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If we are already paying for it, why more anti-piracy legislation?

Get the people who are SELLING copies!

I think the RIAA owes ME money for the CD-Rs that turned into coasters, backups, and frisbees.

Ironically, the RIAA assumes they have the copyright on everything. So if I buy CD-Rs to burn my own music on, I'm still paying them for the *privilege*.

A firearm in the hands (or closet) of a lawful, responsible person is no threat to you, if you do not break into his home or otherwise attack him.

You make a number of assumptions that the weapons are properly stored, and that the owner is a mature, responsible, well-balanced person without any violent tendencies. Even then, guns can be stolen. The presence of guns in a house may pose a significant risk to the inhabitants of that household though. Most women who are murdered by their spouse are killed by guns. Another unfortunate side effect you ignore is the threat guns in the house pose to children. Some statistics from the American Acandemy of Pediatrics suggest that:

* In 1997 there were 32,436 firearm-related deaths, of which 4,223 of the victims were children and adolescents younger than 20 years of age.
* Handguns continue to account for the majority of deaths and injuries from firearms in the United States.
* In 1997, 85 percent of all homicides and 63 percent of all suicides for adolescents 15 through 19 years of age were committed with a firearm.
* The United States has the highest rates of firearm-related deaths (including homicide, suicide and unintentional deaths) among industrialized countries. The overall rate of firearm-related deaths for US children younger than 15 years of age is nearly 12 times greater than that found for 25 other industrialized countries, and the rate of firearm-related homicide is nearly 16 times higher than that in all the other countries combined.
* In 1994, the mean medical cost per gunshot injury was approximately $17,000, with the 134,445 gunshot injuries in the United States in 1994 producing $2.3 billion in lifetime medical costs, of which $1.1 billion (49 percent) was paid by US taxpayers.
* 1997, 306 children and adolescents younger than 20 years killed by firearms died as a result of unintentional firearm-related injuries.
* 10 children die each day from gunfire in America, approximately one every 2 1/2 hours. That is the equivalent of a classroom of children every two days.
* In 1998, nearly three times as many children under 10 died from gunfire as the number of law enforcement officers killed in the line of duty.

So, how about some facts to back up your rhetoric?

Somewhere in that there was some coverage of Jon having three OSen
installed (FreeBSD, GNU/Linux and Windows), during which the prosecutor
got confused by Jon referring to "GNU/Linux", rather than "Linux" per
se; and appeared to be confused about how one computer can have more
than one O/S (or, at least, there was a confusion which appeared to be
about dual boot).

I read through a lot of the list and several things struck me. Overall,
I see the list as lending a lot of credibility to Johansen's case. I
don't see it casting doubt as to this.

Somewhere in that there was some coverage of Jon having three OSen
installed (FreeBSD, GNU/Linux and Windows), during which the prosecutor
got confused by Jon referring to "GNU/Linux", rather than "Linux" per
se; and appeared to be confused about how one computer can have more
than one O/S (or, at least, there was a confusion which appeared to be
about dual boot).

I read through a lot of the list and several things struck me. Overall,
I see the list as lending a lot of credibility to Johansen's case. I
don't see it casting doubt as to this.

Report that elderly people are 50% more likely to commit suicide when they own a gun. - this one from a suicide-prevention research project at a university. Not involved in the gun / anti gun debate.

Report showing a positive correlation between handgun ownership and prevalence of suicide, homicide, and injuries / deaths of children. This one by Harvard School of Public Health, Injury Control Research Center .

The list goes on... but the data is pretty clear:

1.You are more likely to die in an auto accident, statistically, if you have a little red Italian sports car parked in your garage.

2. You are more likely to die earlier, statistically, if you chain-smoke cigarettes.

3. You are more likely to die, kill someone else, or kill yourself, statistically, if you own a gun;

and most importantly,

4. I am probably subsidizing all that risky gun-owning, sports-car driving, chain smoking activity through higher taxes, higher insurance premiums, etc., to the tune of 35% of my gross income. And I'm not very happy about it.

>If you did agree to some, say, shrinkwrap book license, you'd have to obey that license.

I don't think so. Simply attaching a notice purporting to be a contract doesn't make it enforcable.

Here's a program written in BrainF*ck to calculate pi: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jafowler/pi/pi. b

Here's the analysis of the program, and a link to what the Turing-inspired BrainF*ck programming language is about.

Here's a program written in BrainF*ck to calculate pi: http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~jafowler/pi/pi. b

Here's the analysis of the program, and a link to what the Turing-inspired BrainF*ck programming language is about.

I tried to dig up the paper, but these guys are really publishing a lot of stuff. this may have something to do with it. The author's homepage is here, you can look through a list of some of his papers.

Funniest...post...ever...

You should have linked the actual AYB flash though for the slower out there. Nice use of a pop reference.

Yeah, according to this, goatse.cx is not blocked, but goatse.tk(whatever is it I wouldn't go check it :) is blocked.

Tons of sites get 'filtered' by Slashdot every day.. for instance, thanks to the slashdotting (after 10 whole comments!), the Berkman Center for Internet and Society is also inaccessible to me..

http://grep.law.harvard.edu/article.pl?sid=02/11/3 0/050236&mode=nocomment and that's taken care of.

Yeah yeah, I reply to him so he feels special, but hey, maybe someone can use this.

-- Tino Didriksen / Project JJ

Some troll, apparently looking for something to do after calling people to check if their refrigerator is running, threw a page widening post onto the greplaw article. Thanks for the maturity. I'm sure your family is so proud ("John is lawyer, Chris is a doctor, and Billy Bob wastes the time of hundreds of people a day.")

To read the article without the comments (thus avoiding the troll and allowing you to see the article correctly formatted), try this link.

Open Source legal representation already exists.

Apple Computer ended up paying $29 Million to Apple Corp.

And "Human Rights" clauses in EULAs don't do jack shit for the man standing in front of a tank for free speech

I completely agree with the sentiment of your message, but I do feel that the biggest problem isn't the efficacy of such statements being included in the EULA, but rather the inclusion of explicit rather than implicit political demands within the agreements to use software.

Everyone in the slashdot community seems to assume that any politicization will inherently be leftist/libertine in nature. If we treat leftist activism within the EULA as acceptible how can we fairly insist that rightist doctrine has no place there as well?

I know I run the risk of having this post labeled flame-bait, but I feel it important that I get specific. More frightening to me than the leftist-rightist vaguery above, is the possibility that the current, thinly-veiled anti-semitism that masquerades as the "Israeli divestment" movement (as referred to by Harvard's President in a morning prayer meeting address this fall) will soon find its way into an EULA. It does not seem a far stretch to imagine that a developer with ties to the academic community--as many in the OSS movement have--decides to forbid any Israelis or for that matter, any Jews that support Israel fom using their software.

Obviously what is troubling is not that such an EULA would bar people from software usage (as most people don't even read the EULAs and even fewer decide not to use software as a result of something said therein), but rather it gives a forum for statements sheltered from discussion and dialogue.

------
Karma--nothing when compared to Hashgocha Pratis

The first priority of the Virtual Observatory (VO) is making it easier for professional astronomers to combine data from different sources, but we're also committed to involving the amateur astronomy and general public - that will involve special portals and eventually special software tools. I would caution that the whole project is at a very early stage, but I'm optimistic that a few years from now you'll see some nifty tools to let you explore the universe from your web browser (I don't know about support for lynx as one person asked about, personally I prefer wget...). Note that most astronomy analysis software is open source, and most is *only* available for Unix/Linux, so many /. readers will have a leg up on the world if they really want to do stuff with our data. But you don't need fancy software to play with the pretty pictures we make.

There are already a lot of good tools around - someone mentioned Tom McGlynn's Skyview, and he's part of the VO team (perhaps a better word would be Collective, since we are trying to assimilate everyone...) and the VO will provide middleware to make it easier for those public tools to interoperate and get their hands on more data. So it'll be a real help to people writing those kinds of service (Skyview, NED, Aladin, etc.), more directly I think than to most end users at least in the short term.

To address your specific question of format, the current idea seems to be XML descriptive wrappers paired with FITS binary data for most applications. But there are usually GIF/JPEG type preview images around, and the image viewer SAO DS9 for FITS data has been ported to PCs and Macs and is pretty easy to use. In the meantime, you may want to check out NED Level 5 for an excellent overview site on extragalactic astronomy.

- Jonathan

There are lots of databases that follows this philosophy allready, the NASA Astrophysics Data System, the Digitized Sky Survey, not to speak of the larger arxiv.org. You can all grab whatever you like from there.

That being said, there are a number of amateur astronomers who are extremely dedicated and are willing to obtain the skill needed to use such a system, even if there is a tough learning curve. These can be considered "laymen", but they are actually very good at what they do. That's the kind of "laymen" you would expect to use it. Not Joe Sixpack, but the people who are dedicated enough to learn how to use it.

Bullshit. John Halamka is exceptionally qualified. He has written Books named Real World UNIX and Best of CP/M.

I believe that the problem is that he wants to post material that ought to have fallen into the public domain, but did not, due to the retroactive term extension.

Here is the original complaint where this is laid out.

I had, of course, no intention of appearing to side with term extension. I do not support retroactive laws of any nature, including those that outlaw possession of a particular good (i.e., prior possession of a drug or an image or any other proscribed item would constitute an affirmative defense).

I also think that our currently legislated "limited term" is way too long. Most copyrighted works seem to lose value extremely rapidly. The main exceptions appear to be those that involve media shifting, which is situations like re-releasing old audio recordings on CD, taking old films and putting them on DVD, or other dramatic shifts, like making a movie from old books (a great example of this is the recent "Lord of the Rings" movies-- if I'm reading this timeline of copyright correctly, the whole of LotR would be public domain by now. This was prevented in 1976, and again in 1998.)

In most cases, the people enriched by media shifting are not those who originally created the material. And with the exception of adaptive shifts like making movies from books, the main purpose of media shifting seems to be to resell the same content to the same customers in a different form. This also causes a lot of damage to the after-market for existing copies of those works.

It is obvious that Microsoft has been the fantastic driving force behind software innovation over the past two decades. Their uncanny ability to feel out new markets and met the needs of their customers with cost effective, friendly licensed, quality software has forced all other developers to increase the quality of their products.

The output is fed through a low-power Schottkey diode to clamp the waveform and lock onto the desired frequency. I'm sure you can tell what I'm getting at: in order to receive frequency RF, one must generate frequency IF via local oscillations (LO), and IF directly corresponds to RF. Stephen Wolfram points out the relationship V[IF] = V[RF] + V[LO] for increasing and V[IF] = V[RF] - V[LO] for decreasing. Armed with this formula and decent knowledge of the radio's tank circuit, it is trivial to pick up the LO and IF frequencies your car radio transmits, albiet inadvertedly, and customize the billboard contents accordingly. Quite simple really.

I think most of the opinion magazines operate on profit margins ranging from slim to negative and are at least partially reliant on the kindness of wealthy owners or public grants. National Review has William F. Buckley, The Weekly Standard is the pet project of the Kristol family, The American Prospect got bailed out by Bill Moyers a couple years back, Harper's has had a several near-death experience, Paul Newman and Robert Redford are co-owners of The Nation, and gazillionaire Mort Zuckermain bailed out The Atlantic Monthly from a severe deficit. Even the popular market is awfully tough -- just ask Oprah or Rosie, or the people who used to run Jane and Sassy.

All of the opinion mags above target roughly the same demographic as Salon (if not necessarily the same ideologies), and all have equivalent- or higher-quality writing, established reputations, and an existing subscriber base to draw from. The surprising thing is that anyone ever thought Salon's business model would surpass them.

I am dead serious about this, its not a troll, just trying to educate people here to save them from pain. Mind-body disorders are very common: TMJ (jaw clenching/grinding), ulcers, headaches, fybromialgia, back pain, etc. I was offended at first when people suggested my RSI pain was psychosomatic, but now it makes more sense than anything.

Here is a good link that explain it, its purely scientific:

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

Google View as HTML

I wouldn't be typing this if it didn't work for me.

nil_null

1. How does Microsoft plan to allow non-proprietary Operating Systems access to Paladium media?

It's not clear what you mean by Palladium media. If you read the linked article, you see that Palladium has four components. None of them refer to Palladium media per se.

What they do have is attestation, which lets a remote server reliably determine that you are running WMP or some other DRM compliant software before you download. Then WMP can enforce whatever restrictions are specified in the data file. So you could call the media supplied by such a server "Palladium media", and chances are that no, the server won't give you the data if you're not running Palladium - but that's entirely up to the server operator. You can't force him to do what you want, and you can't fool him, thanks to Palladium.

2. Why would consumers want to purchase your product that removes rights they have over their own media?

Now, this doesn't make sense. It's not their own media! The data is on a server belonging to someone else. Palladium gives that server owner more information in deciding whether to let you download it. It allows the server to make sure you're running some software that will follow certain rules. If not, it won't give you the data.

So nobody is taking away rights over your own media. Anything you have today, you can continue to use. What Palladium does is let people decide whether to give you their media, and to do so only if you in effect agree to follow their rules.

In answer to your question about why consumers would want to purchase Palladium computers, the answer is obvious. Server operators won't give the data to people who don't have Palladium. So owning a Palladium computer will be the only way to get entertainment media in the future. Nobody's going to force you to buy one. But some (not all) content creators will refuse to give their content away unless you are running Palladium so that they can be confident that you won't steal their data.

An excerpt from our early marketing materials:

"We aim to create a dynamically growing and easily accessible body of music that is royalty-free to nonprofit broadcasters and webcasters. An alternative source of content, it will enhance noncommercial radio's bargaining position with the recording industry and will provide access and outlet for local music and facilitate bookings on campus and near-campus venues.

Many independent record labels have welcomed our efforts. Whatever hurts college radio hurts the Indies. Whatever helps college radio helps the Indies. Many are already licensing their catalogs royalty free for webcasting. Whatever supposed revenue they are giving up is revenue they never had."

We hope to have the chance to tell you much more about our efforts soon.

For more about the Berkman Center, see cyber.law.harvard.edu.

The last point at which life cycle of the malarial parasite can be frustrated in humans is at the phase of red cell invasion and multiplication. Red cells are constantly created and destroyed as part of their life cycle. A mutation that somehow destroys both the infected red cells and the parasite could therefore eliminate the malaria parasite. The destroyed infected cells would be replaced by new, healthy cells.

While 9/10 of an iceberg's mass is below the waterline, it can never "float underwater". It's not like this is rocket science: Archimedes figured this stuff out 2200 years ago. macdaddy, back up your claim.

Macdaddy is also confusing sea ice with icebergs. Sea ice is what's blocking the Northwest Passage: it's frozen seawater. Icebergs are chunks of glaciers which have flowed into the sea and broken off. Arctic sea ice is not transparent: it's full of bubbles and brine pockets, making it translucent/opaque. I've seen it with my own eyes. Icebergs are much more transparent, but this is because the pressure in the glaciers which formed them has squeezed the bubbles shut, not because of some "bottom-up freezing" (whatever that means).

I do research on the Snowball Earth hypothesis, and macdaddy is off base there too (not to mention off-topic). Snowball Earth sea ice may have been pretty transparent, but my calculations suggest that it would have been hundreds of meters to a kilometer thick. Even if some areas were 60 m thick, that's too thick to permit photosynthesis: you need to find areas with ice 20m thick -- see McKay, 2001: Geophysical Research Letters, 27(14):2153. Ice transparency alone isn't enough to solve the biological objections to the Snowball Earth hypothesis

Check out Harvard project for the latest on the battle. Looks like the Chinese are pulling ahead.

Anyways, I'm still amazed at the simple yet overwhelming idea of laying cables under oceans to link continents, and that it was done so long ago. Wasn't the Atlantic cable (or part of it) recently tested? I seem to recall that it was in relatively good shape.

- broken drivers stolen from other BSD
- no RX polling for network drivers. Linux and FreeBSD have this. I'm sorry if you don't know what RX polling is for, but it is to prevent livelock in an interrupt driven kernel.
- no SMP. I would venture to guess that that's considerably more difficult that "auditing" (snicker) code. Its always easier to complaint than create, something Theo has mastered.
- no reasonable way of updating the OS. Solaris has it. RedHat has it. Even Microsoft has it. Theo's way, buy a new CD, or compile the patches yourself in a way which is not extensible. Smart.

I would never, ever use this in production. If you think I'm a Slashbot, all I have to say is. ... Sure, you hit the nail on the head, yeah that's it! What, Sigmund Freud to the rescue.

Just a note to you idiots out there, Juniper uses FreeBSD for their JuneOS on some very high end equipment. The engineers would probably urinate themselves laughing if you suggested putting OpenBSD on an M160. Oh, don't know what Juniper or an M160 is? That's what I thought.

play with this. (Tests for you realtime whether http://something is accessible from China.)

I can't speak about the Earth-Sun L4 and L5 points, but the Earth-Jupiter L4 and L5 points are sufficiently stable-- that is, their regions of stability are sufficiently large-- that they've become home to over 1,500 asteroids. They're called Trojan asteroids: 588 Achilles, 624 Hektor, and 911 Agamemnon, and so on. You can find the whole list here if you're interested.

There are, if memory serves me right, 6 asteroids in a Trojan relationship with Mars, too.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

Professor Jonathan Zittrain and Ben Edelman of Harvard's Berkman Center are studying exclusions from Google and have so far found some 113 sites excluded, in whole or in part, from the French google.fr and German google.de. Learn more about the situation and context, test the exclusions for yourself, and submit further sites suspected to be excluded. LawMeme and C|Net have more info.

What... you mean you don't feed your family with Squirrel Fishing?

Here is Hernandez's assessment of Ivy League admissions officers: "They may consist of graduate students, former teachers, spouses of professors and college staff; and career administrators. The majority of this group did not graduate from any highly selective college, let alone an Ivy League one. . . . [Many] are not expert readers . . . and most of them are not scholars or intellectuals. . . . What I am trying to say without shocking too much is that the very best of applicants will often be brighter than many of those who will be evaluating them."

Oh my. I can only imagine, with horror, what might happen if an applicant accepted this analysis as a guide for proper interview behavior. It is not a good idea to think you are smarter than other people, particularly those from whom you need a favorable report. Say, for example, a young applicant in the middle of an interview mentions his term paper on progressive education and, trying to be helpful, says, "Maybe you haven't heard of John Dewey, he helped launched that movement." Or what will an alumni interviewer think when he asks an applicant about her science fair entry and hears these words: "Well, this gets very complicated, but I will try to summarize it for you."

I've always respected librarians. They dedicate their lives to sharing information with people as freely as possible. I cheer the American Library Associationprotect individual's privacy and confidentiality, and fight against free limiting legislation like the Children's Internet Protection Act, the DMCA (PDF), and the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. They've been fighting to keep information free longer than the internet has been around. Democracy requires an educated citizenry, and libraries make it their mission to spread knowledge to everyone, regardless of race, social status, or wealth. Library's are a geek's best friend.

For the curious, a FAQ on moral rights and their place in U.S. law is here.

In short, U.S. law provides very little moral rights protection, except for visual fine art.

Quoth the DMCA (17 USC 1201f):

(1) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsection (a)(1)(A), a person who has lawfully obtained the right to use a copy of a computer program may circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a particular portion of that program for the sole purpose of identifying and analyzing those elements of the program that are necessary to achieve interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, and that have not previously been readily available to the person engaging in the circumvention, to the extent any such acts of identification and analysis do not constitute infringement under this title.

(2) Notwithstanding the provisions of subsections (a)(2) and (b), a person may develop and employ technological means to circumvent a technological measure, or to circumvent protection afforded by a technological measure, in order to enable the identification and analysis under paragraph (1), or for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program with other programs, if such means are necessary to achieve such interoperability, to the extent that doing so does not constitute infringement under this title.

"The technology would paste a digital certificate on every byte of data"
O'Reilly
(see item 5)
(google cache of de-generationx)
Cringely--slightly off-topic, but still interesting

BSD doesn't need no stinking journaling.

So then there's no need for it to have, oh, a log-structured filesystem?

...to get the picture of what the article is all about:

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