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Hey, good post, but are you claiming that Harvard was originally called Oxford? As far as I can tell it was originally called Harvard College. But maybe I am misreading you.

sent to "internal" exile (a la freezing starvation Soviet Gulag or Chinese Communist Laogai )

tortured a la Saddam's Iraq vice "abused"

deprived of their civil rights a la Manzanar

sent to "internal" exile (a la freezing starvation Soviet Gulag or Chinese Communist Laogai )

tortured a la Saddam's Iraq vice "abused"

deprived of their civil rights a la Manzanar

NEGATIVE NATIONALISM
(i) ANGLOPHOBIA. Within the
[pseudo?]intelligentsia, a derisive and mildly hostile attitude towards Britain
[United States?] is more or less compulsory, but it is an unfaked emotion in
many cases. During the war it was manifested in the defeatism of the
[pseudo?]intelligentsia, which persisted long after it had become clear that the
Axis [Islamo-fascist?] powers could not win. Many people were undisguisedly
pleased when Singapore fell ore when the British were driven out of Greece, and
there was a remarkable unwillingness to believe in good news, e.g. el Alamein
[Iraq? Afghanistan?], or the number of German planes shot down in the Battle of
Britain. English [Liberal Western Democracy?] left-wing
[pseudo?]intellectuals did not, of course, actually want the Germans or Japanese
[Islamo-fascist groups/countries?] to win the war, but many of them could not
help getting a certain kick out of seeing their own country humiliated, and
wanted to feel that the final victory would be due to Russia [UN?
'world-community'], or perhaps America, and not to Britain. In foreign politics
many [pseudo?]intellectuals follow the principle that any faction backed by
Britain [United States?] must be in the wrong. As a result, [pseudo?]
'enlightened' opinion is quite largely a mirror-image of Conservative policy.
Anglophobia is always liable to reversal, hence that fairly common spectacle,
the pacifist of one war who is a bellicist in the next.

sent to "internal" exile (a la freezing starvation Soviet Gulag or Chinese Communist Laogai )

tortured a la Saddam's Iraq vice "abused"

deprived of their civil rights a la Manzanar

My open letter to Steve Ballmer:

Dear Mr. Ballmer,

As a scientist and developer developer developer developer, I believe I can answer some of your concerns:

We must also work to change a number of customer perceptions, including the views that older versions of Office and Windows are good enough [...]

I can sincerely assure you that I, for one, have never considered older (or newer, for that matter) versions of Microsoft Office and Windows good enough. Not even once. You can stop worrying about that.

On the need to innovate: The key to our growth is innovation. Microsoft was built on innovation, has thrived on innovation, and its future depends on innovation. [...] We lead in innovation in most areas where we compete, and where we do lag [...] rest assured that the race to innovate has just begun and we will pull ahead. [emphasis added]

Now, no matter how much you believe your developers developers developers developers to innovate innovate innovate innovate, saying the above as a company which, in fact, has never contributed a single notable innovation to any computer-related field... Well... What can I say? You are not only doomed. You are already dead.

Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.

Looking at the picture of Prof. George Church -- the aforementioned Harvard geneticist, one is struck by the resemblance with the guy Terry Gilliam cast as the "environmentalist" genetic engineer synthesized a pathogen to kill all humans in The Twelve Monkeys.

George Church is probably one of the least likely geneticists to hop on a world-wide jet tour to deliver a misanthropic virus he's synthesized.

The problem with all this isn't so much the creation of new, deadly pandemics -- nature does a good enough job of that. The real problem is the way amplification of international transport has been behind almost every major pandemic from the Plague which followed on the heels of the Mongol Empire's wide stretch -- to the pandemic of the first World War.

Globalization has already given us the AIDS epidemic and the SARS scare. It may have given us autism's recent explosive growth and a lot more we don't even know about.

No one is being held liable for this increased risk imposed on an unaware population -- this despite the fact even identifiable corporations have externalized the costs of their risk-taking on the public and walked away with higher corporate profits as a result. Not even Ralph Nader has guts to touch this.

Popular misconception on Slashdot.
I don't like the DMCA, but you should read exactly what it prohibits.

The DMCA prohibits "circumvention of copyright protection systems". No matter how you look at it, that's a very different thing from a general ban on reverse-engineering.

The most draconian interpretation possible is to assume that it prohibits reverse-engineering of copyright protection measures. But that's it. And it explicitly allows circumvention for interoperability purposes.

Without getting farther into the issue, an API cannot reasonably be interpreted as a copyright protection measure. And reverse-engineering isn't necessarily circumvention.

So it's really not an issue at all in this case.

I'm not doubting you, but then how come that closed-source license agreements almost invariably prohibit reverse-engineering? Does this mean those license agreements are unenforcable?

Essentially, yes, I believe so. It's a topic of much debate, but Vault Corp. vs. Quaid Software Ltd. in 1988 found that the prohibition of reverse-engineering in an EULA was preempted by federal copyright law.

It makes sense; Copyright law gives you the right to reverse-engineer. As I said, essentially, licenses are for granting rights (however limited), but not for taking them away.

(Disclaimer: This does not constitute legal advice ;-) )

It may be worth mentioning that the GNU Project urges people to refuse to work with Sun, and to instead use the free alternatives to the non-free Sun software.

We need to replace these proprietary software products, not use them.

I proposed a tax on computer supplies and equipment as one possible way to fund free software development.

first exoplanet was discovered in 1995 by the European team of Michel Mayor, around 51 Pegasi
A good link about exoplanets

Here's the amusing narrative that accompanies the mp3 Huygens pronunciation.

I am not sure if the Xbox was for the same reason, but the PS2 could not be exported to certain countries and could not be manufactured in China due to the exceptional 'dual use' potential of the console. I have heard that it could be used for many military uses from guidance systems to low-cost/high density simulators. Nice writeup here.

My Xbox is more than dual use now that I have it with FTP, shoutcast, and full media-center capabilities....

You can listen to it pronounced in Dutch here.

Yes, and there are conflicting reports of this. In particular a study done by the University of California and Stanford. The link is here to a PDF on the results of the report.

This page here used to have some pictures of this system parking.. (Too bad it's currently bandwith exhausted.. Some tweeb posted big big pictures..) And beleave me.. finding "a parking spot" would be easy.

Wondering how to pronounce Christiaan Huygens' name? You're in luck: http://frank.harvard.edu/~paulh/misc/huygens.htm

Unfortunately, if you were raised in America, it's probably impossible for you :)

Nope it isn't a fox bias, it is just further proof that the "liberal media" is a myth...

That's why, according to the Pew Research Group, members of the press are five times more likely to be liberal than conservative. Also in 1992, 7% of the members of the press voted for Bush Sr. as opposed to 37% of the general populace.

Also interesting from that studay was the absolute inablility of liberal members of the press to identify a "liberal" news org. Almost 3/4ths of them could not. You may debate the merrits of the belief that the press in general is left slanted, but their are clearly plenty of orginizations that are.

Also, a recent UCLA/University of Chicago study showed that
"Our results show a very significant liberal bias,"

They also found that the Drudge Report and Fox News Special Report were pretty much at the true center of the political spectrum.

And we all know how the UCLA is far far right-wing, right? You can read the study here (warning, PDF).

Read.

You want to know about Java3D and why people love it? Try looking towards the medical profession, especially radiology and surgical planning. There are a number of Java3D based DICOM viewers out there for viewing CT and MRI images, such as SPLViz and VisAdd.

The cross-platform portability means that the same CT and MRI images can be loaded up onto the same viewer on both the doctor's office PC workstation, their home macintosh or linux system, or even onto one of the esoteric workstations.

To get a better handle on why this images are needed, read up on this article: Combining Local and Remote Visualization Techniques for Interactive Volume Rendering in Medical Applications, and check out the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center Website.

Once you dive around those articles and websites, you'll realize that Java3D supports alot of exotic hardware, such as 5 megapixel LCD monitors, Projection Tables for Virtual and Augmented Reality and Virtual Surgery Tables.

Radiograph images in most hospitals are obtained on VAX or QNX or HP Unix systems, and are then transmitted to Solaris or Windows workstations/servers for post processing. It's typical to have sometype of Oracle database sitting on an imaging archive (we have a 20TB archive, for example), feeding images to the clients sitting on workstations. Sometimes the images are saved as 3D volumetric data, although usually they're saved as 2D slices. So, you need some type of portable 3D viewing application that can sit on nearly any type of box, and can compile the radiographs for whatever local viewing equipment is available...

FYI, medical systems have to conform and perform according to federally mandated law, and there isn't the market pressure to compete with the newest processor on the market. Therefore, priorities are very different in the medical world. Pixel shading and texture mapping are generally on the bottom of our list of importance. True stereoscopic visualization and platform portability are near the top. For our purposes, Java3D outperforms all other competitors, because we *need* the portability, the garbage cleanup of java, and all of the other advantages of Java.

Ben Edelman

The users have varying level of backups, but the biggest issue is that no one can find the new blog now. The weblogs.com domain was integral to these blogs, much like blogger.com, typepad.com, etc. The weblogs were found at hostnames like booknotes.hammock.com, rex.weblogs.com, delphi.weblogs.com, etc. Users very much could have used an opportunity to say what their new URL was. Dave Winer decided that was too much work [MP3 audio post he made].

Thanks bloody slashdotters! You knocked the test engine down! :)

Anyway, slashdot.org is not officially blocked or restricted in China - YET. If your China friends found it difficult to access /. from China it might due to some self-disciplinary measures by individual ISP.

Thanks bloody slashdotters! You knocked the test engine down! :)

Anyway, slashdot.org is not officially blocked or restricted in China - YET. If your China friends found it difficult to access /. from China it might due to some self-disciplinary measures by individual ISP.

See it yourself.

I recommend the Ant microprocessor (which pre-dates and has nothing to do with the Java Ant project). It's a small architecture and was designed specifically for teaching. It has everything you need, and nothing that you do not.

there will soon be 10, per recent revisions ("clarifications") to RSS.

I'm a member of the RSS Advisory Board along with Dave Winer and several others. What do we have to do to convince people that it isn't controlled by Dave Winer or anyone else? Read the license for RSS 2.0. The specification is released under a Creative Commons license and no ownership is claimed of the format embodied by the specification.

The RSS 2.0 specification is frozen and no new development is allowed under the RSS name. The specification states that any new development must happen in namespaces or in new specifications with new names. Funnily enough, when people actually do that (with Atom, and with "funky" feeds), they are still criticised for it by the people who wrote that part of the spec.

I teach physics and astronomy at a university, and I know how to read the image. In case you weren't paying attention, SOHO won't see a transit across the solar disk. It will, however, see a transit across the solar corona, which extends well beyond 5 solar radii (why do you think Lasco C3 has such a wide field of view?). A transit occurs when an object crosses in front of a larger object, not limited to the disk of a star, planet, or moon. Did you hear about the transit of Titan across the Crab Nebula as seen in x-rays? The Crab has no well-defined edge, and yet we still speak of it being transited. The solar corona can be transited, and it is right now.

or Harvard and Faculty if you want to get picky :P

or Harvard and Faculty if you want to get picky :P

Only in america

Anybody know where I can get this paper? I hate reading news blurbs on research. I want the meat!!!

Its not "his site"

Its Radio Userland's site AKA radio.weblogs.com AKA the company that Dave Winer founded. Winer is the RSS / OPML / XML guy who is now at Harvard.

Piquepaille == spammer, Instead of using email to spam, he spams sites like Slashdot (and many others) using his blog.

Piquepaille == scammer

Here is a direct quote from Piquepaille's Blogads advertising entry:

My stories are often mentioned by Slashdot, BoingBoing or Nanodot. Smart Mobs and Mindjack Daily Relay are also sites where I put summaries of my stories, giving this blog a traffic of 150,000 visits per month. So if you have an interesting technology to promote, put your ads on this blog.

Why doesn't he just say "So if you want to associate yourself with a spammer ,give me your money."?

Ignore the fact that he has no "stories" of his own, offers no original content and zero insight.

Like most spammers, he has no incentive to stop because it's profitable for him to spam Slashdot and other sites.

Make it unprofitable. Stop visiting his weblog. Express your displeasure to the editors. Express your displeasure to Radio Userland (they are a quiet participant in his spamming since Userland has a small ad on the blog). Express your displeasure to the advertisers. Let them know you won't buy products they advertise there. Last of all, express your displeasure about his spam [mailto] to Piquepaille himself.

You make Piquepaille's continued spamming possible with your traffic.

(As for all the spamreferences in this post, some might call it poetic justice. Maybe Google will pick it up and let everyone know.)

it's like he's trying to karma whore -- the trollish kind, that is -- on his own weblog. (Which appears to be down right now. So much for my point.)

If you can't buy hardware that will record protected content, then where's your fair use rights now? You still have them, but you can't actually exercise them.

Jurists have commented that without actual, working fair use, the copyright law violates the first article of amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Even the opinion of the Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft has specified that fair use preserves the First Amendment right of freedom of the press. Watch for a big EFF-funded constitutional challenge should Congress try to plug the analog hole.

The only thing Universal v. Reimerdes enshrined is the ability to work within the confines that the copyright holders decide to give you.

I'll quote from an opinion in that case:

It has been viewed by courts as a safety valve that accommodates the exclusive rights conferred by copyright with the freedom of expression guaranteed by the First Amendment ... one might quote the verbal portion of the sound track, rerecord both verbal and nonverbal portions of the sound track, and video tape or otherwise record images produced on a monitor when the DVD is played on a compliant DVD player.

The implication of camcording in the construction "otherwise record images produced on a monitor" clearly refers to the analog hole, as without an analog hole, there can be no lawful fair use. The First Amendment requires that fair use not violate copyright law (infringement, circumvention, or any other offense), and any law that makes fair use impossible is unconstitutional.

I just can't put my finger on what they're up to...

I have two words to answer your question.

Software Patents

A few more words...

Eben Moglen spoke at Harvard in February regarding not just SCO, but the future direction of the IT industry at large.

He said that today the battle is over copyright. In five years the battle will be over software patents. And in ten years the battle will shift to that of bandwidth. Of ensuring that everyone has access to bandwidth as easily as they do electricity, so that all may share in the information that is available.

My dates may be slightly off, but you can see the coming progression of battlefields.

Microsoft engages in illegal and immoral behavior. But they are not stupid. They are preparing for the next war, which will be software patents.

The transcript of Eben Moglen's speech can be viewed here from Groklaw and the video of his speech can be viewed here from Harvard. (Sorry, it's in Real Media format)

If you haven't seen that speech, you should. To call it enlightening is to do it a disservice.

- Neil Wehneman

P.S. I realize I use battle and war imagery a lot in this post, but quite frankly I believe the stakes are that high. Imagine if the printing press revolution had fallen to the entrenched interests of the day. We are now in the same situation, only with digital information.

With their typical prescience, the FSF discussed this issue. Read the transcript of Eben Moglen's talk or listen to the talk and you'll find this segment about one hour into the talk (during the Q&A section):

One of the legal consequences of the SCO affair is that people are going to start to pay closer attention all the time to how free software products are put together. They are going to discover that what really matters is how you deal with the questions of, for example, possible lurking work-for-hire claims against free software. They're going to discover that in this respect, too, Mr. Stallman was quite prescient, because they are going to recognize that the way they want their free software put together is the way the Free Software Foundation put it together since now more than twenty years. The way we're going, they're going to discover that they really would like to have it, is for each individual contribution of code to a free software project, if the guy who contributed the code was working in the industry, they would really like to have a work-for-hire disclaimer from the guy's employer, executed at the same time that the contribution was made. And the filing cabinets at the Free Software Foundation are going to look to them like an oasis in a desert of possible problems. We saw that problem coming. We have tried in our act as stewards over a large part of the free software in the world to deal with it. People are going to want to have that up front for everything that they can possibly, and they're going to be much more reluctant to rely on software that wasn't assembled in those ways.

If you are thinking about working in the law of free software, and gosh, I hope you are, one of the things you might want to be thinking about working on is the software conservation trusts that are going to be growing up around this economy in the next five years. I'll help you make one, or you can come to work in one of mine. We're going to need to spend a lot of time doing work which is associated with trustees. We're going to be spending a lot of time making sure that things are put together and they are built well. And we are going to be doing that on behalf of a third-party insurance industry which is going to be growing up, is growing up before our very eyes now, which is learning that it really cares how the free software is assembled.

Sage words when one's software's source code history is being questioned.

Trademark law does not explicitly prohibit "purposeful ripoffs." Also "as close as possible to a blatant trademark infringement" does not equal "trademark infringement." The rules for determining whether a trademark has been infringed is "likelihood of confusion", according to Harvard Law.

So even if the court rules that Microsoft can keep its "Windows" trademark, in order to prohibit their competitors from using "Lindows" they have to show not just that it's a blatant rip-off of their name, but that consumers will be confused by the similarity. If Lindows markets itself clearly as "based on Linux but as easy to use as Windows(R)" then they might still be able to make the case that no consumer would accidentally buy Lindows thinking that they were getting Windows; rather the name was explicitly chosen in order to compare and contrast their product with the popular Windows product.

You're absolutely right - and yes B1/B12 are helpful when you're in the 'regrowth' stage of a squished nerve. Most people recover without issue, but some experience 'weak' nerves afterwards or even crossed nerves (ie when you smile on one side you inadvertently blink an eye). The condition has a name - something like sink***sis - but since I can't remember exactly google isn't being very helpful.

The harvard neurological forums are a great resource for people with bells/Ramsey Hunt and some other nerve disorders. They were helpful in diagnosing my weird-ass condition and finding information on how to treat it/help with the LONG (6 month) nerve regrowth.

Well, Phillip Greenspun does pose a very interesting question about that exact issue.

What are you talking about?

Ext2/3 and reiserfs both have inbuilt defragmentation capabilities.

No, they don't. But since they borrow their design from BSD's FFS they don't need it either.

This can be seen, for instance, when you boot an ext2 system after an unclean shutdown and it checks the integrity of the filesystem. On journaled filesystems, the log is replayed. IBM's jfs also runs a modified fsck.

Erm, that's fsck. fsck doesn't do defragmentation.

In Linux, it's just not necessary (nor in any Unix derivative such as AIX or BSD that uses those filesystems).

It's true, however performance is severely degraded when disk usage reaches around 90% for classic FFS-like filesystems. While the BSDs can mount ext2 partitions none of them uses ext[23] as default. AIX uses a JFS version that's a bit different from the one you see in Linux, which was based on OS/2's code. I think you're mixing up filesystem integrity with fragmentation. In classic BSD UFS/FFS data is stored in datablocks, which are partitioned in fragments, usually 1/4th of the datablock size. A fragmented file is a file that's stored in non-contiguous fragments. Just that. The performance impact of fragmented files vs the time needed to reorganize the data shows that it's not worth running a defrag program on FFS filesystems.

This paper has some more info on the subject.

1. The article itself refers to the recent observations by Chandra which show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating, and that this acceleration started about 6 billion years ago after a period of decelerating.

2. The Hubble Space Telescope has made observations of supernovae which show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating unexpectedly.

The whole point of the article was to show that the Chandra observations of galaxy clusters agreed with previous observations of supernovae that the expansion of the universe is accelerating.

There is no evidence at all for oscillation. It is an interesting idea, but it is simply not supported by any facts at all.

By the way, here is the part of your comment I was responding to:

Why are they ignoring the obvious (at least to me) possiblity that the universe oscillates around some optimal size. Imagine the universe as a rubber ball. Squeeze the ball and let it go. Every particle inside will immediately start moving away from the others at an accelerated pace, continuing to accelerate until passing the rest boundary, when it will start slowing down.

• clusters are filled with hot gas that emit X-rays with a spectrum indicative of their temperature (typically a million Kelvins or so)
  
• the X-ray luminosity depends on the temperature and the gas mass
  
• the temperature depends on the total (gas + dark) mass
  
• Chandra measures the spectrum which gives you the temperature) and the flux (luminosity / distance^2)
  
• therefore you can find the distance given the gas/dark mass ratio
  
• because clusters are really big and sample a big fraction of the universe, the gas/dark mass ratio is typical of the universe as a whole... and more importantly, that means that all big clusters have the same gas/dark mass ratio
  
• setting the gas/dark mass ratio of all 26 clusters equal gives you the ratio of all of their distances
  
• measuring the redshift of the galaxies in the clusters gives you a relationship between the rate of expansion and distance (relative to the nearest cluster, say)
  
• when you look at this diagram, you see that as things get farther away, the expansion rate increases... and then if you get really far away, it decreases again. this is exactly consistent with what you expect from the cosmological constant (or any form of dark energy with a similar equation of state)

Given the things that are (successfully) sued over in the US, this may not be that outlandish. First of all, "the use of a trademark in connection with the sale of a good constitutes infringement if it is likely to cause consumer confusion as to the source of those goods or as to the sponsorship or approval of such goods" (cyber.law.harvard.edu). Google is certainly using the name to make money. However, this may fail because, other than the book containing the word "googol," I don't get the impression that the Kasner family is trying to sell anything using this name. However, ever since I started using Google, I haven't been able to remember the correct spelling of googol -- so there is a case to be made for some confusion. Might one not reasonably assume some connection between the company and Kasner?

I don't know if the inclusion of the term in a book counts. According to cyber.law.harvard.edu again, "A trademark is a word, symbol, or phrase, used to identify a particular manufacturer or seller's products and distinguish them from the products of another." So it may not be trademark infringement -- but what about copyright? From the Copyright office, under "What is not protected by copyright?" we find "Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans". My assumption would be that the made-up word would could fall through this crack. Probably depends on the quality of the lawyers.

Dictionary.com DOES suggest a connection, saying that "The site's name is apparently derived from 'googol', but note the difference in spelling." wordorigins.org also suggests that Google "is a deliberate variant of the mathematical term...They altered the spelling for trademark purposes" (not that I know how the authors at wordorigins know what Page and Brin were thinking at the time).

So. Money grubbing? Yes. Ridiculous given the things that the US system has granted copyright protection? Maybe not.

And, of course, the obligatory IANAL.

Given the things that are (successfully) sued over in the US, this may not be that outlandish. First of all, "the use of a trademark in connection with the sale of a good constitutes infringement if it is likely to cause consumer confusion as to the source of those goods or as to the sponsorship or approval of such goods" (cyber.law.harvard.edu). Google is certainly using the name to make money. However, this may fail because, other than the book containing the word "googol," I don't get the impression that the Kasner family is trying to sell anything using this name. However, ever since I started using Google, I haven't been able to remember the correct spelling of googol -- so there is a case to be made for some confusion. Might one not reasonably assume some connection between the company and Kasner?

I don't know if the inclusion of the term in a book counts. According to cyber.law.harvard.edu again, "A trademark is a word, symbol, or phrase, used to identify a particular manufacturer or seller's products and distinguish them from the products of another." So it may not be trademark infringement -- but what about copyright? From the Copyright office, under "What is not protected by copyright?" we find "Titles, names, short phrases, and slogans". My assumption would be that the made-up word would could fall through this crack. Probably depends on the quality of the lawyers.

Dictionary.com DOES suggest a connection, saying that "The site's name is apparently derived from 'googol', but note the difference in spelling." wordorigins.org also suggests that Google "is a deliberate variant of the mathematical term...They altered the spelling for trademark purposes" (not that I know how the authors at wordorigins know what Page and Brin were thinking at the time).

So. Money grubbing? Yes. Ridiculous given the things that the US system has granted copyright protection? Maybe not.

And, of course, the obligatory IANAL.

Its not "his site"

Its Radio Userland's site AKA radio.weblogs.com AKA the company that Dave Winer founded. Winer is the RSS / OPML / XML guy who is now at Harvard.

Piquepaille == spammer. Instead of using email to spam, he spams sites like Slashdot (and many others) using his blog.

Piquepaille == scammer

Here is a direct quote from Piquepaille's Blogads advertising entry:

My stories are often mentioned by Slashdot, BoingBoing or Nanodot. Smart Mobs and Mindjack Daily Relay are also sites where I put summaries of my stories, giving this blog a traffic of 150,000 visits per month. So if you have an interesting technology to promote, put your ads on this blog.

Why doesn't he just say "So if you want to associate yourself with a spammer, give me your money."?

Ignore the fact that he has no "stories" of his own, offers no original content and zero insight.

Like most spammers, he has no incentive to stop because it's profitable for him to spam Slashdot and other sites.

Make it unprofitable. Stop visiting his weblog. Express your displeasure to the editors. Express your displeasure to Radio Userland (they are a quiet participant in his spamming since Userland has a small ad on the blog). Express your displeasure to the advertisers. Let them know you won't buy products they advertise there. Last of all, express your displeasure about his spam to Piquepaille himself.

You make Piquepaille's continued spamming possible with your traffic.

(As for all the spam references in this post, some might call it poetic justice. Maybe Google will pick it up and let everyone know.)

Trademark, patent, and copyright laws exist to protect the "property" of those who create them. Without these laws there is little in the way of incentive for developing new products, since competitors can merely take your program, re-label it, and release it. A good example is Biotech patents: biotech companies spend millions of dollars every day in R&D. This R&D results in many useful and life-saving devices and drugs. If a competitor can easily take this device/drug and reverse-engineer and re-release/re-package, there is no incentive for the Biotech companies to continue making these drugs/devices.

Here's another example: You're a engineering student who works in his freetime trying to design a great new widget. You spend thousands of dollars and put in every moment of free time on this product. Finally you get it to work and release it to the world. The next day every widget producer has your design and begins creating their own. DO you have any incentive to ever work on a widget ever again?

Don't get me wrong, i'm a big fan of F/OSS. But your view of IP law is completly wrong. If you're interested in the basis for IP law or just want to learn more about it, Harvard Law School has a great page with primers for copyright, patent, trademark, and trade secret law.

I'm a law student studying in IP so the subject is near and dear to me. I believe in the necessity of IP laws but what is really needed is a balance between IP protection laws and consumer rights. Right now the law is being bent heavily towards strong IP protection and against consumer rights. I'd like to make it a little more fair, but arguments like this make myself and others like the EFF look bad and are just provide more ammo for the content and software industry.

For Celestia I can't say, but you can get ephemerides for most astronomy programs from http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/iau/MPEph/MPEph.html . Just type Toutatis into the big box near the top, pick your program down below, and click on Get ephemerides.