Slashdot Mirror

> if you don't, you wind up doing nothing at all.

Thanks for providing me a reason to keep trying to educate. It may be pathetic and pitiful, but not everyone can hope to be great.

> by shoving document after document of propaganda, doctrine and philosiphy

What is wrong with that? You can't dismiss arguments by classifying them as propaganda or doctrine. One has to read, understand, and then prove them wrong. Your failure to do that can be interpreted in many ways: reading incompetence, unwillingness to face intellectual challenge are some of them.

> you are an extremist

I read from Paul Krugman that it isfunny, isn't it, how "balance" becomes a goal in itself?. Also from him, sometimes you have to be extremist to be truthful. Because being at some extreme or at the middle has nothing to do with being right or wrong, but with not agreeing with the current climate of opinion. Where extremism is unseemingly is when the extreme is pursued as an end in itself: that's what I call "opositionism", or opposing something just because it's unfashionable to be in accordance.

> The extremes to which you would want to go with free software is unatainable at best, and at worst, absolute insanity.

Please prove them so.

> I have not experienced this evilness of corporate which does not allow me to get my work done.

I don't know what's your field, but in the database industry is bad enough that people are bashing the only fundamentally sound approach to the field because they don't realise it was never attempted, instead Big Corp pushes SQL which is brain-damaged. If you don't have database education I won't ever be able to tell you how bad this is, neither in bad faith nor in consequences.

But even outside of IT, haven't you heard about the railroad tycoons, or the military industrial complex, or Enron, or the California energy crisis, or Microsoft? I can't provide you with every piece of reading that's good for your education, but for a starter you could read some Paul Krugman or some Bill Parish. But this is just the tip of the iceberg, much more can be said at the deeper cultural, even philosophical level. Then you will have to do deeper reading, from Plato & St Augustine to Francis A Schaeffer & Rookmaaker, along with their contradictors.

> philosophy means nothing without fact and proof

Well, show me where my own philosophy is lacking. I don't doubt it has lackings, as I am young enough and even elders aren't perfect, being human. But you never cared to disprove it.

> I have yet to come across a person who uses only free software and who's life has dramaticaly improved because of it.

That's show you are missing the whole point. Free software isn't pragmatical in the first place, even if we hope it will be eventually. It's idealistic. It's building a new future, with all the sacrifices that entails.

> it is a rare enough instance just to come across someone who uses all free software period.

Yes, and I've given you the reasons: unreasonable forking (because there is such a thing as reasonable forking too) and time wasted reverse engineering file formats, protocols & APIs which should be documented in the first place.

Anyway, free software is not about being popular -- not yet. We do know it's not yet fit for general consumption, and therefore we are far enough from World Domination(TM).

> When you show me the proof of corporate evil and rule. When you show me the proof of GNU Nirvana, then I will consider your position. But sending me link after link of propaganda is nothing more than that. Propaganda.

Now spare me the junk. These last phrases in your comment are just that, junk. If you can't do your reading and understand your own time and its signs, even yet don't ever go around calling names and putting words in other people's mouths.

See Stevan Harnad's page and SSRN for examples of progress. The problem is very simple: inertia. Scholars have no interest whatsoever in propretary journals. The web could totally replace scholarly publication. People make up all sorts of reasons not change, but that is the nature of people. It will happen. The objectors have to die off first.

The statement explains each of the accesses, which basically comes down to LeMenager testing Yale's security and getting in, then showing how he did it to others three times, then 8 accesses by "junior" members who then thought it was OK and were interested in whether certain students were accepted, and one more access they're not clear on (actually, they mention a total of 14 accesses from the admissions office, but I only count them explaining 13?). As expected, all of the accesses were _after_ the decisions letters were dropped off at the post office. More interestingly, LeMenager isn't being fired (on account of his 20 years of experience, it seems), but he is being moved out of the admissions office. For now, he's being moved to the Communications Office, and according to a local paper (this isn't in Tilghman's statement) his salary will remain the same as it was before.

Furthermore, there was a very interesting take on the fiasco published on Slate yesterday; go ahead and read the full story there. The independent author makes a strong case saying that the only reason Yale bothered to accuse Princeton of wrongdoing was that the Yale Daily Herald had discovered what was happened, and was about to make the report public; Yale wanted to distract attention away from their inadequate security, and did so by blaming Princeton.

I'm still curious as to three things:

1. Why did the editors post this blurb without indicating that independent investigators concluded that admissions director LeMenager intended only to check the security of Yale's website? The implication that he intended to spy on innocent applicants who entrusted him with their personal information is irresponsible.

   Quoth the press release.

   Mr. LeMenager entered the Yale site by using the name, birth date and social security number of a Princeton applicant who he thought might also have applied to Yale, fully expecting that he would then be asked for a password or an ID number. He was surprised to learn that there was no security beyond name, birth date and social security number.

   If LeMenager was actually committing "identity fraud" for fun and profit, why on earth would he tell Yale exactly what he did at an admissions conference in May? Read the source. LeMenager made the mistake of repeating the entry to demonstrate how it was done. That hardly qualifies him for dismissal. Quoth the press release.

   While we do not in any way condone these actions, there is no evidence that there was any intention on Mr. LeMenager's part to do anything other than test, and then demonstrate, the site's security or that he used confidential information for any other purpose.

   Lest we forget, Yale sat on this story for two months before releasing it. I've no idea why.

2. Given the sheer quantity of Slashdot wailing and chest-beating about the tragic propensity for computer-security whistleblowers to get reprimanded, sacked, or prosecuted, the sarcasm of the last paragraph of the blurb is unexpected, if not downright hypocritical.

3. I can understand why the mainstream news calls this a 'hack'. But Slashdot should know better. I'm not referring to the ESR/RMS "Editor, when you say hacker, you really mean cracker" lexicographic crusade -- I'm referring to the fact that using a name/SSN pair obtained legitimately (i.e., from an applicant who mailed it to you) to access a website is not "hacking" by even the most tortured definition of the term. It is social engineering, maybe. It is illegitimate, if done with malice, sure. But it is not "hacking."

I expected better from Slashdot.

Joe

I'm still curious as to three things:

1. Why did the editors post this blurb without indicating that independent investigators concluded that admissions director LeMenager intended only to check the security of Yale's website? The implication that he intended to spy on innocent applicants who entrusted him with their personal information is irresponsible.

   Quoth the press release.

   Mr. LeMenager entered the Yale site by using the name, birth date and social security number of a Princeton applicant who he thought might also have applied to Yale, fully expecting that he would then be asked for a password or an ID number. He was surprised to learn that there was no security beyond name, birth date and social security number.

   If LeMenager was actually committing "identity fraud" for fun and profit, why on earth would he tell Yale exactly what he did at an admissions conference in May? Read the source. LeMenager made the mistake of repeating the entry to demonstrate how it was done. That hardly qualifies him for dismissal. Quoth the press release.

   While we do not in any way condone these actions, there is no evidence that there was any intention on Mr. LeMenager's part to do anything other than test, and then demonstrate, the site's security or that he used confidential information for any other purpose.

   Lest we forget, Yale sat on this story for two months before releasing it. I've no idea why.

2. Given the sheer quantity of Slashdot wailing and chest-beating about the tragic propensity for computer-security whistleblowers to get reprimanded, sacked, or prosecuted, the sarcasm of the last paragraph of the blurb is unexpected, if not downright hypocritical.

3. I can understand why the mainstream news calls this a 'hack'. But Slashdot should know better. I'm not referring to the ESR/RMS "Editor, when you say hacker, you really mean cracker" lexicographic crusade -- I'm referring to the fact that using a name/SSN pair obtained legitimately (i.e., from an applicant who mailed it to you) to access a website is not "hacking" by even the most tortured definition of the term. It is social engineering, maybe. It is illegitimate, if done with malice, sure. But it is not "hacking."

I expected better from Slashdot.

Joe

I'm still curious as to three things:

1. Why did the editors post this blurb without indicating that independent investigators concluded that admissions director LeMenager intended only to check the security of Yale's website? The implication that he intended to spy on innocent applicants who entrusted him with their personal information is irresponsible.

   Quoth the press release.

   Mr. LeMenager entered the Yale site by using the name, birth date and social security number of a Princeton applicant who he thought might also have applied to Yale, fully expecting that he would then be asked for a password or an ID number. He was surprised to learn that there was no security beyond name, birth date and social security number.

   If LeMenager was actually committing "identity fraud" for fun and profit, why on earth would he tell Yale exactly what he did at an admissions conference in May? Read the source. LeMenager made the mistake of repeating the entry to demonstrate how it was done. That hardly qualifies him for dismissal. Quoth the press release.

   While we do not in any way condone these actions, there is no evidence that there was any intention on Mr. LeMenager's part to do anything other than test, and then demonstrate, the site's security or that he used confidential information for any other purpose.

   Lest we forget, Yale sat on this story for two months before releasing it. I've no idea why.

2. Given the sheer quantity of Slashdot wailing and chest-beating about the tragic propensity for computer-security whistleblowers to get reprimanded, sacked, or prosecuted, the sarcasm of the last paragraph of the blurb is unexpected, if not downright hypocritical.

3. I can understand why the mainstream news calls this a 'hack'. But Slashdot should know better. I'm not referring to the ESR/RMS "Editor, when you say hacker, you really mean cracker" lexicographic crusade -- I'm referring to the fact that using a name/SSN pair obtained legitimately (i.e., from an applicant who mailed it to you) to access a website is not "hacking" by even the most tortured definition of the term. It is social engineering, maybe. It is illegitimate, if done with malice, sure. But it is not "hacking."

I expected better from Slashdot.

Joe

I'm still curious as to three things:

1. Why did the editors post this blurb without indicating that independent investigators concluded that admissions director LeMenager intended only to check the security of Yale's website? The implication that he intended to spy on innocent applicants who entrusted him with their personal information is irresponsible.

   Quoth the press release.

   Mr. LeMenager entered the Yale site by using the name, birth date and social security number of a Princeton applicant who he thought might also have applied to Yale, fully expecting that he would then be asked for a password or an ID number. He was surprised to learn that there was no security beyond name, birth date and social security number.

   If LeMenager was actually committing "identity fraud" for fun and profit, why on earth would he tell Yale exactly what he did at an admissions conference in May? Read the source. LeMenager made the mistake of repeating the entry to demonstrate how it was done. That hardly qualifies him for dismissal. Quoth the press release.

   While we do not in any way condone these actions, there is no evidence that there was any intention on Mr. LeMenager's part to do anything other than test, and then demonstrate, the site's security or that he used confidential information for any other purpose.

   Lest we forget, Yale sat on this story for two months before releasing it. I've no idea why.

2. Given the sheer quantity of Slashdot wailing and chest-beating about the tragic propensity for computer-security whistleblowers to get reprimanded, sacked, or prosecuted, the sarcasm of the last paragraph of the blurb is unexpected, if not downright hypocritical.

3. I can understand why the mainstream news calls this a 'hack'. But Slashdot should know better. I'm not referring to the ESR/RMS "Editor, when you say hacker, you really mean cracker" lexicographic crusade -- I'm referring to the fact that using a name/SSN pair obtained legitimately (i.e., from an applicant who mailed it to you) to access a website is not "hacking" by even the most tortured definition of the term. It is social engineering, maybe. It is illegitimate, if done with malice, sure. But it is not "hacking."

I expected better from Slashdot.

Joe

But surely you were aware that removing a watermark is done to remove the security that the watermark was intended to impose and allow "unauthorized" access to it.

Q. Who are you?

We are a group of researchers studying computer security and digital watermarking.

Here's one

Here's two more

Another good resource: the Princeton Mathclub

The paper mentioned in the above article is available (full version) here

Extended version here

The paper mentioned in the above article is available (full version) here

Extended version here

I'm not sure if I would trust her paper given that she's got a 2MB .au file embedded in her homepage. That's no way to ease the load on the net.

Qin Lv, one of the researchers, was a TA in one of my classes last semester. She has a website, and the paper is posted there.

The paper that was presented, entitled Search and Replication in Unstructured Peer-to-Peer Networks, can be found here (top of the page)

I wonder just how well it can simulate Acts of God(tm). Or maybe they can tap into the Global Consciousness Project?

actually, a decision problem A is NP-Complete if every other problem in NP space is reducable to A. meaning that for any problem in NP space, there is a polynomial time algorithm which changes it into A... which is test by comparing the SAME input to A and the function modified by the polynomial time algorithm and showing them to result in the same truth table. (Cook, 1971). The TSP problem, a subset of the problems encompassed by computational complexity theory... In trying all possible routes, the number of given combinations is N! which is itself NP-Hard, but the decision aspect... given a the costs and the number of points is there a route cheaper than x? is NP Complete. For this and other TSP information, here's a good link you should review before accusing people of spouting 'complete bull'.

It's sad to see powerful corporations sinking billions of dollars and trillions of man-hours into a project that is literally a wild goose chase.

It has been demonstrated by mathematicians at Princeton that this kind of copy protection or digital watermarking is mathematically impossible. While "where there's a will, there's a way" sounds flippant and trite, the mathematical principle of seperability essentially states that content can always be extracted from its protected form.

These guys are chasing the elusive pot o' gold that's over the rainbow. Best of luck to them, but oh, what a waste of effort.

My favorite prof Perry Cook had a similar project going at one time: the Rbow.

Using the table on this page: http://www.princeton.edu/~conorneu/hdtv/basic.htm
This assumes a 65" diagonal screen.

For 4:3:
(3x)^2 + (4x)^2 = 4225
9x^2 + 16x^2 = 4225
25x^2 = 4225
x^2 = 169
x=13
That makes the screen height 39"
NTSC (interlaced) - back 156" (13 feet) to 273" (22 feet 9 inches)
SD DTV (progressive) - 97.5" (8 feet 1.5 inches)

For 16:9
(9x)^2 + (16x)^2 = 4225
81x^2 + 256x^2 = 4225
337x^2 = 4225
x^2 = 12.5370919881305637982195845697329
x = 3.54077561956848146706813581221355
That makes the screen height 31.9"
For HDTV - 79.75" (6 feet 7.75 inches)

Cartoon Law I

Any body suspended in space will remain in space until made aware of its situation.

Example

Daffy Duck steps off a cliff, expecting further pastureland. He loiters in midair, soliloquizing flippantly, until he chances to look down. At this point, the familiar principle of 32 feet per second squared takes over.

Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)

The quantum holography I was referring to is something completely different, where you perform holography with quantum entangled photons. I was afraid you might be referring to something like what you're talking about. As far as I know, the whole quantum uncertainty thing underlying brain function goes back to Sir John Eccles, a Nobel prize winning neurophysiologist who did some very good work, but was a very religious Catholic, IIRC. He desperately wanted to find God in the brain, and I think he was the first one to suggest it might be in some sort of quantum indeterminacy thing. He wrote a book with the philosopher Karl Popper (of "falsifiability" fame) called _The Self and Its Brain_ back in the late 70's where they discuss this. Then Roger Penrose came along and made a rather flawed argument as to why the human brain can do things that no computer can do in principle, and he's really the one these ideas are most commonly associated with now. Stuart Hameroff is a biologist who works on microtubules, and he's another person more directly associated with the whole microtubule hypothesis. A number of people outside of neuroscience believe these ideas, especially physicists who know very little about brain function. However, Penrose's argument suffers from a number of logical flaws (try typing "penrose wrong" into google), and Hameroff's arguments about the mechanism of action of gas anesthetics are laughable in light of huge amounts of ion channel data. Ultimately, no one knows if Penrose and Hameroff are right, as that's an empirical matter. But there's absolutely no experimental evidence or convincing theoretical reason to believe that they ARE right, other than the fact that many people desperately want them to be. And this makes sense--the whole notion that the brain is a mere machine subject to more boring laws of physics is something that threatens many people's self worth. Alternatively, there is decades of evidence supporting more conventional models of brain function. There are, of course, a few interesting anomalies. You will probably like this.

This comes from a Hank Wesselman [ph.d.] book - yet it's about the thing you try to repudate. The above statement comes however from the man who founded this organization [noetic.org] - an Apollo 14 astronaut and theoretical physicist. Theory? Maybe. But I want the proof either way, that is what science is about right?

I find it interesting that you think an astronaut/physicist would have insight into brain function than people who actually study the brain. Maybe we should start founding organizations to tell everyone the truth about how atoms behave and what's in outer space? At any rate, science is not about the "proof either way." When someone comes up with an interesting but highly implausible idea and they want other people to take it seriously, they have to have something more supporting it than "you can't prove it's wrong." Whatever that might be, Penrose, Mitchell (the founder of the organization you mentioned), and all those other people do not have it yet. Maybe they will someday, but I doubt it. The situation is much simpler for all the spoon-benders and mind-readers, who are consistently unable to demonstrate their abilities under controlled conditions.

As the Matrix lady says, that oughtta really bake your noodle. :^)

I bet these people will be raided very soon by the FBI.

This is a bit offtopic, so sue me.....but if I recall correctly, Princeton has a human-machine interaction lab. They don't study ergonomics or anything of that sort--it is more of a parapsychological type undertaking.

They do studies as to whether people miles away from a turing-type machine can make it spit out a 1 instead of a zero, or something like this. A bit strange for an institution of this sort to be promoting something that one would normally see on Sally Jesse!

In previous court testimony he has said that source code is free speach (see his public policy page). Yet he seems to be suggesting that Microsoft's private free speach can be regulated by law while others cannot. I want to have my cake and eat it too as well, but it seems to me that he has to pick one postion or the other.
K.

Human being have a strong tendency to treat inanimate objects as though they had sentience. Programmers talk about computers and even programs that way, but people do it to cars, boats, even vending machines. It makes it more difficult to actually tell if an entry is sentient.

Some of the results of the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research suggest why we behave this way, it improves the chances of our influencing the world.

http://www.math.princeton.edu/jfnj/texts_and_graph ics/erratum.txt

-Kevin

Major props. =) LSB radix sort is good too. O(1) insertion, O(1) search time is good.

Does google.com use B-trees or radix?

Wow, check this out... this could be adapted to the B-tree structure to make an awesome search engine!

I am a senior at Princeton University majoring in Comparative Literature. I play viola in the Princeton University Orchestra and I'm a member of Brown Co-op. I come from Ottawa, Ontario -- the capital of Canada!

This is a photo of me with my friends, Jenn Lord (left) and Maciek Hawrylak, at the Ottawa Exhibition.

Last year, I spent a semester studying at the Université de Paris.

My sister, Kathleen, is a freshman at Vassar College (yeah, I know, she's a dyke -- what can I do?). Click here to see a photo of Kathleen dressed up for a semi-formal.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting here is because I really want to start having heterosexual intercourse with some of you as opposed to lesbian relations with the girls on my hall. If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Luv, Jenny

I am a senior at Princeton University majoring in Comparative Literature. I play viola in the Princeton University Orchestra and I'm a member of Brown Co-op. I come from Ottawa, Ontario -- the capital of Canada!

This is a photo of me with my friends, Jenn Lord (left) and Maciek Hawrylak, at the Ottawa Exhibition.

Last year, I spent a semester studying at the Université de Paris.

My sister, Kathleen, is a freshman at Vassar College (yeah, I know, she's a dyke -- what can I do?). Click here to see a photo of Kathleen dressed up for a semi-formal.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting here is because I really want to start having heterosexual intercourse with some of you as opposed to lesbian relations with the girls on my hall. If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Luv, Jenny

I am a senior at Princeton University majoring in Comparative Literature. I play viola in the Princeton University Orchestra and I'm a member of Brown Co-op. I come from Ottawa, Ontario -- the capital of Canada!

This is a photo of me with my friends, Jenn Lord (left) and Maciek Hawrylak, at the Ottawa Exhibition.

Last year, I spent a semester studying at the Université de Paris.

My sister, Kathleen, is a freshman at Vassar College (yeah, I know, she's a dyke -- what can I do?). Click here to see a photo of Kathleen dressed up for a semi-formal.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting here is because I really want to start having heterosexual intercourse with some of you as opposed to lesbian relations with the girls on my hall. If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Luv, Jenny

Oh yeah, here's my email: jmaloney@princeton.edu

I am a senior at Princeton University majoring in Comparative Literature. I play viola in the Princeton University Orchestra and I'm a member of Brown Co-op. I come from Ottawa, Ontario -- the capital of Canada!

This is a photo of me with my friends, Jenn Lord (left) and Maciek Hawrylak, at the Ottawa Exhibition.

Last year, I spent a semester studying at the Université de Paris.

My sister, Kathleen, is a freshman at Vassar College (yeah, I know, she's a dyke -- what can I do?). Click here to see a photo of Kathleen dressed up for a semi-formal.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting here is because I really want to start having heterosexual intercourse with some of you as opposed to lesbian relations with the girls on my hall. If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Luv, Jenny

I am a senior at Princeton University majoring in Comparative Literature. I play viola in the Princeton University Orchestra and I'm a member of Brown Co-op. I come from Ottawa, Ontario -- the capital of Canada!

This is a photo of me with my friends, Jenn Lord (left) and Maciek Hawrylak, at the Ottawa Exhibition.

Last year, I spent a semester studying at the Université de Paris.

My sister, Kathleen, is a freshman at Vassar College (yeah, I know, she's a dyke -- what can I do?). Click here to see a photo of Kathleen dressed up for a semi-formal.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting here is because I really want to start having heterosexual intercourse with some of you as opposed to lesbian relations with the girls on my hall. If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Luv, Jenny

I am a senior at Princeton University majoring in Comparative Literature. I play viola in the Princeton University Orchestra and I'm a member of Brown Co-op. I come from Ottawa, Ontario -- the capital of Canada!

This is a photo of me with my friends, Jenn Lord (left) and Maciek Hawrylak, at the Ottawa Exhibition.

Last year, I spent a semester studying at the Université de Paris.

My sister, Kathleen, is a freshman at Vassar College (yeah, I know, she's a dyke -- what can I do?). Click here to see a photo of Kathleen dressed up for a semi-formal.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting here is because I really want to start having heterosexual intercourse with some of you as opposed to lesbian relations with the girls on my hall. If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Luv, Jenny

I am a senior at Princeton University majoring in Comparative Literature. I play viola in the Princeton University Orchestra and I'm a member of Brown Co-op. I come from Ottawa, Ontario -- the capital of Canada!

This is a photo of me with my friends, Jenn Lord (left) and Maciek Hawrylak, at the Ottawa Exhibition.

Last year, I spent a semester studying at the Université de Paris.

My sister, Kathleen, is a freshman at Vassar College (yeah, I know, she's a dyke -- what can I do?). Click here to see a photo of Kathleen dressed up for a semi-formal.

Anyway, the reason I'm posting here is because I really want to start having heterosexual intercourse with some of you as opposed to lesbian relations with the girls on my hall. If you're interested, don't hesitate to drop me a line!

Luv, Jenny

This isn't the first time some idiots masquerading as lawyers have tried to bully someone.

Warner Brother's staff counsel made the mistake of threatening Groucho Marx because he had announced a new movie with the name "Casablanca" in it. Here is Groucho's initial response... What's truly amazing is that Warner Brother's didn't understand how stupid they looked after getting Groucho's initial letter. The exchange continued for several more letters until somebody at Warner Brothers finally got the message.

Need a sig? Here, have this one...
Intel Hires Idiots

Posted by Michael Fraase, 3/23/02 at 9:54:46 PM.

When elephants dance, its best to get out of the way. Thats exactly whats happening now as the entertainment industrythe recording, publishing, and motion picture industries, mainlyattempts a worldwide intellectual property power grab with two distinct targets. Think of it: a coup and a lock on all published content in the same year, amazing isnt it?

Target number 1 is the average customer: anyone who purchases software, an audio CD, an electronic book, or a movie on DVD. The entertainment industry sees customers as pirates, plain and simple. In their collective minds eye, we all have a wooden leg, eye patch, and a filthy talking parrot on our shoulder. While the Constitution grants customers certain rights with regard to copyrighted material, the entertainment industry very much wants to separate us from those rights.

Target number 2 in the sights of the entertainment industry are technology behemoths like Microsoft, Intel, IBM, and Apple. These companies, in the perverse worldview of the entertainment industry, make the toolscomputers mostlythat allow customers to practice their piracy.

Let me point out that I am a copyright owner, as is everyone else who has ever created a work in tangible form. Thats all authors, for short. Authors are almost never members of the entertainment industry club. The entertainment industry hates authors almost as much as they hate customers. Sometimes, especially when authors get uppity, the entertainment industry hates authors much more than customers. Until recently, authors have always been seen to be at least a marginal threat while customers were seen as merely necessary annoyances.

To complicate matters by at least an order of magnitude, the consumer electronics manufacturersthe companies that make stereos, VCRs, and DVD playershave aligned with the entertainment industry. At least some of them, and at least to some extent.

Unfortunately for usboth authors and customerswere likely to get squished as these elephants dance. The intent of the entertainment industry, believe it or not, is to outlaw personal computers. As security and cryptography expert Bruce Schneier explains it to Mike Godwin: If you think about it, the entertainment industry does not want people to have computers; theyre too powerful, too flexible, and too extensible. They want people to have Internet Entertainment Platforms: televisions, VCRs, game consoles, etc.

Copy-protected CDs

The recording industry is selling shiny plastic discs that contain music that cant be copied to or even played on some customers equipment. Philips, the owner of the CD format says these discs cannot be called CDs because they do not meet the standard of what a CD is. Sony, one of those weird hybrid companies that, as a member in good standing of both the technology and entertainment industries, finds itself on both sides of this issue says it cant guarantee the audio quality of these discs. The technology used to protect these discs sometimes prevents the discs from playing on computer CD-ROM drives, DVD players, and other devices specifically designed to play standard audio CDs.

Sales of recorded music are down 10% in the United States over the last year. The recording industry blames this downturn not on the economic recession, not on the crappy music that theyve released in the past few years, but on Internet piracy.

And its only going to get worse. Hilary B. Rosen, president of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) told Congress on 28 February 2001 that the practice of copy-protecting audio CDs would expand in the United States. If technology can be used to pirate copyrighted content, Rosen wrote in her response to a Congressional query, shouldnt technology likewise be used to protect copyrighted content? Surely, no one can expect copyright owners to ignore what is happening in the marketplace and fail to protect their creative works because some people engage in copying just for their personal use. Her pal, Michael Eisner, head of Disney, said he was tired of being finessed by the technology industry, whatever that means.

Unfortunately for Eisner, Rosen, Disney, and the RIAA, personal useand more importantly the rights associated with that use of copyrighted materialis exactly why copying of copyrighted material is not just allowed, but mandated by the Constitution. That some individuals illegally sell copied CDs or distribute copies of the music on the Internet is immaterial. In fact, fairly casual observation indicates that if customers are treated like criminals they will indeed begin to behave like criminals.

It has become common practice for music-loving computer owners to legally transfer audio CDs they purchase to .mp3 format files on their computers. The copy protection technology employed by the recording industry prevents such transfers by adding distortions to the music of the recordings. The industry insists that these distortions are inaudible when the disc is played on a standard CD player but result in pops when the music is transferred to a computer. In any case, its usually impossible to tell whether or not a disc includes the copy protection technology; in general, the copy-protected discs are not labeled.

Ironically, or probably not, .mp3 player manufacturers could easily defeat the copy protection technology, but they fear doing so would risk prosecution under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) which prohibits the bypassing of copy protection systems. In 1999, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that .mp3 players did not violate copyright law because customers have the right to space shift music they have purchased.

Moral rights

Interestingly, the act of using the copy protection technology is much more prevalent in Europe. Most European countries, unlike the United States, recognize an artists moral rights in the work they create.

Moral rights are a package of intellectual property rights granted to the original creator of a work, and include:

• The right of integrity;
• The right of attribution;
• The right of disclosure;
• The right to withdraw or retract; and
• The right to reply to criticism.

These moral rights are separate from the economic copyright that these days generally transfers from an author to a publisher and they can survive the author. The idea originated with the French, who believe that any creative work, by definition, includes the personality and character of the author. Where copyright is a property right that can be transferred, moral rights are part of the authors personality and character and non-transferable.

The first two moral rightsthe right of integrity and the right of attributionare especially important because they are codified as international law in the Berne Convention. The United States claims its intellectual property law complies with the Berne Convention, but this is just two instances where it doesnt.

The most important of these rights is the first, the right of integrity. Basically it prohibits an authors work from being distorted in any way that would harm the authors reputation and dates to the 1957 French law of droit au respect de l'oeuvre. Its a safe bet that a cross-reference over which the author had no control would be seen as a distortion of the work.

Seemingly, in Europe at least, an artist could make an argument against the production of a copy-protected version of her work on the sole basis of moral rights. Especially in the case of an audio CD to which distortion is intentionally added by the publisher.

In the United States, Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) appears to be taking the point position in questioning the behavior of the entertainment industry. He believes that instead of using copyright to obtain fair compensation for the works theyve licensed, the copyright owner industryincluding the recording industryis attempting to exercise complete dominance and total control of the copyrighted work.

And just how much money does an artist receive in the form of royalties? Use Moses Avalons royalty calculator to figure it out.

A DMCA rewrite?

Representative Rick Boucher (D-Virginia) plans to introduce legislation that would regulateand maybe outright bancopy-protected compact discs. Boucher reportedly has concerns about customers buying copy-protected discs without knowing it and the compatibility problems inherent with the copy protection mechanism. In an interview with Wired News, Boucher said, The big problem initially is that consumers have no information that is complete and reliable about the disabilities which attend copy-protected CDs. These CDs will not play in DVD players, not play on personal computers (and) not even play on all CD players.

Boucher isnt talking about what kind of legislation he might introduce to accomplish his goal of protecting audio CD customers, and the possibilities are intriguing. At the simplest level, legislation may require copy-protected CDs to carry a warning label. At a more interesting level, Boucher may try to rewrite the DMCA. In fact, Boucher announced that he would introduce such legislation last July and reiterated his commitment to that approach in early March of this year.

Internet radio

Under the U.S. Copyright Offices interpretation of the DMCA, Internet radio may be a thing of the past. KFJC, KPIG, and RadioParadise may all be goners. Why is this tragic? Because any of these stations are orders of magnitude better than the sorry excuse for radio available on the traditional dial.

Internet radio is routing around an obsolete and unaccountable industrys safely padded environs and making a difference. Corporate radio sounds exactly the same from coast to coast because it is exactly the same. Sit and watch that website for a few minutes; if it doesnt nauseate you, itll damn sure hypnotize you.

Adding to the arsenal of tools deployed by big media is the Copyright Arbitration and Royalty Panel (CARP). CARP met secretly for the past several months and issued the CARP Report in late February. The keystone of this report is steep licensing fees for webcast music. Lets be clear: compulsory licensing is a good idea, consistent with the intent of copyright law. Usury licensing fees for small webcasters is not.

KPIG responded almost immediately with a plea to save the Pig from the digital slaughterhouse:

Independent webcasters such as KPIG are facing a grave threat to our existence. It may be an evil conspiracy on the part of the big record companies and corporate webcasters, ormore likelyits just a dumb mistake. In either case, KPIG could soon be liable for huge music usage fees ($5,000 - $10,000 per month) that would make it impossible for us to stay online. For background on the issue, see The Death of Web Radio? below and the SaveInternetRadio.org website.

Doc Searls, in his article Bizarre vs. Bazaar, eloquently sums up the combination of DMCA and CARP as the destruction of the Net as a commons and its replacement with a plumbing system for the distribution of content (a word hardly used in a shipping context before Big Media got all drooly over The Promise of The Net).

A brief history of copyright

Copyright, until this recent entertainment industry power-grab, has always been a delicatemaybe even precariousbalance between the rights of the author to benefit from his or her work for a short period of time and the rights of the rest of us to innovate and benefit from those works when they fall into the public domain.

The Constitution granted Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. Originally, the Copyright Act of 1790 established the limited times of copyright protection of 14 years with an option for the author to renew the copyright for an additional 14 years if he or she were still alive. That copyright term was good enough for the first 100 years of intellectual property in the United States. During the next 100 years, Congress extended the copyright term 11 times.

Certain uses of a protected work that would ordinarily be seen as infringing are specifically allowed for education, criticism, etc. These uses are allowed under the fair use provision. The core concept of fair use is that, in general, any use that does not exploit the commercial value of the original is permissible.

The fair use statute recognizes four criteria by which a use can be determined to be fair or unfair:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
2. The nature of the copyrighted work;
3. The amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted wok as a whole; and
4. The effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.

William S. Strong, in The Copyright Book: A Practical Guide , provides an interpretation for working writers:

As a general rule a critic or reporter should not quote at any one point more than two or three paragraphs of a book or journal article, a stanza of a poem, or a solitary chart or graph from a technical treatise.

The Net allows ordinary citizens to exercise their fair use rights in ways never imagined by the entertainment industry. Subsequently, the reaction is to pressure innovation by extending the copyright term for any given work. In October, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear a case that will likely determine the legitimacy of the most recent copyright term extension, the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998. This law extends the copyright term to the life of the author plus 70 years. In the case of works made for hire in which a corporation owns the copyright, the copyright term is now 95 years.

While one side of the entertainment industry was pushing, an activity that eventually became the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, the other side was pulling. That activity eventually resulted in the DMCA. Designed specifically to control the uses that can be made of published works, the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent copyright-protection technology. The result: the entertainment industry controls not only what you see and hear but the methods and devices with which you see and hear it. Even if the copy-protection is circumvented to enable the fair use of a published work, it is prohibited and deemed to be a criminal act.

Digital TV

According to Mike Godwin, digital television is the tipping point in the war between the entertainment and technology industries. Never mind that every time the entertainment industry shoots itself in the foot, the technology industry comes to its rescue. Remember in the 1970s when the movie industry was in a deep funk and that vampire Jack Valenti said that VCRs would kill it for good? As it turns out, the VCR revived the film industry. The film industry was failing not because of customer VCR usage but because they were putting out epically craptacular films. Just like the recording industry todaywhen in doubt blame those dang customers.

Anyway, Godwin says digital television is the flashpoint because its quality (technical, not artistic) is way too good and unlike DVDs, its unencrypted and has to stay unencrypted to be useful. Oh, and the pesky FCC regulations say that broadcast television signals must be sent unencrypted.

The purveyors of digital television think they have the answer: digital watermarks. They think thats the answer for the online distribution of music, and any other digital content as well. Unfortunately for them, in order for a watermark to be used to restrict copying of digital content, consumer devices used to play the content will have to have technology included thats capable of receiving those watermarks. That would require the cooperation of the technology industry, and that cooperation has not been forthcoming.

Godwin cites the theory of Edward Felten, a computer scientist at Princeton, holding that any sort of tagging system that is undetectable by the user will likely be easy to remove.

Digital rights management

Perhaps the weirdest part of all of this is that the technology industry is just as enamored of protecting intellectual property. Theyre just going about it in a minimally different way. Digital rights management (DRM) is the battle cry of the techheads. And where they differ from their entertainment industry brethren is the question of government mandates. The technology industry wants to lock up published content just as badly as the entertainment industry; they just dont want the government (or anyone else) telling them that they have to. Remember that the entertainment and technology industries both lobbied heavily in favor of the DMCA.

And then there are the schizoids, the companieslike AOL Time Warner and Sonythat are so large that they find themselves on both sides of the fence depending which way the wind blows.

SSSCA > CBDTPA

The Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA), kept on a leash but regularly trotted out by Senator Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina), chair of the Senate Commerce Committee, can best be thought of as a sort of appendix to the DCMA. It is clearly designed to further extend legal protections for digital content owned or licensed by enormous media conglomerates.

According to the draft language of the bill, it would be illegal to create or distribute any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies approved by the Commerce Department. Even though MIT professor and RSA Data Security co-founder Ron Rivest has referred to the proposed legislation as the Digital Rectal Thermometer Security Act its really just mandatory corporate welfare for media conglomerates subsidized by the actual creators and consumers of intellectual property.

Felony penalties for distributing copyrighted material without the certified security technologies fully enabled or using a computer that circumvents those technologies are up to five years in prison and fines up to US$500,000.

Even worse, the proposed legislation calls for manufacturers of digital devices and the media conglomerates to collaboratively develop a copy protection system. If, after two years, they cant come up with a mechanism both industries can live with, the federal government will specify a standard. Hollings bill fails to include the actual creators or users of content in any of the machinations.

Should we be surprised that four of Hollings top campaign donors are media conglomerates?

Predictably, the politicians split along party lines over the SSSCA. Or, more accurately, the split is along the lines of entertainment industry campaign contributions. Democrats, who received US$24.2 million in contributions from the entertainment industry tend to support the idea of legislating the protection of copyrighted material in digital form. Republicans, who received a relatively paltry US$13.3 million in entertainment industry contributions usually oppose the SSSCA, claiming it is too interventionist.

In mid-March 2002, the other shoe dropped. Senator Hollings, better known as the Senator from Disney, transformed the SSSCA into the Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA) and ceased his tip-toeing around. The CBDTPA is real legislation, and enjoys the support of five other co-authors: Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), John Breaux (D-Louisiana), Bill Nelson (D-Florida) and Dianne Feinstein (D-California). Just think, one more author and they could have been the seven dwarves. The CBDTPA would require all digital deviceseverything from fax machines to MP3 players and computers (as well as the software that runs on them)to be equipped with embedded copy protection schemes, approved by the federal government.

Whats most disturbing about this is relatively paltry sum it took to buy this legislation. During the 2002 election cycle, only two of the dirty half-dozen were in the top 20 recipients of soft money from the entertainment industry. So far in the 2002 election cycle, Hollings has received only US$19,000 and Stevens has taken only US$39,621. To get the real story, we have to look back several election cycles:

Senator

2002

2000

1998

1996

Total

Fritz Hollings (D-South Carolina)

$19,000

$32,750

$215,284

$43,300

$310,334

Ted Stevens (R-Alaska)

$39,621

$69,900

$109,521

Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii)

$49,852

$49,852

John Breaux (D-Louisiana)

$120,920

$120,920

Bill Nelson (D-Florida)

$47,550

N/A

N/A

$47,550

Dianne Feinstein (D-California)

$211,638

$211,638

$849,815

Theres no question why Fritz Hollings carried the water for this puppy, is there? But check those senatorial links in the table carefully because they tell the even bigger story of who the top contributing industries were for each politician. In every case, the entertainment industry scored big in the top 20 contributors for every Senator. And remember the 2002 campaign cycle isnt over yet. Not hardly.

So, how much does it cost to get your bill through the Senate? Looks to me like itll come in right around US$1 million.

Enter DigitalConsumer.org

The technology industry was quick to respond to the CBDTPA threat by launching DigitalConsumer.org and its attendant Consumer Technology Bill of Rights. Launched by two of the co-founders of Excite, DigitalConsumer.org is basically trying to protect the fair use rights of customers in digital media. The groups principles, outlined in the Bill of Rights are deceptively simple:

1. Users have the right to time-shift content that they have legally acquired.
2. Users have the right to space-shift content that they have legally acquired.
3. Users have the right to make backup copies of their content.
4. Users have the right to use legally acquired content on the platform of their choice.
5. Users have the right to translate legally acquired content into comparable formats.
6. Users have the right to use technology in order to achieve the rights previously mentioned.

The depth and breadth of support this lobbying group will receive remains to be seen. Some of the precepts are in direct conflict with the interests of some of the largest technology industry members. Microsoft, for example, almost certainly wants to be the digital rights management company of record and is none too keen on, say, items 2, 3, 4, and 5.

A solution

The solution is actually quite simple and requires only three steps:

1. Revert the term of copyright to 14 years, immediately and retroactive to all existing works.
2. Recognize moral rights in the works authors create, like every other civilized country on the planet. Make it immediate and retroactive to all existing works.
3. Prohibit any corporation from owning a copyright. Corporations create nothing; theyre consensual hallucinations and exist at our pleasure. I dont know about you, but Im not much pleased any more.

The basis of the problem is found in a single court ruling: Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad. In this 1886 dispute, the U.S. Supreme Court found that a private corporation was a natural person under the Constitution and enjoyed the same protections as a citizen under the Bill of Rights. Corporations from that point forward were granted all of the rights and freedoms of a private citizen, yet none of the responsibilities. We made a mistake; hey, shit happens. Its not too late to fix it.

Your 1980 English teacher might possibly even have read E. R. Dodds' The Greeks and the Irrational (1951) which, in addition to dismissing the vapor account as myth, gives a good statement of why it is irrelevant to trying to understand such phenomena:

As to the famous "vapours" to which the Pythia's inspiration was once confidently ascribed, they are a Hellenistic invention, as Wilamowitz was, I think, the first to point out [65]. Plutarch, who knew the facts, saw the difficulty of the vapour theory, and seems finally to have rejected it altogether; but like the Stoic philosophers, nineteenth-century scholars seized with relief on a nice solid materialist explanation. French excavations showed that there are to-day no vapours, and no chasm from which vapours could once have come [66]. Explanations of this type are really quite needless; if one or two living scholars still cling to them [67], it is only because they ignore the evidence of anthropology and abnormal psychology.

E. R. Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational, III: The Blessings of Madness, pp.73-4

The evidence supporting the "myth" is (relatively) new. Quite fascinating how geologist and author de Boer discovered the fissure in 1981 but, having read Plutarch, assumed it was already known and only in 1995 learned that it was not known to modern science while discussing it with archaeologist John R. Hale under the influence of some wine (which is when they resolved to team up and do a thourough investigation).

As an admirer of Dodds' scholarship, I also can't resist noting that of the 311 pages of the book, 129 comprise the 1099 annotations (three of which appeared in the citation above). Not quite hyperlinks, but enough in quantity and quality for me to judge him the Knuth of his field.

the computer is gradually becoming the instrument itself.

Gee, considering much of my CD collection has been computer music for almost a decade, I'm glad to see a mainstream article about it!

Computing machines have been used for music for quite some time. Other posters have mentioned the software like Reaktor, Absynth, FruityLoops, Max/MSP, Reason, etc, etc. Here are some random artists you can check out:

Richard Devine Uses Reaktor on several computers to create complex industrial electronic beats. His stuff is pretty unbelievable when you listen close to all the detail. He's written music for Nike ads recently so he's fairly accessible.

kid 606: An up-and-coming laptop punk. He's written silly stuff and serious stuff too and done at lot for the live electronic scene. He pretty much uses only Reaktor on a laptop as well. Look for the track " Catstep/My Kitten/Catnap Vatstep DSP Remix By Hrvatski" on your favorite music-sharing service, off his "Down With the Scene" album, you won't be disappointed! Or at least you'll laugh at the singing robot voice.

Autechre are the masters of abstract electronic music (imho). For the past few albums, they've slowly gravitated toward generative music (i.e., write a program to write the music). They use Max/MSP and other stuff (not entirely computers all the time). Their last album Confield is very abstract and almost unlistenable. But fascinating.

Taylor Deupree and his 12k label from New York are into the minimalist side of things, very minimal electronic noise, very art-school stuff. Some of 12k's stuff combines very well with the noise a computer makes, which I like to play when working so that my computer's fan noise is "remixed". Pretty cool if you're into the abstract. They use all sorts of software for their art.

Another Electronic Musician is a guy in the California scene who makes nice unpretencious (sp) electronic beats with Reaktor and other stuff.

Grooves magazine is one of many independent magazines on electronic music. If you see an issue at your local leftfield bookstore, flip through it. They review music software too.

There's plenty of academics into electronic music too. Paul Lansky is one off the top of my head. Several music schools have electronic music programs that use a lot of this software too (Berkeley uses Reason I believe).

So, there is a pretty huge scene for electronic music. There are plenty of young musicians who have chosen the laptop as their primary instrument, and don't even think twice about it.

This was my final year project thesis. Just remember the golden rule unstructured 2 structured == convert 2 XML I wrote a [very bad] program in C++/Perl/tcsh IPC=pipes to add XML tags to English, and then index them into a search engine which would use the lingual data stored in the XML tags to help the search.

NIST does a MASSIVE competition on this annually. I don't want to be an XML-buzzword whore <Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> (XML commando eats Green berets, C++, Java, Perl, COBOL for breakfast)</Arnold Schwarzenegger accent> but you can't beat XML for easily converting anything that you can make sense out of into computer readable format. Real h3cKoRs use SGML, but us underlings have to stick with things we can understand like XML. As for expandability, if we want to encode something else into the document, then just tag-it-and-go

It took me 200 hours to fish out all these links (before the Google days), I don't want anyone to have to waste as much time as I did feeding the search engines exotic foods. It's a year old so pardon me for the odd broken link, armed with these you could probably turn jello into XML ;-)

My favourite bookmarx
PROJect[21 links]
Beginners' Guide[13 links]
Berkeley Linguistics Dept. Course Summaries, general stuffzzzzzzzzzzzzzzCryptic IR Vocabulary defined
Explanations of weird words like hypernym zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHow do we produce and understand speech
How Inverted Files are Created - Univeristy of Berkeley zzzzzzzzzzzzzzNLP Univ. of Indiana, very good basics e.g. word sense d
Simple langauge - useful.... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWhat is Natural Language Processing, links
What is POS tagging........ zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguation defined
Word Sense Disambiguation in detail, scroll down far zzzzzzzzzzzzzzWord Sense Disambiguator - LOLITA (tested at MUC-7 and SENSEVAL competition as best)
XML for the absolute beginner

HTML, XML stuff + parsers[19 links]
Apache plug-in that uhhh does stuff with XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzConvert COM to XML
convert XML, HTML to Unix pipeable formats zzzzzzzzzzzzzzconverters to and from HTML
expat XML parser zzzzzzzzzzzzzzHTML Tidy - converts HTML 2 XML + source code!!
Parse DB (RDBMS, whatever) to XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPerl-XML Module List
PHP Manual XML parser functions - what the hell are they talking about, PHP Virtual M... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPublic SGML-XML Software
Pyxie - XML Processor for Python, Perl, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSGML+XML tools.org
The XML Resource Centre - massive number of links zzzzzzzzzzzzzzW4F wrapper - wrapper converts XML to HTML
XFlat - convert flat file into XML zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML Parsers and other XML stuff
XML.com - Parsers, etc. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzXML-Data Catalog System - uhhhh looks close
XTAL's general converter - convert anything 2 XML

other Background[8 links]
Is Linux ready for the Enterprise, scalable... zzzzzzzzzzzzzzLinux reliability
Linux Versus Windows NT, Mark(sysinternals bloke) zzzzzzzzzzzzzzPC reliability (pcworld)
SPEC - Standard Performance Evaluation Corp. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzSystems benchmarks
TPC - Transaction Processing Performance Council zzzzzzzzzzzzzzUnix Beats Back NT In EDA Workstation Arena
Proper TREC(-8) QA systems[2 links]

pg. 387 LIMSI-CNRS pretty deep parsing[2 links]
More links....
NLP, IR links - lots to corpii, etc.

pg. 575 U. of Ottawa and NRL (shit system, got 0%)[1 links]
LAKE Lab
pg. 607! University of Sheffield (crap system, but OPEN SOURCE!)[2 links]
GATE - FREE IE app w`source code
LaSIE - ER, coreference, template (cv)

pg. 617 Univ of Surrey (inconclusive matches)[2 links]
System Quirk - Or is this their search system..... Hmmmmmm
Univ of Surrey - pointers (hopefully this is their WILDER search system...)

SMU - Pg. 65[1 links]
Natural Language Processing Laboratory at SMU

Textract[2 links]
Cymfony - Technology
Textract - State of the Art Information Extraction

Xerox uhhhhh maybe[1 links]
Xerox Palo Alto Research Center
(OVERVIEW) 1999 TREC-8 Q&A Track Home Page
NLP bloke, Univ Sussex


Tcl-Tk[4 links] Tcl tutorial
Tcl-Tk Contributed Programs Index
Tcl-Tk Resources, sources
TclXML - manipulating XML using Tcl-Tk
Artificial Natural Language - Is this what I'm trying to parse into...
Comparison of Indexers - Prise vs. Inquery vs. MG, etc.
Eagles - Language Engineering Standards
Language Technology Group - lots of modules!
LDC - Linguistic Data Consortium, lots of corpora
Lexical Resources
Links 2 resources, indexers.....
Lots of IR stuff, University of uhhh
Managing Gigabytes Indexer
Managing Gigabytes Manuals and stuff
Htdig search system
NLP & IR (NLPIR, NIST) Group
OVERVIEW OF MUC-7-MET-2
Perl XML Indexing - XML search engine type thing
Phrasys Language Processing Software Components (money)
QA HCI bullshit
SIGIR - TREC-type thing, resources
SMART indexer system documentation
Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) Home Page
The Natural Language Software Registry
Thunderstone IE and IR products
WordNet - FREE DOWNLOADABLE lexical English database

Page created with URL+, nice utility for working with internet shortcuts

Yep, that's what we're talking about. Their data pipeline is described here.

• SDSS image gallery
  
• SDSS Project Book
• Astro's webpage

• SDSS image gallery
  
• SDSS Project Book
• Astro's webpage

Lcc32 - a free win32 Compiler and IDE. The source for lcc (which lcc32 is based on) is also available, and it's a neat little cross-compiler (even if the authors are now MS employees)

Couple of responses. First a sheepish apology for the terrible grammar/spelling of the original post. I was in rant mode.

> So, for starters, and since you are a trained taxonomist, what do you think is the fair ballpark >number of species on the planet?

I don't know. I agree with your questioning the total estimates of species, this is very difficult to do as far as I can tell. I will say that in the field there is a somewhat of a "law" (and I use that term in the most unscientific way) that states that every time you do a revision of a group of taxa you double that number of taxa in that group. So for instance I am revising a group that previously had 7 available species names and I now recognize over 20 taxa. A big reason this happens is that we have more specimens, that are better curated, and more powerful tools to observe those specimens. When the group I work with was last revised (around 100 years ago) they had no scanning electron micrographs, we do now...and they reveal a lot that was missed before.

In the family I work with there are over 4000 species estimated to occur (and I believe this to be accurate) and 2000 available species names. What is very important to note is that just because a name is *available* doesn't mean its describing a unique species. Of those 2000 available names, many are synonyms, describing the same species. So the answer to described/undescribed...easily less than half. Finding out names are good and which are not is very difficult. There are many laws that govern this. Note that a HUGE problems is that these laws only apply to "animal" names. Plant names use a completely different system. Want to catalog all the species? You have to reconcile more than one system of naming somehow.

As said elsewhere the number of total species will depend on the species definition. A phylogenetic species concept is commonly used for those who have no biological evidence available. Once more is understood about biology/ecology/DNA of the organism it frequently turns out that a finer level of resolution can be defined. For the purposes of the All Species they will undoubtedly use the phylogenetic species concept.

Does every expedition come up with new species? In the group I work with, almost always (how exciting!). I can take you to a location (of my choice), we can trap bugs for a day or so, I guarantee you we get an undescribed species in the group I work with. Not so for all areas, obviously impacted areas (e.g. crop fields) are depauperate. Also not so for new groups. Want to describe a new species of butterfly/long horned beetle in North America...very difficult to do because they are so popular and many people work on them (unless you work with micro-lepidoptera). Want to describe a new bird or chordate? Almost never.

There are such curves that you seek in some areas, and its frequently debated how they should be done. Its very well known that you capture the common widespread species first, the rare ones last, the payoff decreases exponentially, the more you know, that harder you have to work to get the new species. You may want to check out this book which has some modern, if not somewhat controversial ideas, about the subject, and lots of technical ideas on modeling the problem.

P.S. Look at the massive administration set up for All Species...and they hope to have a "pilot project" (read actual field work) within a year...my guess is it take 3 years before a single species is named from this initiative. Ask again how many of these luminaries listed on the people page are actually describing species now (many have in the past)? Call me a skeptic.

The best part about it is that it's a cheap solution -- you just add this weird "cat's-eye" type lens onto a normal telescope. This deflects all the light from the center of the frame away, but allows the light on the side of from to come in. This way, the light of the much brighter nearby star won't block out the smaller planet.

The Discovery article was pretty cool. This is the only equivalent I could find online.. Unfortunately it doesn't go into as much detail.

http://www.princeton.edu/pr/pwb/01/0416/6a.shtml

Same with compilers --- the open source crowd loves gcc. Hate to step on any toes but gcc is pretty sucky. Yes it is good for retargeting code, but the performance is terrible....

GCC will be going into the crapper as soon as somebody produces a good fast compiler for linux.

I should have looked this up first. My bad. Except I was right. See #10 on Brad Templeton's 10 myths about copyright. In fact this indicates (under the fair use section) that using a quote from a personal letter probably isn't even fair use.