Slashdot Mirror

A couple of months ago I did manage to get a (heavily edited) letter published in The Times newspaper here in the UK. Although they wanted hard references for many of my points, which I was caught off guard and not able to supply them with over the phone (such as the assertion that file sharing has no effect on CD sales - shortly before the OECD study was published that said the same thing) I did manage to persuade them to publish my opinion that the record industry's stance was borne out of a desire to maintain 20th century monopolies rather than anything else. The only followup I saw came a week later from a professional musician who said that he was scared of internet file sharing as well, because he believed he should be paid each time his music was performed, because this is how he earns his living, and this was nothing to do with "a futile attempt to preserve 20th century monopolies" (to quote my original letter).

This got me thinking, and I still am. Half of me thinks this guy is right and that he does deserve to be paid for the performance of his compositions (but EVERY time - insert credit card into CD player before pressing play?) But half of me thinks he is, in his own way, still living in the 20th century.

In summary, music isn't scarce any more and it CAN be copied easily. If our collective governments were wise, instead of letting the 20th century media barons cripple new technology, and force DRM-laden crap down our throats (Windows Vista and Intel's digitally restricted new chips spring to mind), they'd be busy devising new copyright laws that respect the fact that we all have "perfect copying machines" (computers) linked together in a worldwide network. The fact that they aren't says a great deal to my over-active and depressed thought state on this particular subject...

The root cause has nothing to do with the past. It has to do with the present. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05- terror.html

Eliminate the cess pool of tyranny and oppression in the Middle East and the very people who are now forced to turn to terror to improve their lot in life will defeat it for us. As long as people are forced to choose between oppression and joining the ranks of the oppressors, we will have these problems in a world that is getting smaller with each passing day.

If you want to take on the "root cause" of terror (and I'm talking to everyone, not meaning to single out ryanov), quit the bitching about Iraq and Afghanistan and start actually... you know... supporting what we're doing there. It's the only thing in the long run that has a prayer of winning the war on terror, to the extent that it can be "won".

I'm not sure that you have the slightest clue what you are talking about. With all due respect, you sound like you are ignorantly quoting Michael Moore talking points.

The invasion of Iraq was not illegal, under any reasonable interpretation of any law. At its most clear cut, it was simply a resumption of hostilities that ended with a cease fire in 1991, the terms of which were routinely violated by Hussein thereafter for 12 years. Furthermore, resolution 1441 coupled with the Feb 2003 testimony of Hans Blix that Iraq was in material breech of 1441 also provides pretty solid ground for the invasion. This has all been argued before... you are parroting a talking point that has already been thoroughly beaten down many times.

Coalition forces have gone to ridiculous lengths to avoid civilian casualties. That is one of the stupidest, least-informed comments that gets thrown around by misinformed or ignorant, reflexively anti-war types.

Iraq's economy is booming, not turning into a "new breeding ground of people living in poverty".

Poverty is not the root cause of terrorism. Political oppression is, both intuitively (to those of us who possess intuition) and according to a Harvard study which confirms what common sense already tells some of us: http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/11.04/05- terror.html

You hit the nail on the head with the normal people thing. The problem is that we've been thinking in terms of a single time standard when what we really need are multiple standards. Set a scientific standard based on the atomic clocks then everybody has a base time to work with. No leap seconds/hours/days/years to worry about at all with this one. (Which would accomplish what I suspect the politicians are shooting for; They want to abolish the need to worry about it for a long time.)

With one standard in place, we can then create other standards based on it such as an astronomical time which could take into account leap seconds as necessary but without requiring everybody else to conform to it. Your astrological time could be Scientific Time + 3 seconds for example, which would be easy enough for software and people to work around. It would allow those that need it to continue to use the current time scheme without worry of changing standards.

Now for biological clocks we would probably need to sub-divide into sunlight and human centric time standards. We would have a day based on where the sun stands (expressed as Scientific Standard, plus or minus however many seconds (and expressed as a sundial wristwatch.. maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here.) The human centric one would be based on a day of 24 hours and 11 minutes (the biological standard) and that would do away with all the little irritations of daylight saving time or no saving depending on where you are.)

Plus it would mean that there would be a need for new technology which would in turn produce more jobs but the new tech would affect almost solely end consumers which means no necessity to muck about with aging comptuer programs and systems.

The biggest benefit by far would be to me, who would get to sleep in for eleven extra minutes every morning.

Then again, we could just not muck about with the system everybody is used to.

There is already an asteroid called Persephone discovered in 1895, so the naming contest should continue. Hint: pick a name not yet assigned to any minor planet. (That rules out about 12,500 candidates). There's already a Juno but no Lila.

We've seen such things before, and we've known that water ice exists at the poles. I'm fairly sure this crater has been the subject of a peer-reviewed paper in the past, but I haven't done a complete search of the literature, and I'm not sure the HRSC people have either. MGS MOC saw this crater as early as 2000 (and possibly early).

http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e01_e06/images/E03 /E0302478.html
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m19_m23/images/M23 /M2301915.html
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/m19_m23/images/M20 /M2001204.html
http://www.msss.com/moc_gallery/e01_e06/images/E02 /E0200677.html
(there are more, but I don't feel like posting all of them. . .)

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bi bcode=1976Sci...194.1341K&db_key=AST&data_type=HTM L&format=
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/1080497v1.pd f
http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=water+ice+mart ian+crater&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Search

Just when you thought that this couldn't be bigger news, Ron Baalke at JPL has pointed out that another object, 2003 UB313, resides at 96 AU and has a diameter from 4400 km to 9900 km, assuming its albedo is between 0.05 and 0.25. Though the inclination is a bit weird (44 degrees), this may be considered planet-sized.

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K05/K05O41.html

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/2003ub313.html

EUpheld:

http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=04/08/0 5/0317229&mode=thread

Title:
Spacesuit glove manufacturing enhancements through the use of advanced technologies
Authors:
Cadogan, David; Bradley, David; Kosmo, Joseph

Abstract
The sucess of astronauts performing extravehicular activity (EVA) on orbit is highly dependent upon the performance of their spacesuit gloves.A study has recently been conducted to advance the development and manufacture of spacesuit gloves. The process replaces the manual techniques of spacesuit glove manufacture by utilizing emerging technologies such as laser scanning, Computer Aided Design (CAD), computer generated two-dimensional patterns from three-dimensionl surfaces, rapid prototyping technology, and laser cutting of materials, to manufacture the new gloves. Results of the program indicate that the baseline process will not increase the cost of the gloves as compared to the existing styles, and in production, may reduce the cost of the gloves. perhaps the most important outcome of the Laserscan process is that greater accuracy and design control can be realized. Greater accuracy was achieved in the baseline anthropometric measurement and CAD data measurement which subsequently improved the design feature. This effectively enhances glove performance through better fit and comfort.

see http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-bib_query?bi bcode=1993STIA...9590346C&db_key=INST&data_type=HT ML&format=/

Worried about being attacked from TOR? Then block it, the exit nodes are listed here: http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu:8000/cgi-bin/exit. pl?addr=1

Stop blamming the people who ban tor nodes from their network.

The real problem is with the tor nodes who give unrestricted access. If you're running a node in order for people to be able to browser the web anonymously, then
WHY WOULD YOU ALLOW TRAFFIC TO PORT 22 OR 6667?

Most tor nodes don't restrict traffic, and are irresponsible. Don't belive me? Check it out for yourself:

http://serifos.eecs.harvard.edu:8000/cgi-bin/exit. pl?ports=6667&addr=1&textonly=1

However, whenever anybody is asked to site a case in which some poor schmuck actually got shafted by these laws, they suddenly fall silent.

Rather than them being silent, maybe you're just not listening.

Here's a repost of some relevant comments I made on this subject several months ago:

Here's a basic list of just a handful of abuses I came up:

• The PATRIOT act is being used in regular non-terrorism criminal cases . Anything beyond simple misdemenors is being passed off as terrorism , now.
• A webmaster was jailed under PATRIOT because someone had posted bomb making info on his server . Keep in mind that he didn't put the info there, he was basically a web host, and one of his clients was using his account this way. This is a particularly damning case of abuse where "Innocuous objects such as iced tea bottles and a toy car were described as terrorist devices by the FBI and a joint task force of police officers."
• A disturbing article about using the PATRIOT act to obtain warrants against doctors and scientists . Not because they've done anything wrong, but because they happen to do research with hazardous materials. Guilty before proven innocent.
• Story about someone killed by the PATRIOT act
• Several artists were charged with bioterrorism under PATRIOT for creating artwork meant to educate viewers in the dangers of the biotech industry.
• Story about a veteran being arrested for complaining too much due to the heightened terror alert.
• Shining a pocket laser into an airplane is terrorism falling under the PATRIOT act
• Article republished fromt the Washington post about American citizens held without trial
• A man being harrassed by a "joint terrorism task force" (the kind that has authority under the PATRIOT act) because of investigating Area 51
• Another "joint terrorism task force" investigating a 12 year old for doing a school paper on the Cesapeake Bay Bridge
• A photographer arrested and threatened with being charged under the PATRIOT act for taking pictures of Dick Cheney

And finally, maybe there haven't been as many abuses as there will be once all 2nd legal track the preparations are in place .

The GFDL isn't suited to software (and, frankly, I think it makes a lousy documentation license, too).

Yeah, meant the GPL. Too much Wikipedia :).

If you mean the GPL, I see where you're coming from, but without distribution there isn't anyone to license it to.

The requirement is to license it to "all third parties".

A translation of a derivative work is still derivative

Generally, because a translation of a derivative work contains the original work. It may not contain the same words, but it contains the same structure.

what a C compiler emits when fed source with #included GPLed headers is a derivative of the GPLed work

I disagree. Do you have a court ruling saying this is the case?

However, it's less clear whether the headers can be copyrighted in the first place. It's generally assumed that they can, but some argue that they're ineligible for being purely descriptive--whatever creative effort goes into the writing of the functions themselves doesn't extend to purely factual documentation.

I guess this is another way to say the same thing as I'm saying. After all, if the header file can't be copyrighted at all, then nothing can be a derivative work of it.

However, I believe a header file can be copyrighted, as a header file. That copyright would cover the creative aspects of the header file, such as the order, the whitespace, pretty much all the non-functional parts. None of these non-functional parts are included in the alleged derivative work though, so it is not in fact a derivative work.

What if the headers have inline functions?

Depends how significant and creative those inline functions are. If the functions are more than trivially significant and creative, it's probably a derivative work, but depending on how significant and creative perhaps that use might be considered fair use.

What if we're using a language that doesn't have any notion of #including headers?

Then presumably you'd have to distribute the header file itself, in which case your defense would have to rely on calling the work an aggregation rather than a derivative. It'd be a much different argument, and since the distinction is one invented by the GPL it's a total guess as to what a court would say about things.

Congress intended there to be a standard, but the technical details that lead to a certain conclusion for C code don't apply to, say, Java.

The standard has become quite clear through court precedents though. A derivative work must be in fixed form and must contain a copy of the original work.

The examples of derivative works provided by the Act all physically incorporate the underlying work or works. The Act's legislative history similarly indicates that "the infringing work must incorporate a portion of the copyrighted work in some form." 1976 U.S. Code Cong. & Admin. News 5659, 5675. See also Mirage Editions, Inc. v. Albuquerque A.R.T. Co., 856 F.2d 1341, 1343-44, 8 U.S.P.Q.2D (BNA) 1171 (9th Cir. 1988) (discussing same), cert. denied, 489 U.S. 1018, 103 L. Ed. 2d 196, 109 S. Ct. 1135 (1989). Galoob v Nintendo

The GPL, like any other license, has to fit the contours of copyright law, and some of those contours don't get defined until someone tries to break them. That's the nature of the legal system.

However, the law as well as the legal system are clear that copyright covers the preparation of derivative works, not merely the distribution of derivative works. In fact, the distribution of derivative works is only covered by the fact that distribution of a derivative necessarily involves distribution of the original.

Yes, the GPL needs to fit the contours of copyright law if it is going to be effective, however, it doesn't do a very good job of that.

Where C is the capacitance (residual capacitance), V is the voltage and F the switching frequency.

If you don't believe me, check some real research in this area, not your kindergarten texbook, like Wattch

Shorter wires do make C a little bit smaller, but the dominant part there is the gate capacitance.

There is no need to rewrite story folks. Just go http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rssVersionHistor y to read about the evolution the format.

My guess - based on more than 20 years of purely anecdotal evidence - is that it has something to do with the rampant immaturity and mysogynism of a significant minority of the males who choose some sort of computer work for a profession.

If so, how come gender separation starts more or less as soon as it can, i.e. at university level ? In any "first-world" university, you will find the same distribution of genders: significant majority of women in biology and literature studies, overwhelming majority of men in engineering, 'hard' physics and computing.

Of course, to put things in perspective, one should remember that the most frequently cited physicist right now happens to be a woman (Hell, 10K citations !)

Thomas-

I think we can still do this, just don't tell the punished that they won't actually get sick ;)
Ah, placebos.

Yep

Nowhere is it stated what type of copy you are allowed to make. It just states you are allowed to make a copy for backup/archival purposes. Now, unless this is Soviet Uzbekistan, that implies by default an identical copy, regardless of whether there was such thing as binary media when the law itself was invented.

Quite honestly, I've never seen a citation that states that fair use includes backup/archival purposes, but even supposing it is, it does not imply that it would be a digital perfect copy, even with your pithy reference to Soviet Uzbekistan. You should have just gone straight to Nazi Germany and lost the argument.

Making such a statement without a reference is really reaching.

Fine, I'll do your homework for you: MPAA v. 2600 - Court of Appeals decision. Specifically check out "IV. Constitutional Challenge Based on Claimed Restriction of Fair Use", or just search on the page for "fair use".

If that's the worst case, why bother with encryption at all?

Well, even if you might not agree with it, or understand it, doesn't mean you have a right to ignore the law. If these content companies want to create all sorts of stupid, artificial barriers to copying, thinking it's going to stop copyright abuse, so be it. If you don't like the format, don't buy the content.

No, that's not infringement. This page explains the concepts of fair use and nominative use as they apply to trademark law.

... the group--may be a mechanism for the evolution of ultruism...Readers will be impressed by the breadth of the analysis ...

more hits from: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/reviews/SOBUNT_R.html"

IIRC Stephen Gould, in his book "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory", also uses the variant spelling, although, knowing Gould's penchant for neologisms and his mastery of english, I wouldn't bet heavily on it.

Generally answers seem to cluster around the idea of kinship and the furthering of an individuals gene pool.Perhaps the answer will come in tandem with the solution to another evolutionary riddle pertaining to our kind, why is it we have such relatively small canines? The males of most primate species have large canines especially for fighting, usually other males in order to win controll of groups of females. Some speculation has it that monogamy in our kind did away with the need for large canines, or maybe, in our kind females did away with the male perrogative of controlling breeding?

!Happy Birthday Canada!

Today, both are acceptable and both are found in dictionaries. There is no appreciable difference in meaning. Whether you are a cardsharp or a card shark, you are still a shifty character.

No, as I said "card shark" sometimes means a good player and only sometimes has shify connotations (as opposed to cardsharp).

See, e.g, Webster's:
shark:
1 : a rapacious crafty person who preys upon others through usury, extortion, or trickery
2 : one who excels greatly especially in a particular field

The second definition is commonly used (as is the first), for instance:
http://www.bostonphoenix.com/archive/features/98/0 8/06/CARD_SHARK.html
http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2005/06.02/03- liu.html
etc

It's not clear at all that linking a gpl library into proprietary software is a derived work. The FSF certainly believe it does (hence the lgpl), but to my knowledge there has been no court cases that have definitively made that assessment. I think Galoob v Nintendo (9th circuit) is prob the key case here, although it does not definitively answer the question. LoadLibraryEx and friends is recommended, of course, as that addresses the permenance aspect of derived works the 9th circuit brought up.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/cases/Gal oob_v_Nintendo.html

Though, IANAL, just an interested person.

In the case of QT specifically, I think rewriting enough of it to actually be able to access the functions is probably pretty difficult. Any application that does so probably needs to be able to function without qt as well (most likely some sort of text interface if qt is not there).

This is against the GPL license terms. Any programer who touches the code with the GPL version is legally obligated to open the entire codebase. It is a very VERY VERY risky business to be in if you plan on this scam. Because there are no copyright violations to pay if you get caught. You simply must open your code. Period. And a court order could potentially be issued to require that. If you were caught you would have 2 options: Open your code, or stop distributing your code. Both the nail in the coffin for any closed source software developer.

Google earth is fantastic. It worked very well for me with vmware workstation 5.0 under linux. I had to select OpenGL at the startup of liveearth. When selecting Divx, liveearth will lock up terribly under vmware and you need to do remove the program and and reinstall to get rid of the broken cache. Here is a screenshotfrom the building I work in.

Sure,
http://data.fas.harvard.edu/numerical_stability/g3 009.pdf
http://www.lfp.uba.ar/moreno/TErrores2004/MSExcel/ statproc.pdf

And you can always search google for more, excel is widely known for being mathematically inaccurate.

Sorry, you're dead wrong.

Its been filtered in China at least once, although their filtering changes on a day to day basis. Somebody might have said something "subversive", like "Taiwan is a country". I'd tell you if its banned today, except they've banned the machine that tells you if sites are banned. http://asp-cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/list.ht ml

Dean then started to talk about the power of the enclosure element in RSS 2.0. What is great about it is that it enables one to syndicate all sorts of digital content. One can syndicate video, music, calendar events, contacts, photos and so on using RSS due to the flexibility of enclosures.

Amar then showed a demo using Outlook 2003 and an RSS feed of the Gnomedex schedule he had created. The RSS feed had an item for each event on the schedule and each item had an iCalendar file as an enclosure. Amar had written a 200 line C# program that subscribed to this feed then inserted the events into his Outlook calendar so he could overlay his personal schedule with the Gnomedex schedule. The point of this demo was to show that RSS isn't just for aggregators subscribing to blogs and news sites.

"though excel really is the best spreadsheet software that I have yet seen on any platform."

For some uses maybe, but certainly not for all. Excel is notorious among statisticians and scientists for awful accuracy and calculation bugs that have gone unfixed for several versions (1). For statistical analysis the answers Excel give are sometimes wrong by orders of magnitude. We're talking about completely ridiculous answers rather than simply inaccurate ones.

Plotting colourful graphs are cute enough, but getting the numbers right should be the first priority of any spreadsheet.

Gnumeric on the other hand has deservedly (2) developed a very good reputation for accuracy over the last years.

1. http://data.fas.harvard.edu/numerical_stability/g3 009.pdf
2. http://www.lfp.uba.ar/moreno/TErrores2004/MSExcel/ statproc.pdf

I quote from 2:
"(...) persons who wish to use Excel for statistical purposes should exercise extreme caution.
We note that persons who use the spreadsheet Gnumeric need not exercise such
caution."

And:
"One could argue that it is acceptable to use Excel for summary statistics, one-way ANOVA, linear regression, and some of the statistical distributions, but we are extremely
concerned about Microsoft's cavalier attitude toward accuracy."

About Gnumeric:
"It is interesting to observe that the open source Excel-clone called "Gnumeric" was such a good clone that it even had errors
similar to Excel. However, the developers of Gnumeric, who are part-time volunteers with no R&D budget, chose to deal with these errors in a different way: by implementing correct
fixes. See McCullough (2004a) for a discussion."

I think the point MS is trying to make is this: I subscribe to the slashdot RSS feed. However, I may only want to read the YRO and AskSlashdot stories. That I know of, there is no way to selectively download stories from a feed. If there was some sort of header of section info, I could pick and choose which stories to view and wich to discard before it reaches the viewer.

Yeah, it's not like RSS already has a "category" tag that you could use to mark which topic an item belongs to and let people filter on...

Sorry, the only RSS dating system that *I'm* looking for is a feed for http://www.single-russian-woman.com/.

>>If you don't like RSS 1.0 or 2.0, just declare an RSS 3.0 (or RSS 3.14159) and publish your own spec.
>Aren't many spec names trademarked, in order to prevent somebody from thinking that your "RSS 3.0" is the official update to the standard from the entity widely recognized as the maintainer of the standard?

It's too late to close the barn door on the name "RSS" as the problem with RSS is that there is no "entity widely recognized as the maintainer of the standard." (Even Dave Winer's hagiography of RSS shows the froth.) Some people like the lack of any central body or process for changes, and some don't. If you don't like that, then you might like Atom, provided you like the IETF (the IETF works by "rough consensus and working code").

<pubDate />

This is in the RSS 2.0 Spec. +5 indeed.

Looks like the RSS 2.0 spec is under Share Alike, actually. Ya learn something new every day...

A sensible ordering/dating system would make RSS a great deal more powerful, and a great deal more sensible.

There already IS a dating sytem in RSS, see the optional channel elements "pubDate" and "lastBuildDate" in the RSS 2.0 Spec at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss

Oh god. This was rated 5?
Now that's not very nice at all, at least I did my homework :-P

This is one of the areas of damage done by the Bush administration that I think doesn't get nearly
enough attention. With the current state of affairs, there is arguably no way for a conscientious American to serve their country through the military.

What nonsense. The number of people whose mind's have been changed by the Bush administration are few and far between. To the extent that anyone's minds have been changed they have largely changed to be closer to the views of the Bush administration by the attacks of Al Qaeda and company.

Your list of ways to serve is rather anemic, and a bit revealing. Here is an entire page of links to organizations and programs for patriotic Americans to aid their country and the service members defending us from the butchers who have stated they have the right to kill four million Americans. This isn't Vietnam where we can just pack up and leave and nothing bad happens to us, they came to our country and intend to destroy us. How many remember that Bin Laden's first demand (Q2) to America was that if we want his organization to stop attempting mass murder against Americans that we become a Muslim nation, which for him would be a Muslim of a very specific extremist, intolerant sect? (I can already hear the pathetic, deranged howls about the "right wing Christian theocracy we live under" now.) Well, just keep donating to the ACLU, I'm sure they will be keeping us safe from suicide bombers in our shopping malls with all that they do.

They make mistakes at times

To borrow the language of Austin the Judges are uttering peformatives. They aren't uncovering some external state of affairs and then making statements about what they have discovered. If this were the case they I would admit that they could be incorrect. When they overruled Bowers v. Hardwick they didn't discover anything, they made it incorrect simply by declaring it to be incorrect. Similarly the act of claiming "I apologize" is itself the apology. When someone says "I apologize" they aren't reporting some fact they've just discovered about themselves.

The statement "Bowers was not correct when it was decided" is just legal language. It's typical of Judges to phrase their rulings as if they were discoveries about external states of affairs as this helps to give their statements an air of authority.

I'm influenced in my thoughts here by supreme court justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr, but I'm probably twisting his ideas beyond recognition...

Works typically bring in most of their money in the first few years.

Not necessarily. Dr. Seuss Enterprises and others have argued that sometimes it takes several decades between the release of a book and the release of a film based on that book. How long was this for The Cat in the Hat by Theodor Seuss Geisel?

It's already blocked to them. Here's a short list of some sites blocked by China already
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/filtering/china/China -highlights.html

This whole idea seems a bit pointless. It just means they will block more sites. Think of it this way, you may be helping them post a blog, but as soon as your site gets blocked, now no one can visit your site from China. Currently most smaller sites are ignored. If you have any current chinese readers or visitors you'll possibily end up ruining it for them.

But the article does suggest that, based on the data mentioned, the odds are that if you randomly select a million people from the general population, then the average IQ of the 500,000 with bigger-than-the-median brains will be higher than the average IQ of the 500,000 with smaller-than-the-median brains.

Remember, this is based on the data he looked at, not on some other data. That's important, because he tells the reader which data he used. You or anybody else can look at the data for yourself and decide whether or not he was wrong. Then you, too, can submit a paper to the editors of the journal Intelligence just like he did, contradicting what he wrote. Or, if you find that his conclusions or meta-analyses were correct based on the data, but that he should have used different data, then that would also be a reason you might go ahead and submit your own article saying that. Hello, that is how science works.

Of course, I understand why a person (particularly a non-academic) might read part of that article and say, "OK, the author didn't actually come out and state that all big-brain people are better, but that's what he's hinting at. He's speaking in code--just like they all do. He's saying that my Aunt Gladys, who is a dwarf, is stupid and that she's not as good as all the other people in the world and that we should exterminate her... and that's WRONG. That sonofabitch never met my Aunt Gladys and he doesn't know how wonderful she is."

I do understand why people have those sentiments. It is true that people oftentimes speak in code for political reasons. I'm thinking, in particular, of some simpleminded radio talk-show hosts or politicians. An appropriate--in my opinion--response to that type of stuff, is to say, "Here's what you're stating explicitly, but here's what I think you're actually implying, and I'm going to tell you why you're wrong to imply such a thing." And that's when you give him all your evidence and close your comments by telling him a little story about your wonderful Aunt Gladys.

Of course this reminds me of the outrage over the comments made by Harvard's Larry Summers earlier this year.

Never mind, I won't get into that.

I am a researcher in Astronomy and I have found that Google Schalor is very lacking in my field. They have bigger competition in Astronomy than in most fields because all of the journal articles in Astronomy going back a century have been scanned, cross referenced and are available from the NASA/Harvard Database.

They have a long way to go to compete with that.

I now have carpel tunnel in my right hand.

You may want to read this article as well as some of my previous posts such as this one. Also do a Google search for "sarno tms". I have had experiences myself (1.5 of not being able to work due to pain), and I also play instruments (guitar and bass). The end result was that I discovered my pain was psychosomatic and not purely physical, and I was completely cured in a few weeks simply by addressing psychological issues (one of which was being freaked out by not being able to use my hands without pain, its kind of a snowball effect).

As for the idea of learning bad habbits, I do agree on that. I have been learning drums the last two years, and I am doing it on my own, and I have picked up quite a few bad habits that other drummers point out. But really those only affect my technique. With guitar, I had lessons from the beginning and that really helped my technique. But with drums, although I play good enough to be able jam with other people, I'll probably never be a good drummer unless I start taking some lessons sooner rather than later. And at this point I may not have the patience to go back and correct these things.

please read my post in this thread and also this article

I'm a 33-year old professional programmer with 15 years professional experience and now type over 130 WPM. I've never had a single problem with wrist or hand pain until about 3 months ago. I started having all kinds of numbness in my hand and pain in my wrist. Needless to say, I freaked out. The problem went from nothing to seriously impeding me in a matter of days.

Before you freak out again, please read this article. Do a search for "sarno tms". Trust me, I've been there (1.5 years of not being able to work), and I now I simply don't worry about it because I understand it was a psychosomatic problem and not a purely physical one. You can also go back and read my posts too, like this one.

Considering I never believed that carpal tunnel syndrome or other wrist problems existed previously

You may still be right about this.

"It could be the difference between working in your garden at 70 or wearing wrist braces at 40."

Saying things like this is just creating unnecessary fear. After having my own experience (1.5 years of not being able to work due to the pain which I thought was "RSI"), I discovered that RSI is basically a psychosomatic disorder that can be cured by addressing psychological issues. Read this summary for more info. You can also do a search with the terms "sarno" and "tms" and you should find other pages including other peoples' experiences. If you are in pain right now, its very important you take a look at these ideas, but also important if you aren't in pain because it may save you from worrying about it.

It only took me a few weeks to fully recover and now I use my hands all day long. I work as a software developer, play guitar, bass, and drums; and I have had no pain in the last 2 years thanks to learning it was a psychosomatic disorder. I don't do anything special ergonomically. I don't use dvorak or any special keyboards, I don't worry about taking breaks, I sit in awkward positions sometimes which some people might call "bad posture", I just don't worry at all (that is the most important part).

Triton's plumes are hardly "fluid" in any normal sense, given how thin they are. Scientific models of Triton's geysers are still very vague (there's even a chance that they're really more like dust devils), so what makes you so sure of how they work?

The literature is quite substantial. Check this out. Your suggestion that these are dust devils is absurd. Dust devils that linger for days over a light colored vent, on a moon where the atmospheric pressure is so low that saltation velocity is greater than the speed of sound? Not likely. Given that Triton's surface temperature is so close to the submilation point of nitrogen I think that the canonical explanation is the most reasonable.

There are four elements to a per se tying violation:

1. the tying and tied goods must be two separate products;
2. the defendant must have market power in the tying product market;
3. the defendant must afford consumers no choice but to purchase the tied product from it; and
4. the tying arrangement must forclose a not insubstantial volume of commerce in the tied product.

With the proposed tying of MacOS x86 to Apple hardware, we clearly have 2, 3, and 4. Apple's only defense is that the OS is an "integral part" of the hardware/software offering.

That defense just blew up. If you can run the thing on a stock PC, clearly the tying and tied goods are separate products.

This is an area where software/hardware companies consistently have lost. IBM lost decades ago, which created the IBM compatible mainframe market. Sony lost in the Connectix case. There will be cheap Mac clones from China, and Apple won't be able to stop them.

He was correct...there was a brief ban on exporting playstation 2...http://hir.harvard.edu/articles/996/

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/1201.html

Reverse engineering software for the purpose of interoperability is specifically allowed under tthe DMCA

Believe or not there are actually at least four different bases on which you could (but probably won't be able to successfully) argue for a right to privacy with regard to email communications sent from work:

(i) The Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads: "[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures" -- but which only applies toward government action (although some pretty surprising apparently private actions can qualify as "governmental");

(ii) the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which covers email, and prohibits "(1) unauthorized and intentional 'interception' of wire, oral, and electronic communications during the transmission phase, and (2) unauthorized 'accessing' of electronically stored wire or electronic communications." -- but allows exceptions for companies which provide internet service, and does not apply if the employee consents to ECPA violations;

(iii) State statutes, which obviously vary wildly from state to state. The article that I'm using as my primary source notes that " Members of state legislatures have attempted to pass bills that would strengthen the protections of workers against electronic monitoring in the workplace, but they have generally failed because of sustained and effective corporate lobbying." (*mweheheheheh*).

(iv) Common law (which also varies from state to state) which sometimes recognizes an "actionable right to privacy" -- but under different caveats in each state.

Ummm . . . so yah -- it's complicated, so much so in fact that it's an open question in various states whether or not its legal. Also -- not surprisingly -- the legality of the monitoring will often depend on the purpose of monitoring, the purpose of the communication, sometimes even the industry you're working in, etc. Good luck figuring it out -- especially if you signed a (now practically standard) agreement allowing your employer to snoop through your work emails at will.

Generally, when the law is this fuzzy, corps will do whatever is in their best interest, and count on their lawyers being better than your lawyer if you sue. They're generally right. So assume that your workplace email communications are being monitored. We are the point now that it is never a good idea to send via email something you wouldn't mind all your colleagues seeing. Use Yahoo! or Gmail and at least make it a challenge for BigBroCorp to keep tracking of your on the job dicta. Of course, sending risque stuff from your workplace email may be your chance to be famous. Hehe.

Regards,

Moiche