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Check out this article about how the most widely accepted value for H0 was determined using Type Ia Supernovae.

Type Ia Supernovae are known to have a specific luminosity peak. From this you can determine its distance. From its spectral redshift, they determine its recessional velocity. Using this information, they determine that the Universe is between 12.5 and 15.6 Billion years old. It puts H0 at 64km/sec/mpc.

The Supernova used for this paper was SN1998bu.

I would agree that the picture is a false color composite, probably infrared through the visible light range.

I would agree that the picture is a false color composite, probably infrared through the visible light range.

One thing that isn't reported in the press is the excellent agreement between solar forcing and global warming. To zeroth order the Earth is warmed by the Sun, but variations in solar irradiance are likely the primary contributions to decadal variations in the mean terrestrial temperature (as opposed to centurial or millenial variations like the major Ice Ages). Certainly there is a lot of data about climate over the last 2-3 thousand stars that is correlated with changes in solar activity.

A paper by Friis-Christensen and Lasser (1991, Science, 254, 698) showed that the mean length of the sunspot cycle is inversely correlated to mean terrestrial temperature. This correlation can be seen in other proxies of solar activity back millenia. Doing a quick search produced this page which has a lot of the basic underlying information. What one has to remember is that ALL of the "climate models" that are used to suggest an anthropogenic cause to global warming make the basic assumption that the rise in termperature is primarily correlated with an exponential growth in industry.

This is a nice hypothesis, but doesn't fly in the face of the data. FRom the F-C figure, one should note that temperature rises mostly before 1940. However, exponential rises in CO and CO2 production would demand that it take place *after* 1940.

Over 90 percent of the variance is explained by the Sun. But one thing is clear: in order to have 20th century global warming be explained by man-made causes, you have to violate cause and effect. There might be something buried in the noise, but that'll take more analysis to ferret it out. Nonetheless, it points out that one must be careful reading things in the press or from press releases.

One of my pet research projects is learning more about the sunspot cycle, Activity Cycles on other stars and stars with suppressed activity (like the Sun's during the Maunder, Sporer and Dalton minimums. So, a lot of what I've been looking at with stars, overlaps with some of the work done in solar forcing and its effect on Earth's climate.

One thing that isn't reported in the press is the excellent agreement between solar forcing and global warming. To zeroth order the Earth is warmed by the Sun, but variations in solar irradiance are likely the primary contributions to decadal variations in the mean terrestrial temperature (as opposed to centurial or millenial variations like the major Ice Ages). Certainly there is a lot of data about climate over the last 2-3 thousand stars that is correlated with changes in solar activity.

A paper by Friis-Christensen and Lasser (1991, Science, 254, 698) showed that the mean length of the sunspot cycle is inversely correlated to mean terrestrial temperature. This correlation can be seen in other proxies of solar activity back millenia. Doing a quick search produced this page which has a lot of the basic underlying information. What one has to remember is that ALL of the "climate models" that are used to suggest an anthropogenic cause to global warming make the basic assumption that the rise in termperature is primarily correlated with an exponential growth in industry.

This is a nice hypothesis, but doesn't fly in the face of the data. FRom the F-C figure, one should note that temperature rises mostly before 1940. However, exponential rises in CO and CO2 production would demand that it take place *after* 1940.

Over 90 percent of the variance is explained by the Sun. But one thing is clear: in order to have 20th century global warming be explained by man-made causes, you have to violate cause and effect. There might be something buried in the noise, but that'll take more analysis to ferret it out. Nonetheless, it points out that one must be careful reading things in the press or from press releases.

One of my pet research projects is learning more about the sunspot cycle, Activity Cycles on other stars and stars with suppressed activity (like the Sun's during the Maunder, Sporer and Dalton minimums. So, a lot of what I've been looking at with stars, overlaps with some of the work done in solar forcing and its effect on Earth's climate.

My experience was different from that. When I took AP comp sci my sophomore year in high school, the gender ratio of the class was almost 50/50. Junior year, I took classes in assembly language and graphics. These classes were for people who had completed AP. Unlike AP, they had a lot more males than females. Later, I was involved in our Computer Science Team (which was involved in competitions like the USACO) and found it to be almost entirely male. Finally, I was part of the "Z-Team" who was in charge of administering the school network; that group was entirely male. It seemed pretty clear that the higher up you went, the less females there were. There were plenty of girls and guys who wanted to learn some simple programming, none of the girls ended up pursuing it very far while some of the guys did.I assume then that very few of these girls went on to major in CS at college (which I'm doing). There are definitely less females in the computer science classes here percentage-wise than in AP in high school.

The bus came by and I got on
That's when it all began
There was cowboy Neal
At the wheel
Of a bus to never-ever land

I'm not sure their discussion mechanism actually works; I don't see any items other than the ones the OpenLaw staff posted, and at one point I got the message Warning: Uninitialized variable or array index or property (phorum-collapse-general) in home/httpd/html/msdoj/discuss/read.php3 on line 271. So they need to do some debugging.

The following is a letter I wrote several months ago to the editor of "Performing Songwriter" magazine about a column written by Bill Parsons" about the "Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act" and the "Fairness In Music Licencing Act". I make a number of points that I believe are valid and would like to share them with a larger number of people. The editor never responded.

We've been subscribers to Performing Songwriter for a number of years.

In general, we enjoy the content, especially Janis Ian's column. But one item has always bothered me. Your lack of a letters column. I realize that your publishing schedule and limited editorial space might make this a bit more difficult, but the fact is that you don't do so even on your web site, where space is for all practical purposes unlimited.

This lack has kept me from writing about something else that has annoyed me to no end for quite some time: Bill Parson's "Legislative Update". I realize Parsons is a performing songwriter, but I suspect that is not his primary source of income. He is singing from the RIAA/ASCAP/BMI songbook, and in the interest of full disclosure perhaps you should reveal who he has received a paycheck from this year. My point is, he sounds exactly like a lobbyist. His web page on songs.com states that he is "...a former aide to consumer advocate Ralph Nader". I have no problem with that...just with who is he *currently* aiding?*

Now, I have no problem with political debate, but you have provided no forum for anyone to respond to Parson's ill-considered attacks on the public domain, and passionate defense of the rights of huge publishing empires under the disingenuous guise of "protecting the rights of songwriters".

But this latest, an attack on Eric Eldred is the worst. As the editor, did you bother to visit the Eldred Press web site? Parsons paints Eldred as a commercial publisher, trying to weasel out of paying for work. This is so far from the truth that it verges on libelous.

Here's Eric Eldred's web site:

http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/

Does this look like the commercial entity that Parson's implies? I quote Parsons:

"Eldrich Press is run by Eric Eldred, who publishes old and lesser known books on the internet. To minimize his costs, Eldred focuses mainly on works whose copyrights have fallen into the public domain and are therefore available to the public to use free of charge."

The implication is that Eldred has a commercial interest (a reasonable assumption from someone I assume to be a lobbyist). The truth is, he does not, and never has. Also, the use of the loaded term "fallen into the public domain". Read the Constitution: the public domain is the intended repository of all creative works. Copyright is a limited right, granted for a limited period of time. For 28 years to be extended to 150 years is a mockery.

Perhaps this is hard to grasp, the intention of the framers that everything should naturally fall into the public domain. I find it useful to imagine that Benjamin Franklin had never invented the public lending library. Imagine that tomorrow, someone tried to do so. Imagine the uproar from copyright holders:

"What! You want to use tax dollars to buy our product and let people use it for free?!? You want to put copy machines in thebuilding?!"

This modern day Franklin would never get away with it...they'dcrucify him.

Also, I'd suggest exercising some editorial discretion and rein in Parson's annoying habit of referring to the "(Un)Fairness In Music Licensing Act". It might have been "cute" the first time, but lacking a balancing opposing viewpoint, it's just childish.

And frankly, childishness is the major issue here. It takes children some years to learn to share, and to realize the greater good for all accomplished by sharing. And that's what this is about - the desire of one man (Eldred) to share works that are no longer producing income for their original creators, as the very grown-up framers of the Constitution intended. Here's the passage fromArticle 1:

"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to theirrespective Writings and Discoveries"

You can find a lot more about this from the following page:

• http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/eldredvreno/
• http://www.boston.com/globe/magazine/8-29/features tory1.shtml

The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension act was bought and paid for by a group that contributed more lobbying money than the tobacco companies combined. Parsons claims that it benefits performing songwriters. This is a damned lie. It extends the term of copyright from 50 years after any songwriter is dead and gone to 70 years after their heart has stopped beating. In what possible way does this benefit any songwriter? That, in the unlikely event one of your songs remains popular for 70 years after you're dead, your great-grandchildren rather than your grandchildren will be on the gravy train? And it is a nice train..."Rhapsody In Blue" sold to United Airlines for a cool half-million - providing a lot of money to use to ensure the train keep right on running.

Parsons is appealing to songwriters, none of whom will receive the any benefit from it, that this act is a good thing. Do you believe that there is some great social good accomplished by making a few "trust fund babies" that outweighs the vast social good accomplished by having a large and thriving public domain? Because, that's the ultimate goal of the copyright extensionists. The elimination of the public domain.

Try to imagine a world where Stephen Foster's songs had never entered the public domain. Public domain keeps songs alive, by making it easy for publishers to keep them in print, to provide a world of tunes that songwriters can use to embroider into their own work.

Because the truth is, songwriters do not create melodies. They discover them. In western music, there are a finite number of possible melodies, even fewer in the popular keys. Every songwriter "creates" a melody at some time, only to later find out that Mozart had used it while he was still in diapers. Try to imagine that the basic 4-bar blues riff was copyrighted; that's the world that Parsons wants for us.

A good example of how overly long copyright periods inhibit artists: Kate Bush wrote a song using Molly Bloom's speech from "Ulysses". The song fit the words beautifully and it was nearly ready from release when the Joyce estate refused permission. No amount of bargaining could get Joyce's grandson to relent, and Kate had to "re-write the speech" into her song "The Sensual World". James Joyce didn't refuse Kate permission, his grandson did. He's proven to be the bane of Joyce scholars his entire life, and now will for generations to come.

There's a lot more I could write about this, but the fact that you have no avenue for your readers to respond, to present the opposing side of a political lobbying effort, makes my effort seem pointless. I can only hope that you'll make an effort to see the entire picture, and not just the one that some people are paid to promote. When looking at political issuse, the phrase "follow the money" is apt: look to see which side has a large amount of money to promote it's effort; the side that has less money is the one more likely to have the public's best interest at heart.

Duh! It was Windows' fault! It ate part of my cut and paste! Yes indeed, I meant OpenLaw like that. Please go there now and look up the Eldred v. Reno case. I previewed and checked that the links work this time...:o/

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

Duh! It was Windows' fault! It ate part of my cut and paste! Yes indeed, I meant OpenLaw like that. Please go there now and look up the Eldred v. Reno case. I previewed and checked that the links work this time...:o/

Consciousness is not what it thinks it is
Thought exists only as an abstraction

We should create an open source forum for the creation of legal briefs and legislation, similar to existing open documentation projects.
How about openlaw?

This is a great distinction among otherwise muddy concepts. We need to stress the legitimate uses of circumvention technologies or the overextension of copy-protection systems as access prevention.

Copyright is a bundle of rights granted exclusively to the author. The right to make copies is just one of those. (Others are distribution, performance, and preparation of derivative works, see sec. 106.)

Typically, once the author has exercised his right to copy and distribute a copy to someone else, call him the reader, the reader gets rights under the "first sale" doctrine to use his copy as he wants (read it, read it backwards, place it on a bookshelf, burn it...) or to give or sell his copy to someone else. The reader still cannot make further copies of the work or perform the whole work publicly, but fair use gives him the legal right to use excerpts from the work, or to copy for limited purposes.

The licensing and access controls we're now seeing change that picture. Under a license, the reader doesn't own a copy of the work free and clear, but is granted a more limited set of rights. His license may not permit activities that copyright law would otherwise allow.

If everybody who has access to a work is bound by a more restrictive license, there is no one who can exercise the fair use rights. The author can sue anyone who violates his license agreement for breach of contract, though not for violation of copyright. (Then we face issues of the validity of the contract; on a click-wrap license, the reader can raise arguments that there was no real acceptance on his part, so he should not be bound by the boilerplate...)

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act in effect imposes a mass license condition, prohibiting readers from accessing works except through the methods approved by their authors. (The legislation has imposed its consent to these terms on us.) Fair use is again limited to what readers can do within the bounds of restricted access. Yet the legislative purpose was not to restrict use or access, but to prevent copyright-violative copying. The statute arguably goes beyond its legislative findings.

I'm still trying to figure out where this leads. For one, we can argue that the DMCA unconstitutionally tips the balance of "promot[ing] the progress of science and the useful arts" by granting too many rights to copyright holders, against readers. A narrower argument suggests that for the statute to be constitutional, circumvention of access controls must be permitted, even if those controls are also copy controls. This is only a slight extension of the Sony holding that devices with "substantial noninfringing uses" must be permitted even if the devices (there VCRs) may also be used to infringe copyright.

--Wendy

Is it legal? Yes. Is it ethical...

I didn't make the rules of the game. And I've no choice but to play. So I can only do my best to win.

It's a numbered asteroid (3753) so the orbit is well-determined. Right now it's within 60 degrees of the Sun so that's a little challenging (but Venus is always within 47, Mercury 17ish, so that gives some perspective).

According to the Minor Planet Center it's presently at magnitude 16.2 in Scutum (approx R.A. 18h 34m, Dec. -14 11', but of course that's changing fairly quickly), with a solar distance of 1.205 AU and a distance from Earth of 0.56 AU. It has a diameter of about 17.5 km.

Since it's in Scutum, that means it's also in the Milky Way so the chances of there being few 16th magnitude stars nearby is well, astronomical! :-)

You can get up to date positions, etc. from the website listed above. Please be gentle - it's not a terribly fast server, and a lot of dedicated amateurs/professionals rely on it being available!

You can also try here. You will find my mirror of Sig11's stuff, but I updated it with the latest CVS tarball of the LiViD project. When will these people learn that using CSS decryption is fscking necessary to play the DVDs. Who the hell wants to make illicit copies of DVDs anyway? All you can do is reencode the MPEG stream at small crappy resolution to send around the net (this is never going to threaten the movie industry...) or save the whole thing on your hard drive (I only have 11 gigs of space in toto). I'd rather just buy them for 15 dollars. Jeez.

Here's a drawing. As stuff gets sucked in, it swirls around. Very fast. As it speeds up and the particles bump into each other they heat up. They heat up as much as they can heat up. As they fall screaming in, some of the "heat" leaks away as photons in the X-Ray spectrum.

Bruce

This hit about a month and a half ago, from a widely publicised article in the Journal of Neuroscience. Here's Wired's article; a bit more technical is this abstract, complete with a few pretty pictures (I love Google). I'm sure Slashdot picked it up too.

One neat thing is that research hits published journals often years after the experiments were performed. I'm sure things have progressed much since the cat experiements were done.

>The patent (if granted) WILL expire someday

Technically yes and the same thing could be said about copyright. Except the industry which holds copyrights has gotten extremly powerful. An interesting trend is that whenever the original disney copyright for mickey mouse etc... is about to expire the copyright term is extended (yes for both new copyrights and old copyrights).

This extension of copyright clearly serves no public benifit (these works have already been created so reatroactively extending the copyright doesn't encourage the production of new works) and yet it is enacted! If the biotech industry became large enough such a scenario is possible (tho less likely because of competition within the industry).

For further information about the copyright term extension act and efforts to fight it visit copyright commmons

1. It's the youngest of the set: 2 Gyr, whereas most are older than 5 Gyr. This is due to a selection bias because younger stars have bigger star spots which can ``ape'' the spectral signature of an exoplanet.

   This has happened a couple of times already, but in each case follow-up photometry has shown that the variations aren't planet induced.

2. The radial velocity variations have a much larger amplitude than the other exoplanet stars, about 450 m/s.

3. The orbital period is about the same as the rotation period of the star. This is a problem because the star is under "active" for it's rotation. So, does the planet influence the star's orbit here (but not for any of the other 51 Peg-type planets???) or vice versa.

   The period I *expect* from stars of Tau Boo's mass and age is 5 days, not 3.3 days. But I've been monitoring the rotation for 15 years and it's definitely shorter than 5 days. Weird, weird, weird.

4. Tau Bootis has a weird other period that doesn't "fit" with anything I can think of. I'm still writing a paper on this, but the punch line of "duhhhhh I don't know" isn't very interesting :-)

Interested parties can get our papers at http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~donahue/P reprints/. In the newest paper (I'll put it up on the page tomorrow, PROMISE), we definitely show that there's NO transit of the planet across the stellar disk.

The St. Andrews group are REALLY good people. And, I"m saying that not just because they said nice things about my research recently! :-)

a copyright license that allows people to distribute an etext freely and ensures that no one down the line can take that freedom away. However, people should be forbidden from altering the etext, and the author should always receive credit for the work.

Check out the Open Publication License at http://www.opencontent.org. Even RMS says that GPL is not suitable for books. He has thought up a wide variety of new licenses for different types of books, and is unusually open for discussion on that topic.

But PG books are not copyrighted and so can't be protected by a license. Unless somehow the Database Protection Act passes Congress and somehow PG could fall under that, and use some sort of shrinkwrap license for its productions. Hmm..., who has the most experience with this type of thing?

An alternative to copyright is the [cc] symbol, with a link to the website at http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/cc/. Since copyright is now the default for all new creative expressions, we need some other symbol to indicate that a work is in the public domain, that the public domain is important, and that we will fight to keep it that way.

Then we need to figure out some way to transition the online work to printed form so that O'Reilly and Associates or another publisher can actually afford to publish it. That will require some license like a modified Open Publication License, I think, so one might consider starting from there anyway. But PG can't--the works are already in the public domain.

There are some legal battles being fought on this [copyright extension] issue, but I can't seem to drag up the references.

See the Berkman Center site for the case to overturn the Bono Act. All the briefs are there. Also, the briefs are being written in a novel openlaw process--everybody, including the other side, gets to contribute!

Project Gutenberg is not part of the suit. PG is restricting itself to pre-1923 works. Also, Open Source people have had odd reactions--they seem to believe that strong copyright laws are good, as long as there is a free license.

The spirit that originally motivated Project Gutenbergers ought to move on to a larger movement that unites with Open Source advocates in many fields other than free books. The public domain needs to be as important in our thinking as the environment has become since the 1970s. Open Source and free online book people need to unite with other advocates of a better intellectual property principle for our laws and public policy. This would include the human genome, software patents, patents on the food (agricultural products) necessary for life on this earth, all digital media, vaccines and medicines, and many other areas where large multi-national corporations now based in the U.S. are attempting to assert exclusive intellectual property rights.

The lawsuit against the copyright term extension is only a first step, but it could present the Supreme Court of the U.S. with some ideas that could form a better intellectual property theory to move on to the 21st century. Otherwise, if we Open Source people are continually turned down, we face being isolated and marginalized, over against a rampant free-market capitalist monopoly of our ideas.

The star is inactive compared to the Sun. I can't give specifics (yet) --- I only got a copy of MY data for this star on Friday, but I can tell from the raw data that it's probably at the level the Sun was at during the Maunder Minimum.

However, sunspots can mimic the RV variations if they are large enough. We looked into this problem in our first paper on the subject (Henry et al. 1997, ApJ, 474, 503), and in more detail in another paper (Saar & Donahue 1997, ApJ, 485, 319).

And there is a case where this happened!

The star HD 166435 is young, has a 3.8-day rotation, and the motion of the spots across the surface cause enough photocenter wander to influence the radial velocity variations that it mimic the effects of an exoplanet. We (Henry with precision photometry, and the HK Project at Mount Wilson with spectrophotometry) were able to show (before the paper was submitted for publication) that the variations coincided with variations in the photosphere and the chromosphere of the star with the same period.

The chromospheric variation is the exoplanet killer since the flux variations that are observed have to come from stellar activity.

Needless to say we're trying very hard to keep up with all exoplanet announcements, and even rumours to get a handle on the properties of the stars they orbit.

Bob Donahue

The star is inactive compared to the Sun. I can't give specifics (yet) --- I only got a copy of MY data for this star on Friday, but I can tell from the raw data that it's probably at the level the Sun was at during the Maunder Minimum.

However, sunspots can mimic the RV variations if they are large enough. We looked into this problem in our first paper on the subject (Henry et al. 1997, ApJ, 474, 503), and in more detail in another paper (Saar & Donahue 1997, ApJ, 485, 319).

And there is a case where this happened!

The star HD 166435 is young, has a 3.8-day rotation, and the motion of the spots across the surface cause enough photocenter wander to influence the radial velocity variations that it mimic the effects of an exoplanet. We (Henry with precision photometry, and the HK Project at Mount Wilson with spectrophotometry) were able to show (before the paper was submitted for publication) that the variations coincided with variations in the photosphere and the chromosphere of the star with the same period.

The chromospheric variation is the exoplanet killer since the flux variations that are observed have to come from stellar activity.

Needless to say we're trying very hard to keep up with all exoplanet announcements, and even rumours to get a handle on the properties of the stars they orbit.

Bob Donahue

These telescopes do the most precise photometry ever achieved, working to about 0.001 magnitudes on a night-to-night basis, and about 0.0002 mags for long-term variations. That's ALMOST good enough to montior irradiance changes for stars that vary as little as the Sun does. On a very good night, with lots of overlapping data, these telescopes could almost detect a transit of an Earth-sized planet.

There are two published papers on using these telescopes to look for transits in exoplanet systems. A third has been accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal and will come out in the March 10, 2000 issue. (I'm one of the authors.) Preprints of the papers are all available on one of my webpages:

• http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/~donahue/ Preprints/

(I'll get the preprint of the 3rd paper up there on Monday.)

It's great to see that a transit has finally been observed! We were starting to get worried... The search for transits is being done in collaboration with a long-term program to better understand the stars they orbit also done at Fairborn and with Mount Wilson's HK Project.

Bob Donahue

And yes (as has been mentioned by others), my guess is the reporter (not Gold) messed up with the "hydrocarbons forming in the Big Bang" line -- it doesn't even really make sense to talk about this, since the "Big Bang" phraseology typically only refers to the idea of an initial formation followed by eras of matter/radiation coupling, etc. (That is, by the time the Universe had cooled down to the point where hydrocarbon formation was possible, it was beyond the point typically dealt with in "Big Bang" theories.)

Finally, a couple words on the peer review process. No, it's not perfect -- people can, and probably occasionally do, use the system to further their own careers (by, for instance, delaying or rejecting a competitor's work). But the scientific community isn't blind to these problems, and hasn't been for a long, long time -- in part because of this, I'd go out on a limb and say that most of the time, it works pretty well. Don't screw over other people, lest ye be screwed. Probably the biggest problem I see with the system is one that's inherent to any system designed to check over articles before their publication -- it takes an awful lot of time to go over a paper with a fine-toothed comb, looking for errors or misconceptions and the like, and it's awfully easy to shirk a little on the quality of the review. (And remember, the way peer review works is something like this: you get a letter in the mail from, say, the Astrophysical Journal, saying "Dear So-and-so, as an expert in the field would you please take the time to comment on the enclosed paper and issue a recommendation for or against publication? And, by the way, please do this in the next week.") This is, perhaps, not conducive to either high-quality reviews or cheery reviewers. But it's probably not avoidable.

Have fun.

And yes (as has been mentioned by others), my guess is the reporter (not Gold) messed up with the "hydrocarbons forming in the Big Bang" line -- it doesn't even really make sense to talk about this, since the "Big Bang" phraseology typically only refers to the idea of an initial formation followed by eras of matter/radiation coupling, etc. (That is, by the time the Universe had cooled down to the point where hydrocarbon formation was possible, it was beyond the point typically dealt with in "Big Bang" theories.)

Finally, a couple words on the peer review process. No, it's not perfect -- people can, and probably occasionally do, use the system to further their own careers (by, for instance, delaying or rejecting a competitor's work). But the scientific community isn't blind to these problems, and hasn't been for a long, long time -- in part because of this, I'd go out on a limb and say that most of the time, it works pretty well. Don't screw over other people, lest ye be screwed. Probably the biggest problem I see with the system is one that's inherent to any system designed to check over articles before their publication -- it takes an awful lot of time to go over a paper with a fine-toothed comb, looking for errors or misconceptions and the like, and it's awfully easy to shirk a little on the quality of the review. (And remember, the way peer review works is something like this: you get a letter in the mail from, say, the Astrophysical Journal, saying "Dear So-and-so, as an expert in the field would you please take the time to comment on the enclosed paper and issue a recommendation for or against publication? And, by the way, please do this in the next week.") This is, perhaps, not conducive to either high-quality reviews or cheery reviewers. But it's probably not avoidable.

Have fun.

In fact, this is just another example of the GPL doing its job.

1. RMS has said many times that the right to modify software in private is one of the essential freedoms of free software.

2. Excessively closed development of free software is a self-correcting problem. When the GCC developers were not releasing frequently enough, people started a new line of development. The open branch (egcs) won much more developer support. When FSF GCC releases were made, they were merged into the open branch.

3. The scenario you describe could be a nice model for commercial development of free software. The closed developer could capitalize on its temporary advantage in understanding of its changes, until the open development community became familiar with them. If this means we get more free software, I'm all for it.

4. If Microsoft is bent on creating a schism in Linux, secret development may be part of their plan. But marketing and bullying will be bigger factors.

5. Even if Microsoft manages to make their fork of Linux so overwhelmingly popular that the current mainline linux loses all momentum, it's still free software.

   Andrew

More amazingly people hope to use them as a magic glue to rapidly (vs. slow STM/AFM) place oriented arrays of objects on surfaces with some ~10's nm accuracy (www-chem.harvard.edu/GeorgeWhites ides). One can imagine perfect self-assembled molecular switches which have ideal (no "statistically variant" 100 atom problems, etc.) circuit switching behavior (assuming interface doesn't have worse problems)being implanted into future semiconductor devices.

See www.foresight.org/NanoRev/ for an overview of the nanomolecular playground.

And enjoy the ride!

According to the HBS Press 1996 book " The Internet Strategy Handbook ", DEC (now owned by Compaq) was doing something similar already in late 1992 with their Alpha "Test Drive" program.

I'm not sure if they had anything similar after that, but it is nice to see them feature Linux this way.

/Bergie

--

I took an 'Advanced Topics in Data Networking' course in the spring at Harvard and thought they handled the 'distance learning' piece well. The classes met as usual and were also videotaped, the video of the class was available within hours on the web along with all the slides Scott (Bradner, instructor) used. Most people went to most of the classes, but if you couldn't make one you could watch it at any point on the web. All the reading assignments (mostly RFCs) and exams were on the web. The instructor was available and responsive via email.

A class with no chance of face-to-face interaction with the instructor and no shared space with other students will work for some people, but interaction and groupwork are more instructive for others. Making classes available in a variety of media and allowing the students to choose what works best for them seems like the best idear to me.

Get the jpegs and tiffs over here.

The link given was bogus (I think J05H was trying to make it pop up in a new window and /. mangled the link tag). The correct link is here (in France), with a French version pour les francophones, and a US mirror for those of us on this side of the pond.

Methods of "soft-regulation" can be more dangerous than direct!

Reagle. Why the Internet is Good: Community governance that works well.

The US Constitution is an adept instrument of constraining direct legal regulation, "Congress shall make no law ...." However, modern regulation often is indirect, it sets incentives and disincentives for others (usually the market) to implement and enforce policies more effectively than the government ever could. Whereas Reidenberg suggests that governments should shift the "focus of government action away from direct regulation and towards indirect influence;" I find this trend to be frightening because he makes an assumption that I am unwilling to make: "The shift can, nevertheless, still preserve strong attributes of public oversight." [Reid97, 588] The US Constitution is poorly equipped to constrain indirect regulation.

Consider the following mechanisms of cyberspace regulation:

• direct: threat of violence, monetary penalties, and imprisonment by a centralized authority. Applies if you have a locatable physical presence or assets.
• indirect: direct methods are applied to third parties to create incentives or disincentives against the governed. (My ontology is similar to but differs from Reidenberg's [Reid97, 588])
• link : associate the resolution of a contentious proposal to one for which there is greater support. The US Government's Clipper III proposal linked the government's contested desire to access citizens' private encryption keys to the government's ability to grant much needed legal legitimacy to digital signatures.
• choke : regulate those that are easy to go after. Bavarian authorities prosecuted the head of the German Compuserve division for providing access to Internet materials including pornography and games that were violent or had Nazi imagery.
• gouge : regulate those that have deep pockets, often used with choke. A US Government copyright proposal criminalized the contributory infringement of copyright and made Internet Service Providers fiscally liable for the actions of their users.
• browbeat :threaten further regulatory action. US privacy policy has to date been predicated on the - rather weak - threat that if the "industry" doesn't self regulate, the government will get involved.
• herd : selectively place and remove liability to channel policy towards a goal without overtly setting the direction. "Mandatory self regulation" and safe harbor provisions are frequently proposed solutions to Internet issues.

These are the principal methods by which real world governments would like to regulate the Internet. Let us now turn to the methods the Internet has developed to regulate itself.

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/commons/cc.html offers is a tag that unfortunately does nothing to secure attribution and thus promote an author's reputation; but it does allow downstream creators to derive from a text (or work) and create I thencewith A and N hitherto A henceforth L

- COBARDE ANONIMO TRAVIESO

The problem here is that you're dead wrong.

The telco will slap you with a lawsuit so fast it'll make your head spin if you duplicat a phone book, or use it to build your own list for business purposes.

They may slap you with a lawsuit, but there's no certainty they will win it. In 1991, the Supreme Court ruled that the raw data in a white-pages phone book was not protected by copyright, only the way in which that data is presented.

The case was Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc., and the Supreme Court said: "This case concerns the interaction of two well-established propositions. The first is that facts are not copyrightable; the other, that compilations of facts generally are." In the end, they decided that the white pages were insufficiently original to warrant copyright protection.

I have to wonder if the WHOIS database that NSI "owns" is actually original enough to be deserving of copyright protection, but that's not up to me to decide...

Is the TCP/IP stack going to be rewritten to be multithreaded (finally) in 2.3.x/2.4? (I haven't been following the 2.3 releases at all... I miss my Ethernet.... when does school start again? :-) This is a badly needed feature in the kernel, and I can't believe that it didn't have it already...

Anyway, if somebody has the answer to this question please email me at spong@wave.harvard.edu.

Thanks
Matt

"Software is like sex- the best is for free"

In astronomy, there is a very popular preprint server at Los Alamos where many people submit electronic copies of papers they expect to get published.

However, I usually don't peruse this server. I instead read journal tables of contents (often sorted by topic) or (even better!) newsletters focusing on my particular subfield (star formation). This is for the same reason that I read Slashdot: I don't have the time/energy to peruse everything. Instead, I put my trust in a "portal" of some nature to pre-filter my reading material for me.

I do think it is very valuable to have large archives of electronic materials for reference research (like the NASA/ADS abstract and article service) which is much more effecient than a trip to the library. But I believe the parallel between open source software and scientific reporting breaks down at the bleeding-edge. "Beta" versions of scientific papers are either not worth much (for lack of credibility) or even dangerous (as "bugs" may propagate in the literature).

xxx.lanl.gov preprint archive

Astrophysics Data System

Each major lab (SLAC, Fermilab, CERN, etc) usually also has a method of accessing articles, but I'll let you find those on your own. ;) -- Bob

NSI Closes Top Level Domain Servers

NSI challenged over "obscene" domains

NSI Modifies "whois" agreement

Other related "alternative" DNS and related resources which I have seen mentioned here on /. or elsewhere: Not the European Union: eu.org (free domain names), The Internet Namespace Cooperative (provides alternative to mainstream root servers), The .us domain (an often overlooked alternative for those in the united states), Granite Canyon (free primary/secondary DNS). eu.org recently got very efficient and cleared a backlog of domains; Granite Canyon has had a lot of complaints about spotty service.

Suggested other readings: In whose domain, Exclusion and Coordination in Cyberspace, for the advanced user; Ask Mr. DNS and the FAQ for comp.protocols.tcp-ip.domains.

As a former student and a current employee of Harvard, I think this would be a good place to note that Harvard has a stated policy of requiring that all users of their computers, software, and and facilities are under obligation to turn over the rights to certain work to "The President and Fellows of Harvard College." Thus, Harvard owns the copyrights to such materials.

This could very well be Harvard's justification for deleting the stuff wholesale. You can read the particulars at this link.

That a no-nothing kid and a flack like Clown Princess can call up Harvard and threaten lawsuits against one of the best security talents in the ether is absolutely abominable...

It's time to act...submit your protest letter online [you can even cut and paste this one in] to Harvard's handy UIS Suggestion Box
and/or email Harvard at:
uis-webadmin@harvard.edu
provost@harvard.edu

--diva

That a no-nothing kid and a flack like Clown Princess can call up Harvard and threaten lawsuits against one of the best security talents in the ether is absolutely abominable...

It's time to act...submit your protest letter online [you can even cut and paste this one in] to Harvard's handy UIS Suggestion Box
and/or email Harvard at:
uis-webadmin@harvard.edu
provost@harvard.edu

--diva

That a no-nothing kid and a flack like Clown Princess can call up Harvard and threaten lawsuits against one of the best security talents in the ether is absolutely abominable...

It's time to act...submit your protest letter online [you can even cut and paste this one in] to Harvard's handy UIS Suggestion Box
and/or email Harvard at:
uis-webadmin@harvard.edu
provost@harvard.edu

--diva

I like the idea that the distribution has, but I can't see why they had to pick a name with obvious script kiddy and warez pup appeal. Ah well, names can always be changed. Maybe a Discordian reference for a name? Kalisti Linux? :)

Anyway, I would like to see this thing offer GPL alternatives to SSH 2.0 and PGP, along with all the tools that come with the two floppy distribution, Trinux.

I wonder if Packet Storm Security has posted a link to this yet...

There are two Apache/Java integration projects that I know about; one was already mentioned, the Jakarta project (jakarta.apache.org), "dedicated to providing a high quality, world class 100% Pure Java Servlet and JavaServer Pages implementation", and the Java Apache project (java.apache.org), which has a JVM built in to the Apache daemon, and inlcudes JSSI and full servlet support.

Though I haven't personally used either of these creations, I do know people who have had great success with the Java Apache modules. This project includes mod_java (similar in function to mod_perl or mod_php), client applications, and a document publishing framework as well as server extensions, so for a large scale solution, this may be worth checking out.

Also, I believe, the Java Apache project is more mature than the Jakarta project (although I may be mistaken about this).

In fact, the class was 6.805. Here's the current homepage, while last year's material is online here. (A division of labor between MIT and the Law School's Berkman Center.)

A good set of articles (opinions) concerning the internet can be found at Lawrence Lessig's home page. Lessig is the Berkman Professor for Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School. He also writes a regular column for the Industry Standard. I highly recommend that you read these articles as they are well written and highly thought provoking. Note: his article "Memo to the Leviathan" assumes the hypothetical role of a person that play's devil advocate to Lessig's opinions.