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Stella Daily writes "When the cool kids make fun of the geeks, the results are often lacking in wit ('Hey, Four-Eyes!') or simply inaccurate. We've all heard the joke about the computer programmer who, when given the choice of transforming a frog into a beautiful princess with a kiss, declines, saying he has no need for a beautiful woman, 'but a talking frog is REALLY cool!'" Read on for the rest of Stella's brief review of Science Askew to find out whether insiders can do a better job. Science Askew: A Light-Hearted Look at the Scientific World author Donald E. Simanek and John C. Holden pages 310 publisher Institute of Physics Publishing rating 7 reviewer Stella Daily ISBN 0750307145 summary Geeks poking fun at themselves, with mixed success.

Whoever came up with that joke definitely doesn't know geeks, or he'd know that they most certainly do appreciate the opposite sex and that that programmer would have been all over the frog in a second. But when geeks make fun of themselves? Now that's something to see -- and Science Askew is a collection of just such humor. The jokes run the gamut from one-liner to extended essay, and almost every major branch of science is represented.

The great strength of Science Askew is that, unlike so many collections of humor about a particular group of people, these aren't just blonde jokes with "chemist" or "computer programmer" or "mathematician" substituted for the word "blonde." It's subject-specific humor -- and at its best, it's good for some serious belly laughs. (An example: "Never lend a geologist money. They consider a million years ago to be recent.") Most of the time, a specialized knowledge of a particular branch of science isn't necessary to get the jokes -- merely being a generalist geek is more than enough.

You'll find many old chestnuts gathered here, such as the "Ban Dihydrogen Monoxide!" essay, mixed in with original material by Donald Simanek and lesser-known pieces plucked from magazines. John Holden's illustrations, which range from the brilliantly funny to the incomprehensible, are sprinkled throughout.

Why does Science Askew rate only a 7? While it's nice to have so many science jokes gathered in one place, you're likely to have heard a good number of them before -- and even if you haven't, you can find them (and many more) for free here. While there is a significant amount of original and hard-to-find material, it tends to be of lesser quality than the stuff you can find on the Web. Thus, it's hard to justify the $30 price tag. Plus, as a chemist, I can't help but be miffed that there's no section for chemistry (though there are a few chemistry jokes scattered in other parts of the book). There's an entire 23-page chapter devoted to the life and times of a single fictitious scientist, so why not a chapter for the chemists?

When geeks lampoon each other, the results can be dangerously funny. Unfortunately, as Science Askew shows, the jokes can also fall flat -- but there's enough good material inside to make it worth a look.

You can purchase Science Askew from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

geoffsmith writes "Just stumbled upon an amazing search engine from Princeton where you can search for shapes. What separates this from something like Google Image Search is the fact that you can actually draw out the shape you are looking for on a little sketchpad. The sketchpad allows you to draw front, side, and top views to provide the search engine with a 3-dimensional construct of the shape."

D4C5CE writes "Following in the footsteps of his famous professor, in his paper "Evaluating New Copy-Prevention Techniques for Audio CDs" (yes, that's pure PS), which is one of many interesting contributions to the 2002 ACM Workshop on Digital Rights Management, Princeton student Alex Halderman takes apart (bit by bit, literally) the "tricks on tracks" employed by the music industry to frustrate fair use."

omega_cubed asks: "'You've successfully installed FreeBSD, now your computer is going to hang at boot up!' -- That was what I just recently suffered. I've been running Mandrake on my ThinkPad X20 for almost a year. But the lack of high speed internet connection over the summer prevented me from keeping up with the various patches/updates. Many services--sendmail, apache, etc.--were shutdown one by one because of security vulnerabilities. Recently I decided that instead of trying to catch all those patches I missed in the last few months, I might just as well do a clean install of FreeBSD. I've done what I think was all the preparations necessary: I backed-up all my files, checked all the hardwares for possible conflicts (on FreeBSD.org) and supports, downloaded the ISO image. And I decided the computer should be able to take it. Unfortunately, I didn't come across the old slashdot article reporting a possible conflict between IBM ThinkPad's BIOS and FreeBSD's filesystem. So last night, after much struggling, I installed FreeBSD. It finished, rebooted, and the computer now just hangs at bootup (here's a more detailed report on what happened). It doesn't even go into BIOS. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? Is there anyway I can update the BIOS? The diskettes provided IBM were not able to boot the computer, and I am at a loss here. Thanks."

An anonymous submitter writes "According to BBC News, researchers at Princeton have developed a die-stamp method for chip fabs. The Princeton site claims they've got to 10nm already. The professor in charge has told BBC News Online that they're '20 years ahead of Moore's Law.' Dubious claims aside, it looks like a handy way to bring down prices even if it doesn't improve ultimate top speed."

The redoubtable Stella Daily writes: "For many, the word 'chemistry' brings up deliberately suppressed memories of acid-base titrations and annoying stoichiometry problems. 'Nature's Building Blocks' by John Emsley has the singular ability to take chemistry out of the tedium of the high school lab and bring to the reader the sort of childlike wonder that pioneering chemists like Mendeleev and Lavoisier must have had when making their discoveries." She's got a bit more to say about this book, below. Nature's Building Blocks author John Emsley pages 539 publisher Oxford University Press rating 8 reviewer Stella Daily ISBN 0-19-850341-5 summary Bedtime stories for chemists

From actinium to zirconium, Emsley covers each of the elements of the periodic table in alphabetical order and includes a short section on the periodic table arrangement itself. Though the result looks rather formidable at 500-plus pages, Nature's Building Blocks is less like a college chemistry text (or the staple of every chemist's bookshelf, the CRC Handbook), than like a collection of bedtime stories. For one thing, the book need not be read front to back; just pick an element, any element, and start wherever you like; it's not even necessary to read any chapter beginning to end. Each is broken down into cleverly named subtopics such as "Human Element," "Economic Element," and by far the most fun, "Element of Surprise." Besides information on the history, uses, origin, and chemistry of each element -- all of which are a pleasure to read -- Emsley uses the "Element of Surprise" section to present the reader with facts that range from the commonsensical "I never thought of that!" variety to the utterly unexpected and fascinating. The gee-whiz quality with which he writes is truly refreshing.

The book demands about a high-school knowledge of chemistry, though many sections can be read without even that much, and even lifelong chemists will find it full of surprises. The stories and facts gathered therein include the clever way Niels Bohr is said to have hidden his gold Nobel Prize medal from the Nazis when he fled Germany, how nonstick Teflon sticks to aluminum frying pans, how magnetic mines work, how the British government accidentally killed 31 of its own citizens with silver iodide, and, in the "Who Knew?" category, the fact that a piece of indium metal lets out a high-pitched shriek when bent. As you read, don't be surprised to find yourself saying the words "Too cool" aloud fairly frequently.

So why does this book get an eight instead of a nine or ten? Unfortunately, Emsley is a lot better at talking about the elements' history, usage, etc. than he is about their chemistry. He often seems to be unsure of whether the reader is a knowledgeable chemist or reading about the subject for the first time; in the chapter on silicon, for example, he explains why silicon dioxide is a neutral compound -- a no-brainer for anyone who's had high school chemistry -- but two paragraphs later says that silicon is part of n- and p-type semiconductors without explaining what the heck an n- or p-type semiconductor is. Elsewhere, the text contains serious errors that any half-decent copy editor should have caught. The periodic table section of the book contains the phrase, "Most hydrogen atoms consist of a single proton." In context, he means hydrogen as opposed to deuterium or tritium, whose nuclei contain neutrons in addition to protons, but a hydrogen atom consists of a single proton and an electron; a single proton is a hydrogen ion. This sort of careless error is common enough to be seriously annoying (and possibly deceiving to the chemistry beginner).

Though it must be read with the proverbial grain of sodium chloride, Nature's Building Blocks is a worthy read indeed -- the kind of book that can get people excited about a subject that usually inspires groans and protests of "I hate chemistry!" And for that, this former chemist is grateful indeed.

You can purchase Nature's Building Blocks from bn.com. Want to see your own review here? Just read the book review guidelines, then use Slashdot's handy submission form.

BrianGa writes: "Yahoo news is reporting on Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt suggesting that the universe never began and will never end, driven forever to expand in a series of monster explosions and contract every eon or so in a cosmic crunch. This is directly contradictory to the big-bang theory. The model of the universe envisioned by Steinhardt sees the big bang as merely a turning point on an infinite road."

tsornin writes "The Philadelphia Inquirer reports in this article that Mars Society crews have chosen Wayne County, Utah as an effective simulant for the Red Planet. Although Mars exploration is hardly a high priority on any government's list at the moment, Robert Zubrin and other Mars Society members hope that through their research in Wayne County and in the even more remote northern Canadian location, they can show world governments that a mission to Mars is viable."

Odie writes: "Since the first discovery of a planet around another star in 1995, some 60+ planetary systems have been discovered. That's about one every two month, most of them uninhabitable Jupiter-sized heavyweights. Not much statistics to put in the Drake equation. Recently though, the OGLE team has come up with more than 42 new candidates. Nice in itself, but what is spectacular is that they spent only 32 days finding them! At that rate COROT should soon find plenty of worlds to explore for you budding Starfleet sailors! "

Stella Daily writes: "The unlikely subject of Ron Howard's film A Beautiful Mind , based on the 1998 Sylvia Nasar book of the same name, is John Forbes Nash Jr., a mathematical genius whose doctoral thesis earned him a Nobel Prize -- and a schizophrenia patient whose illness kept him out of the academic community for decades. The John Nash of the film is a brilliant young man who doesn't quite fit in, ignores his classes, is gawky with women and, above all, is consumed with a desire for an original idea. It is easy to like this Nash, with his Southern drawl and his earnest demeanor, and to sympathize with him as he fights his way back from insanity." Stella explains below why things aren't quite that simple. A Beautiful Mind author Sylvia Nasar pages 464 publisher Simon & Schuster rating 9 reviewer Stella Daily ISBN 0684819066 summary A beautifully written biography, more complex and troublesome than the film it inspired.

The John Nash of Nasar's biography, while less likable, is far more fascinating and multidimensional than his cinematic counterpart; he is a draft dodger, a vicious prankster (one practical joke of Nash's involved filling a light fixture with water, which could have electrocuted a hapless victim when he turned on the light), and an arrogant braggart.

Hollywood has whitewashed much from Nash's life; besides working to dodge the Korean War draft out of fears that it would hurt his career, Nash fathered an illegitimate son whom he refused to help care for, despite the fact that his own circumstances were far better than those of the child's mother. The woman he married, Alicia Larde, is portrayed in the film as the one and only love of Nash's life; no mention is made of their 1963 divorce. (Nearly forty years later, the couple remarried.) To read Nasar's biography is to discover fascinating episodes like Nash's stint in Europe, when he attempted several times to renounce his American citizenship and obtain political asylum, and his encounters with fellow patient and Pulitzer prizewinning poet Robert Lowell in a Massachusetts mental hospital.

The book is as absorbing a history lesson as it is a story; Nasar sets Nash's life beautifully in the context of his time. Nash's bisexuality, for example, was much more of an issue then than it would be now; while today many areas have laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation, in 1954 not only was it legal for employers to dismiss a homosexual employee, but any evidence of homosexuality was sufficient grounds to deprive a government employee of security clearance. Later, the reader learns of many once-credited treatments for mental illness, like insulin injections (thought to deprive the brain of sugar and thus kill off defective brain cells), colonic irrigation, and even "fever therapy," given by inoculating patients with malaria or typhoid. Nasar's description of the politics by which Nobel prizes are awarded, a process purposely shrouded in mystery by the various committees involved, is a particularly fascinating read. Her inclusion of these and other details paints a rich historical picture that's a pleasure to read.

The one thing missing from A Beautiful Mind is, of course, the voice of John Nash himself. Where possible, Nasar plucked quotes from his writings and the recollections of friends and colleagues, but Nash himself maintained, as he put it to a New York Times reporter, "a position of Swiss neutrality" toward his biographer. Throughout the extraordinary story of Nash's life -- his rapid rise to fame, his loves, his illness, his disappearance for decades from the academic community, and his recognition at last as a Nobel laureate, one wants to ask him, "What were you thinking?" Unfortunately, it's a question Nasar was unable to answer.

One true merit of the movie, so highly altered from Nash's real story (and, considered apart from the facts, it is both moving and interesting), is that it will undoubtedly inspire many to pick up Nasar's beautifully written biography. It's time to meet the real John Nash.

Want to see your own review here? Read the review guidelines first, then use Slashdot's webform.

Dr. Edward Felten is in a funny position -- or perhaps not so funny. He's the Princeton researcher who took up the challenge posed by the music industry to find flaws in the SMDI watermarking scheme, but didn't enter into the 'no-telling' bargain (here's the click-through agreement [pdf]) which would have made him eligible for a reward, so wasn't bound by non-disclosure terms. When a scheduled academic presentation on the weaknesses [pdf] that he and his colleages found in SDMI became the object of lawsuit threats from the RIAA, and caused him to cancel the planned presentation, Felten decided to turn the tables, and in cooperation with the EFF, sue them instead, for interfering with his scholarly research. Though he did eventually get to present his research, the legal action is still going. Dr. Felten is at a hearing today in Trenton, NJ, but he's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers. Please confine your questions carefully (one per post), and we'll pass the highest-moderated ones on for his answers.

Dr. Edward Felten is in a funny position -- or perhaps not so funny. He's the Princeton researcher who took up the challenge posed by the music industry to find flaws in the SMDI watermarking scheme, but didn't enter into the 'no-telling' bargain (here's the click-through agreement [pdf]) which would have made him eligible for a reward, so wasn't bound by non-disclosure terms. When a scheduled academic presentation on the weaknesses [pdf] that he and his colleages found in SDMI became the object of lawsuit threats from the RIAA, and caused him to cancel the planned presentation, Felten decided to turn the tables, and in cooperation with the EFF, sue them instead, for interfering with his scholarly research. Though he did eventually get to present his research, the legal action is still going. Dr. Felten is at a hearing today in Trenton, NJ, but he's agreed to answer questions from Slashdot readers. Please confine your questions carefully (one per post), and we'll pass the highest-moderated ones on for his answers.

Stella Daily writes: "Had Jonathan Tucker's Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox been released just a few months ago, it might have been of interest only to a few outside of the world of epidemiology, but now that anthrax scares have reawakened public interest in biowarfare, it's hardly surprising that Scourge has been flying off the shelves." Read on for the rest of her review of this sobering non-fiction technothriller. Scourge: The Once and Future Threat of Smallpox author Jonathan B. Tucker pages 291 publisher Atlantic Monthly Press rating 9 reviewer Stella Daily ISBN 0-87113-830-1 summary The history and potential horrors of a vanquished killer

Tucker clearly wrote the book believing that the use of smallpox as a biological weapon was a worrisome, but not especially likely, threat, and on September 10th, most of us would not only have concurred, but would probably never have thought that such a thing could happen; after all, smallpox remains the only infectious disease to have been eradicated by humans. After reading Scourge, you will be grateful that the mysterious sender of anthrax-laced mail doesn't have the power of this infinitely worse pestilence in his or her hands.

The smallpox virus, or variola, is a biscuit-shaped bundle of DNA and protein casing, so tiny it can only be viewed with an electron microscope, yet devastating to the human body. The disease kills up to thirty percent of its victims and leaves the rest permanently scarred after battling fever, nausea, and boils so painful that thirsty patients often refused water, unable to swallow without excruciating hurt. Perhaps to be merciful, Tucker has included no photographs of suffering victims covered in the gruesome pustules of the disease, but should you have a morbid curiosity to see one, visit the Polio Eradication Photo Gallery.

Scourge is not a story about a virus, however; it is a story about people. Tucker tells of the history of smallpox and civilizations, how political machinations combined with idealism to bring about the global cooperation that removed smallpox from the earth, and the elaborate subterfuge used by the Soviet Union to hide its research on smallpox as a potential biological weapon. Fans of Laurie Garrett's (The Coming Plague, Betrayal of Trust) journalistic style will appreciate Tucker's treatment; the major figures in the history of smallpox are presented in terms of their personalities and personal struggles, rather than in simple obituary-style listings of what they did.

In describing the early history of the disease, Scourge is fascinating. You may have known that smallpox helped Hernando Cortes conquer the Aztecs in the sixteenth century, but perhaps you didn't know that smallpox may have been the Athenian epidemic Thucydides describes in his account of the Peloponnesian war. The superstitions that existed prior to the germ theory of disease - and, in some areas, long enough to hinder the last stages of the smallpox eradication campaign in the late 1970s - seem truly impossible now, but such was belief prior to the germ theory of disease.

The conquering of smallpox remains one of the great triumphs of mankind - the only infectious disease successfully eradicated by humans. The history of the eradication campaign is one of cooperation between nations and between scientists, but it is also a story of obstacles placed in the way by reluctant governments, the rapid spread of disease due to world travel, and the stubbornness of the superstitious. Here, you will meet such figures as D.A. Henderson, the reluctant leader of the World Health Organization campaign, and Viktor Zhdanov, the man who first proposed a global eradication campaign to the WHO in 1958, then, ironically, became the first chairman of the Soviet council that oversaw the secret biowarfare program beginning in the 1970s.

The clash between the traditional openness of the scientific community, where information is shared relatively freely, and the secretiveness of bureaucracies, where being in the know is a mark of power, is a recurring theme. Often, you'll find yourself rooting for the researchers, who frequently had to reason with government officials who knew nothing about science, but you may be surprised to find yourself agreeing with the government - specifically, the Department of Defense - a time or two.

The story of the Soviet Union's successful cover-up of its research into the use of smallpox as a biological weapon is unsettling, to say the least. Do you find the aftermath of a nuclear bomb impressive? Imagine that bomb followed by an ICBM bearing smallpox - a disease that kills nearly a third of its victims in a normal situation, but would be attacking survivors of a nuclear attack, whose immune systems would be severely compromised by radiation damage. Lest you think that earlier vaccinations might have helped, the smallpox vaccine is effective for only about ten years before revaccination is required, and the United States had stopped mandatory vaccinations long before the last known case of naturally occurring smallpox was diagnosed in 1978. Such a warhead was one of the foci of the Soviet program, even as facilities were carefully disguised so as to give the appearance of compliance with the Biological Weapons Convention treaty. Western governments did not learn of the full scope of the Soviet effort until 1989, and kept the information classified until former Soviet smallpox research scientist Ken Alibek (ne Kanatjan Alibekov) told the story to the American press in 1998.

Although, officially, the last remaining stores of variola virus are kept in Moscow and at the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta, Tucker raises the possibility that other governments - particularly Iraq - may have retained secret stores of smallpox virus, citing enough circumstantial evidence to keep his speculation from being easily discounted. He also brings up the possibility that a government might, to avoid the certain retaliation that would come from launching a smallpox attack, supply the virus to a group like al-Qaeda, then deny responsibility when the terrorists release the disease. Tucker finished documenting these speculations well before the September 11th attacks; now, one hopes they aren't prophetic.

In the case of smallpox, the truth is as morbidly fascinating as any fiction could possibly be, and Tucker tells the story of those who fought to end the scourge and those who would have preserved it as a weapon with equal aplomb, yet from the perspective of a world where smallpox was a piece of history and sophisticated biological attack a back-burner phenomenon. Now that fears of biological warfare are all too real, Scourge is exceptionally relevant - and hopefully not a prediction of what is to come.

You can purchase this book at Fatbrain.

The first direct legal challenge to the DMCA was filed at 9 a.m. EDT today by EFF-sponsored attorneys at the United States District Court in Trenton, New Jersey on behalf of Princeton Professor Edward W. Felten and others who helped crack a series of digital watermarking schemes as part of an SDMI Challenge sponsored by the RIAA. Named defendents include the RIAA, SDMI, Verance Corporation (producer of one of the cracked watermarked schemes) and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

If this were a movie, it might be called "Saving Professor Felten" and would open with thunder and bombast. In real life, filing a civil suit in a federal court is one of the most boring activities imaginable, even though it's a necessary first step in the process of overturning the DMCA.

Gino J. Scarselli, Outside Lead Counsel for EFF on the case, says, "We got to the courthouse at 8:30, filed around 9, and made motions to seal exhibits to the complaints." As explained in the Complaint itself, EFF filed several of their Exhibits with requests for them to be sealed, because they believe publication of them may invite a lawsuit. The Exhibits to be sealed are Professor Felten's completed paper for the upcoming USENIX conference, and two documents written by Princeton post-grad Min Wu about the investigation performed by Felten's team against the SDMI watermarks.

It was an overcast day in Trenton. Scarselli, along with local (New Jersey) attorneys Grayson Barber and Frank Corrado, and two of the plaintiffs, Princeton residents Bede Liu and Min Wu, went through a metal detector just like anyone else (aside from staff) who enters a courthouse these days.

Scarselli says, "the only person we talked to was a law clerk." Neither the defendants nor any lawyers representing them were present. There will be plenty of conflict later, but the opening round of this drama was so low-key that it was a total yawner for all involved parties. The whole thing was over by 9:45 a.m.

The Complaint Itself, Very Briefly

Prof. Felten and others, mostly professors and graduate students from Princeton and Rice Universities, accepted the SDMI challenge to crack a specific set of digital watermarks, but instead of turning their results over to SDMI in hopes of winning the $10,000 prize offered for a successful crack, they chose instead to publish their findings in the form of an academic paper, and to present that paper at the Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop [IHW], held in Pittsburgh on April 25-27, 2001. Felten and crew believed they had every right to present their research in this public, peer-reviewed scientific forum even though they had accepted a "click through" agreement before taking on the SDMI challenge, in large part because the license to which they agreed with their click contained these words:

"You may, of course, elect not to receive compensation, in which event you will not be required to sign a separate document or assign any of your intellectual property rights, although you are still encouraged to submit details of your attack."

Despite this, SDMI threatened Felten and the other involved parties, including IHW organizers, with legal action under the DMCA. After a long series of emails between Felten, his fellow researchers, IHW people, a representative of Verance Corp., and an attorney who works for both SDMI and RIAA, the original paper, "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge," was first modified, then finally withdrawn.

Now Felten and friends plan to present the same paper at a USENIX Security Symposium in Washington, D.C. on August 13-17, and are asking the court to tell the defendants not to sue or threaten legal action over this new publication or any other publication, and to tell the U.S. Department of Justice, run by Attorney General John Ashcroft, not to file criminal charges against USENIX or anyone else over this matter under the DMCA. As it says in the complaint:

68. In chilling publication, the DMCA wreaks havoc in the marketplace of ideas, not only the right to speak, but the right to receive information -- the right to learn. The main mission of USENIX is to organize forums where scientists and researchers learn from each other. By intimidating the individual plaintiffs into withdrawing their paper from the IHW, however, the private Defendants prevented people from learning. If the source of Defendants' power to threaten, the DMCA, is not dispelled, Plaintiffs will not be the only victims. Without full and open access to research in areas potentially covered by the DMCA, scientists and programmers working in those areas cannot exchange ideas and fully develop their own research. As a consequence, the DMCA will harm science.

69. By imposing civil and criminal liability for publishing speech (including computer code) about technologies of access and copy control measures and copyright management information systems, the challenged DMCA provisions impermissibly restrict freedom of speech and of the press, academic freedom and other rights secured by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

This is just a brief "taste" of what the complaint says. Full text is available here.

The Press Conference

It was held at noon Eastern time, in person simultaneously at EFF headquarters in San Francisco and at a room borrowed from Princeton University. A few reporters were at EFF headquarters in person, but most of us dialed in and participated by phone. The media turnout was impressive; reporters from the Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, AP, NPR, Reuters, Wired, and other major news outlets showed up, which was nice to see; Slashdot has been rather lonely in covering many DMCA matters and complaints. It was nice to see so many "mainstream" pressies finally paying attention.

Felten was in San Francisco. So was most of the legal crowd. USENIX Board member Avi Rubin was on the conference call telephone. The Princeton contingent was tiny, composed only of the people who had been at the court house earlier. EFF legal director Cindy Cohn opened the show from San Francisco with a rehash of the events leading up to the suit, most of which I recapped above. (You can find more information here.)

Felten spoke briefly. The basic thrust of his prepared speech can be summed up thusly: "We are asking the government to let us do what scientists have always done -- share the results of our research."

The USENIX people noted that they hold many conferences and may be subject to both civil suits and criminal prosecution if they publish papers DMCA legal threateners (like SDMI and RIAA) don't like, and view this suit as an attempt to maintain their First Amendment rights to freely distribute technical and scientific information to USENIX members and other interested parties.

Then the press questions began. The first dozen covered ground that is familiar to most regular Slashdot readers. There is no point in rehashing these questions when a Slashdot search for "SDMI + DMCA" or just "DMCA" will give answers to every one of them.

Then Hiawatha Bray, a tech columnist for the Boston Globe, wanted to know if the case would be dropped if the SDMI and/or RIAA decide to stop hassling Felten and USENIX. The attorneys said "No." Their point here is to prevent both private companies and the DoJ from bringing DMCA threats not only against the SDMI crack researchers but against anyone who might go through the same sort of ordeal in the future, so a settlement that affected only this case would not cause the EFF to drop it. Other questions and answers followed, but again, long-time Slashdot readers already know most of them, so we won't repeat them here.

Follow the Money

Ms. Cohn says the cost of this suit, "if fully litigated," could easily reach $2 million. She estimates that the EFF-sponsored 2600 DeCSS defense has already cost nearly $1.5 million, and that suit is still cranking up the appeals chain. She also says -- yes, this is a plug -- that Slashdot readers who want to donate money to help fund all this expensive legal action can check out the EFF Web site.

(Here's the EFF membership/donation page if you'd like to whip out your credit card and pop a few bucks their way; they need all they can get!)

This is Just the Beginning

Now, basically, we sit and wait. The lawyers do lawyer-dances involving lots of paperwork. Discovery motions pass back and forth. Amicus briefs get filed. A hearing date gets set, then there's a hearing, and another hearing, and so on.

The 2600/DeCSS case has been going on for a year and a half and still isn't over. This one is likely to drag out even more. Even if Prof. Felten, his associates, and USENIX win all the relief they seek, chances are high that the RIAA, SDMI or at least one of the other defendants will appeal -- and keep appealing all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

For more info, read the EFF Press Release

pjones writes: "This just in! Open Source is bad for companies and countries too. In a New York Times article (registration required), John Markoff reports that: "In a speech defending Microsoft's business model, to be given on Thursday at the Stern School of Business at New York University, Craig Mundie, a senior vice president at Microsoft and one of its software strategists, will argue that the company already follows the best attributes of the open-source model by sharing the original programmer's instructions, or source code, more widely than is generally realized." Singled out for particular rebuke and scorn are IBM and the famous GPL and its author Richard Stallman. Who will be there to cheer Craig on?" See also ESR's dispatch on same. (Read below for update with time and place.)

Update: 05/03 01:55 PM by T : cananian points to this announcement on time and place. The upshot: from noon to 1:30 p.m, in room 1-70 of NYU's Kaufman Management Center (KMEC), 44 West 4th Street.

John Langford sent in the statement read by Dr. Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, who decided to skip presenting the paper he co-authored at a scientific conference due to legal threats made by the RIAA. The RIAA put out an open challenge in September 2000, requesting that researchers attack and crack the SDMI watermarking scheme, but demanded that anyone who researched the scheme suppress their results in order to be eligible for a cash prize. "Show off your skills", they said, but they didn't mean it. Felten and colleagues declined the cash prize and its accompanying restrictions, but have been threatened anyway - the RIAA would have brought a lawsuit claiming the research paper is a circumvention device forbidden by the DMCA, much like the DeCSS case.

Statement read by Edward W. Felten
Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop
Pittsburgh, PA
April 26, 2001

"On behalf of the authors of the paper "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge," I am disappointed to tell you that we will not be presenting our paper today.

Our paper was submitted via the normal academic peer-review process. The reviewers, who were chosen for their scientific reputations and credentials, enthusiastically recommended the paper for publication, due to their judgment of the paper's scientific merit.

Nevertheless, the Recording Industry Association of America, the SDMI Foundation, and the Verance Corporation threatened to bring a lawsuit if we proceeded with our presentation or the publication of our paper. Threats were made against the authors, against the conference organizers, and against their respective employers.

Litigation is costly, time-consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the other side's case. Ultimately we, the authors, reached a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers to litigation at this time.

We remain committed to free speech and to the value of scientific debate to our country and the world. We believe that people benefit from learning the truth about the products they are asked to buy. We will continue to fight for these values, and for the right to publish our paper.

We look forward to the day when we can present the results of our research to you, our colleagues, through the normal scientific publication process, so that you can judge our work for yourselves."

John Langford sent in the statement read by Dr. Edward Felten, a professor at Princeton University, who decided to skip presenting the paper he co-authored at a scientific conference due to legal threats made by the RIAA. The RIAA put out an open challenge in September 2000, requesting that researchers attack and crack the SDMI watermarking scheme, but demanded that anyone who researched the scheme suppress their results in order to be eligible for a cash prize. "Show off your skills", they said, but they didn't mean it. Felten and colleagues declined the cash prize and its accompanying restrictions, but have been threatened anyway - the RIAA would have brought a lawsuit claiming the research paper is a circumvention device forbidden by the DMCA, much like the DeCSS case.

Statement read by Edward W. Felten
Fourth International Information Hiding Workshop
Pittsburgh, PA
April 26, 2001

"On behalf of the authors of the paper "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge," I am disappointed to tell you that we will not be presenting our paper today.

Our paper was submitted via the normal academic peer-review process. The reviewers, who were chosen for their scientific reputations and credentials, enthusiastically recommended the paper for publication, due to their judgment of the paper's scientific merit.

Nevertheless, the Recording Industry Association of America, the SDMI Foundation, and the Verance Corporation threatened to bring a lawsuit if we proceeded with our presentation or the publication of our paper. Threats were made against the authors, against the conference organizers, and against their respective employers.

Litigation is costly, time-consuming, and uncertain, regardless of the merits of the other side's case. Ultimately we, the authors, reached a collective decision not to expose ourselves, our employers, and the conference organizers to litigation at this time.

We remain committed to free speech and to the value of scientific debate to our country and the world. We believe that people benefit from learning the truth about the products they are asked to buy. We will continue to fight for these values, and for the right to publish our paper.

We look forward to the day when we can present the results of our research to you, our colleagues, through the normal scientific publication process, so that you can judge our work for yourselves."

ssimpson writes "Everyone has probably forgotten the SDMI challenge to hackers to try to break a handful of proposed watermarking and "other" protection mechanisms? Well, it was recognised that a group of researchers at Princeton University broke all of the protection mechanisms and were due to publish a paper on at the 4th International Information Hiding Workshop (25-29 April) but have been threatened with the DMCA if they publish the results. So much for academic freedom, eh? SDMI seem particularly upset because one of the protection mechanims broken in the paper, The Verance Watermark, is currently used for DVD-Audio and SDMI Phase I products. Oops. Somehow, a copy of the threatening letter and the full paper entitled "Reading Between the Lines: Lessons from the SDMI Challenge" has appeared on John Young's excellent Cryptome site. SMDI's urge to "withdraw the paper submitted for the upcoming Information Hiding Workshop, assure that it is removed from the Workshop distribution materials and destroyed, and avoid a public discussion of confidential information." seems a little weak now...."

You're probably familiar with the conventional wisdom that online interactions can lead to a polarization of ideas and of people, by encouraging a culture and attitude of constant reinforcement of already-held ideas. Freematt (Matthew Gaylor) presents below a critical reaction to the interventionism Cass Sunstein proposes to counteract this perceived trend in Republic.com.

Republic.Com author Cass Sunstein pages 224 publisher Princeton University Press rating 6 reviewer Freematt (Matthew Gaylor) ISBN 0-691-07025-3 summary Sunstein argues for greater government involvement as a way to encourage societal cohesion in an age of "cybercascades."

Cass Sunstein is the Karl N. Llewellyn Distinguished Service Professor of Jurisprudence at the University of Chicago Law School and Department of Political Science. A former law clerk for Justice Thurgood Marshall, he has worked for the Office of Legal Counsel in the US Department of Justice.

His former works include: "Democracy and the Problem of Free Speech" (1993), which won the Goldsmith Prize from Harvard for the best book on free speech in that year. "After the Rights Revolution" (1990), "The Partial Constitution" (1993), "Free Markets and Social Justice" (1997), and "One Case at a Time: Judicial Minimalism on the Supreme Court" (1999). His writings have appeared in the New York Times, and the New Republic. He has also appeared on ABC's Nightline, the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, NBC and CBS evening news and other programming.

In "Republic.Com" Cass Sunstein makes the point that in cyberspace individuals now have the ability to filter out everything they don't want to read or see and filter in only those whose opinions they agree with. He calls this the "Daily Me", the ability to filter only the issues that concern you, read only the op-eds that only share your point of view. In short he fears that the Internet will bring about a lack of diversity and will amplify extremism and hate groups (Whatever that means). He writes of "cybercascades" that brings groups of people together who share similar viewpoints, a process that in turn causes group polarization and radicalization.

For example, he says, "a group whose members lean against gun control will, in discussion, provide a wide range of arguments against gun control, and the arguments made for gun control will be both fewer and weaker. The group's members, to the extent that they shift, will shift toward a more extreme position against gun control. And the group as a whole, if a group decision is required, will move not to the median position, but to a more extreme point." (Chapter 3, pages 67 68)

He does his argument great damage by using as an example of a hate and extremist group the usual left-wing target, The National Rifle Association (NRA) He trots out the usual suspects such as Skinheads and the KKK and fails to mention any of the other hate groups such as American supporters of Peru's shining path, environmental terrorists who spike logging areas, World Trade Organization protestors/rioters or other left wing extremists. In Chapter three Sunstein speaks of the gun rights movement alongside the KKK, God Hates Fags, and other hate groups in what can only be considered an attempt at guilt by association.

In Chapter seven, Sunstein writes: "FREE SPEECH IS NOT AN ABSOLUTE," -- his caps. In fact, he repeats this line several times throughout the book. He continues: "We can identify some flaws in the emerging view of the First Amendment by investigating the idea that the free speech guarantee is "an absolute", in the specific sense that government may not regulate speech at all. This view plays a large role in public debate, and in some ways it is a salutary myth." He mentions the usual examples of child pornography, copyright and threats to assassinate the President as examples of the government restricting speech. He creates what I consider a straw-man argument by prefacing these remarks for his "Policies and Proposals" in Chapter eight.

He laments the fact that in a four-station universe the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) had a significant voice. But with the advent of programming with hundreds of choices, the justification for PBS is diluted.

As a partial solution he endorses Andrew Shapiro's suggestion from the book The Control Revolution that the government should support a public website, Public.Net. Sunstein writes: "Public.Net would provide an icon, visible on your home computer. You would be under no obligation to click on it; indeed in a free society perhaps you should be permitted to remove the icon if you really do not like it." He envisions Public.Net to include sections on the "environment, civil rights, gun control, foreign affairs, and so forth." (Chapter 8, page 181)

But what I find most troubling is his idea to require websites to maintain hyperlinks to those with differing viewpoints. His example on page 188:

"We might easily imagine a situation in which textual references to organizations or institutions are hyperlinks, so that if, for example, a conservative magazine such as the National Review refers to the World Wildlife Fund or Environmental Defence, it also allows readers instant access to their sites."

Sunstein continues: "To the extent that sites do not do this, voluntary self regulation through cooperative agreements might do the job. If these routes do not work, it would be worthwhile considering content-neutral regulation, designed to ensure more in the way of both links and hyperlinks."

Princeton sent me a free review copy of Republic.Com; I'm glad they did as I would have been highly upset to have paid money for it. I can understand why Professor Sunstein makes the suggestions he does. In my opinion it has less to do with wanting to expand free and open discourse and more to do with control. Who gets to decide which links get to be included as "opposing viewpoints"? I did note that many of Sunstein's examples involved a right wing organization being forced to carry left wing links.

The celebrated civil libertarian, John Stuart Mill, contended that enlightened judgment is possible only if one considers all facts and ideas, from whatever source, and tests one's own conclusions against opposing views. Therefore, all points of view -- even those that are "bad" or socially harmful -- should be represented in the "marketplace of ideas." And the Internet is an incredibly free and eclectic smorgasbord of ideas. And just as we have freedom to choose which sites we visit or what print magazines or books we read, it would be the end of freedom as we know it if the government forced us to read or watch what they want, even if it were only a link. Thanks, but no thanks to Republic.Com.

You can read the first chapter online for free. You can also purchase this book at ThinkGeek. You may also be interested in Cass Sunstein's Homepage.

thelaw writes: "SecurityFocus just announced the start of their new service, ARIS (Attack Registry and Intelligence Service) Analyzer. The service allows you to submit logs from several different intrusion detection systems automatically and quasi-anonymously. Looking at the front page, they seem to have over 700,000 incidents already reported since starting."

jmsohn wrote in with a link to a press release announcing the launch of Wasabi Systems, formed to provide a commercial channel for sales, support, and service for NetBSD. With me in the Usenix terminal room is Perry Metzger, NetBSD's release engineer, and CEO of the new company, to talk about the company's plans.

N: How long have you been working on this?

P: A couple of months now. Things have moved far faster than we expected. For years we've been hoping that someone would stand up and do this, and no one did. It's a shame that no one's stood up to provide sales and support. There's no central place to get customization done, which is important for some of the commercial users who are using NetBSD in embedded systems, companies like Geocast, or IBM's Network Computer.

We're trying to be Cygnus of this space, rather than the RedHat.

N: How big is the company at the moment?

P: We're in the startup phase. We've got a few people who have already signed contracts, and a few people we're in negotiations with. The non-technical staff is relatively small at the moment, three to four people, the technical staff is larger, and growing pretty fast.

N: So you're hiring now?

P: We're very actively hiring. We're looking for developers, people to do support stuff for NetBSD using clients, infrastructure consulting for NetBSD using clients. We're tapping the NetBSD developer community right now, but we're looking for people who are good above everything else. Contact information is on the website, or just get in touch with me directly.

N: Why Wasabi?

P: It's a neat name. When all the bad names are already taken, why not use a good one? <laughs> We're a hot young company.

N: Are you going to be selling NetBSD on CD?

P: Yes. 1.4.3 on CD within a few weeks when the project releases it. 1.5 as well, which is expected at the end of September (when the RSA patent expires. . .)

We'll be doing a multi-CD release, and probably a couple of different CD options depending on what people want. We have to release for 29 different architectures, which complicates things.

N: How many NetBSD project members are involved in Wasabi?

P: At the moment we have a couple of members from -core, and most of the people involved are developers. We also have a couple of non-NetBSD developers involved.

N: If clients approach you for NetBSD development are you making sure that it's going to be released under the BSD license?

P: Everything that we can we will. There will be instances where clients come to us for work that will be used in house, or is uninteresting. But we're unequivocably an open-source company, and we want to release virtually everything we do as open source.

N: NetBSD is very community led. How is Wasabi going to be contributing back to the community?

P: We're members of the community ourselves. It's in our interests to help out the community where possible. This might mean covering developer's conference fees, hardware costs, all sorts of things. Whatever we need to do to eliminate barriers to improving the system.

N: Any plans for other NetBSD products?

P: You've seen the beachballs? [ At the BSD BoF last night Perry and others were kicking around 300 or so Wasabi beachballs "NetBSD support: it's not hot air anymore" ] I don't think that's a big revenue stream for us. But if people in the community want to buy that sort of stuff then we're happy to be the place they get it from, or to collaborate with other companies to make sure that there is somewhere they can get it from.

N: Any plans to provide support or consulting for the other BSDs?

P: Our area of expertise is NetBSD -- it's what we do best, it's what we know. But, if a customer came to us with interesting work involving another BSD we'd of course look at it. They're probably smartest hiring us for NetBSD stuff.

N: Is this going to be a U.S. operation, or will you be working with NetBSD developers worldwide?

P: We've already hired developers from outside of the U.S., who are staying where they are. We go where the talent is and where the customers are.

N: Perry, thanks for your time.

On May 4, we asked you to suggest questions for an interview with Metallica. It seemed for a while, though, like the interview that emmett had wrangled would never happen -- despite agreeing to speak with us, calls to his agents found that drummer (and frequent spokesman) Lars Ulrich was either "too busy" or "unavailable" for a long time, and we felt pretty much like the winner in a game of "hold the grenade." Yesterday, though, Lars came through for us: after I explained the nature of a Slashdot interview, and how the questions were gathered and chosen, as well as the fact that he was free to be as candid and discursive as he'd like, I spoke with him for more than an hour. Lars seemed impressed by the forum that Slashdot offered and called it "a nice setup" for an interview. You don't have to agree with his conclusions, or with the actions that the band has taken, but you ignore his words at your peril. So without further ado, here are your questions, and Lars, unfiltered.

1) Whose decision was it?
by fprintf

Was it your decision, your manager, your lawyers or record company that made the call to go after the Napster users?

Lars Ulrich: Obviously, it was our concern, 'our' meaning the four members of the band. The record company had nothing to do with it whatsoever. There has been no [support] from the record companies; they never instigated anything, so we took it upon ourselves, there was never really much in term of support. There's been the occasional pat on the back, the occasional call, but I would say that I'm quite, I'd say, more than surprised, I'm quite stunned at the lack of communication and input from the record company. Obviously, you know, with record companies we never really usually depend much on what they have to offer in terms of creative things, but I am stunned at the low volume of support from the record company, both publically and privately. That leaves the record company out if it.

The managers? I mean, obviously, Peter and Cliff, our two managers -- they're our closest advisors -- we have been, they've been advising us for 18 years now. Our managers are basically the fifth and the sixth members of the band. They're a total partnership. We view both of them as equal. And they're equally involved in this. And they of course helped strategize, and they filter things and so on, so obviously they're very involved. Our lawyers are obviously involved, but in a different way. I mean, they take -- the six of us strategize, the four of us [in the band] and the two managers, and then we tell the lawyers, obviously like with any situation, confer with the lawyers and give them direction, you know, what to do. The thing that surprises me a little bit about all this stuff is that people that know Metallica well -- and obviously, when you're dealing with something at this level, not everybody knows Metallica well -- but people that know Metallica well know how the inner structure of this thing works. And Metallica is a very very inward. very independent and actually I would say quite selfish unit, in the fact that we sit down and make our decision sort of proudly by ourselves, and work very, very closely with Peter and Cliff, our two managers. The record company's not involved in this, like I said, and the lawyers are more, sort of, they get directed and guided, and obviously we listen to their advice once in a while.

I think the question was who's idea was this. You have to understand one thing, that I am very personally -- when it comes to my relationship with the Internet and with my comptuer, the fact is that we don't spend a lot of time together. So you have to understand that I would never know what Napster was, unless somebody told me about it, you know what I mean? That's what you pay your managers for, you understand? (laughter)

I mean, I can just barely ... I know how to get onto AOL, and I will say that I have used AOL a couple of times to check some hockey scores. When we were in South America last May during the Stanley Cup playoffs. But other than that, it doesn't really amount to much. So you have to understand that I guess the question was 'Whose Idea Was it?' Well, obviously the information gets, comes to us ... now it's a different thing, but where did I first learn of Napster, I learned it from my managers two and a half, three months ago, but now it's a different story. I open ten papers, and just get bombarded with it. Like I said before, I actually find it kind of fascinating. It still hasn't changed my -- I mean I don't spend particularly more time on my computer or anything like that, but I think that this is a very very interesting topic, and forgetting about my role in it for a second, I think that it's just a fascinating topic, and I think it's one that's just so deep and on so many levels that I think -- you were asking before as if it's sort of a pain in the ass, and I'm actually quite enjoying it because I'm learning so much about it also.

2) Time well spent
by cwhicks

With other programs such as Gnutella, Freenet, etc. that are anonymous and are not controlled by a centralized company which you could sue, like Naptser, don't you think that you should be spending your time and money developing your own Internet solutions from which you can profit, rather than trying to push back the flow of technology which will only become more and more difficult to combat?

Lars: Well, I mean, obviously that's a valid question. But the bottom line is, whenever somebody -- whenever somebody, whenever we feel that somebody -- I don't want to sound too combative here, but you know, when somebody fucks with what we do, we go after them. You don't sit down and sort of try and sort of justify yourself, well, 'Maybe our time and energy would be better spent thinking about something a year or two from now.' We feel the story is pretty well documented about how this all sort of came about. We really felt that it was time for somebody, an artist, with a potential of a public platform, to get involved with this. What the RIAA has been doing has obviously been strong, but it has been sort of in a closed legal forum, and we really felt the issue here really is not just about Napster itself, it's also about the perception of what this whole thing means, it's about the perception of the Internet, it's about the perception of what my rights are on the Internet, it's about the perception of how people have become so comfortable with the computer as a tool that they feel they have a right to these things.

So Napster is, I would say that a month into this now, that Napster is really just one of the things that -- obviously there is a clear, specific legal battle going on with Napster, but I find that the other battle which I think is equally important, is the battle in the public forum, about a public debate, about a public dialogue, about presenting different points of view, about respecting different points of view, about everybody having a chance to go out there and say what they feel and so on. That is also important.

Now, are we aware of the Gnutellas and all these other things? Of course we are, but you can only take it one step at a time. And I believe, and the people that we talk to about this, we believe, that the minute some of these companies become active, when they basically come to a point that they become fully funcitonal, we believe that there will be technology and a way to go after them in the way they can invent this technology and make it untraceable. We believe that as quickly as they can make it untraceable we believe that you can find a way to fuck with it, and we have already heard about different ways of doing that. So I think it's clear that there is nothing that people can talk about for the future that becomes bulletproof. So it's sort of like -- the thing about this sort of mob mentality, what we call the 'Internet Extremists,' it's all kind of cute -- 'Yeah, we want to fuck with the system,' 'Yeah, we have a right to get everything for free.' But I believe that if you have the energy and the resources to chase 'em -- and that's one thing we have is a lot of energy and a lot of resources -- We believe that there will never be a point where they will be uncatchable, and we believe that obviously there will come a point, that we will, this is the question that was asked, where we will sit down and figure out what's right for us. Right now, you know, we know what is not right for us, which is Napster. And we know why it's not right for us, which is that we do not condone and want to be part of some kind of illegal trading of our masters through sources we have not authorized, it's that simple.

So of course there will be at some point -- we are not stupid, of course we realize the future of getting music from Metlalica to the people who are interested in Metallica's music is through the Internet. But the question is, on whose conditions, and obviously we want it to be on our conditions. We don't want these 3rd party services like Napster taken for granted, taken for granted that we want to be part of their system. That ultimately is what the biggest beef about this whole thing [is], is that Napster could have so easily avoided this whole thing. It's like, OK, 'It's January, my name is Napster, or I'm Sean, or whoever the CEO was at the time, we have this service, we would like to know if you are interested in being part of it.' If we'd said Yes, then there's no issue, if we'd said No, then this whole thing would have never -- it's really what this is about, it's what this whole thing ultimately comes down to, you know. We own and control these masters, we feel that we're the ones that have the right to decide where they get used. It's a little bit, what we have called the Book-of-the-Month scenario, which is this whole thing about, it sort of ends up being the reverse; we're the ones who look like assholes for chasing after what we feel, for getting off the service. It's a little bit like the book-of-the-month analogy, where you get a book sent to your mailbox once a month. And if you don't return it within 7 days, you have to pay for it. Do you know what I mean? Are we assholes for wanting to get off this service that I was never asked if I wanted to be part of in the first place?

3) Art vs Commodity
by HeghmoH

In several articles about your actions against Napster, you were quoted as saying something like (paraphrased): "Napster takes our music and treats it as a commodity, instead of as art."My question is, how is it that trading your music for free over the internet makes it a simple commodity, but selling it for far too much money through record companies and stores makes it somehow "art"?

Lars: Yeah. I mean, OK, 1st of all, let's start by making sure that I am not the one who decides that a Metallica CD should sell for 16 dollars. That's a whole other arguement, one that at some other time I'd be glad to partake in, OK? I'm a consumer just as much [as anyone else] ... just because somebody feels that that CD is too expensive doesn't give them a right to steal it, in the same way that if I go down to the car dealership and want to buy a new Suburban, and I feel that paying $47,000 for a new Suburban is too expensive, that doesn't give me the right to steal it, right? It's sort of like, you know what, fair enough, I can certainly respect and I would certainly somewhat agree with the fact that paying 16 bucks for a CD is probably, you know, pushing too much. But, it's the marketplace that dictates that, not me. And people who live in the United States live in a Western capitalist society, where most of these things become about marketplace and about fair competitionin the marketplace, and that's what ultimately dictates these prices. That does not soldify that my only other option is to steal is it. My other option is to not buy it.

It does happen in certain other instances. If there is a full-on consumer boycott of a product, whether it's toothpaste or Suburbans or CDs, sooner or later the people whose livelihood depends -- not the artists, but the companies who are selling these toothpaste or CDs or whatever, will take note. But the way to combat a $16 CD as being unfair is not to go out and steal it, that just bcomes sort of the anarchy, the mob rules. But the reason that I will say, of all these things that I've been quoted as saying in the last month on this, I would say that the quote that this person refers to is probably not one of my finer moments. What I was trying to say by that was ... there's one thing that people kind of keep forgetting, which is that Napster, they have this sort of innocent smirk in front of their face and they hold up their hand and they go 'We're not really pirates, we're not really doing anything illegal, we're just offering a service,' but what people have to remember, and obviously some of this has developed in the last month, is that Napster is a corporation, OK? They just got $15 million in funding from some of the major venture capitalists out here. They have all along, ultimately getting to the point where they could have a major IPO, which is the one option, or get basically bought out by an AOL type of company. So at some point there will be a major, major profit going on for the people who've invested in Napster. And that money is basically the same as profiting from stolen property.

Understand one thing: this is not about a lot of money right now, because the money that's being lost right now is really pocket change, ok? It's about the priciple of the thing and it's about what could happen if this kind of thing is allowed to exist and run as rampant and out of control for the next 5 years as it has been for the last 6 months. Then it can become a money issue. Right now it's not a money issue. I can guarantee you it's costing us tenfold to fight it in lawyer's fees, in lawyers' compensation, than it is for measly little pennies in royalties being lost, that's not what it's about. And also, we're fortunate enough that we sell so many records though the normal channels. Where it can affect people, where it is about money, is for the band that sells 600 copies of their CD, ok? If they all of a sudden go from selling 600 copies of their CD down to 50 copies, because the other 550 copies get downloaded for free, that's where it starts affecting real people with real money. And so I don't know if I've sort of been jumping around a lot, it's just that there's all these points of view that tie into it. So back to the question again, the 'commodity' really becomes about it being traded around illegally, and rather than the art that it is. OK, that wasn't the finest quote ever, but that was also the first quote, six weeks ago. And we've all come a long way since then, including us.

4) home taping vs. napster
by commodoresloat

Have you read the 1989 OTA Report (http://www.wws.princeton.edu:80/%7Eota/disk1/1989/8910_n.html) on home taping, which concluded that so-called "bootlegging" was no threat to music industry profits, and that it in fact served as free advertising? It turned out that the users making tapes illegally were also both more likely to buy more music themselves and more likely to encourage other fans to do so. While obviously the technology has improved significantly since 1989, aren't we really dealing with the same issues?

Lars: Well, 1st of all, you have to remember that you're talking to somebody who advocates bootlegging, who has alwyas been pro-bootlegging. We have always let fans tape our shows, we've always had a thing for bootlegging live materials, for special appearances, for that type of stuff. Knock yourselves out, bootleg the fuck out of it, we don't give. We believe that there is a major, major difference between the old -- obviously one of the scenarios we hear a lot ... 'How is it different from home taping?' I guess is really the question. You know, home taping 10 or 15 years ago really was about, you had vinyl records, and you had the neighbor down the street with you know, his Iron Maiden records, that you wanted to make a tape of so you can play in your car. There is a difference, I think, let me think of a word here, I'm sorry, all of a sudden your mind goes blank (laughter), comparing that kind of home taping to basically going on the Internet and getting 1st generation, perfect digital copies of master recordings from all the world, is just not a fair comparison. We're talking about a network that includes millions and millions of people, and tens and tens of millions of songs that these millions of people have, they can trade. So the old 'home taping is killing music,' well, OK, so you borrow your neighbor's Iron Maiden record, blah blah blah, you know, some guy down at school. There is a long way from that to what's going on right now with perfect first-generation digital copies of music that's available to millions of poeple all over the world. We -- it's not so much once again, it's not so much -- look, our record sales have gone up in the last three weeks, OK? We obviously follow and monitor this. It's not so much about whether it hurts or whether it benefits.

What it ultimately comes down to, and this is really the simplest way of saying it, is 'Who controls it?' And I want the right to control what is mine. And if I decide to give -- I respect the next guy, who wants to put his music on Napster, but I want him to respect the fact that maybe I don't. It's that simple. It's really the point. This is what the whole point of this country is, you have the right to make your own choices in this country, and we were not given that right. People take for granted that our music should be out there and be traded. What if we don't advocate that? They shouldn't argue with that. Napster has the right to exist. I support Napster's right to exist, OK? But I want them to support my right to not be part of it.

And that's where it got, sort of like, wacky, because we believe that when they sat down -- this is another misconception in the last couple weeks, this whole thing about 'Metallica serves Napster with 300,000 names.' You have to remember, they asked for this, OK? That's a point that not a lot of people include. They asked. They said, "If you can give us the Names (ha ha), of people that are doing this (ha ha ha) and we'll take them off (ha ha ha)," like you can't. It was sort of like a dare. And then we hired somebody to basically -- and they could have gotten, you also have to reremember once again, , they [Napster] could have gotten that information themselves. So it became once again our burden, back to the book-of-the-month or the cd-of-the-month scenario. You know, I have to go out to my mailbox, I have to pick this fucking book up, I have to send it back where it come from so I don't get charged for it.

The burden is on me again, I have to sit there with these guys, the names of people trading our music. And you have to remember, the only thing that Napster really has, because legally they realize that it's very very thin, the only thing they have is sort of a public thing where they can pit Metallica fans against Metallica. That's the only thing, that's sort of their, that's their only strong thing, is trying to make us look like assholes in the eyes of the fans, and they're doing, I think they're doing a pretty good job of that. And it's sort of pathetic, because the fight is really obviously between Metallica and Napster. It's unfortunate that the fans become pawns in this, but understand a couple of things. The 300,000 names that were removed from Napster, ok, we believe, from who we've consulted, that Napster has the technology to block Metallica songs off its service, so it's not just about ... we go to them with a piece of information: 'This guy has traded among other things, Metallica songs.' So they take him off the service instead of just taking the Metallica songs off the service. Do you understand? Then this guy hates us, we become the assholes, and that's what they're trying to build their counter case on. And that's kind of a little bit sad I think, it's kind of pathetic that that's really the only shot they have, and obviously because they realize they don't have any shots legally. I don't think it's a fair comparison with 1989.

5) Is your speech free?
by Frank Sullivan

Are you free to answer any way you please in this interview? Or has your label requested that your responses to our questions be reviewed by their lawyers before being posted back to Slashdot? And if so, did you agree to this?

Lars: I think it should be pretty obvious to most people that I am really on my own here. What I know about it, most it comes from reading and educating myself on it. I feel I know a lot about this. Every day, I get all the press sent to my office, I spend the first 2 hours of the day reading, catching up to date with what's going on. Nobody tells me what to say, I don't have to check with anybody. That's sort of the thing we talked about 20 minutes ago, that is somebody who doesn't know Metallica very well, because somebody who knows Metallica konws that the 19 years we have been on our own, we have fought every battle on our own, we don't take anything from anybody. We take advice from our two managers, but ultimately we override them a lot. We are very, very -- about as independent as I believe it's possible to be in this business. But I should also say that we are, we're also, this is going to sound -- make sure you don't edit this! -- we're also, I know this is going to sound like we're full of ourselves, but I know we're also quite smart. And we treat the business side of what we do with respect, and we deal with it as a business so it doesn't interfere with the creative elements of what we do. We try and keep the creative things and the business things as two very separate entities, because my big fear is always that the creative side of what we do can never be influenced, or dictated, or polluted, by what happens in the business side of it. So we are very good at separating the two issues, and we treat the business with the respect that it deserves, because if you do not respect the business side of it, you can get fucked. This, the music world, is littered with the careers of people who did not pay enough attention to the business side of what they were doing and ended up getting majorly fucked.

6) Ignorance of the net?
by imac.usr

In the live chat, you admitted to not being very knowledgable about the Internet or about the technology behind Napster and MP3s. What kind of research on these subjects did you do prior to filing the lawsuit?

Lars: As I said, we were not very knowlegeable about it when we started. Research, research. I mean, we tried to get information from a bunch of different sources. We will always, when we feel we are ignorant about something, we always try to get enough information, we try not to make any decisions until we feel we have the full picture. So obviously, talking to people who knew about Napster, who knew how to operate it, who were dealing with it. People who know about it. We don't sit down and study a Napster operations manual or something, but sitting down and talking with people who understand it. There, you have to remember that Napster came pretty much out of nowhere. I mean, I think I first heard the word Napster probably in December or January, I remember somebody telling me about this "new thing that we're going to hear a lot about in a couple of months," and that guy was right. A lot of the people who advise me are very Internet savvy.

You have to understand one thing; I don't use the Internet a lot in my daily life, personally, because I choose to pick up the phone rather than send somebody an email. That's OK, that's my right, it's a little more comfortable. It doesn't mean I hate the Internet, it doesn't mean I despise the Internet. You know, I respect it, I understand that it plays a major role in a lot of people's lives. But I do also -- and this is one of the things that fascinates me about this whole thing -- I do also see things about the Internet being something that people I think taking for granted, that they're becoming so comfortable with it that the feel they have a right to any piece of information that comes to them through the Internet. The Internet is changing our perception about a lot of things, it's changing our perception about almost everthing around them in society.

And to me, it's just about treading kind of carefully and trying to sort of point a few things out that if you have downloaded music through your computer for the last little bit of time, understand one thing, that's been a privilege, not a right. That's been a privilege you've had; you don't have a right to download my music until I tell you, until the person who owns that music tells you that you can do it. Until then, it's been a privilege that's basically been the result of incompetence and lack of focus by the record labels, and that I don't think the record labels for the last couple of years have paid attention to this. I think that there's been a major, major wakeup call in the last couple of months. The hardest thing for all the major labels is it's very difficult for them to get together and work something out betwenn them. The hardest thing also about this is it becomes very hard to write laws and to generalize accross the board. Because to me this is about individual choices. So you can't sit there and say 'I think Napster doesn't have a right to exist,' because there are people who want to use a service like Napster, but at the same time you also can't sit there and say 'Everyone has to be part of a service like Napster,' because there are people who choose not to. It gets kind of complicated from a legal aspect, and that's where I think the record companies have really let this get to the point where it's at right now, by not being more on top of it, and I think somebody pointed out I think a very very valid thing the other day, that all the people, that are sitting right now, the Sean Fannings of the world, and the guy in Ireland, and all these Internet guys that are sitting there coming up with all these programs and all this stuff, you know what? The record companies should have hired those guys 5 years ago. That is the biggest single fuck-up that they did, was basically letting those guys get to the other side.

7) Skip the Record Company
by cwhicks

How much money do you get from the sale of each CD, and how much goes to the record company? Would you be interested in a system that allows you to circumvent the record company, sell your music for half the price you do now, and get quadruple the cut that Metallica gets on each sale? The internet has the potential to offer such a system.

Lars: Of course, of course. That's something that we have been anticipating for years. For years! I mean, five years ago we had that conversation. Of course, at some point we will get to a place that's close to that. I look at it this way. I believe that there are four -- oh shit! (Lars takes care of something in the background) -- I believe that there are sort of like four links in the food chain here. You've got the artist, you've got the record company, you've got the retailer, and then you've got the consumer. And everybody within the industry has been talking for years about, that ... different people have different opinions; some people think that the record company is going to go away, and others think the retailer is going to go away, and some people think that both are going to go away. What you have to remember is, it's only bands who are fortunate enough to be at the level that we're at that have the option of maybe circumventing the record companies and the retailer.

Because what really, essentially, is a record company? A record company is really essentially a bank, a bank that funds a bunch of money to make records, and videos and promotion, publicity appearances and so on, and they take that shot that one day the artist is going to be so successful that they're going to first of all get all their money back, second of all make a profit. So I'm not necessarily particularly pro-record company, but I do feel that the record companies, they've taken a big beating, because I think people are just very quick to jump on the record company, sort of the Chuck D's of the world -- "Record companies are greedy, it's about lawyers, it's about accountants."

That to me is a little too black and white, because you have to remember that statistically, for every one band that you hear about, for every one band that a record company helps make successful, they lose their fucking shirt on the nine other ones you never hear about, so it's -- that's a whole other conversation that I could talk about for hours and hours, the whole thing about the record companies. But record companies will never be completely extinct, for one reason and one reason only, that there will always be a need to develop younger artists, and record companies will always be able to play a big part of that, because this whole thing about "I'm a young band, I'm an upstart band, I'm going to put my music on Napster, and then I'm going to become successful?" Fantasy. The only way you you will become successful is by having a publicity and promotion campaign behind you that elevates what you're doing above what your competition is doing.

It's very very simple. One of the -- when we monitored Napster for 48 hours three weekends ago, we came up with the 1.4 million downloads of Metallica music, there was one, one downloading -- one! of an unsigned artist the whole time. You can sit there and talk about how this is great for up and coming artists or for unsigned bands, but a big counterargument that nobody gets is, me and you could form a band together, and we could like, make a demo and then we could put it up on Napster. Who is going to give a fuck? Nobody's going to care, because they don't know anything about what sets my and your band out from the gardener and the guy who cleans my pool's band. The record companies will never be extinct, because there will always be a need down at that level. Now where the record companies can become circumventable is when you're fortunate enough -- key word, fortunate enough, to be at our level, where you don't depend on the record company to front you a bunch of money, because you're fortunate enough to have a big pile of it yourself, and you don't necessarily need a record company to publicize, to promote you, because you're sort of kind already at that level. Yes, of course, the scenario that the gentleman asked in the question is very, very possible, and we've been looking at that for a long time. And when we are done with our record contract, I would say that something in that direction is somehwere between a real possibility and a certainty.

8) Question to Lars and the band
by acb

You mentioned that we need laws banning file-sharing software such as Napster. How far should these laws go? If in 10 years time, computer users labour under draconian restrictions on communications software under what is titled the Lars Ulrich Digital Copy Enforcement Act, to the effect that sharing music files (of any sort) without the digital signature of a major record label or copyright authority becomes grounds for loss of Internet access and/or legal sanctions, how will you feel about the fans and small-time bands whose attempts at networking are crippled by these restrictions?

Lars: Yeah, I would say that I have certainly through the course of this in the last month, absorbed what I've learned, and listened to other people and respected other people's opinons, and I have come to actually change my position from, I believe that if it's not Napster, then a type of service like Napster has the right to exist, on the condition that the only thing being traded through that service is music by people, artists and owners who have given that service permission. So that obviously changes the thrust of what he was saying.

I believe ultimately -- and this is sort of what I was talking about before -- that the hardest thing about this is to try and come up with a system where it becomes an individual's right to choose how he will want to partake in this sort of stuff through the Internet. That's the hardest thing because it becomes very difficult, it's very difficult to generalize, like I said before. It's not fair to sit there and say, 'Napster can't exist,' because there are people who would like to use it. And it's not fair to sit there and say 'It has to exist and you have to be part of it,' for the people who don't want to use it. That's where it gets really tricky. There are people who are far smarter than me on this, people that will ultimately ... I believe that five years from now, there will be systems in place where the artists and the owners of the intellectual property -- and remember, we're not just talking about music.

And that's one of the fascinating thing here, is that we're not just talking about music. Why is this a music issue right now? The reason it's a music issue right now is because, of major intellectual property, music is the one that is shortest in information right now, therefore it's the most easily transferrable where technology's sitting right now. We believe based on the people we hired that we're probably not more than a year away from where you can basically download Mission Impossible 2 the same day that it opens in the theatre, and basically watch it on a great computer with a great sound system and maybe even find a way to hook it up to a big monitor in your house or whatever. And when that happens, when the next Tom Clancy or whatever -- when the minute they become available, the minute you can download a 1200 page book five minuntes after it's released in a bookstore, you will find that other owners of intellectual properties, not just musicians, will come out there and [fight].

There's a lot of us on the inside who are sort of dealing with this right now, who are like 'You know what? it would be great if you could download fucking movies right now," because you know what? Hollywood would come out fucking swinging. The may be now, but it's still early. If you look at a baseball analogy, I'd say with music we're probably, I'd say we're in the maybe 5th or 6th inning as far as where we are, how far it can go, you know what I mean? I think with movies we're possibly still in the 1st or 2nd inning. I think there will be a major awakening in Hollywood in the next 6 months, and it's not just about music. This is about intellectual property, this is about the perception of intellectual property. Who owns intellectual property, how has the computer changed the majority of people's perception of intellectual property in the last 6 months? And how will intellectual property be reachable to the people out there who are on the receiving end of intellectual property ten years from now? You know, those are the major things that really need to be worked on.

But one of the main things that needs to be worked on for the next year, I think, one of the great things I think, is the public debate about it. People sit there and feel that they have the right to this, and then when they start getting mroe information about this, a lot of people have a tendency to start realizing some of the points we're trying to make, they start seeing things from a little bit of a different point of view, and ultimately that's a great accomplishment. I believe that a lot of people that are saying a lot of nasty things about some of the stuff right now are doing it out of sort of like a passionate ignorance. And I find that most of the people I talk to at a number of different levels, whether intellectual or a little more layman's, or media, or fans, or Newsweek ... whatever, that people start getting it, at least to the point that they say "We respect your right to not want to be part of this, if you respect" -- which we clearly do -- "our right to be part of this."

9) Just something to think about...
by GrnHrnt

I'm a huge Metallica fan. Lars is the reason I'm a drummer today. But something in an interview with James from "Behind the music" (I think) when he was talking about how he started to like the Misfits, when Cliff gave him a tape and they played it in the van all summer long, made me curious. Have any of you (Metallica) ever copied a tape, record, 8-track, CD, etc. from a friend? This is an infringement of copyright isn't it? I don't mean to make you seem evil, but is it simply the scale of Napster/mp3's that is of concern?

Lars: Yeah, I mean I think we answered that before. Of course we have, ok? And of course it's a valid point. The bottom line is the size of it. The size of it and the quality of it. When we go in, and check Napster out, we come up with 1.4 million copyright infringements in 48 hours, this is a different thing than trading cassette tapes with your buddy at school. I mean, 48 hours! So it's the quality, the quality and the scale.

Thanks go out to Sue Tropio and Gayle Fein of QPrime for their help in arranging this interview.

An anonymous reader writes: "The basic idea is that an electronic device that produces random static noise may be affected by an observer if that static noise is based on the state of subatomic particles. This interaction of the user with the device can be measured and used as a form of input. An interesting aspect of quantum physics is that when a subatomic particle is observed its state changes (its wave function collapses), and the new state that it assumes cannot be predicted. Various theories exist as to why a particle assumes whatever state it does when its wave function collapses. One theory is that the observer is somehow interacting with the particle, causing it to assume its new state. Researchers at Princeton's Engineering Anomalies Research (PEAR) lab have amassed statistically significant data that says that an observer affects the new state of the observed particles. In some way, our mind interacts with these particles, and this interaction can be measured. IBM wants to use this measurement to create a new type of input device that basically reads your mind, no wires attached. IBMs Patent, PEARs Website. Incidentally, the inventors of this patent are a who's-who of the members of PEAR. Particularly Jahn and Dunne."

JohnZed writes, " A press release just came out announcing that a member of Inprise's board of directors, Robert Coates, has resigned in protest over the terms of the pending Corel-Inprise merger. Apparently, all is not going well with Corel's attempts to capture a place in the Linux market. "

t-money writes, "The Helix Code Web site went live this morning. They have a pre-release of their Helix GNOME desktop, which includes the latest development version of GNOME (gnome-core 1.1.5). " Thanks to all the people who wrote in about the Helix Code launch - I've got also got some information from Nat Friedman of Helixcode about what they are doing, so read more. And can I say Wow. This looks cool.

From Nat:
Hello everyone!

We are proud to introduce "McKinley," the first preview of the Helix GNOME desktop. This is a beta release of the Helix Code GNOME distribution. The URL for Helix GNOME is:

http://www.helixcode.com/desktop/

The purpose of this distribution is to simplify the task of installing a fully featured, up-to-date version of GNOME on your favorite GNU/Linux distribution. You can now experience all the joy and all the excitement that goes into the wonderful world of GNOME without agonizing through long, arduous build processes.

Helix GNOME includes all of the core GNOME packages and a number of extras. The entire Helix GNOME desktop is pre-configured to be as attractive and simple as possible. You can see some screenshots here:

http://www.helixcode.com/desktop/screenshots.php3

Currently the Helix GNOME desktop is available for the following operating systems:

• Red Hat Linux 6.0 and 6.1
• SuSE Linux 6.3
• LinuxPPC 2000
• Linux Mandrake 6.1 and 7.0
• Caldera OpenLinux 2.3

In the next few weeks we will be releasing an updated version that will include support for other Linux distributions and other Unix systems. And of course, we're constantly adding packages to the build system and releasing new packages as new versions of the GNOME software become available.

How to install
--------------
We have made installing the full Helix GNOME desktop as easy as possible. You just need to download the Helix installer program, and it will take care of it for you:

You can find installation instructions at:

http://www.helixcode.com/desktop/download.php3

Mailing lists
-------------

If you want to subscribe to our announcements mailing lists, drop a message to:

announce-request@helixcode.com

And in the subject of the message put "subscribe". If you want to join the list of beta testers for the Helix GNOME distribution, send mail to:

beta-request@helixcode.com

A complete list of our mailing lists is available at:

http://www.helixcode.com/about/lists.php3

Questions and Answers regarding the Helix GNOME Desktop
------------------------------------------------------

Q: What does Helix Code do?

A:Helix Code is an open source software company devoted to improving GNOME, the leading desktop environment for Linux. We want to make GNOME the best desktop on the planet, and make it available to everyone.

Helix Code believes strongly in the importance of free software, which is why all of our software is licensed under the GNU GPL, and why all development is done in the public GNOME CVS repository.

Our main task is producing free applications for GNOME. Evolution is our first project: a groupware communications suite which includes an advanced mail client, calendar software and address book service.

We are also developing and improving the Gnumeric spreadsheet. Besides that, we maintain a number of core and peripheral packages of the GNOME system.

Q: What is the Helix GNOME Desktop?

A: Helix GNOME is a service offered to the GNOME user community by Helix Code, Inc.

The purpose of this distribution is to make it easy for end-users to install a fully-featured GNOME desktop on their favorite Unix system.

Q: Is this "Helix GNOME Desktop" another GNU/Linux distribution?

A: No, Helix GNOME is an add-on to your existing GNU/Linux distribution. You need an existing GNU/Linux system to run Helix GNOME.

Q: Is Helix GNOME free?

A: Yes, Helix GNOME is completely free. We are just packaging the latest and greatest versions of the various GNOME tools and making them as easy as possible for people to use.

As with other free software, you get the freedom to copy the software, modify the software, redistribute the software, and redistribute modified versions of the software.

Q: Can I buy a copy of Helix GNOME on a CD?

A: Helix GNOME will be available on CD in April.

Q: Does Helix GNOME distribution include support for Debian/Corel Linux?

A: Not yet, but we plan on supporting these systems in the near future.

Q: Does the Helix GNOME distribution include support for BSD?

A: The initial release of the Helix GNOME distribution does not include support for the free BSD systems, but we are on it.

Q: Will you provide timely updates to the various GNOME packages?

A: Yes, we will. GNOME is constantly under development. Whenever a new version of any piece of GNOME software is released, the dutiful hackers at Helix Code will do our best to make a packaged version available to you as quickly as possible.

Better still, the "Helix Update" application allows you to automatically update your GNOME desktop from the Helix web site whenever new packages become available. You can read more about Helix Update here:

http://www.helixcode.com/desktop/updater.php3

Q: Are you improving GNOME, or just shipping binaries?

A: The Helix GNOME desktop includes a number of improvements and patches that have been posted to public mailing lists, or have been committed to the GNOME CVS repository (but might not have been yet released to the public in source package format). This is all in the interests of making the best possible desktop experience available to GNOME users.

The Helix hackers are also constantly improving GNOME and the various GNOME tools, libraries and components and submitting patches to the various maintainers of those packages.

Helix Code employees actively maintain a huge number of GNOME packages, including: Bonobo, Achtung, Gnumeric, Go, Erdos, libzvt, gnome-terminal, gnome-core, gnome-applets, bug-buddy, gmc, gdk-pixbuf, eof, gnome canvas, evolution, gb, gtkhtml, gnome-vfs, camel, gnome-pim, glade, libibex, and others.

Q: Ok, I give up. What's spidermonkey?

A: Yes.

Enjoy!

The Helix Code Team
http://www.helixcode.com

Ender42 writes "Princeton scientists have created a variety of light-emitting materials that could greatly accelerate the development of flat-panel computer screens and other compact video displays. The discovery, a feat of engineering materials at the level of quantum mechanics, also may yield insights into the basic properties of light-emitting substances. " Practically speaking this means cheaper, higher res, lower power LCD displays. "

Ender42 writes "Princeton scientists have created a variety of light-emitting materials that could greatly accelerate the development of flat-panel computer screens and other compact video displays. The discovery, a feat of engineering materials at the level of quantum mechanics, also may yield insights into the basic properties of light-emitting substances. " Practically speaking this means cheaper, higher res, lower power LCD displays. "

emc3 writes "Those wacky scientists are getting small again. Some folks at Yale have come up with a reversible molecular switch. And at Princeton, they've discovered a method of getting a sheet of resin to assemble ordered arrays of nano-pillars. They say that this process could lead to a new generation of flat-panel displays or DRAM. " Nanites. It's what's for dinner.

John R. Zedlewski has contributed an excellent feature entitled 'Free Software and the Innovators Dilema'. Talks a lot about how industries tend to shift, and what happens when a new low end/low cost technology wrecks the margins. Its worth a read. Check it out. The following was written by Slashdot Reader John R. Zedlewski . Free Software and the Innovator's Dilemma

If you wanted to assemble a "must read" list for any businessperson looking at the Linux/Free Software industry, what would you include? Certainly "Open Sources" from O'Reilly, is the most obvious answer, probably followed by Bob Young's upcoming "Under the Radar," which details the story of Red Hat's rise. But I would argue that a third book belong in the top tier of that list as well: "The Innovator's Dilemma," written by Clayton Christensen and published by Harvard Business School Press.

"The Innovator's Dilemma" traces the histories of various industries, from disk drives and microprocessors to steamships and automobiles, in which established market leaders have been beaten out by smaller, more nimble competitors. This idea, that startup firms have noticeable advantages over their larger rivals, has been one of the cornerstones of the internet era, not to mention Microsoft's antitrust defense, but Christensen is one of the few authors to actually address the specifics of these show-downs. In almost every case, he claims, his example established industry leaders were managed well, by conventional standards. They listened to their customer base and constantly sought to increase their penetration in high-margin, high-end markets. These seemingly-innocuous strategies become disastrous, however, when a "disruptive technology" enters the low end of the market. The established firms shy away from these new technologies to avoid undercutting their core, profitable businesses, but this ultimately leaves the market open for a new player to implement the disruptive technology, then slowly march up the food chain, overthrowing the old market leader. Minicomputer manufacturers in the 1980s, for instance, diligently followed their customers' demands to invest only in faster minis, while ignoring the PC market, which held little interest for the companies' established base of scientific and business customers. How many of those companies are still alive today?

This isn't, of course, a book review. Instead, I guess you could call it my attempt at a wake-up call to those software companies (you know who you are) who still think they can make a living on "business as usual" in the next millennium. Specifically, I want to focus on Linux, which might be the best example of a truly disruptive technology that we've seen since the advent of the internet. In fact, this theory gives us a guide to understand how established software firms risk missing the boat with respect to Linux, just as brick-and-mortar retailers were overtaken on the net by smaller, more daring startups. Consider three statements that a software vendor looking at Linux in 1999 might make:

• "That sounds like an interesting idea, but we asked our customers and they don't seem interested."
• "That sounds like an interesting idea, but the profit margin sounds too slim."
• "That sounds like an interesting idea, but it would eat into our more profitable core business."

Now take those same three statements and imagine them coming from an executive from an established retail vendor considering e-commerce in 1995. It's not much of a stretch, is it? In this case, though, we're hampered by our hindsight. We fail to appreciate that the executives who turned down a chance to take, say, Barnes & Noble to the web in 1995 were in fact making a very reasonable decision based on the traditional, financial bottom line. They would have spent millions to set up shop, made it easier for customers to price compare (and see that, in fact, the Barnes & Noble of 1995 was a fairly expensive bookstore); the customers who did buy online would need at least some discount to offset the cost of shipping; and the site, like Amazon, would have been a spectacular way to drive the parent company into the red. By not embracing the net, however, they opened the door to the B&N's greatest threat in decades, and they ultimately had to spend even more money to build play catch up against the $20 billion internet rival that wouldn't even have been created if the existing booksellers hadn't dropped the ball.

How have today's successful technology firms, then, fallen into the "innovator's dilemma" with respect to Linux? By focusing on the short run and the high end. When companies like Sun, SCO, and Microsoft dismiss the OS, they talk about its lack of scalability, its relative newness, and its lack of a journalling file system. These features, however, are irrelevant at the workstation and workgroup server level, and, more importantly, they're all being developed at an unbelievable pace to help the OS scale to enterprise levels. As commodity hardware becomes more and more powerful, while Linux and Windows NT continue to scale up to new heights, the traditional Unix vendors will find themselves increasingly marginalized to the very highest-end of the computing spectrum, falling into what I call the "Silicon Graphics trap."

Silicon Graphics (now SGI) was notorious for their focus on the high-end, sexy technologies: Cray supercomputers, 128-processor Origin servers, $10,000+ workstations, etc. While each unit sale at this level seems highly profitable, in reality the R&D costs involved in pushing the envelope of technologies at the microprocessor, OS, server, and applications levels was simply impossible to maintain, and the company spiraled deep into unprofitability as companies like Intergraph ate away at their core graphics business with low-cost graphics workstations. Now SGI has become the first traditional Unix company to truly embrace Linux, making it their platform of choice for the IA-64 architecture. Perhaps they were lucky to fall into the trap while they still had time to ride the first wave of the Linux movement.

But that leaves a question for the rest of the OS, hardware, and computer services worlds: are you willing to concede the entire low-to-mid-range server market to smaller, faster companies that position themselves as Linux early adopters? Do you want your future customers to think of you as a Linux pioneer that can accurately evaluate and deploy the OS, or as a second wave Johnny-come-lately that doesn't really understand the phenomenon at all?

Clayton Christensen's prognosis for these established players is unequivocal: unless they form new business units with the autonomy to embrace such disruptive technologies "the probability that they will survive as industry leaders is zero" (Bloomberg Personal Finance, October 1999). In my opinion, some of these market leaders need even more fundamental changes in their structures to address this disruption; they need thorough forward-looking reorganizations, such as SGI is undergoing with Linux and open source, as Microsoft restructured their product lines to face the internet, and as I advocated that SCO should change in my last article.

John R. Zedlewski has contributed an excellent feature entitled 'Free Software and the Innovators Dilema'. Talks a lot about how industries tend to shift, and what happens when a new low end/low cost technology wrecks the margins. Its worth a read. Check it out. The following was written by Slashdot Reader John R. Zedlewski . Free Software and the Innovator's Dilemma

If you wanted to assemble a "must read" list for any businessperson looking at the Linux/Free Software industry, what would you include? Certainly "Open Sources" from O'Reilly, is the most obvious answer, probably followed by Bob Young's upcoming "Under the Radar," which details the story of Red Hat's rise. But I would argue that a third book belong in the top tier of that list as well: "The Innovator's Dilemma," written by Clayton Christensen and published by Harvard Business School Press.

"The Innovator's Dilemma" traces the histories of various industries, from disk drives and microprocessors to steamships and automobiles, in which established market leaders have been beaten out by smaller, more nimble competitors. This idea, that startup firms have noticeable advantages over their larger rivals, has been one of the cornerstones of the internet era, not to mention Microsoft's antitrust defense, but Christensen is one of the few authors to actually address the specifics of these show-downs. In almost every case, he claims, his example established industry leaders were managed well, by conventional standards. They listened to their customer base and constantly sought to increase their penetration in high-margin, high-end markets. These seemingly-innocuous strategies become disastrous, however, when a "disruptive technology" enters the low end of the market. The established firms shy away from these new technologies to avoid undercutting their core, profitable businesses, but this ultimately leaves the market open for a new player to implement the disruptive technology, then slowly march up the food chain, overthrowing the old market leader. Minicomputer manufacturers in the 1980s, for instance, diligently followed their customers' demands to invest only in faster minis, while ignoring the PC market, which held little interest for the companies' established base of scientific and business customers. How many of those companies are still alive today?

This isn't, of course, a book review. Instead, I guess you could call it my attempt at a wake-up call to those software companies (you know who you are) who still think they can make a living on "business as usual" in the next millennium. Specifically, I want to focus on Linux, which might be the best example of a truly disruptive technology that we've seen since the advent of the internet. In fact, this theory gives us a guide to understand how established software firms risk missing the boat with respect to Linux, just as brick-and-mortar retailers were overtaken on the net by smaller, more daring startups. Consider three statements that a software vendor looking at Linux in 1999 might make:

• "That sounds like an interesting idea, but we asked our customers and they don't seem interested."
• "That sounds like an interesting idea, but the profit margin sounds too slim."
• "That sounds like an interesting idea, but it would eat into our more profitable core business."

Now take those same three statements and imagine them coming from an executive from an established retail vendor considering e-commerce in 1995. It's not much of a stretch, is it? In this case, though, we're hampered by our hindsight. We fail to appreciate that the executives who turned down a chance to take, say, Barnes & Noble to the web in 1995 were in fact making a very reasonable decision based on the traditional, financial bottom line. They would have spent millions to set up shop, made it easier for customers to price compare (and see that, in fact, the Barnes & Noble of 1995 was a fairly expensive bookstore); the customers who did buy online would need at least some discount to offset the cost of shipping; and the site, like Amazon, would have been a spectacular way to drive the parent company into the red. By not embracing the net, however, they opened the door to the B&N's greatest threat in decades, and they ultimately had to spend even more money to build play catch up against the $20 billion internet rival that wouldn't even have been created if the existing booksellers hadn't dropped the ball.

How have today's successful technology firms, then, fallen into the "innovator's dilemma" with respect to Linux? By focusing on the short run and the high end. When companies like Sun, SCO, and Microsoft dismiss the OS, they talk about its lack of scalability, its relative newness, and its lack of a journalling file system. These features, however, are irrelevant at the workstation and workgroup server level, and, more importantly, they're all being developed at an unbelievable pace to help the OS scale to enterprise levels. As commodity hardware becomes more and more powerful, while Linux and Windows NT continue to scale up to new heights, the traditional Unix vendors will find themselves increasingly marginalized to the very highest-end of the computing spectrum, falling into what I call the "Silicon Graphics trap."

Silicon Graphics (now SGI) was notorious for their focus on the high-end, sexy technologies: Cray supercomputers, 128-processor Origin servers, $10,000+ workstations, etc. While each unit sale at this level seems highly profitable, in reality the R&D costs involved in pushing the envelope of technologies at the microprocessor, OS, server, and applications levels was simply impossible to maintain, and the company spiraled deep into unprofitability as companies like Intergraph ate away at their core graphics business with low-cost graphics workstations. Now SGI has become the first traditional Unix company to truly embrace Linux, making it their platform of choice for the IA-64 architecture. Perhaps they were lucky to fall into the trap while they still had time to ride the first wave of the Linux movement.

But that leaves a question for the rest of the OS, hardware, and computer services worlds: are you willing to concede the entire low-to-mid-range server market to smaller, faster companies that position themselves as Linux early adopters? Do you want your future customers to think of you as a Linux pioneer that can accurately evaluate and deploy the OS, or as a second wave Johnny-come-lately that doesn't really understand the phenomenon at all?

Clayton Christensen's prognosis for these established players is unequivocal: unless they form new business units with the autonomy to embrace such disruptive technologies "the probability that they will survive as industry leaders is zero" (Bloomberg Personal Finance, October 1999). In my opinion, some of these market leaders need even more fundamental changes in their structures to address this disruption; they need thorough forward-looking reorganizations, such as SGI is undergoing with Linux and open source, as Microsoft restructured their product lines to face the internet, and as I advocated that SCO should change in my last article.

GolemII pointed us to this story at The Nando Times about Peter Singer, who teaches bioethics at Princeton, and some of the ruckus he's stirred up by suggesting that parents of severely disabled infants should be allowed to kill them painlessly in order to save them from a life of suffering. (more below.)

An earlier idea of Singer's, that a human life is not necessarily more valuable than an animal's, led (at least in part) to the founding of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] and the Animal Liberation Front.

We're running this here -- after some serious soul-searching -- because Singer raises thorny ethical questions that make people think in new ways even when they don't agree with him, and if there's one thing Slashdot readers are good at, it's coming up with unique reactions to controversial ideas that cause most people to shut down their critical thinking abilities and issue emotional, knee-jerk responses.

The floor is now open. Please try to treat this as an important ethical discussion, not as flamebait. It's a serious -- if frightening -- subject, and the debate now being carried on about it in academic circles will no doubt affect the way we treat our fellow humans and other life forms, both organic and cybernetic, in the 21st century and beyond.

GolemII pointed us to this story at The Nando Times about Peter Singer, who teaches bioethics at Princeton, and some of the ruckus he's stirred up by suggesting that parents of severely disabled infants should be allowed to kill them painlessly in order to save them from a life of suffering. (more below.)

An earlier idea of Singer's, that a human life is not necessarily more valuable than an animal's, led (at least in part) to the founding of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] and the Animal Liberation Front.

We're running this here -- after some serious soul-searching -- because Singer raises thorny ethical questions that make people think in new ways even when they don't agree with him, and if there's one thing Slashdot readers are good at, it's coming up with unique reactions to controversial ideas that cause most people to shut down their critical thinking abilities and issue emotional, knee-jerk responses.

The floor is now open. Please try to treat this as an important ethical discussion, not as flamebait. It's a serious -- if frightening -- subject, and the debate now being carried on about it in academic circles will no doubt affect the way we treat our fellow humans and other life forms, both organic and cybernetic, in the 21st century and beyond.

GolemII pointed us to this story at The Nando Times about Peter Singer, who teaches bioethics at Princeton, and some of the ruckus he's stirred up by suggesting that parents of severely disabled infants should be allowed to kill them painlessly in order to save them from a life of suffering. (more below.)

An earlier idea of Singer's, that a human life is not necessarily more valuable than an animal's, led (at least in part) to the founding of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals [PETA] and the Animal Liberation Front.

We're running this here -- after some serious soul-searching -- because Singer raises thorny ethical questions that make people think in new ways even when they don't agree with him, and if there's one thing Slashdot readers are good at, it's coming up with unique reactions to controversial ideas that cause most people to shut down their critical thinking abilities and issue emotional, knee-jerk responses.

The floor is now open. Please try to treat this as an important ethical discussion, not as flamebait. It's a serious -- if frightening -- subject, and the debate now being carried on about it in academic circles will no doubt affect the way we treat our fellow humans and other life forms, both organic and cybernetic, in the 21st century and beyond.

Noel writes "Princeton University electrical engineer Stephen Chou who directs the NanoStructures Laboratory, has created CDs that can concentrate data 800 times more efficiently than current discs. " Tiny storage is my friend.

Noel writes "Princeton University electrical engineer Stephen Chou who directs the NanoStructures Laboratory, has created CDs that can concentrate data 800 times more efficiently than current discs. " Tiny storage is my friend.

tknockers writes "News.com has a story about how Linus describes Linux as being "fun". He even goes on to say that in 150 years our lives will only be motivated by fear of boredom. "

After an episode of Babylon 5 with a nice twist, Allan Doyle's contribution was somewhat spooky... Mindsong Inc (notice the Psi Corps sign on their page) has received U.S. Patent No. 5830064... the first patent for a device that can assess the influence of a person's mental intentions on the outcome of a random event. S: As Allan says "Gotta wonder what kind of range they claim to get...". If you take this to be true, should it be patented? If you take it to be false, it's another fine example that anything can be patented. They've got some paper abstracts online. They are a spin-off from Princeton University's Pear Program which has had some pretty interesting results. The beginning of their book is available online. Princeton's experiment goes like this: Take a quantum device that produces a true random binary output (not like a the rand() function). Create a plot such that every time the device outputs a one, the line goes up, otherwise it goes down. Sit a human in front of the screen and ask it to mentally will the line up or down. It has an effect. Consciousness is misunderstood by Western Science, and this experiment is one of the first serious attempts at looking into it. My take is that I've seen this quite a few places over a few years, and have not heard much counter-evidence, but it's still hard to believe. However, coming from an AI background, the only difference I can see between my mental processing and what a computer can do is complexity (which I am sure we will master) and that I am conscious... and I don't see in what way consciousness helps me survive versus your average Zombie/Computer.

Remember that getting a patent does not mean very much. There is a possibly apocryphal story of a British inventor who wanted to prove that anything could be patented. So he patented a foolproof method to kill a fly: hit it with a large heavy object such as a hammer. He duly received his patent.

Finally this article is obviously controversial, being on the margins of modern science. It's very easy to flame, so don't bother. If you have some criticism of their method, some knowledge of value to the others, please contribute. But mindless flames waste everybody's time, and reflect poorly on you.