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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!!!

Civil Disobedience by Henry David Thoreau.

No that was 2.4.0test9-pre9. The current testing kernel is 2.4.0test9. You can't read anything in the version numbers though. It wouldn't surprise me if there was quite a long 2.4.0test series before a very short 2.4.0pre series.

The gods seem to have done a lot of changing to the VM system which isn't sorted out yet (performance can still be a problem), the IDE driver is still in horrible shape performance-wise and as of -test9 has recently had new bug(s) introduced, apparently in an attempt to fix old ones. Unusual things like non-512-byte sector support in SCSI don't seem to be working and various drivers haven't caught up to all the changes in the subsystems and aren't working (for example, the AC'97 sound driver is broken again, *grrr*) and so forth and so on.

Basically, a lot of central things (i.e. not drivers) were redone for 2.4 to make Linux more scalable across a number of platforms and operating contexts, and now they're all working hard on getting things to settle down a little (i.e. basically, bugfixing everywhere).

Be patient. You don't want it released as it is now -- you wouldn't like the result... I'm using the 2.4.0-test series and still experiencing hard lockups, reboots, and bad interactive performance, though I'd say things are generally moving in the right direction...

If you want to watch it evolve, check out the linux-kernel mailing list.

How does the IU Knowledge Base work?

Yeah. it makes you wonder. You're right about artists willing to swallow anything to get in the business. So you can't help but wonder when half the crowd walked out when Napster's inventor showed up on stage at the music awards was because the RIAA "told them to". Probably a lot of arm twisting/blackmail/lying. An organized effort like that among artists just doesn't "happen" spontaneously.

It's just too bad that the majority of the music traded on napster is copyrighted/pirated. Napster does have potential and the technology could be used (legally) for dozens of other purposes besides music. But napster has set themselves up to be the sacrificial lamb of the old guard that can't stand the thought of losing a single nickel (which by recent numbers of CD sales shows that it just is not happenning - ironically napster is probably helping sales). But you know, it's about "principal" (translation: greed).

Napster is not "the" problen though. Napster is "a symptom" of the problem. The real problem is a overly restrictive and bad copyright law (thanks to special interests buying congress), and the internet that could largely render copyright law irrelevant - but not without copyright holders giving a fight.

It really is amazing how restrictive the DMCA is, and how utterly useless also. Take a look at this link that makes the case that the DMCA won't work (besides it being unconstitutional).

I digress. I would hope that this will be an opportunity for unknown artists (and I am quite sure that there are alot of high caliber ones) can bubble up to the surface when the big labels put all their music into proprietary encrypted formats. They will be "independent", and thus free from RIAAs iron grip. And maybe people will listen to them more than major labels. That would give the labels a cut into their revenue stream that they so richly deserve.

The CDs that these "indies" will produce will be cheaper too (so that they will compete against the outrageous $20 CD - not hard to do). And artists would earn more money even with these lower price CDs. That's why the RIAA is fighting napster so hard. Not because people swap a lot of "copyrighted music". But because they want to keep the artificial price of CDs high, and their grubby hands in artists pockes.

So in the end, the RIAA and fellow cronies will only give up their monopoly business when it is pried from their cold dead hands.

One can only hope that it is real soon now.

For what it's worth, there were people in penguin suits protesting outside the stadium, and another one of my colleagues attended and ask Bill a hard question about open source (which he dodged). We did what we could. ;)

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

For what it's worth, there were people in penguin suits protesting outside the stadium, and another one of my colleagues attended and ask Bill a hard question about open source (which he dodged). We did what we could. ;)

Vovida, OS VoIP
Beer recipe: free! #Source
Cold pints: $2 #Product

I took a look at both of the projects: Open Mind associated text strings with pictures (discribing a picture, discribing a picture's contets, and so on), or one text string with another (explaining a fact, giving an example of a relation, explaining cause an effect, and so on). Mindpixel gets a collection of statements/questions in the form of text strings, and tries to get a consensus on whether the statement is true or false (or if the answer to the question is true or false).

But this seems to me to be the wrong way to go about it. While these projects will collect massive amounts of data, all that data is is associations between text strings. All they'll be able to do is detect that there's certain connections/correlations between certain words, and certain collections of words. This way of doing AI assumes that intelligence is just a bunch rules and mechanisms for manipulating symbols, with the symbols somehow representing chunks of information.

But what if you took these vast stores of information and replaced each word with word with some gibberish: "vut" replaces "car", "folp" replaces "clock", and so on. All the relations between words, and groups of words, remains exactly the same, but no human could understand it; all of the meaning would go out of it, because the meaning is being suplied from the outside, by the humans knowledge of what certain strings of letters mean.

However, if you were somehow to do the same scrambling to the vocabulary of a human's mind, so that this (formerly English speaking) human now used "vut" for "car" and "folp" for "clock", other people would eventually be able to understand and communicate with him; all of the meaning and information has stayed the same, it's just the labels that have changed. But for something like Open Mind or Mindpixel, the words aren't labeling anything; there's just relations between meaningless strings of characters.

The above argument is a (rather bad) summary of the argument that Douglas Hofstadter makes in the book Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies. Anyone interested in AI should read this book. Douglas makes a very compelling argument that diving straight away into things like words and sentences is getting much to far ahead of ourselves, and that we first need to make tiny baby steps in AI before we can attempt to make an AI that really uses human languages.

Given that Edison was the one-man MPAA of his time, I'm not sure whether comparing anyone to him is such a great compliment.

I can't understand why the name Douglas Hofstadter doesn't come up more often when there is question of the mind, creativity and models/analogies. Maybe his name's just hard to remember... Also see his book, which I stole to give this post a subject.

I can't understand why the name Douglas Hofstadter doesn't come up more often when there is question of the mind, creativity and models/analogies. Maybe his name's just hard to remember... Also see his book, which I stole to give this post a subject.

Nobody offered him anything. The strawberry was minding its own business when this stranger came along and savagely consumed it. Not only that, but it was pure gluttony too, as the man obviously didn't need the nurishment of said berry if he was in such a predicament. PLANT RIGHTS NOW!

Douglas Hofstadter's brilliant book "Goedel Escher Bach" comes to my mind. It's a very good read and could have suggested to Scheider 20 years ago that every formally defined system is going to have holes in it.

Yes, the infamous Homolka trial information ban. You can find more info at http://www.cs.indiana.edu/canada/karla. html

You asked for it, you got it.
More Schoolhouse Rock then you can shake a verb at.

Schoolhouse Rock - everything about Schoolhouse Rock, including the lyrics, sound files, history, events, products, and more.
Schoolhouse Rock [Yak.net] - Lyrics
Schoolhouse Rock - More Lyrics.
Unofficial SHR - Even more Lyrics and links.
SHR Sound clips - Plays SHR sound clips using a Java applet.
And if all that isn't quite enought for you.. here is a page for info on Schoolhouse Rock Live.

• MMM Group at University of Nijmegen [publications]
• Machine Listening @ MIT Media Lab
• Affective Computing @ MIT Media Lab
• Musclefish

• Music, Cognition, and Computerized Sound, Perry R. Cook
• Music, Mind and Machine, Peter Desain and Henkjan Honing
• The Scientist and Engineer's Guide to Digital Signal Processing, Steven W. Smith
• Neural Networks for Pattern Recognition, Christopher M. Bishop

• Tracking Musical Beats in Real Time, Paul E. Allen and Roger B. Dannenberg
• A Model for Musical Rhythm, Jeff A. Bilmes
• Autocorrelation and the Study of Musical Expression, Peter Desain, Siebe de Vos
• A Beat Tracking System for Audio Signals, Simon Dixon
• Prediction-Driven Computational Auditory Scene Analysis for Dense Sound Mixtures, Daniel P. W. Ellis
• A Similarity Measure for Automatic Audio Classification, Jonathan Foote
• Representing Rhythmic Patterns in a Network of Oscillators, Michael Gasser and Douglas Eck
• Adaptive Signal Models: Theory, Algorithms, and Audio Applications, Michael Mark Goodwin
• Recognition of Music Types, Hagen Soltau, Tanja Schultz, Martin Westphal, Alex Waibel
• Irrelevant Features and the Subset Selection Problem, George H. John, Ron Kohavi, Karl Pfleger
• Beat tracking with a nonlinear oscilator, Edward W. Large
• Modeling beat perception with a nonlinear oscilator, Edward W. Large
• Automatic Transcription of Simple Polyphonic Music: Robust Front End Processing, Keith D. Martin
• Musical instrument identification: A pattern-recognition approach, Keith D. Martin and Youngmoo E. Kim
• Music Content Analysis through Models of Audition, Keith D. Martin, Eric D. Scheirer, Barry L. Vercoe
• Musical Sound Information: Musical gestures and embedding synthesis, Eric Metois
• A Machine Learning Approach to Musical Style Recognition, Roger B. Dannenberg, Belinda Thom, and David Watson
• Resonanc e and the perception of musical meter, Large, E. W., & Kolen, J. F.
• Music-Listening Systems, Eric D. Scheirer
• Tempo and beat analysis of acoustic musical signals, Eric D. Scheirer
• Content-Based Classification, Search, and Retrieval of Audio, Erling Wold, Thom Blum, Douglas Keislar, James Wheaton
• Classification, Search, and Retrieval of Audio, Erling Wold, Thom Blum, Douglas Keislar, James Wheaton

I couldn't find anything in the kernel traffic archives, but there's an archive of the mailing list - this might be the initial post you're thinking of. That was in June; there seem to be followups to that in September. I found those using "zero copy transmit" on this search page.

I couldn't find anything in the kernel traffic archives, but there's an archive of the mailing list - this might be the initial post you're thinking of. That was in June; there seem to be followups to that in September. I found those using "zero copy transmit" on this search page.

• Prozac
• Ritalin

If you want, there is a GTK+ based XEmacs version here. For me, it's extremely stable. I thought I would never see Aquamacs. :)

Free?

Apparently you don't remember 1993, my friend.

So, did anyone else notice a couple of very nice techno tracks during the movie? I thought they were very well done, but can't find any evidence that anything other than the Michael Kamen orchestral score CD will be released. Anyone know anything or own the score already? Are these tracks in it? Email me here if so... I'd love to know.

Moderators, please forgive me for veering offtopic, but this lad needs to be enlightened.

There are several alternative browsers on the market. They're all maturing slowly and some have even got features that Exploder doesn't already, despite Micro$oft's corporate feature bloating.

Konquerer, part of the KDE Project, is another good example of an underdog browser that's starting to take hold in the market. It's support for standards which make a viable browser are almost unmatched at the moment (in the alternative browser market).

Xemacs has a Browser called W3. It supports the majority of standards that make a viable Browser, and is written in Elisp, thus compatible with the Xemacs editor.

Of course, we can't forget Mozilla. It's the open-source version of Netscape 5. Probably the best browser out at the moment aside from Exploder/Win32, it runs on many platforms and is the most likely browser to take over the Exploder market share. It already enjoys a large market share in the UNIX world, just under that of Netscape 4.x. This thing supports nearly everything, including Alpha channels. Watch out for it.

The article states that this procedure is only for retinitis pigmentosa, but in the end, it is not a treatment for RP, but an early biocompatibility test. RP is only a useful physiological test bed that renders the patient blind over large areas of the retina, while leaving most of the retinal structure intact. The patient was undoubtedly a research volunteer, and was aware of all this, and should probbaly more properly be coinsdered a 'subject' (but I hate calling patients that).

As you probably recall from elementary school, there are two types of receptors in the eye. Rods handle B/W vision, are more sensitive to light, and are responsible for night and peripheral vision. Cones handle color vision, and are only found in the central areas of the visual field, especially the area of best vision in the eye, fovea centralis. (not to be confused with a nearby region of *no* vision, the macula lutea or 'blind spot' where the optic nerve enters the retina). Simple layman diagrams and links to useful concepts (but not *absolutely* accurate) can be found at:
http://hyperphysics.p hy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/retina.html
http://hyperphysics .phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/vision/rodcone.html
Here's a good anatomical overview of the eye

RP is a group of genetic diseases which cause the rods to degenerate. about ten different mutation have been linked to forms of RP, which can be dominant, recessive, or X-linked. Initially, the patient loses their peripheral vision, beginning in a single region, then gradually spreading. The fovea centralis is the last region to be affected, if ever, because there are few rods in the fovea. It is not clear if loss of sharp central vision is due to 'pure' RP at all, since mutations in some 'RP' genes can cause macular degenerations or other retinal conditions. It appears that the loss of central vision is dependent on the individual's particular mutation.

The retina is laid out in layers, and in very different way that you might imagine. The photo sensors are in the *back* of the retina, and in front of them are several layers of neurons that allow the sensors to integrate (share info between nearby sensors, etc) and in front of that are the blood vessels a snd the neurons that go from the interneurons into the optic nerve, etc. Light passes through all these layers before hitting the rod and cone sensors. The only things that are 'behind' the sensors are the pigmented (choroid) layer, a black layer that absorbs all leftover light to keep it from bouncing around the eye; and the sclera, the tough "white of the eye" that provides support.
[Slides and images]
[Good slide, exlanations, links, but a bit technical]

So why use this implant in RP? Well, by prying apart the layers of the retina as described, the sensors can be placed where the cones used to be, and with a bit of luck, the overlying layers of interconnecting neurons will remain intact (they are presumably unaffected by the rod-destroying mutations, since 'cone' vision is preserved in RP) All this is done in the periphery of the eye, away from the delicate Fovea and macula. Here it can be tested, through the (largely) intact eye, without significantly affecting the patient's remaining natural vision (though there's always some risk)

This implant links into the web of interneurons in the retina, instead of having to be connected to the optic nerve as the native rods and cones do. You can see how this is easier than trying to do delicate neurosurgery on the optic nerve, and then re-training the patient's visual cortex. This is the most 'natural' process for th patient, since all position info is preserved and the preprocessing of the retina is present (ther preprocessing has two purposes: feedback to nearby sensors, which is lost in man-made sensors, and pre-processing of the visual impulses, which is preserved)

However, a low resolution 'pinhead' sensor on the periphery won't help an RP patient at all. In fact, patients sometimes find patchy remnants of peripheral vision distracting and annoying. Clearly this is not a treatment for RP but an early stage biocompatibility test for later work (that is more likely to be useful in other conditions).

Here's a review article on progress and challenges in similar subretinal implant technologies

(Disclaimer: I published some research on retinal layers as an undergrad, but that was almost 20 years ago, and before I went to medical school)

• Any science sites with close ups of skin samples (dermetology, medical databases, eg).
• head shots

The good:

• The really hairy people organization.
• Beastiality web sites

I think slashdot needs a solid color gif of just a skin tone color for it's new cencorship icon.

A quick web search for "random haiku generator" turned up several worthy m a t c h e s.

However, most of them either recycle the same lines, or string words together based on few criteria other than syllables. One way or another, they make little sense. I wouldn't consider a haiku generator "intelligent" until it escaped both of these traps. Okay, sure, so the beauty of minimalist work is that the human mind gets to fill in the gaps. But they'd better be "gaps" and not massive, yawning chasms.

And if the haiku/senryu is going to be generated from an RDF file, ideally it would say something of some relevance about the contents of said file. That is, it would either synthesize verbally communicated information or form an opinion, which are both extraordinarily tall orders even with the current advancements in AI technology.

I love haiku/senryu, and if I had the hacking skillz, I'd have a go at this myself. But I don't, so I'll merely wish luck to those who try. And if any of you happen to read this, you'll be my hero if you include a --moooose option. Where a normal haiku is a poem in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the seaason, a mooooooose haiku is a poem not quite in 5-7-5 format that makes reference to the moooooooose. :P

I was also disappointed not to see a symbolic logic algorithm such as the Resolution Theorem Prover (Robinson, 1965) or Circumscription (McCarthy, 1980). I'd like to have been able to point to something of Jon Barwise' Situation Semantics, but couldn't think of a specific algorithm to highlight.

Yes, we are supposed to be a Repuublic, and not a Democracy, as many politicians would have you believe. Thank God. If we were a Democracy, under majority rule, think of where we would be as a nation now. Women and Blacks would still have no rights, because the Majority of voters would never have allowed it. Popular != Right.

The problem with our current system, is the same problem that would exist in any democracy. The majority of voters are not led by informed decisions, but rather by marketing. The ongoing corruption of the Right to Bear Arms is proof enough of that. That apathy is the problem with the system is the one point I could not agree with you more on.

As for our founding fathers, although a few of them did in fact want a plutocracy, and a few others a monarchy (those being the only systems they understood, having lived in such a state their whole lives), enough of them were of sound mind to realize the folly in that. Thomas Jefferson for one was fully against it, and is well known for having written, "The Declaration of Independance". (Read the whole thing, not just the famous paragraph)

For a bunch of wealthy men out to protect their money and power, they sure made some stupid moves when they decided to take on all of England, which resulted in having their homes razed to the ground, their possesions confiscated, and their families killed, all in the name of Freedom and Equality for all men.

-Tommy

P.S Interesting side note, Thomas Jefferson was a huge Open Source advocate. Read this letter, "No patents on ideas".

Socioeconomic Hazards

The patenting of genetically engineered foods and widespread biotech food production threatens to eliminate farming as it has been practiced for 12,000 years. GE patents such as the Terminator Technology will render seeds infertile and force hundreds of millions of farmers who now save and share their seeds to purchase evermore expensive GE seeds and chemical inputs from a handful of global biotech/seed monopolies. If the trend is not stopped, the patenting of transgenic plants and food-producing animals will soon lead to universal "bioserfdom" in which farmers will lease their plants and animals from biotech conglomerates such as Monsanto and pay royalties on seeds and offspring. Family and indigenous farmers will be driven off the land and consumers' food choices will be dictated by a cartel of transnational corporations. Rural communities will be devastated. Hundreds of millions of farmers and agricultural workers worldwide will lose their livelihoods.

I was going to say the same thing, but you beat me to it friend.

Folks, mod this guy up another for me!

More detail: Python is an object-oriented language built as such from the ground up, un like C++ which is none the less derived from C and has less syntactical conformity (and I say this where my only difference with the above statement is that I perfer C++ slightly over Python, though Python is a close second.) Not only that, but Python is a great numeric language with native Ultra-Long integer type and a complex number module build in. With the LLNL PyNum Numeric Extensions. Couldn't find a good implementation of the Gamma function over the set of Complex numbers, but I guess your youngins' ern't inta that yet. :)

Another possility if you wanna get retro is do what I and doubtless you did: teach them on the C64! That is, get one of the variety of C64 emulators on the net and let them programme their hearts out in Basic. The great thing about the C64 is that because it uses PET/ASCII with all those graphics character in the characters with the MSB high so it's pretty easy to use graphics without having to use MoveTo, LineTo and the DC (if you do go the Windows route -- though so far all I've suggested exists in Linux-port form and I don't recommend teaching X-Motif just yet! :) The point is, it's much more WYSIWYG and really easy to come up with some cool stuff. For instance, I wrote a character editor for the C64 which was quite a fun project. The advantage is that the entire operating system is Basic so you have to be a programmer from the beginning just to use it. :) Disadvantage: it's a Proceedural, not on OOP language.

A good list of available emulators can be found at http://commodore64.net/emulators/

The other thing I would strongly recomend is Logo. Logo is graphics and geometry application in which the user controls a 'turtle' by simple geometric commands. This is a great tool for learning the [most] basic principals of Graphics which I'm sure your kids will be most interested in because of their love for games. They can use it to draw their own pictures using basic proceedural programming techniques such as loops and recursion.

You can get an MS Windows version of Logo at: http://www.softronix.com/logo.html.

You could also download a Linux port of the Berkley Logo Software from this University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill software archive though you may need to check out Steve Bakers' Software Page if you have any problems with the port.

Anyway, Python DOES have a pretty good graphics library and with TCL/TK you could even teach them a bit about interface design and with PIL you've got Graphics so that's just about everything. Anyway, at least I would choose one or more of those three options and make sure in time they should try to learn them all.

One last note I should make is it's you be very helpful to their overall understanding of programming and logic if they could learn at least one rule-based language down the road, such as Scheme (thank you Professor Romanik! :).

Be Seeing You,

Jeffrey.

I do not think that the original poster was saying that he wants a web without graphics, but rather that he wants a web with text. For example, take a look at my college's home page, http://www.ius.indiana.edu/ *with graphics turned off*. Now try to get somewhere specific. Can you do it?

The web allows for many different medias, and yet too often people only use graphics (and the occasional text).

I think that browsers such as the newest IE for the Mac (as much as I despise MS) and iCab (a very compliant browser, even showing HTML mistakes) are the futureof browsers: Compliant.

Other people on this thread are correct: Clients are the problem. Try showing them what their web page looks like in Lynx, or in iCab. "Do you want people coming to your web page to see this?"

Then we come to my pet-peeve: JavaScript. I cannot stand pages that depend on JS-support. It is fine to use, but as soon as I get to a page that is impossible to navigate without JS, I leave.

My final point: People need to realize that the web allows for a relatively seemless media environment. This does not mean, however, that you should pick one form of media and rely on it exclusively on your page.

Actually, this is being done by Indiana University.

Actually, this is being done by Indiana University.

Another way to show that LISP was neater than Turing machines was to write a universal LISP function and show that it is briefer and more comprehensible than the description of a universal Turing machine. This was the LISP function eval[e,a], which computes the value of a LISP expression e - the second argument a being a list of assignments of values to variables. (a is needed to make the recursion work).

...

S.R. Russell noticed that eval could serve as an interpreter for LISP, promptly hand coded it, and we now had a programming language with an interpreter.

One can imagine another similar wrapper that allows users to change the bitrate and frequency to associate files. A "porn channel" could be one pairing of bitrate and freq, while the "term papers channel" could be another.

By the way. Have a look at http://www.indiana.edu/~uits/cpo/netdraf t
Indiana University has worked with Napster to create a more efficient way of distributing search results. When a user searches for "Not_Illegal.mp3", the results are displayed based on the proximity to the user. Local networks are preferred over further away ones.

just a suggestion.

The risk is both damage to the physical hardware and data corruption. The hardware can easily be replaced when it's a cheap Celeron, but not when it's a dual core IBM Power CPU. The data corruption can't be ignored, though. Don't believe me? Maybe you'd like to hear it directly from someone you might trust.

W inchip Specs

Another site, the Indiana University Knowledge Base had some decent, general information, but nothing on bus speeds and voltages.

The short answer is that this is a 60MHz bus box, probably 3.3v. If the chip was running at 200MHz, the bus would be 66MHz. The 3.3v will be fine for my Pentium 166-MMX, and the 60MHz bus should run okay with my chip (according to Intel's documentation. Whee! I'll have to check the documentation on my AMD K6 233MHz later.

Chris

copy-on-write link "file system"

Then use Google.

Read some nice things about about file system research like File System Assimilation.

And finally find a post done in 96 in the Linux Kernel list. Its here and it discusses this subject on links and copy on write.

Enjoy, Xmal

The one feature amuses me most about C++ is Templates. Is the Turing completeness of the template language intended or did it just come into existance by adding needed features?

(For those interested: Template Metaprograms (by Todd Veldhuizen))

Check out http://www.uwsg .indiana.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/9912.1/1397.ht ml. This was Linus' announcement on December 14 that they were aiming to ship 2.4 by the end of the first quarter this year.

I have a friend who said that until she discovered W3 and Emacspeak the Web was closed to her. While it is true that the blind are a niche market, there is an environment out there that does give them access to the Internet, and it is only available because of free software!

Apparently Zhirinovsky sees the parallel between himself and Buchanan. Buchanan won't admit it though.
Here's an excerpt from a bio of Zhirinovsky:

In February, 1996, Vladimir Zhirinovsky hailed Pat Buchanan's victory in the New Hampshire presidential primary. He wrote a letter to Buchanan, saying: ``You say that Congress is 'Israeli-occupied territory.' We have the same situation in Russia. So, to survive, we could set aside places on U.S. and Russian territory to deport this small but troublesome tribe.'' Zhirinovsky called Buchanan a ``brother in arms'' and wished him a ``convincing victory'' in November's U.S. presidential ballot. Buchanan rejected Zhirinovsky's endorsement. Zhirinovsky then changed tone. "I thought you were really defending the interests of your nation," said the letter, the text of which was released by Zhirinovsky's office. "And you've turned out to be just like Clinton and other corrupt politicians, moved by greed and vanity, not by love for the fatherland."

You make a very, very good point. Isn't there a way the Linux and *BSD kernel could be patched to disallow execution from a stack? I know there's plenty of memory protection and such in there, so can't we put in one more layer of protection?

So, let's just change chips. :-) Of course, that's hardly enough. Can't we clear up a lot of these exploits by fixing the stack? The answer is yes, we could clear up a lot of them. But that sadly, it's not going to cure the class of problem completely.

Why should stack and data pages be executable? Why are any pages that are executable also writable? Well, there are a couple reasons for that. Certainly it hasn't always been that way. But the signal trampoline code from gcc(1) makes this very attractive, and it's a bit annoying to change. You still have to deal with issues of mmap(2), which can ask for pages with any access bits it cares for.

And let's not pretend please that C is the issue here. It's not. You're diddling the instruction set. I don't care if you used a Pascal compiler. You could still diddle it. Then again, there's something to be said for having a cleaner library. See the end of this missive for a simple, elegant, and effective approach to one class of these problems in C by someone famously inclined toward the simple and elegant.

What I strongly suggest that anyone interested in this do is read existing literature on this. Yes, it's work, but it's really, really good for you. Start with the paper StackGuard: Automatic Adaptive Detection and Prevention of Buffer-Overflow Attacks. And yes, the buffer overrun in the version of Perl referenced by this paper has long since been fixed. But then read about how to defeat this. You can also check out disabling an executable stack on Solaris, and why this isn't a cure-all.

Even with a non-executable stack, you can still be bitten. Several such exploits have appeared on bugtrak. Here's one. The short explanation for why this isn't a panacea is that if I push a pointer to "/bin/sh" and a (char *)0 on the stack in a place right before an system(3) (well, or or execl(3) or execve(2) or whatever) then it'll still suck to be you. Notice I haven't executed any code that I put on the stack. I just managed to change some of the arguments to existing calls.

Let me put up a copy of some mail from Ted T'so, who said it well:

Well with a non-executable stack most security conscious system administrators will sleep better :) I can guarantee that. (Not too much better as holes always exist but quite a lot).

The advantage of the patch is that it will stop the current set of attacks that take the form of "find buffer overrun in a program", followed by "apply standard toolkit to exploit buffer overrun by putting executable code on the stack".

The disadvantage of the patch is that after we apply, within a few months we will see a new toolkit of the form "corrupt the stack to point the return address into someplace entertaining in libc --- like right before an an execl call in the implementation of popen()."

The danger is people thinking that with this patch, they don't need to worry about finding and fixing buffer overrun bugs in their code....

Here's the promised gem of insight from Dennis:

> ..... If most implementers will ship gets() anyway,
> there's little practical effect to eliminating it from the Standard.

On the other hand, we removed it from our library about a week after the Internet worm. Of course, some couldn't afford to do that.

Dennis

The reason that Scheme is not as well known as a programming language is that it is sort of the "learning beater car" of programming languages. Scheme's main utility advocates are in AI and its sub-disciplines, so commercial applications will not be written in Scheme. There is no great market for Scheme programmers, but there is a market for programmers who can understand the fundamentals behind great programming. I think that this book especially lends itself to the beginning programmer- and for web support of all kinds the Scheme Repository of Indiana University is rivalled only by the Schem Underground at MIT.

Good luck in your programming endeavors!

http://www.cs.indiana.edu/~ kinzler/home.html#etc/ctwmrc

The question here isn't whether to use ASCII, HTML or LaTeX, because there already is a highly developed, sophisticated markup language for electronic text editions, TEI-SGML, specifically designed to preserve all structural information of the original text. Some e-text projects such as the Victorian Women Writers Project code in TEI-SGML. This is not only good for scholars/literature hacks, but also allows lossless reformatting of the source code into HTML, ASCII, PDF, RTF, etc..

The Gutenberg Project certainly was a good idea and a great achievement when it is founded, but might have to rethink its coding policy. Other e-text projects are already doing better here.

It's interesting to me that no-one mentioned either Emacs/w3, or Amaya as possible contenders in the browser wars. Either one of which currently runs better than Mozilla, and both of which are Open Source.

I think it was Jamie Zawinski who said that every application seeks to expand until it can read e-mail. I would add the corollary that the really bloated applications expand until they can browse HTML.

For example: there is Emacs/W3, which just released version 4.0. To quote the Freshmeat entry: Emacs/W3 is a full-featured web browser, written entirely in Emacs-Lisp, that supports all the bells and whistles you will find in use on the web today, including frames, tables, stylesheets, and much more. Emacs/W3

Now, I happen to use XEmacs. It's my favorite editor. I couldn't code without it, debug without it, or even read e-mail without it. But I can browse the web without it, and I think building an emacs-based browser is just way over the edge.

As the wise man said, though, Your Mileage May Vary.

--JT