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Prof. Felten has a weblog, Freedom to Tinker. It may answer some questions in advance. He is also teaching a class this semester called "Information Technology and the Law". The readings are online.

counter-intelligence achieved by banning or deleting any information of value to the enemy

I don't buy that argument. Motors convert electrical energy to kinetic energy. Where does the electrical energy come from? Typically a heat engine and generator.

Several things to think about here:

(1) the efficiency of an EV charged by an oil burning power plant - even considering the transmission and storage losses - is still better than the efficiency of a car engine.

(2) non-typical energy sources do exist and are more predominant - even in the USA - than you might think. But the only way your car will ever use those sources is if you drive an EV instead of ICE.

(3) the efficiency of a chain is no better than the efficiency of the weakest link. The engine needs to be replaced if the overall efficiency is ever to be improved.

(4) the ICE has been tweaked and tuned for 150 years. It has reached "perfection". The EV is a relatively immature technology. It has more growth potential. Sometimes you need to realise that your current technology has no further potential and then - painfully - you have to replace it.

60% * x% * 90% is less than 60%.

Studies into end-to-end efficiencies of EV vs ICE are available. The EV gets 28%. The ICE gets 14%. That's with today's technology; even with the gross inefficiencies of electricity distribution and storage. Tomorrow's technology - including alternate energy sources - will aid the EV more than the ICE. The energy efficiency of the EV is proven and will get better. The ICE is a dead-end in all senses of the word.

Unix started as UNICS in 1969

MVS(OS/390) started as OS/360 in 196X

VM/CMS started as CP/67 in 1967 (approx)

Roadmap for War on Iraq and the New American Empire brought to by:

Elliott Abrams , Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney , Eliot A. Cohen
Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky
Steve Forbes , Aaron Friedberg
Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby
Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle
Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld , Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz

xyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzy

I agree with your sentiments. 1)If typechecking is done at every reference, then for each field in the program, the machine shud keep track of its type. So if i have 100M fields(pointers) in my machine, then it means that I need to keep track of 100M types. And this is way too much overhead. 2) It does not matter whether or not the implementation is entirely conrained inside a VM. all i need to do is to turn off the security mangaer, which can be done from inside the virtual machine. 3) I agree that compiler optimisations help my attack. btw, i dunno if you checked my comments on the comments posted here. you can get my comments here Do email me about the results of your experiments. --Sudhakar.

Yes you are rite, but not rite. The program makes no use of types at runtime. I mean, there are no typecasts in the program. Hence, the typesafety of the applet can be verified at link time. My guess is that if type safety can be verified at link time, a virtual-machine will try to do it at link time. Finally, a lot depends on the exact implementation details of the VM. I have not looked at Smalltalk and Lisp. So I cant say much about them. However, my instinct tells me that some attack can be launched in those cases. Please let me know if you have some ideas! I am still undecided about what happens with dynamic checking. All depends on what exactly I mean by dynamic checking. Sudhakar.

It was a pleasant surprise to see my paper on /. this morning. Now pdf slides are available here . My comments on the views shared here are also available . Sudhakar .

It was a pleasant surprise to see my paper on /. this morning. Now pdf slides are available here . My comments on the views shared here are also available . Sudhakar .

It was a pleasant surprise to see my paper on /. this morning. Now pdf slides are available here . My comments on the views shared here are also available . Sudhakar .

Well, that broke, but there's a pdf here Or click here and hit the top link for google's html cache of it...

sorry the link in the last post didn't work...

-- AcquaCow

That would have been modded up if you had posted a link (page 157). However, the parent post specifically said that it was ignoring reversible computing, as no such computer exists.

First there was Rogue, then someone wrote Rogomatic. Then someone wrote a limited but cool-looking clone of Rogue called Diablo II, and someone wrote d2jsp. History repeats itself!

Yet power transmission is 50% efficient, and another 50% is lost charging the batteries. Net result - electric cars double the CO2 emissions.

No, they do not double the C02 emissions. They are always reduced, though the amount of reduction depends on the source of the electricity. But even the dirtiest power plants still result in less pollution overall. Read this.

It's a very accessible read, and explains their thought processes quite clearly.

As I recall, the discovery of iridium, an element only found extraterrestrially (i.e. on asteroids), in the strata of rock that corresponds to the date of the extinction of the dinosaurs tipped them off.

-DZ

"On December 18, 1953, Dr. Irving Langmuir gave a colloquium at the Research Laboratory that will long be remembered by those in his audience. The talk was concerned with what Langmuir called "the science of things that aren't so," and in it he gave a colorful account of several examples of a particular kind of pitfall into which scientists may sometimes stumble."

One of the best papers ever on this sort of thing is now, finally, on line here - N-Rays, Mitogenic Rays, Allison Effect and much more.

If it accidentally turns out to be a gigantic acoustic weapon, we're in for some of the best news spin and finger pointing in history..

I admit that I'm not an networking engineer, so maybe there's some very complex technical issue I'm missing here. If so, enlighten me.

If the only argument against it are schools previously in the .edu domain feeling like their domain is cheapened, I say get over it. Unless there's obvious abuse like someone registering prindeton.com and trying to pass themselves off as being Princeton University, there's no issue - and that issue would seem entirely separate from which TLD the site is in.

If Dawn's Beauty School is teaching its students something ( edu cating them), then they would seem to have just as strong a claim to having an .edu domain - which to a lay person who hasn't read the docs on the origins/requirements of TLDs just means "school" - as Princeton, Yale, Reed or Oregon State. Elitists should take a pill.

There is a really good piece on Prof. Krugman's page that explains why California's idea of how a free market for power should be structured didn't work. It boils down to as long as the last guy can sell half his power at more than double a competitive price someone will make sure that enough capacity is offline to keep prices high. What should have happened was what the phone companies did, local distribution monopolies and many competitive power providers that users choose and pay the power provider's rates, I don't know anyone who is paying more for long distance than they did 20 years ago, not a pooled average.

There is a really good piece on Prof. Krugman's page that explains why California's idea of how a free market for power should be structured didn't work. It boils down to as long as the last guy can sell half his power at more than double a competitive price someone will make sure that enough capacity is offline to keep prices high. What should have happened was what the phone companies did, local distribution monopolies and many competitive power providers that users choose and pay the power provider's rates, I don't know anyone who is paying more for long distance than they did 20 years ago, not a pooled average.

His Energy Czar was escorted from the building 20 minutes or so after the last gas-lineup ended. (/sarcasm)He actually cut back a number of research projects, including fusion research.

Carter cut funding for the Clinch River Breeder Reactor Project in Oak Ridge. Funding for fusion research (PDF) grew during his term. Between 1972 and 1979, the fusion budget increased nearly 10 fold. Typical gov't program. My father was in the fusion business and each year he would bring home a new HP calculator that the lab had bought him just to spend all of their budget before the end of the fiscal year. This would be like buying a shiney new PC today for each physicist every year when they do 99% of their work on the supercomputer down the hall. In the 1980s, Congress reduced funding in constant dollars. Probably not an unreasonable thing to do since fusion is a long term research program and won't be economically feasible for a while.

Aside: Really, it's not about the egos of scientists, or the perfection of our telescopes and instruments. Goodness knows, if they were so perfect, we wouldn't be begging for money to build new and better ones! :)

The link that pyrrho mentioned describes the basic reasons why baryons can't be all of the hypothesized dark matter. And since 1996 (when the article was written), the evidence has become vastly more convincing. I'll attempt to summarize.

Sure, we could hypothesize that the Universe is filled with "dim, normal stuff" like brown dwarfs, white dwarfs, lost airline luggage, missing socks, dryer lint... but we're just not able to see them. Fair enough. But there is a limit to this argument for numerous reasons.

• There are not enough baryons in the Universe. The Big Bang only made so many baryons, and this is something we can measure. The limits on the number of baryons in the Universe are quite tight -- only, say, 5% of the mass needed to give the Universe an uncurved geometry.

  Okay, so maybe we just live in an empty, open Universe! But numerous measurements of the curvature of the Universe, in particular recent observations of the cosmic microwave background itself suggest that the curvature is not open but uncurved. So we live in a Universe with plenty of gravitational matter of some form or another. Aside: we are gathering a huge amount of information by looking at the angular sizes of the bumps and dips in the cosmic microwave background, which is fossil radiation from the Big Bang and a few percent of the static you see on your TV when tuned to a blank UHF channel. This page shows what the CMB power spectra (that is, how many inhomogeneities occur at a given angular size) look like, and how changing various cosmological parameters has an effect on the spectrum you'd expect to see. Try out changing the baryon density -- the effect is quite pronounced. It also says that the Universe has the number of baryons that Big Bang theory says it should have.

• Even if we can't see brown dwarfs (or basketballs, for that matter) by their reflected light, we CAN infer their existence by their gravitational interactions with light, i.e. gravitational (micro)lensing. It's not that we "haven't looked hard enough" -- but rather that "if the Universe was full of brown dwarfs, there'd be tons of observable microlensing events". But microlensing events are exceedingly rare. In this case, the null result is interesting, because it highlights that baryonic matter is not as prolific as we want/need!

So this makes us all feel a bit uncomfortable, because either some of the fundamental tenets of cosmology are flawed (even though they explain nearly all of the observable Universe, right down to the abundances of the elements and the large scale structure of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background, the recession of galaxies etc.) ... OR ... the Universe is mostly filled with matter what is unlike anything we yet know how to explain.

It's going to be a fun ride! :)

first off, to not pose: I'm a software engineer, not an Astronomer, though my statement of what was "considered less likely" is based on what I've been recently told by astonomers I work with.

This was an interesting read, though as I said, it was found just through a google search.

I admit it's all speculation and half of it I don't claim to actually understand to the level of making a good argument.

But think of a couple things. One, it's not about perfect instruments, it's about instruments that are good enough to see what you are looking for. If I have ten marbles in a dish, but it weighs as much as twenty... I know I should see the extra marbles if they are ordinary marbles. We are not talking about a little bit of missing mass, we are talking about a huge bit of missing mass.

Another, it's about what you do see. For example, there cannot be a diffuse gas in the galaxies to cause this effect because (a) it would not have enough mass and (b) you could see absorption lines of the gas.

It's not like we are looking for something small, remember... we're looking for something big! Something with a lot of mass that for some reason doesn't or can't glow.

And of course I agree that relatively exotic dark matter cannot be the only source of dark matter, some is just undetected baryonic matter. The rub is that it doesn't seem there could be enough of that to account for all the dark matter, a significan portion looks to be something exotic or at least non-baryonic.

There is another very important point to recognize here. The HST Key project results (based upon Cepheid variable stars) is independent of the measurement/modeling of the ages of the oldest stars of Milky Way halo stars and clusters. Sure, both measurements each have significant systematic errors, but their uncertainties come from entirely different things! So the fact that they agree is quite reassuring. It also means that the measurements can be combined, at least to some degree.

With the newest generation of instruments and telescopes observing the Universe from radio waves to gamma rays, there will be new, independent methods of measuring the age and fate of the Universe. Already measurements from Type 1a supernovae are narrowing the uncertainties in some cosmological parameters. Other methods that currently yield very large error bars, but will be pivotal in the next few years are gravitational lensing (a detailed description here) and the Senyaev-Zeldovich effect (some details here).

When and if we get to the point where all methods yield the same result, we'll have our answer. In the meantime, if you just quote the formal results from just a single group, from a single type of argument/measurement, the systematic errors are going to be large, particularly when you're dealing with anything on cosmological scales!

Two other free compilers:
lcc
TenDRA
If not gcc, there would be even more free compilers. Writing a compiler is not as simple as writing another ICQ client, but it's still not rocket science.

Constructive.

He didn't say it well. His tirade was laced repeatedly with statements to "shut up," and "stop whining." I understand the moral sentiment you see, but his motivation was less noble.

I can hear the emotion when both the AC and the asswipe wrote. The AC clearly rings of a "What The Hell? O_O" reaction. Our mutal aquaintance, Sir AssScratch above, is clearly spewing forth a flame. The nobler component of the flame is a wish that people would stop complaining, and apply that energy to better themselves (or at least make money). This is just a prop, however. The author's (Sir Scrotum's) motive is to convince himself and us that he is superior than the AC. The author percieved a flaw in the AC, and latched on to it like a lamprey to draw on every drop of ego he was able.

I'm glad you saw the softer side. I don't think the author had benign intentions. If his mission was the truth, it wouldn't have been laced with derisive orders.

Whom is the audience for this post? Those who believe in "Fair Use" as defined under the law. Not Fair Use as "I want everything to be free, and damn the consequences to everyone else".
First a clear explanation of copyright

CAFE at the EFF
Note what it doesn't say as well as what it does.

Here as well is a "balanced" look at what's being fought for, for both sides.

A summation of positions

Note in all the above the author isn't being denied his rights, and the consumer isn't his.

Personal Computer Software Copyright Violation: An Unobtrusive Analysis of Internet Software Piracy

Looking at the "piracy" phenomena from the sociologist perspective.

White collar crime increasing

Of which copyright theft is.

The Digital Challenge to Intellectual Property Rights

Note this part of the above "To an economist, assets are valuable not because they merely exist, but because they can be bought and sold and traded.". Note to people who argue that the copyright holder has the original even if you make an exact copy are missing the point. Existance isn't enough.

. INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

Technology, Intellectual Property,and the Operation of Information Markets

There is more for such a complicated topic with far reaching consequences. Which I intend to expand upon latter.

I don't expect anyone to read this, partically because the battle lines have already been drawn. US vs THEM, and when that's done. Proper discussion is very hard.

Also remember that on BOTH sides there are those factions that seek only their own ends and "Fair Use" really isn't one of them.

Time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening all at once.

Yo yo, yo what about that Nina Fefferman - she worked there too, right? If you like freaky goth white chicks, she ain't bad.

Here's Sedgewick's Shell Sort implementation in C

He probably spent all his time sucking Paul Krugman's dick.

Adoption for mainstream in this context could also be defined as those that are creating software. Yes, there is good evidence of this, eg shops such as IBM and Sun have dontated -and use- considerably to the open source movement.

But 'open' and 'mainstream' imho, is more than just software.

Well, I guess you need an open protocol to start with. Mmmm. Maybe like http?

Then you need an open data format. Well, with all it's faults of mixing formatting with data, html could fit that bill.

So arguably, if you say that the web is mainstream, then you've satisfied much of the above.There are definitely open source implementations of these.

But why stop there? What about data that that software manipulates? Yes, there is evidence for that being 'open' as well, eg dmoz.org provides the categorized information used by (last time I looked) Google, AOL, etc. It's a dump with a fairly 'open' license on re-use. In the information retrieval and knowledge management world, there are such things as WordNet , again a collaboration amongst many people with a fairly open license
(Please no hate mail on the fact these are not GPL equivalents - it is merely to demonstrate a point)

The value of a piece of software is not just the programming - in some cases added value by data is even more valuable.

Adoption for mainstream in this context could also be defined as those that are creating software. Yes, there is good evidence of this, eg shops such as IBM and Sun have dontated -and use- considerably to the open source movement.

But 'open' and 'mainstream' imho, is more than just software.

Well, I guess you need an open protocol to start with. Mmmm. Maybe like http?

Then you need an open data format. Well, with all it's faults of mixing formatting with data, html could fit that bill.

So arguably, if you say that the web is mainstream, then you've satisfied much of the above.There are definitely open source implementations of these.

But why stop there? What about data that that software manipulates? Yes, there is evidence for that being 'open' as well, eg dmoz.org provides the categorized information used by (last time I looked) Google, AOL, etc. It's a dump with a fairly 'open' license on re-use. In the information retrieval and knowledge management world, there are such things as WordNet , again a collaboration amongst many people with a fairly open license
(Please no hate mail on the fact these are not GPL equivalents - it is merely to demonstrate a point)

The value of a piece of software is not just the programming - in some cases added value by data is even more valuable.

See this paper. Modern CD-ROM drives currently have low-level access to the CD data. The hardest part is finding a CD-ROM drive that doesn't have buggy firmware.

From the article: After a 5% decline in the sales of recorded music in 2001, the first fall in living memory,.

That statement would be correct if nobody could remember way back to 1997. In those heady days of the Clinton presidency and the dot com boom, the folks at the RIAA reported a 6.5% decrease in annual sales. Back then they didn't have the p2p bogeyman to blame so they laid the blame on retailers streamlining their inventories.

On the whole 'who to blame' angle, I'm amazed that nobody is talking about the role of Clearchannel's radio monopoly on decreased music sales. Before one company dictated that there would be only a handful of radio formats across most major cities, stations were more likely to expand their playlists to include local acts, independent musicians, and songs that local programming personnel liked. Now, playlists are sent down from the home office, and there is more homogeneity among playlists. What does that mean? Fewer new songs get any real airplay, thus giving the listeners of Big Radio fewer unique albums to consider buying...

Back to EMI: The description of their system has so many vague statements that I seriously doubt that this will take off (and we know that EMI never tries to mislead listeners). What listeners want is ease and freedom.

Here's what needs to happen for online music to be profitable for the labels:

1. Record companies have to realize that consumers really don't care who produces or distributes an album. When I go to a record store to by an album, I don't have to know whether it's a BMG or Sony album, I just go to the store and buy it. With these disperate online music services, each with their own catalogs, consumers are supposed to care about these things.

2. Give me the freedom to listen to my music how I want and when I want. Too many of these services offer limited ability to burn CDs or copy to mp3 players. Stop that. I bought the damn music, let me listen to it the way I want. Stop treating your customers like crooks.

It's not that hard. Record executives have a hard time realizing that the music industry is about the artists. Yes, Mr. Exec I'm sure you're a really neat guy, and I know you spend a lot of time doing important things like Bribing radio stations to play your music and engaging in $480,000,000 in price fixing, and I can only imagine how difficult it is to threaten academic researchers. But seriously, you may be getting just a teansy bit greedy and irrational.

Man, I need some sleep...

I wouldn't hesitate to say that this punk (the customer service rep.) doesn't know what he's talking about... check out this article from New Scientist where John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University, argues that any type of audio-CD copy-protection is futile with the advent of upgradable firmare in CD players. As long as we can reverse-engineer their copy-protection, we can play our CDs in our computers.

I wouldn't hesitate to say that this punk (the customer service rep.) doesn't know what he's talking about... check out this article from New Scientist where John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University, argues that any type of audio-CD copy-protection is futile with the advent of upgradable firmare in CD players. As long as we can reverse-engineer their copy-protection, we can play our CDs in our computers.

Um, perhaps you're thinking of Netrek, a completely unrelated game (save for having a name starting with "net"), which does use signed clients to exclude players using robots or cyborgs?

For networked nethack, the "client" is (as others have noted) a remote login program like telnet or ssh, so that kind of cheating isn't so much of an issue. Although, in simpler times, there was ROG-O-MATIC...

Anyway, my point is that a lot of these Lberal Arts kids are going to be interested in knowledge about a wide area of subjets--that's the whole focus of a Liberal Arts education. Computers is another area (though, today it would be extra interesting since everyone uses them but so few know how the "magic" works) to learn about. Of course, there are always some who don't want to learn.

I was wondering about textbooks or notes and looked up the course info at Princeton's site. It's COS 109... unfortunately they don't have many details but searching for K himself led me to his notes and problem sets (link is HTML, but notes are pdf). He obviously used cal(1) for the schedule, too.

Enjoy!

In my Computing Ethics class, mention was made of a problem (can't find a source, sorry), where a pipeline had computer controlled valves. There was something like a T-valve, where to switch flow, one valve was closed, and another opened. Since the valves worked slowly, it didn't really matter if you opened one before you closed the other or vice versa. Until the process (which was running as low priority) was interrupted after closing one, and blew out a huge section of pipe.
Also, you might be interested in a book called Normal Accidents that documents similar problems with all sorts of technology. Preventing software problems is good, but preventing entire systems of accidents is better.

Covet means to desire something of someone else's, as in jealousy. Covetous means greedy. Just because you can look at the root word doesn't mean the shade of meaning doesn't differ slightly when it's in a different form. usurious. The first synonym listed is exorbitant.

Shhhhhhhh - you're going to ruin it you fool.

Remember, we tell them their plans suck after they implement them (see SDMI).

Is it just me, or does he have a picture of Natalie Portman in his photo collection?

Her name is Julie?

Copy-protection bashing and Natalie Portman... A hero to us all. I salute you!

Rather than using signal strength for triangulation, you use it to record a "radio map", and compare your current position to the map. The basic steps are:

1) Walk around a room, recording the signal strength to each AP (so you get a file such as "Access Point #1, Avg signal: 96 AP#2, Avg signal: 74 ..." ). Netstumbler or other software can help you make this file.

Create a "profile" like this for every location you wish to map (roughly, one every square foot or meter). The number of profiles determines the granularity of the system, but too many profiles can cause "collisions" in the sense that different locations have similar profiles, for some reason or another. There are ways to combat this, one of which is to make an educated guess on the new location based on the last one. (i.e., the user could not have walked over 10m in one interval)

2) When a user connects, they can compare their current signal strength info ( such as AP#1, signal: 34 AP#2, signal: 74) to the map: the closest point is probably their location.

I did a simple euclidean distance calculation (taking each profile as a vector in some large space [cool how the pythagorean thm. generalizes, eh?]. There are many better ways, which I am researching this semester, but euclidean distance is fine for now.

I'm pretty sure this is why they must spend an hour per 10,000 square feet to "calibrate" the system. I had to do the same, but it was a *lot* slower; I need to make a tool to do this automagically.

This semester I am also looking to get my system working with an ipaq robot running familiar. It's the combination of the palm pilot robot kit and this positioning system. Hopefully, the little robot should know (roughly) where it is, and be able to be controlled via the internet.

Check out my webpage if you are interested in more details.

In 1996 I was working at a Web development firm called Giant Step in Chicago. At that time a lot of people (including Bill Gates) still thought the Web wasn't going to change much. I had referred a friend, named Andy (who may read this) for a programming job there. He was immediately assigned to work on the new Oldsmobile Web site, which accounted (at the time) for something like 3/4 of our annual revenue. The is old enough to have been missed by the Internet Archive. What a shame. Oldsmobile was going to use a really new markup feature: Frames. Andy was (like most geeks) a pretty antisocial person, so in his tag, he always typed: You're a loser, get a real browser.</noframes> When Oldsmobile launched the new Web site, they launched it on dialup capable consoles right in some dealer showrooms. The consoles were shipped running the latest and greatest (Windows 95) and a brand new browser from Microsoft. Yes, it was flawed back then too. Andy didn't know he had it right -- MS wasn't even a player then, and no one took them seriously. The time between when the first dealer called our client-service rep complaining that the new system had called him a loser to the time Andy was fired, packed, and gone was about 10 minutes.

The primary purpose of DeCSS not as a piracy tool and it's been ruled illegal under the DMCA.
It was also possible to threaten Professor Felten with prosecution under the DMCA in spite of section 1201(j) and the threat was credible enough to prevent him from publishing his work without permission.
It apprears that there are plenty of ways to circumvent any protection of legitimate circumvention under the DMCA.

Interestingly, Rogue also spawned the first (AFAIK) game playing bot, Rog-O-Matic back in 1984. In a way, it really ruined the game, as top ten lists on mainframes all over began to fill up with "Rog-O-Matic" entries. However, watching it play (ultrafast) was mesmerizing.

I don't think it took advantage of the infamous arrow bug though... ;-)

Umm... how exactly is that page supposed to prove that MS is using Linux and not releasing the results? Down the bottom of that page, the source code for the compiler (lcc) they're discussing is provided for download.

This kind of "mad genius professor" model of innovation isn't really borne out by the facts.

1. Increasing global communications is creating diversity as well as homogenisation. Certain things are being homogenised, but overall there's much more variation in knowledge and production of culture than previously. This can be verified by having a look around, or reading Mauro Guillen's comprehensive review (500KB PDF) of the evidence in his excellent book The Limits of Convergence.
2. As another poster noted, standardisation has been happening through textbooks anyway. But more to the point, there are way more textbooks available now than there used to be, and a lot of teachers aren't up with them. There should be no excuse for tired profs wheeling out their favourite old chestnut that they learnt from and not paying attention to contemporary work in the field. Hopefully, something like Open Courseware will increase the pressure on educators to provide the best possible texts in their work.
3. The whole idea of peer review, open source, and open courseware is that more eyes on the work are better, and why rewrite when you can reuse and modify. I've always scoured the web for what's happening in my field, then adapted, modified, or discarded to suit anyway - so I look forward to having some more highly reviewed content to build into my lectures!

Open Courseware is just a great initiative. In my view any standardisation that does occur will be more than offset by the increase in quality of people's material, and the overall contribution to the field that open source/courseware encourages.

Danny

Read this for more details