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I will just try to spark some discussion, here is a few points to consider followed by my own thoughts on this matter. Open Economies participants will recognise the content of this submission.

I think theses issues are worth to address to try to find some common ground (or than again, maybe we will not) to take action from.

1. Is there a gap? What is it then?

2. Where is the gap? Are we talking about the gap worldwide in developing countries or even on a national level in welfare countries with internal differences and gaps (i e USA or Sweden)?

3. Should we bridge the gap? (Should you answer no to this question, the rest of the questions may not be useful.)

4. Do we have a responsibility as humans to brdige the gap? Why / why not?

5. Are there any negative consequences of bridging the gap? Do we (i e the rich filthy bastards) profit from the differences?

6. Are there any positive consequences of bridging the gap Do we (again the rich filthy bastards) profit from minimising the differences?

7. How do we bridge the gap in short time with lack of funds?

8. How do we bridge the gap in long time with lack of funds?

9. How do we bridge the gap in long time with lots of funds?

10. Name one measure you can initiate today to bridge the gap. Will you do it?

- - -

I will try to address some issues to get the discussion going. I hope you do not mind me doing this.

>1. Is there a gap? What is it then?

Yes. There is a gap in countries and between countries and between continents in respect of:
1. computers
2. access
3. general IT knowledge and
4. use.

If one of the factors 1-4 is missing in any given community, the digital gap will eventually evolve. In a community with high rates of 1-4, the digital development will flourish.

>2. Where is the gap? Are we talking about the gap worldwide in developing >countries or even on a national level in welfare countries with internal >differences and gaps (i e USA or Sweden)?

I think the gap is relative and could be applied and considered both on a domestic and international level.

>3. Should we bridge the gap? (Should you answer no to this question, the >rest of the questions may not be useful.)

I think we should consider the world throught the John Rawls veil of ignorance. Rawls is well-known to all scholars of jurisprudence and most likely all of you, but just to make sure we are on the same page: the basic idea is that the choice of the pinciples of social organisation is to be made by persons who have no idea of the actual position they will occupy in society or of their interests and inclinations. Rawls is wideley critised, maybe best by Nozick, but I still consider his ideas as a good tool and framework for any regulatory or policy discussions.

Seen through the eyes of Rawls we should bridge the gap at least if we do enjoy the benefits of a digital society.

>4. Do we have a responsibility as humans to brdige the gap? Why / why not?

Yes, according to the answer to 3.

>7. How do we bridge the gap in short time with lack of funds?

I think we should be very generous with our knowledge. It will not cost us much to set up web sites spreading our knowledge and works to other communities. The open source and free software movement could be the most important step towards digitalisation of Africa. Sweden is one country spending a lot of funds on financial aid directed towards developing countries (often referred to the Group 77 countries). Maybe we and other nations should refocus and educate and ditribute or knowledge instead of cash.

At the United Nations Millenium Summit the prime minister of India, Shri Vitar Bhapal Vhajpayee stated:

"A 'New Economy' drives the world today. Yet, nearly a quarter of the people this Assembly represents have neither prospered nor gained from these developments. Often,they find themselves further marginalised and more vulnerable as development economics gives way to unbridled market economics and social objectives are erased by profit motives."

>8. How do we bridge the gap in long time with lack of funds?

Actually, the same answer as 7. We also probably could donate a lot of outranged equipment to the Group 77 countries or to less fortunate people in our own contries.

>9. How do we bridge the gap in long time with lots of funds?

I think we should address these issues through the United Nations or a similar organisation and fund a special program aiming to wire the world.

>10. Name one measure you can initiate today to bridge the gap. Will you do it?

I have translated the GNU GPL v 2 into Swedish, which - to my surprise - was very much appreciated by Swedes lacking knowledge of the English language. If you are not a programmer, easy things like this could actually improve the world, although it may seem simple and naive on the verge to pathetic. I have also published some of my works online, which has turned out to be helpful to a few people. It is not a huge effort, but if we all do something it could have some impact. You do not have to go into Pay it forward-sleazy movies extremes .-)

My new task will be to write easy to grasp guidelines to use computers with free software or open source software. It will cost me a few hours, but hopefully someone will be helped.

If you read this far, I am very impressed. Thank you for your attention.

Best Regards

Mikael

Yes, the idea with literate programming is that the documentation and code is all one file. It prevents the whole "Oh, now I need to do the docs." problem, and the problem where the documentation diverges from the actual code. If you change the code, you change the documentation right in the same file next to the code. I find noweb to be an interesting tool. It is Latex and Lyx aware. The one page document on noweb below is very informative: Onepage guide to noweb

NegWeb is a "semi-literate" programming tool. Basically, it lets you define chunks of output files in any order, in any location in input files. So if you want to put the chunk of documentation for a feature in LaTeX or HTML just before the chunk containing its implementation, you are free to do so.

It differs from other literate programming tools in that it doesn't have any concept of formatting the NegWeb source as a whole. Literate programming started with Donald Knuth's WEB, which arranges Pascal in the same way that NegWeb arbitrary text files (an operation called "tangling," since the results are compilable, but not pretty), but also indexes and pretty prints the Pascal and treats the text between the code chunks as TeX (called "weaving"). Knuth later created CWEB, which does the same thing, but for C instead of Pascal.

My problem with this approach is that when you go to edit it, you deal with the ugly TeX source, or you reweave constantly. Also, unless you are such a TeX wizard that you do it without ever thinking or looking things up, you are distracted from working on your functional output by fiddling with the formatting. The NoWeb approach is to have the plain text source the most readable version of the source, on the principle that code is most often read to be edited.

The name is a play on NoWeb, which is essentially a simplified and generalized CWEB, since NegWeb is essentially a simplified (some literate programmers would say "crippled") and generalized NoWeb. NoWeb is very extensible, and supports indexing and pretty-printing for a lot of languages, as well as using several different formatting languages for weaving, such as LaTeX and HTML.

Either would work for rearranging arbitrary ASCII text chunks into files: NegWeb is simpler, NoWeb is prettier.

You might be surprised at the freedom it gives you to factor your code into short, manageable chunks. It definitely helps to set up a few macros in your text editor to treat the chunk names as hyperlinks to find the definition of the chunk, and all places it is used.

1. Take a look at literate programming tools, like noweb or doc++ (language specific).

Given the broad nature of you query it's not clear what is most appropriate for you; but literate programming might be what you need.

2. Framemaker. I've never used it myself, but I have known people who did all of their word processing in it. Pretty output, can do web output too, and definitely intended for larger documents.

3. Look at [La]TeX again. Seriously. Some of the stuff you need may not be easily provided, but I don't know. Get the book on LaTeX and see if that doesn't handle your previous problems.

Third, the Appellants argue that an individual who buys a DVD has the "authority of the copyright owner" to view the DVD, and therefore is exempted from the DMCA pursuant to subsection 1201(a)(3)(A) when the buyer circumvents an encryption technology in order to view the DVD on a competing platform (such as Linux). The basic flaw in this argument is that it misreads subsection 1201(a)(3)(A). That provision exempts from liability those who would "decrypt" an encrypted DVD with the authority of a copyright owner, not those who would "view" a DVD with the authority of a copyright owner.15 In any event, the Defendants offered no evidence that the Plaintiffs have either explicitly or implicitly authorized DVD buyers to circumvent encryption technology to support use on multiple platforms.16

While this may not be applicable in other countries at the moment I do see it as something to look out for down the road. People really should read the decision.

They're already getting that world. http://eon.law.harvard.edu/openlaw/golanvashcroft/ discusses a challenge to two copyright act amendments which effectively hose PD (namely, the Sonny Bono CTEA act and the URAA, which allows companies to retroactively reassign copyright to works already in the public domain). Predictably, the Crackdot editors were so busy hitting "reject" that they missed the submission. That or they didn't think it was important that PD works are being raped by media corporations.

You touched upon the apparent real reason the MPAA is pushing so hard for these types of laws: they don't care if the work is copied, they just want to have absolute control over its distribution. It would be nice if the courts started looking more closely at region encoding.

-Legion

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy is located inside the bright white patch in the center of the image. The colors indicate X-ray energy bands - red (low), green (medium), and blue (high).

The supermassive black hole at the center of the Galaxy is located inside the bright white patch in the center of the image. The colors indicate X-ray energy bands - red (low), green (medium), and blue (high).

Harvard University has put some more images from the telescope online.

Harvard University has put some more images from the telescope online.

So you are saying that thousands of still active missiles in former Russian and newer stuff in places like China are NOT direct threat to us ?
Nope, never said that. I just happen to agree with the logic that got us to badger the Soviets into signing the ABM treaty back in 1972. Made sense then...still does.

See, the fundamental problem with missile defense is that no matter how you decide to defend, the attacker can come up with a counter attack much more cheaply than you can defend against it. Missile defense is a losing game. Our MIRVed warheads were a direct response to the Soviets building a defensive perimeter around Moscow. We'd just overwhelm their defense. We only needed to get 1 or 2 warheads through and Moscow was toast, whereas, they had to get ALL our warheads to survive. To make it harder to see the warheads, we made the warhead shells out of carbon. Carbon doesn't show up on radar very well. So the Soviets figured they would track the pressure wave the warhead made as it re-entered and aim at the leading edge of the wave. No problem. We made our warheads spin like a pencil in a pencil sharpener. The warhead ablates evenly as it hits the atmosphere so it stays very sharp. Result is you can't track the damn things until they're on top of you. Remember - only one or two out of 100's has to get through and you lose.

This is what was going in in the 60's and we realized the damn game would never stop unless we got together with the Soviets and called a halt. That's what led to the ABM treaty. The only folks unhappy with the ABM treaty were the companies that had been pigging out at the money trough.

Now asteroids, that's a different story. They're not being hurled by sentient beings who are trying to defeat your defense. They're predictable - if we see them - and if we see them soon enough, we can do something about it. That's why we look for them and that's why we need to be thinking about what to do about them when we do see one headed our way. It's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when.

You might find this reading on comet showers worth looking at. Pay attention to the authors - they're not lightweights in the field.

Here's a list of PHAs (Potentially Hazardous Asteroids) and a simulation of the orbit of this particular asteriod.

Absolutely there are, but regardless of the perceptions on Slashdot there is a general respect for the idea of IP rights. In China some reports claim that piracy is upwards of 98%: That is staggering. AutoCAD has 90%+ of the CAD market in China, a country of a billion people, yet strangely sales there are "negligable".

What the devil am I talking about, I am talking the the assault on our freedom and in particular the freedom of fair use.

This device is precisely the thing the the media industries (The MPAA and RIAA to mention a few) want, a closed device to deliver content to the end user where they have complete control of what gets done with it. It is just one in a serious of steps, including the DMCA, which the media industries hope will eventually lead to this.

Is it going to happen, NO. But are they going to try, most defiantly. There is a fundamental paradigm shift on our hand due to the Internet. The simple fact is that it is going to be imposable to control the flow of any sort of information. It has already happened with music and it is eventually going to happen with video and other forms of information. And there is nothing the media industries can due about it. Unfortunately the media industry doesn't really see this and those that due refuse to accept and will do everything in there power to make the Internet into what they want. And thus it is going to be hell. What we have seen already is just the begging of the storm. It is going to get a lot worse in the coming years as they media industry continue to try there tricks to control the free flow of information. If you do not see this conflict by now I fell very sorry for you as the signs are everywhere, the DMCA, the SSSCA, and Microsoft's .NET to mention a few.

What can we do about it? Well that is a very good question. We can't avoid this conflict but we can prepare for it. Some of the things we can do are: 1) Support Open Source software (although I think that goes with out saying). 2) Write (snailmail, not email) your congressperson to repeal the DMCA. 3) Refuse to buy hardware you can't develop for. I for one have no interest in TiVO are it competitors for one simple reason, it is a black box that is not designed to be user programmable. And finally 4) spread the word.

For more insight into this issue see the article The Coming Storm by Bruce Bell.

Truthfully, one thing I personally would really like to do is to develop, but really don't have the resources to do so, is a truly open TiVO like device that is *designed* to be user programmable and will store everything completely unencrypted. This device will force the MPAA industry to accept the inevitable. It is completely legal but the MPAA will completely hate it and will do everything in there power to stop it. And with out a lot of will power and a major team of legal exports to back me up they probably will.

emacs

autoconf

make

I had a really great fucking post but a stray keyclick nuked it. I don't feel like typing it all again so anyone interested please use ESP and I will send you a mind bullet. I'll also point to a handy website. Here is a really good page not because it contains much info but because it has two very good papers written about the recording industry and does a good job summing up what my mind bullets contain. It's good to see artists telling the RIAA to fuck off, the only problem I see is these artists have already made their money and have their fame, the recording companies could drop them like a bad habit and they could still make money on their own. There's thousands of bands that don't have that ability and probably never will. The recording industry likes it that way but then again, so do most people who really like listening to music (or just want to be cool for owning some new popular album). That blows.

According to Dr. Jeff Bradstreet a little-mentioned fact is that Over 90% of autistics are blood type A. If true, that would be better than twice the expected frequency for American "whites" and so close to 100% that the probability of it being due to chance is disappearingly small.

Do I have to be running a server to download linux ISOs, pr0n videos and public domain (50-year-old) movies?

Sorry, but the only public domain movies are those first published on or before December 31, 1922. Almost anything first published on or after January 1, 1923, is under effectively perpetual copyright in the United States, under a precedent set by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Eldred v. Ashcroft decision that gives Congress the power to set arbitrarily long terms on copyright.

Guess when the first Technicolor movie was made? 1923.

• Wikipedia article to which I contributed
• Everything 2 article that I wrote
• Eldred v. Ashcroft, a lawsuit to overturn the Bono Act
• House directory and Senate directory: whom to fax if you want this law repealed. Yes, fax. E-mail is assumed to be spam, while paper mail is assumed to carry anthrax.

I think the system we have, with copyright expiring after a while, is the correct system: that way the artist knows his immediate family profit from his work and not faceless corporations.

Immediate family, immediate profit. Copyright should last life plus TEN years (long enough for the family members to learn to produce more works), not life plus 70. However, Constitution 1.8.8 as interpreted by the Eldred v. Ashcroft court recognizes the lifetime of the Universe less a day as an adequate "limited time."

Americans: please write your representative and senators, asking them to repeal the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act.

If they no longer sell it, and no longer support it, technically it's abandonware, right?

No. Copyright law does not work like trademark law.

Have there been any court decisions on abandonware

Software created as a work for hire (including most commercial software) becomes abandonware 95 years after first publication. Relevant case: Eldred v. Ashcroft.

Has MS been enforcing MS-DOS licenses?

Unlike trademark law, copyright law allows monopoly owners to make implied licenses by refusing to enforce a copyright, and the owner can pull those licenses at any time.

See this app for a demonstration how little present value Sonny's extra 20 years adds.

"Macrolensing", by itself, usually refers many different situations, but characterized by that several images of the object is resolved. There are a few known objects. This database includes only multiply imaged quasars, mostly lensed by a single galaxy, but you can have lensing by galaxy clusters as well.

Actually, the question arised some controversy here among my fellow students as to whether what is known as "weak lensing" should be considered a part of macrolensing, but after consulting The Book, we figured it probably shouldn't.

Encouragement is done by giving them exclusive copyrights to the work they create, protected by law, for a limited time.

Limited? Every 20 years, the US Congress accepts $6 million from Disney employees and amends copyright law to extend all terms by 20 more years. They get away with this because courts currently consider "the lifetime of the universe less one day" a valid limit because they don't consider the preamble "to promote the progress of science and useful arts" to limit the power of Congress in any way. For more info, see Eldred v. Ashcroft.

Distributing a work over the internet without the author's permission or even knowledge isn't just illegal, it's immoral.

How is an author morally entitled to royalties 50 years after the author is dead and buried in the ground?

libraries do not republish material, they lend a specific copy.

What is the digital equivalent of such an action?

(of course, having the 'limited time' being shorter than a human lifespan would be nice)

Nice, but unless you have more than $6 million to bribe Congress to repeal the Bono Act, it's not gonna happen.

Though Michael (charmingly) seems to think it is, "code as law" is not a new idea. Check out Marc Rotenberg's article here. It's a pretty obvious idea, actually, not particularly "groundbreaking." Lessig is an interesting writer though, and a great speaker.

Sites in Europe or USA, both have a French language version. They have a 26page PDF detailing it.

How amusing. I submitted this earlier and got it rejected. oh well.

This link I was using has a nice story attached. Also for more general info about extra solar planets try Jean Schneider's here or its mirror here.

I'm getting funky time outs all over the place, so its hard to tell whether or not things are up. Unless you guys have gotten so good at slashdotting a site that you do it BEFORE a site has been posted. ;)

I graduated from an ivy-league school - U. Penn. . After graduating, I've also taken some classes at Harvard . Ivy League status in itself means nothing, don't get the impression that an Ivy League education solely by it's prestige is a significant achievement.

I can affirm that there were a large number of fools/idiots at U.Penn (less at Harvard, but they're still present). For some of these, you'd be surprised they even graduated high school.

I can also say that there is little chance a school would flunk out a student who's family is of some prominence (eg, his father was a Yalie, Prescott Bush was a senator), or of economic influence.

Not to mention Bush Sr's and Junior's membership in the exclusive Skull & Bones club.

Eldred (quick refresher for the /tons/ of people looking at this fascinating thread) is basically about an online archiver who puts works whose copyrights have expired on the web. He sued, claiming his first amendment right to post these works had been abridged. A good summary of the state of the case is here.

In practice, you will always need paste (unless you had a surface like this, where if you blew it up to the size of colorado the biggest flaw would be one inch tall!)

But since this is a Harvard researcher being written up in the Harvard press, my hype-o-meter is on the alert. Then I read this:

Lieber has "philosophical differences" with the industry's "top-down" approach to nanotechnology--taking big things and making them smaller. "The way to truly revolutionize the future," he says, "is to take a completely different approach: build things from the bottom up."

Pardon me, but have these philosophical differences yielded even a working flip-flop yet? The world is littered with "proofs of concept" that are too difficult to implement. I'll admit that this technology is extremely promising, but at this highly experimental stage of development it's hardly time to go bashing the accomplishments of the semiconductor industry. Unless, of course, you're trying to drum up press for yourself.

That said, sounds pretty cool. I'll be even more interested when they can form some basic logic circuits with it.

My hate, whose lash just Heaven had long decreed,
Shall on a day make sin and folly bleed.

RXTE is a pretty old satellite. From the page, I see it has given great results and continues to do so. That's pretty neat.
Still, I recently read about another x-ray satellite out there that's newer and likely to be still more important for future x-ray imaging. Chandra observatory was launched by NASA not long ago. You can get more information at chandra.harvard.edu.
Feel free to check out both pages and see the differences between RXTE and Chandra.

My wife (not a lawyer ... yet) is working on a project to help people with interpretation of the law as it concerns domain name. Try this on for size:

restatement

It's only a draft but it should be more available by the end of the year. Basically it's the UDRP, which is the legal document that many domain name registrars use to settle disputes, turning to the WIPO as an arbitrator.

Definitely read the entire UDRP, especially the sections on bad faith.

Cheers!

half my job is supporting our linux network (about 20 nodes, soon to be 30) running a Postgres server with "mission critical" data on it. Our Engineers and Ops guys use it to keep track of telemetry from our satellite. It's all part of an ancillary network that works better than the real support network of SGI boxes.

Troller_Park_Trash, If you're already knowledgeable about the means of operation of filtering software, you may find that the most new & interesting part of the http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/ page is the Appendices listing specific sites that have been, by and large, wrongly classified by filtering programs.

For example, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/index-subset.html ("Blocked Site Archives - Subset with Linked Pages - Appendix A") gives information about 395 such URLs. You'll likely find yourself surprised that many of these are blocked -- I know I was.

Regarding the blacking out of certain text from my report: As http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/ mentions, a protective order (from the court in which the underlying case is pending) limits distribution of certain portions of my report -- namely anything I learned from reviewing confidential documents from filtering companies, or from attending confidential portions of depositions of their employees. But the work you, and most others here, are likely to find of greatest interest is the listings of specific sites blocked. (I'm presently adding a bit of text and formatting to help folks find this content more quickly and easily.)

Ben Edelman

Troller_Park_Trash, If you're already knowledgeable about the means of operation of filtering software, you may find that the most new & interesting part of the http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/ page is the Appendices listing specific sites that have been, by and large, wrongly classified by filtering programs.

For example, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/index-subset.html ("Blocked Site Archives - Subset with Linked Pages - Appendix A") gives information about 395 such URLs. You'll likely find yourself surprised that many of these are blocked -- I know I was.

Regarding the blacking out of certain text from my report: As http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/ mentions, a protective order (from the court in which the underlying case is pending) limits distribution of certain portions of my report -- namely anything I learned from reviewing confidential documents from filtering companies, or from attending confidential portions of depositions of their employees. But the work you, and most others here, are likely to find of greatest interest is the listings of specific sites blocked. (I'm presently adding a bit of text and formatting to help folks find this content more quickly and easily.)

Ben Edelman

Troller_Park_Trash, If you're already knowledgeable about the means of operation of filtering software, you may find that the most new & interesting part of the http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/ page is the Appendices listing specific sites that have been, by and large, wrongly classified by filtering programs.

For example, http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/index-subset.html ("Blocked Site Archives - Subset with Linked Pages - Appendix A") gives information about 395 such URLs. You'll likely find yourself surprised that many of these are blocked -- I know I was.

Regarding the blacking out of certain text from my report: As http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/edelman/mul-v- us/ mentions, a protective order (from the court in which the underlying case is pending) limits distribution of certain portions of my report -- namely anything I learned from reviewing confidential documents from filtering companies, or from attending confidential portions of depositions of their employees. But the work you, and most others here, are likely to find of greatest interest is the listings of specific sites blocked. (I'm presently adding a bit of text and formatting to help folks find this content more quickly and easily.)

Ben Edelman

think this shows the power of open source software.

While there's still big egos involved, there's probably less of the corporate mindset politics, like chosing a persons code because you owe them a favor, play golf together, wear the same ties, or their mom is on the same United Way committe with a potential customer's chairman, other sucking up and brown-nosing issues.

This let's you use the current slots for memory (after all, we can put in a couple of Gs of memory into those slots.) and the bandwidth is higher than a PCI slot. latency issue is gone since it's RAM after all.

The one issue that remains is 'flushing' in the event of a powerdown. for that we could put in a daemon that gets a signal from upsd and makes a copy of it onto a hdd. on power-up the same daemon reads from the hard-disk and creates that ram-drive (or partition i should say).

no need to shell out bucks for that capability. it's already here. just a daemon that needs writing.

essentially, from what i understand, this gives you a virtual filesystem on the RAM instead of the harddrive. once you create your ext2 (and i'm sure there's a way to create ext3 on there as well) you're off to the races as long as you have a UPS running to make sure your boxen dont' power down and lose all of it. you might consider to implement a 'oh shit, UPS says time to power down is 5min -- better make a copy of the 'RAM-disk' onto a real disk partition' routine in one of your programs and you've solved all your problems.

welcome to linux.

Here are the results of that contest. In the daily score sheets each flight is linked to the GPS log of that flight, so anyone can analyse the flying style and tactics of world champion pilots. You need a free program to view these files.

Here are some examples of good glider flights made in the USA, such as a 500 km flight at an average speed of 247 km/h (153 mph). Without an engine!

(WIMP = Weakly interactive massive particle; MACHO = Massive compact halo object)

(WIMP = Weakly interactive massive particle; MACHO = Massive compact halo object)

I can eat glass, it doesn't hurt me.

Lameness filter encountered.
Your comment violated the postercomment compression filter. Comment aborted

There is also a 1986 PRL article, Diffraction of atoms by light - The near-resonant Kapitza-Dirac effect, which has as the abstract:

The Kapitza-Dirac effect is observed in the scattering of sodium atoms by a near-resonant standing-wave laser field. The data clearly show diffraction peaks of the atomic momentum transfer at even multiples of the photon momentum. Theoretical predictions for an off-resonant, adiabatic interaction with a two-state system are in reasonable agreement with the data.

It isn't clear whether a special case of the Kapitza-Dirac effect was first observed (e.g., the first time observed using an electron beam), but it seems that it wasn't the first time this effect was seen in the lab. (The press release also mentions that the basic physics demo of the double-slit experiment was Quantum Mechanics 101, when it really is High School Physics 101).

Incidentally, this case really frightens me.

Although paying attention to the news is worthwhile (and was necessary for the first day or two to understand the magnitude of the situation), thinking strategically about some of the issues that will be addressed is a good idea. In particular for this forum, thinking about the tradeoffs of software freedom and security is a good idea.

I recommend reading comp.risks for an ongoing forum about risks to the public with computer systems.

Code , by Lawrence Lessig will help you think about more general public policy issues.

If you are interested in Usama Bin Laden, check out this accompanying website to a Frontline special . It has interviews from last week in response to the WTC and Pentagon incident.

Also, I recommend looking at a white paper America's National interests 2000 which was written by many individuals on Bush's staff, to get an insight for how they might think about this problem. It also does a good job illuminating what national interests are, as well as deals with some of the conflicts between national interests and national values.

Another paper: Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy co-authored by John Deutsch, former CIA head.

In the midst of all the pressure to create more security, don't forget individual liberties .

If anyone has good links about how to deal with this on an international level, that would be fantastic. I am sure one of the reasons this effort will take so long is because it will also include strategic alliances that will extend to the electronic sector.

Although paying attention to the news is worthwhile (and was necessary for the first day or two to understand the magnitude of the situation), thinking strategically about some of the issues that will be addressed is a good idea. In particular for this forum, thinking about the tradeoffs of software freedom and security is a good idea.

I recommend reading comp.risks for an ongoing forum about risks to the public with computer systems.

Code , by Lawrence Lessig will help you think about more general public policy issues.

If you are interested in Usama Bin Laden, check out this accompanying website to a Frontline special . It has interviews from last week in response to the WTC and Pentagon incident.

Also, I recommend looking at a white paper America's National interests 2000 which was written by many individuals on Bush's staff, to get an insight for how they might think about this problem. It also does a good job illuminating what national interests are, as well as deals with some of the conflicts between national interests and national values.

Another paper: Catastrophic Terrorism: Elements of a National Policy co-authored by John Deutsch, former CIA head.

In the midst of all the pressure to create more security, don't forget individual liberties .

If anyone has good links about how to deal with this on an international level, that would be fantastic. I am sure one of the reasons this effort will take so long is because it will also include strategic alliances that will extend to the electronic sector.

Found this link on Slate:

http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/visions/Publications/te rrorism.htm

Written back in '98 apparently, it gives some good insight into plans for dealing with this sort of thing -- I suspect that the "monitoring" aspect of it will get a huge boost from yesterday's attacks.