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I guess that Harvard etc are private businesses that receive no public funding, so are an example of the inherent benefits of capitalism over socialism.

Yup; Harvard is a private university, and most of its libraries are inaccessible to non-Harvard people. BU (Boston University) is also private, and is a bit more welcoming, but not much. But the "private" part isn't all of the story. I attended several American "public" (state-owned) universities, and while they were more open than the typical private university, they still erected barriers to the general public. As a student, I had numerous instances of being denied access to parts of various departmental libraries. This depended a lot on the department, though, and there were a lot of libraries where I could just walk in and read anything I wanted, no questions asked.

One thing that's different about the Internet is that it appears to (but doesn't) solve the basic barrier with traditional libraries: Most of them are a long distance away. Yes, there is "inter-library loan", but this tends to apply only to fairly common books. If you're looking for something rare, they are often not willing to ship it; you must visit the library to see it.

The Internet potentially solves this. But in many cases, and with most technical journals, there's a "paywall" in the way. Buying a subscription to all the members-only sites online is often beyond the financial capabitities of all but a few. We may solve this eventually. And some technical journals have already started to make material over N years old available to the general public. But this is countered by others that are restricting access. The New York TImes just did this. Though the NYT isn't what you'd call a technical journal, they are a "publication of record", which has legal meaning in the US, and a quick check I did recently showed that their paywall did block my access to things that (in the print form) is public information.

Another problem is the limited digitalization of a lot of material. Some time ago, I wanted to read some music-related material that was left behind by a musician who died about 50 years ago. I found that her papers had been donated to a state historical museum. It had an index of her material online -- but none of the actual documents. I can probably take a 2500-mile trip to the museum to view them, but that appears to be my only access. They have no plans for copying them, much less putting them online.

OTOH, some scholarly fields have been greatly enhanced by the Internet. There are a number of online collections of ancient documents, sometimes in poorly-understood languages, and these have attracted "amateur" historians and linguists who have helped greatly in the transcriptions. One that got a lot of attention a few years back deals with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which contains images, transcriptions and translations of may of those documents. These relics were previously totally unavailable to the public, including most scholars, and the documents' "owners" objected strongly to the online copies when they first appeared. There are similar online projects around the world. A lot of Mesoamerican material, especially including Mayan writing, have been put online, and again "amateur" linguists and historians have helped materially in decoding its contents. Google "Mayan writing" for lots of links to information on this.

So the Internet's effectiveness at eliminating the traditional barriers to information is currently in a "mixed" state. There's a lot of information available in seconds that used to take long trips to distant locations to access. But online organizations are experimenting with ways of limiting access to paying customers. And there's a lot of material that will never be online in our lifetime.

We'll see how it all plays out. Or maybe our descendants will.

Most people already carry around this much computing power with them in their smart phone. You can get adaptors for the USB perhipheral interface on most smart phones to turn it into a USB host with a hub, which can then be used to connect a keyboard. And I'm sure I've seen someone do a video-over-usb off one of those as well.

Why not just add a USB host port and an HDMI out to an existing smart phone? The incremental cost over the existing smart phone would be less than $25, they generally already have network connectivity via wi-fi or 3G, and it's still just about usable even if you don't have an external display and keyboard to plug in.

Raymond’s Rule of Smartphone Subsumption: if neither the physics nor the ergonomics of a gadget’s function require peripherals larger than will fit in a smartphone case, the smartphone will eat it!

No, he isn't, he just has another approach which is equally valid but does not work for *me*. I often need to use software which I do not have the time to completely assess (and it's not weird fringe stuff, Adobe and Microsoft products are on that list too). The other issue is that ipfw is more network and less application focused, but ipfw is not hard to set up - there are GUIs such as WaterRoof and Flying Buttress available if you spend 10 seconds on Google. There is a good intro to OSX ipfw available as well (at least, *I* like it, YMMV :).

His approach would be an upfront analysis and then tune ipfw accordingly. The problem for me with that is that software often does a lot of things you don't really know about - updates are a classic, which only happen every so often. In the ipfw case you'd end up with a failure to update and you'd have to go and dig to find out what happened and why retrospectively.

My approach is to install the code after I have checked its origin and scanned it for malware(*), and then monitor where it's going when it talks to the Net. I caught a couple of interesting things that way (in which case I tend to fire up Wireshark and have a good look at what it's trying to do), but it does mean that I occasionally have to adjust things on the fly. This way, my filter learns and will not bother me other than when an application decides to do something new. I do, however, pay the price that I risk getting interrupted (something I hate) but this approach works best for me at present.

The disadvantage is that this approach requires a very clean approach to installation, and presents a slightly greater risk. His approach is very low risk, but is more labour intensive. Different shades of grey..

There are far too many references to list them all, but start with the Arizona DOT, then try here. From there, google driving speed limit safe.

The BC Ministry of Transportation has a good report in pdf form here.

You realize he is the Father of the World-Wide Web, right?

Pfft, bullshit british propaganda, brought to you by the same geniuses who gave us the Shortest Lived Empire Ever, along with We Taught The Natives About Field Howitzers and Machine Guns, You Can Thank Us Later. Oh what you thought that would slide?

http://www.ibiblio.org/pioneers/cerf.html

among many others.

There was that story a while back about some physicists figuring out that they couldn't send email more than 500 miles.

Back on topic, I'll bet VPNs throw wrenches in their methods.

Since he quoted me, I have replied to the report on Spadaro's article at Imprimatur me!

I think you'll love Knuth's next book

T-Mobile supports the iPhone... just no 3G service....

3G service in the US is still pretty close to nonexistent outside of a couple of major metropolitan areas, anyway. If the network isn't there, it doesn't really matter what your phone supports.

And one of the most disturbing prospects of a merger between the two GSM/UMTS network owners is that it's actually going to reduce the incentives for any provider improve that situation with new infrastructure buildout, which is pretty dangerous when the existing incentive is already zero .

And we're not just talking about reducing the competitive forces (which ESR cites as being the only thing motivating new buildout) by a mere ~25%, we're talking about reducing the competitive forces in the international standards-based market by 100%, moving us into a situation where moving to a different carrier guarantees the hardship of buying a whole new set of phones--and, if you're moving away from `the GSM company', the additional hardship of giving up international roaming.

We may well see network-growth stop, as a result of this--or at least slow down a whole lot.

I beg to differ. It doesn't take much effort to find Lilypond versions: http://www.google.com/search?q=goldberg%20variations%20filetype%3Aly leads quickly to this set of scores with copies here and here, all of which provide the score as Lilypond files, as well as PDFs and MIDI.

So it seems worth asking again: what is the new thing that this project is bringing to the table?

ESR has suggested possibly 24 months.

http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=2931

"the choice that seals Nokia's doom isn't the tie-up with Microsoft [...] It's the way Elop has failed to resolve Nokia's drift and lack of a strategic focus. Instead of addressing this problem, Elop plans to institutionalize it by splitting the company into two business units that will pursue different - and, in fact, mutually opposing - strategies."

Complete post is here.

Obligatory Doctor Fun cartoon...

Um, so did Iran, through, of all places, Israel. I don't believe Iran and Israel hate each other as much as some people would like you to think.

Keep in mind that the whole deal was being brokered by the US; the Iran-Contra affair. Isreal was essentially a conduit for the movement of arms to a specific faction of Iran. I don't think this shows any particular favor of Isreal towards Iran.

The Iraq-Iran war was a stalemate. Iraq had access to Western and Soviet hardware.

Um, so did Iran, through, of all places, Israel. I don't believe Iran and Israel hate each other as much as some people would like you to think. The whole thing could be an attempt to lock China out of the region since now all the overland routes outside of Russia are under control of the allies.

Eric Raymond presents a noteworthy analysis of the smartphone wars, here, in which he predicts Microsoft will fail in that market. Proceeding from the observation that the wireless broadband market has had negative profitably for the previous ten years:

...Windows Phone 7 is a no-hoper. Windows licensing fees are not just like NRE, they’re actually worse because they’re a recurring expense that will come right out of per-unit margin on sales and bring with it all the strategic problems of losing control of your software layer. It would take seriously bad drugs to get a carrier CEO to buy that combination.

Of course the same logic applies to a Windows 8 phone.

If you want to learn more about the guidance computer, you may find the AGC emulator interesting.

Doc, I'm going to remind you of the words of the Sage of Baltimore:

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. -- H. L. Mencken

Now, I'll admit that I was among the people who found "global warming" to be plausible as a threat, but after I saw the code in the climategate material, I concluded that they were cooking the books. ESR did a nice job of describing it here.

-jcr

Giuseppe Verdi would argue against that --- he was prominent in the formation of the Societa Italiana Degli Autori Ed Editori (SIAE) in 1882 --- which was scarcely the first such effort ~128 years ago --- GEMA itself was formed in 1915 (95 years ago) out of an organization which started in 1903 (107 years ago).

If you want music to be free, limit yourself to public domain stuff (Roger McGuinn's Folk Den http://www.ibiblio.org/jimmy/folkden-wp/ is an excellent source which often includes sheet music) or write something of your own and release it to the public domain, but if you want to use something which someone else has written and copyrighted one should adhere to their wishes.

William

Actually, this wasn't something I did myself, but the Apollo Guidance Computer source code must be one of the oldest 'backups' to be recovered. Old assembler printouts saved by the programmers were OCR-ed, then fixed up by hand where the OCR couldn't read the text, then assembled, then checksummed and cross-checked with the binary dump in the printout, then run on an emulator:

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/

Nathaniel hawthorne knew that in 1850.

Eric Raymond (esr) has been saying this for a long time now.

Eric Raymond (esr) has been saying this for a long time now.

Eric Raymond (esr) has been saying this for a long time now.

Eric Raymond (esr) has been saying this for a long time now.

here's another could shoulda woulda: http://www.ibiblio.org/bomb/

I think that the tablet is basically just a specialized form of smartphone. These gadgets have been predicted to replace the personal computer, and things are moving in that direction with smartphone GPUs, wireless graphics, etc.

The writing's on the wall: laptops and PCs will be replaced by smartphones (and tablets) as everyday computing devices for most of the public.

Dr. Fun, one of the original Web cartoons, has a cartoon for that.

Wanted to moderate in this thread but I'll post instead.

Again.. so you're special so you can ignore posted signs?

I am not the PP but I'll answer in his stead.

Posted signs are ostensibly put up for safety. However, there are a couple of points:

1. It was proven time and again that the safest speed is at the 85th percentile of traffic speed, yet the posted limits are usually way lower. On the 400-series highways in Ontario the posted limits are 100Km/h yet, when there is no congestion or visible police presence, the observed speed of the rightmost (slowest) lane is 115-120Km/h. Near where I live there is a school with a sign advertising lowered speed limits "when lights" are flashing, yet a short distance from there there's another one with reduced speed in effect 24/365 (at least one person that I know was ticketed at 1AM on an August weekend).

2. Police vehicles are allowed to go over the speed limit only when they have their lights/sirens on, yet people constantly observe them speeding without being ticketed.

Therefore: When (1) speed limits are routinely set too low for the conditions and (2) are routinely broken by those in charge of enforcing them. they lose their moral strength and become arbitrary coercions set up for revenue generating reasons. In such case, obeying or disobeying them becomes a personal choice. After all, if Sgt. Whatsisname can go 60Km/h in a 40Km/h zone, right past a speed trap, and not get stopped then it is obviously not endangering anyone.

Interesting reading: Report No. FHWA-RD-92-084

How can you be sure they were left up by mistake?

He cannot. But if they were removed afterwards -- without any change in the conditions -- he can conclude that. And if he observes similar occurrences multiple times, he can extrapolate.

Even if you're 99% sure, I wouldn't be surprised if you were pulled over for violating a posted sign, despite the fact that it "shouldn't be there". No one's saying we have never been speeding or that we've never broken the rules of a posted sign. All we're stating is that you can't just assume a sign is incorrect just because you feel like it. You can't break the law just because you disagree with it without having consequences.

When you disobey a bad law the fact that you may still get punished is still a consideration. After all, if you refuse to give a bully your lunch money, he and his gang may still beat you up even if morally they are in the wrong.

ESR, is that you?

I can see you waking up every morning going:
"Arg! Microsoft pissed in my cheerios AGAIN!!"

Here it is

And of course, there is research [nsw.gov.au] showing that about 40% of road deaths were caused by speeding, which would account for 16,644 deaths if we go by my original numbers of 41,611 deaths in car accidents.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Quoting from the page you linked to:
> In NSW speeding is a factor in about 40 per cent of road deaths.

They fail to disclose how it is a factor, correlation not being causation and all that.
Also, is "speeding" defined as going over the posted speed limit or driving faster than is safe according to current conditions?

In particular, consider the following hypothetical situation:
Take a road with a posted speed limit of 100Km/h. Assume everybody obeys the limit and drives at 95Km/h. Let's say there are 50 fatal accidents per year. Now, the municipality improves the road but leaves the speed limit in place. Due to the better road conditions, the number of fatal accidents drops to 30 per year, however, at the same time people begin to drive faster. Let's say 50% go over the posted limit. So now the fatal accidents "in which speeding is a factor" grew from 0 to 15 (or more, due to accidents between "speeders" and "non-speeders"). Did you see what I did here?

Now, you could say that I pulled this example from my back orifice. So let's look at actual reports where speed limits were changed and how it affected the accident rates.

Report No. FHWA-RD-92-084 by the U.S. Department of Transportation. From the summary:
Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent.
Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent.
Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.

http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/publications/eng_publications/speed_review taken from the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation site. From the summary:
Based on the analysis, it appears that raising the limit from 90 km/h to 100 km/h resulted in a 12.9 percent reduction in crashes at the sites where speed limits were raised. The Phase II sites experienced an 8.6 percent reduction in total crashes. Both reductions are statistically significant.

For another interesting read see http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/a-facdec.html

And of course, there is research [nsw.gov.au] showing that about 40% of road deaths were caused by speeding, which would account for 16,644 deaths if we go by my original numbers of 41,611 deaths in car accidents.

Lies, damn lies and statistics.

Quoting from the page you linked to:
> In NSW speeding is a factor in about 40 per cent of road deaths.

They fail to disclose how it is a factor, correlation not being causation and all that.
Also, is "speeding" defined as going over the posted speed limit or driving faster than is safe according to current conditions?

In particular, consider the following hypothetical situation:
Take a road with a posted speed limit of 100Km/h. Assume everybody obeys the limit and drives at 95Km/h. Let's say there are 50 fatal accidents per year. Now, the municipality improves the road but leaves the speed limit in place. Due to the better road conditions, the number of fatal accidents drops to 30 per year, however, at the same time people begin to drive faster. Let's say 50% go over the posted limit. So now the fatal accidents "in which speeding is a factor" grew from 0 to 15 (or more, due to accidents between "speeders" and "non-speeders"). Did you see what I did here?

Now, you could say that I pulled this example from my back orifice. So let's look at actual reports where speed limits were changed and how it affected the accident rates.

Report No. FHWA-RD-92-084 by the U.S. Department of Transportation. From the summary:
Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent.
Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent.
Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.

http://www.th.gov.bc.ca/publications/eng_publications/speed_review taken from the British Columbia Ministry of Transportation site. From the summary:
Based on the analysis, it appears that raising the limit from 90 km/h to 100 km/h resulted in a 12.9 percent reduction in crashes at the sites where speed limits were raised. The Phase II sites experienced an 8.6 percent reduction in total crashes. Both reductions are statistically significant.

For another interesting read see http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/a-facdec.html

Just shut up and follow the rules!

No. There are so many bad rules I can't even begin to count them. I will lobby to change the rules, knowing full well that most of them won't ever be changed, and in the mean time I'll break them and challenge them in court. I'll also try my best to sway public opinion in order to have some chance of getting the rules changed.

Some examples of bad rules:
My son won't say "Hellboy" because it makes him nervous because his teachers and grandparents told him "hell" was a "bad word". That is a horrible rule. Censorship is always bad. I try and teach my kids to be polite, yet at the same time teach them how wrong censorship is. I don't scold them for using what other people might consider "dirty" words, because I don't believe the words themselves are dirty. However I try to correct the root issue, anger.

Drug laws. They are all bad laws. Drug use is a health issue, not something that should require law enforcement. Yes drugs do bad things to people, but so does anything in excess. Video games, food, hell even water if enough is consumed will kill you. The majority of people in the US take some form of drug daily, be it Caffeine or Alcohol or a swath of prescription drugs. Yet the only people serving jail time are the poor. If you have money you can get better drugs from your doctor.

IP laws. We really don't need them, people will produce without them. It still takes physical resources that will be hoarded to make anything to play them on, house them, distribute them on the network. There will always be information jobs in big, small, medium companies where the knowledge of how to use IP will be needed. That is the new digital economy. Its not about goods, its about service. It is about servicing the customers, be it the accounting department, or the person downloading a song. If you aren't servicing the customer you aren't making money. There is a group of IP thieves hoarding what centuries of technology and innovation from countless people have created. They are standing on the shoulders of the giants before them, then claiming they own the rights to that tune, that process, that idea. When actually, they don't. They then use their distribution channels and law enforcement to create an artificial scarcity that doesn't exist. There should be a completely free flow of information, there are so many niche areas that we don't have enough people on the planet to fully explore. There will always be ways to earn

I love it when that gets thrown out. How about "4 out of 5 Slashdot readers agree ...."

Here you go:
Report No. FHWA-RD-92-084.

You are welcome.

Do you feel at all guilty about the increased chances of killing someone when you have accident? Do you think that we should just do away with speed limits entirely and let everyone drive as fast as they please?

Surely speed limits are there to keep as all safer. I understand why people speed on highways, but on some residential roads in built up areas the speed limit is essential to keep people safe.

That would be correct if the speed limits were based on actual "safe" speeds, which is not the case.

I invite you to read report No. FHWA-RD-92-084 by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Some interesting conclusions below:

# Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent.
# Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent.
# Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.

You may also find this interesting.

Do you feel at all guilty about the increased chances of killing someone when you have accident? Do you think that we should just do away with speed limits entirely and let everyone drive as fast as they please?

Surely speed limits are there to keep as all safer. I understand why people speed on highways, but on some residential roads in built up areas the speed limit is essential to keep people safe.

That would be correct if the speed limits were based on actual "safe" speeds, which is not the case.

I invite you to read report No. FHWA-RD-92-084 by the U.S. Department of Transportation. Some interesting conclusions below:

# Accidents at the 58 experimental sites where speed limits were lowered increased by 5.4 percent.
# Accidents at the 41 experimental sites where speed limits were raised decreased by 6.7 percent.
# Lowering speed limits more than 5 mi/h (8 km/h) below the 85th percentile speed of traffic did not reduce accidents.

You may also find this interesting.

Speaking of which, why not put yourself in the mood by reading some of ESR's thoughts on sex: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?cat=3

Crazy how someone can have all this opinions based purely on theory, and not practice.

The learning curve for Lilypond is really no worse than for any other text-based music typesetting software -- and far easier than, say, the TeX music packages. ABC is a little more simple on the surface, but is so much less flexible as to make it useless for complicated music. MusicXML seems to be a good transport format, but as parent points out, it's clunky: like any other XML format, everything is perfectly readable and will take a year and a day to type.

Lilypond, which seems to me to be the best option for open-source notation software, is probably not a worthwhile system for creating on-the-fly snippets for web pages. Something JavaScript based would be nice for that, and it seems likely that there could be wiki plugins that could be used to create musical examples without huge dependencies (much less specific versions of any given large software packages), or a knowledge of how to use these large, complicated notation software packages. There might still be the problem of being limited to simple examples, but do we really need all of Lilypond and its dependencies to create an example of a Phrygian scale?

Hundreds of voices protest that the word "trick" is widely used for legitimate data manipulations.

So "hiding the decline" (i.e., tree ring data which does NOT support AGW) is "legitimate data manipulation"?

ESR looked at the CRU code, and described it as "blatant data cooking". Is that "legitimate data manipulation", too?

( Original Post )

Is reduced to a superannuated pop gun, that has lost its cork, the string is frayed and the wood is riddled with dry rot and termites.

I don't know, ibiblio is kind of legit. Red Hat didn't feel like releasing a torrent, since they don't have a tracker lying around.

A free series of textbooks on the subjects of electricity and electronics

An American fifteen-year-old, raised on modern nutrition all her life and given proper prenatal care, is in a better position than ~95% of the women of the world (and more like 99.9999% of the women of history) to have a healthy baby without harm to herself. She's also in a far better position to do so than she will be in thirty years, when she has about thirty times the odds of producing a Down's syndrome baby.

The main objection most people really have is that they don't want teens getting laid. To that I say: get over yourselves!

Is Eric Raymond a Microsoft shill? He's come out against IBM's threat, as well.

Here are some more studies:
http://www.tfhrc.gov/pubrds/03jan/10.htm
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel/index.html

the speed limits are generally set to the 85th percentile

Oh they are? And how do we know that?

If the speed limit is really set at the 85th percentile, only 15% of the vehicles will be traveling faster than the speed limit. Any average day on any average highway will suggest that this isn’t the case.

The only study I can find is dated from 1990, but its findings are quite unsurprising to me:

In a nationwide survey of current speed zoning practices, all states and most of the 44 localities reported using the 85th-percentile speed as the basic factor in setting speed limits.

...

Preliminary Results
Driver compliance with speed limits is poor. On average, 7 out of 10 motorists exceeded the posted speed in urban areas.

On the average, 70% of drivers exceeded the speed limit: the speed limit was set at the 30th percentile, not the 85th.

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df9507/df950713.jpg

http://www.ibiblio.org/Dave/Dr-Fun/df200601/df20060116.jpg

I don't really see how your link supports your assertions. It says: " Archimedes' work was translated into Arabic by Thbit ibn Qurra (836-901 AD), and Latin by Gerard of Cremona (c. 1114-1187 AD). " That does not say that Archimedes' work comes to us through Arabic, it just says that it was at one point translated into Arabic. Indeed, this source seems to contradict your position: a collection of Archimedes works in 9th-century Constantinople form the "basis of the texts we have today." Why would Greek scholars in the 9th century who didn't know much Arabic, if any, make a collection of Archimedes in Arabic, instead of Greek, when the Greek manuscripts were clearly still available in the 9th century (how else would bin Qurra have translated Archimedes into Arabic?)? I think I'd believe that that collection (which "is the basis of the texts we have today") which they are is mentioned here was in Greek, unless you can provide some evidence that it was not...

This page seem to contradict your statement about Euclid's elements. If a 4th century edition formed the basis of texts until the 19th century, then the texts until the 19th century were not based on Arabic, because there is no way that 4th century text was in Arabic. And then that text was improved with another Greek version, to form the Heiberg edition, which, so it says (in 1971), "still stands". There's no mention of Arabic.

Other responders have similar problems (Ptolemy's Almagest: http://www.ibiblio.org/expo/vatican.exhibit/exhibit/d-mathematics/Greek_astro.html). But one of the other responders mentions Hero of Alexandira, and appears to be partly right: of his 14 works listed in this article [PDF], 1 comes to us from Arabic (the Metrica), and 1 comes from Arabic with some Greek fragments (the Mechanica). Both seem to be significant works.

So I still think there is this myth that "lots" of Greek works are transmitted to us through Arabic, although I'm happy now to have some examples of significant texts (2 of Hero's 14) that do actually fit this model.