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Risc chips had more performance back when it was 386 vs Mips, but that advantage disappeared over time

http://www-vlsi.stanford.edu/group/chart/SpecInt2000.pdf

I've never understood why the group that believes we didn't do it think that means we can continue being oblivious. Climate change is climate change, man-made or not. It will cause problems, and we do need to think ahead.

First of all, there is a lot of evidence that global warming might actually be a good thing. The longer summers will tend to create more areas that have longer growing seasons and are more favorable to growing crops. Global warming will also increase precipitation levels in most areas, leading to less drought overall throughout the world and also contributing to more food for the world. Warmer temperatures will lead to a reduced need for fuel used in heating and it will reduce deaths due to exposure and the stresses placed on people during cold weather.

Health and Amenity Effects of Global Warming
Not the End of the World as We Know It
Questions and Answers on Global Warming

Secondly there are the costs and benefits associated with global warming. If you look at a detailed analysis of the sacrifices that would have to be made to carry out some of the recommendations of global warming alarmists, the economic impact is quite severe. Compare that to the economic benefits of a warmer climate and you can see that maybe we should be taking a less severe stance on global warming and instead of sacrificing everything maybe we should pick and choose our battles more carefully.

Economics of Global Warming

Lastly, although there is evidence that supports the theory that greenhouse gasses are part of the reason for global warming it is far from a foregone conclusion. There is also evidence that solar warming and several other factors might be primary causes. Without a thorough understanding of the mechanisms of global warming it is difficult to come up with methods of reducing the warming trend. We can call for severely impacting our economy and health by curtailing industry in the hopes that it will reduce global warming or we can make sensible cuts while we learn more about the situation.

There's a good paper with an in-depth analysis of the topic here:

http://www.stanford.edu/group/greendorm/participate/cee124/TeslaReading.pdf

It's written by Tesla about the Roadster, but all the facts have sources cited, and most of the information is not specific to their particular car.

Does this temper your skepticism any?

I find it hard to accept the idea that some lone guy on slashdot has found a problem in the maths used by all the astronomers in the world who describe galaxy rotation, or indeed that even if you had, it seems galaxy rotation is not the sole piece of evidence for dark matter.

"Advertising in general, or at least the way it is currently done, is something that I believe a more enlightened society would view as either a great evil or at least a corrupting influence."

More enlightened society does view it as a corrupting influence, 'evil' being a term that's generally avoided in said society. If you look at trends in comtemporary philosophy/cultural theory you'll find a number of critics of this, a part of what they label as 'the culture of capitalism' or 'late capitalism', from Theodor Adorno (stanford encyclopedia of philosophy entry) to Fredric Jameson.

Interestingly, society is neither enlightened nor interested in becoming enlightened (the criticism is there and instead of either reacting and modifying the system to fix the problems or replacing the system completely, whatever floats your boat, we are in denial about the existance of what's literally in our face every day), so this is what we're stuck with.

Bookmarks are getting smarter. Firefox 3 adds support for tagging bookmarks, but not much in the way of uses for those tags. I think the tags get transferred to delicious if you use the delicious plug-in (I don't, so I'm not sure). If that is the case, there are many third party sites that will suck in data from delicious and spit out mind maps.

And really, I would be surprised if further tag features are not added to Firefox.

Or extensions. TagSifter looks neat:

http://cs.stanford.edu/people/adw/tagsifter/

In the paste I was not very impressed by things as http://www-graphics.stanford.edu/projects/brookgpu/ because of the latency that is involved in actually transferring data back and forth from CPU to GPU memory. Thus I observed the same thing. But now it seems to the actual latency for transfer is reduced because of PCI-e, one might wonder if decent compiler technology is able to optimise 'normal' code for GPU instructions.

Yeah, but why does he use this unscientific and highly religiously charged word? As if consciousness wouldn't be enough of a problematic notion.

We don't know what consciousness is and calling it an emerging property is not really much of a progress.

Folding@home is sustaining over 4.2 Petaflops and rising quickly.
You can see statistics here: http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=osstats
And a nice graph charting the rise here: http://img388.imageshack.us/my.php?image=foldinghome20kx2.png

I also enjoy reading the Wiki article on the NSA's headquaters: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Agency#Facilities

It goes on to talk about their own private chip fab, and how they are using an inordinate amount of power. I can only assume they are running some major hardware...

I don't think this compares with Fermilab. The fine article is talking about creating positrons, not anti-protons. This isn't the first time I've heard about creating positrons from a laser shown upon a gold foil target. Here are two (from 2004 and 2001 respectively) that I just found on Google Scholar describing a result and a theory behind the positron production:

http://llacolen.ciencias.uchile.cl/~vmunoz/download/papers/wclpp05.pdf
http://www-project.slac.stanford.edu/lc/local/PolarizedPositrons/doc/ClassicalPapers/B_Shen-J_Meyer-ter-Vehn-PRE65_16405.pdf

It also isn't very efficient. They make 10^11 positrons per 400 J of energy input. If those positrons react with 10^11 electrons, they produce gamma rays with the energy 2 * (electron mass * (10^11)) * (c^2) = 0.0163742083 joules. Maybe it is more efficient than Fermilab, but that's still not very much. Since these are light positrons - not heavy anti-protons - I don't think these results would be very useful for fusion. Maybe as a source of gamma rays or as a research tool.

Here is the science: http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MornerEtAl2004.pdf

Here is the science to the falling sea level around the maldives: http://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/MornerEtAl2004.pdf

Unless you're an employee of the school, or use their equipment, you should own anything you do. Graduate students may be employees if they have an assistantship, but undergraduates usually are not.

I had some minor difficulties with Stanford over a similar issue in the mid-1980s. I was a Stanford student, wasn't using any Stanford equipment, and wasn't a Stanford employee. There was some huffing and puffing from the Stanford side, but they knew they had an unwinnable case. It worked out fine for me in the end. Stanford later changed their policy in that area, and I was told years later by a faculty member that I was partly responsible for that. The new policy is in some ways worse and in some ways better; Stanford wants a cut, but they'll help market the technology, and if they don't, the inventor gets it back. This is often a win for students. Stanford has very close connections with the Silicon Valley venture community and a track record in licensing technology. Stanford owns a piece of Sun, Cisco, Yahoo, and Google under this deal.

It's much worse if you're arguing over IP rights with some school that doesn't routinely do IP deals. The school administration is likely to be both overbearing and clueless.

"Bill Gates .. Brilliant young maths wiz .."

The Pivot Table ..

"The whole idea of time-sharing only got invented in 1965"

timesharing John McCarthy 1957

yeah but democracy is the best of a bad bunch.

a.k.a "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time."
Churchill, 1947. [ source]

Feel free to read the paper. After all, this story is about a science paper. How a "shuffle" works is defined in the abstract. It's pretty silly to criticize a paper without even reading it.

The MDI instrument on SOHO can image the far side of the sun using helioseismology. See
http://soi.stanford.edu/press/farside_Feb2006/web/

There are lots of interesting and relevant threads here (some...not so much). I'm definitely down with GEB as being somehow of relevance to this, and of course the Formal Logic/CS connection should be obvious (and yes, CS/Logic is Math, which is why Waterloo is pretty much the only place I know of that has CS in the right faculty...and no, I didn't go there).

But I think the best answer to this question is Cantwell Smith's book The Origins of Objects . It's explicitly about the epistemological and ontological commitments of computation. What is it we're doing when we "compute"? Is the notion of "computation" definable? (please don't give me half-arsed definitions of algorithms in response). It's quite a read...I've gone back to it a few times now and still haven't made up my mind about it.

In case you don't know who Cantwell Smith is and are the kind of person who likes/wants/needs credentials: he was a co-founder of Stanford's CSLI, a principal scientist at Xerox PARC, and (a short quote from his Wikipedia entry) "Smith is currently based out of the University of Toronto, where he is Dean and Professor at the Faculty of Information. Additionally, Smith holds a Canada Research Chair in the Foundations of Information, and is cross-appointed as Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Computer Science and in the Program in Communication, Culture and Technology at University of Toronto at Mississauga."

I'm an undergrad at Stanford University and I just declared the major here that most embraces this idea: that Computer Science and Philosophy have a lot in common. It's called Symbolic Systems (or SymSys) and really is an intersection of CS, Phil, Psychology, and Linguistics. In short, our focus is that there is more to CS than designing algorithms. It's about the thought behind it - purely logical and human alike.

http://symsys.stanford.edu/

As the original post hints, this is an adaptation of and old Emo Phillips bit.

I was walking across a bridge one day, and I saw a man standing on the edge, about to jump off. So I ran over and said "Stop! don't do it!"
"Why shouldn't I?" he said.
I said, "Well, there's so much to live for!"
He said, "Like what?"
I said, "Well...are you religious or atheist?"
He said, "Religious."
I said, "Me too! Are you christian or buddhist?"
He said, "Christian."
I said, "Me too! Are you catholic or protestant?"
He said, "Protestant."
I said, "Me too! Are you episcopalian or baptist?"
He said, "Baptist!"
I said,"Wow! Me too! Are you baptist church of god or baptist church of the lord?"
He said, "Baptist church of god!"
I said, "Me too! Are you original baptist church of god, or are you reformed baptist church of god?"
He said,"Reformed Baptist church of god!"
I said, "Me too! Are you reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1879, or reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915?"
He said, "Reformed baptist church of god, reformation of 1915!"
I said, "Die, heretic scum", and pushed him off.

If you have a morally perfect God, how could he *imagine* evil in the first place?

If god cannot imagine evil, how can he have any sense of morality and how, therefore, can he possibly be morally perfect? For morality to have meaning, immorality must exist, and be understood.

You can get free will and choices without being evil.

Not if the key element of and rationale for free will is to allow choice between good and evil.

I won't go deep into this here, but there's a plenty of places where you can find information about what I'm talking about. This one is very good.

It's mildly interesting to see formal logic more rigorously applied to the question than is usual, but based on my (incomplete) reading, that text supports my point. I didn't go into to 3.3 "Indirect Inductive Versions of the Evidential Argument from Evil", but the conclusion of 3.2 is, quite properly, that the inductive step between statements 8 and 9 cannot be justified. The section is just a longer, more-detailed version of my argument that "there is always a possibility that a moral, omniscient and omnipotent god may allow what we think is terrible, but is less evil than not allowing the event, because of some issue of which we are not aware."

As one example, when people see murders and other atrocities, they may say "If there was a god, and he was good and powerful, he would have stopped that". But if non-interference with free will is a very high moral priority, then stopping the atrocity, or even just removing the opportunity for the atrocity, would be more wrong than allowing it.

I think it goes way deeper than you said. If you have a morally perfect God, how could he *imagine* evil in the first place? You can get free will and choices without being evil. I won't go deep into this here, but there's a plenty of places where you can find information about what I'm talking about. This one is very good.

And, as Carl Sagan and others before him already told, if God is immortal and we're mortal, then he's definitely cruel. The fear of dying is so terrible that it guides most part of human philosophy and religion.

So you are saying that you believe the right of 50 people in a restaurant to have a peaceful dinner is trumped by the right of somebody saying "fuckity fuckity shit you dick" at his table.
You are saying that it is ok to walk down the sidewalk in your neighborhood yelling obscenities and racial slurs at your neighbors.
You are saying those people should all just leave so they don't have to listen to you.
I don't agree.
I don't believe that freedom of speech is a greater freedom to uphold than my freedom to live a peaceable life.
In fact, freedom of speech is better defined as freedom to express one's opinion. Freedom of expression is a subset of freedom of speech, and it is generally agreed that there are limits to freedom of expression as suggested by men like John Stuart Mill and Joel Feinberg; at the heart of which are two premises called the "harm principle" and the "offense principle".
  See http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/freedom-speech/ for a detailed analysis of this and also how it relates to hate speech, pornography, etc.
It is principles such as these that are put in place in government that help to make a society a better place to live in, without restricting someone's right to express their opinions in a manner respecting those who are around them.

Most of the productive stuff I do is on the internet. I get my news from the net. When I need to know something I google it. Recently I've been viewing CS107.

Funny thing, last year I competed in the Stanford Math Tournament and one of the rounds involved knot theory. http://sumo.stanford.edu/smt/ but for some reason they don't have that round in their list of problems, but these are the solutions: http://sumo.stanford.edu/smt/2008/Solutions/power-soln.pdf.

Funny thing, last year I competed in the Stanford Math Tournament and one of the rounds involved knot theory. http://sumo.stanford.edu/smt/ but for some reason they don't have that round in their list of problems, but these are the solutions: http://sumo.stanford.edu/smt/2008/Solutions/power-soln.pdf.

SupraBrowser

It's a secure, threaded IM client (all socket communication 3DES encrypted with a zero-knowledge proof SRPP), written in Java, that runs on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It was developed for the hedge fund industry in Boston. I developed it initially, but it's mainly being maintained, not developed further because we don't receive any new feature requests.

Don't let the extensive features fool you. It's primarily a secure, threaded IM system. The other features were added (email gateway, auto-forwarding to email, embedded web browser with sophisticated tagging engine) based on its being used *very* heavily every day and requests coming from highly advanced users of the system.

There is also a Firefox plugin that integrates with it, as well as a pure ajax client written in the Eclipse Rich Ajax Platform.

Feel free to contact me personally for any details or help setting it up. The release on sourceforge assumes fairly good technical abilities (building it from ant, getting xulrunner to work with javaxpcom) and is not a general packaged release. However, it is running many places in production.

suprasphere@gmail.com

David Thomson

How's that for timing? PALGN just interviewed Eric Kaltman, cataloger at the Stanford University library about his role in cataloging game-related material and the challenges that DRM and MMOs present. Stanford's part of the "preserving virtual worlds" project, along with the University of Illinois mentioned in the article. He's also the guy who writes on the How They Got Game blog, where he documents his findings.

It's an interesting field. Far more challenging than I would have thought.

Sorry to hear that but it does get better in uni. I'm a computer scientist from Victoria, in the early 90's I taught lab classes at RMIT and have been a commercial developer for 20 odd yrs. My own son did his VCE in the late 90's and I have to say the teacher was brilliant. Basically the course consisted of writing a database in Pascal which if done correctly (in stages that build on previous stages), is a great introduction to programing. The same teacher taught maths to my daughter, he introduced the concepts of algebra using excell which I also thought was a good use of technology for year 7-8(?)

However I realise everyone's milage will vary with the education system and some of the hoops you jump through are just societies "rubber stamp" or even your teacher being "human". If you find your course boring you have to be carefull you actually do know what they want you to know. I got bored and dropped out of high school in what is now called year 11 and it wasn't until I was thirty that I got a chance to go to uni again as a mature age student. No matter which way you look at it, failing because you haven't memorised the sequence of menu selections required to create a pie-graph isn't going to help you.

Once you are confident you know the course material and can pass the course with ease, read what interests you the most, if your interested in programming/science then personally I recommend three "classics", The Art of Programming", The C Programming Language", The Demon Haunted World.

Now get off my lawn!

You are wrong: if you spread windmills out all over the continent, you'll ALWAYS gonna have electricity; see this study : http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/windfarm-120507.html , It's basically impossible for an entire continent to be wind-free (because that would mean that the sun has stopped shining + the earth has stopped turning). and for the US, 2or3 5Mwh windmills per mile highway would be enough to replace ALL current production.

Of course that there is no evidence for God's existence is not necessarily evidence for God's nonexistence, though it might be if we had reason for thinking that if God existed there would be evidence for this.

No evidence for existence doesn't imply non-existence. That is true.

Then you say (I think) ... that if god existed, and if we expected there to be evidence that he existed, our expectation of evidence being unfulfilled, we can then turn that into evidence of non existence of god. I think that's what you say, but I'm not sure.

I certainly don't accept that your one line statement has coherently summed up why I'm wrong. It sums up why you think I'm wrong, but I wouldn't call it a compelling argument.

See, from a scientific and logical point of view, you can't really say anything about the existence or non-existence of god. There is simply no measure of evidence which would conclusively establish either proposition as true. Science basically says that once you're outside of a reality you can play what if with, you're no longer playing with science.

By its very nature, any entity which would be capable of creating the universe as we know it would be outside of the realm of what we'd be able to know. So, speculating on what happens outside of the reality that we can understand and know is ... well, speculating. At that point, pretty much any form of speculation is essentially equally valid -- flying spaghetti monster? Sure, why not??

The big issue here, is how plausible you, yes you personally, find the idea that "god" or whatever you define as "god" to have been able to create our planet, all other concepts and things being equal. To me, I find it implausible.

Dude, I find reality implausible. That doesn't mean I find it impossible to believe in or reject that it exists, however odd or unlikely it may seem.

Here is what I personally believe ...

I believe that if such a being as god existed who could create the entire universe, that being would be so vast and profound that we could never really have a hope of forming a concept which would encompass that entity. I believe at that point that it's likely the universe would continue working within the physical rules which dictated its behavior, and planets and life would be a side effect that that universe. I don't think I can form an intelligent position on what god would be doing in the meantime, or what his opinions would be on the matter. :-P

I believe that there is absolutely zero objective evidence which could definitely establish the existence or non existence of such a being. I don't think we'd be capable of seriously evaluating this evidence anyway as it would be way more than our wee brains can possibly grasp.

I'm not advocating for the belief in a god, since I don't believe in god. I'm advocating for the belief in the belief in god.

Personally, I view it as a modified version of Pascal's Wager. I found that atheism lead to dark places without answers, and theism ignores the answers we have because those don't match what they believe. Personally, if your world view includes what we know to be scientifically true, and if you choose to believe in god, there is essentially no net harm to anyone else. The intangible personal benefits you may or may not receive are entirely your own business.

I choose to try to live my life as if there were greater consequences than a life which is merely ugly, brutish, and short. I can't accept the rigid morality of a church and an enduring "soul", and I can't accept the consequences of a system where what we do has no "big picture" implications and therefore morality is optional and a sign of weakness.

I fall into the camp of "neither this nor that". The Buddhist

Let me give you one line that sums up why you are incorrect:

Of course that there is no evidence for God's existence is not necessarily evidence for God's nonexistence, though it might be if we had reason for thinking that if God existed there would be evidence for this.

This all boils back to the same basic philosophy, empiricism vs rationalism or just straight agnosticism vs atheism .

The big issue here, is how plausible you, yes you personally, find the idea that "god" or whatever you define as "god" to have been able to create our planet, all other concepts and things being equal. To me, I find it implausible. This is the real grey area. The grey area is not science or god, the real grey area is implausible or not.

Let me give you one line that sums up why you are incorrect:

Of course that there is no evidence for God's existence is not necessarily evidence for God's nonexistence, though it might be if we had reason for thinking that if God existed there would be evidence for this.

This all boils back to the same basic philosophy, empiricism vs rationalism or just straight agnosticism vs atheism .

The big issue here, is how plausible you, yes you personally, find the idea that "god" or whatever you define as "god" to have been able to create our planet, all other concepts and things being equal. To me, I find it implausible. This is the real grey area. The grey area is not science or god, the real grey area is implausible or not.

I thought it was closer to "organizations doing embryonic stem cell research cannot receive federal funding at all" as opposed to receiving federal funding for that project. I'm not certain on that, but if that was the case, it is effectively a ban, as no academic or research institution is going to give up all access to grant money over one line of research, and ditto for most private ventures, exacerbated by private venture disliking research that doesn't have a clear and obvious product that is likely to be approved and unlikely to cause them much grief involved.

I don't know the exact rules, but I'm quite sure your idea of them is incorrect.

Stanford University does huge amounts of human embryonic stem cell research. For example, look at this faculty member's recent publications (I don't mean to single this guy out -- it's a random page from a Google search). Or look at this page, or this page. But at the same time, it's well known that Stanford University also receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding per year from federal grants for various (unrelated) research projects.

I thought it was closer to "organizations doing embryonic stem cell research cannot receive federal funding at all" as opposed to receiving federal funding for that project. I'm not certain on that, but if that was the case, it is effectively a ban, as no academic or research institution is going to give up all access to grant money over one line of research, and ditto for most private ventures, exacerbated by private venture disliking research that doesn't have a clear and obvious product that is likely to be approved and unlikely to cause them much grief involved.

I don't know the exact rules, but I'm quite sure your idea of them is incorrect.

Stanford University does huge amounts of human embryonic stem cell research. For example, look at this faculty member's recent publications (I don't mean to single this guy out -- it's a random page from a Google search). Or look at this page, or this page. But at the same time, it's well known that Stanford University also receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding per year from federal grants for various (unrelated) research projects.

I thought it was closer to "organizations doing embryonic stem cell research cannot receive federal funding at all" as opposed to receiving federal funding for that project. I'm not certain on that, but if that was the case, it is effectively a ban, as no academic or research institution is going to give up all access to grant money over one line of research, and ditto for most private ventures, exacerbated by private venture disliking research that doesn't have a clear and obvious product that is likely to be approved and unlikely to cause them much grief involved.

I don't know the exact rules, but I'm quite sure your idea of them is incorrect.

Stanford University does huge amounts of human embryonic stem cell research. For example, look at this faculty member's recent publications (I don't mean to single this guy out -- it's a random page from a Google search). Or look at this page, or this page. But at the same time, it's well known that Stanford University also receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding per year from federal grants for various (unrelated) research projects.

Have you seen The Mother of all Demos?

http://sloan.stanford.edu/MouseSite/1968Demo.html

How far we've advanced and how little we have advanced, after 40 years.

There was so much more that could have been done. Thing is the driving need to do it is not there.

its not like physics where you can make a hard true or a hard false out of an issue

Where to begin? For starters, you're only half right about physics...

I'm not a physicist so I can't answer your question, sorry. Maybe the info below will help...

Original press release about the image:
http://soi.stanford.edu/press/agu05-98/

Nature abstract from the 28 May 1998 issue (full text requires payment, or you can go to the library!):
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v393/n6683/abs/393317a0.html

While you're trying to be useful, can you fix the redirect loop of your Standford page. Firefox gave up after reaching http://cs.stanford.edu/~guhaj/////////////////////

This has to be a new low for Slashdot.

The evidence this is spam/slashvertisement:

• The "Anonymous Coward" link goes to: http://cs.stanford.edu/~ guhaj
• Meanwhile, "guha_cruxlux", a supposed developer of cruxlux.com, is replying to comments defending the site.
• "guha_cruxlux" has a slashdot ID of 1383127, meaning he's had an account for all of about 10 minutes.

And if being obvious spam/slashvertisement weren't bad enough, the summary is basically a giant Obama/McCain troll.

But hey, they managed to keep spelling and grammar mistakes to a minimum, so I guess that's something.

I've taught intro CS at Stanford, and the key is to leverage programming projects as you go. Just talking about CS without doing it is ridiculous ... fun programming projects that are scaled to challenge the students at the level of what they know can work really well, emphasizing the key aspects of CS while engaging the students.

This site gathers great assignments for use by instructors or whatever:
http://nifty.stanford.edu/

This site has live little programming problems that work in the browser
http://javabat.com/

Slashdot smarties challenge: heres's a tiny programming problem
http://javabat.com/prob?id=Logic.makeBricks
See if you can type in a solution which passes the tests the first time -- harder than it looks!

You could check the Stanford Engineering Everywhere program's resources. They released some great beginner level programming courses under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Those could be adapted for teaching the subject to students, and the content used for instructional material.

You could check the Stanford Engineering Everywhere program's resources. They released some great beginner level programming courses under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license. Those could be adapted for teaching the subject to students, and the content used for instructional material.

Yeah, everyone remembers Windows as the OS that could be completely pwned if the user installed and ran Quake or Quake II. Shit, that hack works on Linux too, sorry. Let me try again.

We all remember how Windows boxes were used to admin huge botnets of Windows computers. Ah, dammit, they were cracked Linux boxes doing the admin work. One more try.

You can bet your money on there never having been a rootkit for Linux!

Damn, I was so close.

I'll let you work out the moral of this story, but I can steer you onto the right track - next time you're going to prattle about the security of something, try picking something that has had more than only 6 vulnerabilities found in 2 years of release, none of which allow privilege escalation and all of which have been patched.

Yaaaay! The long debate is settled! We have a yardstick in measuring reasonable limits to the 1st Amendment!

If "aproposofwhat" thinks it's propaganda, it's not protected speech!!

Listen 'tard, the most important property of the 1st Amendment is that it specifically shields speech that pisses you off. You are the self-important flamer the Founding Fathers were thinking of.

Oh, yeah, this is a Fair Use discussion. So it's not really about the First Amendment at all. Then let's focus on fair use.

"fair use" is intended to protect scholarly works

"scholarly works", lol. Such works of great academic value as "Amish Paradise"?

There is a standard "four factors" test of fair use. Your venom seems to have rendered you ignorant of them, so let's review these:

1. Purpose and character of use.
   • commercial v. non-commercial use
   • nature of use (criticism, commentary, etc.)
   • tranformation v. verbatim use (this is the fair-use basis of the protection of parody)
2. Nature of copyrighted work (creative v. informational)
3. Amount and substantiality of copied portion
   • Amount: seconds v. minutes, paragraph v. pages, etc.
   • Substantiality: the distinctiveness, recognizability, and relative importance of the copied portion (such as, the opening of "Stairway to Heaven" v. 10 seconds of the middle)
4. The effect of the use on the value or marketability of the original.

All information drawn from http://fairuse.stanford.edu/Copyright_and_Fair_Use_Overview/chapter9/9-b.html and http://www.publaw.com/parody.html.

Notice that there is no fifth test, "Degree to which the use offends strongly-held opinions." So citing that as why you think fair use is inapplicable is flatly asinine, as well as a dishonest and weaselly way to try to interfere with someone else's First Amendment rights.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, and I've never seen the work in question, but the commentary in TFS (You did read TFS, didn'y you? No, I didn't think so. Ignorant and angry; that's a great combination you've got going for you) tells me that the use in the offending movie was specifically criticising the content and assertions of the lyrics of the song, not just as light background music. There's your scholary usage, you twit. (It also tells me the submitter is a twit, because it's not ironic if it's intentional and to the point. Irony is "wow, he accidentally shot himself". Irony is not "wow, he intentionally shot himself.")

After many preview submissions, I can see that the mods have rightly submarined your clueless post into "-1 Troll"dom. I'm glad, even if this means my response to you is also invisible.

The best demo dialog that I've seen is from SHRDLU, written in 1968-1970.

Here is a link to an mp3 of the oral argument in this case, for the interested.

And here's the website for the law practice of the attorney who represented Jacobsen.

A link to the defendant's attorneys, who notably do not list intellectual property among their specialties. It is arguable that the defendant made a poor choice of attorney for this case.

And finally the Stanford lecturer who was the primary author on the amicus brief in support of Jacobsen.

To add to my comment:

http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ-PS3

How does the PS3 client's visualization compare to other FAH clients?

The PS3 client supports advanced visualization features. While the Cell microprocessor does most of the calculation processing of the simulation, the graphic chip of the PLAYSTATION 3 system (the RSX) displays the actual folding process in real-time using new technologies such as HDR and ISO surface rendering. It is possible to navigate the 3D space of the molecule using the interactive controller of the PS3, allowing us to look at the protein from different angles in real-time.

Wind farms don't scale

They do. http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/december5/windfarm-120507.html