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Private ownership of huge swaths of land was so common in the ancient Roman world that they came up with a word for them: latifundium. Remnants and impressions of these units survive up until this day.

Private landholding is basically as old as civilization itself, there is written evidence from the period that it was common in Mesopotamia and all the cultures that sprang from it. In Mycenaean society virtually all land is held by the nobility and the serfs are so disenfranchised as to be explicitly called slaves in the original source documents. (See page 108 of this. The next page of the same work corroborates my allusion to the formation of large private lands in Rome through military service-induced absenses. You know what? Actually, this is probably as good a source as I'm likely to find with the limited time I have online at work, so just read the whole thing. It corroborates over and over historical evidence and patterns for hierarchical landholding in society after society age after age. It might be a little dry, but real professional academic socio-historical analysis isn't meant to be thrilling.)

Commons are a legal *fiction*. Ancient and medieval commons, as I said in a response above, were *logistical* uses of land whose ownership was still with an aristocrat or oligarch. Modern commons are again deliberate logistical considerations, US public lands are property of the government, which only in the most naive principle is property of the taxpayer, since any use outside of the parameters of government policy will result in a police action (this is a particular bone of contention in a lot of places where local law enforcement such as sheriffs thinks the federal enforcement agents are being raging jerks toward the county residents and arresting them for simply 'using' land that is 'theirs' as taxpayers... just look at the videos on constitutionalsheriffs.com).

One shortcut might be to learn from the hideous mistakes of others:

http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/~xmath/mirror/www.iarchitect.com/mshame.htm

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/help/HA100898951033.aspx

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZegWedG-jk4

http://www.cs.rutgers.edu/LCSR-Computing/some-docs/emacs-chart.html

There's a growing trend in math (and maybe other disciplines, for all I know) away from non-free publishing.

Prominent mathematicians have been complaining for years (more links here) about overpriced journals, and entire editorial boards of some journals have resigned in protest (see a list of mass resignations and similar changes here). There are now plenty of entirely free journals in combinatorics, topology, and other fields, and pretty much everything that gets published these days is either available on the author's website or on the arXiv.

So modern research tends to be free, but what about all the books you need to read before you understand this research? Sure, a copy of Rudin may be expensive and there's not much we can do about that, but maybe you can learn from the free analysis course notes at MIT's OCW site. You complain that EGA is out of print, but basically everything Grothendieck wrote is available for free, and you can even get them along with tons of other old French publications through NUMDAM. (There's even a project to transcribe SGA into LaTeX.) Lots of other books are free to download legally (and this is by no means a complete list), even though many are commercially published as well.

Finally, you can complain all you want about university tuition, but I really doubt that free tuition is going to open up mathematics to the masses. Ultimately the very top students who can't afford it are getting scholarships and grants to cover their education (and I do know some people who got free rides at Princeton because they couldn't afford it -- that school is definitely more generous than most), and since most other people couldn't get into Princeton anyway the tuition is never even an issue for them. The best way to make mathematics more accessible is to give everyone access to free textbooks and current research, and the "marxist university professors" you deride have been gradually moving in that direction for years now.

By the way, what do you think has been done to damage the Princeton math department's reputation? Whatever you think Shapiro and Tilghman have done to the university, nobody in their right mind would deny that it's one of the top few in the world and I doubt most people would openly proclaim any one department to be the best anyway.

Hmm. If we delve into the gun-lobby links you gave

I hardly think that the US Department of Justice is a gun lobby, nor is the Worldnetdaily(though it does appear to be a conservative news site). Theksa.com, I'll give you. Didn't look closely enough at the marquee. I mostly grabbed the first likely looking sites in google.

The data doesn't seem that clear-cut, indeed it seems rates are the same. I'm not sure how to interpret this data though (there's not much of it). I'm not sure either one of us should draw any strong conclusions from it.

It's simple enough:
In 1995, 30.9% of those surveyed in England reported being the victim of a crime in the last year. In the USA, the figure was 24.2%, which would make the papers as 'Crime is 25% lower in the United States!'. It probably isn't a straight percentage actually, people who were victims of multiple crimes probably were counted in the survey. IE if 1% of the population reported being assaulted twice, the results would end up being 2,0.

Overall, you were much less likely to have property stolen or damaged in the USA, a little less likely to be assaulted, more likely to suffer 'sexual offense'. Digging deeper into the methodology - sexual offense includes 'offencive behaviour', which seems a little vague to me - a wolf whistle could count for a particularly sensitive individual.

Air-rifles: Yes, I did note in another comment they can be lethal. As the article notes though, over half the recorded "firearms" incidents were of 'minor wounds' (i.e. kids/teens shooting each other with pellet guns quite likely).

I might be a 2nd amendment advocate - but at the same time I consider myself tough on crime and very much for gun safety. I don't care whether it's a .50BMG sniper rifle or a BB gun, it should be treated with respect and handled in a safe manner. If you really want to shoot each other, that's what paintball markers, combined with the proper safety equipment, are for.

Hmm. If we delve into the gun-lobby links you gave, the worldnetdaily one is spinning this data from Universiteit Leiden. The data doesn't seem that clear-cut, indeed it seems rates are the same. I'm not sure how to interpret this data though (there's not much of it). I'm not sure either one of us should draw any strong conclusions from it.

Air-rifles: Yes, I did note in another comment they can be lethal. As the article notes though, over half the recorded "firearms" incidents were of 'minor wounds' (i.e. kids/teens shooting each other with pellet guns quite likely).

The one clear-statistic available though is that the USA has the highest rates (a few times over) of gun-shot fatalaties in the developed world...

This was on BoingBoing on the 30th.
Coincidentally, in an interview about privacy in our university's newspaper:
Two of your propositions read: "In 20 years time, there will be no privacy any more" and "In 25 years time, there will be no more right to privacy."
"Research carried out by the Nationaal Comité 4 en 5 mei [Dutch organisation for the national days of remembrance and liberation] reveals that nobody worries about privacy if this means more safety. I think that's strange, because privacy, to me, is one of the essential conditions necessary to guarantee the right to personal freedom, but for other constitutional rights too, such as the rights to freedom of speech and religion.
"A sense of security is tangible to people. The notion of privacy and why the freedoms are so important is a much more philosophical discussion. Maybe I should write a "for dummy's" version of this thesis.
"Privacy is often regarded more as an obstacle than a fundamental right. That's due to the clandestine feeling that clings to it, its anonymity. But privacy is a means to maintain a balance of power. The more I know about you, the more control I have over you."
Telephone taps or terrorism?

The summary is slightly misleading, but this disconnect has big implications for the reader's understanding (imho)...

I can name plenty of chemical reactions that are complete on the femtosecond scale, and while speed helps, that's certainly not the whole picture. What matters is how mismatched the energy levels between the reactant and the product are. When transitioning between energy levels, either energy is transferred out of the system by nonradiative release (heat), luminescence, photofragmentation, or transfer to a chemical partner - this last case is what the article is referring to. Getting to an energy level which can react is going to result in a heat deposition for at least some photons because any photon of a higher energy than the reacting state must deposit some of that energy just to be able to react at all.

http://www.monos.leidenuniv.nl/smo/basics/images/j ablonski.gif Unfortunately, this scheme doesn't show photofragmentation or energy transfer to another molecule, but I'm in a rush so it'll do.

The squiggly lines show possible heat depositions - the molecule starts in the ground state, absorbs a photon (the yellow up arrow), then relaxes to the excited state. This excited state then does whatever it's going to do. If 100% of the time under a set of conditions (i.e. a quantum yield of 1.00), the excited molecule follows a particular pathway we call that perfectly efficient. In the specific example of photosynthesis, this means that all of the absorbing chlorophylls transfer the energy along the photosynthetic pathway (I'm lumping all the subsequent processes together here). It does not mean that 100% of the energy got transferred along the way - there will always be some photon that deposits more energy than the reacting state has, meaning some energy will be converted to heat.

In short form (if you didn't feel like reading all this): efficiency in this case refers primarily to how often the molecule dumps its energy into photosynthesis instead of all to heat, luminescence, etc. It's not referring to the energy throughput, as some photons will always be an imperfect energy match, and the extra energy will end up as heat.

What if you have a table and you need a functional index on a user defined function? MySQL can't even do that, so it will be forced to scan the whole table. PostgreSQL makes it trivial.

You are going to laugh but since MySQL basically uses a 1 application model you just de-normalize and have the functional field inside the table itself.

As for benchmarks there are plenty of benchmarks of Oracle vs. MySQL (a tie to slightly in MySQL's favor on what MySQL does well using cheap hardware. Anything else Oracle wins). There are plenty on benchmarks of MySQL vs. Postgres. The Postgres people seem to dispute these but they show MySQL killing Postgres. You can download Oracle for free. Benchmark it and go ahead and publish. That's a pure a 1st amendment case as I can imagine. Let them try and sue.

PostgreSQL can also combine indexes into in-memory bitmaps before looking in the table. That means you don't have to make a multi-column index for every combination of attributes you select. This is done automatically by the planner.

Oracle has a custom engine for star queries. It has some pretty substantial transformation rules when needed. As for MySQL it doesn't even pretend to support Datawarehousing so ...

err, the data doesn't back it up at all:

Grand total of recorded crimes for the year 1999
Switzerland: 4,355.74 per 100,000 inhabitants
United States of America: 8,517.19 per 100,000 inhabitants

Though, those are official number, the International Crime Victim Survey (http://ruljis.leidenuniv.nl/group/jfcr/www/icvs/I ndex.htm) shows interesting results (sometimes different from the official result), but you have to remember that it is just a survey on roughly a thousand people per country (not every people responding), meaning that the number are potentialy off by 1 or 2% (and when the number or classification show result in the 1 per 1000, those are meaningless).

Just to say that it is hard to mesure the quality of a society :)

This is not Roebroeks and Dennell's hypothesis. They propose that the "Out of Africa 1" theory where Homo ergaster/erectus migrates out of africa 1.8 Myear ago is wrong. Instead they propose that an earlier more primitive humanoid migrated out of africa earlier and that Homo erectus evolved in asia and then back migrated to africa.

This hypothesis is consistent with the "Out of Africa 2" theory proposed by Stringer et al which requires a relatively the recent evolution of Homo sapiens in africa and its subsequent spread throughout the world.

Their views are better summarized in the following link:

http://research.leidenuniv.nl/index.php3?m=1&c=144

Than in the National Geographic News article.

It's a wiki, for christ's sake. You don't need a PhD to contribute.

If you want, add your understanding as an "alternative theory". After a while, somebody who knows may just remove the other one or relegate it to a "historical theory" or something.

You're right, a lot of the technical articles are either 1) based on outdated theories, or 2) up-to-date, but ridiculously complex. But, guess what? Most educational materials are the same way! Schools still teach Newton even though he's been proven wrong for a hundred years.

If intelligent people always insist on appealing to arbitrary authority to back up their assertions, we wouldn't get anywhere. Read this if you don't believe me.

Sorry about the bad link. Here it is.

It's not really something you can have "proof" for - you can't measure culture. It's like saying "European women are sexier".

Well, actually, people can measure culture; sociologists do it regularly. And you should also be able to measure it though proxies. For example, I was suggesting that if America's culture is more violent, there should be more violent crime. Which doesn't seem to be the case.

Of course, there are other potential explanations. Assuming that American culture is more violent, then you could explain the parity in crime rates by saying that Australians are naturally more violent, and don't need any cultural stimulus to assault people a lot. :-)

Perhaps Einstein (or the typescript writer) got a little bored?

Doodle on a 1914 Transcript

To help fit in when you go to China, I suggest you participate in one of their native religions. This will help you get along great in your new home.

While there is no question that money and the promise of riches were also motivations, saying that some of the reasons behind the first waves of immigration had nothing to do with practicing a religion freely ignores the historical record.

I don't deny that the push for religious freedom resulted, ironically, in cases of religious intolerance during colonial times. But religion through the US's history has been a deep motivation for immigration. But even if you wish to keep living in your bubble of revisionism, I challenge you to deny that religion didn't play a part during the foundation and growth of the US, and doesn't play a part today.

AFAIK they started public manifestation after the government cracked down on them. See http://religiousmovements.lib.virginia.edu/nrms/fa lungong.html#issues
In early 1999 the Chinese government launched a renewed effort against various spiritual movements. In response the Falun Gong held asilent, non-violent, mass protest. Over 10,000 people participated. The illegal protest occured outside the Communist Party headquartersin Beijing on April 25, 1999. 21 The government was frightened both by the size of theprotest and by the lack of fore- knowledge of Chinese intelligence. The government points to the size of the protest as an indication of ahigh level of the movements. Li Hongzhi and other Falun Gong members continue to claim that the demonstrations have always beenspontaneous. They argue that the lack of heirarchy and the loose nature of member networks prevent any such organization.

In the following months, practitioners were harassed while performing their group exercises throughout China. Falun Gong members were told that their phones were being monitored and that their retirement pensions would be terminated. Police broke into practitioners' homes and confiscated Falun Gong materials. Some followers have been arrested and have disappeared. The movement claims that many of its incarcerated members have died while imprisoned. Thousands of members have continued to demonstrate peacefully in about 30 Chinese cities.
Also http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/bth/falun.htm:
For over three years now, the Falun Gong (the Practice of the Wheel of the Dharma) movement has been in the forefront of the international news. After its large scale demonstration for freedom of practice at the residential area of the Chinese Communist Party elite at Zhongnanhai (Beijing) on 25 April 1999, an increasingly severe crackdown has followed, with more severe legal measures specifically introduced to deal with this phenomenon. This crackdown includes the exertion of considerable pressure on Western media in China not to pay too much attention to the suppression of the Falun Gong and Western authorities to prevent overly visible Falun Gong protest during state visits of Chinese leaders (this would influence coverage at home, as they would have to cut references to the Falun Gong out of all reports). It also includes removing Falun Gong adherents without trial to psychiatric institutions, pressurizing them through their jobs and personal networks, unannounced searches of private homes, hotels and any places where Falun Gong followers might be staying, and so forth. People arrested are be put under severe pressure and are maltreated (to the extent that even force-feeding during hungerstrikes takes place very clumsily with obvious results), which has already frequently led to permanent physical & psychological damage, deaths and suicides. Essentially, all means are considered legitimate in dealing with the movement.

The communist regime perceives of the Falun Gong movement as an "incident" and as a subspecies of the traditional category of "crooked teachings" (xiejiao, the Chinese pejorative pendant to the Western labels "cult" - Northern American - and "sect" - Western European). As someone working on new religious groups in recent Chinese history, I see the movement as an important religious phenomenon in its own right, arising out of the specific urban circumstances of post-1949 China, but responding to social, ethical and emotional needs that are quite traditional. The way in which the communist Chinese state has misunderstood this movement, and is labelling and persecuting it bears strong resemblances to the way in which the imperial Chinese state saw similar phenomena in the past.
and http://www.time.com/time/asia/news/magazine/0,975

Al Gore did support continued funding for DARPA projects like ARPANET, after they had already been started, and for that he would deserve some credit, if he hadn't tried to inflate his small contribution to the level of something critically important.

Having said that, Al Gore was not in any way instrumental in initiating funding for the creation of ARPANET. According to this history of the Internet, the plans for ARPANET were published in 1966/67, and it was operational by 1969. During this time, Al Gore was still an undergraduate student, so not in any position to 'take the initiative' in funding creation of anything. Gore apparently finished law school in 1976, at which point he entered American politics as a member of congress.

By 1989, I had already started numbering Apollo objects using gaulish gods. One which I had not used was Toutatis since I thought it was an invention of Goscinny and Uderzo, authors of the well known comic book series "Les aventures d'Asterix". There are several dozens sites about this comic book series, you may want to look at few of them :

• Stephane Riviere Asterix's page
• Page on asterix in different languages
• The international Asterix homepage which contains many more links to Asterix pages elsewhere

One of their constant saying is "By Toutatis", another one is that their only fear is that the sky may fall onto their heads.
I discovered my ignorance of gaulish culture when I learned that Toutatis was ( or had been ) a real God. I also learned that the citation in Asterix was not a joke, but that it had been reported by some historians of Alexander the great who had met some gaulish warriors ( who had once invaded Italy and Great Britain ).
One of the first thing we learned about Toutatis was its record low inclination. This meant that it is indeed ( in a remote future ) a good candidate to fall onto our heads. The name stuck almost immediately at the telescope when I proposed it. Toutatis, also sometimes spelled "teutates" is a totemic deity, to which human sacrifices were made.
Don't be misled, very few french persons do know about the cruel god Toutatis, but most will talk to you about Asterix and his friends if you come to swear " By Toutatis ! ", provided you get the right (i.e. french) accent...

You can see a nice small movie of actual 3He crystal growth at Leiden University.

A map like this might do the trick. Implementation details are left as an exercise to the reader.

Others too have written about the (im)possibility of creating a map on a 1:1 scale.

Borges did so in "Of Exactitude in Science" in A Universal History of Infamy":

In that Empire, the craft of Cartography attained such Perfection that the Map of a Single province covered the space of an entire City, and the Map of the Empire itself an entire Province. In the course of Time, these Extensive maps were found somehow wanting, and so the College of Cartographers evolved a Map of the Empire that was of the same Scale as the Empire and that coincided with it point for point. Less attentive to the Study of Cartography, succeeding Generations came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome, and, not without Irreverence, they abandoned it to the Rigours of sun and Rain. In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar; in the whole Nation, no other relic is left of the Discipline of Geography.

Interestingly, the problem Borges identified has disappeared because we have computers. We no longer have to create an immense, cumbersome map, instead we can store the map on a small harddisk. Furthermore, the monitor allows us to display any piece of the map without having to unfold an immense document. Finally, the computer can easily scale the document so that we can convert the map to a useful scale.

Umberto Eco then took up the challenge in "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1" in How to Travel with a Salmon:

When the map is installed over all the territory (whether suspended or not), the territory of the empire has the characteristic of being a territory entirely covered by a map. The map does not take into account this characteristic, which would have to be presented on another map that depicted the territory plus the lower map. But such a process would be infinite.

This is mostly a thought experiment and less valuable in the real world. The problem of creating the map and keeping it up to date will be the obstacle long before the infinite recursion will be a problem (which you can just avoid by not expanding the entire map). Still, it is a nice example of real-world infinite recursion. The best example that I know is a visual effect that the Droste company used for their boxes of cocoa. The nurse carries a plate with a box of cocoa which shows a nurse carrying a plate with a box of cocoa which shows... Simple, but a very good introduction to infinite recursion.

Nothing a quick search engine couldn't solve...

Hofstadter's GEB was the cult book when I was doing my Maths degree in the early 80's - I still reread it every year, because it's a damn good read (and gives me an excuse to get the old Bach vinyl out - I haven't replaced it on CD yet :)).

I run a 2.2 kernel, with the patch for Ethernet bridging and firewalling.

http://bridge.sourceforge.net/


http://www.math.leidenuniv.nl/mailman/listinfo/bri dge


It seems that the new firewalling technique of 2.4 (iptables) does not play well with Ethernet bridges.

I have a DSL connection to a small subnet of static IP addresses (/29). The problem is that the DSL uplink, out of my control and unfirewalled, is on one of the addresses in my subnet! It's as if there is a fox in the henhouse.

There is no proper routing subnet, as there should be. This is no doubt because of the IP address shortage. The DSL uplink must exist on the same subnet as my machines, giving me only 5 usable addresses for my machines. Broadcasts must be passed correctly, or the machines won't be able to ARP each other. Proxy ARP is not an option, because of the need to keep the DSL uplink on the same subnet.

So, I run Ethernet bridging with firewalling. I bridge two Ethernet cards together, passing broadcast packets between them (filtering out externally generated "smurf" broadcast packets, of course). I also implement my firewall at this point. The network is one logical LAN, but partitioned into two physical LAN's, with the firewall machine in between them. The firewall makes sure that unwanted packets from the DSL uplink never reach my machines.

It's not perfect (there is no stateful connection filtering), but it has worked well for me. Probes come in at least every hour, and no successful breakins to my knowledge.

And another reason not to upgrade? The machine's uptime is now at 326 days, I'm going for the year :)

• mathematical analysis including some cool animation of Escher's "Print Gallery."
• Science Jokes website by Joachim Verhagen
• Adriaan van der Hek's First Virtual Mousepad Museum

Maybe you could check the "Master of Industrial Ecology" site. Same universities, but that's an english mastercourse... One of its contributiors is the CML (Centre for Environmental Studies) in Leiden

I was very interested to find out that this work was considered a Droste picture. Without the center, there is no clear definition between recursions, so it appears to be one continuous drawing, whereas you can clearly see a repeated picture in most every other Droste effect.

My favorite Escher piece is Up and Down . The symmetry is very easy to see, although it never ceases to amaze me how he drew 2 point of perspective of the same scene in one fluid picture, a ceiling and a floor existing as one and the same. If he had drawn the sketch as if he was halfway up/down the tower, the top and bottom portion of the picture could be taped together in a loop, connecting the floor to the ceiling again!

You don't suppose Escher just didn't KNOW what went in the middle? The guy wasn't a mathematician, after all. He was an artist. From the grid he used it's apparent that what he came up with doesn't agree absolutely with the extracted mathematical representation, so it's pretty clear he was just doing art and not making a mathematical statement. Martin Gardner and others make this mistake about Escher. His art may represent certain mathematical principles, but it doesn't necessarily derive therefrom. The center also would have been very difficult to paint, since it gets progressively more detailed, almost fractalized, at the center: Take a close look at the very center of this image. It keeps going!

having downloaded a few loops (they'll make great screensavers), i'm now torn between two equal desires: part of me wants to research the proof of fermat's last theoren, while another part of me wants to put on some hendrix, drop some acid and stare at an endless escher loop for a few days

The International Institute of Air and Space Law in Leiden has been around since 1986, and there are a number of others.

Given that the space economy is somewhere around the $100 billion/year mark these days (mostly communications satellites of course) there's plenty of room for lawyers to step in and help out. Who gets sued when a half-billion dollar satellite is blown up on the launch pad? Or when a rocket goes astray and destroys a warehouse or two? Who argues on your behalf with international bodies like the ITU, or helps you get your export permits to launch through the State Department's tough regulations? Even NASA has a bunch of lawyers on staff! Law is part of the world we live in, as much as science or technology. Just doesn't get much coverage on /. :-)

Recently, a legal dispute has arisen between Mr. Dennis Hope, an American business man, who is selling estate on the moon after having filed a claim for ownership with his local United States authorities, and Mr. Martin Jorgens, a German pensioner who can show a certificate of the 17th-century Prussian King Frederick the Great, bestowing upon his ancestor the ownership of the moon as an award for services rendered.

Neither of these claims could possibly be honoured, however. You cannot give away what you do not possess yourself, and that holds good for an American municipal official as well as for a Prussian king. And apart from that, the most fundamental Article of space law, Article II of the Outer Space Treaty of 1967 (often called the 'Magna Carta' of Space Law), expressly excludes the possibility that any state may incorporate any part of outer space, including the moon, into its territory.

Here are some statistics. This is from the International Crime Victims survey performed by a UN agency. England had a HUGE jump between 88 and 91. Any theories on this (not too familiar with current events in England myself)? Interestingly it looks like most of Europe increased in crime while US went down (probably due to big economic boom we experienced).

This *is* the REAL THING

Yeah, tell me more about your evil brain-games.

btw. maybe i will post it someday as a topic, but my concern with the slashdot community is; group thinking is as good as nothing.
I think that some structures in this culture which promotes individual thinking (wich I am VERY happy to meet, thank god!), are also directing structures which are completly the opposite, just to meet the ideals.

Nevertheless, I think this is a great site...and boy, the future is gonna change good when more people read these kind of thinking..

vinylat33

The Interview

interviewer : So what is your age ?
nerd : 18 years old

interviewer : Your parents must be proud ?
nerd : well, my brother more, cause now his Explorer doesn't crash anymore when he visites porn sites.

interviewer : uuuhh....?

interviewer looks like director
director slaps his forehead

interviewer : I mean, how did you find all these bugs?
nerd : well, i wrote a nice program on my linux box, which searches for the standard patterns in the code which are basically based ,.. uh funny,.. on BASIC.

interviewer : BASIC ? ,... uuuh... well, gongratulations with your prize. People,...the first who found 40000 bugs.
hilarious applaud from the microsoft tribune

interviewer : Wat are you going to do with the price money?
nerd : i quess a nice 21 inch monitor doesn't hurt and my own RAID system would also be nice.

interviewer : very nice, very nice.

.... the net.

When their source will be in the hands of the-not-so-funny-evil-hackers, the attacks on windows-servers will increase with successfull results. Anyone knows that security by obscurity (binairies aren't easy in finding holes) isn't what your security model should be based on.

By allowing nice-hackers access to the source, the first easy attacks will be save.

Be prepared for installing service pack 6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16..... and so.
I told you so....

vinylat33

GRAIL (acronym for Gravitation Radiation Antenae In Leiden) is also looking for gravitational waves using a copper sphere with a diameter of 3 meters at a temperature of 1 mK.

Interested in reading this stuff, see here.

vinylat33

GRAIL (acronym for Gravitation Radiation Antenae In Leiden) is also looking for gravitational waves using a copper sphere with a diameter of 3 meters at a temperature of 1 mK.

Interested in reading this stuff, see here.

vinylat33

All those languages are interchangable?

Seems to me like opening a pool full of bugs.

M$ compared to any *nix system is qua security a joke. (keep in mind that m$ get's big money for their product and *nix systems not)
So how do they fix (gnif gnif) the security problem considering the .NET?
And please, stop telling me they will fix it, cause they won't.

BTW. M$ has no monopoly, at least not if you think of using other systems.

sig. If Bill Gates got a nickel for every time w2k crashed,... oh... he does...

vinylat33

DeCSS can be found here, and I take responsibility for it since I placed it their.
Also, the copyright is GPL, so anyone who thinks I am breaking the law, go fuck yourself.

vinylat33

--- Open standards. Open source. Open minds. The command line is the front line.

Society that will trade a little liberty for a little order will lose both, and deserve neither. Thomas Jefferson

I post DeCSS (and old movie-channel decoderer) here.
If you do not like this, FUCK YOU!
Others are welcome to download the code.

If you want to complain about this, email me at my email address

vinylat33

I post DeCSS (and old movie-channel decoderer) here.
If you do not like this, FUCK YOU!
Others are welcome to download the code.

If you want to complain about this, email me at my email address

vinylat33

A cross-platform progam language before of Java existed, but all syntaxes where in Espanol.

vinylat33
sig. mmmmmm, nice, linux is boosting lately....

Just take a look here then and read it carefully, you will see that LSB and this system will change the Linux world to be a better place: http://www.w i.leidenuniv.nl/~wichert/talks/PackageManagement20 00/html/

Of course, people actually downloading the whole human genome probable wouldn't worry about this, but couldn't they use a better compression format than .zip? I bet using bzip2 or rar would shave a couple of hundred MBs off of that 753MB file. Also, the differences in compression techniques would be interesting to see on a large group of files mainly consisting of G, A, C, and T. -- demiurge You find a file that appears important and obliterate it from memory!!! Score one for the downtrodden hacker!

• G -- 00
• A -- 01
• T -- 10
• C -- 11

This would only work for the .fa files, but .fa files can contain "N"s also. If you just want to browse the Genome, look through the pieces directory. .

It's not like splicing is anything new - hell we've been making corn that poisons butterflys for a while now - it's not new. Why is this news? What is the nature of the chromosome, is that what makes it so special? What does it do? Anything?

The Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences at Universiteit Leiden has a somewhat similar organization, but I'd consider MSU a much better candidate.

Note that St. Petersburg State University has a similar organization of having a Mathematics and Mechanics Faculty. It probably used to be called Leningrad State University back before "glasnost."

I could go with either MSU or St. Petersburg as being "the ones." St. Petersburg has been doing very well in the ACM contests, which suggests that they are likely rather good.

Whether that's from student selection ("nature") or quality of teaching ("nurture"), or some combination of both, is another question...

At our institute we have lotza 'puters clustered in subgroups and I think that the naming conventions our sysadmins use are silly but effective. For example, without going into Dutch geography, one group is named after rivers in the Netherlands. The larger the river the more powerfull the machine that is named after it, with the central servers having names like the IJssel and the Rijn (you know the Rhine don't you?) Another group uses the periodic table with the servers named after the first elements Hydrogen and Helium.

Although not entirely consistent it works fairly well. I know intuitively which machine to hit for that extreme resource slurping process.

One problem is that al our foreign scientists (about 30% of the institute is non Dutch) are in the dark, since they dont know any of the Dutch rivers. ;-p

Bruce

The Apple Public Source License - Our Concerns Bruce Perens , Primary Author: The Open Source Definition. Co-Founder: The Open Source Initiative.
Wichert Akkerman: Debian Project Leader.
Ian Jackson: President, Software in the Public Interest. Author, Debian package installation tool `dpkg'.

We welcome Apple Computer, Inc. as a participant in the Free Software Community. We feel that a few problems in the present version of the Apple Public Source License (the APSL) disqualify it as "Open Source(TM)" or "Free Software". We hope that Apple can address these issues to everyone's satisfaction.

The participation of companies like Apple and IBM should be considered in the same way as the participation of any free software developer. Everyone is welcome to make a contribution. Individually, we each decide whether or not to accept a particular developer's contribution, for reasons that range from technical to legal and licensing concerns. We openly discuss these issues before our community, often quite harshly, as a means of developing consensus and charting our course. One consensus that we've reached is the Open Source Definition, a generally accepted definition of Free Software licensing, written by Bruce Perens and the Debian GNU/Linux developers in 1997.

We note that much of the material that Apple has just released under the APSL originated at The University of California, Berkeley and at Carnegie-Mellon University. That work was sponsored by the U.S. Government, paid for with our taxes, and was already available as Free Software under the BSD license and other well-accepted Open Source licenses. Many of these files do not significantly differ from the pre-Apple versions except that they bear the addition of a new copyright and license. Other files are entirely authored by Apple or bear significant modifications that should indeed be considered Apple's property. Where Apple has not significantly modified individual files from their pre-Apple versions, their original licenses should be preserved without the addition of the APSL.

Section 2.2(c) of the APSL requires that the producer of modifications to APSL-licensed code use a particular URL in the Apple.com domain to notify Apple. While the demise of Apple Computer, Inc. is unlikely in the near future, that sad event would leave us unable to comply with this section of the APSL. This would constitute a restriction on all rights granted by the license, including those rights necessary to qualify under the Open Source Definition. The Free Software community plans a very long lifetime for its software, and we hope that Apple will cooperate by changing this provision so that APSL-licensed software could survive without Apple. We suggest that the simple publication of modifications, such as posting on a personal web site accessible to the global internet and pointed out in any binary distributions, be all that is required. This is consistent with other licenses in our community.

Section 9.1 of the APSL allows Apple to terminate our rights to use any or all APSL-covered code, at its sole discretion, in the event of an unproven claim of infringement, no matter how specious. This is derived from a similar objectionable portion of IBM's Jikes license, which disqualified that license from being referred to as "Open Source". We hope that Apple will consider the investment that members of the Free Software community will put into APSL-licensed code when they write modifications for it. An arbitrary termination could cause us to suddenly lose that investment at some future date, with no chance for appeal. The licenses accepted by our community do not provide the possibility of termination in this manner. If termination due to an infringement claim is to be allowed at all, it should be explicitly limited to the particular source-code lines that are considered to infringe upon an existing patent. This would make it possible for the free software community to "write around the problem" and create a non-infringing version. The authors of the APSL apparently did not consider that patents expire. It should be possible for us to store infringing code for restoral to use upon the expiration of the patent in question. Apple might also consider if it's possible to allow third-parties to defend the disputed code from an infringement claim that would cause us all to lose our rights under the APSL.

We also regret to note that that Eric Raymond, with the best of intentions, jumped a little too fast to embrace the APSL in his enthusiasm to welcome Apple to our community. He placed the Open Source designation on a license that wasn't quite ready for that. We invite Eric and other members of the Free Software community to join us in requesting the few simple changes to the APSL that we have outlined in this letter.

Contact: Bruce Perens <bruce@perens.com> 510-526-1165 (USA) Links to Relevant Information

• The Open Source Definition.
• The Debian Free Software Guidelines, from which the Open Source Definition is derived.
• Is Your Software In Danger of Termination, an open letter on the topic of license termination.
• Debian GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd Distribution.
• Software in the Public Interest.