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That's what makes "faith healing" or "alternative healing" seem to work. At least 80% of their patients would have healed anyway.

To truly understand why "faith healing" and "alternative healing" and other placebos seem to work (though often times, only temporarilly), you have to understand that most of these symptoms that are healed by such things are psychosomatic in nature. The true cause of the symptoms is basically psychological (not saying that the actual symptoms aren't physical, though). For starters read this document and see my other post. Sure, you may say this is just another "alternative healing" but this is the only one I've found that makes sense if you take the time to read up on it. It all kind fits together once you understand it.

QWERTY won't kill your hand in ten minutes or ten days. More like ten years. For some people, maybe even never. But for others, much sooner. I for one would prefer to never get RSI, and I decided after I experienced what turned out to be a false alarm that I never wanted to experience the real thing. Unfortunately, no science has been done in this domain to my knowledge so we are on our own with anecdotes.

Please don't spread misinformation about how typing causes "repetitive strain injury." "RSI" is essentially a psychosomatic problem. By spreading the idea that using a keyboard can hurt your hands, you are helping cause it. For starters, read this document. Do a Google search with the terms Sarno and TMS. Then read the book "The Mindbody Prescription" by John E. Sarno.

I suffered for over one and half years and was not working during that time until I realized that the true cause of my symptoms originated psychologically. After that realization the pain simply went away and I went back to my normal activities. Don't buy into the misinformation that exists out there. There is plenty of it out there, it will screw your head up if you believe it. My physician was even very skeptical about the existance of "RSI" and he ended up being right.

I say forget about ergonomics. Type on whatever you feel comfortable in whatever setup you feel comfortable for as long as you want to without breaks. That's what I do. But don't take my word for it, read up on what Sarno has written and you will get a better understanding of why ergonomics doesn't matter so much and you should never fear typing on a keyboard. Just don't worry about it is all I'm saying, that is the most important thing.

Have they all been confirmed relative to other postulates, or confirmed absolutely? Or IOW, are the confirmations the only possible explanation, or is there another? Or many others?

Forex, dark mass and dark energy suddenly become superfluous if certain types of turbulence are taken into account.

For another example, Big Bang predicted no quantum redshifts, and yet not only are they there

their systematic imperfections give them a centre a little way from the Milky Way

These are direct contradictions of Big Bang by observation.

OBTW, post a reply logged in

On what evidence do you base your conclusion that this is an absurd question?

Considering that sex hormones affect neural growth in humans and other higher-order animals - link1 link2 link3 link4 link5 - your insistence that examining male/female neural differences is "arbitrary" is ill-informed at best, and deceptive at worst.

The brains of men and women are - in general - different; that much is (to the best of current knowledge) simple fact. What is not known is what cognitive differences those structural differences create, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

What is also not known is the level of sheer stupidity that would drive someone to over-ride information about an individual with information about a population. If 90% of women are better at math than 90% of men, that's only useful information if I'm I'm hiring someone at random. If I have aptitude scores for each candidate in front of me, it doesn't really matter whether the man is in the 98th percentile of all men but only the 91st percentile of all people; if he's the best candidate, he gets the job.

That is why "but I know lots of women who are good at math!" anecdotes are completely useless; each person is an individual, and population-level statistics like "men are better at math" do no more than tell you about the distribution of those individuals. When you've actually got one of those individuals in hand, distributional information is meaningless.

There are population-level differences; that's not the point. The point is that population-level differences are meaningless when talking about a single person; that, I believe, is where you'll get the most effective combatting of sexism. Think of someone as an individual and suddenly they're not a stereotype anymore, regardless of what the stereotype in question was; cut the problem off at the root.

1. Only geeks take real math classes at Harvard College: 2004 QRR
2. Most geeks are male.
3. Therefore, most females are bad at math.

It is called time preference, but the expectation of inflation doesn't explain it.

For $100 today to be worth more than $115 a week from now, you'd have to have %100,000 annual inflation, which is well outside the expectation of Americans.

And if you adjust all the numbers in question for 10% inflation, for instance, people would then be choosing between $100 today and $115 in a week; and between $91 a year from now and $105 in a year and a week (rounding off the pennies). The rational choice would be to prefer the larger amount in each case; in fact people prefer $100 now to $115 in a week, but would presumably still be indifferent between the $91 and the $105, or if anything prefer the $105.

In considering the more distant future, then, people make more obviously rational decisions, taking the inflation rate into account. But in considering the immediate future people put an apparently irrational premium on having cash in hand.

A number of papers have been written on why this kind of time preference might have been selected for under the circumstances man evolved in; the idea is roughly that "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" is a good rule of thumb for hunter-gatherers. See Evolution and Human Nature (pdf) from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, for instance.

Please see this. Since the thread started about Harvard, it seems only fair to point out how the new President of Harvard University has moved to change this over the last year. If your family makes less than $40,000, you have zero expected contribution to tuition, less than $60,000 a substantially reduced contribution.

I think that's a pretty huge move towards fairness, don't you?

Those stats didn't sound quite right to me, and they seem to contradict the numbers in Harvard's own information book:

http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/budget/factbook/current _facts/enroll_ethnicity_7.html

It shows (American) whites as comprising 44 percent of the student body. And since a third of the international students are from Europe, that probably tips the total over half. No info on how many are 'gentiles' though.

That's less than the 70 some percent whites make up of the population, but lets see who is even more under-represented: Wow, even though blacks make up about 12% of the population, they're just 6.3 percent at Harvard! And Hispanics, who I believe recently passed blacks as Largest minority in the US, have just 5.5%!

Of course we all know who the real culprits are: those crafty Asians and Pacific Islander's. Of course their status as the lone over-represented race is due to white guilt, not a culture that values academic achievement. (/end sarcasm)

To disclose my slight personal connection to the issue: My uncle was the first Irish Catholic to get tenure at the history department at Harvard.

Those stats didn't sound quite right to me, and they seem to contradict the numbers in Harvard's own information book:

http://vpf-web.harvard.edu/budget/factbook/current _facts/enroll_ethnicity_7.html

It shows (American) whites as comprising 44 percent of the student body. And since a third of the international students are from Europe, that probably tips the total over half. No info on how many are 'gentiles' though.

That's less than the 70 some percent whites make up of the population, but lets see who is even more under-represented: Wow, even though blacks make up about 12% of the population, they're just 6.3 percent at Harvard! And Hispanics, who I believe recently passed blacks as Largest minority in the US, have just 5.5%!

Of course we all know who the real culprits are: those crafty Asians and Pacific Islander's. Of course their status as the lone over-represented race is due to white guilt, not a culture that values academic achievement. (/end sarcasm)

To disclose my slight personal connection to the issue: My uncle was the first Irish Catholic to get tenure at the history department at Harvard.

If you want to know how to correctly pronounce Huygens, go to this web site.

I have on hand lots of information about advertisers supporting these companies. One complication is that some of the advertisers are unintentional participants -- e.g. the ads were placed by affiliates, apparently often acting without authorization by the underlying merchants. Often, the link format makes it possible to tell the difference between an affiliate's ad and an "official" ad.

As to Gator advertisers: See Gator advertisers as of 2003 and Gator advertisers based on data from Claria's S-1 disclosure.

In any event, I'll be updating my site with more advertiser information in the future. It's at the top of my list of priorities.

Wavelet compression however is used in jpeg2000 which is a bit better than jpeg but even that isn't supported by any digital cameras.

I've been working with wavelets (eg.) in several contexts for many years now. Saying wavelet compression does 'a bit' better than jpeg is an enormous understatement. Especially in applications where you need serious compression ratios, wavelets are vastly better than the traditional jpeg compression algorithm.

Want proof? See for yourself.

But it sounds like this has more to do with improving transfer times for images that already exist in jpeg than developing a new standard for compression. But if some digital cameras started supporting jpeg2000, it'd be a boon: you could fit many more images in memory without a perceptiable decrease in quality OR could fit the same number at much higher quality.

Well, that may not be true, either, according to the article I read about a decade ago:

ApJ article (1993): Our Sun III

Oh gosh, I referenced ApJ in /. What have I done?

Tengen, I think, was a part of the Atari that sold home computers and consoles, while Atari Games was pretty much solely an arcade company

Then why was Atari Games v. Nintendo about Tengen's "Rabbit" modchip? And why was Klax published by Atari Games (arcade), Tengen (early home versions), and Midway (more recent GBC port)? It appears you have it backwards. Tengen was the brand that AG used for console ports of AG's arcade titles because the other "Atari" was taken by the consumer division, which was sold to Commodore, then JTS, then Hasbro, then Infogrames, which has since renamed itself to Atari. Search for more

But you're right about one thing: Midway Games West (formerly Atari Games/Tengen) did shut down two years ago.

From the Harvard Optical SETI web site:

"A high-intensity pulsed laser, teamed with a moderate sized telescope, forms an efficient interstellar beacon. Using only "Earth 2000" technology, we could build such a laser transmitter. To a distant observer in the direction of its slender beam, it would appear (during its brief pulse) a thousand times brighter than our sun."

Simply put, a targeted laser pulse would be exponentially more efficient than using a power-hungry radio antenna.

The all-sky optical SETI system at Harvard receives its funding from The Planetary Society and the Bosack-Kruger Charitable Foundation.

You already need to pay a levy to sing a song under copyright in public. Famously, ASCAP threatened to sue the Girl Scouts of America over singing songs like "God Bless America" or even "Happy Birthday".

Another reference on this.

Most pain syndromes are psychosomatic

Vioxx is a useless drug in most cases just like all other NSAID's.

It's so handy, I tend to use it instead of hunting up the paper copies in my 'box of printouts'. Yes, it's actually faster/easier to find something I've already read by getting it online, than to hunt in a file cabinet.

And they have excellent search, reference chasing (you can find all papers that cite a given paper, or simply see all references a paper uses), and even persistent searches (email me everytime a new paper comes up on 'target X').

Some astro journals are still, alas, subscriber-only (usually with university block subscriptions), but the bulk are open to anyone.

But astronomy has always been a field where amateurs and professionals can both participate.

I tracked back the observations to the version I had in cache in my laptop. Back when the last used observation by JPL was Dec 26.14032 and the probability was 0.022, JPL reported 169 observations used. http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K04/K04Y64.html, MPEC 2004-Y64, also lists around 160 observations in total, ending on that date. Obviously, just about every observation was used until this calculation.

Anyway, if the identification on March 15 is reasonably correct, even a hundred missing observations from the last few days shouldn't do much of a difference, if randomly chosen (not chosen just to fit the identification in March). Most of the accuracy is from the position at a certain date, not from the added precision of more measurements at just about the same time.

(Credit to magnuss for one of the links.) http://www.hohmanntransfer.com/news.htm mentions that the object was found in images from March 15th. I find this odd in no way in itself, it's quite natural that the determined orbit has been back-stepped to verify where the object was before its discovery in June, as any such data would improve the accuracy far more than more observations made today. Obviously, it seems they succeeded.

The raw data linked from that site has 243 observations in total. Maybe the newest JPL data is filtering to only use observations from certain telescopes, or they're aggressively filtering out "junk" data. I would welcome some kind of explanation like "ooops, a lot of people looked at another rock" or something along those lines. Another note is that the size estimation is up again to 430 meters instead of 390. Not a big change in the light (pun intended) of the fact that this is based on the measured intensity in the data, nothing else.

Nobody's getting shut out of the DVD player business.

Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS [harvard.edu] issue? "Without licensed DVD players for GNAA/Linux and other operating systems, an entire class of computer users is completely cut off from viewing DVDs." ffs

Nobody's getting shut out of the DVD player business.

Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS [harvard.edu] issue? "Without licensed DVD players for GNAA/Linux and other operating systems, an entire class of computer users is completely cut off from viewing DVDs." ut

Nobody's getting shut out of the DVD player business.

Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS [harvard.edu] issue? "Without licensed DVD players for GNAA/Linux and other operating systems, an entire class of computer users is completely cut off from viewing DVDs." sqb

Math boxes allow for greater flexibility and adaptability to varied mathematical abilities. (This text is the only one that gives the instructor a choice of teaching planetary science either at a descriptive level or at a moderately advanced level involving algebra and elementary calculus.)

b) According to the IAU's Committee for Small Body Nomenclature, three objects are both minor planets and comets: Chiron, Wilson-Harrington, and Elst-Pizzaro. Your comment that "comets and asteroids have very different histories and compositions" is irrelevent, as the histories and compositions of individual objects are often not known (even spectroscopy can only tell you about the surface, not what's beneath). Thus an object that has never been known to sport a coma is typically designated as a minor planet (i.e. asteroid) regardless of composition. The clear-cut distinction between asteroids and comets disappears in the face of observational constraints.

c) Armagh Observatory, on Centaurs: "These bodies, many of which have diameters greater than 100 km, are called "Centaurs" because of their "half-comet, half-asteroid" status." There are many links on that page to other pages discussing the controversy surrounding the naming of objects. Centaurs are usually referred to in the literature as asteroids, not comets. Notice that the Minor Planet Center (which was given responsibility by the IAU of designating minor bodies in the Solar System) lists Centaurs on the minor planet orbits page, not the comet orbits page.

The nomenclature problem isn't limited to Centaurs, as discussed in this excellent but dated Spacedaily article, which says (referring to a April 20, 2000, "Nature" article by Dr. Don Yeomans):

Yeomans in Nature points out that recent computer simulations show that as much as three percent of Kuiper Belt objects are likely to be rocky asteroids that formed in the outer fringes of the Asteroid Belt -- but then, at some point over the eons, flew close enough to Jupiter to be catapulted by its gravity into the outer Solar System.... [M]eteorites have been found still containing significant traces of water trapped inside them -- which means that "Far from being the dry rocky bodies they were once thought to be, it would seem that some asteroids, along with with comets, might be significant sourcees [sic] of water."

Google is my friend. Is it yours?

I wasn't talking about Sedna. I was responding to a general statement you made about asteroids, not any particular asteroid.

Math boxes allow for greater flexibility and adaptability to varied mathematical abilities. (This text is the only one that gives the instructor a choice of teaching planetary science either at a descriptive level or at a moderately advanced level involving algebra and elementary calculus.)

b) According to the IAU's Committee for Small Body Nomenclature, three objects are both minor planets and comets: Chiron, Wilson-Harrington, and Elst-Pizzaro. Your comment that "comets and asteroids have very different histories and compositions" is irrelevent, as the histories and compositions of individual objects are often not known (even spectroscopy can only tell you about the surface, not what's beneath). Thus an object that has never been known to sport a coma is typically designated as a minor planet (i.e. asteroid) regardless of composition. The clear-cut distinction between asteroids and comets disappears in the face of observational constraints.

c) Armagh Observatory, on Centaurs: "These bodies, many of which have diameters greater than 100 km, are called "Centaurs" because of their "half-comet, half-asteroid" status." There are many links on that page to other pages discussing the controversy surrounding the naming of objects. Centaurs are usually referred to in the literature as asteroids, not comets. Notice that the Minor Planet Center (which was given responsibility by the IAU of designating minor bodies in the Solar System) lists Centaurs on the minor planet orbits page, not the comet orbits page.

The nomenclature problem isn't limited to Centaurs, as discussed in this excellent but dated Spacedaily article, which says (referring to a April 20, 2000, "Nature" article by Dr. Don Yeomans):

Yeomans in Nature points out that recent computer simulations show that as much as three percent of Kuiper Belt objects are likely to be rocky asteroids that formed in the outer fringes of the Asteroid Belt -- but then, at some point over the eons, flew close enough to Jupiter to be catapulted by its gravity into the outer Solar System.... [M]eteorites have been found still containing significant traces of water trapped inside them -- which means that "Far from being the dry rocky bodies they were once thought to be, it would seem that some asteroids, along with with comets, might be significant sourcees [sic] of water."

Google is my friend. Is it yours?

I wasn't talking about Sedna. I was responding to a general statement you made about asteroids, not any particular asteroid.

Math boxes allow for greater flexibility and adaptability to varied mathematical abilities. (This text is the only one that gives the instructor a choice of teaching planetary science either at a descriptive level or at a moderately advanced level involving algebra and elementary calculus.)

b) According to the IAU's Committee for Small Body Nomenclature, three objects are both minor planets and comets: Chiron, Wilson-Harrington, and Elst-Pizzaro. Your comment that "comets and asteroids have very different histories and compositions" is irrelevent, as the histories and compositions of individual objects are often not known (even spectroscopy can only tell you about the surface, not what's beneath). Thus an object that has never been known to sport a coma is typically designated as a minor planet (i.e. asteroid) regardless of composition. The clear-cut distinction between asteroids and comets disappears in the face of observational constraints.

c) Armagh Observatory, on Centaurs: "These bodies, many of which have diameters greater than 100 km, are called "Centaurs" because of their "half-comet, half-asteroid" status." There are many links on that page to other pages discussing the controversy surrounding the naming of objects. Centaurs are usually referred to in the literature as asteroids, not comets. Notice that the Minor Planet Center (which was given responsibility by the IAU of designating minor bodies in the Solar System) lists Centaurs on the minor planet orbits page, not the comet orbits page.

The nomenclature problem isn't limited to Centaurs, as discussed in this excellent but dated Spacedaily article, which says (referring to a April 20, 2000, "Nature" article by Dr. Don Yeomans):

Yeomans in Nature points out that recent computer simulations show that as much as three percent of Kuiper Belt objects are likely to be rocky asteroids that formed in the outer fringes of the Asteroid Belt -- but then, at some point over the eons, flew close enough to Jupiter to be catapulted by its gravity into the outer Solar System.... [M]eteorites have been found still containing significant traces of water trapped inside them -- which means that "Far from being the dry rocky bodies they were once thought to be, it would seem that some asteroids, along with with comets, might be significant sourcees [sic] of water."

Google is my friend. Is it yours?

I wasn't talking about Sedna. I was responding to a general statement you made about asteroids, not any particular asteroid.

Universal v. Reimerdes is a lowly Federal District Court Case fron New York

Universal v. Reimerdes was upheld on appeal. Yes, the EFF intentionally held off on seeking certiorari until it could get a number of conflicting opinions among the appeals circuits.

But the big problem here is that when the plaintiff has access to much larger financial resources than the defendant, the plaintiff can dilate the litigation and in effect win by default. Would a developer of an "installer EULA circumvention device" be able to put up a defense against the bottomless pockets of Microsoft Corporation?

Of course, we're constantly bombed with xrays from outer space too, though.

HERE

Why is requesting help such a bad request? I think it is perfectly reasonable.

A quote relevant to this headline:

...Ehrlich answered by saying "I think they are extremely robust. Scientists may have made statements like that, although I cannot imagine what their basis would have been, even with the state of science at that time, but scientists are always making absurd statements, individually, in various places. What we are doing here, however, is presenting a consensus of a very large group of scientists?"

I want to pause here and talk about this notion of consensus, and the rise of what has been called consensus science. I regard consensus science as an extremely pernicious development that ought to be stopped cold in its tracks. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you're being had.

Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Claiming most scientists believe in global warming and that none claim that it definitely will not happen completely misses the point. "Opponents" of global warming are not arguing that it is definitely not going to happen, but rather that the current information is insufficient to make the statements many have been making on the subject.

Go watch it and if you're curious, read on. If not...that's good too as I'm only going to ramble a bit;

What I take from it is that the developer should reject the impulse to build everything from scratch and build just the core tool kit for others to use. After all, you can't know what other people are thinking or what they want...even if they tell you.

Along those lines, I look for projects like Plone that build on the work that preceeded it (Python to Zope to Plone) and make it easy to design extentions (Plone Products) that interoperate with the lower levels. I avoid monolythic projects that don't seem to be flexable enough to incorporate other toolkits. This is not pre-made integration, though. Quite the opposite.

Having the lower levels available and modifiable (Python source of Zope and Plone) means that you're not locked into one and only one way of doing things if you need to make changes. The vendor or core developer(s) don't dictate what you do or how you do it. Yet, along the chain each part works well with the levels above and below it.

Additional link; Erik Von Hippel.

Signs like "Fish & Chip, $5" or "All player must register before going on ice" are so common here, it kind of makes me sick.

Still, English has been moving since Old English from a tense and ending based grammar and towards a word order based grammar (think of how weird "yoda talk" seems, even when it isn't technically grammatically incorrect, and understand it just fine you can), so we may just be losing those agreements at the end of words, because the sentence structure dictates the meaning without them. It's still grating to me, but I bet none of the old fogeys in Shakespeare's time were down with the great vowel shift.

...and the way it has always been. Groups with a sufficiently strong interest in the subject speak up loud enough to be heard. The average person isn't usually affected enough to make a fuss. This same thing happened in the writing of the 1976 reform of the copyright act. From a paper by Harvard Law Professor William W. Fisher III, "...the negotiations privileged groups with interests sufficiently strong and concentrated to have formal representatives. Very rarely was the public -- the consumers of intellectual products -- represented in any way. And Congress itself -- whose job, one might think, is precisely to protect the public's interest -- failed to do so."

For Physics and Astronomy examples (the ones I know the most about) try:
http://arxiv.org/

http://adswww.harvard.edu/

http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/ and http://simbad.u-strasbg.fr/sim-fid.pl et al

and now of course http://scholar.google.com/ as well.

I'm sorry but this is such utter bollocks I don't know where to stand. Most reputable science recognises global warming as well proven now.

Excuse me? Oh wait, you mean you've a good many hundred years of information to predict something on the scale of a few million years, such as ice-ages.

And a bunch of scientists got together and agreed that it had to be true, so it must be true. Consensus science - so yeah, global warming must indeed be because of all the evil global warmers.

Gotcha!

We're at the peak of a warm cycle after the end of an ice-age, I think it's only natural that the world is getting warmer. In fact, maybe we should try keeping it warm, before we slip into a cold-phase once again, rather than the other way around.

And oh, maybe you should read Michael Crichton's talk at Caltech - Aliens cause Global Warming!

You might learn a thing or two on how real science is done.

Maybe, you would be able to find the court filings too. Does anyone know where you can get Microsoft's filings in US vs. MS?

I searched for a link but Microsoft have removed all their court filings from http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/doj/, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/, http://www.microsoft.com/legalnews (all 404, but, interestingly, not with MS's usual 404 message) and the rest of their site, and no one seems to have copies. See the filings list (with links) at Harvard Uni's OpenLaw.

While I fully understand the business compulsions Google operates, I think Google, of all companies, can definitely do better than this; they can, at the very least, give a non-obvious link to this third-party site. I mean, that's what they did with DMCA, didnt they?

While I fully understand the business compulsions Google operates, I think Google, of all companies, can definitely do better than this; they can, at the very least, give a non-obvious link to this third-party site. I mean, that's what they did with DMCA, didnt they?

private institutions? none of their damn business.

As far as I know there are only two or three private colleges that do not accept federal funding (Hillsdale College in Michigan, Grove City College in Pennsylvania, and Patrick Henry College in Virginia). I graduated from Hillsdale in 2002 and so this fact falls close to home, but you can see these other sources for verification.

This brings us back on topic, should the federal government be able to keep tabs on its investment? Maybe the better question is should the federal government be funding (read controlling) nearly all of the higher education in the nation? Seeing as only 3 colleges are run without federal money, which I would like to find anyone who gets funding without strings attached.

It's nice to see the GNU fans spreading FUD about BSD (this, and the whole "BSD is dying" campaign). One might wonder what's the difference between GNU and the big and evil corporations they hate so much, since they're using the same dishonest marketing techniques - and spreading FUD is really the most disgusting.

Luckily, the OS world hasn't been monopolized yet by FUD-spreading corporations and FUD-spreading communists. There still is BSD - and it's here to stay. :)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

The EFF has said that the legality of ripping audio CDs is unclear. Likely, it would be considered "fair use". In 1971, Congress commented on not restraining noncommercial home recording. The Sony Betamax case found that "time-shifting" copyrighted broadcasts for home viewing was fair use. Making personal copies of music with certain devices is allowed under the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992. For a digital copy to be legitimate under the AHRA, the recording device must prevent multiple-generation copies via copy protection. Also, manufacturers of digital recording devices and/or of blank recording media must pay royalties to the recording industry. Computer equipment is excluded from the AHRA. In the court case RIAA v. Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc. it was ruled that a portable MP3 audio player was outside the scope of the AHRA. This was because the player only recorded music from a computer system. In the case, it is said that use of the player is compatible with the main purpose of the AHRA; the main purpose of the AHRA is "facilitation of personal use."

In any case, non-commercial ripping of legitimately-obtained audio CDs is not likely to hurt anyone.

DeCSS doesn't brute force the key, it requires a valid player key. It uses this player key to decrypt the 40 bit title key stored on the DVD. DeCSS then uses the title key to decrypt the DVD content just like any other DVD player. The original player key included with DeCSS was extracted from the Xing player.

The Xing key has long since been revoked, but a flaw in CSS makes it easy to generate new player keys, reducing the effective key length to 25 bits. So players like LiVid can simply generate different player keys until they find one that works at runtime. They can then feed this player key to DeCSS to read the DVD.

For more information about CSS, try here

For instructions on how to use it under Linux, see (for instance): http://modular.fas.harvard.edu/sprint_merlin/

Internet Explorer makes Windows an unsafe OS

Oh wait, is this, by any chance, the same Internet Explorer that Microsoft (and its key executives) claimed under sworn testimony in US v. MS was a fundamental part of their OS that could not be removed due to it been responsible for much of the basic OS functionality? Hmmm...I wonder?

(Not that this is really a problem for Microsoft as they regularly directly contradict themselves in quick succession--even in court.)

I searched for a link but Microsoft have removed all their court filings from http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/doj/, http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/, http://www.microsoft.com/legalnews (all 404, but, interestingly, not with MS's usual 404 message) and the rest of their site, and no one seems to have copies--I assume because MS own the copyright and won't let anyone copy them. See filings list (with links) at Harvard Uni's OpenLaw.

So true. I thought I had RSI after self-diagnosing using information online, but the root cause of my problems was psychological.

Now I doubt whether any case of RSI ("repetitive strain injury") is not psychological. Typing on your keyboard is not a health hazard! Nor is having "poor" posture.

http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/daily/2004/10/ 27-errors.html

A copyright protects an original work in the tangible, fixed form in which it has been set down. It protects only the expression of the work, and not the idea underlying the work. Whereas a copyright protects an original work in the tangible fixed form in which it has been set down, a patent protects the creation of inventive concepts as well as their reduction to practice.

If we had to wait for one to go off in our direct neighbourhood chances are we'd be fried. The galaxy is transparent to radiation of that energy so a burst would be seen no matter where. And it better be far since the energies involved are such that one of the theories of dinosaur extinction is that they were wiped out by a gamma-ray burst within our galaxy! Here's the short story on that, and if you like the number crunching version better that's here .