some quickies. option8 sent us the MacCrate which probably isn't up to code. Course neither is this one (thanks pkr) Speaking of cases, Deega sent us a site where you can get air brushed cases. rafa noted that Propaganda Volume 12 is out. UM_Maverick has started YALS called Linuxtopia.com pq wrote in with a picture that proves that a spell checker is probably a good idea. RoLlEr_CoAsTeR found something on Brunching Shuttlecocks which lets you combine Advertising and Perl: its actually extremely clever. Speaking of perl, ThePixel noted Perl Toys, which I think we mentioned a year or so ago, but with Christmas coming up, it probably is worth checking out again. Especially if you want magnetic poetry. Speaking of stuff to buy, JbirdUAH noted that Copyleft has Slashdot frisbees! Just in time for Winter! jhopson sent us a retelling of beowulf starring people you know. Lexie (who should really ask CowboyNeal out) sent us Eunuch which I'm not gonna explain, but its definitely wierd. motardo noted that Dalnet is for sale on eBay. Ant noted that Google seems to have an interesting result if you search for 'More evil than satan himself'. Speaking of evil, jsfetzik sent us Sinux the Linux for sinners. And how about Captain Zion's link to FsckU-FsckMe(tm) which is not for children, but is pretty amusing. Maybe you'll find auto.pron.org a little more wholesome. Finally, jetpack pointed us to Forum2000, which I'd never seen before, but am glad I did. It was mentioned in a comment awhile ago, and then we were assimilated. Super wierd.

CamelMan wrote to us with an interesting story over at CNN. The Internet Engineering Task Force is apparently on a fast track to get the Common Name Resolution Protocol into place as early as next year. It will be, however, mostly aimed at intranets, and not at the Internet writ large.

hfcs asks: "I'm looking for sources for an affordable, 4-6 channel, compact, stereo, line-level audio mixer. In my office I have 4 PCs (Linux, W95, NT, Mac) and CD player, each demanding their own speakers for audio output. Low end pro-sumer stuff (Radio Shack & the like) start at $200 for this, but it's huge. Decent mixers start well above that. A master volume would be nice, but since each device can do it's own output level, so I don't need channel level control. I just want to be able to hook everything up to one nice set of amplified speakers rather than 4 independent mediocre sets without damaging any of the sources. Any suggestions?"

John Thacker writes "Here is a News.com story about the Commerce Dept. approving the export of a 448-bit encryption system by a Tennessee company. (Home of Al Gore, incidentally) This comes on the eve of a big meeting between the FBI and computer companies about encryption. The catch? The program does have a back-door. But the back door key is specific to a user. The Gov't can still request to break in, but only for one user when a subpoena is obtained. Not perfect, but somewhat of a compromise. "

louie wrote in with This Link where you can read that Mozilla now has XML capability, courtesy of James Clark, technical guru of the XML group at W3. Can't wait to see that integrated into the main source tree.

Get ready to rumble as the tidal wave continues. First off, Andrew Mobbs sent us an important list of must-read RFCs. RFC2321, RFC2322, RFC2323, RFC2324, RFC2325. He also reminds everyone that ds.internic.net is no longer the canonical RFC archive. Luis Villa sent us Important news on the Java API. Gernot asked us to check This directory on ftp.gimp.org. Lastly, james sent us this one and Raj Dutt sent us this one.