Slashdot Mirror

(4179) Toutatis 2453278.07 2004 Sept.29.57 0.01036 8 oppositions, 1988-2000 MPO 6175 (4179) Toutatis

From this link.

The parent page has many links of interest.

(4179) Toutatis 2453278.07 2004 Sept.29.57 0.01036 8 oppositions, 1988-2000 MPO 6175 (4179) Toutatis

From this link.

The parent page has many links of interest.

Or let's say you go to the movie theater and they're showing "Star Wars III". So you pay your $10 or whatever for a ticket, sit down, and the movie is nothing but two hours of the goatse guy pulling his ass open. So trademark protects ordinary people from getting scammed. Nobody can legally call their product "Star Wars" without permission.

The problem here comes when a trademark gains a wider scope, often through memorabilia licensing. First, the precedent set in the "ENJOY COCAINE" case ( Coke v. Gemini Rising ) seems to ban parody. Then the "STAR WARS" mark was plastered all over lunchboxes and toys. Finally, the Trademark Dilution Act took a trademark owner's power to control criticism even further. What purpose of protecting buyers do such broad trademarks serve?

Why should any one believe your statement. Because you brashly proclaim "That's a fact." ?

I (and I'd guess I'm not alone in this) am not interested in your or anyone else's proselytizing about the evils of aspartame (or anything else for that matter). If you have strong, verifiable facts that back your claim please share them. Otherwise, please shut up.

Here are some useful links on the safety of aspartame and some of the more common "complaints" spewed about by people who apparently have nothing better to do.

A link from MIT

A link from Harvard with a reprint of an article from TIME magazine.

One, two links from the "evil" FDA.

And a reprint of an article from "The Lancet" posted at aspartame.net. These links were all from this page at snopes.com. That took me a whole 3-5 minutes to find.

I also found a lot of pages making claims about formaldehyde and brain tumors and multiple-sclerosis. All of the "aspartame alarmist" pages lacked links to any scientific studies, any papers by third-party organizations, etc..

Read this document to learn what "RSI" is really caused by:

http://www.rsi.deas.harvard.edu/handout.doc

For more info, Google for: sarno tms

Tomorrow at 4 PM, physicist Shahriar S. Afshar, a Visiting Scientist at Harvard University's Physics Department will give a talk entitled Violation of Bohr's principle of complementarity in an optical "which-way" experiment at Texas A&M University.

Afshar has done a variation of the standard two-pin-hole "welcher-Weg" optics experiment, in which he demonstrates that wave interference is present even when one is determining through which pinhole a photon passes. This result is in direct contradiction to Neils Bohr's Principle of Complementarity, which would require in the quantum world that when one is measuring quantum properties, all wave interference phenomena must vanish. Afshar's trick is to find the location of the minimum points of wave interference, place one or more wires at these minimum points, and observe how much light is intercepted when one is determining the pinhole through which the photons passed.

It has been widely accepted that the rival interpretations of quantum mechanics, e.g., the Copenhagen Interpretation, the Many-Worlds Interpretation, and my father John Cramer's Transactional Interpretation, cannot be distinguished or falsified by experiment, because the experimental predictions come from the formalism that all such interpretations describe. However, the Afshar Experiment demonstrates in an interaction-free way that there is a loophole in this logic: if the interpretation is inconsistent with the formalism, then it can be falsified. In particular, the Afshar Experiment falsifies the Copenhagen Interpretation, which requires the absence of interference in a particle-type measurement. It also falsifies the Many-Worlds Interpretation which tells us to expect no interference between "worlds" that are physically distinguishable, e.g., that correspond to the photon's passage through one pinhole or the other.

The Transactional Interpretation, on the other hand, has no problem in explaining that Afshar results. "Offer waves" from the source pass through both pinholes and interfere, creating a condition in which no transactions to the wires can form. Therefore, no photons are intercepted by wires, as Afshar observes. The quantum formalism makes the same predictions.

On this basis, it appears that two of the major interpretations of quantum mechanics have been falsified and should be relegated to the waste basket of physics history. The Transactional Interpretation, which involves a forward/back in time handshake, is one of the few (perhaps the only) interpretation(s) left standing after the Afshar test.

Ask yourself, who am I trolling for with this, and be enlightened

The Register had something or two to say about D-flat.

Every ticket would have a Texan, Californian, or New Yorker on the ticket. Politicians from the aforementioned states would be completely ignored. And before anyone nitpicks this one, historically candidates very rarely lose their home state.

If this were true, candidates would be doing that now. You don't think that Republican's would just throw together a NY/California President/VP ticket then?

. The Dakotas, Vermont, Wyoming, New Hampshire, Idaho, Rhode Island, Maine, D.C., Alaska and Delaware would never see a candidate campaign in their state. They would be completely irrelevant. Carrying Virginia would completely invalidate losses in all of those states.

Sorry I took these out of order. But a candidate wouldn't really "carry" all the people in Virginia no matter how often he were to visit.

I think that Electoral College should be reformed or throw out all together. As you mention, It seems like it was originally a consession to the smaller states. It is unfair that the smaller states get 3 electoral votes no matter what. This throws off how much weight an individuals vote actually has to an electoral vote.

A constitutional amendment was proposed in 1979 which would have allowed for direct elections...

I like everything about this plan, the only problem is if a recount or run-off is needed it will be hard to do. I suppose they could do a recount only in a disputed state if something like that should be needed. Another plan that could make sense is changing the electoral college so a state can split their votes according to how the states population voted. Maine and Nebraska already have a system like this in place. I also think that if the electoral college is kept, the amount of electoral votes should be determained by actual voter turnout, not total population. Any change to the electoral college should be made with the provision that presidential canidates must visit every state, to avoid the small states from losing out to the bigger ones when it comes to the canidates time.

Some oddities I found about the electoral college....

Voter turnout is different than the actual population of the states which determains the amount of votes in the electoral college, for example in the 2000 election.

2,438,685 people voted in Minnesota, which has 10 electoral votes and an population of 4,919,479

2,359,892 people voted in Missouri which has 11 electoral votes and an population 5,595,211.

So 2,438,685 people in effect counted for 10 votes, while 2,359,892 counted for 11! Clearly this doesn't work out the way it should.

the ratio of electoral voters to population is thrown off in other states also because of the "3 vote minimum" rule. For example Kentucky has a population of 4, 041, 769 and has 8 electoral votes

Maine has a population of 1,274,923 and has 4 electoral votes

Although Kentucky has about three times Maine's population they only have double the electoral votes... I think the electoral college either needs to be reformed, or replaced with a direct election

Philip Greenspun wrote a fascinating analysis of this a few months ago. To quote part of it:

Home Depot sells window air conditioners for $80. They are made in China. When it breaks you throw it out. Twenty years ago a window air conditioner cost $1000 in today's money. When it broke you called the repairman.

You can buy a 27" TV for less than $200. It is made in China. If someone asks you what brand of TV you have, unless you're a geek with no life, you won't have a clue. You don't see ads for Daewoo or Apex TVs. When it breaks you throw it out. Forty years ago the TV industry employed at least one million Americans. TVs were made here. They cost so much that they needed to be financed, thus creating jobs in banks. If they broke every neighborhood had a TV repairman to come out and service the machine. Some of the most expensive advertising campaigns of the day were for cars. Consequently, consumers were intensely brand-loyal and proud to own an RCA, a Philco or whatever.

Once something can be assembled in China out of 100% Chinese-made components it can sell for approximately 1/10th the previous price.

Let's look at cars. According to http://www.autoalliance.org/ecofacts.htmthe auto industry employs at least 5 percent of Americans. People have jobs making cars. Because cars are so expensive people have jobs financing them, repairing them, and insuring them against collision and theft. Because cars are so expensive, people have jobs marketing and advertising them (more than $1000 of the price of a normalcar has gone into advertising, probably closer to $5000 for a Mercedes or BMW).

Within 10 to 20 years the Chinese will be able to sell a car that is very similar to today's rental car:4 doors, 4 seats, air conditioner, radio, new but not fancy. It will cost between $2000 and $3000 in today's dollars. With cars that cheap it will be unthinkable to manufacture in the U.S. Consumers won't bother to finance a $2000 purchase separately (maybe they'll add it to their credit card debt). Drivers will still carry liability insurance but won't bother with collision or theft coverage. With cars that cheap it won't make sense to advertise. If Ford or Toyota tried to sell the average person a $25,000 car they would simply laugh, much as a Walmart shopper would think you're crazy if you tried to persuade him to spend $2,000 on a TV.

If his analysis is correct -- and it certainly seems plausible -- then the predictions he goes on to make from there are wide-ranging and dramatic. What happens if the 5% of the American workforce that makes, sells, and finances cars is suddenly out of a job? What other manufacturing field could pick up that much slack? Can the economy change course in time to maintain America's wealth, or could this drastically accelerate the loss of blue (and now white) collar jobs that we've been seeing since the 1970s?

Maybe we should all just go apply at Wal-Mart now. At least then in 10 years we'll have a shot at being a minimum wage shlobs with seniority.

I think you mean this slashdot story from September last year. It was based on a press release of the Chandra X-ray observatory about sound waves of a black hole.

It can actually be quite useful. I had (until the hard-drive gave out and I was too lazy to reinstall) a box set up as a voicemail system, which would allow you to leave a message in someone's box. Every day right before anyone got home, it would send out e-mails to everyone who had messages with a list of who had called (caller ID & phone number) for them. You could then log into the intranet site and be given a list of calls and associated audio recordings of the messages. You could download & listen to them then delete them.

Fairly simple to do, and it was quite fun :)

"No the rules are not simple. Maybe in your head the rules are simple but in the law rules are very complicated. The test is whether a reasonable person would confuse the two. I don't think any judge would decide that a reasonble person would confuse lindows and windows let alone lindows.com and windows.com."

The judge will look at the similarity of the names. Lindows is one letter away from Windows. The judge will look at the similarity of the products. Both are operating systems. The judge will look for evidence of confusion. Weak point there, this happened before Lindows had much time to get into the market. (That and they virtually gave Bill Gates the raspberry.) The judge will look at the customer for this product. If somebody buys a computer with Lindows pre-installed, they aren't likely to know it's not Windows. Or, to put it another way, it would be easy to confuse them. The judge will also look at the intent of using that name. This is where Lindows will bite the big one. They had absolutely no reason to not realize that a product called Windows existed. Worse, they've taunted MS before.

"First of all no damage was done and no damage would have occured."

There was no time for the damage to be done, and frankly you don't know shit about what would have happened otherwise.

" Secondly MS sued because they got sue happy."

They sued because they had to. They have to defend their trademark or risk losing it due to 'abandonment'. Inescapable fact, sorry.

"Not only is this completely inadmissible it's also totally irrelevent."

It is admissable as the judge will look at Lindows' malicious intent.

"The real damage will be done if the judge throws out the trademark, which as I said he has indicated he might. I suspect MS will settle this for big money rather then risk that."

So you say Lindows is doing Microsoft harm, interesting... Palm should be sued while they're at it.

"Of course they did. Nobody is claiming otherwise. It's a perfectly normal name for a linux distribution." ... that is trying to intentionally rile up Microsoft in such a way they know they will immediately end up in court.

"Microsoft sues a lot of people. They are a sue happy organization. They sue 16 year olds for gods sake. Everybody at one time or another will draw fire from MS. They are extremely agressive."

I agree that's a true generalization of Microsoft, but in this particular case, they had to. Already proven that earlier.

"They did no such thing."

By calling it Lindows, oh yes they did.

"Why? Just because you hate them? Just because MS hates them? Because they sell linux? Why?"

Because it has a negative effect on Linux's reputation? Because it's a frivilous case? Because it's a waste of a legal battle they won't win?

"MS is a sleazy, unethical, evil corporation. They will do anything at anytime to destroy people and companies they don't like. They recognize no laws, they know no boundries. They will continue to act that way as long as the evil people running it continue to be in charge. The govts are powerless to stop it."

I agree.

McDonald's lost the right to use their famous golden arches in South Africa because another local South African company beat them to it. More info here

I had no problems with RSIs until I started working in Java.

The truth about "RSI"

Of course, it's OK for Apple to do that. Apple could have sold munitions to Germany in WWII and it would be OK.

Partial list of advertisers, courtesy of Harvard
News story on Harvard wrestling with the then Gator corp

I disagree, government is never the answer if you want something truely fixed. There are plenty of rules in place on how to maintain a reliable system, rules formed by the industry itself as "best practice" procedures; not to mention that there's already an alliance called NERC for US & Canada who's supposed to be managing it. A similar government commission FERC exists for setting USA policy only. Thirdly, there's another coallition called NAESB who sets the common standards for energy markets.

What doesn't exist is legally binding penalties on those who don't follow the "best practices" on how to run a control area. (Why can't we sue our utility company like we could any other private industry? Government.) Most of FirstEnergy's failures documented in the final report were not because there weren't any rules in place, it's that they weren't obeying the procedures already laid out; procedures that would have notified neighbors they were having issues, giving them time to rebalance the energy flows. This is a change that's been in the big "energy bill" for the last 4 years as the Senate sits and refuses to act on it, as the Democrats won't have anything to do with Republican proposed bills. The politicians have been arguing about Standard Market Design for 3 years, no progress. Private industry realized it needed common market rules for better efficiency and cost savings, so it's been implementing it themselves. If you leave things to the government, they argue and argue and nothing gets done.

The recent proposals, including the IEEE paper you link to, want to mandate additional collection equipment on every utility company in North America, so that one (government, of course) agency can collect all the data and have the big picture view. Well, in the next two years thanks to private industry advances brought on by deregulation, we may be down from hundreds to maybe 10 private institutions called Regional Transmission Organizations (RTOs) that will have the same big picture of vast swaths of the USA, with no government involvement whatsoever. That's the path I'd rather see.

Well, a good idea and a mother who shared a position on the board of United Way with John Opel (the then chairman of IBM).

The dude even looks like Simon & Garfunkel!

If it somehow found a way (legally) into my house and onto my hard drive, it belongs to nobody else but me, and as long as I keep it for myself, I'm allowed to do whatever I damn well please with it.

If an iTunes DRM'ed protected AAC file found it's way legally to your hard drive, I'm going to guess that happened using iTunes, the terms of which you agreed to. So, if you agreed to to their terms before using their service, I believe you are going to be legally bound to those tunes, no?

In fact, DRM exists because copyright holders know this. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a need for DRM! The whole point of DRM is to keep you from doing things you are legally entitled to do as specifically written in copyright law.

What things are you legally entitled to do as specifically written in copyright law that Apple iTunes prevents you from doing? I would highly advise you read section IV of the ruling in the MPAA v. 2600 case for more information on "fair use". The term is so heavily misused on Slashdot that it has become meaningless.

Your comment is interesting, but we still need to address whether an author's rights in his or her own works, whether moral rights or copyrights, are alienable property interests.

If we decide that these interests are alienable (ie can be bought or sold), then it doesn't matter, for the purposes of determining the limits of copyright entitlement, whether the holder of the interests is the author personally, or some third party that purchased the author's interests.

Couldn't gravitational lensing be a possible means for testing frame dragging?

Theoretically, yes.... there's a recent paper that works out the numbers for lensing from a spiral galaxy, and it's roughly on the order of a few micro-acroseconds. Possibly detectable by SIM or GAIA.

[TMB]

The breadth of censored content there is simply amazing.

So I guess now we can call all those dopey muscle bound guys 'apes' with a clear conscience

I realize this comment is in jest--and that my response is way offtopic-- but the world is changing, damnit... I played Division IA college football, and yes--I'm posting on Slashdot... The Geek/Tech/Nerd stigma/prejudice/expectation is deeply ingrained as someone single/pimply/bug-eyed... but someone is dopey just because they workout? wtf?
Mod this Offtopic, but shouldn't the intelligent crowd be the first ones to try and change this persona... try and accept the fact that technology now appeals to more than just typical Geeks and not everyone who posts on this site is male/single/pimply?

On that note, were you aware that Harvard is the nations largest Div I athletics program... Looks like some of those geeky kids up in Boston do a little bit more than study.

And here's this just for the heck of it.

Bored at the Big H? Hows this for a few things to try?

The best opt-in I've ever seen is an RSS feed.

• If you put it in your aggregator, you want it.
• If you remove it from your aggregator, you don't want it.

Mass-mailers/mail-mergers/automated-mailers (including my-cowardly-self) can deal with the fact that people are simply friggin' overwhelmed with inbox influx. I'm not an AOL user, but I've dealt with lousy unsubscribe procedures by crying "spam" to CloudMark etc... Go cry to mommy that they accidentally marked your carefully crafted newsletter as spam. Get over it.

Spread the word, RSS doesn't suck. Overload of inbox crap, opted-in or not, in the inbox does suck.

Thank you MS for making Outlook 2003 not download e-mail images by default! Thank you SpamCop and SpamHaus! Thank you Netscape engineers and Dave Winer for RSS!

While I'm on a roll. What the F is up with the national do-not-call list? Shouldn't it be a national call-me-i'm-an-idiot list instead?

I am now nearing the end of my first year of law school. I studied CS at Carnegie Mellon and graduated in '98.

I can assure all of you that law is insane. It is very very hard and a ton of work. I suggest you go check out Vosburg v. Putney, the first case we read in Torts. Walk in the door, and you're going to read this case. You will have no frigging idea what's going on. I certainly didn't...

Here's how it goes. You read 30-60 pages of stuff like this, go into class, and the prof grills you about what this case means. What is battery? What should it be? What is right? What is wrong? Where do we draw lines, and how do we? Can we?

This is definitely not programming.

I consider their position on this to be nothing more than empty threats. They can claim royalties for such copies, but media shifting and backups are very clearly legal (through precedent, written law, etc).

I'm not that worried quite yet.

1. The max resolution of computer technology matched the max resolution of television.
2. Because of the high cost of manufacturing electronics, families had fewer TVs/monitors.
3. Houses were smaller (page 14)
4. Videogames were more family friendly than today.
5. We didn't each carry e-mail around on our cell phones.

Gee, yeah -- big windows all around the front come to think of it.

maxwell-dworkin

Also, they have a blow up a few pages of Willie's homework assignments hung in the foyer. His implementation of BASIC I think?

Harvard has a nice page with lots of links an references for people looking to dig deeper into the Minor Planet definition under which asteroids like Ceres and Sedna fall under.

Well it beats the universities' own name choices. Harvard's actually an excellent example, they came very close at one point to naming one of the residential Houses after the university's third president Leonard Hoar, I kid you not.

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

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

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

Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS 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."

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

Perhaps you missed the whole DeCSS 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."

Amatuer astronomers continue to make significant contributions to the field. It was an amatuer who first noticed that al0667 might hit the earth and it was another amatuer who recorded the key observation that placed the same object on a safe trajectory. If you're serious about wanting to help spot these things, you can start here.

RSS feeds are an easy way to move news from site to site. For example, here is Slashdot's RSS feed

You can find more information here

--
Real-time deal updates, over 400 a day!

Dinosaurs on Sedna? I think they'd just fly off, there couldn't be enough gravity on a rock 2000meters wide to hold down those "gentle giants"

First, for fans who came to the game late: the quote "What next? Drill Sedna for oil?" was in the original version of the story, but was removed after a few minutes. This is known in the business as "closing the barn door after the cat is out of the bag and turning your butt into hamburger."

Anyway, back to the oil. This story about Sedna's discovery points out that the planet(oid) is very dark and very red. Don't forget the far-out but plausible theory that Earth's hydrocarbons came from comets, not dinosaurs.

Now imagine... what if Sedna is a big ball of frozen, red transmission fluid? I see NASA getting some new funding for KBO research real quick!

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

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

Of course, this applies only to integer speeds. Floating point calculations can get a lot faster - up to 3,400,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 GHz for single-precision floats, and much higher for doubles. Perhaps future 32-bit processors will be forced to emulate integer arithmetic using floating-point registers?

There's a great book covering the current state of nutritional research from the Harvard School of Public Health: Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy. It's about $15 US, and worth every penny.

Empirical Analysis of Internet Filtering in China

Ah, you guys are talking about RSS.

When you take into account the many years of schooling -- a typical neurosurgeon will be in his 30s before even starting to practice -- the fact that residents are worked like slaves, and the arduous call schedule of surgeons in general, then their pay is quite reasonable imo. Of course I'm biased, as I should be since I'm going to med school myself. And possibly going into neurosurgery, to tell the truth.

This article, on how some doctors are dropping malpractice insurance, is also a good read. A key fact to glean from that article is that for one physician it would have cost $60k/yr for $250k of coverage. That's ridiculous.

And sometimes the food includes a viral license that requires that you release the source to the contents of your stomach as well. I'd be happier with food that just caused a core dump.

Maybe I should stick with Windows...

It is a criminal offense to claim, with fraudulent intent, that you have a copyright if you do not. The SCO Group does *NOT* hold the copyrights to the UNIX source code. Novell has *NOT* transfered the title for the works that the SCO Group fraudulently filed for copyright in 2003. The SCO Group do not have the right to sue anybody for violation of copyright works without the assent of the title holder.

The SCO Group claims the right to sue for work in standard UNIX and POSIX interfaces that AT&T and Novell granted full rights to use royalty free in perpetuity for the ISO, ANSI and FIPS federal standards.

The SCO Group's contract claims against IBM and others based upon the AT&T license in respect to rights of so called derivative works is in direct contradiction to evidence presented to the SCO Group by Novell.

The SCO Group though the press and SEC filings, has bolstered the share price of the SCO Group based upon demonstrably false claims to the contrary of above points 1,2 and 3. The SCO Group CEOs and legal agents were notified by Novell and IBM *before* making these false claims and presenting them as fact. The actions of the SCO Group must be in violation of several SEC regulations.

So how is the lawsuit going to go if it gets to court?
Eben Moglen's Harvard Speech
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/p.cgi/speakers.html [harvard.edu]

The Transcript
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=200402260 03735733

The McBrides, jointly -- I feel sometimes as though I'm in a Quentin Tarantino movie of some sort with them [laughter] -- the McBrides have failed to distinguish adequately between dicta and holding.

I do not like Eldred against Ashcroft. I think it was wrongly decided. I filed a brief in it, amicus curiae, and I assisted my friend and colleague Larry Lessig in the presentation of the main arguments which did not, regrettably, succeed.

Oddly enough, and I will take you through this just enough to show, oddly enough, it is the position that we were taking in Eldred against Ashcroft, which if you stick to holding rather than dicta, would be favorable to the position now being urged by Mr. McBride. What happened in Eldred against Ashcroft, as opposed to the window dressing of it, is actually bad for the argument that Mr. McBride has been presenting, whichever Mr. McBride it is. But they have not thought this through enough.

Let me show you why. The grave difficulty that SCO has with free software isn't their attack; it's the inadequacy of their defense. In order to defend yourself in a case in which you are infringing the freedom of free software, you have to be prepared to meet a call that I make reasonably often with my colleagues at the Foundation who are here tonight. That telephone call goes like this. "Mr. Potential Defendant, you are distributing my client's copyrighted work without permission. Please stop. And if you want to continue to distribute it, we'l

Actually, the recent spirit photos seem to indicate that the Martians are not really interested in a treaty!

Watch (RealMedia), Listen (Speex codec), Or just Read (HTML text) and become more informed.

Watch (RealMedia), Listen (Speex codec), Or just Read (HTML text) and become more informed.

Watch (RealMedia), Listen (Speex codec), Or just Read (HTML text) and become more informed.

Here's an interesting page listing the Fortune 1000 and their domain registrars.