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here you go... http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.html

"contains only the slightest differences (probably typographical) from the book we have in the Bible today."

With some people's allergies, a can of Beanee Weenees having a few typos on it's label would be completely unnaceptable. Shouldn't we hold the writings that control the destiny of man up to a little higher standard than a can of Beanee Weenees?

The only thing I regret about religion is that the Greeks didn't win more wars. At least then little boys would get to look foward to their sunday school lessons on Aphrodite, goddess of love, beauty and sexual rapture.

Linkage to a comment on it from Duke University School of Law: http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/200 2dltr0023.html

The organization in question has a membership which is almost entirely print media and authors. They have nothing to do with the RIAA or its Canadian equivalent. Given the complexity of the music copyright issue, they should avoid any mention of it. They'll just end up looking stupid and it will hurt their credibility with the kids they're trying to educate.

Actually, if you want a comic book on copyright that is actually good: http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/
It is a comic book put together by a couple of law profs and deals with what artists can and can't get away with. It manages to be educational and entertaining. Of course, it's pitched more at university students and not elementary school kids.

Check out this article for many really fascinating details about discovering the problem with the tower, and how it was fixed.

http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm

There is a fantastic story from 1995 in the New Yorker as told by the lead engineer of the Citigroup Center building. He talks about how one of his engineering students at Cambridge told him his math was wrong and his building would fail. He didn't believe him at first, but finally found his error. He decided to come forth with the fact that he screwed up, which could have ended his career. An excellent read.

http://www.duke.edu/~hpgavin/ce131/citicorp1.htm

Your point about "digital audio" media is well taken, but most generic CD-Rs are classed as 'data storage' and not 'digital audio' and thus don't offer any kickbacks to the media companies here in the U.S. [1] So your giant spindle of Taiyo Yuden CD-Rs, designed for use in your computer's drive, are safe; regardless of whether you burn Red Book audio to them or not.

I haven't looked recently so I don't even know if Best Buy and the other big box stores even sell the "digital audio" type of CD-Rs anymore. I'm sure if you go to Guitar Center or any other low-budget-musician supply store, you'll find them: basically they're designed for use with special "consumer" audio recording devices, which wouldn't use the data discs. (Oh, and they cost a lot more than the computer/data ones, obviously.)

Interestingly enough, actual professional-grade CD-burners (which the industry seems to define as anything with balanced XLR inputs and rackmount ears), normally don't have such silly restrictions, and will happily burn onto whatever type of blank you shove in there.

It would please me to no end if the "Digital Audio" tax was the stake through the heart of the "consumer" CD-R format, since it was a hideous abortion to begin with from day one. Ironically, the only people I ever knew who bought the expensive "Digital Audio" CD-Rs were people in garage bands who had 'consumer' CD-recording equipment that wouldn't use data discs. Meanwhile, a few years later, every guy with a computer and a spare bay in it bought a data drive and started copying CDs.

Hope the industry got their money's worth with that law. Any time I start to feel any moral hiccups while "stealing" music, I just think of what the industry did to DAT and how they tried to do it to CD-R, and go about my merry way.

References:
[1] MUSIC PIRACY AND THE AUDIO HOME RECORDING ACT. See section The Audio Home Recording Act, specifically: "The SCMS and royalty requirements apply only to digital audio recording devices. Because computers are not digital audio recording devices, they are not required to comply with Serial Copy Management System requirement."

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/zoomcomic.html
That's the plight of the documentary filmmaker in this comic.

I suddenly want to dig out the 1984 commercial again.

Text of dialog: http://www.uriahcarpenter.info/1984.html

Quicktime of ad: http://www.duke.edu/~tlove/mac.htm

That ad is known by many as the best ad ever. AFAIK, it only was played once during the 1984 American Superbowl commercial challenge.

Enjoy!

• Copy on Write saves you real memory, cache memory, and CPU time by pretending that each forked process has a true copy of a memory segment when it in fact is looking at the original. That is, right up until a fork tries to write to that memory location, in which case an exception is handled by making an actual copy to a new location and allowing the write.
• Linus believes that the exception will occur enough in real world usage that it will be slower than just doing the copy in the first place.
• Linus wants to push the manual use of zero-copy memory sharing through the vmsplice() routine. He believes that the programmer will always know better than the system when to share memory.
• Linus doesn't like "VM Games" despite the fact that Virtual Memory, Memory Mapped Files, Disk I/O, Write Caching, etc, etc, etc, are all already "Memory Games" and "VM Games"

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/

Three law professors have created a comic book that does a good job of describing fair use as it applies to documentary film makers. It's much more entertaining than some of the other, much drier sources out there. The book itself has many examples of the fair use of copyright and trademark materials.

One of the problems is that, even if you completely comply with the law, distributors may not take your work because they are afraid of being sued. We have a culture of entitlement over here and people are more than willing to enter the lawsuit lottery. Sometimes it pays off big. (RIM was just forced to pay more than half a billion for infringing invalid patents.) The net result is that people will bend over backwards to avoid even the fair use of copyrighted material.

University Professor isn't on here? Wow. It might not pay as well as software engineering, but you get summers off, and once you have tenure, it's impossible to get fired.

Then again, you have to deal with rapists on a daily basis, so maybe software engineering, although not as stable, is a better profession.

Reminds me of a classic bit from the Dave Letterman show (can't remember if it was pre-CBS or post-NBC). Dave pauses during his opening monologue, then smiles at the camera. "Ladies and gentlemen in the viewing audience at home: If you would like a videotaped copy of tonight's show.... TURN ON YOUR DAMN VCRs!!" (Massive laughter from studio audience.)

The point of the joke was to poke fun at the semi-common practice of offering videotaped recordings of TV shows for sale during the actual broadcast. Doing so, of course, is in no way illegal. *Neither is recording the broadcast on your own for your personal enjoyment.* That act is by definition "fair use" and it is covered by law.

The important thing to realize is that the act remains the same *regardless of the mechanism being used*. If I connect an audio patch cable from my radio's headphone jack to my computer's sound card input, I can record broadcasted music off the air. Since I didn't use a traditional tape machine, does that automatically make my actions ILLEGAL? Come on, get a clue already.

If you honestly don't get it, try this link:

http://www.law.duke.edu/cspd/comics/

If you *still* don't get it ...well, to paraphrase an old saying, "You can lead a mind to understanding, but you can't make it think."

http://www.decorplast.ch/_borders/smart-54.JPG

http://www.duke.edu/~mpc8/pictures/Semester%20abro ad-%20PARIS/mom%20and%20dad%20and%20smart%20car.jp g

http://www.arisaka.org/berlin/smart.jpg

...and i think that was not a stupid choice.
Especially not for that parking thing :D

Prayer did affect six month mortality.

"...six-month mortality was lower in patients assigned bedside MIT, with the lowest absolute death rates observed in patients treated with both prayer and bedside MIT..."

So the death rate is the same right away but six months later, if you were prayed for, you have a much better chance of being alive. You will also have less of a chance to be re-hospitalized.

As a physician myself, I find it interesting that the authors chose to pitch this as a failure for prayer rather than a success.

The comment that this study contradicts the results of a previous http://dukemednews.duke.edu/news/article.php?id=50 56 stenting study is incorrect. While that study found a different in the number of adverse effects, the difference was not statistically significant. While the headline for the earlier press release suggested some benefit, the study itself did not.

Not to nitpick or anything, but I recently read a study that debunks your claims.

As a soon-to-be-newly-minted MBA at a pretty decent program, I'll second QuantumG's thoughts, and add some more for the "MBAs suck" crowd:

I agree that there now seems to be a glut of MBA programs out there on the marketplace. I pass at least four or five signs advertising such driving along I-85 in the Southeast. However, a lot of them (especially the ones from the for-profit tech-ed places) do not seem to be taken that seriously at all. Even with the ones that actually pass accrediation muster, the job marketplace has sifted out the degrees into different tiers. So the marketplace at least has its own ideas for determining a high-quality degree from a good-quality one from a no-quality one. Whether the marketplace actually has the right choices is an exercise left to the reader, but at least it's good information to have when considering what kinds and which programs to apply for.

My decision to go out and grab an MBA was realizing, after my third dot-com-related layoff in one year (the annus horribilis of 2001), that the business types seemed to be able to quickly land elsewhere, whereas us techies had to scrape and claw for work. That, and what seemed like a huge threat of offshoring in 2002.

I do have some quick advice for you techies out there thinking about the MBA path: if you're interested in simply moving up the corporate ladder where you are, consider a local (and accredited by AACSB!) program and/or one that focuses on engineering or technology management (Duke has a great MEM program). If, however, you're intent on switching career paths (say, from technology to marketing, finance or management consulting), then try to get four or five good solid years of work experience with a nice "trajectory", score at least a 700 on the GMAT, and apply to as many of the top fulltime programs that you think you can get into.

I'm officially requesting /. change it's name to /FUD!

"yum has no local cache search, no download resuming..."

The local cache for yum is located in /var/cache/yum/, if the file is already downloaded it will not download it again, it will only redownload the repomd.xml file again and continue. A useful distinction is the progress bars "###" & "===", the first is reading and the second is downloading.

yum is very strict on how to handle errors and personally if I was getting a kernel upgrade (or something else important) via yum I would definately want it to be careful! This is mentioned in the YumTodont - the discussion linked from the YumTodont gives some good insight on the topic aswell.

Haydn.

I'm officially requesting /. change it's name to /FUD!

"yum has no local cache search, no download resuming..."

The local cache for yum is located in /var/cache/yum/, if the file is already downloaded it will not download it again, it will only redownload the repomd.xml file again and continue. A useful distinction is the progress bars "###" & "===", the first is reading and the second is downloading.

yum is very strict on how to handle errors and personally if I was getting a kernel upgrade (or something else important) via yum I would definately want it to be careful! This is mentioned in the YumTodont - the discussion linked from the YumTodont gives some good insight on the topic aswell.

Haydn.

If you are interested in DNA nanotech, definitely check out the SciAm article by Ned Seeman (the founder of the field). Here are some links to lab pages:

Ned Seeman
William Shih
Eric Winfree
John Reif

Although I am sure Michael Crichton is an expert on just about everything from dinosaurs to time travel, there is considerably more substantial reference material available on this matter. http://law.duke.edu/publiclaw/supremecourtonline/l abvmet.html

Not to mention the inherent problems with advertising Pepsi on some bloodstained field of carnage.

That's so shortsighted. Everyone knows that Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.

It exists, and it is called yum: http://linux.duke.edu/projects/yum/

Learn before you FUD-Spread.

Lighting rods don't necessarily conduct all of the lightning's current. One idea is that they conduct some current and ionize the air around them -- then the bulk of the current flows through that ionized air (just like the ionized air lightning usually flows through). Another theory is that they work to prevent lightning. This is one of those things that has led to much debate.

I've used it for years, simple easy email and web driven work request system. Here's the site and here's a live WREQ queue to poke at with read-only access.

I've used it for years, simple easy email and web driven work request system. Here's the site and here's a live WREQ queue to poke at with read-only access.

While I find the idea that life originated from some primordial soup mix to be distasteful at best and downright inconceivable at worst...

Doesn't everyone in biochem201 do Miller's experiment?

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

The unfortunate thing about the skeptics is that they seldom want to take into account 1) time, and 2) chaos.

I think we have different ideas of "favor" .. I'm factoring cost of ownership, free support, and ease of integration as well as performance.

Xen is not an out of the box virtualization solution. You have to spend an hour setting up key pairing and writing a few scripts, and be comfortable with that.

However, the people most likely to need that kind of technology, are comfortable with that.

Open source is rallying around Xen, and I think you'll see its usability increase drastically in the not too distant future.

Please take a moment and read the Beowulf definition for a class 1 cluster :

Here

Xen tips the scales for many things that I like to do. But maybe not someone else. I think "better" at this point remains relative to the intended use, and ability to craft a means of managing it for that use.

So, the problem with Network neutrality is that it opens up the DSL and Cable providers up to competition for their other service, and that'a a big disincentive for them to roll it out. I wrote an article about this at the Duke Law & Technology Review.

So, the problem with Network neutrality is that it opens up the DSL and Cable providers up to competition for their other service, and that'a a big disincentive for them to roll it out. I wrote an article about this at the Duke Law & Technology Review.

I found this lecture rather interesting.
Professor Koleman Strumpf: "The Effect of File Sharing on the Sale of Entertainment Products: The Case of Recorded Music and Movies"
Warning: This is a realmedia stream! If anyone knows how to download it and convert it please tell me, I would love to have a copy of it localy.

See section V.

THE FIRST SALE DOCTRINE AND DIGITAL PHONORECORDS

"Notwithstanding the provisions of 106(3), the owner of a particular * * * phonorecord lawfully made under this title, or any person authorized by such owner, is entitled, without the authority of the Copyright owner, to sell or otherwise dispose of the possession of that * * * phonorecord."

The disposal 109(a) speaks of allows two options: distribution of a particular phonorecord to another or to destruction of a particular phonorecord. Thus, this section allows me to sell a vinyl copy of a phonorecord to a friend or destroy my phonorecord without requiring permission from the author.

There is plenty of stuff on the web, but to get you started, here are some things to get you thinking about how abiogenesis may have occurred, or at least suggest the workings of some steps along the way.

1) In 1953, Stanley Miller, working under Harold Urey, showed that amino acids are able to form spontaneously in the conditions which may have existed in earth's primordial atmosphere. In three months, his experiment produced at least 7 amino acids, which included 3 of the 20 found in modern (and probably ancient) organisms. (Amino acids are the 'building blocks' of all proteins).

2) Certain lipid molecules, including phospholipids (the main type of molecule that makes up cell membranes), will spontaneously form a number of structures when placed in water, eg "micelles" and "bi-layers".

Micelles are tiny spherical structures made of relatively few molecules, and can 'carry' other molecules inside them, although I'm am not aware of the significance of this.

Bi-layers are often much larger structures capable of forming large sheets, or "membranes" which can be quite bendy and stretchy. They can even bend around on themselves to form massive. spherical "containers" which separate their contents from the outside world and thus allows the contents to become significantly chemically different. This is exactly the structure used by all living cells to contain the vast array of chemical reactions that need to be carried out under special chemical conditions.

The significance of spontaneous organisation of certain lipids is that it is thermodynamically favourable for these structures to occur and therefore plausible that they played an important part in containing the first biochemical interactions that occurred during abiogenesis.

3) It has also been suggested that certain clay substrates may have formed a biochemical "staging ground" for collecting and organising biologically significant molecules. I remember reading (possibly in a Richard Dawkins book) about one theory which suggested the idea that the clay substrates themselves could have been self-reproducing. The premise of this particular theory is that imperfections in some crystal structures are often repeated throughout the crystal as it grows. Therefore crystal structures with certain imperfections may have encouraged more of themselves to exist. Furthermore, the theory says, if particular "self-replicating" crystal structures gave rise to large scale properties that further encouraged the production of these crystals, then they would become even more prolific. For example, if a certain "self-replicating" crystal was usually generated in still water, but also had the property that, when washed into slow-moving water, sediments of the crystal caused that slow-moving water to "dam up", then the water would become still again, thus creating an environment suitable for creating more of the crystal.

Far-fetched? Perhaps, But I am always wary of criticising a theory simply because of my own incredulity.

Anyway. The upshot is that we are a number of theories of abiogenesis out there, none of them at all complete. I guess that any theories will remain speculative until we are able to satisfactorily string together a series of observeda and reproducible reactions and interactions that would be able to explain abiogenesis.

So Google are producing a Ubuntu-based distribution. This isn't news as most large companies do this (hell, my last job had 10 staff and we were about to produce a Debian customisation). Google used to use a Red Hat distribution but are have been switching since at least November last year according to https://lists.dulug.duke.edu/pipermail/dulug/2005- November/016656.html.

I'll eat my dog if this ever is released to the world as a "consumer" distribution, designed to take Windows marketshare.

Playing the stock market is gambling where you on average get 108 pennies for every dollar you risk.

That's quite an unsupported assertion. How about backing it up. Hint: You won't be able to, because it isn't true.

Well, the Miller-Urey experiments give us an answer to this.
They showed that organic molecules can be created by discharging electric sparks in boiling water, methane, hydrogen and ammonia, which happens to reproduce quite well the conditions that prevailed on the early Earth.
He showed that this could produce aminoacids, sugars, lipids, nucleic acid bases. There are your basic building blocks.

The actual study shows that what the now inflated US numbers count are associate degrees along with bachelor degrees.

US
BS in IT 84k
BS other 137k
AS all 84k

Total 222k

Hey the Indian and Chinese numbers are fake and ours are not! Wait, if we include all our associate degrees and all our non-IT degrees then our fake numbers are higher than their fake numbers! Yay for America!

The Red Herring article fails to link to its source. Ironically the actual study criticizes articles like these for failing to identify their sources. So here is the study itself. Enjoy.

Modelling 'real' neurons in detail is generally done with ~10k compartmental models, which are generally described by something like:
http://neuron.duke.edu/cells/
and modelled in something like:
http://www.neuron.yale.edu/neuron/

Even using vastly simplified neurons, like integrate & fire types, for example: http://www.nsi.edu/users/izhikevich/publications/s pikes.htm
you still have many vastly different types of spiking behaviors.

You then still have to deal with the fact that neurons 'generally' connect to about ~10k others, (actual range something like 10-100k). And that's before you get to details like what neurons are where, with what densities, that long range connections in mammalian brains are generally not very well understood, etc. etc. etc.

The brain is a lot more complicated than you think. We're still many many years away from modeling a mouse brain, at a purely neuronal level. I mean, there still isn't a definitive model of the Aplysia, neuron count ~10k...

Jokes aside, I beleive private institutions are free to set their own standards, but they should do so carefuly. Clearly, this was not a set standard at all, but a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. What a waste to admit the student, educate him for almost a year and half, give him a great scholarship and then have a person who should be an academic and life mentor try to drive the student out of the university in some kind of chest pounding contest. If the student does manage to stay at the University and graduated, I'm sure they'll ask him for a donation a year later. I think I lived this storry.

For ever teacher's pet, there's a teacher's punching-bag.

Start off on the good foot. If you're a magic-user, the most important spell is Lvl. 3 Eroticism. Be sure to tell the GM that you would like to "put on your robe and wizard hat" before you learn it, aight?

If your party ever encounters a gazebo, be sure to ask the GM how many hit dice it has. Be careful - those things have powerful resists.

And on a more serious note, if you enjoyed either of those links, you're on the right track. Buy a basic set. Find a group of players who recognize a (Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Monty Python, Terry Pratchett, Snow Crash, or any other bit of canonical geek humor) and start playing. If they're not playing D&D, play whatever it is they're playing. All pen-and-paper RPGs are fundamentally the same - if you've got even the slightest inklings of an imagination and a sense of humor, it doesn't matter how introverted you are. You'll have more fun than you ever thought possible.

The Supreme Court found that Grokster "promoted" abuse solely on evidence that Grokster employees planned to use growth from abuse in scaling their network, and considered ways to use that abuse. They did not find any evidence that Grokster publicly promoted abuse. They found "intent" by a corporation, which is not a person who can "intend" (even if you believe that a person's intent can ever be proven). Hence my comment that Grokster "appreciated" abuse, but did not promote it.

That's just not true. Grokster publically advertised that it could be used for trading copyrighted materials. They even advertised specific copyrighted materials that were available for download. See Duke's analysis.

They say, among other things:
"Similarly, Grokster sent users a newsletter promoting its ability to provide particular, popular copyrighted materials." ...

No, a magnet link doesn't point to anything.

Magnet links are "an open URI-scheme and supporting practices/code for enabling seamless integration between websites and locally-running utilities, such as file-management tools." They are a URN rather than a URL in that it specifies what to search for rather than where to download from. See http://magnet-uri.sourceforge.net/ for more information and the spec.

A magnet link will never point to a torrent file, but it could specify a file hash for a torrent file that can be searched against.

This is a magnet link

It specifies what to search for. The href portion is "magnet:?xt=urn:sha1:YNCKHTQCWBTRNJIV4WNAE52SJUQCZ O5C". When clicked it will cause your P2P client to launch (if installed) and search for files whos SHA1 hash match the one provided.

This is a link to a torrent

It specifies a location to download the torrent from. The href portion is "http://torrent.dulug.duke.edu/torrents/stentz-binar y-x86_64.torrent". When clicked it will either download the torrent file via http or launch your torrent client and connect to the tracker server.
 

First off, I must say that IAAP; however, as with all science that shouldn't be your only reason to believe me, it just gives some credence to what I am about to say. One of the most important things to point out with both your critique of the article, and TFA itself, is with regards to the temperature said to be obtained.

The basic problem with describing the temperature of the fusion elements is that there is no clear temperature. To describe something as having a temp, it must be in some form of thermodynamic equilibrium. If you relate the temperature, for example, to the kinetic energy of a particle, then there is a certain distribution of energy of the particles in thermodynamic equilibrium, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution.

If, however, you take only a small number of particles at a very specific velocity in the distribution, you may have an exceedingly large temperature, but it cannot be said to be in thermodynamic equilibrium! So calling it eleventy-billion degrees Kelvin [sic], does not make it so.

By way of another example, we may use that same distribution to describe other forms of the energy of the particles, such as their atomic/molecular energy levels. If we to now preferentially prepare the particles in the higher energy states, and compare this energy distribution to a Fermi-Dirac Distribution or the Classical Limit, we see that in order to accomplish this distribution, we need to have either k (Boltzmann's Constant) or T (the ABSOLUTE temperature) to be negative. As k is a constant, we have the absolute temperature, which can never be less than zero Kelvin or Rankine, less than zero.

Then surely such a system could never exist, you cry. But it does, for this "population inversion" as it is called, is what drives nearly all forms of lasing with the exception of Free Electron LASERs and their ilk. Most everyone has seen a laser, and while they may be cool, they certainly are not that cool.

Basically, my major beef is that, unless the system is in thermodynamic equilibrium, you must be very careful about throwing out anything about raising the temperature or similar ideas.

So, why is it still called temperature? Because it's a nice handy word that we're all familiar with. And that is fine, as long as you don't take the analogy of temperature too far and try to apply ideas to it that can't be applied given your assumptions.

I'm certainly not saying you're wrong in being skeptical, nor am I saying TFA is wrong, I am merely suggesting that thermodynamics (particularly the first law) does not successfully deny the claims made.

How about EphPod?

It's what I've been using since I bought my iPod. Didn't even attempt to install iTunes.

Sadly, it's not open source, but here's a HOWTO get your iPod and EphPod working in Linux (with Wine).

The reason you may get negative comments, may be because of your own ignorance, and not the ignorance of the Slashdot audience.

For plenty of information on evolution: http://evolution.berkeley.edu/
For examples of transitional forms in the fossil record:
http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/lines/IAtran sitional.shtml
The truth of the matter is that evolution has evidence from nearly every discipline of science: anthropology, biology, physics, psychology, and chemistry. The theories themselves are now finding uses in electrical engineering and computer science.

How does life begin from a a few elements?
http://www.chem.duke.edu/~jds/cruise_chem/Exobiolo gy/miller.html While the atmospheric conditions that precipitated this result is now in question, this is just an example of how science continually re-evaluates itself. The theory of gravity is far more in a state of flux than evolution, but I'm pretty sure that I'd be in pain if I jumped from my balcony.
Once you have amino acids, it isn't that big of stretch to have autocatalytic RNA. (Self-replicating single stranded DNA)

Law of Entropy? I assume you mean the second law of thermodynamics, which pertains only to closed systems. My body will also tend toward a state of disorder when I die, but I fail to see your point. Energy has been transferred from our sun to the earth in the form of light and heat. This very energy enables me to type my message. This same energy is what makes life possible on our planet. Contrary to what most people think, there is no law of entropy that states order must always decrease. http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/richard_car rier/entropy.html

Law of conservation of mass negates the big bang? Perhaps you're familiar with Einstein's equation (E=MC^2)? Energy is proportionate to mass; thus mass can become energy or energy can become mass. Law of Conservation of Mass-Energy has displaced the law of conservation of mass. If this weren't true, I'd expect an interesting explanation for the atom bomb. Perhaps the creator just wills electric to come from nuclear power plants.

While you mention 'scientific laws of today', you quote old scientific thoughts from hundreds of years ago and laymen notions of modern laws. What laws of today to you speak?

The truth is CREATIONISM is a theory of last resort for those clinging to antiquated ways of thinking. And while I try respect spirituality, leave it in your church. At one time, I believed that I should respect everyone's choice of religion; as politics once again becomes interwoven with religion I realize I have to become more active in debate. Take some time to study molecular biology, physics, and logic; and come up with an interesting argument. I'm curious as to how you would explain the 'evolution' of HIV and antibiotic resistance.

Being more and more aware of the monkey business IP owners do trying to take away my rights (Broadcast Flag being the most recent example), I was nicley surprised to see that your kind of business is allowed. I always though you need to buy the DVD/VHS with explicit permission for renting.

However, after reading on Copyright Law, I discovered the First Sale doctrine does not apply to renting. E.g.:
The disposal 109(a) speaks of allows two options: distribution of a particular phonorecord to another or to destruction of a particular phonorecord. Thus, this section allows me to sell a vinyl copy of a phonorecord to a friend or destroy my phonorecord without requiring permission from the author. First Sale is not an absolute right, however. It is important to note that First Sale covers transfers of ownership not merely transfers of possession, such as rental, lease or lending of phonorecords. (from http://www.law.duke.edu/journals/dltr/articles/200 1dltr0018.html)

Could you give me a few pointers to understand how it is legal to rent? Are you non-profit? What other exception to 109 do you use?

I seriously doubt you have to worry about apt replacing ports ever. As slick as apt is to use on the x86 platform, I hear from my friends lucky enough to run 64-bit x86 Linux systems that there are all sorts of problems when trying to get apt working properly in that environment.
For instance when browsing the web, some of the plugins out there are only available in the 32-bit x86 flavor, not 64-bit. Fedora can use yum as the dependency checker and even my friend the die hard apt user has switched his systems to using yum for updates. Perhaps yum will become the new open source standard.