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Yeah, Napster isn't doing too terrible.

They're shipping with the Gateway 510XL computer, they have an exclusive deal with Penn State to give free subscriptions to students and have announced their sales for the first week, here is a snip from the press release:

Los Angeles, CA - November 6, 2003 - Napster, a division of Roxio (Nasdaq: ROXI) today reported its initial progress following the launch of Napster 2.0 on October 29th. Since launch, Napster has sold more than 300,000 songs and thousands of music fans have joined Napster's Premium subscription service. Premium members have downloaded or streamed over 2 million tracks during the first week of the new service, and the Company estimates that it will have in excess of 80,000 Premium subscribers by the end of the year.

Demonstrating the broad appeal of the "all access" nature of its Premium service, Napster and Penn State University today announced that Penn State will purchase access to Napster's Premium service for its students. Napster will add thousands of paid subscribers, and Penn State becomes the first university in the nation to offer their students legal access to the world's largest library of digital music via the Napster Premium service. Penn State plans to roll out access to Napster to its students in January and plans to extend access to the music service to members of its alumni association in the future. Penn State boasts the largest alumni association in the country with nearly 150,000 dues-paying members.

Well, what do you mean by "can no longer remove anything from it"?

If you mean "can no longer remove anything from it, and still preserve the semantics of the language", you've just described Scheme. Suffice it to say that not everybody think Scheme is the end of all languages. Scheme is super-elegant, but so unpractical to program in that everybody uses their own dialect which adds the features you need to do real-world programming. In this sense, scheme is like Pascal.

If you mean "can no longer remove anything from it that can't be simulated through other mechanisms with adequate performance", then you are basically looking at a minimal Forth. While great for embedded CPU's and programming for special Forth-chips, the language isn't exactly the ideal software engineering language. Chuck Moore's most recent forth, colorForth does for example not have any stack underrun checking. And no forth will ever have any kind of type system, you are always working on raw bits.

If you are meaning "can no longer remove anything from it, without loosing the ability to do anything at all", then you are basically looking at an assembler for a one instruction set architecture chip. While useful as an april fools joke, it doesn't really have any practical purpose.

There are plenty of languages that have "bloat" as part of their design. The idea is that features are useful, and users want them. Some classic examples are Common Lisp, C++, Java, Visual Basic, and Ada. All of these languages are either hugely successfull in the real world, or has a large academic following (or both). (PS: Yes I hate VB myself, but don't tell me it isn't important in the real world...)

I think the title should be changed to "The End of the Easy Oil Age." As the title suggests, once the oil wells start to dry out, we'll turn to alternate ways to extract oil from the ground. It turns out North America might have a promising source of oil if they lower the cost of squeezing oil from the source rock.

Two thirds of the world's oil shale reserves are located in the United States. The largest known
reserves of hydrocarbons of any kind are the Green River shale deposits in Wyoming,
Colorado and Utah. These reserves are estimated to be 270 billion tons. At 20 gallons per ton
of shale, this translates into 130 billion barrles of oil. This is five times as much as the proven
reserves of petroleum in the U.S.. However, no commercial production of fuels from oil shale
esists today, so there economic recoverability is not well known. It is probably safe to say,
however, that oil from shale is not economically competitive with petroleum at current
petroleum prices.

'Synthetic' Fuels, Oils Shale And Tar Sands

1. i assume he used the tar that ships with solaris... and we all know that the solaris tar sucks badly. if he wants to benchmark the fs and not the app (tar) he should have installed gtar on the solaris box.
2. the http benchmarks seems specious... i would have preffered to have seen a specweb99 bench... something that i could compare to real, existing benchmarks.

I noticed that penn state has some job openings related to this project for all you p2p folks out there.

= 9J =

When we were treated like children, the 40 hours (and honestly probably a lot less) was all we put in...

(b) Exempt staff: ... keeping in mind that forty (40) hours a week is a minimum requirement ...

Easy ... cause the house was controlled by right-wing conservative fucks. Now, I didn't go to *CUNT-FEST* or *SEX-FAIRE*, so my information is all from news sources and talking with friends on campus. There were tents in the HUB lawn (Student Union Building) that were running events such as "Orgasm Bingo" and "Pin the Clitorus on the Vulva". Here are 2 links: The first is a listing of the campus newspaper's articles favorable towards them (As most are). The second is an editorial by a student that has links to more articles at the end.

Personally, they have the right to put on an event like this. I would've liked to see it a little less "IN YOUR FACE" because, believe it or not, people do bring their kids and families to walk around campus. Seeing huge banners stating *CUNT-FEST* isn't exactly a family atmosphere at 3 in the afternoon on a Saturday. My only real beef with them is the inequity of funds distribution that those groups get. I was in 3 different UPAC supported clubs that year. Every club is supposed to get a minimum of $350-$450 if they have at least 15 (maybe 20) members. All of the clubs I was in had at least 50 (one, the Deck-hockey club had over 200). All of my clubs got nothing because "funds had run out," yet these people, several weeks later, get nearly Ten-Grand to put on a show that less than 200 people showed up to and was basically put on to tell the culture around them, "FUCK YOU!".

Now, don't get me wrong. The representative (Lawless R-Montgomery County) that spearheaded this crusade to cut funding is a cocksucker in his own right. If it were up to him, the entire campus would be dry and anyone caught buying condoms would be expelled. He's a self-rightous, pompous douchebag. I *believe* (unsure) that he was voted out of office last year in the elections. I'm too lazy at the moment to look it up.

As I said in my original post, it is one thing excercise your free speech, it is another to expect to continue to be rewarded for it if a significant amount of people find it offensive or dumb. Just like it is a poster's right to put up "GNA FPs" and "Natalie Portman covered in Peanut Butter!" and "BSD is DEAD!" posts, but don't expect to be modded up for it.

-Ab

Easy ... cause the house was controlled by right-wing conservative fucks. Now, I didn't go to *CUNT-FEST* or *SEX-FAIRE*, so my information is all from news sources and talking with friends on campus. There were tents in the HUB lawn (Student Union Building) that were running events such as "Orgasm Bingo" and "Pin the Clitorus on the Vulva". Here are 2 links: The first is a listing of the campus newspaper's articles favorable towards them (As most are). The second is an editorial by a student that has links to more articles at the end.

Personally, they have the right to put on an event like this. I would've liked to see it a little less "IN YOUR FACE" because, believe it or not, people do bring their kids and families to walk around campus. Seeing huge banners stating *CUNT-FEST* isn't exactly a family atmosphere at 3 in the afternoon on a Saturday. My only real beef with them is the inequity of funds distribution that those groups get. I was in 3 different UPAC supported clubs that year. Every club is supposed to get a minimum of $350-$450 if they have at least 15 (maybe 20) members. All of the clubs I was in had at least 50 (one, the Deck-hockey club had over 200). All of my clubs got nothing because "funds had run out," yet these people, several weeks later, get nearly Ten-Grand to put on a show that less than 200 people showed up to and was basically put on to tell the culture around them, "FUCK YOU!".

Now, don't get me wrong. The representative (Lawless R-Montgomery County) that spearheaded this crusade to cut funding is a cocksucker in his own right. If it were up to him, the entire campus would be dry and anyone caught buying condoms would be expelled. He's a self-rightous, pompous douchebag. I *believe* (unsure) that he was voted out of office last year in the elections. I'm too lazy at the moment to look it up.

As I said in my original post, it is one thing excercise your free speech, it is another to expect to continue to be rewarded for it if a significant amount of people find it offensive or dumb. Just like it is a poster's right to put up "GNA FPs" and "Natalie Portman covered in Peanut Butter!" and "BSD is DEAD!" posts, but don't expect to be modded up for it.

-Ab

State firmly and clearly, "My ancestors didn't scratch, claw, and battle their way to the top of the food chain so that I had to force myself to exist on salad."

Say, "See these?" point at your canine teeth and finish with, "2 million years of evolution developed these. They're for RIPPING AND TEARING FLESH. Who am I to tell the Earth Mother, Gaia, that she fucked up in her evolutionary plans?"

Point them to Maddox's Guiltless Grill. This one is chock full of goodies.

The liver is the largest organ in your body. It's primary digestive function is to secrete bile (whis is stored in the gall bladder until needed) to digest animal fat. Hell, the next largest is the stomach, and stomach acid digests whole proteins mainly. So the 2 largest organs in the digestive system are designed to digest animals. The partial proteins of plant matter are digested later in the small and large intestines by enzymes released by the pancreas. So, we're designed mainly to digest animals and the parts that take care of the plants are the same parts that hold our sh*t until we can find a toilet.

(my personal favorite...) "Ok, you win, I'll make you a deal. I'll eat vegan and nothing but vegan ... but you gotta indulge me. We are reaching a compromise here. I'm trying you're way, you try mine. As long as I eat vegan, you MUST eat at least 1/8 pound of pig (either ham, bacon, or sausage) and some form of egg derived substance with your breakfast. Lunch involves something made from cow ... at least 1/8th pound ... sometimes 1/4 pound. Dinner is a rotating option of cow, chicken, turkey, pig, (rarely seafood), deer or other wild game, or lamb (rarely). Veal, steak, or hamburger is especially common and encouraged. No tofu is allowed. No 'exotic' veggies, either, like kale, alfalfa, sprouts. Just peas, carrots, celery, corn, and green beans. Salad is the SIDE dish and shall be proportioned as such. Every sandwich/sub/potato/salad you eat mush have cheese and bacon on it. Do we have a deal?" Rattle that off fast (like an announcer stating the 'fine print' on a comercial for a contest) and look real serious. I've had o

Hey! I resemble that remark! As a proud alumni of Penn State University (a.k.a. "The world's largest community college" and "A drinking town with a football problem") we were ranked 1st and 4th best party schools last year by CNN.com and Playboy/Bacardi (not necessisarily in that order). We are in the mid 40s this year in overall academic rank. Not a bad balance of work and play, especially when you consider that our business college is basically a joke. As the EE t-shirt puts it: Lim(GPA->0) = Business

We also have one of the highest graduation rates for athletes. 1 in 8 PE (professional engineers) has a degree from Penn State (1 in 6 female engineers). Our Nuc-E program is rated #1 (granted, there aren't that many, especially with an active reactor to experiment on). Our AE (Arch-Eng) is top 5, especially in the Lighting and Construction inspection fields. Our IE program (my major) was #3 ranked when I graduated. Our CS and CompE programs suck ass ... royal ass ... I mean, a field of donkey's in an F-5 tornado amount of ass-sucking. Our EE is there (though, there's something to be said for a course that 70% of the students retake EE350 at LEAST twice ... some as many as 5 times). That's not even half of our engineering majors offered. We still have ME, Chem-E, Civ-E, Ag-E, Bio-E, E-Sci, Poly-E, Enviro-E, E-Mech, and Mat-E.

But anyways, we're not just a party school ... some of us know how to drink AND get work done. I was a member of the engineering social fraternity, and we'd hear all the "geeks", "nerds", etc.. comments until people came to drink with us. It's quite a statment to hear someone say, "Damn, you guys can DRINK!" to which we reply, "You think it's possible to understand physics or diff. eq's fully while sober? I think not. Besides, you business people screw up, and you have a failed project and move on to the next one. Worst case, you lose your job and have to work as a manager at Bennigan's. Us engineers screw up and buildings collapse, reactors melt down, bridges shake to pieces ... people die. We gotta drink just to stay sane."

-Ab

They aren't running windows on the actual fail-safe machines. We have a reactor here on campus cause we're one of the few universities to teach Nuclear Engineering. I was an Industrial Engineer and we had to tour the plant and comment on the safety systems and re-design parts of it to make it more human friendly, especially in an emergancy situation.
One of the things we learned is that the computer that actually controls the rods is run on DOS. They are required by the NRC (Nuclear Regulatory Committee) to run a very specific program to manipulate and monitor the rods that is only to be run on Dos. The program is internet capable and supports dumb terminals. This is how they instructed us before we went into the control room (in a classroom elsewhere in the building).
On some other notes, if the machines fail, the control rods fall automatically. They are held up buy the computer (well, by motors and/or electromagnets controlled by the computer). If they stop receiving signal form the computer, gravity naturally pulls the rods back down. They also have 2 additional COMPLETE systems ready to be plugged in at any moment if the primary system crashes. At this reactor, you can actually watch the reaction in the pool from above (contrary to the movies, the glow is an eerie blue, not yellow or green).

-Ab

Note that you can do Beowulfy tricks with OS X just as easily as with Linux - well, as with disk-bound Linux (nothing beats ClusterKnoppix for convenience). It just costs more to do so (like, nearly double), and sadly the schools figure that if they're going to change, it will be to one system only: and the almighty buck rules. However, I figure that a desktop loosed from MS-Windows' clutches is a desktop freed, never mind the beauty competitions. (-: PS, it tickles my funnybone that the linked OS X page - written by an afficiondo of the stylish Mac - looks ugly and says so. :-)

From what I remember of history, Edison didn't invent the electric light bulb he perfected the vacumn technique. A man named Swan made the first electric light bulb in 1879 but he had trouble with the vacumn later that year Edison sorted the vacumn. His bulb lasted for 40 hours. A year later in 1880 he had a bulb that could last for 1500 hours and he began marketing it. In 1910 Coolidge invented the tungsten filament which increased how long the bulb could last.

So depending on what you want from an electric light bulb it the 'inventor' could have been any of the three Swan, Edison or Coolidge. In fact Swan filed a law suit against Edison for 'stealing' the idea. Edison wasn't really an inventor he was more the head of a research department.

More info here here here and some info on the law suit that Swan filed against Edison.

Somehow i doubt that. If i write directions to a local bar for you, is that really something that gets copyrighted just because i wrote it?

Actually, yes. My directions are copyright by me the moment they're transfixed in some media. Your writing them down theoretically counts.

That said, facts cannot be protected by copyright. The majority, if not the entirety of my directions will like be facts. So if you just write down "South on Maple Street, turn left onto Johnson (near the gas station), and go three blocks, bar's on the left", that's darn near pure fact. However, if you transcribe my entire directions including my idiomatic language and quirky side notes, well, you'd have something I could definately claim copyright to.

If i have a conversation with someone, do we exclusively own the copyright to that conversation?

I doubt that either of those examples would be something that can be copyrighted, any more then a students notes from a class are copyrightable.

This is actually the most obvious case. The facts that the teacher conveys cannot be protected by copyright. The specific way in which he conveys them is protected, assuming that it's transfixed (Say, through someone taking near-exact shorthand, or tape recording it). The specific notes a student takes (Assuming that it's largely their own rephrasing of the facts conveyed) are protected by copyright for the student. There is even a very real argument that the student's notes represent a derivative work of the teacher's class, thus redistribution or sale could be controlled by the teacher. Some examples are here and here. I don't actually agree with this point of view, but it's definately not a crystal clear case.

All of this is, believe it or not, for your protection. Your creations are protected, even if you didn't think to protect it in advance. The specific examples you give are a bit silly, but it's true. Maybe during a conversation on politics you give a brilliant rebuttable that convinces everyone that you are right. I'd be pretty ticked off if the journalist who happened to be recording an interview with someone else at the next table over noticed my brilliant speech in the background of their tape, transcribes it, and passes it off as his own work.

In fact, they were mp3's of original a capella music about astronomy. On the same web page, there were references to Prof. Emeritus Peter Usher, an elderly, white, generally unhip astronomer whose recent contributions to the field include an analysis of the astronomical context of Hamlet .

The good folks of the department were kind enough to issue widely-distributed press releases mocking the RIAA, who later apologized for the error.

It's a good thing this guy didn't break any patents on roller coasters. Although to be fair, most of those have expired, and patents on actual physical machines are palatable.

Oh, does this remind anybody else of the Cartmanland episode of South Park where Cartman owns his own theme park?

I didn't see any links to the sources yet on the blog or the article so here is the homepage for Dr. Craig A. Grimes. There are two recent pdfs about the titania nanotubes on his publications page.

I didn't see any links to the sources yet on the blog or the article so here is the homepage for Dr. Craig A. Grimes. There are two recent pdfs about the titania nanotubes on his publications page.

You need to get your BS sensor checked; the research is real and legitimate.

Here's a reference to the original article, which is available online:

2003 Craig A. Grimes, Keat G. Ong, Oomman K. Varghese, Xiping Yang, G. Mor, Maggie Paulose, Chuanmin Ruan, Elizabeth C. Dickey, Michael V. Pishko, James W. Kendig and Andrew J. Mason, "A Sentinel Sensor Network for Hydrogen Sensing," Sensors, vol. 3, pp. 69-82. PDF format

In Texas that can't happen.. the jury's word is final. And since the US Supreme Court has ruled several times in favor of the jury nullification, you could easily appeal and overturn a judges ruling. See Jury Nullification, Jury NullificationSupreme Court Justice comments/a.

What?

Read The Tylenol Murders, and go down to motive. In fact a google search turns up nothing close to your assertion and all articles say that the cases in both 1982 and 1986 are unsolved.

Please site your evidence.

I was a member of the Penn State FutureTruck program this past year, which had 15 universities develop hybrid-electric Ford Explorers. I know several schools had in-dash PC's of some sort to provide entertainment, telemetry, and navigation functions.

PSU's system (picture here) , which I wrote in Delphi, focused on entertainment, such as the MP3 player screen shown in the picture. The interface is fairly easy to navigate without requiring too much attention while driving. The display itself is a touchscreen made by Xenarc, the company that makes the DIN-PC featured in this article. The PC itself is a Cappuccino Mini-PC running Windows 2000. The PC was mounted in the center console which (after adding some small fans) kept it cool enough to run well.

Well, two very successful species are the Norway Maple and the Norway rat. Let's try crossing them ....

Since the site is slashdotted, I don't know, but it seems to me the experiment is doomed unless poems are constrained to mate with nearly identical poems. Otherwise you're likely to do the equivalent of mating cats with yeast.

In fact, I expect that to work you'd have to start with a limited number of something like "bacterial poems" and allow them to acquire complexity through mutation and mating. However, it would take so many generations to produce large, complex poems people would probably lose interest.

Perhaps a better approach would be to start with a single human generated poem of moderate length and undoubted mediocrity. There are a number of poets who have been popular in their day and have subsequently been relegated to history's aesthetic dustbin, for example Abraham Cowley. These would provide a rich source of mediocre starting material. Then see if they coudl be improved by a process of random mutation, mating, and viral infection.

Chances are any experiment like this will meet with some success, given the human mind's tendency to find patterns and meaning in everything. The difference is that in real poems there is a human imagination at the bottom of them, which makes them communication.

Under penalty of perjury, we submit that the RIAA is authorized to act on behalf of its member companies in matters involving the infringement of their sound recordings, including enforcing their copyrights and common law rights on the Internet.

1) IIRC, the goal is to not have to memorize an IPv6 address.

2) It becomes ::1. I think that's pretty easy to deal with. (IPv6 address are collapsible, so zeroes can be omitted.)

For more information, check (shameless plug) http://www.lug.psu.edu/presentations/ipv6.pdf, an overview of IPv6.

I did that at the last PSU LUG demo day with a copy of "A Beautiful Mind" residing on my home computer and my laptop at the demo. We played it over a projector and it drew a crowd- well, once people realized what it was.

QUOTE: "Because of so much work and overtime, American workers are the most productive in the world. Cut this productivity by 20%, and you automatically increase the variable cost for a product by 20%. Legislate vacation time, and everything will become more expensive, the foreign trade deficit worsens, the dollar devaluates and everything will become even more expensive. True, we work hard, but our hard work reflects in the low product prices and high standard of living." END QUOTE
Hmmm, I found this which states that "overtime leads to an average drop in worker productivity of about 15 percent for work weeks exceeding 40 hours." from the Penn State College of Engineering.

Increased time at work != increased output.
-> Increased time at work != cheaper output.
-> Decreased time at work != more expensive output.

~Tetravus

https://lists.cse.psu.edu/archives/9fans/2003-June /025148.html

An interesting parallel to the whole video game/violence argument is to consider the older comic book/violence argument. This link is an interesting read: http://www.psu.edu/dept/inart10_110/inart10/cmbk4c ca.html And here's a good quote from the article: "Badly drawn, badly written, and badly printed - a strain on the young eyes and young nervous systems - the effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child's natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the `comic' magazine." What's truly sad is that as a culture we have not grown past this idiotic tendency to pass the buck. Surely the next generation will look back on our current fear and loathing of video games with the same bemused confusion that we now have for the last generations fear and loathing of comic books.

At PSU Physics , we use a variety of OSS for research. Most notable is our computing cluster which runs particle simulations and such on Linux. I'm unawae of any who have reversed drivers for their instruments to run on OSS in my department, however many researchers use PERL to analyze the results.

Radio that takes advantage of government and educational exemptions for public performance royalty payments sounds like a more realistic collective work. You know, the university buys music bassed on advice from music experts and student volunteers who then share that music? Wow, what a concept - music education. Oh yeah, I forgot, most college radio stations have gone to "realistic" formats to get their DJ's ready for the real world of comercial radio playlists. There's no chance of extending the free radio concept to online music services is there? The dean it telling everyone to pay per play. What an industry whore.

80,873 students x $2 fee/student = $161,746

That's enough to buy 8,138 CD a year. Compare this to the current holdings and you see a total industry rape about to happen. Buy the music, make it available and tell Universal, Sony, Time/Warner and all that to screw off.

No lie:

http://www.psu.edu/trustees/robinson.html

I find one of the most rewarding things that I get by going to class is learning from the experiences of my professors. They have been working with computers for a long time and in most cases have developed effective ways to solve problems (and I don't mean problems out of the textbook) and simply have experience with which program design/implementation ideas will work well and which will not.

Of course this means you have to actually go to class and listen to the professor (which is very hard in some cases.) If things are slow try asking a few questions and you'd be surprised how animated some of the most boring professors can be when they actually get an interesting question from the class (not just "Is this going to be on the test?") And if you want to ask something that doesn't really have much to do with the topic being discussed in class, go to office hours or email them. Most will be more than happy to discuss an interesting topic with you.

And how do fix the problem of being able to learn more from an O'Reilly book? Take classes that aren't directly related to computing. I'm double majoring in CS and math (at Penn State) and I love how I can see that the ideas and implementations we discuss in my comp sci classes are cool applications of the more general and fundamental concepts I've worked with in my math classes.

Of course this is all based on my personal experiences. ymmv

No way, man. Let those fuel cells run on vodka . But keep yer mits off my Jolt! I do not want to have to choose between feeding my laptop and feeding my aqueous caffeinated sucrouse habit. It won't be pretty! So just back away from the Jolt, ok?

Don't forget about the $100,000 bill.

It was never in public circulation. The department of the Treasury used it internally for transferring funds.

Heh heh. I just read the readme file with the "usher" in the filename.

I love the way he tears apart the reviewer of his submitted journal article.

<blam> Take that!

Good though, to see the network admin is getting signatures in his department to tell RIAA to go formally fsck themselves.

Penn State is working closely with the RIAA because Barry Robinson a lawyer for the RIAA is on the Board of Trustees so instead of representing the interests of the university and protecting the students, Penn State president Grahm Spanier has chosen to let a trustee influence university policy for the sake of the crooked organization he works for. I should post this AC but I really dont give an fsck. Penn State is dedicated to building unnecessary buildings while removing as much parking as possible. I now have to walk 20 mins from a staff parking lot to work so fire me before I die of heat stroke this summer ;)

Penn State is working closely with the RIAA because Barry Robinson a lawyer for the RIAA is on the Board of Trustees so instead of representing the interests of the university and protecting the students, Penn State president Grahm Spanier has chosen to let a trustee influence university policy for the sake of the crooked organization he works for. I should post this AC but I really dont give an fsck. Penn State is dedicated to building unnecessary buildings while removing as much parking as possible. I now have to walk 20 mins from a staff parking lot to work so fire me before I die of heat stroke this summer ;)

I'm an undergrad here at Penn State. Over the past few months they have been cracking down on copyrighted materials. They emailed the following letter to every student in the University:

I have a serious message for you about making illegal copies of copyrighted material. While you may be tempted not to read this email, I suggest that you do so in order to better understand just what the risks and penalties are for violating the law.

In recent years, high-speed computer networks and personal computers have made it easy to copy computer programs, movies, and recordings. Most of this material is copyrighted, which means the right to make copies is restricted. Making copies of any copyrighted material without the right to do so is against both state and federal law and University policy. Most people who make illegal copies know it is wrong, but are unaware of how severe the penalties can be.

The US Copyright Law (Title 17 of the US Code) has very serious penalties for violations. These include significant fines for each copy. If you copy more than $1,000 worth of material, there are criminal penalties that include substantial fines of up to $250,000 and up to 10 years prison time for flagrant cases of infringement.

The software, record, and movie industries are stepping up their enforcement of copyright laws. They are using computer technology to detect those who run servers or simply download something they have no right to possess. The likelihood of being caught is growing every day, and prosecutions will become more frequent.

You may have downloaded copyrighted materials and not been caught, so you think you're safe from prosecution. I urge you to think again. Two students in Oregon were caught and prosecuted under the criminal statutes. One received a suspended two-year sentence, the other spent time in jail. A student in North Carolina spent 41 months in prison for copyright infringement. Messing up your future is a steep price to pay for music or a video.

What happens at Penn State if you are caught? By statute, the University must immediately block your network access when we receive notification that a particular computer has been involved in a violation of the law. You may also be taken to court by the copyright holder or charged in the federal courts with a crime. That is not all that can happen. You should know that falsely certifying either that you have the right to material or have removed it can result in federal perjury charges as well as copyright infringement.

What else does Penn State do? When we receive a complaint, student offenders are referred to the Office of Judicial Affairs and employees to the Office of Human Resources. Why? Because it is illegal and against University policy to infringe on someone's copyright. A student can be expelled and an employee terminated under University policy.

The bottom line is that there is a potentially high price to pay for an illegally copied computer program, movie, or recording. Stealing is stealing and against the law, regardless of how you try to justify it.

Thank you for your cooperation.

Rodney A. Erickson March 31, 2003

After the letter was sent 220 students were served notices from the Judicial Affairs Office. You can read more about it in the school newspaper. school newspaper. In the article it says, "Rodack said it can take only one complaint against a student before dorm Internet connection is shut down and he or she is investigated."

Has anyone else seen the same pattern at their school? Is this par for the course?

Can this post get any longer?

Quite frankly, I'd like to see you sum up complex philosophies in a two-hour movie, complete with action, plot, and Neo's lengthy dialogue. The Matrix isn't an end-all in philosophy. It's simply a springboard for interesting philosophy discussion. For example, what would you choose, meeting your destiny by sucumbing to fate and gaining the freedom of superpowers, or rejecting that destiny, retaining free will, but living a mundane existence? And there's quite a multitude of views on whether Cypher's really right or not. It's a supplement, not a replacement.

How about a reply instead of a mod-down ? The Matrix was neither a unique, nor original movie. The dialog is laughable, and there are as many or more stupid things in that movie as in any other piece of Hollywood drivel. It's been a while since I last watched that piece of garbage (I don't own it), so I can't list the product placements from memory, but who didn't know that Nokia produced the "cool" cell phone props ? Regarding the "formula" which produced this movie, the ONLY objective difference is the target audience: geeks. You were all conned, sucked into buying a product and thinking it was great. How oddly appropriate.

check out 47 and 58 too.

check out 47 and 58 too.

For those of you who didn't read the article, Read this! it is all of Neo's dialogue, all 3 pages of it. I never realized it before, but most of his lines are questions. and the only really long line is his ending narration.

Since my server is apparently dead, I put up an image mirror here.

I travel quite a bit all over the Europe. Ever since the latest airport security measures were put into place last year, I've given up flying. I have traded enough of my privacy and comfort for security. The airlines are not going to get any more of my money if I can just help it.

With the increased time it takes to actually get through the security and board your plane, trains at least in the core continental EU the high speed trains are very competetive both in the price and speed and completely outclass the planes when it comes to comfort.

Secondly, I'm fed up having to feel like a criminal or that I have entered a war-zone every time I fly. Seeing guards walking around the terminal carrying shoulder-slung automatic weapons makes me feel apprehensive. The metal detectors are set so sensitive now that even the small metal studs in my shoes set them off. This, of course, is followed by an embarrasing body search. Ridiculous regulations such as banning nail clippers, small scissors or practically any sharp object from the hand luggage doesn't make traveling by air any more comfortable. I bet one could do much more damage with a ball-point pen (which is not on the forbidden items list) than with nail clippers if one were properly trained and determined. Any this doesn't make me feel safer. I've lost my privacy, I've lost my comfort -- why fly anymore?

"Open Source requires participation; coding and community."

Does it? I don't think I have ever joined in the R-Project's mailing lists, but I use their software regularly. I know a lot of Linux users who lack the time or the skill to be kernel hackers.

You /do/ realize that most of us choose a platform that /does what we want it to/ and /works for us/ and not for religious reasons? For my purposes, Linux isn't ready for the desktop. If I joined the team, I could help it get ready, and in a matter of years, it might be with my help (it also might be without my help).

OTOH, I could just continue using my Mac and actually meet my deadlines and get my work done.

My spare time, incidentally, does go into an Open Source projects, either: The Swarm Project or Equation Service. You want me to start working on Linux now as well?

See Dr. Fraser's Bad Science page, with links at the bottom.

However, I do think some of the material and writing is too high-level for 8-11 year old kids.

Penn State uses a colossal waste of time and money called Angel. It is the biggest piece of shit I have ever had the misfortune to use.

Issues I can remember:
"One of the three servers was down all weekend before we noticed. In the future if you can't log in make sure you try a few times."
"Something happened and we lost all your quiz scores for the semester. You'll have to redo them."
Plus it's IIS with a SQL Server backend. It took down the entire IST departments network for two and a half days.