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If people start receiving sentences for minor (or non-existent) infractions, then large numbers of people will realize that the difference in punishment between, say, talking about guns at work and using guns to fix the country is minimal.

Tracking by uptime, as a lot of other posts describe, simply is not enough. If you want to compare success by uptime, your management might as well just outsource your department to a datacenter company.

A Service Level Agreement can truly monitor your performance as a customer service organization. This idea would measure the soft side of IT support as well as uptime. Also if you do uptime measures, monitor the services, not just ping times. That is simply a waste.

HEAT is a very expensive system but can track service levels, and many open source or cheap packages can monitor uptimes.

A quick google has an example here.

1) RPM IT IS 'basically dead'. Take a look at: https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/rpm-maint/2 007-March/thread.html nobody is contributing to a RPM site launched with a big fanfare from Redhat. Even your former founder went APT when decided to go alone. "RPM Hell is a common way of referring to it". RPM doesn't allow concurrent version of libraries in a simple way and we can go on with arguments like this ones for a long time. Also if Redhat and Mandriva and Suse are using it, that doesn't mean it's a good system. Most Fedora people use APT and so do many Mandriva and Opensuse users. Their number is increasing. 2) I'm not talking about freeness of Mandriva. I had a very good time when French parliament decided to go with Ubuntu. That's freedom. 3) If you don't switch to Debian base soon you'll die soon. Time will prove it. Switch, soon. 4) RPM distributions are bad for Linux because commercial software producers are doing packages in this format and that's not for a technical reason but only for commercial agreements. We need autopackage-style for commercial software and APT based for free ones. Thats all folks, everybody can judge by them self...

Now here is a cup of STFU:
http://intranet.northcarolina.edu/docs/aa/research /copyright/PatentAndCopyrightPolicies.pdf
http://www.provost.duke.edu/pdfs/IntelProp.pdf

And those two are just in the fucking near by area. I'm not going to disclose who I work for but I promise you that the organization does indeed provide it's employees with ample opportunity to invent and patent their inventions.

Here's a cup of reading comprehension genius - read page 2 of that UNC policy and tell me who the patents are OWNED BY.

...every invention or discovery or part thereof that results from research or other activities carried out at a constituent institution...shall be property of the constituent institution

Know what that means? All the patents gotten by UNC students and profs are owned by UNC. Sheesh, and they say that the degrees from those ACC schools are watered down. Don't Duke and UNC teach reading anymore? OF COURSE they let you do work that leads to patents, and apply for patents, but YOU DON'T OWN THE RIGHTS. Which was my point, if you choose to read it. Yes, lots of grad students have patents from their work. Some derive (usually) small royalties from them. However, I still maintain I've never seen a University that, as standard policy, allows students (or even profs, for that matter) to patent work derived from their position in the university and keep full rights. This has been the case since the 50's when there were some famous cases related to that, a few involving some very lucrative catalyst patents. Since then, universities have wised up, and they make their inventors sign away the rights as a precondition of working or studying there.

I'm pretty sure you didn't read like I fucking told you to do:

Now here is a cup of STFU:
http://intranet.northcarolina.edu/docs/aa/research /copyright/PatentAndCopyrightPolicies.pdf
http://www.provost.duke.edu/pdfs/IntelProp.pdf

And those two are just in the fucking near by area. I'm not going to disclose who I work for but I promise you that the organization does indeed provide it's employees with ample opportunity to invent and patent their inventions.

Well, Duke University Shared Cluster Resource (http://www.csem.duke.edu/, over 1,100 processors and still growing) has used CentOS for the last couple of years, and it was working just fine.

In 1991, the Supreme Court addressed this question in Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Co.10 Feist is a publishing company specializing in area-wide telephone directories, and Rural is a public utility company that provides telephone service to Northwest Kansas. Feist had almost 50,000 white page listings in fifteen counties, while Rural had fewer than 8,000. The white pages listed the names, phone numbers, and towns of residence of all of the residents in a particular area alphabetically by last name. The two companies competed vigorously for yellow page advertisements. Feist copied Rural's collection of white page listings in order to compile its own. The district court granted summary judgment to Rural, relying on the 'sweat of the brow' doctrine, which justified protection because of the labor involved in collecting and arranging the facts.

The Supreme Court rejected this doctrine because, with the Copyright Act of 1976, Congress made it clear that originality was a requirement for copyright protection.

http://dukenews.duke.edu/2006/10/outsourcing.html here's the study http://www.boozallen.com/media/file/Globalization_ White_Collar_Work_v3.pdf This new information should be a wakeup call for policy-makers. The irony is that corporate profits no longer know national boundaries. Solutions are going to take political leadership, and real committment. If no solutions are forthcoming, we will continue to see significant employment displacement here, with all the social problems that that implies.

Quibble all you like, but before you do read this. Note the table about two-thirds down listing eight new testament manuscripts that are dated A.D 200 at the very earliest. Do you really think it's possible to write with any degree of accuracy about the life of someone who lived 200 years before hand in an age where litteracy is rare. Well nutters and zealots will believe anything.

As for the books of the old testament, well you don't really want to go there do you. It always amazes me how christians cherry pick what they like from the old testament (like the 10 commandments) and yet ignore those parts that advocate killing, corporal punishment and slavery. The old testament is as barbaric as Sharia Law.

"The "Roundup Ready" canola seed that grew in Mr. Schmeiser's fields is resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide marketed by Monsanto as "Roundup." The seed is sold only to farmers willing to sign a contract preventing them from engaging in seed-saving practices for planting in later years. Once a farmer agrees, they spray their fields with "Roundup," which kills everything but the "Roundup Ready" canola."

Unfortunately you don't even have a choice. Even worst, our Canadian legal system has set a very bad precedent for this:
http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/200 1dltr0015.html

Just saw that the inventor has a page on its history and mechanics , plus lots of great pics.

Actually, SCO [slashdot.org] (back when it was called Caldera) invented Open Source back in 1996 [google.com]. Yes, that's before the OSI thing, though after the foundation of the FSF.

The Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT had open source software as early as the 1960s and early 1970s beating out SCO by a long shot. The first computer game, Spacewar, came out in 1962 as a result of many programmers' contributions in an open manner. They used to compeat to see who could come up with a nifty hack, something that was considered impossible, never thought of, or was able to shave a few lines out of a program. Those programmer were amoung the first computer hackers and followed the Hacker ethic.

I think someone already has.

They're talking about the very few retards who swallowed their bullshit. Smart people read this instead.

http://europa.eu.int/eur-lex/pri/en/oj/dat/2002/l_ 201/l_20120020731en00370047.pdf

http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/200 2dltr0014.html

Does GB intend to withdraw from the EU?

If so, the "Big Brother" talk is more than idle literary reference. We can move forward with renaming Britannia to "Airstrip One."

Round 2 is people violating copyright claiming fair use

In this case, fair use is a pretty damned good argument. The fact that the videos will refuse to play because the player software has decided that it simply doesn't like your hardware is a good enough reason to circumvent the restrictions, IMO.

And if I owned the necessary hardware and such a disc, I'd be making that argument to the secretary of state that I should be allowed access to an unprotected copy, in order to be able to access the data as is my right as a valid licensee.

while they're not bad in any sense, they do have problems which are associated with any RPM based distro- dependency hell. I'm sure that any of you who've tried to install any applications would have faced the problem of missing dependencies sometime. And it's all too common to have a few packages totally missing from the repository which means that you have to search for their respective RPMs on the net, download them and install them separately. While functional, this can get a little frustrating over time.

"Dependency hell" existed before YUM (which came from Yellowdog's Seth K. Vidal) solved the problem. YUM is explicitly a dependency solver. It builds on top of the RPM system to automatically find and install the dependent RPM packages.

I knew it wasn't going to be Fedora Core or Yellow Dog since they seemed to have lots of problems when it came to media players.

Fedora Core (don't know about Yellow Dog) explicitly chooses to stay away from software which relies upon non-Free, patent-encumbered material. As a project it considers things like Ubuntu's binary graphics driver distribution, or the inclusion of mp3 decoding software (which is encumbered by the Frauenhoefer Institute's ridiculous patent) to be against the GPL and Free Software. As a result it helps to foster the development of free alternatives, without which there would be a much smaller software ecosystem. This is sane, long-term thinking which steps away from opportunistic, short-term compromises which seek to cannibalize market-share from other Linux distros by spreading confusion and misinformation. Debian has a very similar attitude. There are some non-Fedora run repositories where people have packaged up things like the mplayer codec bundle, mpg321, flash etc. If you really have to have them it's easy to edit /etc/yum/repos.d to add the repository.

The only solution was using a distro which had a better package management system, and did its work without bothering you, the end user.

Look, if an ebuild isn't in the portage tree then you're not going to have much luck installing it unless you make your own. Ditto for an rpm being available to yum in a repository. Your article is uninformed fanboi-ism. To your friend: don't let him near your PS3!

To anyone not using Gentoo, don't take this article as representative of the community, it's a great distro with many advantages and not everyone involved with it is as much as a moron as the article writer.

Most also don't "believe in" global warming.

I work with SkyPilot Networks (www.skypilot.com) hardware and have a wireless mesh network set up with 30+ nodes that I am managing. I was getting 5.8Mbps of throughput even when I was a couple of hops away from the gateway according to iperf! That's not bad at all! I think that all of this WiMAX stuff is very exciting, and I even wrote a short paper concerning future development which can be found at http://www.duke.edu/~jyw2/spectrum.html

Hereyou go. Just one reference out of many many studies. Alcohol involves a chemical effect that has negative consequences on a developing brain. Your claims of "don't put words in my mouth" are a bit of a joke because it is fairly clear what you believe the military is all about (killing random strangers) and that you are trying to draw a parallel between negative effects of drinking on a developing human brain and military service on a developing human brain.

So yes, some people in the military do kill, and I'm sure it has a profound negative effect on many of them. However, the positive effects on a developing human are going to FAR outweigh the negative, but that would require abandoning the "killing random strangers" mentality. How about every single individual going through basic training...again you have to give up the idea that its all just mindless conditioning, that you can't possibly learn discipline and the ability to make important decisions quickly, and how to lead people, and so on. Financial responsibility, independence, accountability...the list is huge.

I'm not putting words in your mouth. YOU were the one that drew the stupid parallel between the negative effects of the "going to kill random strangers" military service and drinking. I do agree that entering without a little thought about the matter isn't that great. Interestingly enough there have been great military men to say that conflict is good for the military because it weeds out the cowards who are only there to feed on the government. But the claims of indefinite is a little goofy, because when you sign up you sign a contract, and it is fairly clear on how long you will be in. If you really do support the military it would serve everyone better to not make such insulting remarks about our purpose.

"In 1953, Stanley L. Miller and Harold C. Urey, working at the University of Chicago, conducted an experiment which would change the approach of scientific investigation into the origin of life."

http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiolo gy/miller.html

This is basic 10th grade biology class in a public school. Amino acids do form in natural circumstances. This is exactly why arguments for creationism are not scientifically valid. There is direct evidence to disprove creationist arguments and creationists refuse to accept them.

That's a bit of an oversimplification:

The proper way to handle errors and avoid inconsistent states is not all that clear (see comments #53 and #57 in the bug report you linked).

RPM's main developer (Jeff Johnson) is, by the accounts I've read, a very talented developer. He asked about fixing this bug, was told by management that it was not important enough to risk destabilizing RPM for RHEL 4, and so marked the bug closed. Once he no longer worked for Red Hat, he promptly fixed it, as part of his continuing to maintain RPM on his own time. (Slightly more details on this thread, although it's horribly long.)

Wasn't the CPPA overturned by the 9th circuit court of appeals in Ashcroft v. The Free Speech Coalition and the Effect of the Decision??

Try giving a deep, suculent "yard of tongue down your throat" soul kiss to the suspected troll. Watch in the closet door mirror: If their spine lights up IT'S A CYLON! FOR GOD'S SAKE RUN! Otherwise it's probably a troll.

If you want to go ahead and have sex with the Cylon before you run, that's your business.

One problem yum has had is that it wants to check the network for updates before every operation. This has improved recently ... It still needs to re-read the data, which takes longer than it should, but only has to call out to the network if something is likely to be different, which makes a *huge* difference when you're installing individual packages or querying it with search or info.

Reading and re-reading the data should be quicker now, too.

The repository data is stored in a giant XML file which is incredibly slow to parse. Back in the day, it would read this file in every time you ran yum. Last year [1] they added a SQLite cache, so this step could be skipped if the data hadn't changed.

Relatively recently, they added a separate yum-metadata-parser written in C that dramatically reduces the time the parse step takes. Take these changes together and what used to take 45.5 seconds every time you ran yum now takes 7.5 seconds only if the data have changed. [2]

It sounds like they've done as much as they can without changing the transferred data to be an indexed binary format (with the associated forward/backward compatibility complexity).

(I'm not running Fedora Core 6, so I'm not sure if this change made it in.)

[1] - Looks like yum 2.3.1 introduced the cache, around March 2005.

[2] - See this message introducing it around May 2006 sometime after yum 2.6.1.

One problem yum has had is that it wants to check the network for updates before every operation. This has improved recently ... It still needs to re-read the data, which takes longer than it should, but only has to call out to the network if something is likely to be different, which makes a *huge* difference when you're installing individual packages or querying it with search or info.

Reading and re-reading the data should be quicker now, too.

The repository data is stored in a giant XML file which is incredibly slow to parse. Back in the day, it would read this file in every time you ran yum. Last year [1] they added a SQLite cache, so this step could be skipped if the data hadn't changed.

Relatively recently, they added a separate yum-metadata-parser written in C that dramatically reduces the time the parse step takes. Take these changes together and what used to take 45.5 seconds every time you ran yum now takes 7.5 seconds only if the data have changed. [2]

It sounds like they've done as much as they can without changing the transferred data to be an indexed binary format (with the associated forward/backward compatibility complexity).

(I'm not running Fedora Core 6, so I'm not sure if this change made it in.)

[1] - Looks like yum 2.3.1 introduced the cache, around March 2005.

[2] - See this message introducing it around May 2006 sometime after yum 2.6.1.

"Aren't these ridiculous software patents only valid in the US?"
No. And a patent...

Do you have any evidence to back that up? The remainder of your comments seemed to be based on this assumption.

To my knowledge, US software patents are only valid in the US, possibly Japan and some Asian countries.

Without being able to use a patent to prevent use and distribution on projects outside of the US, the threat of patent litigation by US corporations is a fairly empty one. And we haven't even discussed the very large US corporates with a vested interest in FOSS who wouldn't like to see this happen.

You pay too much in taxes, regulations, tariffs and other regulatory costs in the UK, so more people are poor. That's a fact that we don't see charts for.

I'll admit that I haven't conducted a thorough survey, but a quick google for "poverty statistics uk us" would suggest otherwise...

Hmmm, is this a troll.

Try looking up Atheism in a good dictionary. The form of the word gives it away, it's the opposite of believing a god exists, it's believing no god exists. The middle ground (the scientific ground) is called agnosticism. If you've come across any greek words in the past you may recognise the stem "gnost" which indicates something about knowledge, basically I take it to mean "don't know" - this word is used for those that are neither theist nor atheist.

And incidentally physics (the purest science IMHO as a physicist ;0) is based on assumptions about basic elements of the universe. We call them axioms they are principles that are accepted as true without rigorous proof. For example Einsteins relativity has the axioms: 1) there is no absolute frame of reference (Lorentz invariance); 2) speed of light is a constant. From these axioms / assumptions we can build time dilation (for example) a measurable effect but we can't certainly say that the axioms are true. Indeed every now and again someone proposes a theory that counters major axioms - like non-constancy of c - which makes things very interesting. Other axioms inhabit a more metaphysical realm, such as existence of other minds, existence of an external reality (brains in vats and all that).

So are axioms true? It depends what you believe. You can't prove them. There's a very readable account at http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/Philosophy/axioms/axi oms/node3.html .

Sorry, I've gone off on one I think ... please point out the flaws in my argument, there are several.

HTH

Parent Anonymous Coward knows just enough law to be dangerous. I'll take this opportunity to respectfully correct where (s)he went wrong:

If Microsoft were to sue a Linux entity (a distro, a developer, a company, whatever), the doctrine of unclean hands (also known as "laches") might provide a successful defense--but it would only be a limited defense. Here's why:

The Federal Circuit decided in the famous Aukerman v. Chaides, 960 F.2d 1020 (Fed. Cir. 1992) (en banc), that a successful latches defense prevents damages for the period prior to when the law suit was filed. This means that, if for example, Microsoft waited 10 years to sue somebody for infringement after the date *on which they should have originally sued*, they couldn't get damages for those 10 years. IMPORTANT: Microsoft could, if it won, still prevent the defendant from using that patented invention after that. It just means that Microsoft wouldn't get any $$$ for those 10 years.

Another subtlety of the laches defense is that (I'm pretty sure about this, though I don't have any cases to cite), the plaintiff's original threats have to be fairly specific. So, for example, Microsoft has to send a nasty letter to a particular company, saying "You're infringing on our patent, number 7,899,999," to create a reasonable apprehension on the part of the defendant that an infringement suit is imminent.
If Steve Ballmer is just yelling, "Those Linux people! They're infringing!!!"--well, that's just got going to be specific enough to give a defendant a good laches defense.

See http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/200 5dltr0009.html for good info on the laches defense in patent infringement suits.

(Also, btw, it is incorrect that a plaintiff always has a duty to mitigate damages. I can think of a couple examples of where that's not true. But that's enough law for one post.)

Why only focus on the past six years when there are four Presidencies' worth of history on the subject?

There's an argument that rights organizations such as ASCAP and BMI over-compensate the top players and under-compensate the little guys. On a site such as YouTube, you can see how this would happen. Sure, there are lots of clips from Comedy Central or SNL, but there are also lots of clips of Joe-Bob falling off his dirt-bike while trying to jump a bonfire. All of these clips are covered by copyright, but it's likely that Joe-Bob's videographer won't see a dime from a video rights society.

The other thing to be aware of is that a video often impacts other copyrights. So, if the video of Joe Bob jumping over the bonfire happens to include people singing "Kum-By-Ya" in the background, you might have to get the right to transmit the music. If he's clearly wearing a sponge-bob T-shirt while jumping, you might have to get the right to that as well. My personal opinion is that such things are covered by fair use. But, companies (especially video production companies, which naturally want to minimize fair use) go to great lengths to buy the rights to such content and will edit things out if they can't obtain such rights. Duke Law School has a great comic book (?!) about this at http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/digital.html .

I have an easier application deployment solution. Set up a local apt repository with the software that your business needs, update your repository configuration, then...

# aptitude install openoffice.org

If you want a completely automated process, stick that in a shell script and force defaults:

# aptitude -y install openoffice.org

No licensing woes, installer IDs, registry hell, anything like that. yum works just as well for you rpm fiends.

I'm not exactly sure that all of the complaints about RPM really stack up. RPM by itself is not inherently broken. It's actually a solid format for distributing source and binary software.

I think a number of the early complains about RPM stem from Red Hat's initial lack of a solid package dependency resolver and downloader like apt for Debian. In recent years this has been addressed by the likes of Yum and the very promising Smart package managers.

I have yet to see a trully perfect package management solution, but RPM certainly has some strengths over the options currently out there. Yes some pacakage maitainers can do a bad job at stating dependencies but this is more of QA issue than a problem w/the RPM format.

All Linux distros, other Unixes and even Windows suffer from some form of dependency / DLL hell. I think we really could set Linux apart or at least a distro apart is by coming up w/a small set of pacakages that constitute a base system and keeping them stable for a number of years. This is one of the areas that makes Windows look "more compatible" than the 20+ top Linux distros. This is what the LSB specification intended but mostly failed to do. Almost all Windows software is available for the two most popular OS releases (2K and XP) but in Linux it's all distro-specific, which is a shame.

Here's an example of a all too common disappiontment:
My boss installed a Linux distro the other day on his desktop. This was his first Linux desktop coming from a Windows background. I walked into his office and saw Firefox open to the Evolution website. When I asked him what he was doing, he said the distro had come with Evolution 2.2 and the latest release was 2.8. He was just trying to update Evolution. Well, anyone else tried this on a "packaged" Linux distro? You need to rebuild it from source, plus about 15 dependencies including a newer releaes of glibc. It just doesn't work "out of the box". We need to establish a flexible but solid base system so that people can just write software that JUST WORKS for GNU/Linux. This idea of having to get a 3rd party package built for YOUR distro is just a waste of everyone's time.

That story is related in this comic (don't let the format fool you, it's an extremely good intro to the problems with current IP law.)

Oh, and don't worry about D/Ling it. It's under Creative Commons.

I went to a fairly high end school, that was the worst thing you could do, they'd even protect you if you were involved in a DUI or date rape type event but cheating was an instant expulsion.
Happen to go to this school or some other highly exclusionist school?

We automatically record around 70 lectures per week using the Lectopia System http://lectopia.uwa.edu.au/ and haven't noticed any major drops in attendance in any of those lectures. One of our departments, the School of Computing, did a study of the use of Lectopia across a number of units and found there was no discernable drop in attendance at all compared to the control classes that hadn't used the system.

What we find is that although any recording is only second-best to a good-quality live interactive lecture, it is great for reviewing lectures before exams, for English-as-a-second-language students, those with disabilities and distance and part-time students, as well as regular students who have time-table clashes or who just slept in. We also notice some students putting down their pens and instead listening and participating in class and then later at home or in a computer lab with headphones on and the web browser in the background, writing notes on the lecture in Word as they pause and rewind the recording.

For some lecturers this system is the easiest and simplest way for them to get their lecture content "webified" and it's also great to be able to enable last year's version of a lecture when the lecturer is sick or the lecture has to be cancelled for some reason.

We use the Lectopia system (originally called iLectures) which is an enterprise-class system that enables lecturers to book their lectures at the start of semester and then on the day of each lecture just walk in, turn on the microphone (which triggers the recording) and deliver their lecture as they would normally. 15 minutes or so after they finish their lecture, streaming and podcast versions of the lecture appear on the web in their unit web pages all without any human intervention.

The system automatically captures whatever gets shown on the data projector as a high resolution, high quality XGA stream synchronised to the audio from the lecture theatre sound system so students can see the mouse moving around as the lecturer talks. It also means that no matter whether the lecturer is browsing the web, running a program or just showing powerpoint slides, it all gets recorded at a high enough quality for the users to read the small text better than if they were actually in the lecture theatre.

The system automatically compresses multiple versions for different bandwidths from 14k up to 1Mbps or more in Windows Media, Quicktime, MPEG-4, MP3, iPod audio book and 3GP formats for mobile phones etc in streaming as well as multiple downloadable formats. It also automatically publishes podcast versions to iTunes U.

Duke University in Durham NC uses Lectopia http://www.duke.edu/ddi/projects/capture.html to automatically record their lectures to fill all those iPods they give out to their students. A third of the universities here in Australia and New Zealand also use the system. The University of Western Australia (the original developer of Lectopia) records over 400 lectures per week across over 40 lecture theatres while at least one other university in Australia is planning to install automated Lectopia digitisers in 150 classrooms across their campuses.

We see podcasting/streaming lectures as a very valuable enhancement of existing lectures, something which turns them into a resource available 24/7/365 anywhere in the world. Not a silver bullet to replace lectures, but rather something to expand their usage and capture their value making something that used to last for one hour once a year in one room on campus into something available anytime, anywhere.

-Mart

Martin Hill, Digital Media Specialist
Information Management Services, Curtin University of Technology
Western Australia
web: http://ilectures.curtin.edu.au/

In a truly fair legal system, the lawyers would only be paid after all appeals were exhausted and both sides' costs would be borne by the losing party.

It sounds nice, but if you don't sort of implicitly assume that all cases are resolved in a just manner. Well... Suppose you have $citizen who wants to sue $EvilCorp for being evil. The citizen does so. The citizen loses. The citizen has to pay EvilCorp's lawyers millions. That's a really good way to discourage suing EvilCorp. (Or consider the other way around. $EvilCorp sues $citizen because it's evil. They win. To add insult to injury, the citizen now also loses millions paying for the lawyers.)

That's the three-second Slashdot version, admittedly, but loser-pays is not all peaches and cream and pretty fluffy bunnies. Here's some random Internet paper that looks to present a few of the issues:

The fundamental problem with a loser-pays proposal is that it would chill counsel from pursuing cases involving potentially legitimate claims where success is uncertain ... Given the numerous variables that counsel must weigh, and the uncertainty of the outcome, the prospect of facing automatic sanctions for merely being incorrect would undoubtably deter a great number of claims that warrant pursuit.

How can they enhance THAT?

But you're not really stating that correctly. The purpose is to motivate the creation of more material, for a richer creative landscape that the public can enjoy. That's not the same as "public domain."

In regards to copyright the U.S. Constitution states: "Congress shall have the power . . . to promote the Progress of Science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries." The intellectual property clause was added to the Constitution because of the recognition of the importance of balancing both an author's interest in protecting their creative works with the public interest in maintaining a method by which those same works could enter the public domain.

It was also an accurate ruling because, under either a natural rights or property theory, copyright deserves infinite protection. The ruling has furthermore strong foundations because the CTEA is within the boundaries of both Constitutional limitations and Congressional intent, and its addition of the fair use exception accomplishes many of the same objectives that would be realized by allowing the work to fall into the public domain.

This is a well done hardware project, but there was no analysis demonstrating that he could generate random numbers using this hardware.

For example, see

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudorandom_number_g enerator

http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/General/rand_rate.php

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3742/i s_200201/ai_n9046353

5031621 can i connect to aol useing linux 2006-03-20 23:13:49 5031621 can i connect to aol using linux 2006-03-20 23:14:36 1 http://yolinux.com/ 5031621 how do i connect aol with linux 2006-03-21 17:35:01 1 http://yolinux.com/ 5031621 how do i connect aol with linux 2006-03-21 17:35:01 2 http://yolinux.com/ 5031621 how do i connect aol with linux 2006-03-21 21:09:08 3 http://www-jerry.oit.duke.edu/ 5031621 aol for linux 2006-03-25 23:28:02 1 http://yolinux.com/ 5031621 linux 2006-04-19 13:10:43 5031621 how do i add a modom to a linux system 2006-04-19 13:11:25 5031621 how do i add a modem to a linux system 2006-04-19 13:13:55 2 http://www.aboutdebian.com/ 5031621 linuxmodoms.com 2006-04-19 21:11:18 5031621 linux games 2006-04-26 21:29:56 1 http://www.linuxgames.com/

http://www.oit.duke.edu/helpdesk/jabber/

Duke University, at least, does this; as far as I know no one uses it.

This was probably pointed out in the last discussion on this topic; if so, it's worth mentioning again. Here's an interesting comic from Duke Law that points out some of the landmines of copyright law. Instead of collage, it uses documentary filmmaking as its example. It tries to be balanced, but to me it paints a bleak picture of the future of art.

SharkJumper

If, on the other hand, someone decides there's a market in altering DVDs and reselling them to you, the consumer, then that is different.

The article sadly never expands upon Apple's own college offering, iTunes U, which is supposedly free for Colleges. Not only do students have access to music collections and the iTunes Music Store, but they also can listen to and download class lectures, professor podcasts, etc. They've recently added three more schools to the iTunes U roster including Duke, North Carolina Central University, and Butte College.

Did the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 have such an effect?
Theoretically, yes. In practice, no.

"The AHRA also provides for a royalty tax of up to $8 per new digital recording machine and 3 percent of the price of all digital audiotapes or discs. This tax is paid by the manufacturers of digital media devices and distributed to the copyright owners whose music is presumably being copied. In consideration of this tax, copyright owners agree to forever waive the right to claim copyright infringement against consumers using audio recording devices in their homes."

Are you trying to imply that doing your best to make sure the laws are enforced is a bad thing ? No matter how unpopular a law is, it's still law as long as it is on the books. You would not want to live in a world where people can pick and choose what laws they obey.

Right, only certian people should be allowed to pick and choose what laws they obey

My concern is the almost inevitable expansion of this program to things other than cp. The past actions of this government (secret illegal wiretapping, datamining bank records, holding US citizens for years without charging them with a crime, touture, etc) show just how little the current administration cares about the privacy and constitutional rights of Americans and leads me to beleive that (if a system like this is built) iti s only a matter of time before it is used to monitor and archive internet traffic and look for many things other than cp (copyrighted files? normal/legal porn? political dissent?)