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[Legalizing slavery] is an extreme example, of course, but so is the 'Happy Birthday' thing.

The means are delineated by the extremes.

If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after it leaves his or her mouth, most of them will say yes.

If you ask them whether an artist should have any control over his or her music after he or she dies, what will most of them say? My argument isn't against copyright, which I consider a useful tool, but rather against excess and abuse.

You never did answer the 'theft of services' point

Thanks for reminding me to address the issue. I have done so. And about sneaking into a concert: For one thing, additional labor is needed to clean up after those who fill empty seats.

For those who are interested, the Nantero's technology is based on earlier work in the lab of Charles M. Lieber. The original paper was published in the journal Science. Rueckes et al, Science, Vol 289, P. 94. Rueckes went on to found Nantero.

The original experiment worked as follows:

One rope of singled walled carbon nanotubes sits suspended above another in a crossbar configuration. When an electric charge is applied, the top nanotube rope bends downward, where it is held in place by van der waals attraction to the bottom rope. To deactivate the switch, another charge is applied to repel the bent nano-rope into its original position.

This electromechanical switch works as a switch because of tunneling of electrons between the upper rope and the lower rope. When the ropes are sticking together, enough electrons tunnel from the upper to the lower, or vice versa so that one can measure a good signal, turning the switch on. When the ropes are apart, the tunneling conductance drops by several orders of magnitude, turning the switch off.

The original experiment was done with bundles of carbon nanotubes. In principle, the concept should work at much higher densities for single nanotubes, but the technology still has hurdles to cross. Currently, the tubes conduct because ropes of tubes are likely to contain both semiconductor type and metal type tubes. Since metal type tubes are fantastic conductors, having even a few of them in a rope will allow a device to work. However, when one crosses the threshold to single nanotubes, the device will only work if the tubes are metal type. Hence, an important problem will be finding a way to produce only metal type single walled nanotubes. Currently, carbon nanotubes are produced in a mixture of semiconductor type and metal type nanotubes. It's difficult to control that property because it depends sensitively on the way the sp2 bonds on the nanotube sidewall line up, something that no one yet knows how to control.

Here is a sorta technical document about accented and special characters...

Netscape

Here is a pretty layout of what buttons to press...

Harvard

For another pessimistic point of view, check out May's Harvard Business Review, "IT Doesn't Matter," summary here. (I suggest reading it at a good magazine store with tables and coffee because buying the damn thing is not a sound value proposition.)

The article essentially argues that an in-house IT department is no longer strategic for most companies--that IT has become a commodity. Although I think this is completely absurd at this point, chances are they have a point. In any case, it's interesting reading.

Selling or otherwise sharing pirated copies of vinyl records or casette tapes, while it's music piracy, because of its analog nature, meant that there was always incentive for the buyer or acquirer of the pirated music to one day purchase an original if they desired better quality.

I think what really irks the music industry is that they believe CD piracy lacks that side-effect. Analog music piracy was free marketing and promotion for the music labels -- people got their hands on lower quality samples, some of whom would become motivated to purchase originals for the sake of better quality.

What I don't think the music industry is tracking is how many CD sales are happening BECAUSE of CD music pirating. How many people wouldn't have dared shell out $15.99 to buy album XYZ of an artist they'd never heard of if they HADN'T just come across it via a P2P filesharing network, listened to it and said, "Hey, I want to help support this small-time artist and/or band, let me buy a copy and hope they get more than $0.03 in royalties ..."

To answer your question, I think the Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 (AHRA), 17 U.S.C. 1001-1010 would seem to indicate that if you owned the CD and made a digital copy of it, you're allowed to do so. (Link taken from another excellent page: The DAT Controversy by Jocelyn Dabeau and William Fisher.)

I take advantage of this so that I only keep copies of all my CD's in my car, in case my flip-file of CD's gets stolen or my entire car. It also makes CD scratches less annoying, since for $0.35 I just toss the scratched copy and make a new one to keep in the car.

However, is it legal to make a digital copy for non-commercial personal use of someone else's CD for your own use, even though you may legally own a copy of the music in another medium (record, cassette, etc.)? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm guessing it's not legal. IMHO, I think it should be.

-- Dossy

This Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles clip has to be the funniest movie clip I've ever seen in my life!!!

And what happens if these mice & the mice bred by Harvard (that are incredibly susceptible to cancer) mate? Do they implode?

No not exactly.

This is for letters of recommendation which are needed to apply to most Gradute and Medical Schools.

It generally gives the opinion of the recommender as to how well suited the person is for whatever field they are trying to pursue. Here is a link that gives advise to teachers on how to write letters of recommedation for an idea of what kind of things they have in them.

When hydrogen is absorbed into metal hydrides (a kind of storage medium/system that has been developed over the past decade or so) it becomes much less dangerous to handle and use relative to when it is in its free state.

I believe in The Second Superpower

you generally can get away with a whole lot more than you can if you are trying to sell a product using someone else's name.

Penny-Arcade.com sells products on its comics pages. Such products include advertising and PA merchandise.

or instance, a fake television commercial on a comedy show about Crack A Cola is almost certainly going to walk away without incident.

Are you sure? See Coca-Cola Co. v. Gemini Rising, Inc., 346 F. Supp. 1183 (E.D.N.Y. 1972), over selling posters containing "Enjoy Cocaine" with a modifed Coca-Cola logo. The producer of your hypothetical comedy show would not be able to eventually sell DVDs of the season containing the Coke parody without the Coca-Cola Co. bringing up Coke v. Gemini Rising in a drawn-out court proceeding.

This story has been given way too much publicity and the guys raising a stink are jerks who are doing it for the publicity. Please don't post the story in duplicate or triplicate as seems to be the mode lately.

Thank you.

I won't bother to find out first hand until they slap a recordable DVD drive in there.

03.02.26.we | Non-Novel Patents

In addition to the alarm about the unruly expansion of copyright, an outcry over an offensive software or method patent is surfacing nearly every week now. But the storm is not yet upon us, these are merely the first chunky hail stones: it can, and probably will, get much worse.

Patents are supposed to be novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, these are rather subjective criteria that require the discretion of knowledge, experience, and good judgment. Such attributes belong to those skilled in an art, not to bureaucratic institutions. (Witness how those administrative functions formerly administered by John Postel, a skillful and respected Internet elder, are now bungled by ICANN, the bureaucracy now responsible.) However, we have no great patent arbiter, only a governmental process and this has led to a focus on, and misunderstanding of, prior art by computer professionals.

The question of novelty and non-obviousness is proxied by a mechanistic process of push and pull between a patent applicant and patent examiner. An examiner, on his own judgment, can not easily dismiss the application of a proprietary interest worth, potentially, millions of dollars. He can only ask, "how is your claim different than this prior art." Once this dance is done, a court is not likely to disregard the patent's novelty as documented in its file wrapper (the exchange between the applicant and examiner) and the resulting claims.

In the narrowest construction, this process of emulating good judgment with respect to novelty and non-obviousness works: the resulting patent claims are more narrow than the initial application with respect to some existing works. But in the sense of promoting innovation and the "useful arts and sciences" of computer software and networking, it is a huge failure.

As I've mentioned before, "Good technology, often created through simple processes, lends itself to applications unforeseen by its designers." As Lessig, in The Future of Ideas, amply demonstrates this principle is what makes the Internet and Web such an innovative force when as expressed as layered end-to-end architecture. To adopt his metaphor, our common roads permit arbitrary journeys; our private cars permit us to traverse our chosen paths. Much like the Internet and Web, there are no patents or controls on the roads that determine where you must go. (There are rules such as which side of the street to drive on, much like networking protocols, but these don't affect your destination.) It would be a shame to loose this flexibility, and this is just what the patent system encourages: claims that combine our common infrastructure and abilities in "novel" ways.

It's as if roads and driving themselves are recognized as an important infrastructure and ability, but someone could patent using a car on a road to drive to my house. Is using a car on a road to drive to my house really that novel? The Patent and Trademark Office can not make this judgment well, it will only look for prior art of someone previously, explicitly, specifying this exact method in the past. Perhaps they will find the method of driving to my house that I've provided on the Web. The applicant might then amend their application such that they have a claim for a car, on the road, driven to my house using a stick shift, and a new claim for the same using automatic transmission. The claims have been narrowed and there is no previous exact d

03.02.26.we | Non-Novel Patents

In addition to the alarm about the unruly expansion of copyright, an outcry over an offensive software or method patent is surfacing nearly every week now. But the storm is not yet upon us, these are merely the first chunky hail stones: it can, and probably will, get much worse.

Patents are supposed to be novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, these are rather subjective criteria that require the discretion of knowledge, experience, and good judgment. Such attributes belong to those skilled in an art, not to bureaucratic institutions. (Witness how those administrative functions formerly administered by John Postel, a skillful and respected Internet elder, are now bungled by ICANN, the bureaucracy now responsible.) However, we have no great patent arbiter, only a governmental process and this has led to a focus on, and misunderstanding of, prior art by computer professionals.

The question of novelty and non-obviousness is proxied by a mechanistic process of push and pull between a patent applicant and patent examiner. An examiner, on his own judgment, can not easily dismiss the application of a proprietary interest worth, potentially, millions of dollars. He can only ask, "how is your claim different than this prior art." Once this dance is done, a court is not likely to disregard the patent's novelty as documented in its file wrapper (the exchange between the applicant and examiner) and the resulting claims.

In the narrowest construction, this process of emulating good judgment with respect to novelty and non-obviousness works: the resulting patent claims are more narrow than the initial application with respect to some existing works. But in the sense of promoting innovation and the "useful arts and sciences" of computer software and networking, it is a huge failure.

As I've mentioned before, "Good technology, often created through simple processes, lends itself to applications unforeseen by its designers." As Lessig, in The Future of Ideas, amply demonstrates this principle is what makes the Internet and Web such an innovative force when as expressed as layered end-to-end architecture. To adopt his metaphor, our common roads permit arbitrary journeys; our private cars permit us to traverse our chosen paths. Much like the Internet and Web, there are no patents or controls on the roads that determine where you must go. (There are rules such as which side of the street to drive on, much like networking protocols, but these don't affect your destination.) It would be a shame to loose this flexibility, and this is just what the patent system encourages: claims that combine our common infrastructure and abilities in "novel" ways.

It's as if roads and driving themselves are recognized as an important infrastructure and ability, but someone could patent using a car on a road to drive to my house. Is using a car on a road to drive to my house really that novel? The Patent and Trademark Office can not make this judgment well, it will only look for prior art of someone previously, explicitly, specifying this exact method in the past. Perhaps they will find the method of driving to my house that I've provided on the Web. The applicant might then amend their application such that they have a claim for a car, on the road, driven to my house using a stick shift, and a new claim for the same using automatic transmission. The claims have been narrowed and there is no previous exact d

This area of the regulations isn't just "big business against the consumer." Consumer electronics manufacturers are big business, too. I'd expect to see Federal preemption of these State laws in fairly short order.

I've set up a mirror for Broken Saints (of everything on the site that I could find except the forum) to help out with their "mounting bandwidth bills." It redirects to my computer, as I don't have the 400MB to store all that stuff on my account. Furthermore, if you want to set up a mirror to help out too, go to http://[my ip address]/bs/totalbs.tgz for a tarball of the whole thing.

My site (on my computer, currently 140.247.87.50) is pretty neat too, and I've set up a fun hitcounter script too, which logs things like code-red attacks as well.

Please don't hack me.

It is so important in these uncertain times that we focus our vitreol on case where there is actual legislative or judicial overreaching.

Read the judge's opinion before leaping to conclusions. This is NOT a case that was decided on the merits of an underying DMCA claim.

The plaintiff in this case was not N2H2, but rather the fellow who wanted to do his reverse engineering. He sued under a theory of equity, seeking what is called a declaratory judgment. Before even reaching the question about whether the plaintiff is entitled to act, the Court must first address whether or not it has jurisdiction.

This isn't a light issue -- the Federal Courts only have jurisdiction over ACTUAL "cases and controversies." This is a constitutional limitation. The federal judiciary does not offer what is called "advisory" opinions -- ever.

Here, without touching on the DMCA issue at any level, the Court simply ruled that our erstwhile declaratory judgment plaintiff didn't have the standing to drag D2H2 to court. I agree with others here that the reasoning for no standing was not the Court's strongest argument, but in view of the Copyright Office excemption, this case just doesn't hold water on the standing question.

Read the court documents here. Edelman asked the court to permit him to a) ignore the license which bars reverse engineering, and b) ignore N2H2's copyright by publishing the web sites he discovered. The judge noted that Edelman hasn't actually done anything yet, and declared that the court is not in the business of handing out a "get out of jail free" card in case he ever does his research, and N2H2 seeks relief.

700,000 people a year die from heart disease.

Right, so alcohol it is then. ;)

1.) Could machines ever be considered 'persons', complete with legal rights and deserving of the same treatment as people? Could it be just as cruel to send a highly-intelligent machine to do a dangerous, complex job as it would be to send a person?

2.) If humanity was to be replaced by supplanted (perhaps peacefully) by an intelligent, caring, communal robo sapiens, would this be a tragedy?

3.) Implications for personal identity, problem of other minds.

4.) Impact of cloning on our perception of free will, all humans being born equal.

Secondly, Robert Nozick (in Anarchy, State and Utopia ) raised an interesting issue about the value of actually doing an act, rather than simply having the *experience* of doing that act. Imagine living most of your life in a VR simulation of your choosing, experiencing a rich panoply of scientific insights, sporting achievements or charitable good works. At what point and why do these (cease to) have any value? This is related to the question raised in The Matrix of whether Neo should take the red or blue pill.

-

Greg

1.) Could machines ever be considered 'persons', complete with legal rights and deserving of the same treatment as people? Could it be just as cruel to send a highly-intelligent machine to do a dangerous, complex job as it would be to send a person?

2.) If humanity was to be replaced by supplanted (perhaps peacefully) by an intelligent, caring, communal robo sapiens, would this be a tragedy?

3.) Implications for personal identity, problem of other minds.

4.) Impact of cloning on our perception of free will, all humans being born equal.

Secondly, Robert Nozick (in Anarchy, State and Utopia ) raised an interesting issue about the value of actually doing an act, rather than simply having the *experience* of doing that act. Imagine living most of your life in a VR simulation of your choosing, experiencing a rich panoply of scientific insights, sporting achievements or charitable good works. At what point and why do these (cease to) have any value? This is related to the question raised in The Matrix of whether Neo should take the red or blue pill.

-

Greg

(Note that the Telegraph article refers to "a team from Harvard University." As everyone should know, Harvard as an institution does not designate a couple faculty members to check out this whole global warming thing and give the definitive answer; these researchers -- astrophysicists by training -- decided to investigate this subject of their own accord. It is not atypical for people associated with prestigious institutions to use the name of the institution to advance their views on a subject outside their area of expertise. This is why it is sometimes said that a Berkeley study proved that the theory of evolution is fatally flawed -- a professor of criminal law at Berkeley has written a number of books and articles so contending. All that having been said, it makes sense to wait and see what they have to say.)

Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protestors, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.

In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his these that it's all about the street, man).

As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to.
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"

Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.

It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.

But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.

Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.

The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.

Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google ranking by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for over 5 years.

Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.

If you are interested in actually reading the papers, they can be found on the arXiv.org e-Print archive, and directly here and here. I would suggest the first article - the math doesn't look so hairy.

If you are interested in actually reading the papers, they can be found on the arXiv.org e-Print archive, and directly here and here. I would suggest the first article - the math doesn't look so hairy.

I boycott Dr. Seuss Enterprises because it submitted an amicus brief supporting the Bono Act. A K5 user once pretended to channel Dr. Seuss:

graal:
"Some are glad,
Some are sad,
And some are very, very bad.
Why are they sad, and glad and bad?"

pin0cchio:
"I'll tell you why they are so sad:
The Congress passed a law that's bad.
The public domain has been sacked
by what they called the 'Bono Act'.
And this made Eric Eldred shout:
'Let's get the courts to throw it out!'
But in their ruling, the Supremes
Told Larry Lessig, 'In your dreams.'
The public seemed to've lost the fight
For limits on the copyright.
But all is not lost, to be sure,
And you can help put reason back:
Just ask your rep and senator
To pass The Eric Eldred Act."

Here you can see where they were on this not so long ago

Short version: They hooked up 177 halfway down a cat's optic path and were able to create images/movies from the info they recieved. One Problem is how hard it is to connect to all the nerves without disrupting their message. the other problem is the image info changes as it moves from the eye to the brain, so it gets processed as it travels. They were only able to interpret the image information at a certain spot on the way to the brain.


You can see pictures here

I don't really think that nanorobots are necessarily the answer in this case. Spell checking could be done by DNA sequencing, which is currently expensive but there are efforts to develop new techniques that would make sequencing cheaper. I think that a new, cheaper sequencing technology will will be released long before DNA-synthesizing nanobots.

However, I must admit that nanobots constructing DNA would be really frickin' cool. :)

Hydrogen peroxide as fuel. Insert obligatory bleached-blonde joke here. ;)

Despite the tone of Yahoo's article, and despite the fact that unfortunately physicists are resorting more and more into spectacular announcements (and I am a physicist), the issue is not settled. This search at the NASA's ADS will show you a bunch of papers on the topic (even tough some entries are unrelated). Just browse the abstracts, you will see that not everyone in the astrophysics community agrees that variations in solar radiation are the main cause of global warming.

...reference to the I Can Eat Glass Project?

Roadmap for War on Iraq and the New American Empire brought to by:

Elliott Abrams , Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney , Eliot A. Cohen
Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky
Steve Forbes , Aaron Friedberg
Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby
Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle
Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld , Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz

xyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzy

If you'll look here, you'll see that I substantiated my claims quite well: 1482 of 1676, or 88.4%, of the class of 2000 graduated with Latin honours.

Don't take this to mean that I believe that Harvard isn't an amazing educational institution or that I'm discrediting its graduates. And don't be an elitist Harvard assholes by just assuming that I didn't go to Harvard. As it turns out, I didn't.

But that's because Yale's better. :)

I was mistaken about his time at Vanderbilt, but Gore did in fact graduate cum laude from Harvard.

His strong senior thesis on the impact of television on the presidency allowed him to graduate cum laude.

Harvard does, incidentally, have a much lower standard for granting Latin honours. Of the 1676 in the class of 2000, 1482 received Latin honours. That's 88.4%.

Tobey (and everyone else) should go and read the information at these websites:

Summary of Dr Sarno's theory on TMS

Back Pain and Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS)

And read this book:
The MindBody Prescription by John E. Sarno, M.D.

This book (as well as some of Sarno's other books) is probably available at a local library if you don't want to buy it.

Anyone who has back pain, repetitive strain injury, or any kind of pain at all should go and read all this. Read it even if you don't have pain. It completely changed my life and many other people have benefited from this.

Tobey (and everyone else) should go and read the information at these websites:

Summary of Dr Sarno's theory on TMS
Back Pain and Tension Myositis Syndrome (TMS)

And read this book:
The MindBody Prescription by John E. Sarno, M.D.

This book (as well as some of Sarno's other books) is probably available at a local library if you don't want to buy it.

Anyone who has back pain, repetitive strain injury, or any kind of pain at all should go and read all this. Read it even if you don't have pain. It completely changed my life and many other people have benefited from this.

... is a very famous number theorist.
His results have had a key role in Wiles's proof of Fermat's last theorem.
He's at Harvard - see his homepage.

• The iNDian sNakes, authors of Yaha, retaliated against Pakistani hackers who are alledgedly defacing websites based in India
• The Lion worm author chastised Japanese textbooks' treatment of Japanese occupation of China and Korea
• The Adore worm was in retaliation for a U.S. Navy surveillance plane colliding with a Chinese fighter pilot
• OnTheFly, creator of the Anna K. virus, wanted to call attention to the danger of viruses (as well as get Kournikova's attention), and
• VBSWG.X, was created to boost pageviews at four pornography websites.

A lot of things are psychosomatic in origin. Psychosomatic does not mean purely in one's head (people generally don't know the real definition, go look in a dictionary), it means that there is a mind-body relationship. To put it in easy to understand terms: your brain has been programmed so that it causes your body to react to certain chemicals. This why there is techniques such as NAET which can remove allergies (I can't vouch for NAET's effectiveness or methods). The mind and body have a very tight relationship with each other, and modern science has only touched the surface of this.

Do a little research, you may not have to live with your allergies. I personally had some minor allergies (typical cold symptom stuff), and suffered for many years. It was not until later, when I dealt with a lot of other problems of psychosomatic origin, that I realized that the allergies were psychosomatic as well. I'm not saying this is the same for your case, but you never know.

And remember, almost everyone has psychosomatic problems, it is nothing out of the ordinary. It's not easy figuring out all this stuff, but once you do, you can live a better life.

I wonder if this applies to the seven rules for spotting bogus science?

Believe it or not, basic celestial mechanics still has several unsolved problems.

For instance noone knows exactly how to model the formation of ring structures like the Kuiper Belt(a ring of asteroids orbiting the sun), or Saturn's rings.

If you don't believe me check out this link.

You might find this link interesting.

More to the point -- what are they supposed when someone sends them .doc files?

If the file format is open and well-documented then it shouldn't matter which application users choose to run - they can choose what works best for them in regards to performace, ease of use, security and such.

.DOC files, even if they are MS-Word, are the very example of interoperability problems. There is no MS-Word format, but instead a whole suite of related, yet incompatible formats (please point out my mistakes, this is from memory):

• DOS
  • 2,3,4&5.x
• Macintosh
  • 2,3,4,5,6, 98, XP
• Windows
  • 2.x, 6.x,7.x, 97, 2000, XP

Just sticking with the DOS/Windows examples above, that's 9 different formats in less than 15 years, an average of 0.6 per year. To put it in English, a new format is put out more frequently than every two years. Lack of forward compatibility between the file formats used by these applications has been used consistently to drive upgrades of office packages, operating systems and hardware, all of which cause strain with retraining and budgets.

Heads up on the changes planned in for MS-Office 2003, especially the DRM, they look to cause extreme difficulty.

One of the things that would make DNA computing run a lot smoother is improving DNA sequencing technology.

In my opinion, a cheap, effective DNA sequencer could provide a revolution in the biotech world, maybe even similar to the development of the microchip in the late 1970s.

Here's a link to the Harvard lab which discovered nanopore sequencing, which is a good bet for the next breakthrough in sequencing technology.

Well, what's cheaper: maintaining a staffed piece of real estate containing a PC (i.e., a library), or just dropping an antenna on top of a housing project?

Now that I think about it, providing welfare recipients with broadband access may well be the most cost-effective way of getting them the information they need most: where they can get a job, where they can get housing outside the public housing system, what's going on at their kids' schools, medical information, local news, etc., etc. (Some Harvard students set up a program to do online tutoring for Boston high school students; by all accounts, it seems to work pretty well.)

If a welfare recipient had to have one "luxury" appliance, a broadband-equipped PC seems like a reasonable choice. It would be far more justified than any other similarly priced item I can think of.

By contrast, the amount of money spent on Boston's public access cable programming is massive, and is entirely wasted.

FWIW, you can find more of Levin's work at various places. Prof. Danny Quah also has some thoughts on the subject.

Seuss Enterprises submitted an amicus brief supporting the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

Now can anybody translate that brief into the verse style of Dr. Seuss?

970,412 domains on one IP are just parked domains at 209.67.50.203 (futuresite.register.com). I doubt there will be any kiddie porn here. The next level has 822,079 domains at 64.225.154.175 also apparently parked with "Web Page Under Construction". Then 206,255 domains are at 216.34.94.186, and again, parked. The top 9 are either parked or ambiguous.

Only when you get down to number 10 with 123,011 domains do you get something other than parked ... they are for sale. Check out the full lists about half way down on http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/ip-sha ring/. Also, check out the graph just below there. Another example of natural power law distribution.

Those sites do beat my 22,484 domains running on one IP. But then, these aren't second level domains; they are third level, so I guess they don't count.

For those highly interested, CDT released a study [pdf] today on the Penn. law that is the subject of this Salon article.

We argue that the law is unconstitutional and unwise. The statute has been used hundreds of times in recent months to force Pennsylvania ISPs to block access to web sites deemed child pornography, but without any notice to the users who are blocked or any meaningful chance to challenge the determinations.

The law raises interesting constitutional and technical problems. Because ISPs respond to the Penn. orders by blocking access to an IP address, they inevitably block any innocent domains with the same address. Also, this approach -- now being considered by other states -- scales very poorly (~400 notices from Pennsylvania in six months, multiply that by a couple of years and 50 states and dozens of countries and you're looking at a lot of routing table exceptions to maintain.)

Ben Edelman at Harvard's Berkman Center released a related report this week. Ben has found that two-thirds of all .com, .net, and .org sites are hosted on web servers with 50 or more domain names - meaning that many sites might be vulnerable to this form of IP address blocking. "Web Sites Sharing IP Addresses: Prevalence and Significance" is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/ip-sha ring/

More info about the Penn. law and CDT's report "The Pennsylvania ISP Liability Law: An Unconstitutional Prior Restraint and a Threat to the Stability of the Internet" can be found at http://www.cdt.org/speech/

What web links are there where some people might try sorting out matters of reputation?...

For example, law students' practicing the related skills of mediation or arbitration at
http://pon.harvard.edu

For the official record, my wife is fun, smart, sexy, and:

1. She was pissed about a co-worker sneaking on to her lab computer to read his Hotmail, so she set up a Hosts file that blocks Passport.
2. She bought me an RJ45 crimping kit for my birthday last year, and she has borrowed it from me for her own use more than once.
3. The year before that she got me a Victorinox CyberTool.
4. She has written a LISP parser and a C garbage collector ( CS51, as an elective no less)

Sure, I have to spend a couple hundred bucks a year on Valentines and our Anniversary, but it's way cheaper than a couple nights at a titty bar or whatever you poor schmucks have to do. More importantly, it's a shared bank account and she makes more than I do. Bwa ha ha!