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Planetlet? Planette? Heck, we already had planetoid.

Actually the astronomical term "minor planet" has long been used to describe the thousands of identified solar system objects that are neither full-fledged planets nor moons. This new one, WR-106, is a member of the Kuiper Belt, essentially a large amorphous cloud of asteroids outside the orbit of Neptune; hence the official grouping Trnns-Neptunian Objects.

This is an exciting class of discoveries. It was surmised for a number of years but only in the 1990s did significant identifications of these objects begin. Now we're reached the hundreds, and there's likely many more to come, as techniques for locating them are refined. (In a nutshell, using computers to do the same flash image comparisons that Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto.)

What's significant about WR-106 is its hypothetical size -- which is far from verified. It could possibly be larger than Ceres (d. 570 mi), in the asteroid belt, which up until now has reigned as the largest minor planet. What this suggests is that the larger objects in the outer solar system are by no means all identified and discovered. Heck, there could even be a full-fledged twin of Mercury, or even Mars, way out in the deep dark. It's possible, and discoveries like WR-106 mean you can't just discount that possibility.

The whole question of Pluto's planethood has never really been open. What reached the press was a badly garbled story of disrespect to Clyde Tombaugh; what really happened is simply that the people who track minor planets wanted to include Pluto (and its almost-as-big moon) as part of the TNO group. There's no question, or at least wasn't, that Pluto would be at the head of that class, just as Ceres is at the head of the list of asteroids. It wasn't about downgrading Pluto, but about recognizing it as the first discovery in a vast new universe of discoveries in our outer solar system.

It's not really important to most astronomers what they're called. We've gone beyond the simplistic question of "how many planets, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10?" to the full realization that our solar system is made up of an infinite number of objects, from Jupiter-sized gas giants, to rocks like Pluto or Phobos, down to dust specks too small to see let alone count. The list of numbered asteroids is closing on 20,000, and that's just what we can find from Earth!

The importance of this discovery doesn't lie in the headline-grabbing reconsider-what-you-all-learned-in-fourth-grade aspects, but in how this affects the questions of cosmology and planetary formation, as well as the prospects for the future. If our solar system is made up of so many small rocks, it increases the odds that there are more rock-strewn star systems out in the larger galaxy. If our solar system has ore-filled rocks all over the place, that's probably a good omen for anyone contemplating colonizing the outer solar system.
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Planetlet? Planette? Heck, we already had planetoid.

Actually the astronomical term "minor planet" has long been used to describe the thousands of identified solar system objects that are neither full-fledged planets nor moons. This new one, WR-106, is a member of the Kuiper Belt, essentially a large amorphous cloud of asteroids outside the orbit of Neptune; hence the official grouping Trnns-Neptunian Objects.

This is an exciting class of discoveries. It was surmised for a number of years but only in the 1990s did significant identifications of these objects begin. Now we're reached the hundreds, and there's likely many more to come, as techniques for locating them are refined. (In a nutshell, using computers to do the same flash image comparisons that Clyde Tombaugh used to find Pluto.)

What's significant about WR-106 is its hypothetical size -- which is far from verified. It could possibly be larger than Ceres (d. 570 mi), in the asteroid belt, which up until now has reigned as the largest minor planet. What this suggests is that the larger objects in the outer solar system are by no means all identified and discovered. Heck, there could even be a full-fledged twin of Mercury, or even Mars, way out in the deep dark. It's possible, and discoveries like WR-106 mean you can't just discount that possibility.

The whole question of Pluto's planethood has never really been open. What reached the press was a badly garbled story of disrespect to Clyde Tombaugh; what really happened is simply that the people who track minor planets wanted to include Pluto (and its almost-as-big moon) as part of the TNO group. There's no question, or at least wasn't, that Pluto would be at the head of that class, just as Ceres is at the head of the list of asteroids. It wasn't about downgrading Pluto, but about recognizing it as the first discovery in a vast new universe of discoveries in our outer solar system.

It's not really important to most astronomers what they're called. We've gone beyond the simplistic question of "how many planets, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10?" to the full realization that our solar system is made up of an infinite number of objects, from Jupiter-sized gas giants, to rocks like Pluto or Phobos, down to dust specks too small to see let alone count. The list of numbered asteroids is closing on 20,000, and that's just what we can find from Earth!

The importance of this discovery doesn't lie in the headline-grabbing reconsider-what-you-all-learned-in-fourth-grade aspects, but in how this affects the questions of cosmology and planetary formation, as well as the prospects for the future. If our solar system is made up of so many small rocks, it increases the odds that there are more rock-strewn star systems out in the larger galaxy. If our solar system has ore-filled rocks all over the place, that's probably a good omen for anyone contemplating colonizing the outer solar system.
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Here's a list of all the Minor Planets in the Solar System. Would make a good datafile for NPC names for a RPG, I think. Or a show-off list for one of those guys that can memorize Pi to 600 places. If you discover a Minor Planet you get to name it, subject to approval from the Astronomical Union (naming a discovery after a pet animal is discouraged).

Here's a list of all the Minor Planets in the Solar System. Would make a good datafile for NPC names for a RPG, I think. Or a show-off list for one of those guys that can memorize Pi to 600 places. If you discover a Minor Planet you get to name it, subject to approval from the Astronomical Union (naming a discovery after a pet animal is discouraged).

You'll find talk about data pipelines, " the grid ", and more. Of special note is that the technologies behind the actual efforts under way right now to create the NVO et al., are overwhelmingly based on Open Source technology and Unix. The fact that someone in Microsoft tries to jump on the bandwagon with what will presumably turn out to be a closed, proprietary solution, isn't really news.

You'll find talk about data pipelines, " the grid ", and more. Of special note is that the technologies behind the actual efforts under way right now to create the NVO et al., are overwhelmingly based on Open Source technology and Unix. The fact that someone in Microsoft tries to jump on the bandwagon with what will presumably turn out to be a closed, proprietary solution, isn't really news.

Although I'm not aware of any database of pure raw data, NASA at least have the Distributed Astronomy Library, described here, which is a repository of astronomical *information*. An example is here

Now, open the Real-Time Chat Log and do a search for: "Oh. My." (spoken by Christopher Ambler) and read along after watching the video! See as Vint Cerf goes into "attack-mode" and takes on Louis Touton and Joe Sims.

Check out Christopher Ambler and the chat-room's reaction to the whole thing! Incredible and hilarious at the same time! Watch the look on the Board Member's faces when they realize that Afilias isn't going to get .web!

Take that NSI !!!!!

Now, open the Real-Time Chat Log and do a search for: "Oh. My." (spoken by Christopher Ambler) and read along after watching the video! See as Vint Cerf goes into "attack-mode" and takes on Louis Touton and Joe Sims.

Check out Christopher Ambler and the chat-room's reaction to the whole thing! Incredible and hilarious at the same time! Watch the look on the Board Member's faces when they realize that Afilias isn't going to get .web!

Take that NSI !!!!!

> The Opera browser is 100% W3C
The opera browser isn't 100% W3C compliant!
Some examples: http://css.nu/pointers/bugs.html#Opera3 5
http://www.people.fas .ha rvard.edu/~dbaron/css/test/results


> Mozilla/NS 6.0
Mozilla IS NOT Netscape!!!
Please read this http://www.gerbilbox.com/newzilla/in dex .php

Best regards

Uriel

- - - - - -

The Opera browser is 100% W3C compliant and does a very good job in retaining compatibility with bugged web pages.

Oh, c'mon, you didn't *really* mean that, did you?

As for the standards part, sorry to remind you, but Mozilla and so Netscape 6 have the crown for the most standards compliance around (and they're still not 100% conformant). Opera does a good job, but every browser still have issues.

I have digged a little and found this for your reading pleasure:
Conformance tests results

Now, about compatibility with buggy web pages you gotta be joking... some time ago I tried to test some pages from where I work in Opera, just to see how it behaved. Most HTML there is written by lazy designers using Dreamweaver, so it is a complete mess and a total junk, unless you are willing to spend some hours to fix it. IE shows them OK (after all, Dreamweaver outputs for IE). Mozilla does just as good a job as long as you fix the Javascript issues (just add DOM compatibility to the scripts). NS4 does OK also. But Opera completely garbles the thing. I was so shocked by the horrid result that I never touched Opera again.

You may argue that "Opera is supposed to be about compliance, not buggy HTML", but in the real world we have buggy HTML in every place you go, thanks to old browsers not conforming to standards. And in that Mozilla kicks the hell out of Opera. Just check bugzilla and look for bugs with the "compat" keyword.

You may like Opera, it may be fast and all, but please, get facts a little straight before claiming things like "100% compliant".

unbroken

forget copyright...
counter-copyright
"The idea surrounding the counter-copyright campaign is fairly easy to understand. If you place the [cc] icon at the end of your work, you signal to others that you are allowing them to use, modify, edit, adapt and redistribute the work that you created. "

Actually that would be Eldred vs Reno

DB

• Taking Subsidiarity Seriously
• Federalism, Subsidiarity and Democracy in the European Union

Try this one:

Object 1999 AN10 will slip by Earth on Aug. 7, 2027 at about 7 AM GMT at a distance of 0.002652 astronomical units - about 246 521 miles. Check it out for yourself at this page.

The Moon is about 246 000 miles away.

In astronomical terms, that's a bullet passing five millimeters above your head.
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You can see that none of the objects in the table has a period of 353 or 354 days. Perhaps an object with a longer period got slowed, or one with a shorter period got accelerated, by Earth-Moon approaches. Or Apollo 12's lost stage ended up here...

Taking into account new precovery data of the object taken by the Catalina Sky Survey on 17 May 1999 (see http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/ K00 /K00V15.html), the NEODys team has calculated that the 2030 impact scenario is no longer real (see http://ne wto n.dm.unipi.it/cgi-bin/neodys/neoibo?objects:2000SG 344;main .)

As a result of the new data, there has been a dramatic improvement in the orbital uncertainty. In fact, the nominal miss distance for this object is now given as 0.0346 AU on 22 September 2000 (22.89 UT22.19). What this means is that the object will come no closer to the Earth in 2030 than 3 million miles! In other words, the claim that this object may hit the Earth in 2030 has now been completely ruled out - less than 34 hours after the IAU and NASA decided to announce a "significant impact risk" to the world.

It was unwise of the IAU and NASA to rely on the 1999 one-night stand data by the LINEAR team. The IAU/NASA impact announcement was premature and alarmist.

(Thanks to B. J. Peiser for the above.)

Does the term "Flipped SU(5)" mean anything to you?

Suggest you check out Hagelin's scientific background a bit more before you start suggesting that Hagelin isn't a "real" Quantum Physicist. It is easier to say than "theoretical physicist" or "Quantum Field Theorist," afterall. A good place to start would be Hagelin's scientific publications.

You might be interested to know that his former Physics professor at Harvard, Howard Georgi, says that "He's not a kook. He's an incredibly smart guy who has well-thought-out opinions on many things." As you can see, Professor Georgi isn't a kook, a pseudo-scientist, or an intellectual slouch, either.

One posssible basis for copyrights is "natural law", where an author has rights to their works forever. (eg. IP is very similar to physical property)

Another is "instrumentalist theory", where copyrights give an author some control for a limited time, to induce authors to create works.

Then there's "droit moral" (supported by Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel), which says something along the lines of: "property is acquired not necessarily by labor, but rather by one's joining of his individual Will to some object external to the self. As a result of this process, the thing possessed comes to embody the owner's personality". As a result, if someone disrespects/parodies/any-action, it's said that they're partly doing that to the author. "no strange work be presented as his, but that his own work not be presented in a changed form." Also, some followers of this theory separate authors' rights into two classes: alienable and inalienable. This seems to be a nice compromise between the two previous theories.

I don't know how accurate or current the paper is. But it's an interesting difference, IMHO.
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Wow, that site is really cool. I remember going to it a long time ago, they certainly have kept it going.

Anyway, here's another great pic of 2 more galaxies collding.

And hell, I might as well borrow their html of the description:

Billions of years from now, only one of these two galaxies will remain. Until then, spiral galaxies NGC 2207 and IC 2163 will slowly pull each other apart, creating tides of matter, sheets of shocked gas, lanes of dark dust, bursts of star formation, and streams of cast-away stars. Astronomers predict that NGC 2207, the larger galaxy on the left, will eventually incorporate IC 2163, the smaller galaxy on the right. In the most recent encounter that peaked 40 million years ago, the smaller galaxy is swinging around counter-clockwise, and is now slightly behind the larger galaxy. The space between stars is so vast that when galaxies collide, the stars in them usually do not collide.

the questions you pose don't have straightforward answers -- at least not ones that appear straightforward to me. But you can come up with some broad estimates.

A rough estimate of interstellar gas density is on the order of 1 particle per cm^3 -- a bit lower (0.1) between clouds, a bit higher (20) in diffuse clouds, much higher (10^3 - 10^6) in molecular clouds.

At these densities, it turns out that the likely effect of galaxy - galaxy collisions may be to strip out a large portion of the gas in both galaxies. Certainly the large-scale effects are enormous, and you can see them in our own Milky Way -- the galactic disk is "warped" upwards by as much as 4Kpc (12,000 light years) at large (20 kpc) distances from the nucleus, and this is thought to be a result of a tidal interaction long ago with the Large/Small Magellanic Clouds. Also, one of the most popular theories for how elliptical galaxies (or at least some elliptical galaxies) form is via collisions between spirals -- ellipticals have very little gas and dust. This theory is borne out somewhat by the fact that the concentration of ellipticals is much higher in rich clusters of galaxies than it is in the "field" -- as the density goes up, you would expect more collisions, hence more formation of ellipticals.

And hey, while we're at it, the process of gas stripping is a fundamental issue in the study of clusters of galaxies. As galaxies in a rich cluster move through the (very hot) intracluster medium, a shock develops and basically pushes a bunch of the gas out -- for a relatively simple physical analysis of this situation, see for instance Shore's book on Astrophysical Hydrodynamics.

But to get back to the original issue: if we were sitting on Earth when the MW collided with Andromeda, what would it be like? The answer is that I don't really know -- my hunch is that the local (in both space and time) effects would not be all that great; life around the Sun would probably get along just fine. But I don't know, because I'm too lazy to work out the problem. :-) (I'm sure this is in the literature somewhere, if you're truly dedicated -- try the Astronomy and Astrophysics data abstract service,.) Certainly the very long-term effects would be enormous, though.

Hope that helped clear things up...

What concerns me is the increasing amounts of money funneled into the War on Drugs and the meagre results being shown. I am also getting sick of hearing how people's basic Constituional rights keep getting trammeled by drug police (DEA, FBI, and local law enforcement) whether or not they are using drugs.

Harvard Study: Survey Finds Increased Use of Marijuana and Other Illicit Drugs at U.S. Colleges in the 1990s

Scientific American: Marijuana Use among Teens Increased Consistently through the 1990s

Nader is for decriminalization of marijuana use (not sale) and treatment for offenders (not mandatory prison sentences). This is in sharp contrast to both Gore/Bush who want to continue with the failing War on Drugs and its accompanying problems.

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Hmm, this is right. sounds just as silly as storing a bunch of electrons on an array of millions of small capacitors, and then refreshing them dozens of times per second, to store data bits. And if extra charge comes along, or it's not refreshed long enough, the fragile data gets wiped out. Oh wait a second, that's how DRAM memory works.

Okay, but it's certainly as ridiculous (sp) as making little tiny EXTREMELY static-sensitive transistors wired in a feedback path with current maintaining them in 2 possible states so they can flip and flop between the two, and thus store data bits. Yeah, and if someone rubs their sock on said transistor substrate, they'll send the data into total chaos. Hey wait a minute, that's how SRAM works.

So you can see these seemingly delicate scenarios are both in use today, almost certainly both being made to use in the computer you've used to post your sarcastic little statement. BTW, Dr. Kool, since you're at Harvard University, you're probably very aware of some of your fellow Harvard faculty research with quantum structures, and, I believe, quantum bits.

Good day.

As one of the team who produced this image, I find the Chandra Halloween card a bit naff. They've missed off the mouth!! card Jeremy

If that looked like a skull, take a look at http://chandra.harvard.e du/ photo/cycle1/0204/index.html. It reminds me of some will'o'wisps.

Other cool space images from Yahoo on the Soyuz launch:

Transport

Launch pad

Liftoff


--

yeah, I don't have any clue how the copyright issues apply to scientific papers. But in astronomy and astrophysics, it's getting to the point where I'm quite surprised when I need a paper that isn't online. This site, for instance, will let you do searches over the contents of many journals, stretching back almost a century in some cases, and then get the papers you need either in scanned or fully electronic form. (Interestingly enough, the "electronic refereed journal" version of many articles requires your institution to have purchased access -- that is, ApJ online isn't accessible to everyone. But the scanned versions don't have such restrictions -- at least not that I'm aware of.)

Read the deposition here.

Might as well advertise the original paper that Egan references, since I wrote it: it appeared in the Astrophysical Journal in 1995. Terr est rial Implications of Cosmological Gamma-Ray Bursts

• You can either "mount" the resultant FS publicly, so that anyone on your system can see it, or
• Each and every program that wants to go after encrypted data needs to individually explicitly include cryptographic support to read keys and access/update encrypted data.

As is nicely outlined here , the Plan 9 operating system provides the ability to do this Another Way, using the concept of namespaces. The basic idea is that the "file tree" is no longer a global thing, but is, instead, localized to processes.

In effect, I might, from my shell, run the command:

mount -t crypto /home/cbbrowne/encrypted-stuff /mounts/plaintext

This results in the encrypted stuff in my home area getting attached to the file tree under /mounts/plaintext

The two clever things about this are that:

• /mounts/plaintext is visible to the shell that invoked the mount, as well as to its children.
• /mounts/plaintext is not visible to any other processes.

  Entertainingly, perhaps not even to root.

Why should this be considered relevant to Linux? Because there has been considerable discussion of namespaces in relation to the Linux kernel. It won't be in 2.4, but it's the sort of thing Alex Viro is liable to consider experimenting with in 2.5 or some such version.

If Digital Convergence has any "intellectual property" claim, it is most probably patent -- and without seeing specifics, I'd be dubious about even that. (Query how a process for Web information retrieval triggered by the scanning of a bar code is any innovation over a library's retreival of remote database records when it scans a book at checkout.)

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act exploits a loophole in the Constitution that makes "the lifetime of the Universe" a valid value for "limited times" in the copyright clause. It's all part of the slippery slope to make copyright perpetual. This must be stopped; click here to help.
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XPlay Tetris On Drugs!

Look at the constitution;

Article I section 8 of the constitution states that the purpose of copyright is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors exclusive right to their respective Writings...."
(bold mine)

This is clear. It says that the copyright should go to the author. It does not say that it goes to the author's children, grandchilderen, distant relatives, or corporate interest. When congress originally passed the first extension to the copyright law in 1831 (upon renewal for a total term of 28years) none of the original framers of the constitution were even in the congress to vote on it, and only one (Madison) was alive.

Retroactive changes to the length of a term of copyright are wrong, in my opinion. I would have no problem with Disney lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms .

The problem is that "ex post facto" is Disney's middle name. See here. So it's ok for big money to argue for retroactive changes, but if the public does, then screw them??? The thing is that if the public ever does, they don't have the money "to grease the wheels" to move legislation through. There are no glamerous movie stars, no expensive parties, no expensive lobbyists to take congress out to dinner. That's they way it has been for the last tenty-five years until now you have David Corwin, senior counsel for the Motion Picture Association of America, saying that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is "near and dear to our heart." See here.

The fact of the matter is that anybody who studies this issue even just a little bit realize that the public's interest has aalways been nothing more than an afterthought. Indeed, the author of this analysis noted that with the task force on the DMCA;

The message of these recommendations seems to be that the Task Force will see what rights are left over for the public once the rights of the authors have been firmly established.

And this was before the passage of the Sonny Bonno Copyright Term Extension Act!

So we have reached the point now that the only rights left to take away are constitutional ones, such as freedom of speech, fair use, the right of first sale, and the established right to reverse engineer and have interoperability. So now copyright holders are taking those too!

What really has been "ex post facto" has been the endless retroactive copyright terms over the last 40 years.

with Disney lobbying for longer and longer copyright terms if the longer terms only affected new works

For the first time in our history, nothing is falling into the public domain due to the CTEA. So, as a citizen, why should I support some government granted monopoly if I get nothing in return??? Where is the Quid Pro Quo???? These same companies that are suing Napster are the ones who lobbyied and effectively "paid" congress for the CTEA, not to mention the DMCA. Look at it, what is this story and thread about?? Companies who do not want us to use Napster or DVDs on linux, but at the same time are taking our fundamental rights as citizens away, not to mention the old (and I mean old) works that were supposed to enter the public domain?

So what reason do I have to support their so called "copyright" when they are effectively taking all my "rights" away????

Time for a little counterpoint, don't you think?

If the term length is set by legislation (I am not certain if it is or not), then in what way is this not ex post facto?

If you read the constitution, the "right to copy" was originally intended to go to the author only for limited times. So the only "ex post facto" here is the endless copyright term extensions??

It's so ludicrously bad now, that you have the government arguing that extending copyright is a national tradition This statement (in their brief to the appelant court, see openlaw) is so outrageously absurd that it defies description. So by their reasonong, congress twenty years ago had planned on retroactively extending copyright terms now, and in another twenty years they are going to do it again, ad infinitum???

Why didn't congress back in 1976 just extend copyright law for another 100 years? Or is congress just trying to "circumvent" the "limited times" clause of the constitution???? What's "ex post facto" about saying that is wrong??

So, what congress is doing is whoring themselves to special corporate interests by defrauding the public of their due. There is no nicer way to put it.

Please forgive me if this post seems like a flame. But your statement illustrates perfectly why many of us over at openlaw shake our heads. On the surface it seems very logically and correct, but in reality it could not be further from what is right. I'm really glad you made your post, because it illustrates beautifully the widespread ignorance of how the publics' rights are being ripped off by a prostituted congress. I do not say this lightly.

So I invite you to become familiar with the openlaw site, and I hope to see you on the discussion boards there. Some of the people their are extremely smart, and when I open my mouth I get it slapped!!!

The legal point of view:
The DMCA forbids the "circumvention of technical measures." The DVD-case was all about DeCSS, a "technology primarily designed or produced for the circumvention of protection afforded by a technological measure." (Sec. 1201 of the US Code)
Judge Kaplan decided in the DVD-case that fair use is not relevant in the DMCA. Ergo: IF Sony had used some kind of crappy protection, THEN reverse engineering would be in breach of the DMCA (if it had been enacted).

nen

DMCA covers devices that control access to copyrighted works (eg CSS). AFAIK, changing the delivery method is all good, as long as the new method also prevents copying.
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BG turned his back on the very same institution on which Lessig relies for his livelihood.

Actually Lessig taught last year in Berlin, and moved to Stanford Law School this year. Mr. Gates in fact has given a lot of money to build and equip a new computer building at Harvard, not far from where the first computer at Harvard was built, and not far from the debate. The Berkman Center where Lessig worked and his own office had a number of Microsoft Windows Intel computers when I visited, although Lessig himself seems to be naturally a Macintosh type. I don't believe Lessig has any bias against Bill Gates or Microsoft--he teaches students the law as best he can, and his brief to advise Judge Jackson was a model of impartiality.

Lessig has publicly stated that he thinks the *government* should be involved in making software

Read his book, "Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace," and you will learn what he really thinks. He thinks there is a place for laws with technology such as the Internet, for example to protect the public domain and give incentives for new works to be created. He refers to Jefferson--who if he was a "liberal" in your sense was nevertheless a radical one.

And Lessig is doing a lot more than that old story about being master in the Microsoft case. He is leading a lawsuit to overturn the Copyright Term Extension Act, Eldred v Reno. The trouble is that Jack Valenti considers that law already bought and paid for, and didn't respond to that suit during the debate--instead, preferring to talk about Napster and other cases in which the difference is not that clear between Lessig and Valenti.

I think the debate was productive. It gave Valenti a chance to enter the lion's den and talk about copyright policy with some smart people, some of whom may go to work for him. The side representing Free Software should be as bold and persuasive. But it's hard unless the comments stick to the point and unless they refrain from confusing personality and appearance with real views and understanding.

But you don't necessarily have to believe me--he's my lawyer, and doing a fine job, I say. For further information about Larry Lessig, see his Stanford web page and his older Berkman Center page, where you can read many of his works online and comment on them.

Just got back from the live debate--sorry if you missed it, but I did send a message to Rob last week.

I asked a complicated question of Jack, and it flustered him because he didn't understand it--I think two-part questions exceed his short-term memory span. But pay no mind to that--the whole point was not winning the debate, but educating people about copyright and patent, or "intellectual property" as some persist in calling it. And Jack is doing a good job on his end; it's time we did a better job.

My question was if it was "theft" for the owner of a bar or restaurant to evade paying royalties on public performances of copyright music. In the 19th century, two Parisian songwriters demanded that a cafe owner pay them for having the band play one of their songs--the owner declined--the songwriters went to jail--and the French law was changed.

That would sound like "theft" to me, and would be appropriate under the natural rights theory of copyright like the Kantian theory that Jack earlier mentioned, and the later French Republican reinstitution of copyright. And I might personally agree that the authors ought to be reimbursed--I am not one who thinks that everything on the Internet ought to be free, or that musicians should not be paid, nor that copyright has been practically overturned by the Internet.

The point is that the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 was passed only because U.S. bar and restaurant owners managed to get an exception, allowing them to escape payment. So when Jack dined at a nice Cambridge restaurant before the debate, he was listening to "stolen" music in his words. (In fact, a group of Irish songwriters have managed to sue in the E.U. to declare the U.S. in restraint of free trade, because of this very lack of "harmonisation," and the U.S. is now appealing--otherwise the U.S. may well be sanctioned.)

Jack didn't see it that way, of course. He rapidly abandoned the natural rights theory of copyright, the only one under which it makes sense to say that a copyright can be "stolen" by someone else. He fell back on the statutory, utilitarian, theory of copyright that underlies the viewpoint of the Framers of the Copyright Clause in the U.S. Constitution, that Larry Lessig eloquently expanded on.

So Lessig talked about the Copyright Term Extension Act suit (Eldred v Reno), and Valenti talked about Napster and ICraveTV.com and DeCSS. Still, the education about copyright went pretty well, I think.

What is scary is that Valenti's talk about streaming movies over the Internet, and his ignorance of their complete denial of fair use, because of the DMCA, might come true. Then the only way people could have fair use would be illegal and go underground in some way. Then what becomes of copyright law--I think it doesn't matter at that point--and the courts don't have any guidance on how to decide issues, except to try to do some economic balancing, which will always favor those with the most money.

But this trend to encryption and locking up things will at the same time destroy the movie studios, I think. Theaters, video rental stores, the whole business model of staged releases and so on, would be threatened. I would advise technologists in Hollywood to try to adapt the business model and make works more open and accessible and not fear "piracy." Instead, use technology to make products more valuable, and encourage consumers to buy more attractive and useful products.

Jack if he had the chance to think about this might well agree. I really do think he is a decent guy and it is wrong to make fun of him. I just hope the people behind Jack, the technologists and the ones who control technology, can become a little wiser now and see what the Free Software movement has accomplished.

Meanwhile, the lawsuits are going forward. A moot court at Harvard Law School Oct 2 (Monday) will prepare Lessig for the Oct 5 oral arguments in Eldred v Reno (to overturn the CTEA). Those arguments will be before the US District of Columbia Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. All are invited there to hear the real stuff.

And the DeCSS case is going to appeal. It was a great pleasure to talk with Emmanuel Goldstein at this debate and shake his hand and encourage him. But it would be even better if more of us helped out in the OpenLaw group to help prepare the appeals brief in the DeCSS case.

Right now the lawsuits are our best bet. But we must still continue trying to learn more about copyright and patent law and educate everyone we can, else Jack Valenti will be doing it instead.

Yes, actually! There is a rather good video at the Harvard Law School site (the one in the article above), as well as logs of the real-time chats.
It still doesn't do any justice to real life, though.

rainbowfyre

This is probably online somewhere, so if anybody knows a link, please post it.

It's here.

Now that it's over, catch the archive: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/f utu reofip/archive.asp

The webcast has been archived here.

Maybe they'll release a video after the live WebCast, or a slashdot member will provide a very good report on the debate. *hint hint, clue clue*

Or maybe some hybrid of the two... :)

"Archives of the debate will be posted at its conclusion." (from http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/futureofip/webcast.as p

To go straight to the webcast, go here: http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/grou pch at/manual/

Free public debate between Jack Valenti and Lawrence Lessig: tonight at 7pm.

If you're in the Boston area, you can attend in person, or catch the webcast with realplayer.

~

Proteins are built up out of twenty standard amino acids, and it turns out that if you can make a model which describes the behaviour of individual amino acids well (with reference to quantum calculations, or experimental data), then you can describe their collective behaviour in proteins quite well too.

The Amber, CHARMM, and GROMOS parameter sets for doing this are quite refined, and simulations using these parameters appear to agree pretty well with reality.

The big problem is that, as the project pages mention, computer simulations of proteins have only recently hit the 1 microsecond range. What they don't tell you is that many common-or-garden proteins fold on a millisecond, second, or longer timescale. That's a factor of a million you have to brute-force your way through. A simulation also deals with one protein molecule at a time, while nature tends to fold a couple of billion of them at once, so it doesn't matter if a few don't quite make it to the correct fold in a reasonable time.

All you have to do is scratch the surface to see the puss ooze. For instance;

Actually, it was Linda Daschle, wife of Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle who lobbied on the behalf of the drug companies to pass the bill through.


Actually, if Hatch has balls why didn't he use them to put his name on his legislation???? See here.

Also, you can follow the history of this crap legislation here.

That, and if Disney were to have lost those trademarks, it would have lost the core of their business, costing a hell of a lot of jobs

It is not the purpose of the constitution to "provide jobs for Disney employees". Sure, that was Disney's teary eye plea, but it doesn't wash. This is the epitome of "corporate welfare". Maybe they could think of some new ideas to sell, like the constitution intended??? See all of the pathetic arguments dealt with here and here and here and most importantly here

He's an artist himself, so he undertstands both the need to protect content creators as well as the need for people to be able to copy works they own.

Actually, he doesn't have a clue. See this letter written to him.

And people who have "copyrights" don't "own" their work. It was only meant to be a temporary "right to copy". Not a perpetual "right to own". See this for a detailed history and explanation.

and what the hell relevance does it have to any of this anyway?

I guess when Senator Hatch speaks "in favor" of the consumer as he does here in the NYT article, he pegs the BS meter now.

As for the link, several Democratic senators were also involved in the copyright extensions

Oops, you're right here. This is not a "Democratic" or "Republican" issue. It's a "represent the public interest issue before those of lobbyists" issue.

It would have been a perfect troll otherwise.

All you have to do is scratch the surface to see the puss ooze. For instance;

Actually, it was Linda Daschle, wife of Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle who lobbied on the behalf of the drug companies to pass the bill through.


Actually, if Hatch has balls why didn't he use them to put his name on his legislation???? See here.

Also, you can follow the history of this crap legislation here.

That, and if Disney were to have lost those trademarks, it would have lost the core of their business, costing a hell of a lot of jobs

It is not the purpose of the constitution to "provide jobs for Disney employees". Sure, that was Disney's teary eye plea, but it doesn't wash. This is the epitome of "corporate welfare". Maybe they could think of some new ideas to sell, like the constitution intended??? See all of the pathetic arguments dealt with here and here and here and most importantly here

He's an artist himself, so he undertstands both the need to protect content creators as well as the need for people to be able to copy works they own.

Actually, he doesn't have a clue. See this letter written to him.

And people who have "copyrights" don't "own" their work. It was only meant to be a temporary "right to copy". Not a perpetual "right to own". See this for a detailed history and explanation.

and what the hell relevance does it have to any of this anyway?

I guess when Senator Hatch speaks "in favor" of the consumer as he does here in the NYT article, he pegs the BS meter now.

As for the link, several Democratic senators were also involved in the copyright extensions

Oops, you're right here. This is not a "Democratic" or "Republican" issue. It's a "represent the public interest issue before those of lobbyists" issue.

It would have been a perfect troll otherwise.

All you have to do is scratch the surface to see the puss ooze. For instance;

Actually, it was Linda Daschle, wife of Democratic Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle who lobbied on the behalf of the drug companies to pass the bill through.


Actually, if Hatch has balls why didn't he use them to put his name on his legislation???? See here.

Also, you can follow the history of this crap legislation here.

That, and if Disney were to have lost those trademarks, it would have lost the core of their business, costing a hell of a lot of jobs

It is not the purpose of the constitution to "provide jobs for Disney employees". Sure, that was Disney's teary eye plea, but it doesn't wash. This is the epitome of "corporate welfare". Maybe they could think of some new ideas to sell, like the constitution intended??? See all of the pathetic arguments dealt with here and here and here and most importantly here

He's an artist himself, so he undertstands both the need to protect content creators as well as the need for people to be able to copy works they own.

Actually, he doesn't have a clue. See this letter written to him.

And people who have "copyrights" don't "own" their work. It was only meant to be a temporary "right to copy". Not a perpetual "right to own". See this for a detailed history and explanation.

and what the hell relevance does it have to any of this anyway?

I guess when Senator Hatch speaks "in favor" of the consumer as he does here in the NYT article, he pegs the BS meter now.

As for the link, several Democratic senators were also involved in the copyright extensions

Oops, you're right here. This is not a "Democratic" or "Republican" issue. It's a "represent the public interest issue before those of lobbyists" issue.

It would have been a perfect troll otherwise.

That link should be this.