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You have some interesting points to make about the deficit, but unfortunately the dates of the capital gains tax bill (1997) and the creation of Roth IRAs (1998) don't match any significant change in what's going on in the budget (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/3015540/US-Budget-Deficit-or-Surplus-1960present where the decrease in the budget deficit was remarkably linear over Clinton's eight years).

?Your chart doesn't contain enough information to accurately assess the situation. Despite that, you cannot deny that the Roth IRA conversion as well as the capitol gains reductions created an increase Taxable income which also increase taxes as well as Social security revenue. It's all smoke and mirrors that has convinced you of the surplus or that the mechanics were sound.

Unless you have compelling quantitative data that supports the importance of these revenue streams (not offset by something else), it looks to me like you're wrong that these were major factors.

No, I'm not wrong, I'm just looking at all the facts, not the ones that allow me to create an illusion. It's all there and availible.

It is true that Clinton got a nice dividend from the end of the Cold War. There is, to say the least, considerable controversy over whether the spending in the War on Terror was necessary or even useful (and whether it even makes sense to call it a war). So I don't think the Presidents can entirely escape from responsibility for government spending, even if happenstance plays a part.

I never said they could. I said that circumstance that were happening during the Clinton years won't be repeatable and it gave him an advantage that other administrations won't have. In other words, if you win the lottery and pay off all your bills but don't adjust your spending appropriately for when the funds run out, you will be broke and in debt once again. Clinton in effect won the lottery.

Before I go to the trouble of tracking down difficult-to-find data, I want to get some indication that it might actually satisfy you. So far you have appealed to individual choice to "refute" a point about human nature ("you don't have to go into debt"--well, yes, true, and you don't have to eat more than will barely avoid starvation, nor do you have to keep warm and/or cool, etc.), and you have also accepted, as far as I can tell, that the natural state of affairs is for wealthy people to have better investment and income-growth opportunities than poor people--and then somehow seem to think that this isn't relevant to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

No one is going into debt to eat enogh food to not only satisfy them but to be happy. It simply isn't happening. Going into debt isn't even a problem. The problem is where people are going into debt by purchasing new cars instead of older ones when they can't afford the new one. It's when they buy a boat or jet skis instead of paying their health insurance. It's where they are buying too much house for what they can afford for vanity reasons. Making $22,000 a year and having a $700 a month mortgage payment is just stupid. That's 38 percent of their income and they either need to get a better job or rent. Throw a $300 a month car payment plus the costs of insurance on top of that when a couple year old used car would do for far less, and you can easily see how their poor choices made them poor. If we guess that someone is single, under 25, or has a few tickets or something on their record, they should see around a $100 or more a month insurance rate on that new car, They will be spending 60% of their income on debt that they don't need. In contrast, if you rent for $500 a month, or even look at the practical side of things and get mar

so why do FireWire 400 readers still consistently beat out USB 2:

While USB 2.0's theoretical 480Mbp/s (60MBp/s) throughput should be sufficient for UDMA 4 CompactFlash, realthroughput is significantly less. Top hard drive manufacturers typically cite USB 2.0's best speed at 33MB/s, or abouthalf the speed of UDMA 4 CompactFlash, or 25% of UDMA 6 CompactFlash. There are myriad reasons for USB 2.0's'real world' speeds including: CPU overhead from its master/slave arrangement, NRZI encoding, and inexpensivechipset implementations. The USB 2.0 UDMA reader used in the benchmarks above uses one of the latest USBchipsets from Genesys Logic. While a new generation of that chipset should soon be available, we don't foresee itproviding throughput close to half of that of FireWire.

heck, those benchmarks show that even using FireWire 400 to read a PIO CompactFlash card still beats USB 2.0 UDMA reading a UDMA-enabled CompactFlash card.

You have some interesting points to make about the deficit, but unfortunately the dates of the capital gains tax bill (1997) and the creation of Roth IRAs (1998) don't match any significant change in what's going on in the budget (see http://www.scribd.com/doc/3015540/US-Budget-Deficit-or-Surplus-1960present where the decrease in the budget deficit was remarkably linear over Clinton's eight years).

Unless you have compelling quantitative data that supports the importance of these revenue streams (not offset by something else), it looks to me like you're wrong that these were major factors.

It is true that Clinton got a nice dividend from the end of the Cold War. There is, to say the least, considerable controversy over whether the spending in the War on Terror was necessary or even useful (and whether it even makes sense to call it a war). So I don't think the Presidents can entirely escape from responsibility for government spending, even if happenstance plays a part.

Before I go to the trouble of tracking down difficult-to-find data, I want to get some indication that it might actually satisfy you. So far you have appealed to individual choice to "refute" a point about human nature ("you don't have to go into debt"--well, yes, true, and you don't have to eat more than will barely avoid starvation, nor do you have to keep warm and/or cool, etc.), and you have also accepted, as far as I can tell, that the natural state of affairs is for wealthy people to have better investment and income-growth opportunities than poor people--and then somehow seem to think that this isn't relevant to the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

The natural state of affairs, given the long human history of kings and wealthy merchant houses and so on, seems to be for the rich to get richer and stay very rich indeed (until some calamity or revolution) and for the poor to stay about the same. The great feat of the 20th century was to create a large "middle class" that defied this historic trend.

What Bush has done to encourage enhanced income disparity is (1) to lower taxes at the top end, allowing the natural aggregation of wealth to proceed faster; (2) to pay less attention to environmental and labor and similar issues so that companies can profit through activities that make many people's lives a little worse; (3) spend prolifically in ways that do not help the economy; and (4) allow the debt/credit situation to get entirely out of hand with the relative burden falling more heavily on the debtors than the creditors.

Let me repeat: accumulation of wealth is the *natural state of affairs*. Any argument that simply says that something is natural, a choice, or whatever, is *irrelevant* to the point about the rich getting richer and the poor not getting richer. Maybe the poor do things that make you think they should stay poor--but then you should agree that the disparity exists and is widening and say that that's the way things should be.

Now, I'll find quantitative data to back up bits of my argument as you request, but only if you specify what sort of thing you think is relevant to the argument. ("If we get this piece of data and it says this, it's good evidence for my position; and if it says that, it's good evidence for yours.")

Nicola Tesla's methods of wireless power wasn't
wireless in the sense that you wouldn't need a wire for you laptop.

Tesla transmitted power using one wire and then later replaced the one wire with the earth.
See page 44 in
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4445/quaternionic-electrodynamics

So, Tesla's method is wireless in the sense
that there is no wires from the power station to your home, but you would still have to connect the laptop with a wire to the earth.

A good place to start is to read the book
They All Told the Truth: The Antigravity Papers
by Richard P. Crandall

http://www.amazon.com/They-All-Told-Truth-Antigravity/dp/1553957237

Notice that the typesetting on this book is very bad, so if that is all you look at you will be very disappointed.

But this book will teach you how to build a anti-gravity generator and will provide you with
the theoretical foundation for understanding anti gravity.

But to understand the theory you should know about
general relativity and quaternionic electromagnetism.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/4445/quaternionic-electrodynamics

There is also a very nice free intro to Erlang and functional programming in general, specifically for the procedural programmer: Thinking in Erlang

Burning garbage creates highly toxic materials, like dioxin. So does gasifying the garbage, apparently, according to this position paper. The article doesn't address this issue.
There is a reasoned and informative opposition to this plant. By ignoring this opposition, the featured article reads like a PR piece.

1) Turn on the FS on iPodB (an option when it is plugged into PCB)

So it's impossible.

You misunderstand. Perhaps I should have started with:
Ensure mass storage is enabled on both iPods. Once that is true you can copy files off both iPods on any PC you want.

What you're saying is that unless you have access to BOTH the PCs the iPods are synced to you can't transfer music at all.

Nope, not at all. As long as the iPods are visible as a file system to the single PC you care about, you can copy all the files off the iPod.

If you need access to BOTH PCs, why bother? Just move the files PC to PC.

You only need access to "both" PCs in the first place in the same sense you need both PCs in order to populate the iPods in the first place.

This is clearly seems deliberate to me. Apple really doesn't want you to share music.

No, you are just misunderstanding my instructions.

Apple doesn't care if you share music, they just don't make it the primary function of the iPod.

Um, the problem definitely existed seven years ago when this feature was first unveiled, and as a solution it definitely worked.

No it didn't. I had an original Rio PMP300, and MP3Man, the first MP3 players ever made and neither had this problem (they didn't do any metadata though).

Um, those systems couldn't handle 5GB of songs (or roughly 1000 songs). When you need to parse 1000 songs, you need some kind of magic when you have a 60MHz CPU...

I had an original Archos and it didn't have this problem, and it was a slow HD-based player AND did metadata and on-the-fly playlists.

Ugh, when I first got the iPod I could tell it was literally 10x faster than the Nomad and Archos my coworkers had.

For one thing, clicking on a genre/artist/playlist did not spin up the HDD. That is literally a 1/10th second difference between the iPod and most other HDD based players.

Since it was a mass storage device it also meant the filesystem could not contain anything other than straight ASCII (and limited at that), so the files HAD to be mangled if the file had apostrophes, diacriticals, etc.

This makes no sense at all. The filesystem most MP3 players use is FAT32, iPods (I think) originally used HFS+, now they use FAT32. FAT32 supports almost exactly the same character set as NTFS (the only possible 3rd filesystem here) so the filenames on your PC SHOULD work on the iPod, just as they do on EVERY OTHER MP3 PLAYER. Special characters and Unicode are meant to be handled in the metatdata, the ID3 tags.

Um, I had Japanese music files from Japanese music CDs that contained Japanese characters. Experience (and this document) says FAT32 could only store/display 8 bit DBCS characters... unicode was stored in special metadata folders/directories

There is simply no need to mangle the filenames and metadata into ASCII gibberish for "performance" and there never was.

If you say so. My experience was it worked. My training in CS also tells me that a hashtable is going to be faster.

Where did it insert hash data?

Into the tags. Last time I imported MP3 files into iTunes the song, artist, and album names in the ID3 tags were replaced with random ASCII strings (which I assume is hash data). Album art was stripped too.

Bizarre. Never happened to me.

If govt. can lower the price of health care by a single payer system, it should also introduce a single payer system for food.

It seems not to be specifically for AppleBASIC, but is this possibly the one [e-scribe.com]?

No, but thank you. The book I recall was very specifically written for the Apple II. The robot I mentioned was a bit of a mascot, very cartoon-like.

I was actually pretty lucky. I had two excellent experiences in learning to program from books. One was the AppleBASIC tutorial, and the other was a C++ book for use with Turbo C++ (actually learned C++ before C). It's funny, I recall a very technical Apple BASIC book (I think it was the official reference manual) alongside the friendly one, and a co-worker grimaced as he mentioned "Yeah, that's the one *I* learned from." As it turns out, he also learned how to program C from the K&R book - which also wasn't the easiest way to learn.

I find that these filters are more often abused for control rather than used appropriately.

More specifically, there is no precise definition of pornography that filter companies can use, even if they wanted to try as hard as possible to do the right thing.

Would the filtering company be legally at fault if they used too permissive of criteria? Would they be at fault if they used too restrictive of criteria? Yes on either count, so the content-filtering requirement will be struck down as unconstitutional.

I have seen way too much credible evidence that this disease was likely engineered to give creedence to this particular report - I've done quite a bit of reading about it on both sides of the issue and for now that is what I believe. I have put some links below the appropriations bill that cover some of the information, The records are there, and this appropriations bill is is just one of many, many things that seem to show this - including a flowchart that seems to show the development of AIDS as an engineered disease from 1971.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3280929/Special-Virus-Program-AIDS-Flow-Chart-TOP-SECRET (Flowchart of the "Special Virus Cancer Program")

DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS FOR 1970

HEARINGS BEFORE A SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE COMMITTEE ON APPROPRIATIONS HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
NINETY-FIRST CONGRESS
FIRST SESSION
SUBCOMMITTEE ON DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE APPROPRIATIONS

H.B. 15090

PART 5
RESEARCH, DEVELOPMENT, TEST, AND EVALUATION

Department of the Army
Statement of Director, Advanced Research Project Agency
Statement of Director, Defense Research and Engineering

Printed for the use of the Committee on Appropriations
U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE
WASHINGTON : 1969
UNITED STATES SENATE LIBRARY

[pg.] 129 TUESDAY, JULY 1, 1969

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGICAL AGENTS

There are two things about the biological agent field I would like to mention. One is the possibility of technological surprise. Molecular biology is a field that is advancing very rapidly and eminent biologists believe that within a period of 5 to 10 years it would be possible to produce a synthetic biological agent, an agent that does not naturally exist and for which no natural immunity could have been acquired.
MR. SIKES. Are we doing any work in that field?
DR. MACARTHUR. We are not.
MR. SIKES. Why not? Lack of money or lack of interest?
DR. MACARTHUR. Certainly not lack of interest.
MR. SIKES. Would you provide for our records information on what would be required, what the advantages of such a program would be, the time and the cost involved?
DR. MACARTHUR. We will be very happy to.
(The information follows:)

The dramatic progress being made in the field of molecular biology led us to investigate the relevance of this field of science to biological warfare. A small group of experts considered this matter and provided the following observations:
1. All biological agents up the the present time are representatives of naturally occurring disease, and are thus known by scientists throughout the world. They are easily available to qualified scientists for research, either for offensive or defensive purposes.
2. Within the next 5 to 10 years, it would probably be possible to make a new infective microorganism which could differ in certain important aspects from any known disease-causing organisms. Most important of these is that it might be refractory to the immunological and therapeutic processes upon which we depend to maintain our relative freedom from infectious disease.
3. A research program to explore the feasibility of this could be completed in approximately 5 years at a total cost of $10 million.
4. It would be very difficult to establish such a program. Molecular biology is a relatively new science. There are not many highly competent scientists in the field. Almost all are in university laboratories, and they are generally adequately supported from sources other than DOD. However, it was considered possible to initiate an adequate program through the National Academy of Sciences - National Research Council (NAS-NRC).
The matter was discussed with the NAS-NRC, and tentative plans were plans were made to initiate the program. However decreasing funds in CB, growing criticism of the CB program, and our reluctance to involve the NAS-NRC in such a controversial endeavor have led us to postpone it for the past 2 years.

Michael Widenius
MySQL Fellow
2008-04-17

From http://www.scribd.com/doc/2575733/The-future-of-MySQL-The-Project

Its an interesting read:
Change MySQL development model to attract outside developers
-Give outside developers commit and decision rights to the MySQL server code base (similar constraints as for internal developers)
-Do this by aiming at a high target: "MySQL should within 2 years have as many outside core contributors as PostgreSQL".
Yes, we have a lot to learn from how PostgreSQL is developed!

In that case, I'd like to make you a great offer on a slightly-used cow...

1 cow (standard version), $2,400
2 colors (Black/White), extra $150
Leather upholstery, $100
Milk reservoir for summer & winter use, $50
4 Milk taps @ $12.50 each, $50
2 Bumpers, finished in Horn @ $ 17.50, $35
Fly swatter, semi automatic, $30
Environmentally friendly exhaust catalyst, $60
All terrain and weather boots, $100
Brake system 2 circuits (Legs front and rear), $400
Multi tone horn, $135
Eyes, HALOGEN, $150
Multiple fuel use possibility, $1,250

Total for cow plus accessories, $4,910

this paper is worth reading. (Here too.) ("I've Got Nothing To Hide" and other Misunderstandings of Privacy, by Daniel Solove).

I suggest you read I've got nothing to hide and other misunderstandings of privacy.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/852783/how-to-make-a-bomb-house-hold-items

Since you didn't provide a source where one could find more about this particular case, I'll have to go by what little information I were able to find - a couple of sentences in a 1998 essay by Richard Stallman called Copyleft: Pragmatic Idealism , hardly an unbiased source. From what I could gather, NeXT wrote the Objective-C frontend for GCC, something I would not describe as mere "Objective C modifications", and wanted for some undisclosed in the essay reason to provide it to the GNU project in the form of .o files instead of as source code. Now, I don't know what NeXT's motivation could have been, but given that the late 80's was still the heyday of proprietary software and barely the dawn of open source, I can see them doing it out of farce of habit. And the only reason this can be considered a GPL violation is that both the license and the "anti-modular" design of GCC were specifically created to prevent such cases. Otherwise the Objective-C frontend probably was/is a self-contained chunk of code, entirely written by NeXT, and not using any GPL-ed code but only interfacing such.

At any rate, your statement "Not anymore, but not for lack of trying." somehow does not suggest that all you have is a single, not so clear-cut case form more than 18 years ago, that seems to have been quickly and amicably resolved.

Q: Can I use slydial to connect to the voicemail of a landline phone number?
A: No. slydial only works to connect to the voicemail of a U.S. mobile phone user.

Which is weird, since landlines that have provider electronic voicemail, those have remote numbers too, no?

Anyway, there are some publicly-posted lists of these numbers. [1] [2]

BONGARD PROBLEMS. No machine can crack them in at least 10 years time. And when one does, baby, we'll have genuine AI.

Just let me throw this out there.

(2007 H1B filings)

I read Slashdot via telegraph.

I can do you one better: Slashdot via carrier pigeon.

You can also get TCP/IP over swallow (African or European) as long as the packet doesn't weigh more than a pound.

If you're really serious, check out Phaeaco and this.

Some time ago some researchers came out with a book which was supposed to be called "the end of intuition". The name of the book actually became "Supercrunchers", because people would click more on that ad than in the "end of intuition". I wondered why the final name shouldn't be "hot college lesbians".

The Eliza effect is so huge that any nice trick machines do seems to give us the immediate feeling that "It's alive!", and it has deep meaning.

Nonsense.

As a researcher of psychologically plausible AI models, I found the whole idea disgusting, and submitted a paper to a journal explaining why the whole thing is bogus.

Expect to see more of this overexcited nonsense in the future.

My collegue Alok wrote a fantastic essay on this issue which everyone here should appreciate as it starts with the basic principles of how the internet works and then analyzes a conception of net neutrality and more importantly extends the debate to consider different possibilities for net prejudice i.e. prejudicial packet treatment (also called QoS, etc.). The basic conclusion is that legislation should be enacted (and can be defined and implemented effectively and easily) based on an analysis of technology as well as business motivations of telco.s not to project net neutrality but rather to prevent pernicious types of net prejudice. This would protect best telco., consumer and engineering interests. You can read the essay at scribd: http://www.scribd.com/doc/938752/Against-FeeBased-and-other-Pernicious-Net-Prejudice-An-Explanation-and-Examination-of-the-Net-Neutrality-Debate Here's Alok's summary of his argument: defining net neutrality as the idea that every packet must be treated equally, there's an alternative, net prejudice, in which packets can be treated prejudicially (or preferentially depending on your perspective!). Through analyzing the kinds of technologies involved in sincere and rent-seeking net prejudice by telco.s, the essay arrives at conclusions that protections are needed (e.g. legislation) not so much to protect net neutrality but rather to protect against pernicious net prejudice, and these protections won't inhibit any technological innovation (e.g. IPv6 which provides for quality of service or net prejudice) nor provide any disincentives to telecommunications infrastructure investment.

In North America and Europe, an electronic signature is generally legally binding, so it's the people, not the law that are the barrier.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/1809825/Environmental-Protection-Agency-flourene

Well, OK, technically it's silaflourene, but that has a good chance of being worse.

I really think you don't want this stuff sprayed on you.

Wow if that's the standard by which you judge religions, and presumably the actions that must be taken to stop them, you must be advocating for nuking mecca.

Because by the standard of amounts of violence and death used to keep the cult/religion together, islam certainly spans the crown by a margin of at least a few hundred million deaths :

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2342790/Hindu-Indian-History-Islamic-Invasion

About 100 million people died, and that's counting only 1/3rd of the eastward expansion of islam, in about 400 years, and that's the low death toll estimate.

The inquisition is less than a grain of sand with it's estimated death toll of about 2000 (lowest) to about 50000 (highest).

So in comparison : the largest ever problematic section of Christian history caused 1/2000 th the amount of deaths as ONE muslim religious expansion war. And that's using the highest death toll estimate on the christian side and a low one of the muslim side (otherwise it'd be 2000 versus 300 million).

At the westward side of expansion there were a lot of cultures in the way of the muslims. Hardly a trace remains : Egyptians, Tunisians, Carthage, the Berbers, tons of Jewish kingdoms, twice as many small Christian kingdoms (and we're hardly 1/6th of the distance westward, one can only imagine the amount of culture lost)

So tell me, what do you think ?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/34504/Thicker-Than-Blood

That rhetoric is getting old... very old.

Refusing to consent to illegal searches does not make me a terrorist. You might find this 'tutorial' on how to handle illegal searches enlightening.

"If you have nothing to hide..."

If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to look. You might want to read this paper on the matter: ""I've Got Nothing To Hide" and other Misunderstandings of Privacy"

Well, he's already using the air for power, perhaps he could to TCP over avian carriers?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/551889/Introducing-Freebsd-70 a presentation of the SMP in FreeBSD 7.0 using PostgreSQL and MySQL to produce benchmarks. Notable quotes - a) MySQL degrades after utilizing all CPUs, while PostgreSQL does not (the explanation is that MySQL has scalability problem). b) PostgreSQL is in general 35%-45% faster. I can't tell if all is true, just wanted to make it public, if it hasn't been already made. Iv

Hi. You used to be able to unlock PDFs by uploading them to Scribd http://www.scribd.com/ and then downloading them again in text format. Don't know if they closed this loophole yet as I haven't tried in a while.

Well, the term quantum teleportation is just science PR
for coping a quantum stat from one atom to another.

Many of the experiments with real teleportation (starting with Tesla)
have been kept secret.

But you can find some experiments here.

Proj. Gutenberg is great, but (sticking to books that are not found in mysterious warez channels!) there are two other good choices I've hit lately and recommend:

1) manybooks.net (not .org, as I'd remembered it ;)) -- just downloaded quite a few childhood favorites (Bobbsey Twins!), but not everything on it is old; for instance, I look forward to reading The Hacker Crackdown, which B. Sterling kindly allowed them to host.

2) Scribd -- http://www.scribd.com/ unbelievable assortment; I think it's been called "YouTube for PDFs," and if not, there just called it that.

There are also quite a few random ebooks out there hosted online by their authors or with their permission; I *think* Baen has lots of books like this online. In the Beginning Was the Command Line used to be up, though it looks like Harper Collins has changed Cryptonomicon.com to be just a plug for the book by that name. (Nothing wrong with that, though! Good marketing.) Read The Lie Behind the Lie Detector, PDF from https://antipolygraph.org/pubs.shtml, and Ain't Nobody's Business if You Do from http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/books/aint/ This last is not a downloadable eBook, but rather the entire content of the (compelling!) book online; that (I assert) is a good argument for the OLPC XO.

However, my XO came in the mail yesterday, so you can count me biased if you please ;) I got it in large part as an eBook reader, and so far I am very impressed with its capabilities. The keyboard is small (tiny!), but it beats the one on the Kindle, and it beats the one (that isn't) on the Sony even worse ;) It also has a color screen when you want one, and all the other goodies that the XO comes with.

timothy

Scramjet is so last millenium, antigravity is the way to go.

Learn how to build your own antigravity generator in the book:
They all told the truth: The antigravity papers by Richard P. Crandall, isbn 1-55395-723-7

see
http://www.scribd.com/groups/view/223-extreme-physics

Here is a copy of the article from the Journal of the American Medical Association: http://www.scribd.com/doc/822211/YouTube-as-a-Source-of-Information-on-Immunization-A-Content-Analysis/

Here's how its done. The btnI parameter redirects to the first link in search results. It seems to be using a hacked website to redirect to the actual target.

Really, google needs to wise up and disable that btnI parameter for GET requests.

It wouldn't hurt for the lameness filter to remove it from anonymous posts either.

Also note that nuclear energy may be energy negative, and there is a limited supply of fissionable materials of sufficient quantity, as discussed here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/4446/nuclear-power

We must also consider that nuclear may not be profitable, once all the expenses are considered, such as proper disposal of waste.

As mentioned earlier in the discussion, almost every viable form of power generation has a negative environmental impact. The only real way of reducing this is to reduce our consumption, which means changing the way we live, and slowing or reversing population growth.

And it's Multivac not MULTIVAC!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3407/The-Last-Question

You know, given the whole scribd / Asimov / Doctorow thing, I'm rather surprised that's still up there.

And it's Multivac not MULTIVAC!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3407/The-Last-Question

According to the court documents the suit was filed Feb. 2006.

Depending on time and culture, most attractive looks can vary from

• rail-thin (today's model standard) to
• pleasantly curvatious (20s-60's model standard) to
• juicy plump ("Rubenesque") to
• downright obese (some arab cultures)

Just because you're used to it, doesn't mean that it's been (and will remain) the standard for all time.

> I'm not familiar whith those replacements that work with PDAs. Can you pls name them for me?

Not to be a jerk, but you haven't looked very hard.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/410688/bionicmessage-GroupWare-sync-server-install-gude

There are several (OpenGroupware, SOGo, Citadel, and others) groupware servers that support GroupDAV. Funambol will sync with everything but the kitchen sink [pun intended].

http://www.funambol.com/opensource/

There is a GroupDAV plugin for Thunderbird @ http://www.inverse.ca/english/contributions/thunderbird_groupdav_plugin.html

And several of the Open Source groupware servers, including OpenGroupware, are feature competitive with proprietary solutions like Microsoft Exchange.

In order to substantially comply with 512(c)(3)s requirements, a notification must do more than identify infringing files. The DMCA requires a complainant to declare, under penalty of perjury, that he is authorized to represent the copyright holder, and that he has a good-faith belief that the use is infringing. This requirement is not superfluous. Accusations of alleged infringement have drastic consequences: A user could have content removed, or may have his access terminated entirely. If the content infringes, justice has been done. But if it does not, speech protected under the First Amendment could be removed. We therefore do not require a service provider to start potentially invasive proceedings if the complainant is unwilling to state under penalty of perjury that he is an authorized representative of the copyright owner, and that he has a good-faith belief that the material is unlicensed.

While I have great respect for Pournelle as a writer, he should have read Doctorow's piece more closely.

Ignoring the obvious ad hominem, let's look at Jerry's arguments:

"I can say this: Scribd.com which Doctorow defends has the complete text of a number of works. One of them is Sheffield and Pournelle, Higher Education. I guarantee you that neither I nor Charlie's widow has given this outfit any permission to do this. They used to have more of my books, and Niven's, and many others. They also had a series of hoops one had to jump through to get those taken down. The procedure was onerous, and they didn't answer my emails."

Doctorow doesn't defend scribd, and he also voice no objection to authors (or their agents) sending DMCA notices in order to remove truly infringing content. His problem is with SFWA sending fraudulent notices (which of all things wasn't even in a proper format) that resulted in non-infringing material being removed. And those 'series of hoops' are what's required by the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. It is the law, not some arbitrary attempt on scribd's part in order to make the process more difficult than necessary. If he has a problem with the law he should take his complaints to Congress.

Mr. Doctorow's ill-considered attack on the action taken provides no verbiage distancing himself from scribd.com or the infringement issue. Instead he makes it very clear that he enjoys a long and cozy relationship with same.

"SFWA will have an answer to Doctorow. Doctorow does not seem to have done his homework regarding DMCA, but that too is hardly astonishing. DMCA has a number of legal requirements for both those asserting their rights under it and those asserting a right to post copies of works without the permission of the copyright owners. I am no expert on those matters, but SFWA has such experts among its membership and supporters."

I find it incredibly hard to respond to that in a non-ridiculing manner. Cory has been working with the Internet and copyright for so long that he should be able to quote the entire DMCA by heart by now (well, maybe not the rider bill concerning the sui generis protection of boat hull designs). If there is someone that doesn't understand the DMCA it is Burt, he didn't even manage to send a proper DMCA notification to scribd. If that's the level of "experts" that SFWA has available, I'd strongly advise them to get outside counsel post haste. Especially now that Burt has exposed the SFWA to liability due to perjury under DMCA 512(f).

While it remains for a judge to rule (and a judge will rule on this) by all appearances any liability from perjury will be infinitesimal when compared against the massive copyright infringement issues. I would urge any author with the wherewithal to retain counsel on this matter, or to pool with other like minded authors to do so.

And let me repeat; noone has said that sending notices in order to get infringing material removed is wrong. The entire issue is with SFWA sending notices that resulted in non-infringing content, and content from authors that have explicitly allowed for distribution being taken down.

And yet, Pournelle reports that they still have works of his that were on the infringement list posted. Only taking down the items they knew they could defend, the willfulness of the infringement appears to become obvious.

"They made it difficult for writers to ask that their works be taken off: we had to find them and request one at a time and provide them other materials."

That's the way the DMCA works. If he doesn't like, Congress is over there.

The hostile appearance of compliance is not compliance.

"[..] or that the right of Doctorow to have his work displayed on a site that uses piracy to get net traffic is far more importa

While I have great respect for Pournelle as a writer, he should have read Doctorow's piece more closely.

Ignoring the obvious ad hominem, let's look at Jerry's arguments:

"I can say this: Scribd.com which Doctorow defends has the complete text of a number of works. One of them is Sheffield and Pournelle, Higher Education. I guarantee you that neither I nor Charlie's widow has given this outfit any permission to do this. They used to have more of my books, and Niven's, and many others. They also had a series of hoops one had to jump through to get those taken down. The procedure was onerous, and they didn't answer my emails."

Doctorow doesn't defend scribd, and he also voice no objection to authors (or their agents) sending DMCA notices in order to remove truly infringing content. His problem is with SFWA sending fraudulent notices (which of all things wasn't even in a proper format) that resulted in non-infringing material being removed. And those 'series of hoops' are what's required by the DMCA notice-and-takedown process. It is the law, not some arbitrary attempt on scribd's part in order to make the process more difficult than necessary. If he has a problem with the law he should take his complaints to Congress.

"SFWA will have an answer to Doctorow. Doctorow does not seem to have done his homework regarding DMCA, but that too is hardly astonishing. DMCA has a number of legal requirements for both those asserting their rights under it and those asserting a right to post copies of works without the permission of the copyright owners. I am no expert on those matters, but SFWA has such experts among its membership and supporters."

I find it incredibly hard to respond to that in a non-ridiculing manner. Cory has been working with the Internet and copyright for so long that he should be able to quote the entire DMCA by heart by now (well, maybe not the rider bill concerning the sui generis protection of boat hull designs). If there is someone that doesn't understand the DMCA it is Burt, he didn't even manage to send a proper DMCA notification to scribd. If that's the level of "experts" that SFWA has available, I'd strongly advise them to get outside counsel post haste. Especially now that Burt has exposed the SFWA to liability due to perjury under DMCA 512(f).

And let me repeat; noone has said that sending notices in order to get infringing material removed is wrong. The entire issue is with SFWA sending notices that resulted in non-infringing content, and content from authors that have explicitly allowed for distribution being taken down.

"They made it difficult for writers to ask that their works be taken off: we had to find them and request one at a time and provide them other materials."

That's the way the DMCA works. If he doesn't like, Congress is over there.

"[..] or that the right of Doctorow to have his work displayed on a site that uses piracy to get net traffic is far more important than mine to have a writers organization try to act in my behalf."

The real issue here is what requirements there should be on services that provide 3rd parties the ability to publish stuff. The notice-and-takedown provisions of the DMCA isn't without it's flaws but it is certainly better than nothing. Copyright holders might feel that the current law is too lax or onerous, so I'd be really interested in seeing what kind of system Pournelle would like to replace it with.

And it might also be educational for him to think through the consequences of his proposed system. For starters: What would be the impact on services ranging from MySpace and YouTube down to blogs which allows comments on posts? Could unscrupulous organizations like the Church of Scientology abuse his system to silence online criticism?

Smart people have thought about these questions, and notice-and-takedown and a similar procedure called notice-and-notice are at the top of the pile when it comes to striking a balance between protecting creators, not stifling the creation of new services and avoiding abuse of the system.

Thicker Than Blood

Come give me a takedown notice for my own book. I'll sue the crap out of you.