Slashdot Mirror

Then:
I believe Watson and Crick's solution to DNA structure was a fabulous achievement, but press should also be given to Hershey and Chase's 1952 experiment proving DNA as the genetic material. Of course, they too rested on the shoulders of giants in chemistry and biology, but their work has equal claim to initiating an era of reverse engineering hereditary mechanisms.

Now:
Biology has come a long way reverse engineering life, but still has a long way to go. Unlike systems composed of similar components interacting to create a complex and often unpredictable outcome, life is composed of a huge variety of components which can interact to create stable outcomes (homeostasis). As we identify the individual components and subsystems, a new field is emerging. This field, called systems biology, is about modeling this complexity.

Now/Next:
Perhaps most exciting, there now exists enough information to begin forward engineering life. In living systems we have the ultimate collection of both components and subsumption architectures for making complex systems. Rodney Brooks was brilliant for modeling his robots after living systems, but a living system can be the starting point for further engineering. This work has begun, but consists mostly as limited applied science with pharmaceutical, agricultural, or industrial enzyme goals. Is anyone (else) engineering life for the sake of engineering?

These issues have been so widely discussed on Slashdot that you should have been able to follow a few of the links and do somesearch. For privacy/copyright/patent/piracy issues start reading through and following links from this starter list:

EFF
Lawrence Lessig
EPIC
Consumer's Union
Forbes (search for articles on copyright, patents, or intellectual property
Eldred

I have not tried one of these, but I'd like to. This guy has an intriguing setup using a two-piece keyboard mounted to the arm rests of an office chair.

..the reason that HTML was such a piece of crap is that early folks (like them here at US in 1991 where pretty damn sure that everything will be TeX. It was designed for physics experiment collaborations to use. Everything else was not anticipated..

First webs server and browser in USA was developed at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center - 2 years before Mosaic and with most of its features in. One of the guys who did it As far as I know he got noting out of it..

That's because Yahoo was made by a bunch of fanatical amateurs. It was originally just a grad student experiment that outgrew the lab.

I'm sure I'm not the only one here who remembers where they were the day they clicked their Yahoo bookmark and saw it redirect to an evil .com address. That's the exact moment when dotcom mania began.

Here is an excellent read on type one diabetes and stem cell research, and a comment on why study sjogren's in conjunction with diabetes (namely, the organ being damaged is much easier to get at and assess.)

Here is a great site for info- the CDC genomics site, which includes info on common and rare genetic diseases, and can give a greater array of background info. NCBI offers another set of info- an explanation of human mouse homology (thus answering the question... why mice?

I hope this helps put some extra info out there for those of you who are interested. And frankly, as one who has had to deal with the sudden "switching on" of not just one but a whole array of diseases- since my DNA happened to include the lucky strands- I'm now having my stance on animal testing completely revised...

Just thought I'd point you to Stanford's WICS group web page.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/wics/

It has some with WICS-related links, resources, articles, and of course contact info. One of the more interesting (and probably relevant to your questions) things they do is a mentoring program. These links should give you some idea what at least one group out there is doing.

Good luck!

Just thought I'd point you to Stanford's WICS group web page.

http://www.stanford.edu/group/wics/

It has some with WICS-related links, resources, articles, and of course contact info. One of the more interesting (and probably relevant to your questions) things they do is a mentoring program. These links should give you some idea what at least one group out there is doing.

Good luck!

I also worked on the short documentary that was filmed during the course of the project and which was shown ultimately to a Congressional committee, IIRC.

Maybe someone somewhere will find the existence of this old research and its public publications of use...

I also worked on the short documentary that was filmed during the course of the project and which was shown ultimately to a Congressional committee, IIRC.

Maybe someone somewhere will find the existence of this old research and its public publications of use...

It's not a choice between punch card machines and touch-screen machines.

See my web page on the subject, which was discussed here previously.

We don't have to accept technology that is wide open for vote fraud (and simple error). In some sense, we had better technology 100 years ago, when we had hand-marked paper ballots which were counted by hand at the precincts.

The FDL doesn't cancel existing fair use doctrine--in general short excerpting or commenting on a copyrighted work is fine, just as you can quote a book in a review of it. If the excerpt's not short (namely if you are copying large parts of the manual) then I think it's reasonable to have to include invariant sections. Elsewhere on this thread I pointed out that excising something can change the meaning of the whole just as modifying something can.

A third solution for your excerpting would be to incorporate the other manual by reference ("see section 12 of the GNU make manual") or whatever.

Not to put words in your mouth, but I anticipate an objection on the basis: "who's to know what fair use is?" There is a FAQ on fair use that helps, but the fact is that fair use is based on judgment, not absolute rule.

Funding agencies in the USA (NSF, NIH) and Europe have recently decided to target the construction of such software, and many competing projects have been given grants, most of which involve the production of open source software.

Relevant keywords are "eScience", "Experimental Data Management", "Experimental Metadata", and to some extent "Grid Computing".

Here is a paper which lays out the program of research.

I work for one such NSF & NIH funded project at Dartmouth College. We're developing such a tool : Java-based, completely open, available at sourceforge, currently in alpha, to be released for fMRI use in July, but designed from the start to be generalizable for all of experimental science. This is built on top of a pre-existing framework for semantic data management and modeling from Stanford.

I'll try to list some of the features relevant to your needs:

• the thing will organize all your data across all experiments and sports a nice Java API, annotations, a set of interchangable & sophisticated query engines, and java plugins for supporting, among other things, application specific tasks, application specific rendering widgets for data, and new backend data formats.
• currently supported backend formats include: RDF, DAML+OIL, XML, text files, and SQL databases.
• we should have cluster job submission support integrated in by july, but it depends on your cluster set-up. currently this is presented to the user by way of executing "processing pipelines" for data. If this metaphor doesn't work for you, you may have to write some additional code for us!
• since the experimental designs are represented in a prolog-style knowledge-base, it would be very simple to put some intelligence in about how to "run" or "execute" a given class of experimental designs and do a lot of automatic reasoning or planning re: dependencies. In fact, I think that someone at Stanford has already done this, but I'd have to look into it.

Finally, I would like to stress that our project is one of many, and that if it doesn't meet your needs, within a year there will be many competing "eScience" toolkits.

You may contact me for more information by reversing the following string: "ude.htuomtrad@exj".

Several months ago I read a post here that got me thinking about my SSN. According to the post, the SSN was not intended to be an ID number, but has gradually evolved into one. (Anyone who can post a reference to confirm this would be appreciated. I Googled around for a while but could only find references that equated SSN with ID). So I started noticing how often people ask me for it. I've been quite surprised at how often it is asked for. Exam registration, scholarship application, research conference registration, volunteer application, etc. I've started writing "available upon request" when it asked for my SSN, and no one has complained. But it makes me wonder how many times I've given it out without thinking twice about it?

There was a really good discussion about privacy issues in Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace by Lawrence Lessig. It gave a clear description of the problem and proposed some alternative solutions. One of his points was that privacy was formerly the default simply because no one was capable of maintaining a practical and useable database of the size that would be necessary. Because of this former impossibility, there was no need for legislation or other guidelines to address it. That makes the problem unique to our day and age because only recently have we had the technology to do these sorts of things. Lessig argues that in such cases we have two options:

1. Interpret the Constitution as literally as possible. If the costitution says it's okay (or fails to say that it's not), then go for it.
2. Determine a solution based upon the same principles that the founding fathers used.

Anyway, just some things to think about...

03.02.26.we | Non-Novel Patents

In addition to the alarm about the unruly expansion of copyright, an outcry over an offensive software or method patent is surfacing nearly every week now. But the storm is not yet upon us, these are merely the first chunky hail stones: it can, and probably will, get much worse.

Patents are supposed to be novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, these are rather subjective criteria that require the discretion of knowledge, experience, and good judgment. Such attributes belong to those skilled in an art, not to bureaucratic institutions. (Witness how those administrative functions formerly administered by John Postel, a skillful and respected Internet elder, are now bungled by ICANN, the bureaucracy now responsible.) However, we have no great patent arbiter, only a governmental process and this has led to a focus on, and misunderstanding of, prior art by computer professionals.

The question of novelty and non-obviousness is proxied by a mechanistic process of push and pull between a patent applicant and patent examiner. An examiner, on his own judgment, can not easily dismiss the application of a proprietary interest worth, potentially, millions of dollars. He can only ask, "how is your claim different than this prior art." Once this dance is done, a court is not likely to disregard the patent's novelty as documented in its file wrapper (the exchange between the applicant and examiner) and the resulting claims.

In the narrowest construction, this process of emulating good judgment with respect to novelty and non-obviousness works: the resulting patent claims are more narrow than the initial application with respect to some existing works. But in the sense of promoting innovation and the "useful arts and sciences" of computer software and networking, it is a huge failure.

As I've mentioned before, "Good technology, often created through simple processes, lends itself to applications unforeseen by its designers." As Lessig, in The Future of Ideas, amply demonstrates this principle is what makes the Internet and Web such an innovative force when as expressed as layered end-to-end architecture. To adopt his metaphor, our common roads permit arbitrary journeys; our private cars permit us to traverse our chosen paths. Much like the Internet and Web, there are no patents or controls on the roads that determine where you must go. (There are rules such as which side of the street to drive on, much like networking protocols, but these don't affect your destination.) It would be a shame to loose this flexibility, and this is just what the patent system encourages: claims that combine our common infrastructure and abilities in "novel" ways.

It's as if roads and driving themselves are recognized as an important infrastructure and ability, but someone could patent using a car on a road to drive to my house. Is using a car on a road to drive to my house really that novel? The Patent and Trademark Office can not make this judgment well, it will only look for prior art of someone previously, explicitly, specifying this exact method in the past. Perhaps they will find the method of driving to my house that I've provided on the Web. The applicant might then amend their application such that they have a claim for a car, on the road, driven to my house using a stick shift, and a new claim for the same using automatic transmission. The claims have been narrowed and there is no previous exact d

Yeah, God forbid a doctoral candidate should spend time on something interesting or worthwhile that isn't directly related to his thesis.

What exactly is the guy's thesis? Anyone know?

And incidentally, i am not a doctoral candidate, but as far as i can tell from what i've heard, graduate students these days mostly do rediculously complicated problem sets and read webcomics.

You can read a copy of his 1962 paper at http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/EngelbartPaper s/B5_F18_ConceptFrameworkInd.html

Someone has to make a Knuth joke. I tried, couldn't come up with anything. Come on people!

Here's his errata.

My favorite is the Random Number error. It took a while, but someone discovered that apparantly one of the portable random number generators behaves poorly during the first 2000 or so of each seed number. So, naturally, Dr. Knuth corrected it almost immediately.

Never have I seen a man so humble that so amply deserved to be arrogant...

Someone has to make a Knuth joke. I tried, couldn't come up with anything. Come on people!

Here's his errata.

My favorite is the Random Number error. It took a while, but someone discovered that apparantly one of the portable random number generators behaves poorly during the first 2000 or so of each seed number. So, naturally, Dr. Knuth corrected it almost immediately.

Never have I seen a man so humble that so amply deserved to be arrogant...

If you get the speed, programs will come.

For example, he writes:

No one actually proposed implementing numbers as lists in practice. In fact, McCarthy's 1960 paper was not, at the time, intended to be implemented at all. It was a theoretical exercise, an attempt to create a more elegant alternative to the Turing Machine. When someone did, unexpectedly, take this paper and translate it into a working Lisp interpreter, numbers certainly weren't represented as lists; they were represented in binary, as in every other language.

But that's just not true. McCarthy not only intended LISP to be implemented, the CACM April 1960 paper's introduction begins:

A programming system called LISP (for LISt Processor) has been developed for the IBM 704 computer by the Artificial Intelligence group at M.I.T. The system was designed to facilitate experiments with a proposed system called the Advice Taker, whereby a machine could be instructed to handle declarative as well as imperative sentences and could exhibit ``common sense'' in carrying out its instructions. The original proposal [1] for the Advice Taker was made in November 1958. The main requirement was a programming system for manipulating expressions representing formalized declarative and imperative sentences so that the Advice Taker system could make deductions.

If he can't even get that right, how can you possibly credit a claim like:

Semantically, strings are more or less a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. So why do you need a separate data type? You don't, really. Strings only exist for efficiency. But it's lame to clutter up the semantics of the language with hacks to make programs run faster. Having strings in a language seems to be a case of premature optimization.

Gimme a break!

Alcmaeon is the newest entry. And I bet that changes by the end of the weekend.

I can't let this go by without a challenge.

You are wrong from an intellectual, philosophical, and historical viewpoint.

Might I suggest that in the future if you wish to expand on a subject, that you do your own reading and research, rather than rely on the definitions the latest demagogues and politicians wish to pour into you?

If you say you don't want a mansion, you're a liar. It's called the American Dream.

Not everyone's dreams are limited to the "bling-bling" sets of a "YO! MTV Raps" video dude.

How many acres does it take to hold that many wind turbines?

Well, first off, as someone else pointed out, I should have said 1.5 million turbines, not 150,000, so as not to assume constant peak output as I had mistakenly done. However, each one of those turbines takes only 36 square meters, meaning that all 1.5 million would take less than 14,000 acres, or about as much oak forest that is lost each year in California alone, or less than twice the area of the Stanford University campus.

That power costs about 4 cents per killowatt hour, compared to 3 cents for poorly-scrubbed coal (compared to European scrubbing standards, which result in 4 cents/kwh), anywhere from 7 to 15 cents per kilowatt hour for natural gas (depending on market rates with occasional shortages) 11 cents/kwh for nuclear (plus hidden externalities for waste disposal). In other words, it's the best deal around.

How many of them need to be running at capacity at one time to power the entire U.S. electrical grid?

Right, you hit the nail on the head for the 150,000 figure. Again, I should have said 1.5 million for average output values. The occasional drop caused by widespread windlessness could be backed up by hydroelectric power stations, or storage systems.

How does technology influence ideas like "freedom of speech", "freedom from unlawful search and seizure," and other supposedly inalienable rights? An example: If a government writes a virus that infects a computer, looks for illegal material, sends a warning back if it finds anything, and then deletes itself after infecting a few more computers, have you been illegally searched? Remember that (ideally) only those who actually possessed said material would get any notice from the authorities.

has written some great books on these matters (my example was actually ripped off from "Code and other Laws of Cyberspace").

The question is often asked, "Can a robot have a soul?" Being an atheist, I would rephrase it to ask whether a robot could have those qualities which we value in ourselves and other human beings. Creativity, flashes of inspiration, hopes, fears, emotions, and dreams. Further reading: anything by Daniel C. Dennett.

A lot of questions you could formulate simply take a classical ethical dilemma and uses technology to highlight some aspect of the problem. For example, say that we created an artificial intelligence. Now, say that the intelligence took a staff of fifty people and half the electricity from a hydroelectric dam, but was only about as intelligent as a normal human being. Assume further that it has passed the Turing test.

Question 1) Is this machine as valuable as a human life? Why or why not?

Question 2) Given the vast resources that the machine consumes, are its creators obligated to keep it running once its scientific value has been exhausted?

The second question is basically a reformulation of the well-explored question, "When do the needs of the many justify the taking of a life?"

"What do other people have a right to know about you? What information do you have a right to keep private, and from whom? Technology gives the people around you unprecedented abilities to keep track of your history, your likes, your dislikes, your behavior patterns, and your associations. If a government develops a technology that can take this information and use it to determine which people are likely to commit serious offenses, where does the government's obligations lie? In protecting the potential victims, or in respecting the rights of the suspects (who haven't actually done anything). How well do current laws fit both the current and future problem space?

Doomsday tech: With every advance in science, things get easier. Advances in chip manufacturing happen, and suddenly you have game consoles that cannot be shipped to hostile nations. Advances in materials technologies suddenly make it possible to build 400-story skyscrapers. So what happens when a technology suddenly pops up that makes it very easy to do serious, unspeakable damage to those around you?

For example, a new chemical process suddenly makes it possible for someone to enrich uranium in his basement? Or, in a worst-case scenario, imagine that someone figures out how to create a device that would destroy the world, and knows that it could be built without leaving your local Radio Shack?

The ethical thing would be to not build the device. That's simple enough. But what if such powers were a natural result of a discovery in physics? Would it be appropriate to outlaw entire branches of scientific inquiry to avoid the things we could inflict upon ourselves if we had the knowledge?

There's a lot of science fiction that could be used to illustrate ethical dilemmas. For example, The Measure of a Man is probably my favorite Star Trek episode of all time. I also remember an excellent story by Isaac Asimov, where an archaeologist builds an illegal device that can be used to see into the past. He simply wanted to do some research on the worshippers of Moloch, and ends up distributing plans for the ultimate privacy intrusion device known to man. Does anyone remember the name of the story?

Lawrence Lessig has a good response on his blog...

Let this extremism finally force recognition of the best response to this problem for now: a compulsory license with a large carve out for non-commercial "sharing."

Time to write my Congressman again...

Remember something called Interactive TV? It delivered a high-bandwidth interactive experience - but to deliver a service over it you had to negociate with the likes of Time-Warner. If you don't remember it, that probably has to do with its eclipse by the Internet - a net that you didn't need *anyone's* permission to offer a service over. (And yes there was a bubble, but a huge amount of valuable activity happened among all the scams.)

Unlicensed spectrum could spur the next technical value explosion. This conference had some great discussion of this issue - and how this will only happen if more spectrum is allocated for open access.

But nothing will happen unless geeks (and Intel, etc :-) write their congresscritters and organize.

According to Karl Popper, something like this has already happened. He argued that the future was inherently unpredictable because there was no way to predict technological advance before it took place, and no way to predict how society would develop without knowing what technology it would have available.

Truth is, we have no way of knowing what humans will be like in the future, let alone what artificial agents will be like. By the time AI becomes a reality there may not even be a significant difference.

It's bad programming habits and the lack of tools that catch those program time errors.

Static analysis, the use of programs to analysis code that has not been compile completely to machine code, has historically been undeveloped in open source. I use to have a list, was my research focus for a while, but basically we have one decent static analyzer Splint, and it's not that hot compared to commercial offerings.

For instance the HANDS group from stanford has tracked down lots of kernel bugs using their in house analyzer, in lots of obscure places. MS has an in house program I hear they guard closer than the kernel itself! I have a friend that did kernel work for them that agreed with this, they give him the kernel source but not the ananlyzer binaries even. The guy who wrote it, known in pointer analysis circles often goes on about how he's found tons of bugs in open source projects ( bet you he's not filing bug reports )

There are lots of groups working on static analysis, but no one wants to open source their code.

Hind, Michael http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hind/

Hind has written amongst other things probably the best and most recent introductory papers on pointer analysis at http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hind/paste01. ps.

stanford checker

SUIF compiler suif

I had a few other links, but the lameness filter is complaining about "too many junk characters". You'd think slashcode would have a better filter by now.

It's bad programming habits and the lack of tools that catch those program time errors.

Static analysis, the use of programs to analysis code that has not been compile completely to machine code, has historically been undeveloped in open source. I use to have a list, was my research focus for a while, but basically we have one decent static analyzer Splint, and it's not that hot compared to commercial offerings.

For instance the HANDS group from stanford has tracked down lots of kernel bugs using their in house analyzer, in lots of obscure places. MS has an in house program I hear they guard closer than the kernel itself! I have a friend that did kernel work for them that agreed with this, they give him the kernel source but not the ananlyzer binaries even. The guy who wrote it, known in pointer analysis circles often goes on about how he's found tons of bugs in open source projects ( bet you he's not filing bug reports )

There are lots of groups working on static analysis, but no one wants to open source their code.

Hind, Michael http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hind/

Hind has written amongst other things probably the best and most recent introductory papers on pointer analysis at http://www.research.ibm.com/people/h/hind/paste01. ps.

stanford checker

SUIF compiler suif

I had a few other links, but the lameness filter is complaining about "too many junk characters". You'd think slashcode would have a better filter by now.

If Lessig posted it on his blog, I think it's legit.

-R

MP was a separate entity from the beginning -- it hasn't changed significantly since it was first introduced, and the Gnutella world did not embrace it because it made no attempt to have anything to do with Gnutella other than taking it's name so we'd all be talking about it right now.

I went into the details of why we haven't released GUESS on another thread. In a nutshell, we think that TCP approaches are more robust and can achieve the same efficiency and scalability. MP had nothing to do with increasing the outdegree -- that's an idea that has been around Gnutella for years, and the most rigorous discussion I've seen for why high outdegrees are important is the following paper from the Stanford Peers folks at:

Beverly Yang and Hector Garcia-Molina. Designing a Super-Peer Network

That link doesn't seem to be working at the moment, but you can reach it from:

Stanford Peers Page

All that said, I wish MP the best. I wish it had chosen a different name, but oh well.

MP was a separate entity from the beginning -- it hasn't changed significantly since it was first introduced, and the Gnutella world did not embrace it because it made no attempt to have anything to do with Gnutella other than taking it's name so we'd all be talking about it right now.

I went into the details of why we haven't released GUESS on another thread. In a nutshell, we think that TCP approaches are more robust and can achieve the same efficiency and scalability. MP had nothing to do with increasing the outdegree -- that's an idea that has been around Gnutella for years, and the most rigorous discussion I've seen for why high outdegrees are important is the following paper from the Stanford Peers folks at:

Beverly Yang and Hector Garcia-Molina. Designing a Super-Peer Network

That link doesn't seem to be working at the moment, but you can reach it from:

Stanford Peers Page

All that said, I wish MP the best. I wish it had chosen a different name, but oh well.

Stanford teams up on distance learning project

Friday, March 7, 2003:
Through a teleconference linking Singapore and Stanford last month, Nanyang Technological University and Stanford finalized an agreement for a multifaceted research and distance learning project that will increase the University's presence in Southeast Asia and expose it to unique environmental engineering challenges.

"The Stanford Singapore Partnership, which enables students and professors in environmental engineering to collaborate on research projects, will allow 15 to 20 Singaporean graduate students to spend a summer quarter at Stanford and three quarters in Singapore taking Stanford classes through distance learning arrangements."

MIT's OKI Project, Open Knowledge Initiative

Stanford's CourseWork

University of Michigan's CHEF Project

limewire is great for finding books to download. You can automatically filter for documents (ps,pdf,doc...) although i find alot of the best computer related books are in zip format. I got a huge zip file (50MB) downloaded ages ago that basically was the whole o'reilly series on java.

right now i'm sharing a giant zip file called AllDocsSubscription.zip which is the full documentation (up to 3.03) for the open source jboss project and would normaly cost a pretty penny. also available here

"Of course not." If we assumed the framers were trying to protect a useless right, we'd all become prospective Supreme Court Justices, such as the majority in Eldred v. Ashcroft.
q.e.d.
SCNR

The important question is does the project mentioned in your sig support Linux. The answer is no. That is why I instead run Folding@Home on my Linux servers, reniced to 19.

Visit the man who is at the front lines of this battle for us all.
"If this case has taught us anything, it is the importance of their battle."

Viva la Resistance!

There's been no real revolution since win95

And that was just copying most of the MacOS ideas, so you could say there's been no revolution since Lisa, which pioneered or commercialized (under license from PARC) most of the GUI innovations we take for granted today (bitmapped displays, menu bars, pull-down menus, overlapping windows, pop-up windows, event queues, resources, etc.).

Roadmap for War on Iraq and the New American Empire brought to by:

Elliott Abrams , Gary Bauer
William J. Bennett, Jeb Bush
Dick Cheney , Eliot A. Cohen
Midge Decter, Paula Dobriansky
Steve Forbes , Aaron Friedberg
Francis Fukuyama, Frank Gaffney
Fred C. Ikle, Donald Kagan
Zalmay Khalilzad, I. Lewis Libby
Norman Podhoretz, Dan Quayle
Peter W. Rodman, Stephen P. Rosen, Henry S. Rowen
Donald Rumsfeld , Vin Weber, George Weigel, Paul Wolfowitz

xyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzyxyzzy

I assume some of this information may be "company secrets" but I'm very interested in learning what metrics are used to determine which source code is "buggier" than others. Is this something as simple as running lint + "gcc -Wall -ansi -pedantic" then piping the output to "wc -l" ?

Are there checks for use of unsafe functions like gets and the str* family of functions in C? Are there more complex data flow analysis algorithms at play here like those in the used in Stanford's Meta-level compilation techniques?

Inquiring minds want to know. A pronouncement like OS foo has more/less bugs than OS bar is meaningless without a definition of what having more/less bugs means.

... which was discussed several months ago on /. IIRC, goes into much more detail on the dynamics of the cat-and-mouse game of DRM and copy distribution and is very insightful about the possible outcomes.

As far as I know only the original version of the google algorithm was released when Google was still an academic project. However, though that algorithm is still the basic principle, all modifications to prevent abuse through link farms, duplicate contents etc. are not public.

Could you imagine an influenza strain that spreads through the air and causes chronic lung damage (and lots of deaths)?

We don't have to imagine it -- it's already happened. Check out the Influenza Pandemic of 1918.

One quote from the link:
"The effect of the influenza epidemic was so severe that the average life span in the US was depressed by 10 years."

I wonder how well smatch/stanford checker could check for similar conditions.

You should definitely read this article, The Economics of the Microsoft case, by Tim Bresnahan, who was chief economist (?) for the DOJ during the trial.

• Some publications are embarassing, and would damage their corporate image. For example, Disney doesn't want Song of the South to be seen again. They've also censored the original versions of Alladin and other films.
  
• A richer public domain will reduce the public's need to buy new entertainment products. If 50-year old books and TV shows were available for free, there would be slightly less need to pay money for new ones. (The TV-Land channel, at least, would see it's operating costs decrease)
  

We need more Distributed Computing disease curing programs aka http://folding.stanford.edu/

tecks and scientists unite! :)

(stop looking abroad while there's problems at home (SETI))