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You couldn't be bitching that Intel is trying to ensure no more copyright extensions for media giants like Disney: Intel's Amicus Brief for Eldred vs. Ashcroft

You couldn't possibly bitch that Intel's Andy Grove and Leslie Vadasz have been THE most vocal tech company in the fight to protect our consumer rights against Disney's Michael Eisner pushing the CBDTPA bullshit and and closing the analog hole: Hollywood vs. High-Tech and EFF Applauds Intel's Stand

Perhaps you are disturbed that Intel didn't whore itself to Microsoft in true AMD's Jerry Sanders fashion to help alleviate Microsoft's legal woes AMD chief testifies in Microsoft's favor followed by the very coincidental Microsoft support for Hammer Microsoft To Support AMD's Hammer

As far as marketing and time to market go, I can't think of a more formidable opponent than Intel. Hoping Intel will fail in this arena is futile. And hoping they will fail for ethereal political reasons is absurd. And thinking that a quake demo against a 1.6GHz P4 underclocked to 0.8GHz and memory bandwidth equally underclocked is any indication of "suck ass" performance is pathetic.

You know when you have to tie both hands of your opponent behind their back to give him a fair fight, you've got some serious problems of your own.

In a nutshell: Encrypt the password using the "secret" as the key and store it somewhere safe. Then disperse the secret key value to multiple individuals, who must combine their information to retrieve the true secret key. You can do a variety of things with it, such as dispersing it to n individuals but only x n individuals must collude to extract that secret.

Some comparisons in his rhetoric and how it has (not) changed...

"I am just a simple caveman..."

Valenti, 1982 - I am not a lawyer; I beg to ask the forgiveness of all of you in the UCLA Law School. If I was smart enough maybe I would have been a lawyer and then I would feel more comfortable about presenting this case. "

Valenti, 2000 - "I am not a lawyer. I wanted to be one; go to Harvard Law School. Ended up at Harvard Business School - if I am arrogant, that's what they taught me - haha. "

"We are a poor industry..."

Valenti, 1982 - "Now, let me tell you something about the high-risk business that we are in. This may be one of the most precarious business enterprises which a man or a woman can enter. Movie making is a high-risk business. Let me cite you some examples. The average film costs $20 million...And 6 out of 10 films do not retrieve their total investment period. Now, what are you going to do right on top of that? There is going to be a VCR avalanche."

Valenti, 2000 - "For the movie business in the Internet era, a threat on opening nights is someone copying the new movie and sending it out over the Internet. An average movie costs $52 million to make. Only two in ten ever profit from theatre sales."

Demonizing the perceived Enemy as "deadly", "pirates", "stranglers", "terrorists", etc.

Valenti, 1982 - "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.

Valenti, 1982 - "The public interest is at stake here. It is the public interest that you have by solemn oath sworn to serve because what I am talking about and what the rest of these witnesses are talking about is making it possible for a steady stream of quality entertainment to reach people through their television sets....

Valenti, 1997 - "It was a historic meeting...a first-time commitment of full government support at the highest level of the Russian leadership to a long-term plan to decrease surely and radically the deadly hold of pirates on the intellectual property community

Valenti 2002 - "There are more than nine and a half million broadband subscribers now. Once those large pipes and high-speed access subscribers begin to increase, we can be terrorized by what's going on."

Valenti 2002 - "We're fighting our own terrorist war."

But some things have changed...or have they?

Valenti, 1982 - "Now, these machines are advertised for one purpose in life. Their only single mission, their primary mission is to copy coyrighted material that belongs to other people..."

Valenti, 2000 - " Look at Sony-Betamax. The VCR had substantial non-infringing use. For example if you time-shift (tape now and playback later). But the court in Sony-Betamax did not rule on shifting to ten million people. So watch how you cite Sony-Betamax. Napster is not time-shifting - but sharing with anonymous millions."

Interesting.

W

The brunt of my research was documenting some 6000+ examples of overblocking -- blocking of sites that weren't consistent with respective filtering programs' blocking definitions and policies.

My report is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.e du/people/edelman/mul-v-us

Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School

The brunt of my research was documenting some 6000+ examples of overblocking -- blocking of sites that weren't consistent with respective filtering programs' blocking definitions and policies.

My report is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.e du/people/edelman/mul-v-us

Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School

The brunt of my research was documenting some 6000+ examples of overblocking -- blocking of sites that weren't consistent with respective filtering programs' blocking definitions and policies.

My report is available at http://cyber.law.harvard.e du/people/edelman/mul-v-us

Ben Edelman
Berkman Center for Internet & Society
Harvard Law School

My mistake in using the word property, which includes the ability to transfer (sell) as well as control usage. However, the lesser point still stands, that by your logic Microsoft should be able to dictate who can and can't write programs for Windows.

Perhaps better than the temco/tenco (sp?) case is the game genie one: http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/cases/Galoo b_v_Nintendo.html which perhaps should mean that a program dynamically linking to a library does not make it a derived work.

Reverse-engineering, I always thought, was like what AMD did in "clean room" examination of the 386 and 486 processors. If they did it any other way, such as microscopic examination of the silicon instead of coming up with their own implementaion, I'd bet AMD would be a memory right now.

As for giving more ammo, the case is already fsck'd as it is... I have little faith the court system will see the light, there's big money involved here, and big money gets what big money wants. Because of this, everyone should shut up? Why then post the above story on Slashdot for comments?

The link you gave is a complaint from January 2000, and pretty much sums up in much better detail some of the contents of my original post... so I gave away nothing that hasn't already been said before by the lawyers. I am assuming of course, that the high priced lawyers (or their legal assistants) employed by the DVD CCA are much more adept at keeping good research on this matter than my recreational reading on DeCSS.

As pointed out by Seth Finkelstein in comments a few days ago (and another comment)

Comments, like this one, are ripe for quotes to be taken out of context. ARE BEING USED IN TESTIMONY FOR THE MPAA . Why give them bullets to shoot us with? Especially bullets that are inapplicable. (And you gave a great quote that can be taken out of context: ``Even if DeCSS was "reverse-engineered" from this purloined key, it would not really be reverse-engineered because of the method that the key was obtained from.

There are no Miranda rights. Anything said on slashdot is being held as an opinion of our community. What is said is being held against 2600, me, and the ideals EFF stands for. Our community isn't homogeneous, but what you say in the future may be used against me, personally, because the views you espouse will be put into our mouths, purportedly proving that we knew what we were doing was illegal, which it isn't.

Either reverse engineering is legal or it isn't. If it is, then, I don't know what the legal implications may be. (Reverse engineering being classified as illegal would be such a radical departure, I can't envision it. But if you feel it is, ignore what I have to say below which rests on the assumption that a shrink/click-wrap prohibition on reverse engineering sold goods is legal.)

Assuming reverse engineering is legal, any trade secret derived from Xing's player loses its protected status. IE, anything learned from Xing's player, including the algorithms and keys it uses are now public. Remember, trade secret protections are designed prevent ill-gotten gains from industrial espionage. Which is why they don't apply if they, for example, accidently publish the trade secret, or it gets reverse engineered, thats legitimate.

Anyhoo.. Next time, please be a little more careful in what you say, and how it may be misquoted. Actually, this applies to everyone.

As pointed out by Seth Finkelstein in comments a few days ago (and another comment)

Comments, like this one, are ripe for quotes to be taken out of context. ARE BEING USED IN TESTIMONY FOR THE MPAA . Why give them bullets to shoot us with? Especially bullets that are inapplicable. (And you gave a great quote that can be taken out of context: ``Even if DeCSS was "reverse-engineered" from this purloined key, it would not really be reverse-engineered because of the method that the key was obtained from.

There are no Miranda rights. Anything said on slashdot is being held as an opinion of our community. What is said is being held against 2600, me, and the ideals EFF stands for. Our community isn't homogeneous, but what you say in the future may be used against me, personally, because the views you espouse will be put into our mouths, purportedly proving that we knew what we were doing was illegal, which it isn't.

Either reverse engineering is legal or it isn't. If it is, then, I don't know what the legal implications may be. (Reverse engineering being classified as illegal would be such a radical departure, I can't envision it. But if you feel it is, ignore what I have to say below which rests on the assumption that a shrink/click-wrap prohibition on reverse engineering sold goods is legal.)

Assuming reverse engineering is legal, any trade secret derived from Xing's player loses its protected status. IE, anything learned from Xing's player, including the algorithms and keys it uses are now public. Remember, trade secret protections are designed prevent ill-gotten gains from industrial espionage. Which is why they don't apply if they, for example, accidently publish the trade secret, or it gets reverse engineered, thats legitimate.

Anyhoo.. Next time, please be a little more careful in what you say, and how it may be misquoted. Actually, this applies to everyone.

What is at stake is whether he may be enjoined from doing what he was doing.

This was a run-of-the-mill injunction case. It took a major twist with broad implications beyond the case at hand.

No one is proposing a new law here or a new interpretation of an existing law.

That is exactly what happened.
The majority judges stated in their ruling that they were changing the function of an existing law...

The very first sentence of the majority's legal discussion announced that "[t]he common law adapts to human endeavor." Hamidi, 94 Cal.App.4th at 329. The court explained that "[f]or example, if rules developed through judicial decisions for railroads prove nonsensical for automobiles, courts have the ability and duty to change them." Id. (emphasis added) (emphasis added in legal brief, not by Alsee) . The obvious import of the court's analogy is that the majority believed that the tort of trespass to chattel needed to be "changed" to adapt to the new "human endeavor" of e-mail.

The fact that the Court of Appeal has radically transformed the law of trespass to chattel is one of the principal reasons that this case has generated such intense interest from various amicus parties around the country, all of whom in previous letters to this Court recognized that the Court of Appeal opinion is not in keeping with established law ... In sum, it is abundantly clear that the Court of Appeal opinion makes new law.

The change they made has a lot of people (amicus parties) concerned. They changed how the law works - but just when applying it to the internet. If the change they made were to apply off of the internet then ordinary radio broadcasts could be tresspass. Oops, they goofed.

Unfortunately many people who don't "get" the internet think you need special rules for it. In 99.9% of cases the old rules are perfectly fine. Theft is still theft. Fraud is still fraud. And in this case nuisance is still nuisance.

Tresspass to chattel only applies when damage is done or you are denied the use of your property. It was designed that way for good reason. Remove that restriction and it malfunctions. They needed a soldering iron. The Intel's laywers pulled out a hairdrier. The judges said "OK, we'll use a hairdrier. Just rip it open and expose the heating elements." It's not safe as a hairdrier anymore.

-

This is probably the most important copyright case of our generation.

At least until we manage to drag the DMCA (kicking and screaming) before the supreme court.

And I agree, the opening brief is an excellent read even for non-lawyers. Highly recommended even for hackers allergic to legaleese.

-

Umm, did you actually read the opening brief, it's
here in case you haven't.

I read the first 30 pages, it clearly focuses on the 3,350,000 copyright registrations between 1923 and 1942.

As another poster has pointed out, the brief is excellent reading. Why don't you try it.

Is it just me or do others see a big difference in the quality of the aguments being put forth, pro and con. Salon has an interview with Morton David Goldberg, who is a top copyright lawyer and partner with Cowan Liebowitz and Latman in New York. He feels the Supreme Court shouldn't have even heard the case. His arguments don't seem very insightful or well thought out to me. At one point he makes the statement: "And the court, in another case from the 19th century -- there was a claim that a circus poster was not original, because originality is a requirement of the Constitution..." but actually originality is not explicitly required by the Constitution, but is inferred by the verbage "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts...". He also throws around a big scare about "creat[ing] a dangerous precedent by shifting power away from Congress and toward the judiciary". Baloney.

On the pro Eldred side, the opening brief filed by Lawrence Lessig, et al seems to make alot more sense. It basically says that the authors of the Constitution used specific language in the copyright clause to limit the length of time that a monopoly would be given to authors of creative works. By regularly extending that time, Congress is, in effect, circumventing the "limited time" in a piecemeal fashion and, in effect, creating unlimited copyright terms. They also do a good job of showing how the reversion of a copyrighted work to the public domain helps to further scientific and artistic progress and bring up interesting First Amendment issues surrounding it. Good read.

Title 17, Section 1201(a)
(2) No person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, component, or part thereof, that -
(A) is primarily designed or produced for the purpose of circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title;
(B) has only limited commercially significant purpose or use other than to circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title; or
(C) is marketed by that person or another acting in concert with that person with that person's knowledge for use in circumventing a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title.

Rather than having .kids.us, and then later .teens.us it would seem much more sensible to have .xxx, or .rude

This is already being proposed by Sen. Mary Landrieu of Louisiana. It is a bad idea because it allows the government to decide what is "harmful to minors" on the Web.

The bill proposing a .kids.us is much, much better because it is essentially a "kid-friendly" certification. It is essentially opt-in by the site owners (and regulated). A .xxx TLD would give us two options: (1) have the government shut down any non-xxx domain that the government thinks does not belong outside the red-light district, or (2) have only the legit xxx businesses move to the .xxx TLD and otherwise have the same situation we have today, with over 4,000 "regular" domain names pointing to a single web site.

Starting in 1962, congress had a bonanza with copyright extensions, even applying them ex post facto. Today, copyrights last the life of the author plus 70 years or 95 years for works for hire. Heinlein died in 1988. Under current law, Heinlein's work will remain under copyright until 2058, at which point it will all enter the public domain.

Plantiffs in the Eldred v. Reno case wrote a brief which chronicled the history of copyright lengths (the history starts at paragraph 61). Eric Eldred is challenging the retroactive extension to copyrights. The Supreme Court is planning to hear oral arguments in the case sometime soon. If the court declares retroactive extensions unconstitutional, Stranger in a Strang Land will enter the public domain in 2017.

I wholeheartedly agree with Eldred's case, but to be fair, Eldred's chances are slim. The district and appellate courts ruled against him (with a lone dissenting judge in the appellate court). At least four Supreme Court justices felt the arguments were compelling enough to hear the case. However, as the district and appellate courts pointed out, even the first copyright law applied retroactively (to works that were protected under state copyright laws).

"like the French government's purchase and placing in the public domain of the first photographic patents in the early nineteenth century... The work of Harvard economist Michael Kremer ( 1998, 2000), both with respect to the possibility of public purchase of patents at auction and of shifting some public research and development funding from effort-oriented to result-oriented processes (that is, holding contests for private companies to develop vaccines instead of funding research directly), is especially intriguing in its attempts to develop institutions that have all the advantages of market competition, natural monopoly, and public provision."

The Harvard student paper The Harvard Crimson has an article up, and there is also a fairly lengthy obituary on the official Harvard website. One interesting thing to point out for those who have never perused the Harvard catalog is that the Crimson article mentions the two courses Gould taught this past semester at Harvard, and one of them is Science B-16, a course for nonscience concentrators (majors). Good to know that his public mission of helping people understand science was matched by his work inside the university.

SymphonicMan

The Harvard student paper The Harvard Crimson has an article up, and there is also a fairly lengthy obituary on the official Harvard website. One interesting thing to point out for those who have never perused the Harvard catalog is that the Crimson article mentions the two courses Gould taught this past semester at Harvard, and one of them is Science B-16, a course for nonscience concentrators (majors). Good to know that his public mission of helping people understand science was matched by his work inside the university.

SymphonicMan

The Harvard student paper The Harvard Crimson has an article up, and there is also a fairly lengthy obituary on the official Harvard website. One interesting thing to point out for those who have never perused the Harvard catalog is that the Crimson article mentions the two courses Gould taught this past semester at Harvard, and one of them is Science B-16, a course for nonscience concentrators (majors). Good to know that his public mission of helping people understand science was matched by his work inside the university.

SymphonicMan

Exactly. Much of my decision to go to law school (I'm starting next year) was based on what I learned here on Slashdot about the infringement on our rights by the wealthy and powerful. And I picked my school because it runs The Berkman Center, which is partially responsible for both creative commons and chilling effects. I'll be able to start working on what I care about as soon as September rolls around. Few other professions afford you that opportunity.

Or at least the history of copyright in the UK. Which is where Alan lives. And is a country whose legal history had quite a bit of influence on the US, where you live.

The historical origin of copyright there was censorship laws that restricted printing rights to publishers, and made the publishers responsible for making the system work. The publishers then created a system where the right to create copies of specific documents was property that could be bought and sold between them. It was initially sold by the author to a publisher, and the publishers then could resell or keep (their choice) the copyright.

This worked for a couple of centuries until censorship laws were struck down in the late 1600's. The resulting vacuum left publishers in a bad place, which they solved with a bill passed by Queen Anne circa 1710 (IIRC). This bill created the idea that an author owned their works by virtue of creating it, albeit only for a limited time. This allowed the publishers to resurrect most of their old system. The open question then became whether there was a common law justification for *permanent* copyrights (because in common law once property was created, it was owned indefinitely). Courts went back and forth and this was finally settled in the negative some decades later by the House of Lords, at roughly the time of the American Revolution.

For a detailed history I highly recommend Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright. Often the hardest part of history is putting aside how we think about topics to appreciate how people of that day approached what were then novel issues. This book does an excellent job of that.

I should pass an incidental note. Much of the official US theory of copyright stems from Thomas Jefferson's thoughts on the matter, which stem from French, not British, jurisprudence. In this view copyright is a tradeoff between the harm done to the public by removing what should be their right (the right to make copies) and the benefit from giving authors an incentive to create original works. This differs markedly from the British discussion of whether the production of literary works is or isn't the creation of property, which being property should be protected as all other forms of property are. (A view that remains popular with publishers, Hollywood, the RIAA, and so on.)

There are other, simpler WEB variants as well.

Nuweb works with basically any language.

Noweb is a bit older and written in ICON.

The main advantage of these WEB variants is that they use LaTeX rather than TeX, and TeX is far too complicated. The disadvatage is that WEB and CWEB "know" about the language and can give more information about things like the variables and functions, where in a generic literate programming system, this is either not possible or must be done manually.

- Serge Wroclawski

I wouldn't be so sure about that.

Here's the link- They slowed C to 38 miles an hour, not the 60 as I originally states. My bad.

The above post appears to be nothing more than a personal vendetta.

No. It's in the main part a discussion of personal legal risk, in the context of someone urging me to personally take action similar to the DMCA case which 2600 has done (on-topic!). I could do it (on-topic!), in a censorware context . And I am quite worried about what will happen to me if I do (on-topic! - wow, given this legal appeal failure, is it on-topic!). That's very far from "nothing more".

For background, please read about programmers having been sued for anticensorware work, and even going to jail over the DMCA.

That's not "personal" at all, except in the sense that I don't personally want to go to jail, or get sued. Am I wrong for that? (or is it off-topic?).

"Slashdot editors abusing their privileges" may strike a chord with some, but it is definitely not the case here.

That's not what I said. Quote:

So I feel heavily constrained as to what I can do to fight the DMCA, in large part because I have to worry about a Slashdot editor who has already shown he's extremely willing to abuse power for revenge.

Which part of this do you disagree, purely as a statement of fact? Was Michael Sims correct in the domain hijacking of What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) ? Am I wrong to worry about the potential for him to abuse his power as a Slashdot editor? I am indeed concerned about personal smears, because such attacks, even from Slashdot comments, ended up as DeCSS court evidence! Is this inaccurate? Is this false? Is this even off-topic for this thread, given that it's about the court decision in the 2600 DeCSS case against the DMCA?

I realize people say these Slashdot comments lessen me. What can I tell you? It's very frustrating to contemplate the potential legal consequences of doing something to fight the DMCA. It's one thing to post rah-rah comments in a discussion thread. But when one sits down to real consideration of what's involved, that's far, far, more serious.

Look, you don't have to like me. You don't have to believe that I'm a pleasant person. But I would ask you to respect the severe legal and personal consequences involved in any action against the DMCA.

This, like many things you post about, has nothing to do with censorware.

That is incorrect. The original question concerned. Librarian of Congress exemptions. I am quite familiar with that topic, having played a role in establishing one of the only two DMCA exemptions granted. Those two exemptions were for obsoleteness and for censorware. I then quoted part of the actual text of the exemption to demonstrate how narrow was the exemption granted. I suppose I could have quoted the text for the obsoleteness exemption, but given a choice, why not use the relevant topic dear to my heart?

So you are mistaken, it was written in direct and accurate response to the original poster's question.

Of course, I talk about censorware a great deal. I've done much of the pioneering work on that topic. And if I may say so, I'm expert about it and familiar with the relevant legal issues surrounding it. And these legal issues strongly connect with the DMCA, per above.

I usually don't reply to personal attacks in these threads. But since you're not a troll, and it is arguably on-topic, I'll make an exception here.

Regarding going up against the DMCA myself, well, just how eager would you be to take legal risk in my place, given that Michael Sims has done actions such as What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org) ? That's an extremely serious question. This isn't a game. It's not a silly flame-war. Note what this story is about - 2600 has lost at every LEGAL level, been outright flamed by the judge in the original case decision, and DeCSS cases have even had comments from Slashdot postings used against them. The smears you mention, have been against me. If I take too much legal risk, as sure as the other side has lawyers, it's all going to be in their court evidence. So I feel heavily constrained as to what I can do to fight the DMCA, in large part because I have to worry about a Slashdot editor who has already shown he's extremely willing to abuse power for revenge.

Maybe I'll get modded down for this, but it's late, and I'm tired. It's not a nice topic. But going to jail over the DMCA is far worse. And I didn't take any vow of silence about Michael Sims.

http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/NY/trial/op . tml

This is part of Harvard's Openlaw site, which has an excellent OpenDVD section

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/NY/trial/op . tml

This is part of Harvard's Openlaw site, which has an excellent OpenDVD section

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/DVD/NY/trial/op . tml

This is part of Harvard's Openlaw site, which has an excellent OpenDVD section

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

In the final analysis, the dispute between these parties is simply put if not necessarily simply resolved.

Plaintiffs have invested huge sums over the years in producing motion pictures in reliance upon a legal framework that, through the law of copyright, has ensured that they will have the exclusive right to copy and distribute those motion pictures for economic gain. They contend that the advent of new technology should not alter this long established structure.

Defendants, on the other hand, are adherents of a movement that believes that information should be available without charge to anyone clever enough to break into the computer systems or data storage media in which it is located.

Judge Kaplan wasn't exactly shy about his views, no sirreee bob ...

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

This isn't an auction site -- but you may find what you're looking for (in limited quantities) at the MIT Flea Market in Cambridge, MA.

They're on the third Sunday of each month, April through October...there's a little bit of info here (it's the best site I could find on short notice -- but still sucky).

I haven't been in over a year, but there is usually some useful stuff there...and even some not-so-useful stuff that's juts damn cool (like IPC's, Sparc 5's, old SGI's, and Alphas).


-Turkey

the notion that by producing creative works, authors benefit society, and so were entitled to make a living from a time-limited legal monopoly

Yawn, this AFX face thing is old news. I heard about it months ago and it's been fairly common knowledge among AFX fans for awhile now. Oh, well.

However, I've been looking for other songs with odd spectrographs. The most recent contender has been the track "A is to B as B is to C" on geogaddi, the most recent Boards of Canada LP. Nothing as obvious as a face, but it has some strange effects, plus something apparently hidden in the high frequencies (at around 15000Hz, if I remember correctly). Anyone have any idea what this is? (You can view an image of the spectrograph here).

More people were murdered by their own communistic governments than by any wars or famines in the last century.

That would be true only if you disregarded all the various violent external U.S. actions in South America, Africa, and Asia as well as those of the totalitarian regimes the U.S. has set up throughout Latin and South America. Sure, the U.S. tends to avoid killing its own citizens, but our leaders seem to have no qualms about supporting mass murder in other countries.

There are the Spaceguard groups - take a look here.

We need Larry Lessig to write this email! He's the one law professor who is most up-to-date with the damage that the DMCA, RIAA, CARP and others are doing daily and can articulate it in a way that most non-/. folks will understand. He has taken on Jack Valenti (head of the MPAA) directly in debates and run circles around their theories and ideas.

-info

Here

Check out WebAgent

Then have a look at some of the flash files on this site.

Then come back here and tell us how much flash sucks and is bad for the internet.

It's all up in the air until the Supreme Court rules on Eldred v. Ashcroft.

I read about this product from time to time, and I never hear any ill effects. it's just screaming "Too good to be true" to me, and I cannot seem to find anyone who has anything bad to say about it. I think I'll look it up on Google.

Side effects (in the order Googlegave them to me):

• Shortened attention span?
• Headaches, nausea and tingling in the wrist
• Modafinil, Provigil or Alertec is associated with the following side effects - headache, nausea, anxiety, increased blood pressure and heart rate, insomnia. Modafinil, Provigil or Alertec must be taken early in the day to avoid sleep disturbances.
  Also: Modafinil, Provigil or Alertec is able to decrease the effectiveness of oral contraceptives because it increases the metabolism of oral contraceptive hormones by the liver. An adjustment in oral contraceptive therapy may be required. (Anything that interacts with the liver or effects it's metablolism enough to be on a warning concerns me greatly -RG)
  [virtualdrugstore.com]
• FDA Provigil page

I read about this product from time to time, and I never hear any ill effects. it's just screaming "Too good to be true" to me, and I cannot seem to find anyone who has anything bad to say about it. I think I'll look it up on Google.

Side effects (in the order Googlegave them to me):

• Shortened attention span?
• Headaches, nausea and tingling in the wrist
• Modafinil, Provigil or Alertec is associated with the following side effects - headache, nausea, anxiety, increased blood pressure and heart rate, insomnia. Modafinil, Provigil or Alertec must be taken early in the day to avoid sleep disturbances.
  Also: Modafinil, Provigil or Alertec is able to decrease the effectiveness of oral contraceptives because it increases the metabolism of oral contraceptive hormones by the liver. An adjustment in oral contraceptive therapy may be required. (Anything that interacts with the liver or effects it's metablolism enough to be on a warning concerns me greatly -RG)
  [virtualdrugstore.com]
• FDA Provigil page

I never grokked why this stay-up-for-hours mentality became such a powerful meme with college students. I *always* did better by getting a reasonable amount of sleep than by staying up to cram. Give yourself a few extra days lead time for in-depth studying. Get proper sleep sleep for the period just before and during exams. Watch your performance soar.

I actually saw the video press release go out on NASA TV last week (woohoo, I get to watch NASA TV at work). They did a fade FROM that picture to another one done in the X-ray spectrum (Chandra) where that virtually invisible star turned into a shining beacon of quark.

• Visible light: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0211/0211_op tical.jpg
• X-rays: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0211/0211_xr ay.jpg

I actually saw the video press release go out on NASA TV last week (woohoo, I get to watch NASA TV at work). They did a fade FROM that picture to another one done in the X-ray spectrum (Chandra) where that virtually invisible star turned into a shining beacon of quark.

• Visible light: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0211/0211_op tical.jpg
• X-rays: http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/2002/0211/0211_xr ay.jpg

No one really laughs at gambling addiction; why isn't gaming addiction taken seriously? Researchers have found that gambling generates similar brain patterns as cocaine usage. Gaming certainly shares many characteristics with gambling.

As someone who has personally become addicted to all sorts of games ranging from Civ to RPGs to Mechwarrior to Tetris, I think gaming addictions should be studied seriously.

Speaking of which, what am I doing here, at this hour???

Heheh... thanks for the laugh.

And here I thought the Super Huge Interferometric Telescope poster we posted at that same meeting was the wackiest thing there... :)

[TMB]

Predicting the Unpredictable

The article mentions, among other things, the work of BiosGroup. From their website:

BiosGroup, a Santa Fe-based consulting and software development company, pioneered the use of complexity science to solve complex business problems and is now the world leader in applying the techniques of this emerging science to large commercial applications.

BiosGroup was founded as a joint venture between the Center for Business Innovation of Ernst & Young (now Cap Gemini Ernst & Young) and Dr. Stuart Kauffman, a co-founder of the Santa Fe Institute and author of several books on complexity science.

-XDG

I am one of the authors of a competing paper on RX J1856 that was published yesterday, as well as a co-discoverer of the pulsar in 3C58. In my opinion these results, while definitely a possibility are certainly very preliminary. And in fact, there are other possibilities that make quite a bit more sense.

In the case of RX J1856, there is a ~15% chance that the lack of pulsations (one of the biggest reasons for suspecting a quark star) is simply the result of an unfortunate emitting geometry or viewing alignment. Given that there are ~7 objects known that are similar to RX J1856, having at least one of them in this 15% seems quite likely to me -- and avoids having to invoke a new form of "star stuff".

As for 3C58, the neutron star cooling problem can be mitigated (but not completely removed) by assuming a larger age for the supernova remnant (and therefore the neutron star) -- which expansion measurements and pulsar timing measurements also suggest.

In other words, there are simpler explanations for the facts. Although those explanations certainly wouldn't get as much press...