Slashdot Mirror

Whilst looking through the winner's personal info, I came across this page which has quite a photo of ... something bloody attached to his arm ... and a god of vampires link.

It's often said that genius and eccentricity often go hand-in-hand, I'm just not sure what's in the photo. Dare I say it's a vampire bat feeding off the 2001 ICFP Contest Winner's arm? Anyone else know?

Someone has got to get an interview with this guy for slashdot!

Official website

Official press release

Story on CNN

Official website

Official press release

Story on CNN

Kenneth Colby and Joseph Weizenbaum amazed the academic world by demonstrating a electrical typewriter capable of fooling leading psychiatrists into believing it is a human patient suffering from infantile autism..

Oh dear, everything repeats....

It's not a quote, it's a paraphrase summary of what "opponents" (of space-based strategic defense) "reason". It's party based on the journalist's interview with me and does not reflect bias - he's reporting other peoples' views accurately.

> this "respected space analyst" is either
> extremely arrogant and naive, or (more likely)
> an anti-Bush liberal democrat.

Can't I be both? :-) OK, it's true, I am not only an anti-Bush liberal (sometimes Democrat, although they are not liberal enough for me) but even a Harvard-Liberal-Academic-Kennedy-Wannabe (I am not technically Harvard faculty, but I do teach some of their students) and (to quote another reply) semi pinko-Limey (dual citizen, US-born, if it matters) and even a radical activist, and worse yet, Linux user.

Nevertheless, I claim to be not an entirely kneejerk stereotypical liberal, and I do support the US intelligence community's use of spy satellites and believe they contribute to international stability. But the US pushed for UN Res 1721B for a reason, the State Dept felt that the loss of secrecy on our classified birds was compensated by the benefits of openness, particularly amid concerns the USSR was launching secret satellites. Now the shoe is on the other foot, it ill behooves us to change our argument around.

Analysts who are on the other side of the political fence - like Jim Oberg (Capt USAF ret.), who of all my friends is probably the least likely to ever be accused of being a pinko liberal Harvard type - have made very similar criticisms of the US filings in the past.

I encourage you to check my more detailed statement at hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/un/untxt.html in which I discuss why I think even proponents of space-based weapons (of whom I am clearly not one) should abide by the treaty.

Sorry to be joining this thread so late, I've been a bit too busy to be checking /., but am kind of chuffed to be the target of a thread instead of just a lurker :-)

- Jonathan

No, I'm still here! Wait... who are those guys with dark glasses coming up the hallway?

Aaaargh....

Seriously: check out http://hea-www.harvard.edu/~jcm/space/un/untext.ht ml for a more detailed and nuanced statement by me on the problems with the UN satellite listings.

Check this out... The Berkman Center has teamed up with the Computing Research Association in support of Felten. You can read about it here.

Knuth uses postscript for figures? What a hypocrite. I stick to pure [la]tex for my figures with eepic (by way of xfig).

MSFT was among the 1999 winners, but their entry was in Haskell, not Visual Basic. Unfortunately their writeup has disappeared from the MSFT web site.

1. PLClub submitted two separate entries using OCaml, either of which would have won the contest.
2. Camls 'R Us took second place.
3. Galois Connections took third with their Haskell entry.
4. The Merry Mercurians took fourth with their Mercury entry.

1. Camls 'R Us mopped up the competition with their 3585-line OCaml entry
2. The 1250-line Haskell Entry that took 2nd place was written in a mere 24 hours.

1. First prize was a Cilk entry. Winning the contest doesn't seem to have made the language take off in popularity.
2. Second prize: an OCaml entry ``beat out 23 C and C++ entries, many of these being highly tuned programs produced by extremely competent programmers skilled in game-playing algorithms.''

Read the findings of fact from U.S. v. Microsoft. Microsoft, in an attempt to prevent IBM from shipping Lotus SmartSuite with their computers, conducted an audit, and refused to license Windows 95 to IBM until the audit was resolved. The story begins at paragraph 115. In paragraph 125 we see that Microsoft extorted $31 million from IBM.

Read the findings of fact from U.S. v. Microsoft. Microsoft, in an attempt to prevent IBM from shipping Lotus SmartSuite with their computers, conducted an audit, and refused to license Windows 95 to IBM until the audit was resolved. The story begins at paragraph 115. In paragraph 125 we see that Microsoft extorted $31 million from IBM.

Read the findings of fact from U.S. v. Microsoft. Microsoft, in an attempt to prevent IBM from shipping Lotus SmartSuite with their computers, conducted an audit, and refused to license Windows 95 to IBM until the audit was resolved. The story begins at paragraph 115. In paragraph 125 we see that Microsoft extorted $31 million from IBM.

It was the ultra-conservative Republican, Orin Hatch (representing ultra-conservative Utah) that wrote the DMCA.

Hatch is a moderate. He's one of the few Republicans who is in favor of the antitrust prosecution of Microsoft (the fact that Novell is in his state is only a coincidence I'm sure), and he's as clueless about techonology as you would expect.

Besides, the DMCA was a bipartisan bill, cowritten by Democrat Senator Leahy, who Senator Hatch praises here:

"Finally, I would like to particularly pay tribute to the ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Senator Leahy. I don't know of anyone who has more interest in the Internet, more interest in computers, more interest in copyright matters than Senator Leahy, unless it is myself, and I don't think I have more. He has done a great job on this committee. It is a pleasure to work with him."

The bill passed 99-0, the nonvoting senator being absent. Can't get any more bipartisan than that.

In Advent Sys. Ltd. v. Unisys Corp., the Third Circuit determined that software is a "good" within the meaning of the Uniform Commercial Code (U.C.C.).13 925 F.2d 670, 676 (3d Cir. 1991). Other courts have also determined that the U.C.C. should apply to software and that the sale of software constitutes the sale of a good. See, Step-Saver Data Sys., Inc. v. Wyse Technology, 939 F.2d 91, 99-100 (3d Cir. 1991); Downriver Internists v. Harris Corp., 929 F.2d 1147, 1150 (6th Cir. 1991). If it is established that the transaction wherein the end-user obtains possession of the software is a sale, the so called "first sale" doctrine, applies. Under that doctrine, the owner/purchaser of a copyrighted product is authorized to dispose of the product without regard to the desires or policies of the copyright holder.

The more inappropriate aspect of this response is that it adopts the language of property rights with respect to copyright and patents - the view that monopolies in information are somehow natural, god given things.

This is a deeply problematic view of copyright and patent law, one which was explicity ruled out in various common law jurisdictions by virtue of Donaldson v. Becket (1774) and the US Constitution.

A more reasonable and modern approach is to regard IP laws as economic instruments which must balance the public interest in incentives with the public interest in widespread distribution. The Free Software movement (and the more general anti-IP sentiment on the internet) is a result of the fact that technology has shifted this balance - the public interest dictates that copyright and patent laws ought to be weaker, to utilise the distributional possibilities of the net. In this context, IBM's actions can be seen to be more unethical and inconsistent.

Of course, expecting the average copyright lawyer, let alone IBM marketing, to acknowledge this, is rather unrealisitic. :)

BTW, for further reading, see RMS' artcile Re-evaluating copyright: the public must prevail, William Fisher's Theories of Intellectual Property, or A Philosophy of Intellectual Property by Peter Drahos.

What I would like to see happen with beowulf research is for everybody to connect their clusters via the internet (the proverbial Beowulf of Beowulfs) and go for the Holy Grail - the simulation of consciousness within the human brain. Folks, we are already using clusters of computers to search for consciousness...that's what SETI@Home is. But space is big, and very empty, and our odds of finding ET are small. Let's start a public project to search for HAL instead. Here is what we know about the brain. Here is the place to scratch the surface on how we think it generates consciousness. We are geeks, we are hackers, we joke endlessly anout Beowulfs of Beowulfs...what are we waiting for?

As for the environement. It's all just a bunch of scare tactics, right? Well, if you listen to ultra right-wing groups such as capitalismmagaize.com and aynrand.org, perhaps, since it's in their own best interest to promote their ideology which says you shouldn't inconvenience yourself for the benefit of anyone else. Similarly, a story about the severity of global warming from a group like Earth First! wouldn't carry much weight, either, even though they can quote plenty of studies themselves.

So is it just a bunch of scare tactics? We have hard data showing that people definitely have a significant impact on the local climate -- think urban heat islands. Is it possible that in doing so, the local climate can have such a huge effect without impacting the larger world? Not really. There aren't ecosystems that large that exist in complete isolation.

Many people have claimed that carbon sinks, largely in the form of forests, would be more than enough to counter the effect of increase carbon dioxide emissions. The Kyoto Protocol placed significant emphasis on forests for that purpose. Unfortunately for that view, researchers at Duke released the results of a study showing that while the growth rate of plants showed significant initial increases, it slowed dramatically within a couple years (see the last couple paragraphs). What's the implication? That we'd need to constantly be planting forests. And of course since they'd absorbed the carbon we couldn't cut them down since that'd end up releasing the carbon back to the atmosphere. Actually, it isn't known how much of the carbon the trees actuall keep as opposed to storing in short-lived organs like leaves which fall off, decay, and release the carbon back into the environment (see the infor about this ongoing Harvard study). And if you want to know more about the group that did the research for Duke and is conducting related studies, their homepage is here.

Finally, as for the idea that "our president has stood up for his belief that environmentalism, when carried to the extreme, is very unhealthy for everybody"... Well, if you cut through the political commentary in this column you find out that Bush's own ranch has gone to great lengths to be environmentally sensitive. So much for his politics reflecting his actual beliefs.

What is "shockingly similar" between a hypothesized orbiting star and one which happens to pass nearby?

That was my first take as well, but then when I looked through the references, I found that many feasibility questions seem to be resolved already. For instance, I read the main page and thought, "Sure, but how do you transport the strand through the nanopore?" Then I checked the first reference listed, and what do you know: "We show that an electric field can drive single-stranded RNA and DNA molecules through a 2.6-nm diameter ion channel in a lipid bilayer membrane."

The final system may still be largely conceptual, but it's by no means blue sky. I tend to be a techno-skeptic but this work impresses me.

The page sounds to me like a breathless plea for lots of venture capital funding.

This is grossly unfair. The language and style are well within the normal bounds for scientific papers. The word "revolutionary" is appropriate for a technology that would do years of work in hours. And in case you didn't notice, it's not private research -- it's being done at The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, The Biological Laboratories, Harvard University. What interest would a university laboratory have in "venture capital"? If they later spin it off into private industry for product development, then they might go for venture funding, but it simply makes no sense to do so now. There's a big difference between research sponsorship and venture funding.

Tim

That was my first take as well, but then when I looked through the references, I found that many feasibility questions seem to be resolved already. For instance, I read the main page and thought, "Sure, but how do you transport the strand through the nanopore?" Then I checked the first reference listed, and what do you know: "We show that an electric field can drive single-stranded RNA and DNA molecules through a 2.6-nm diameter ion channel in a lipid bilayer membrane."

The final system may still be largely conceptual, but it's by no means blue sky. I tend to be a techno-skeptic but this work impresses me.

The page sounds to me like a breathless plea for lots of venture capital funding.

This is grossly unfair. The language and style are well within the normal bounds for scientific papers. The word "revolutionary" is appropriate for a technology that would do years of work in hours. And in case you didn't notice, it's not private research -- it's being done at The Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology, The Biological Laboratories, Harvard University. What interest would a university laboratory have in "venture capital"? If they later spin it off into private industry for product development, then they might go for venture funding, but it simply makes no sense to do so now. There's a big difference between research sponsorship and venture funding.

Tim

Well, according to Jonathan's Space Report, there is already an Imax camera loaded onto Atlantis for a July launch!

the reason I suggested 2050 was because the cap in most of the world is 70 years

William H. Gates III is still alive, isn't he? In cases where works for hire do not have a fixed term, the rule is LIFE of the last surviving contributor plus 70 years. MS-DOS won't go PD until at LEAST 70 years after some slashdot zealot murders bill gates.

"Life plus 70." Doesn't that sound like a prison sentence?

Dickens, which people still read and enjoy

Charles Dickens, sure, he's on Project Gutenberg, but what about Geoffrey Chaucer? If DisneyCo has its way, copyright terms will be repeatedly extended until the average reader can no longer understand the language of works written hundreds of years ago in 1922, and it'll still be constitutional according to the letter of the law.

Public domain is a closed constant set, and the consumers show their approval of this by voting with their dollars for products whose makers engage in destruction of the value of the public domain. Write your representatives in whatever government you're under if you disagree with these practices.

The test is known as the MMPI-2 (Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory).Developed as a specialized psychological test for the measurement of psychopathology, the MMPI has been the preferred psychosocial diagnostic instrument among clinicians for the past 50 years.

Originally published in 1940 by Hathaway and McKinley, MMPI has been implemented in many clinical and non-clinical contexts, including medical, educational, medicolegal and organizational settings. A restandardisation and partial revision of the MMPI resulted in the publication of the MMPI-2 in 1989.

GAC (Generic Artificial Consciousness -- pronounced "Jack") is the artificial personality being developed at the Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project with the collaboration of nearly 40,000 Internet users from more than 200 countries worldwide.

GAC will be evaluated using the MMPI-2 over the next several months to assess its learning of human consensus experience from the Mindpixel project's large and diverse group of users from many different cultures.

The test will be supervised and interpreted by Dr. Robert Epstein, one of the world's leading experts on human and machine behavior.

"Nothing like this has ever been attempted," said Epstein. "We're evaluating thousands of people worldwide as if they were one collective individual."

"We don't know if it is possible to build a normal personality out of millions of little pieces. This experiment will tell us how reasonable the idea is," Epstein added.

In the nearly one year the project has been online, Mindpixel's Internet contributors have made nearly 8 million individual measurements of more than 355,000 individual items of human consensus experience.

The project's organizers hope that they will gain enough information by the time the project's data collection phase is complete (2010) to build a highly accurate statistical model of an average human mind which they hope can be used as a foundation for true artificial consciousness.

One of the world's leading experts on human and machine behavior, Robert Epstein received his doctorate in psychology at Harvard University in 1981. He is Editor-in-Chief of Psychology Today magazine and University Research Professor at United States International University in San Diego.

He is also the founder and Director Emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Massachusetts and Adjunct Professor of Psychology at San Diego State University. He was also the former director of the famed Loebner Prize competition in Artificial Intelligence.

The Mindpixel Digital Mind Modeling Project was launched on July 6, 2000. It is the world's largest Artificial Intelligence effort, with nearly 40,000 contributing members in more than 200 countries.

[Contact: Dr. Robert Epstein, Christopher McKinstry]

02-Jul-2001

The encryption via satellite that they mention is just the Zong-Rabin hyperencryption system and has nothing to do with quantum encryption. It's just the streaming one-time-pad with the assumption that no one can store the bit stream for long enough to retrospectively break an arbitrary message.

Probably they use a trie or the related Patricia tree. These are very space efficient and relatively fast.

• The Dark Matter problem gets far more fun than this: This result shows that between 0.1 and 18% of the critical density of the universe (i.e. what is needed so the universe just expands for ever - more than this and it will collapse...) can be neutrinos. What we can see (stars mainly), makes up 10% of this. The big question still is, what is the rest... (see here and references contained within for further information.)
• This result means neutrinos do have masses but we don't know what they are. We only know what the mass differences are (which determines the probability that they will have oscillated by the time they reach the detector) and that they must be small. What causes these masses to be small (new particles, extra dimensions...) is the next big question...
• If neutrinos have mass, then, according to special relativity, they can't travel at the speed of light. However, if they are very light (which they are) and have a much higher energy than their mass (which they do), they will travel very close to the speed of light.

optical detectors have a pretty limited duty cycle (meaning that high frequency light pulses would be next to impossible to detect...)

Hybrid avalanche photodiodes are able to respond to light pulses on a time scale of a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second). The theory of optical SETI is to use lasers with nanosecond ultra-high-power pulses. They are so bright, they will outshine the neighboring star (for a nanosecond) across the entire optical spectrum - no need to look for the right frequency.

It's much easier to generate a powerful radio signal than it is a bright light pulse

Uh yeah, petawatt (pulsed) lasers exist, show me a petawatt radio!

Optical extinction is a problem, but with the powers available, we can detect human-buildable lasers with human-buildable detectors over 1,000 LY. See: Optical SETI home page.

Actually, most scientists use the term gamma radiation only for electromagnetic rays of a very highly frequency, as usually only found in radioactive decay. Gamma rays have a higher frequency than X-rays, which are higher than ultraviolet, which in turn are higher than visual light, which is still zillions times higher than even the most high frequency radio waves. It would make more sense to compare the mobile's radiation to microwaves, rather than to gamma rays.

As to your comment: "If you read it carefully, you'll see that copyright is supposed to strike a balance, contrary to your absolute view on intellectual property..."

Well, copyright is supposed to do many things, depending on the degree to which you subscribe to each of the four theories listed above. Obviously it depends on the theory being used. Perhaps in your thesis you should make this clear. If I subscribe only to the Labor Theory, for example, what am I to balance it with? Really, you assume too much.

And so what if the paper is contrary to my supposed "absolute views"? This sounds a lot like an appeal to authority - the weakest arguement of them all! If I show you a paper that claims that copyright should be absolute, should you adopt that view? Of course not. Its very anti-intellectual to simply accept a view because some authority (even an academic authority) propounds it.

How exactly is this suit "against U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft"?

Read the filing. Rights advocates often sue the the Attorney General in order to overturn a bad law; see also the case formerly known as Eldred v. Reno , which seeks to overturn the Sonny Bono Effectively Perpetual Copyright Act.

True, the balance of subject matter will more closely model peoples intrests however this does not make the listed sites any better. The links submitted will likely be by the person responsible for the site. This does not filter the noise. Perhaps they need a moderation system?

For example, their is a very good tutorial site on Guitar chords and scales and such called Dansm's Home Page. I did find this under Arts/Music/Instruments/Stringed/Guitar/Acoustic/Ar tists/ but I think I would moderate that this be placed in the Music Education section as well.

I hope the music industry suffers 100% drop in sales.

I also hope that no-one buys another film DVD, ever again.

That would serve them right for trying to take away freedom on our computers. it would also reduce their financial capacity for instituting lawyer attacks on open source software.

Personally, I would like to see vermin like Steve Heckler bankrupt, homeless and living as a down-and-out.

Never forget, representatives DO represent the will of the people. If they fail to, they get replaced by those next in line who claim to. It's the beauty of the american democracy

If that were true, we wouldn't have a DMCA or a Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The United States of America is not a democracy but a plutocracy, which Webster defines as "government by the rich." Our representatives have learned that campaign money is more powerful than integrity in getting a fellow elected; a Congresscritter generally represents her constituents up until the day after inauguration, after which she represents special intere$t groups such as RIAA and MPAA.

But in a slightly more sinister sense, special interest groups do represent the will of the people. The pure capitalist would say that "if consumers don't want effectively perpetual copyright terms, they wouldn't buy from producers that funnel their money into lobbying for such laws." The public voices its approval of loss of rights by buying tickets to Disney's Pearl Harbor and Atlantis. There just isn't that much economic demand among consumers for freedom.

Sometimes the only way to get rid of bad law is to FLOUT it

Sometimes you can flout it a little at a time to take advantage of the "slippery slope" phenomenon, by pushing the limits of fair use and creating works that are barely legal (but not in the kid porn sense).

Remember YOU CANNOT DISPUTE A LAW UNTIL YOU ARE CHARGERD WITH VIOLATING IT. One cannot simply say, "I think the DMCA sucks. I'm going to sue the Fed to repeal it." No court will even listen to you.

Except that's exactly what the Eldred v. Reno case is about, suing Attorney General John Ashcroft (no relation to Richard Ashcroft of what was once the Verve, who the Perpetual Copyright Act that Congress passed during Zippergate to escape media attention. Think of it as a double "Wag the Dog": Kosovo was a cover for Lewinsky, which in turn was a cover for the Sonny Bono Act and the DMCA.

Barzok writes: Aside from "cache the whole disk in RAM," isn't there a limit to how fast a FS can get, because of the drive?

Log structured filesystems are supposed to achieve nearly the disk write speed. At least naively, one would also think they'd get better speed than "journalled" filesystems, because the filesystem itself constitutes a journal.

Some folks seem to think that clustered writes give you nearly the same performance, though.

Barzok writes: Aside from "cache the whole disk in RAM," isn't there a limit to how fast a FS can get, because of the drive?

Log structured filesystems are supposed to achieve nearly the disk write speed. At least naively, one would also think they'd get better speed than "journalled" filesystems, because the filesystem itself constitutes a journal.

Some folks seem to think that clustered writes give you nearly the same performance, though.

It's not just who hold the pursestrings that matters - what matters is what the University considers important. If it's money, and if enough money comes from the students, then the University might hold off for monetary reasons. However, money isn't always top on the minds of University administrators - often it's the University's image.

As an example, I was a math grad. student at Johns Hopkins. One of the things that had come down from the University administration a few years before I got there was that we were to hold the line against grade inflation. The University as a whole has made this a priority (i.e. that Hopkins grades mean something significant), and one of the consequences is that we never had to worry about a lack of administration support when it came to punishing cheaters. The image of Hopkins had been tied by the administration to the idea that grades received at Hopkins represent what they ought to.

Not that this was a completely effective deterrent. It always boggled my mind when grading tests the number of people who would cheat off their friends when their friends also had no clue what they were doing. (We usually graded tests by giving each TA one or two problems, and that TA would then grade those problems across all sections - with fewer than 200 students per class, it's pretty easy to pick up on something you've seen before) I mean, if you're going to cheat, wouldn't you at least pick someone who knew their stuff to cheat from? I'll wager that upwards of 70% of the time the cheater was cheating off someone else who had no clue. I will admit that the standard punishment was usually simply giving the student a 0 on the test, which almost inevitably led to an F in the course. I don't think we ever found sufficiently flagrant violations to warrant referring the matter upstream. (Pretty obvious acts of desperation, mostly) I also don't remember ever catching anyone who wasn't a freshman.

Compare this to the conventional wisdom about a certain other institution that apparently values above all its reputation of having the best of the best as its student body, and is seriously hostile to anything that might make a student look bad. (This is mostly mere grapevine gossip, but backed up with horror stories from someone who TAed there, and some anecdotal evidence from people who've been undergrads there) Presumably an institution with less cultural capital would want to prevent its grades from becoming meaningless, but that place has a different set of priorities.

Certainly not according to the Northern District Court of California and the 9th Circuit, who rejected this argument in Napster. In particular, the Courts read the rest of the statute, which they held excludes the use of a computer as a "recording device."

The AHRA argument was always Napster's weakest argument, even when used to justify personal use of the recordings and time sharing. There is further substantial authority that while AHRA provides for personal household use, it does not permit limitless sharing (distribution) of personal recordings with third parties.

There are still some interesting (if not necessarily productive) thought experiments that you can do though. For example, imagine moving into the black hole. If you found a large enough black hole (and certainly they're out there... ones equivalent to billions of solar masses), the tidal forces at the event horizon would be small enough that you could pass it without harm. (In other words, since the radius of the event horizon (in the Schwarzschild metric sense) is so large, the gravitational force is essentially constant, like on the surface of the earth.) Of course you still couldn't see anything coming from a gravitational potential lower than yours. So what would that be like? Then there are other metrics that turn the event horizon into something you can only asymptotically approach, but the singularity itself is flattened out (don't remember the name of the metric). Passing through the singularity, the space coordinates become imaginary, and time becomes real (!), but there's no discontinuity at the origin (where the singularity is in the Schwarzschild metric). The sci.physics black hole FAQ has some more interesting info.

Moreover, I was also under the impression that if a device has any non-infringing utility (e.g., a VCR can legally time-shift programs, in addition to copying movies), then the courts consider it legal. I believe that was established primarily in the Betamax ruling. Hence, if the DeCSS has a legal purpose, which is to enable legal viewing (under First Sale) of legally bought movies, it should not be held accountable to other, less desirable usings of itself. What we have here is the VCR being held to one standard (perhaps because it was backed by a large corporation), while DeCSS is held to a much lower standard (perhaps because the defendents are 'hackers'). It's as if the courts have the dual view that practically no one was going to use the VCR for copying movies (perish the thought!), while, if DeCSS were to be legal, everyone and their lawless mother would be copying DVDs all over the place and then e-mailing them to each other!

Well, all I can say to that is: I don't know. My hatred of the MPAA/RIAA grows daily, and apparently our government has already thrown its hat in with the corporations that donate to it, rather than the people who elect it. I think a new type of civil disobedience needs to arise. The only problem is that Martin Luther King et. al. would have been hard-pressed to continue their civil disobedience if they were getting slapped with $500,000 fines rather than just short jail terms. Note that I'm not saying that public use rights and civil rights are in the same league of importance, merely that the civil disobedience model would be interesting in this situation.

XTE J1748-288 is another system with a rotating black hole. Also GRS1915+105 and SS433 could be, but I am not sure of this. (All the four sources are microquasars, and rotating black holes should be in all of them) These sources are all in our galaxy.

I am not that interested in extragalactic stuff, but I think there are also several active galaxies with known spinning central black holes.

A good resource for checking 'First ever' astronomy discoveries: ADS abstract service

then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like

Except authorities who enforce forgotten laws end up on DumbLaws.com and are embarrassed out of their... Next point?

there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.

In fact, there's nothing in the Constitution that requires copyright itself to expire. The "for limited times" in U.S. Const. 1.8.8 is relatively meaningless in the face of the Eldred v. Reno^H^H^H^HAshcroft decision, setting a precedent allowing for already nearly perpetual copyright to be extended even longer. This is a bad thing.

Doesn't seem that big or costly . . .

I wouldn't claim to know what the current social assumption is, but in the US, material created after 1/1/78 is automatically protected by copyright, by default. People mark material anyway to be more sure that notice has been provided if it came to a dispute.

Also, take a look at some related activity - Copyright's Commons at Harvard Law. Interesting parallels with their [cc] "counter-copyright" device. These appear to be the same folks doing the opencode and openlaw initiatives.

And they've got a bunch of stuff on the Eldred v Reno. copyright extension argument, and the old Jack Valenti v Lawrence Lessig debate as an added bonus :-)

I wouldn't claim to know what the current social assumption is, but in the US, material created after 1/1/78 is automatically protected by copyright, by default. People mark material anyway to be more sure that notice has been provided if it came to a dispute.

Also, take a look at some related activity - Copyright's Commons at Harvard Law. Interesting parallels with their [cc] "counter-copyright" device. These appear to be the same folks doing the opencode and openlaw initiatives.

And they've got a bunch of stuff on the Eldred v Reno. copyright extension argument, and the old Jack Valenti v Lawrence Lessig debate as an added bonus :-)

I wouldn't claim to know what the current social assumption is, but in the US, material created after 1/1/78 is automatically protected by copyright, by default. People mark material anyway to be more sure that notice has been provided if it came to a dispute.

Also, take a look at some related activity - Copyright's Commons at Harvard Law. Interesting parallels with their [cc] "counter-copyright" device. These appear to be the same folks doing the opencode and openlaw initiatives.

And they've got a bunch of stuff on the Eldred v Reno. copyright extension argument, and the old Jack Valenti v Lawrence Lessig debate as an added bonus :-)

It is quite beyond me why Sagan-bashing is so fashionable, but as an astronomer, I can assure you that Sagan's science was impeccable. ADS archives 307 articles by him, including 184 peer-reviewed journal articles: this link should work (unless lameness filter intervenes) -- or just go to adswww.harvard.edu and search for yourself.

Specifically note papers like this one in Nature: "Cometary Organics but no Evidence for Bacteria". That was him, claiming that the evidence was not there for one of his pet theories. In science, at least, being able to say that you have disproved your own pet theory counts as good work.

As to the appropriateness of the analogy with PhilG, I have no comment one way or the other. It just gets me pissed off that people are so willing to take the mutterings of pissed-off journalists and smear Sagan's work without even knowing what he did!

It is quite beyond me why Sagan-bashing is so fashionable, but as an astronomer, I can assure you that Sagan's science was impeccable. ADS archives 307 articles by him, including 184 peer-reviewed journal articles: this link should work (unless lameness filter intervenes) -- or just go to adswww.harvard.edu and search for yourself.

Specifically note papers like this one in Nature: "Cometary Organics but no Evidence for Bacteria". That was him, claiming that the evidence was not there for one of his pet theories. In science, at least, being able to say that you have disproved your own pet theory counts as good work.

As to the appropriateness of the analogy with PhilG, I have no comment one way or the other. It just gets me pissed off that people are so willing to take the mutterings of pissed-off journalists and smear Sagan's work without even knowing what he did!

I don't know that it's legal to share files only with your buddies, per se, but it's certainly harder for the RIAA to track, for the reasons you cite. That's becoming increasingly important, too. Evidently, the MPAA has already started hiring companies to track individual Gnutella users' downloads and proceeded to "re-educate" them, even at places like Harvard, see here.

The RIAA can't be far behind. Bring on Aimster & Freenet!