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People use many different definitions of what 'a year' is:

From The Devil's Dictionary (1881-1906) [devil]:
YEAR, n. A period of three hundred and sixty-five disappointments.

but in the most commonly used definition the year is defined by the orbit time around the sun, not just any object orbiting another.

With your logic, it takes years for many YoYo tricks to complete, and in atoms, a lot of time is spent by the electrons when orbiting the clumps of protons and neutrons, and I can have sex nonstop for years on end on a ferriswheel.

(hhmm, I couldn't paste the wordnet 'dict' output here, because the 'postercomment'/'lameness' filter thought it was lame...)

I'm not sure how the pickup is slow.. The beauty of electric DC motors is the constant acceleration. I'm sure the set points in the current profile that hackers will one day be able to get into the cars to change the performance curves.

For more geekier chemistry on electric/hybrids, here's Princton's chemistry website about hybrid electrics

Pros:
At a stop light, they are silent and no emissions. Silent start-up and DC-motor acceleration until the gas engine kicks on. Cool reuse of breaking energy into charging batteries instead of boring friction and heat in conventional cars. Can be used as a power plant, say, in power outages, or maybe one day, cars plugged into grid can run gas engine to produce electricty during peak times. And they sell pretty well

Cons:
From a cost point of view, they'll never beat out the super-efficient gas motors mini-cars. Battery life and cost of replacement (currently >= value of older hybrid vehicle). The impact on environment for spent toxic chemicals. Engine repairs. (I'm not sure if you've ever look in one, but they are jam-packed with every inch filled and basically unserviceable in terms of the ever fewer small jobs you can do yourself). Oh, and you *MUST* use specially licensed high-voltage service techs, which are few and far between currently. Will cause gas prices to rise -- see econ 101 supply vs. demand

At the same time, you can't always dream because resources are finite. If we dreamt like Rip Van Winkle, we'd be spending billions of dollars and a few fine minds researching parapsychology, astrology, and endeavouring to produce a perpetual motion machine.

Morse code is just a code, it is nothing important. When it is necessary (all the above) use it, if not, don't. :)

The important thing is it should not be the limit for HF.

Btw, on VHF try WSJIT, it is just brilliant for weak signal work. Who gives a s**t about morse. This is the cutting edge of communication! :)

Actually not quite true (that the VM person won't understand or like linux).

Linux has actually given VM a shot in the arm. VMers are well aware of that fact. I support a couple of VM systems during the day and play around with Linux at home at night.

Also in terms of culture, I think you would be very surprised with the VM culture. VM spent many years as the unwanted child, VMers had to rely on each other in order to be heard above the MVS roar.

If you take a look at some of the history of the internet you will find VM sitting there (BITNET was basically a collection of VM systems). The listserv concept was originally from VM (CERN was -- might still be -- a big VM site).

If you want to see some of the history of VM you can start here: http://pucc.princeton.edu/~melinda

Apperently your security experts knew more about Unix than Windows.

Are Unix shared libraries insecure? Why are Windows DLLs insecure when their Unix counterpart isn't? The one issue I'm aware regarding this is the current directory being searched before system directories - that was fixed in XP SP1 & W2k3.

Why is the registry unsecure? The registry is fully ACLed, so every key can have it's own set of permissions. You can specify read, write, or special permissions. And you can specify users, groups, etc... This is a much greater form of flexibility w.r.t. configuration & security than Unix offers (where every setting is either editable for a program, or not).

The user groups are insecure? I don't even know what you're talking about. Unix has groups too, but Windows in general offers much greater flexibility in permissions for users and groups because it uses ACLs, rather than just having rwx bits you can flip for 3 categories.

Windows does not encourage the user to have admin privledges by default. Windows XP asks you to create a new user account. By default this account does not have admin privledges.

Windows does have su/sudo capabilities. From the command line there is a "RUNAS" command, from the start menu you can right click for the context menu and select "Run As". Gee, was that so hard? And if that IS too hard, Windows offers fast user switching, so you don't have to logout and log back in.

I'm sure the list of fundamental differences did go on and on. Unfortunately the reality is that Windows has a much more robust security API. It supports a wide range of settings. The unfortunate fact is that people are mostly oblivious to this (as you are), and many (non-Microsoft and non-Microsoft logoed) apps don't work well without permissions. Those are all bugs in the programs. And finally of course Windows does have bugs, just like Unix does, and those result in the occasionally vulnerability. But mainly Windows has lots of stupid users who open attachments (and any recent version of Outlook has blocked attachments for years). Not to mention the number of 18year olds who would like to see Microsoft burn in hell who write viruses.

Finally, I'd like to address the "Unix was designed from the get-go with security in mind. Windows is patching a fundamentally insecure system." Unix passwords were originally stored in plaintext. Originally users just didn't use them. Don't believe me? Ask Bob Morris, he improved the situation.

The fact of the matter is that Unix was NOT designed with security in mind. Certainly security was added, and more recent implementations (Linux & the BSDs) were designed with that security model in mind. But Unix's security system was developed ad-hoc.

What about Windows? Windows NT was designed with security in mind. Everything I've described here are security concenpts baked into the core of Windows NT. But it goes much further than that. Let me just give you one example: security attributes can be attached to a thread when you create it.

So I've just described SOME of the security features Windows has built in. And I've countered every example of poor Windows security you've cited.

So the bottom line is this: Windows has vulnerabilities. Unix has vulnerabilities. More people release virues for Windows than Unix.

Regarding the Treaty of Tripoli, perhaps you might want to study a more scholarly source. (You will want to read the whole thing and pay particular attention to the issues around "Article XI.")

Regarding the beliefs of Founders of the United States, and how they were all Deists, I think the matter is more complex than you acknowledge.

Their weaknesses are: The human robot owners live long lives in perfect health, in stupendous luxury.

I love asimov.

Speaking of Asimov, doesn't honda's Asimo have the ability to see where you're pointing, and then go there? I heard Asimo units are working as receptionists where they've been leased.

also, there's products coming out now like Cindy Smart which uses a digital camera and OCR to read flashcards and teach 5 year old girls math and literacy skills.

and finally there is, of course realdoll.

so I guess what japan wants to do is merge all these technologies into the all purpose robots that we've been dreaming of. Don't worry about robots revolting though. Our AI people have made sure that they've internalised our world views as any good colonised labour force should. Check it out at WordNet - this is what future robots will think of humans and robots

Their weaknesses are: The human robot owners live long lives in perfect health, in stupendous luxury.

I love asimov.

Speaking of Asimov, doesn't honda's Asimo have the ability to see where you're pointing, and then go there? I heard Asimo units are working as receptionists where they've been leased.

also, there's products coming out now like Cindy Smart which uses a digital camera and OCR to read flashcards and teach 5 year old girls math and literacy skills.

and finally there is, of course realdoll.

so I guess what japan wants to do is merge all these technologies into the all purpose robots that we've been dreaming of. Don't worry about robots revolting though. Our AI people have made sure that they've internalised our world views as any good colonised labour force should. Check it out at WordNet - this is what future robots will think of humans and robots

Their weaknesses are: The human robot owners live long lives in perfect health, in stupendous luxury.

I love asimov.

Speaking of Asimov, doesn't honda's Asimo have the ability to see where you're pointing, and then go there? I heard Asimo units are working as receptionists where they've been leased.

also, there's products coming out now like Cindy Smart which uses a digital camera and OCR to read flashcards and teach 5 year old girls math and literacy skills.

and finally there is, of course realdoll.

so I guess what japan wants to do is merge all these technologies into the all purpose robots that we've been dreaming of. Don't worry about robots revolting though. Our AI people have made sure that they've internalised our world views as any good colonised labour force should. Check it out at WordNet - this is what future robots will think of humans and robots

...but you will be able to draw fantastic sunsets and flowers...

All you need ia a crayon.

The fact is, we are rather unsure of what will happen as the universe ends.

When I was an undergraduate, my astrophysics and cosmology courses went into a number of models. The problem isn't that any of these models are inherently wrong. The real problem is that we don't have the observational evidence to choose and properly parameterize any particular model. Hasn't anyone else noticed the constant influx of observations that favor one model or another? I don't think these observations are necessarily wrong either, they are just pushing our techniques to their limits.

Not long ago, a new and very interesting model was published. It fits well with observations. Anyone with a passing interest in cosmology and/or string theory should read that paper, it's very short and easily digestable. This idea is, of course, very interesting. Is it actually the way the universe works? Hmmm, I don't know. We just don't have the observational capability to say with a high degree of certainty how the universe will evolve on a long timescale.

Sure, I like hearing about the latest measurements and calculations. But, I take it all with a megaparsec-scale cloud of sodium. It's interesting, but not too meaningful, most of the time.

This debate is definitely going to go on for some years to come. In fact, it may well not have a good answer for 5-15 gigayears.

The problem in California was that their "market" was set up in a really bad way. The set the price for everyone based on the final bidder's bid. The reason that there was constant "maintenance" work being done was pretty simple as long as the down firm rotated and the down firm could make money by shutting down prices remained very high. There is an excellent, if a little simplistic, example of this market on Prof. Krugman's page. Whatever you think of his politics, his economic thought is generally spot on. Most of the problem keyed off of the drought in the Northwest, and rules that changed that required that certain levels of water run through for salmon runs. The dams weren't ready for either change and had to cut power by enough to allow the limited power systems of California the chance to greatly increase prices. I think the big lesson to learn here, is when you set up the rules that will create a market, you shouldn't let the groups that could be the biggest beneficiary of those rules write them without some independant expert checking.

Well, in this case because it's merchandizing use of Einstein's image you need to contact the Roger Richman Agency:>/a>
But, if you really want to know, material originally published prior to 1971 belongs to the Albert Einstein Archives at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
But if it's unpublished material or material originally published after 1971 or further if it was published in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, you should contact the Princeton University Press..


I hope this *ahem* clears things up a little...

I don't know if I've ever seen one person who could potentially have so many different requirements to use their image... Especially a DEAD person.. Anyway though I did think that shirt was pretty funny.. I did a peice of artwork with Einstein's image in it, and even though I asked for permission about four months ago, I still have not received word back, so good luck!

Actually, the outstanding question is whether or not neutrinos have mass. If they do, then the need for Dark Matter[tm] goes away. If they don't, we still have brown dwarf stars, undiscovered planets, and the effects of elector-magnetic currents on stars still not quite 100% accounted for within the current cosmological model.

Dark Matter, as an esoteric, non-euclidian form of matter, is still, IMO, nothing more than the late 20th century equivalent of the luminiferous aether of the 19th century, and merely a convenient algorythmic placeholder, until proven otherwise.

Actually, things turn out to work a little differently.

First of all, neutrino oscillation experiments confirm pretty convincingly that neutrinos do have mass. Rough bounds on the amount of mass have already been placed. The best numbers to date say that massive neutrinos can account for some, but far from all, of the dark matter effects observed.

Second of all, brown dwarfs and other "massive compact halo objects" would be baryonic dark matter - and there are good arguments for most of the dark matter being non-baryonic. A summary of some of these arguments can be found here (it's multiple pages; follow the links).

Third of all, I have not heard a convincing argument that EM effects in stars relate to the dark matter problem. There is one reseaercher who keeps publishing papers about the galaxy acting as a dynamo, with large-scale EM effects determining structure, but many holes have been poked in this proposed model (a few came up in previous slashot articles).

There are some questions about the galactic magnetic field (why it has one as strong as it does, if I recall correctly), but the observed field has negligeable effect on the movements of stars within the galaxy.

In summary, there really does seem to be some kind of exotic dark matter present in large quantity, and we already have several candidates for components of it.

But of course it is all far too late. If realistic predictions are anything to go by, world oil production will peak in the next decade and then begin to fall at about 2 percent per year soon afterwards. Even if the US started building wind turbines (the most promising renewable energy source) at a rate of 20,000 a year right now, there would still be major problems. As it is, it looks like everyone is going to carry on as usual until the energy shortages begin, at which point there will not be enough spare energy available to undertake a massive renewable energy building program. Given that more than 4 billion of the worlds 6 billion people are only alive because of the energy subsidy of fossil fuels, which allows chemical fertilizers and mechanised agriculture, the resulting resource wars and famines are likely to be very bad.

...the electronic musician Paul Lansky already did this on his album Ride with a 14 minute piece entitled "Heavy Set". It's quite repetitive, though; it's literally just a piano with occasional ambience-esque swathes of melody every few moments. You can hear an excerpt of it.

...the electronic musician Paul Lansky already did this on his album Ride with a 14 minute piece entitled "Heavy Set". It's quite repetitive, though; it's literally just a piano with occasional ambience-esque swathes of melody every few moments. You can hear an excerpt of it.

...the electronic musician Paul Lansky already did this on his album Ride with a 14 minute piece entitled "Heavy Set". It's quite repetitive, though; it's literally just a piano with occasional ambience-esque swathes of melody every few moments. You can hear an excerpt of it.

Initially, the snippets remind me of unedited "l=a=n=g=u=a=g=e" poetry from the late '80s, but I suspect they'll be verging towards formal and stylistic standards like R.Frost or ee cummings, since that's what people got in school (and usually remember). I don't have faith that this will wind up with anything like the avant-garde direction that the newness of the generation technique suggests is possible.

There's a good tradition of last century's poets experimenting with generation techniques. Bryan Gyson and William Burroughs played with cutups, and someone's even automated the process with TextBlender Pro (disclaimer: haven't tried this one). I had a gas with this idea, and once had a month off so sequestered myself with a typewriter (yeah I'm getting old) and source texts by Buckminster Fuller, Nietzche, Attar, and some histories of WW2, in order to generate some centos for fun and non-profit (never published, needless to say).

William Carlos Williams claimed that poetry is a word machine:

• To make two bold statements: There's nothing sentimental about a machine, and: A poem is a small (or large) machine made out of words. When I say there's nothing sentimental about a poem, I mean that there can be no part that is redundant.
• 
  
  Prose may carry a load of ill-defined matter like a ship. But poetry is a machine which drives it, pruned to a perfect economy. As in all machines, its movement is intrinsic, undulant, a physical more than a literary character. From: Williams's introduction to The Wedge, in Selected Essays of William Carlos Williams

vi man page

If you feel the need to object to DNA privacy issues, bear in mind that three men were wrongly convicted of the murder

The wrongful conviction of these men cannot be assigned to anything but the insincerity of the police and prosecuters in seeking out the real perpetrator. If they had the dna evidence that they believed would lead to the murderer, how can they justify convicting men whose dna did not match that evidence.

A state collecting evidence on citizens before they commit a crime is a serious threat to freedom. You cannot assume that a just government will always be just. If the government were to decide that an individual were undesirable, or that a patsy was needed to cover for a crime committed by a law enforcement or intelligence officer, then the database would be an all too convenient rescource.

In addition, there is the current belief among some that all behavior is genetically determined. If you were to combine the existance of such a dtatabase with the acceptance of research such as this you then have millions of persons who are born "guilty" of a crime that they did not yet, and may never commit.

here's an interesting discussion of expert systems, particularly about flight control and nuke plant systems. and it's by yet another UCB faculty (plugs to my alma mater :-)

This improper usage really bugs me, too. For everyone who hasn't yet figured it out, (including the Slashdot "editorial" staff)

The proper spelling of Berkeley [berkeley.edu] is B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, and the proper usage is "University of California, Berkeley," being that Berkeley is the University of California; the other UC schools (UCLA, UCSC, et al) are merely extensions of UC Berkeley, which was founded in 1868.

So no, it's not spelled "Berkly," "Berkely," "Berkley," or any combination of the three, and it most certainly has no connection to the Berklee College of Music [berklee.edu].

I'm amazed that any self-respecting geek can misspell "Berkeley", given the advances made there. Where the hell do they think Berkelium and Californium were discovered? If it weren't for Berkeley, which runs LANL [lanl.gov] and LBNL [lbl.gov], the DOD would be up shit creek, and GWB wouldn't have any of those "nuke-u-ler" weapons he likes to talk so much about. For the love of god, the guy who won a Nobel prize [princeton.edu] for inventing the frickin LASER [geocities.com] is a professor there.

Finally, without Berkeley, there'd be no BSD; it's the Berkeley Software Distribution. It's in the name of the operating system. At the very least, the person submitting the article (and the Slashdot "editors") should be able to figure out the proper spelling that way.

to link meat and cyberspace in a manner more completely than geo-tags or any other such poppycock. Didn't you watch Serial Experiments Lain??? God, what is Slashdot coming to these days.
Remember,
IPv7, for a new wonderful experience.

Once the lexer is complete, a parser can be built. The tokens from the lexer are assembled into a parse tree. My favorite tool for generating parsers is CUP. The grammar for the parser is usually specified in BNF form.

As you can see, the parser depends on the lexer and the lexer depends on regular expressions. If you really want to be picky about it, there are some parser generators (javacc) that let you stick regular expressions right on the leaves of the grammar and handle both the parsing and the lexing. So yes, you need more than regular expressions to do parsing, but parsers are still almost always based on regular expressions.

As lore would have it, the original USL suit against BSD and Berkely University broke up on the rocks for a similar reason.

As lore would have it, the proper spelling of Berkeley is B-E-R-K-E-L-E-Y, and the proper usage is "University of California, Berkeley," being that Berkeley is the University of California; the other UC schools (UCLA, UCSC, et al) are merely extensions of UC Berkeley, which was founded in 1868.

So no, it's not spelled "Berkly," Berkely," Berkley," or any combination of the three, and it most certainly has no connection to the Berklee College of Music.

I'm amazed that any self-respecting geek can misspell "Berkeley", given the advances made there. Where the hell do you think Berkelium and Californium were discovered? If it weren't for Berkeley, which runs LANL and LBNL, the DOD would be up shit creek, and GWB wouldn't have any of those "nuke-u-ler" weapons he likes to talk so much about. For the love of god, the guy who won a Nobel prize for inventing the frickin LASER is a professor there.

Without Berkeley, there'd be no BSD; it's the Berkeley Software Distribution. It's in the name of the operating system. If you can't even properly spell the name of the operating system to which you're referring, why even bother to make any comment at all?

Troll bashing time.

irony (noun) - incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs

Now, for the reading-impaired, allow me to explain how mozilla's broken GIF support is ironic:

1. Dozens of messages here lament the fact that IE's PNG support is broken and mozilla's PNG support is correct.
2. However, contrary to what one might expect in light of the above, it turns out that IE has the correct GIF support, and mozilla's GIF support is broken.

Before filing the suit, the R.I.A.A. alerted University officials, who contacted Peng, who then removed the site, University spokeswoman Lauren Robinson-Brown â(TM)85 said. She noted that Princeton receives about 150 copyright infringement complaints per academic year, and students are usually âoefully cooperativeâ when told of their violations.

Except in this case it had nothing to do with copyright infringement. It was something totally different. I guess search engines are no longer allowed at Princeton.
When will this site be pulled?

Beside the finding and organizing files, the biggest problem for desktop users today is probably that changes on the file system are not recoverable. It is easy to accidentally overwrite a file and lose your work, and the only only sane way to solve these kinds of problems would be to make it possible to revert changes.

Several research systems have been created, like the Elephant File System, but none of them made it into the mainstream free and commercial operating systems. Are there any specific reasons why nobody offers recovery (high complexity in implementation, very bad effect on performance, etc) or is it just because FS designers don't see the need for it?

They went apeshit even with cassette tapes; I still remember the ads they took out in the backs of magazines trying to convince people that taping records was theft. The US Congress Office of Technology Assessment actually studied the effect of home taping on the recording industry in 1989 and concluded that it actually benefited the industry to let people tape records. Here's the study. It actually dealt with and answered most of the arguments the RIAA raised again with regard to P2P. (If you're interested, this study of the future of copyright and the music industry is a must read too).

This gives you a lot of faith in the kind of screening they do at the national weapons labs and at Homeland Security!

No, that's not right. While a compiler could produce assembly as it's final stage (as e.g. lcc), gcc, and most other compilers do not. Just because gcc and most other compilers are able to produce assembly code in the same way they produce object code, does not mean that that is what they usually do!

On the other hand, there is nothing wrong in generating assembly code, and I would probably use that approach if I were to write a native-code compiler myself (something that seems less and less likely the more I learn about it...)

Hate to inject some actual facts into the argument, but here's an actual paper describing in explicit detail exactly why you are wrong.

Here are some links referring to extra-territorial jurisdiction (or universal jurisdiction - the idea that some crimes are so terrible that every court has jurisdiction for the crime):

• Amnesty International statement on universal jurisdiction
• a UN resolution "Adopting the resolution by a recorded vote of 133 in favour to two against (Israel, United States) and two abstentions (Australia, Latvia), the Assembly reiterated its call for the repeal of unilateral extraterritorial laws that imposed coercive measures contrary to international law on corporations and nationals of other States."
• (html from google) Princeton PDF hosts an article titled "Multinational Pharmaceutical Corporations and U.S. Extraterritorial Jurisdiction". It has a nice description about some exceptions to absolute sovereignty, some of which are widely recognized, and some not.

As a technician on the Omega Laser I guess have a bit of an inside track on what's going on around the LLE.

First you must make a distinction between most powerful(energy/time) laser and most energetic(energy per pulse) laser, this is a distinction not made in the article. The Omega laser is currently the most energetic ultraviolet(frequency tripled Neodymium:Glass) laser in the world now at ~25 Kilojoules per pulse, very soon to be eclipsed by the preliminary first light of the National Ignition Facility. However each "shot" on the system, as they are called, is only a couple hundred picoseconds to a couple nanoseconds long (depending on the shot pulse shape) making it's peak power around a maximum of about 60 Terawatts. This is not the most powerful laser in the world. The Rutherford Appelton laboratory in England has a "Petawatt" system they just commissioned which is capable of at least hundreds of Terawatts of power albeit only with a couple hundred joules of energy per shot.

It is interesting to note that the mechanism the Petawatt upgrade at the LLE will use to achieve it's million billion watts of power in a pulse time of a few picoseconds to hundreds of femtoseconds is called Optical Parametric Chirped Pulse Amplification(OPCPA) and was invented right at THE UofR in the late 1980's!! Chirped Pulse Amplification lasers are the only means to get to petawatt intensities and they are interesting because they are the first technology to allow nuclear reactions to be directly caused by intense light radiation(ie. no implosion/ heating stage as in ICF). This is really interesting because in addition to the spark plug type inertial confinement fusion catalyzing experiments that are planned, the intensity fluences allowed by petawatt lasers approaches (possibly >10^21 watts/sq. inch) what is necessary to do an experiment called "sparking the vacuum" whereby enough energy is placed in a small enough volume of space in a short enough period of time to cause a spontaneous transformation of energy directly into particles(via E=Mc^2). Neat eh?

Anyway, long story short, one of their evil demonstrations was a page that would popup a new browser window that would emulate the full Netscape 3 look&feel quite closely (yes, that was a while ago, I said).

Of course, back then, they didn't have the convenience of resizable "fullscreen" chromeless windows that IE provides.

Huh? There are thousands of researchers working dilligently every day to figure out how "computer space" works. Computer science is a very young field, and at present, we are unable to answer even the most basic of questions concerning the nature of computation and its relation to time, space, information, randomness, and the universe.

You want extreme programs? Look at Nisan's pseudorandom generator, the PCP theorem, Shor's quantum factoring algorithm, etc. These are all efficient programs that changed the way people thought about the world.

I think you mean this guy

I suspect Felten was referring to his work on Secure Internet Programming.

For example, he's done some excellent work on Proof-Carrying Authorization, where instead of relying on a server-side list of people who are allowed access, the client proves he should be let in based on a collection of signed statements.

Example: You said that any employee of a member of the Consumer Electronics Association could read this page. You said that IBM is a member. IBM said that everyone in the security department is an employee of IBM. The security department said I'm a member.

I suspect Felten was referring to his work on Secure Internet Programming.

For example, he's done some excellent work on Proof-Carrying Authorization, where instead of relying on a server-side list of people who are allowed access, the client proves he should be let in based on a collection of signed statements.

Example: You said that any employee of a member of the Consumer Electronics Association could read this page. You said that IBM is a member. IBM said that everyone in the security department is an employee of IBM. The security department said I'm a member.

I suspect Felten was referring to his work on Secure Internet Programming.

For example, he's done some excellent work on Proof-Carrying Authorization, where instead of relying on a server-side list of people who are allowed access, the client proves he should be let in based on a collection of signed statements.

Example: You said that any employee of a member of the Consumer Electronics Association could read this page. You said that IBM is a member. IBM said that everyone in the security department is an employee of IBM. The security department said I'm a member.

If he has no law degree and can't answer legal questions (especially those that affect technology), then what business does he have teaching a class called Information Technology and the Law?

In your day, phreakers et al were pretty much barely a blip on the radar screen. A few of you got charged with old laws, several were threatened or intimidated, and many many kids followed in your wake.

Now we're watching a world get built where PhD thesis material might be illegal, writing code can get you arrested and charged, and even giving an academic presentation is threatened.

How much responsibility, if any, do you think the early phreakers and hackers have for this rash of paranoid law?

Biological anthropology is certainly an interesting topic. Craig Stanford wrote a book entitled The Hunting Apes that examines meat eating (primarily about its role social development), but which does map out what's known about diets of various primates, aboriginal societies, and historical extrapolations. Well worth checking out.

FWIW, it appears that for most of human history, meat consumption was much less common than caveman cartoons would have us believe.

Other universities, namely umass and rpi are known for their smb indexing utilities to share files throughout their networks. My question is why pick on Dan Peng of Princeton University for creating wake when several other universities have been doing the same thing long before the inception of wake. canofsleep being a perfect example. Also the flatlan client created by an RPI Engineering student.

Adam, a classmate of mine in a course on Information Technology and the Law noted on the course newsgroup that FindLaw has the complaints online.

The irony is that this happened the same week we discussed the Napster case in the class.

Princeton University discourages filesharing but students will always find ways to share files. There is a LOT of misinformation about Phind though. While I do not believe in sharing copyrighted works as someone who has is trying to make a living producing commercial software, Phind is NOT a peer-to-peer file sharing service as the RIAA has described. All it is is a search service that searches all SMB (Windows/Samba) file shares campus-wide and indexes the files it finds. It is up to you as a user to locate that machine on the network, make the connection, and grab the files. In fact, there are a lot of files on there that have nothing to do with copyrights. People share their papers, research, vacation photos, etc. on their workstations and Phind will index them if they are public shares.

Just like anything else, there are legit uses as well as legitimate uses. Shutting down a service and depriving people from it's legitimate use is not the answer. --Jon

Princeton eh? Could it be that snarky Ed Felten getting busted there for doing "filesharing research"?

No! He points the finger elsewhere in his Freedom to Tinker blog back in November 2002: the campus paper, the Daily Princetonian then had a nice article with some details on how filesharing works (and is policed, not tightly enough for the RIAA apparently) at Princeton these days.

At least until today.

(I had to laugh at the frankness of the music professor quoted in that article.)

--LP

Fellow /.ers may recollect the "cool scientific paper" where the authors bomb DRAM chips with Xrays or more simply with 50-watt spotlight bulb to exploit Java and .NET virtual machines. That attack is very relevant to this new scheme proposed in this RFC.

What if the new security bit flips? Wow! I just improved my result from 70% to 100% !!! I should waste no time in typing my latest paper.

--Sudhakar.