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Funny you mention that. I just heard a local public radio blurb about a Cincinnati company that is applying this to multi-perspon emergency worker and police radio communications and conference calling. Here's an article (not from the same comapny) about using this for cockpit displays. A PDF about NASA research on the subject. (Goes into exactly how we can fool the ears into spatial localization.) A chapter from a book about auditory cueing using spatial localization.

Most of this seems to be geared towards increasing Situational Awareness in the context of aircraft cockpits.

How MUCH crack have you been smoking?

LISP is over-rated but XML is just fine?

Go Read

and no not Internet2, that's just faster stuff.

MIT got a grant for those DHT (distributed hash table) thingamajiggers, remember?

Project homepage here

Paul Krugman wrote a nice article about this "gold bug" in Slate a while ago. Whatever you may think of him personally, the article sets forth the considerations crisply.

Anyone who feels paper money has no intrinsic value is encouraged to mail it to me. I'll pay the postage. And just try buying lunch with gold bullion. There are hardly any employed economists advocating gold or the gold standard, but it is worthwhile to discuss why these are inferior forms of money.

Think of your paper money as shares of stock in America Inc. If you don't believe in American solvency, consider that the rest of the world does. Two thirds of American currency is in circulation overseas, and America attracts trillions in foreign investment. I'm bullish on it, and note that gold has been a consistently lousy investment since the 80's, underperforming even inflation by failing to appreciate at all (the chart is not in constant dollars). Also, don't forget to deduct transportation or storage costs like that safe deposit box. Paper money did the same if you stuffed in under the mattress and failed to invest it in at least a passbook savings account or insured CD -- either of which handily outperformed gold.

Looks like a typo on the date of the Morris Worm. The Morris Worm was November 1988, not 1998. Here's a link for reference.

• XFoil - XFOIL is an interactive program for the design and analysis of subsonic isolated airfoils. It consists of a collection of menu-driven routines which perform various useful functions
• NASG Airfoil Database - This database includes airfoil specification(contour,thickness ratio and etc.) and performance(lift,drag and moment) data widely.
• Aircraft Design Software Review - This page originated from a paper given at the ASEE Annual Conference, Sunday, June 25, 1995, Anaheim, CA (Gary Slater, session chairman: Software and Multimedia). It has been updated for design class use.
• CompuFoil - CompuFoil is the industry standard in airfoil modification and plotting software. Used by SIG, Estes Industries, Midwest Models, Hobbico, House of Balsa, HobbyHangar, Great Planes Models, R&R Products, CR Aircraft, DJAeroTech, The Electric Jet Factory, NASA, West Point, dozens of schools, colleges, universities and discriminating R/C modelers around the world. CompuFoil runs on Windows 95, 98, and ME. It will also run on WindowsXP/2000, and Macintosh computers (with a PC emulator), but these two require a custom setup program stub file..

There's a lot more, but this should give you an idea. Use google to find more (this may be a good place to start :-)

Aerodynamics is a huge field, and i doubt you'll ever get far enough to build your own plane, but if you're anything like me you'll have a lot of fun trying.

Good luck!

IHTFP is a registered trademark of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. See http://hacks.mit.edu

He also argued that slavery is justified and women belong in the home. Do you wish that caught on too?

Notice my words "Plato argued"? He said it, not me (and it was the grandparent post who wanted to "screw the Estate"), and of course per his profession, Plato was just challenging people to think and take their ideas to their natural conclusions.

However, I don't see where "women belong in the home come from". Read the same chapter I linked, 3 paragraphs up:

Then let the wives of our guardians strip, for their virtue will be their robe, and let them share in the toils of war and the defence of their country; only in the distribution of labours the lighter are to be assigned to the women, who are the weaker natures, but in other respects their duties are to be the same.

and elsewhere on the page
They will use friendly correction, but will not enslave or destroy their opponents; they will be correctors, not enemies?

We could easily find passages to show that other influential men supported slavery as well.

I think the article explained it best:

The copyright article explains it wrong here:
The whole issue was argued three centuries ago, and it was established as a principle of democracy that, when the author is dead, his work becomes the property of all.

It was not "established" with any kind of unanimity at all. It is not a "principle of democracy", but merely a law that some democracies found profitable at the time. And the copyrights of 300 years ago lasted a fixed amount of time (14+14 years), independent of the author's death. Nonetheless, it would be nice to return to such limited timesframes.

However current lawmaker's have been swayed by the publishing cartel's arguments: "We didn't have copyright 1000 years ago, and didn't need it. But as technology advances and copying gets easier, we'll continually need longer terms and stronger enforcement". The simplistic reasoning goes that if 28 years was good 300 years ago, then 96 years must be even better today.

Screw the "estate". That is Newspeak for spoiled brat kids living large off someone else's creativity, lacking their own.

NewSpeak? If you say so! Estates and inheritances have let spoiled brats live off their parents' wealth for thousands of years.

To be consistent, you should argue to crank up the estate-tax as well, so that no one can be exempted from work by virtue of his birth, or given any inherited advantages in money or status. Plato argued for that some time ago:

their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent

For some reason, this never caught on.

No, I reckon "Worse is Better" qualifies, especially to the many of us who only really know "worse".

Here's the link - my favourite quote: The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

Everyone hates AOL CDs.

Even dogs.

Thank goodness for university boffins and government stupidity!

My favourite quote from that txt? "As usual, the policy debate about regulating technology ends up being obsoleted by technological innovations."

Ali

You mean this?

I recently attended a talk given by JPL's Nagin Cox, she worked on the Galileo project for 5 years.

Regarding Amalthea flyby, she said that it was very likely that Galileo was going to be toasted by Jupiter's magnetic field. That's why Galileo went in to the flyby already lined up for the September 2003 Jovian Kamikaze Mission. The fear was that once it became a flying toaster they wouldn't be able to control it, they'd rather have it burn up in Jupiter's atmosphere rather than risk contaminating a moon.

You're delusional. Fact is that any employer would just take that theoretical difference and pocket it, leaving you with the same salary as before, only without unemployment insurance or workman's comp to cover you when the shit hits the fan. You'd be left buying your own insurance on the same salary, facing the choice between losing a significant chunk of your income or doing without insurance for inevitable hard times. In fact, I could see companies viewing employees who buy workman's comp. or unemployment insurance as disloyal, since they wouldn't trust their employer to take care of them.

The government may be inefficient, and it may be corrupt, but in the end it pays out reliably and consistently. That's more than any for-profit venture would do if given the chance to take over the potential market for either insurance.

Even if you only make $36k a year- the average salary- you're paying half your income in taxes- and that's just direct. The things you buy, would be %30 or more cheaper if there wasn't a federal income tax, etc. (And the value of the services you get from the government? Less than %10 of what you pay in taxes-- thats how much you're being ripped off.)

AS they say, if you're not outraged, you're not paying attention.

The outrage one should feel is that while the average American citizen gets only a 10% return on the near 50% of our income we pay into the system, the wealthiest members of our society see massive returns on the relatively tiny share of their money that they pay into the system. Corporate welfare kickbacks, polluter's tax credits, offshore shelters, and all the other tricks in the book used to stimulate the economy through trickle-down voodoo economics mean that those lowest on the social totem pole see the lowest return on their buck, while the CEO's of the world see a heavy return on their taxes.

First, solar eclipses occur when the moon passes through the path of the earth and the sun, creating its own umbral shadow casted upon the earth. This blackens the sky to almost nighttime for a few minutes, an often spectacular display of nature's erraticism and beauty at the same time.

What most people forget, however, is that while the visible straight-line rays of color are blocked by the moon, most of the diffracting patterns of raycasting shadows and harmful radiation, such as UV, infrared and gamma, are not blocked by a line-of-sight blockade by the moon. This is why you often see cancerous lumps on the exposed skin of viewers of eclipses mere days after the event has passed.

Not even sunglasses can block the longitudinal waves of harmful gamma radiation, which penetrates the skin and malforms cells into cancerous, replicating destroyers. So, while many people often embark a solar eclipse as a marvelous display of beauty, if you dare to venture near a window or even outside in Ceduna, Australia, dress up heavily, and don't look directly at the sun's raycasting aura.

So I spent a few days whipping up a small perl script which works reasonable well, find it here

It actually works better than POP3 because it lets you d/load messages from different folders separately (even the Bulk folder, which as you noted is *very* useful).

Bottom line, if you're already using linux/*BSD, you might want to check Freshmeat.net before going out and buying or coding something that may not be necessary.

Current computer security research is motivated by the realization that some cyber-attacks will succeed and that systems therefore must be designed for survivability. Two critical enabling technologies for building survivable systems are autonomic response and orchestration. SARA, the Survivable Autonomic Response Architecture, is an architecture developed as part of Lincoln Laboratory's participation in the DARPA SWWIM program. SARA facilitates orchestrated autonomic response by allowing components developed by independent information assurance developers to collaborate to defend computer networks and systems. SARA is well suited to defend against fast, distributed information attacks that require rapid, coordinated, network-wide responses. The core components of the architecture are a run-time infrastructure (RTI), a communication language, a system model, and defensive components. The RTI incorporates a number of innovative design concepts and provides fast, reliable, exploitation-resistant communication and coordination services to the components defending the network, even when challenged by a distributed attack. The architecture can be tailored to provide scalable information assurance defenses for large, geographically distributed, heterogeneous networks with multiple domains, each of which uses different technologies and requires different policies. The architecture can form the basis of a field-deployable system. Prototype versions of SARA have been used in a number of experiments and environments; most notably, SARA was a core technology in an experiment in which distributed defenses neutralized a self-propagating polymorphic email virus.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 6, 2002

Journalist Helen Thomas condemns Bush administration

By Sarah H. Wright
MIT News Office

Veteran journalist Helen Thomas brought the grit and whir of a White House press conference to Bartos Theater on Monday evening, speaking with passion about the media's role in a democracy whose leaders seem eager for war.

Actually, the 82-year-old former United Press International reporter didn't just speak: she surged into her topic, giving everyone present an immediate sense of the grumpy wit and fierce precision that gave her reporting on American presidents Kennedy through Bush II such a competitive and lasting edge.

"I censored myself for 50 years when I was a reporter," said Thomas, who is now a columnist for Hearst News Service. "Now I wake up and ask myself, 'Who do I hate today?'" Her short list of answers seems not to vary from war, President Bush, timid office-holders, a muffled press and cowed citizens, pretty much in that order.

Angered by what she views as the Bush administration's "bullying drumbeat," Thomas referred early and often to her own hatred of war, quoting from poets and politicians to bear down on President Bush and his colleagues.

Winston Churchill, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Louis Brandeis, George Santayana, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King Jr. all made appearances in Thomas' sweeping portrayal of what she sees as the administration's betrayal of both the character and will of the American people and the principles of democracy.

"I have never covered a president who actually wanted to go to war. Bush's policy of pre-emptive war is immoral - such a policy would legitimize Pearl Harbor. It's as if they learned none of the lessons from Vietnam," she said to enthusiastic applause.

Thomas ignored the clapping just as she once ignored the camera flashes and shouting matches of the Washington press corps.

"Where is the outrage?" she demanded. "Where is Congress? They're supine! Bush has held only six press conferences, the only forum in our society where a president can be questioned. I'm on the phone to [press secretary] Ari Fleischer every day, asking will he ever hold another one? The international world is wondering what happened to America's great heart and soul."

Like any star, Thomas, who resigned from UPI in 2000, appreciated her audience's thirst to get the insider's view of our national leaders, and she gave generously, in snapshots, though the Reagan and both Bush regimes were cast in darker hues.

"Great presidents have great goals for mankind. During my years of covering the White House, Kennedy was the most inspired; Johnson rammed through voting rights and public housing; Nixon will be remembered for his trip to China and for his resignation; Ford for helping us recover from Nixon; and Carter for making human rights the centerpiece of foreign policy," Thomas said in an even, respectful tone. She just sighed over Clinton, who "tarnished the Oval Office."

Thomas' mood became visibly more somber at the mention of Ronald Reagan's military buildup and at the name Bush. Again and again, Thomas warned the MIT audience, "It's bombs away for Iraq and on our civil liberties if Bush and his cronies get their way. Dissent is patriotic!"

After her talk, Thomas participated in a panel discussion with MacVicar Faculty Fellows David Thorburn, professor of literature, and Charles Stewart III, professor of political science. Philip S. Khoury, dean of the School of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences, introduced the speakers.

"Helen Thomas offered a very powerful indictment of the current behavior of the Bush presidency in her comments on the incoherence and inconsistency of Bush's policies and the danger to civil liberties of Bush's rhetoric," said Thorburn.

He compared the lack of public awareness of an antiwar movement in 1965 and 1966 with the wide public debate about Iraq going on today. "An aroused citizenry can instruct the government," he said.

Stewart also focused on the current public debate about Iraq, declaring that it may be a "hopeful sign. The polls say Americans don't want to talk about Iraq - they want to talk about the economy, about education. But the press has continued to point out the important thing. Everyone knows there's been a dance between the President and Congress over Iraq."

Thomas didn't let the press off the hook, though. "Everybody learned the lessons of Vietnam, including the Pentagon. In Vietnam, correspondents could go anywhere - just hop on a helicopter and report on the war. Now we don't have that access. It's total secrecy. The media overlords should be complaining about this. I do not absolve the press. We've rolled over and played dead, too," she said.

Asked to advise young journalists, Thomas pounced. "Remind the politicians you interview that you pay them, that they are public servants. Remember every question is legitimate. And don't give up. There's always a leak. There's always someone who's trying to save the country," she said.

The talk was sponsored by the MIT Communications Forum.

IE doesn't do real spam filtering yet, but MSN 8 now does content-based filtering that learns by example. Since they brag that it uses a "patented" algorithm, I assume they're using this Bayesian filtering algorithm.

Before everyone starts worrying that MSFT has patented Bayesian filtering, (a) I don't think the patent would hold up well in court, because e.g. ifile is older and (b) patents are not a problem for open-source projects anyway.

Interesting that this article hit #1 on the blogdex a few days ago, and has since fallen off the chart.

Interesting links there now are Republican commentary from The Onion and a frightening NY Times article on the "virtual, centralized grand database" the new Homeland Security Bill the House just passed would create.

That's a good idea -- I wouldn't want Ryu coming into my home and hadouken-ing the place up.

even if they would have a clue, they can't fuck up her machine, since she won't even know (and doesn't need to know) the root password.

Can't help pointing out that you could do the same with W2K or XP. Linux is not the only OS with user restriction options.

For many years, I was a die-hard OS/2 user. IBM finally killed that. I tried switching to Linux (this was before I read the GPL), but over time I found myself spending more and more time dual booting to Windows. And while it frustrates me that there are some things I really can't do, at least not easily, from within Windows, they're relatively minor things that I don't run into on a daily basis. They're power user things, and while I certainly qualify for that title, lately I've been less gung-ho to do things just because I can.

And as for the reason I found myself gravitating toward windows: well, it's really simple. Games.

New games: Sure, there are a few Linux releases, but the vast majority of commercial PC games are for Windows. And with the exception of Nethack, the non-commercial ones generally don't compete. I'm sure there's a good Linux RTS out there somewhere (haven't looked), but when my neighbor throws a LAN party, and everyone brings their Windows machines, I'd be wishing I could join the Warcraft III action.

Old games: OS/2 had fantastic legacy DOS support, and so does Windows. On Linux, you've got to set that up by hand, and it's not 100% compatible. (Granted, XP has problems with VESA.) I can not, will not live without Civilization, Master of Magic, Master of Orion, Wizardry VII, Ultima Underworld... but I've got a job now, and a social life, and I can't geek around like I did in high school, tinkering all night to get them to run. (And if anyone's going to reply with, "Dude, it's fully documented and takes thirty seconds," let me preemptively respond: on Windows, it takes zero seconds, and the documents are far easier to find and access -- which is honestly pathetic, because the Windows help system blows. Computers exist to help people be lazy. Linux wasn't doing its job.)

I think the single most deciding factor keeping people on Windows, really, is convenience. I don't mean the inherent convenience of using operating system; I mean the convenience of being able to walk into your local consumer electronics store and find software to fit your needs. Hell, you can buy Age of Empires at Sam Goody.

Yeah... maybe this is all because of Microsoft's unfair business practises. But really, there's an upside to it. Do you remember the early 80s? Will Lode Runner run on my Apple II? Is that copy of WordStar for C64, or for PC? I do not long for the days of splintered platforms. Sometimes, having a choice is not as important as having a standard. Developers can write for Win32, and know they'll have a customer base. Consumers can buy Win32, and know they'll have easy access to software.

Sure, Win32 kind of sucks techincally, and has terribly restrictive licensing. But frankly, the GPL is worse (too bad FreeBSD didn't become the fad; I'd happily run that on a Zaurus), and ultimately Linux is no grail itself. The unix architecture was designed over thirty years ago. Come on... we can do better than that now.

Ten years down the line, everyone in the consumer markets will have moved to Oxygen or some equivalent. Until then, as mentioned, I'd rather have a standard of questionable quality than have no standard at all.

(This is my first Slashdot comment. Gee... good thing I hit Preview. C'mon, guys, LiveJournal has code for intelligent autoformatting of line breaks, and they're open-source too. Steal it, implement it, because typing <p>...</p> over and over again is entirly unnecessary, except maybe to those who'd rather have an exclusive club than a public forum, and enjoy laughing when someone's post is a long block of unbroken text. And if you can figure out why this paragraph is 100% topical to the linux-on-desktop issue, you get a cookie.)

I'm just heartened that a lot of the heavy-duty intercontinental communication is done by fiberoptic. Why don't we start looking more seriously at alternate forms of computing? We've known for decades now that magnetic devices can be unreliable, but there doesn't seem to be a push to change gears.

There are up-and-coming technologies that could be feasible--check out http://www.media.mit.edu/research (MIT Media labs.)

Also, if this is going to be an extremely gradual change, the switchover will be less painful. But has anyone actually tried our standard magnetic-based equipment under an environment equivalent to the one after the pole switch? Or the possible environments *during* the switch? I imagine it'd be like moving a huge magnet over an entire room and seeing if hard drives still work. :P

And how would one make this seem relevant to the general public? The Y2K fix was so behind-the-scenes that ENTIRELY TOO MANY people dismissed it as hype, when in fact programmers, engineers, IT people worked countless hours to make the transition as smooth as it was. How could one convince the general public that they need different forms of computers in EVERYTHING, from their wristwatches to their air traffic control centers?

I'm just throwing out stuff, here. *shrug*

MIT's The Tech is actually located at http://www-tech.mit.edu/... way to check those links.

perfect place to get rid of that stuff
the mit flea ("Swapfest").

third sunday of every non-winter month at Albany street.

your post says you're in franklin, so get another uhaul and don't drop so many this time! tons of people in your position have offloaded all their shit (working and not) there. only costs $17 (plus $12 for each additional space, you'll probably need ~3 spaces). you set up at 7:15-9am and buyers swarm in at 9am (most sales are done in that hour, the good stuff goes in the first ten minutes). most sellers leave before noon, but (i think) it lasts till about 1:30.

there's lots of cool stuff there, all related to computers, wireless/radio, or 'cool gadgets.' stuff i've bought there include: door sensor, computer remote control, TONS of cables and connectors, cdrs, ropelights, my palm pilot, floppy drives, led's, movies, and tons of stuff the i have forgotten about. it's all dirt cheap too ... floppy drives ~$2, rj45 eth cord ~$1, and so on. there are tales of "the one buck guy" ... a friend of mine bought two complete computers (120mhz and 90mhz) for two bucks, but he only made one appearance at the flea and was sold out by the time i arrived at 9:30am.

one seller once told me "swapfest! get yesterday's technology today!" ... don't go there looking for something released in the past few months. can't find edo ram, pentium pros, a complete (~200MHZ) computer for under $100, or some strange connector? this is the place for you!

This looks similar to Blogdex at the MIT Media Lab.

Anyone who is interested should look at both of them.

What, no mention of Blogdex, the Media Diffusion Index? It's several years old, and is pretty good at picking current trends.

~GoRK

If you want to know what weblogs are saying about the Nasa moon hoax story then I recommend you get psycholog^H^H^H^H put a bookmark on good old Blogdex. Fine format, good leads to web stories both nerdy and not. You want links (and related weblogs) for the text of the UN Resolution on Iraq, the hockey dad suing to get his son named MVP, or a simple tool to give you the size and text of any web page? They're on Blogdex today.

If you want to know what weblogs are saying about the Nasa moon hoax story then I recommend you get psycholog^H^H^H^H put a bookmark on good old Blogdex. Fine format, good leads to web stories both nerdy and not. You want links (and related weblogs) for the text of the UN Resolution on Iraq, the hockey dad suing to get his son named MVP, or a simple tool to give you the size and text of any web page? They're on Blogdex today.

no no no, its Yatta!

microkernels were the rage. HURD answered the call and started work. Now, almost 20 years later, MIT pulls the rug out with exokernels. So will we wait until 2020 to get a working model of that too?

God bless HURD for trying to advance the state of the art and improve upon the dated UNIX model, but sheesh! I wish HURD were ready for prime time. I really do. But a working model with caveats (Linux, OSX, *BSD) will always be better than a better model that's mostly theoretical in the real world.

That said, no one's paying the HURD developers. If it gos their nads, have at it. RMS needs to relax and realize that it is little more than a research experiment and not the second coming.

1AF4 F638 4B2D 3EF2 F9BA 99E4 8D85 69A7

9A49 B5AF 8C39 83B9 369C 2512 D1B1 A795 D48A 5892

John Crain's PGP signature reports the version of PGP he is using is "PGP Personal Security 7.0.3". Perhaps key fingerprints are displayed in MD5 instead of SHA-1 in this version of PGP? I doubt that, since I think PGP originally used MD5 sum and moved to SHA-1.

I do not now how to compute the MD5 fingerprint of a PGP key either in PGP Freeware 6.5.8 or GnuPG 1.0.6.

Record companies, trying to break in new bands, have started to sell some discs to retailers for less. Instead of paying roughly $11, the typical wholesale cost of a new Dave Matthews disc, stores could buy the Vines' ''Highly Evolved'' from Capitol Records for $6.46.

Your first stop should be Here

Your second stop should be here

Your third stop should be here

Your forth stop should be here

Your fifth stop should be here

Open Office would be my choice for an office suite (that or Star Office)

KDevelop is a decent enough development suite for use in a school, but with
this age group I would use this
project

For a good teaching language This
is a good place to start.

Hope this helps!

As far as I know, the mp3s here are free. But many recordings are indeed copyrighted.

Also, in case anyone is interested in sheet music that fell out of copyright, check out this link.

What do you think the legal (or appropriate) uses of MP3 technology should be?
MP3 technology is technology to compress digital sound files to a size more easily manageable by current hardware (especially portable music players and) and current bandwith capacities (internet but also the USB bus often used for portable music players). As far as I know any use of MP3 technology is legal and appropriate. What can possibly be wrong with compressing a sound file? As far as I'm concerned MP3 technology (or any other technology solely used for audio or video compression has nothing to do with the other parts of the debate named (DMCA,CBDTPA,DeCSS,etc).

We all know the RIAA complains about the illegitimate uses of P2P technology. Since its most prevalent usage is (by the RIAA's definition) illegal use, what are some applications of the technology that the P2P crowd can use to swing the tide in its favor?
Well, I'm on slippery legal ground here, but one of the legal uses of the audio I buy (here in the Netherlands at least) is giving that audio (the original) to a friend either for a while (so he can listen to it for a few days) or forever (as a gift). In my Opinion it would (or maybe should) be perfectly legal to make MP3 versions of my audio, and share(through P2P) this mp3 version to the world. As long as I made sure only one person in the entire world was listening to that piece of music at any one time, including the original I bought then this would be a legal use. After all, having an MP3 file on your disc of material you don't own isn't illegal as long as you don't listen to it (again, under dutch law), so the P2P system would just be used to allow others to download music they might want to listen to in the future to their disc for storage (for example to make more efficient use of available bandwidth) until they have the opportunity to listen to that music (that is, it is their "turn" to listen to the song). Apart from that I think freenet and locstworld are good examples of legal use of P2P technology and these guys are searching for more. Basically P2P is a way to make a network less dependent on specific nodes so there are tons of legal uses (darpa net is a good one too)

The DMCA ...
I'm not familiar enough with the exact contents of this law to react to this question.

An argument frequently levied at the RIAA and MPAA is that they are more than content to label the large majority of consumers as thieves and pirates. What can the RIAA and MPAA do to change this? How can these organizations polish this image up?
The main interest of these bodies at this time seems to be to limit the value of their products to close to nothing. DVD's I cannot watch on my linux box (without "illegal" DeCSS) CD's that will not play on my PC (my only CD player currently) etc. The image of these bodies is directly related to the precieved value of the products they sell. So currently it appears customers (or at least this customer) and RIAA/MPAA see each other as thieves and pirates and both act as thieves and pirates would act towards thieves and pirates (a lack of mutual trust comes to mind....)

With laws such as the DMCA and possible future legislation such as the CBDTPA, many consumers feel that their freedoms to enjoy the entertainment they purchase are being slowly eroded away by content companies. What rights (other than the right to listen or view) do you feel that consumers should have with media they purchase?
Right to change the format of said media to suit the users needs. (portable MP3 players, (future) portable video players, even place the media on a (non public) internet server to be able to enjoy the media all over the world without having to lug several suitcases of media carriers and equipment around.)
Right to enjoy the media in the company of family, friends, etc.
Right to sell the media to whoever you please once you don't need or want it anymore.

Somebody must be hoarding all the IPs

Yes, they are.

OpenCourseWare is MIT's initiative to share course materials via the web. Dspace is an attempt to solve the long-term storage problems associated with born-digital research materials.

It will be possible to put things into a Dspace archive that will not be accessible to certain people; OCW materials are by nature meant to be universally accessible.

"And just who... {} foots the bill for this $250,000/yr that it's going to cost to maintain the site? Is it going to be added to tuition which is already high enough here in Canada and is outrageous in the U.S.??"

Well, for a start, MIT may choose to use a portion of their $1.5 Billion dollar fund raised from alumni, there's a source:

MIT Fund

Another reason why this is a sweet decision on MIT's part is that this (hopefully) opens up a lot of the interesting courses at the school. Part of the inspiration for the Web content caching company Akamai was a course at MIT that I would love to see. Unfortunately, I don't have the money, citizenship, or an admission offer from MIT's Computer Science program to do a degree at the school. But if they put it online, I can at least look at the course curriculum and buy any text or print off the notes and learn the material as best I can.

They're working on both specialized LCD displays and actual holographic displays (and all of the problems entailed)

Not quite a shell-script, but just as easy:

http://mirror.lcs.mit.edu/telecom-archives/archive s/security-fraud/judy-sammel-incident.html

For the record, the previous comment was inspired by an example from Marvin Minsky illustrating what is known in AI as the qualification problem.

Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.

Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.

These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.

As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.

I prefer keeping some anonymity on Slashdot (lets me rant more easily), but if you come across me on the Internet otherwise, you'll recognize me by my .sig, which is a three-line PostScript program (albeit not nearly as cool as the raytracer).

PostScript is an amazing language - completely changed the way I thought about programming. Bored with systems-level C programming? Give PostScript a try....

I prefer keeping some anonymity on Slashdot (lets me rant more easily), but if you come across me on the Internet otherwise, you'll recognize me by my .sig, which is a three-line PostScript program (albeit not nearly as cool as the raytracer).

PostScript is an amazing language - completely changed the way I thought about programming. Bored with systems-level C programming? Give PostScript a try....

Yacas -- A symbolic computation engine similar to Mathematica or Maple. It has a Lisp core, with plenty of syntactic sugar. Released under the GPL.

Octave -- A damn fine piece of work for numerical computation. IMO, it beats MatLab any day. Released under the GPL.

Maxima -- a descendant of Macsyma, which all True Math Geeks remember. It's a symbolic computation engine with a Lisp core, like Yacas. Released under the GPL.

JACAL -- another symbolic computation engine with a Lisp core. Released under the GPL.

GAP -- a system for doing abstract algebra and combinatorics. This is really only of interest to a limited subset of mathematicians. However, it is incredibly good at doing what it does. GAP is under its own license, which I'm fairly certain would classify as free to RMS.

There are many others, but these are the most mature that I've dealt with. If you're looking for a pretty front-end, Maxima has one, there's one for Octave called G-Octave (uses Gnome), and there's one for GAP called XGAP. None of them match the purtiness of Mathematica or Maple, though. There is TeXmacs, a rather impressive TeX-ish WYSIWYG. With some effort, you can make it serve as an input/output mechanism for any CAS. However, I recommend against using it for its intended purpose as, although its rendering is very impressive, it is a big step backwards for structured documents.

opensource.apple currently redirects users to opendarwin.org to fetch the iso, but unfortunately opendarwin.org has been taken offline. in the interim the following mirrors are available...

darwin/x86 iso
http://web.mit.edu/darwin/www/darwinx86-602.iso.gz
http://enigma.us.itd.umich.edu/darwin/www/darwinx8 6-602.iso.gz

darwin/ppc iso
http://web.mit.edu/darwin/www/darwinppc-602.cdr.gz
http://enigma.us.itd.umich.edu/darwin/www/darwinpp c-602.cdr.gz

md5 checksums
MD5 (darwinx86-602.iso.gz) = d4e9a94c48d900736fa9f77d42707d50
MD5 (darwinppc-602.cdr.gz) = 07d4614c4e3b417f0022a97cf941ad97

installation instuctions
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6. 0/install.x86.txt
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6. 0/install.ppc.txt

opensource.apple currently redirects users to opendarwin.org to fetch the iso, but unfortunately opendarwin.org has been taken offline. in the interim the following mirrors are available...

darwin/x86 iso
http://web.mit.edu/darwin/www/darwinx86-602.iso.gz
http://enigma.us.itd.umich.edu/darwin/www/darwinx8 6-602.iso.gz

darwin/ppc iso
http://web.mit.edu/darwin/www/darwinppc-602.cdr.gz
http://enigma.us.itd.umich.edu/darwin/www/darwinpp c-602.cdr.gz

md5 checksums
MD5 (darwinx86-602.iso.gz) = d4e9a94c48d900736fa9f77d42707d50
MD5 (darwinppc-602.cdr.gz) = 07d4614c4e3b417f0022a97cf941ad97

installation instuctions
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6. 0/install.x86.txt
http://www.opensource.apple.com/projects/darwin/6. 0/install.ppc.txt

Actually the Mach kernel is MUCH older than Linux--started in 1985 and has a long and rich development history. Apple bought NeXT, and used OpenStep as the basis for OS X. OpenStep/NeXTStep was based on Mach. Also see the HURD.