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Nope, I'm a pretty avid follower of this stuff. Something like 2% of the work that the CTEA prevented from entering the public domain is currently being economically exploited.

It's all in the amicus briefs that were filed with the Supreme court in Eldred v. Aschcroft and it's spelled out clearly in numerous places on Lessig's blog.

Check out this report for a statistical analysis.

-R

I was just readin his book yesterday in which he sez (one of)IBM's strategy was to provide outsourcing of IT services to companies such that "if it cost them 1000 dollars then IBM wld do it for 750" That plan more or less was one of the thngs that helped him bring IBM back to today. Now this very strategy is being used to bring down the costs to maybe 300 bucks by outsourcing to companies in different countries. So just coz now 'country' is involved in this solution does it change the soundness of strategy? NO!

...it would probably exist as single-celled forms such as bacteria, cyanobacteria,
and fungi found on Earth. The most interesting thing, though, is that the
origin of such a Mars life form could probably not be Mars-based. On
Earth, we have mightily strained to hypothesize an origin of life in primordial
ocean soups and atmospheres
in the presence of electric sparks and self-assembling
molecules. These theories have been severely weakened
in recent years with the discovery of fossilized life forms on Earth with
an apparent age of 3.5+ billion years which, given the estimated age of the
Earth, would imply a much more rapid creation of life than the hypothesized
mechanisms would allow. If life is present on Mars, the Earth-origin
theories of life are weakened even further, in the absence of evidence for
the necessary atmospheres and oceans on Mars, and theories for extraterrestrial
origins of life would gain traction.

Other things that fund terrorism:

Drugs Fund Terrorism
The Drug War Funds Terrorism
Porn Funds Terrorism
Saudi Arabia Funds Terrorism
Also, Diamonds, Weapons, Charities, Muslims, Extortion, bin Laden, and Al-Queda funds terrorism

So a few hours after this "Ask Slashdot" was posted, there was a Slashdot Articleabout Brumley and Boneh's timing attack on OpenSSL. Does it look practical to you, and does it look like there are practical workarounds?

High end audio on Linux.

The greatest invention of Smalltalk is hype: co-opting and taking credit for other people's inventions.

Simula 67 was the first object-oriented language, and all practical/successful OO languages follow from it: C++, Java, C#, Eiffel, etc. But even Smalltalk experts mistakenly believe that Smalltalk invented OO. Smalltalk isn't even OO as we know it.

Similarly, the mouse was invented by Doug Englebart (movie evidence - ) along with the idea of the word processor and many other things we take for granted now. And the GUI was invented by Ivan Sutherland in Sketchpad: pop-up menus, drag and drop, etc (used a light pen).

Who modded this Troll?!

I am an engineer working in spectrum, and I was at the Stanford conference. Everyone making lots of haughty remarks about quantum and how it's not feasible needs to go read the papers presented at this conference. Smart/spread spectrum is here, it's just a matter of time.

The political and other non-technical aspects of this are covered in The Future Of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig. Good read.

...just took place earlier this month. There's a lot of good information here. An audio/video archive of the conference will be available on the 17th for those who didn't catch the webcast.

The idea that Spectrum doesn't need to be regulated is quite old, and it seems more and more likely to be valid. In any case, the idea that it needs to be controlled by government interests is less and less likely.

-R

People could lend their cpu cycles helping something worthwhile out Folding @ home instead of looking for something that isn't there. Helping the fight against diseases like Alzheimer and Parkinson is a lot more rewarding than looking for little green men.

BTW, what alteratives to BIND exist for Linuxand *BSD? I actually don't know and would like to know.

There are now a number of alternative packages that may have advantages for many deployments. E.g.:

MaraDNS is a general-purpose, fast DNS server package (doing recursive, authoritative, and caching roles, plus fully supporting zone transfers):
http://www.maradns.org/

pdnsd is a small caching-only DNS server with a disk-based cache, suitable for small networks and workstations:
http://home.t-online.de/home/Moestl/

Dnsmasq is a small authoritative and caching DNS server for a group of NATted / IPmasqued machines (optionally pulling names from DHCP leases):
http://www.thekelleys.org.uk/dnsmasq/

DNRD is a small caching-only DNS server for NAT / IPmasq networks:
http://dnrd.nevalabs.org/

MyDNS is a MySQL-based authoritative and caching server (no recursive service) suitable for very large sites. In such roles, it's faster and more responsive than BIND9, even though the latter uses a RAM-based cache:
http://mydns.bboy.net/

ldapdns implements the same idea, except out of an LDAP database. Again, much faster than BIND9:
http://nimh.org/code/ldapdns/

GnuDIP is an authoritative server for Dynamic DNS:
http://gnudip2.sourceforge.net/gnudip-www/

NSD is a high-performance authoritative-only daemon:
http://www.nlnetlabs.nl/nsd/

PowerDNS (open source as of 2002-11-25) is an authoritative-only daemon with a modular structure supporting various back-end information stores such as SQL databases (MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle 8i, Oracle 9i, IBM DB2, and others via ODBC), BIND zonefiles and other file formats, and LDAP directories. Supports AXFR zone transfers.
http://www.powerdns.com/products/powerdns/

CustomDNS is a authoritative-only daemon for both static addresses and its variant form of dynamic DNS:
http://customdns.sourceforge.net/

lbnamed is a similar authoritative-only daemon for static and dynamic information, with a load-balancing multi-machine architecture:
http://www.stanford.edu/~riepel/lbnamed/

Posadis is another fast authoritative-only daemon:
http://posadis.sourceforge.net/

dents is another general-purpose DNS server, but is perenially unfinished, and is probably dead, at this point:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/dents/

Pliant DNS Server is another general-purpose DNS server, although it may not support zone transfers:
http://pliant.cx/pliant/protocol/dns/

Yaku-NS is another small, fast general-purpose DNS server:
http://www.kyuzz.org/antirez/ens.html

Twisted Names is an authoritative and caching DNS server, written in Python:
http://twistedmatrix.com/documents/howto/names

Oak DNS Server is an authoritative and caching DNS server, supporting dynamic DNS updates and AAAA records. It's written in Python, and doesn't need to run privileged:
http://www.digitallumber.com/oak

dnsjava is a minimal, authoritative-only server, a resolver library, and a set of DNS utilities, all written in Java:
http://www.xbill.org/dnsjava/

Related:

FireDNS is a client library for DNS requests, with emphasis on speed and asynchronous processing. Written in C, and has low-timeout blocking functions. Can be used to relace standard libc resolver library functions like getbyhostname with much faster equivalent code:
http://ares.penguinhosting.net/~ian/

GNU adns is a resolver library for C (and C++) programs, and a collection of useful DNS resolver utilities:
http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~ian/adns/

Proprietary packages include:

UltraDNS (UltraDNS Corporation)
djbdns/tinydns
ATLAS (Verisign)
BINDPlus (Information Network Eng. Group, Inc.)
Global Name Service (Nominum, Inc.)
NeDNS (Neteka, Inc.)

I maintain this list at http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/linux-info/dns-servers

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Well, it would be feasible for any computationally intensive tasks like folding, where it takes a long time to work on a single, relatively small work unit. A few minutes to download a work unit, a few hours to process it and voila! Of course, finding a suitable project that you can make money at would be hard.

If I can trade my CPU cycles for free *legal* music, I'd have to know what they're going towards. If it's something I completely agree with like F@H, then great! I'm all for it! However if it's something like Seti@Home that I don't agree with, or worse something that I'm morally opposed to, then I'd have to say no means no.

Usability Engineer is actually quite an interesting position, IMHO. It focuses not so much on the raw, technical nuts-and-bolts, but on how people work with machines. You'll often find jobs (in the real world, I suppose) like this going to people who've graduated in Human Computer Interaction at places like CMU or Stanford.

My own opinion is that it's a very important field. I think everyone knows we're not going to win Grandma back from Microsoft with the current state of Linux on the Desktop, even if it is getting better. Apple isn't going to win, because it's-- what, 3x as expensive? Even if I love them!

So it's up to the Open Source movement to generate something that doesn't provide what coders THINK the users would like to work with, but something that they can demonstrably interact with well, and understand enough to use.

A further opinion is that all we need is a little more handholding... It's not a bad thing! Don't you want Microsoft to start losing?

It's because of the close proximity of three very developed sources of technological innnovation, UC Berkeley, Stanford University, and Xerox Parc. Not to mention all of the other tech companies that have sprung up to support YOUR up and coming tech business. It's becuase it is a center for technological innovation, and the culture there is "supposed" to foster that. Whether it does now or not is another story.

Speaking as a resident of California, I can say that a lot of the residents choose to have their tax rates so high becuase they choose to protect the environment with those taxes. California has ALWAYS led the nation in progessive environmental legislation. If you've ever been here and seen some of the beautiful landscapes and natural sites we have, you'll understand. Politicians here fight tooth and nail to prove to the voters who is the more environmetally counsious without wasting tax resources. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things wrong with California, but to be honest I wouldn't want to live anywhere else, and I've been a few places in my time. The weather and the beauty is a BIG draw for people moving to California. It always has been and it always will be as long as we protect it.

I think Bernhard Rosenkraenzer (sp?) was a KDE packager, not a contributor. And he wasn't fired; he quit. Than Ngo's handling the KDE builds now.

GNOME looked quite OK at version 1.4 (actually I preferred the look over KDE although the functionality wasn't at the same level), but version 2 and above is definitely a step back and only barely better than the Windows GUI which is probably the most primitive GUI out there.

I was kind of the opposite. I thought GNOME 1.4 sucked compared to KDE 2.x, so I've continued to use KDE. (3.1 is now on my Red Hat laptop.) But now that GTK+ has anti-aliased fonts and GNOME 2.2 has that nifty Wi-Fi applet, I'm thinking about switching over to GNOME. They sure need to do something about that GTK+ file dialog, though. Man, what a piece of junk.

So you declare the startmenu as the control-center and think all problems are adressed?

No, I thought you would. I got the impression that you felt it was the biggest problem with Red Hat Linux. You were throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so I addressed it.

According to your logic, Safari users could send bugreports right to the KDE-team.

Yes, it was my understanding that Safari and Konqueror both use KHTML as the rendering engine. If a page doesn't render properly in Safari, then it also doesn't render properly in Konqueror. Maybe I was wrong -- bad example. But I think my point about Bluecurve still stands.

So you have to rely on a bunch of people to do what is the job of the distributor?

Huh? I don't expect them to do anything for me because I get everything from them for free! I download new Red Hat ISOs every six months at no charge. Or do you expect them to do what you want without giving them a nickel? No wonder you're all "ticked off". C'mon, beggars can't be choosers! Besides, even if you were paying them, Red Hat still can't include every package you want exactly the way you want it. They don't even have to provide KDE at all if they don't want to. For instance, rdiff-backup is a program I can't live with out, and it's not included in Red Hat. But I'm not going to quit using Red Hat just for that reason, since I can download the RPM here. The bottom line is, KDE 3.1 binaries are available from Red Hat, and if you don't like the way they've packaged them, you can still get the "pure" versions from that site I mentioned.

This loyality really ticks me off.

It's not loyalty; it's inertia. ;) I've been using Red Hat Linux since 5.2, and the reasons to switch aren't compelling enough for me. It's just easier to go with what you know.

I would say "screw them" and switch to someone else.

Hey, that's perfectly fine by me! Use whatever distro you want. But like I said, I thought we were talking about what Linux newbies should use, not what you should use. I don't see why those folks would care whether KDE 3.1 was a few weeks late.

You know, this information just HAD to be there... According to this press release the database mentioned is approximately 60 LOCs. There's just no escaping them!

"The half million Gigabytes of data in the BABAR database, printed out, would fill one billion books. That's nearly 60 times the number of books in the Library of Congress, the largest library in the world."

This would seem reasonable, except for the fact that the US was only granted limited power to punish crimes: only crimes defined in the Constitution that affect the nation itself. "The drafters of the Constitution clearly intended the states to bear responsibility for public safety and what Alexander Hamilton called 'the ordinary administration of criminal and civil justice.'"

The US was designed as a forum for businesses to deal with each other across the nation in a uniform manner (money, laws, etc...), not for the administration of criminal justice. The vast majority of US jurisdiction is civil. And, in civil court, a person can only be sued for monetary "damages" inflicted on another. By building inkjet cartridges in one's basement, no damage is caused. Therefore, even if building inkjet cartridges in one's basement for personal use were technically "illegal", no one would have standing in court to bring action. By selling inkjet cartridges, however, damages in the form of the profit that would have gone to the patent holder are incurred.

Remember also that patent (and copyright) law is a compromise brokered by the state between content creators and inventors and society as a whole. In exchange for exclusive "rights" (really powers, since it is basically the 'right' to infringe upon others' rights) to profit from one's discoveries for a period of time, society gets access to vast troves of technical knowledge on which to build and improve. If everyone were prevented from building and verifying and improving upon inventions during the time in which the patent holder has "exclusive rights" to them, innovation would grind to a halt. By preventing people from profitting from others' inventions, inventors are granted a "right" that they would not otherwise have: the right to be free from competition for a period of time once one's invention is put into the public sphere.

The case you mentioned, that of manufacturing and selling infringing products within a state, is specifically placed under Federal Civil Jurisdiction by Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. By selling the cartridges, you cause damages to the Patent holder and violate his "exclusive right to (profit from his) discoveries". This has nothing to do with interstate commerce. If it didn't involve patents (or copyrights), the US would have no jurisdiction because it is "intrastate" commerce. If there were no damages, no one would have jurisdiction because no one would have standing in court because no one would have a claim against you.

Cruster... That's a typical Engrish word, not Chinglish though.

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/BFROOT/www/Public/C om puting/Databases/index.shtml This is the link to database section of the BaBar experiment. Read more about BaBar at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/BFROOT/

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/BFROOT/www/Public/C om puting/Databases/index.shtml This is the link to database section of the BaBar experiment. Read more about BaBar at: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/BFROOT/

For those wondering what the hell SLAC is, it stands for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Apparently, the SLAC library (SPIRES) stores pretty much every particle physics experiment data and write-up ever.

Here is the pretty picture and their about page.

For those wondering what the hell SLAC is, it stands for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Apparently, the SLAC library (SPIRES) stores pretty much every particle physics experiment data and write-up ever.

Here is the pretty picture and their about page.

For those wondering what the hell SLAC is, it stands for the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.

Apparently, the SLAC library (SPIRES) stores pretty much every particle physics experiment data and write-up ever.

Here is the pretty picture and their about page.

Net Speed Record Smashed
Posted by
CowboyNeal
in The Mysterious Future!

from the fast-ethernet-not-so-fast-anymore dept.
BrianWCarver writes "The BBC is reporting that scientists have set a new internet speed record by transferring 6.7 gigabytes of data (the equivalent of 4 hours of DVD-quality movies) across 10,978 kilometres (6,800 miles), from Sunnyvale in the US to Amsterdam in Holland, in less than one minute. Average speed: more than 923 megabits per second, or more than 3,500 times faster than a typical home broadband connection. The data was sent across the Internet2 network. Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (Slac) Computer Services participated in the record-breaking event. Slac has an interest in such high-speed transfers as they have accumulated the largest known database in the world, which grows at one terabyte per day."

Please compare and contrast the services your
company offers with those offered by Checker
or Smatch.
They seem pretty similar. In fact, do you
use Checker or Smatch internally? It would
seem logical.
- Dan Kegel (dank@kegel.com)

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 is has more/less bugs than OS bar is meaningless without a definition of what having more/less bugs means.

A quick MS kludge that deserves mention (and of course has many limitations) is booting Windows boxen to a WINNT.sif file (aka an "answer file").

Pop a floppy in the drive. Open up notepad, and put in something like this. Save your file as "winnt.sif" (w/the quotes...otherwise it will name it winnt.sif.txt), and reboot your computer with both the install *and* bootdisk in the drives. The cd (boots first in BIOS, of course) installs according to the WINNT.SIF instructions on the floppy.

I remember 2 years ago, US (NYC) and France (Strasbourg) did a cross atlantic surgery intervention (Much much more than 400km ). Here is the clue : Stanford Article.

Actually, the lawsuit ( and here) was over overlapping windows. The technology (now Patented by others - lawyers I think) was the main gripe in Apple's original lawsuit. The problem with the lawsuit was that it was based mainly on "Look and Feel" which began with Atari's Pacman/Centipede games versus Bally's arcade games (or whoever it was at the time). Anyway, Apple Computer and Microsoft came to an agreement. Microsoft got the entire set of source code listings for the MacOS (or as much as they needed in order to have a fully functional OS) and Apple got to have MS-Word and Excel for the Mac. Further, Apple also got an agreement from Microsoft not to release Excel for the IBM PC until a given time (I think it was 1990 and if you will remember - the IBM PC didn't have Excel for quite a while).

The lawsuit and all of the crossed T's and dotted I's was on-line at one time but I can't find it now otherwise I'd post a link directly to it. It was very interesting reading. Apple basically rolled over IMHO. I also remember reading some time back that Bill Gates considered that lawsuit one of the pivotal lawsuits which gave them full monopoly power over the Macintosh as not only could they create an OS based upon the MacOS but they also were allowed to sell it to whomever they wanted. Which is why, in the later lawsuit, Apple lost so badly. They (Apple) basically signed away all of their rights to Microsoft.

Ya know - if Apple were a human being they would be dead by now from all of the times they've shot themselves in the foot, arm, head, torso, etc.... Not that I don't like them (I've got several Macs as well as IBM PCs) - but they've always seemed like an idiot savant.

Seriously, not to be critical or anything, but I'm just curious:

Why would you spend your spare CPU cycles on something like this? Why not put them more towards protein folding or an AIDS cure or even evolutionary research... something that would/might benefit humanity? Or is finding a proof/disproof to this hypothesis going to benefit us somehow?

huh....How does this hurt ? Of course it does. This is not economics, this is human society. When you want to provide an alternative to Microsoft then it is imperative to provide a unified face.

Actually its ironical that the most intelligent people in one dimension are so brainless [sorry for the harsh term] in another dimension. I have been like that when I was shouting up and down about linux. Let me give you an example: linux in itself came about due to a "critical mass" of organized people saying "hey lets get something out of this malleable chunk of cool code. There WAS before that the *BSD's and unix variants, what was definitely lacking was a concerted effort bounded together by the GPL and also the timing of the internet boom. But linux success HAS been in "rolling out" standard server based software - quickly roll out apache, php, mysql and get running....its SIMPLE isnt it ? its repeatable and its easy to do. quickly do a configure,make, make install - it works across MOST if NOT ALL of the software. WHY ? because the authors want to provide a uniform way of doing things. Extending this to a slightly larger scale doesnt seem to cross the minds of the ners?

While choice might be good for innovation and anti-monopolistic checks too much of choice does hurt. So a EE person asks me what is linux ? I say its an OS with a bunch of utilities. They ask "where can i download it"? and I say "huh....its like soap. you can get many flavours. The most popular is RedHat but you know this driver is supported better in the other distro but you know the security is best in Bastille but you know debian is the best in stability so you have to decide what you want to do" and the people go "huh-uh. thanks for the info.....later". This is for the end user side and believe me it does present a confused picture. For the developer side, thats us, it fractures a LOT of the effort. KDE reinvents the wheel,GNOME cannot *gasp* do what KDE has
done and so reinvents it in a slightly different form and so on and on. Imagine the number of install work, the number of packages, the number of hacks, the effort going into each of these distros - if they were to be combined into a select few then I can bet those distros will be awesome.

I cant believe I typed so much. Very sorry for the length. I just really dont agree that too much choice is great. There is a balance just like in real life for most things.

And, by the way, my univ has a linux distro too : SULinux

Thanks for reading.
vv

The PC/mac bit is obviously wrong, but the DX7 and MIDI bits seem correct.

According to this midi history, the first midi instrument showed up in december 1982, and the official midi spec was published in 1983.

BTW, Dave Smith, one of the fathers of MIDI (and creator of the famous Prophet 5), is still at it -- check out his latest synth, the Evolver, which is a wonderful combination of digital and analogue, and an utterly inspiring little box. Affordable too!

Absolutely right! The DMCA is evil. Here's a bit of conspiracy theory for ya: Gilette makes new razor with FRID tags in it. CheapsRazors.com also makes razor blades that you can use with your Gilette razor but that don't include the chip. Well, that's reverse engineering too my friend. That's tampering with the device, etc.
it's time people read Lawrence Lessig's books and start doing something about it!

I hate to point this out, but physical modelling has been around since the mid-80's in music technology research labs like CCRMA and CNMAT, but only until the early 90's was the technology available to implement the algorithms cheaply.

Many other companies (specifically synthesizer companies) make products based on modelling - Access Music, Waldorf GmbH, Novation, etc. Don't forget the big boys like Yamaha, Roland, and Korg.

If you want more information on new technologies in music, I'd suggest looking at Hartmann's Neuron and related products - they're actually using neural nets and controlled feedback to add musical randomness into the sound.

Finally, there are other people who have been making unique music instruments for quite some time - but not necessarily for child development. Check out Buchla and Associates for some really unique instruments.

The IDSA wants all emulators to be banned. More on this here.

More bullying by IDSA and Cox.

I'm guessing the IDSA is a games-only version of the BSA.

:-) yet another reason to be running distributed.net
or some other ways to tie up your cpu. After all, if you are not using your processor, those cycles are just going to waste.

:-) yet another reason to be running distributed.net
or some other ways to tie up your cpu. After all, if you are not using your processor, those cycles are just going to waste.

There have been several research efforts to ensure security and prevent misbehavior in ad hoc networks.

The following papers address many of the issues:

The Ariadne System (for secure routing)

Mitigating routing misbehavior

There are several others that solve similar problems in the research literature.

http://gah.stanford.edu

If you've read Code you probably already know why this kind of regulation by code is bad, but Lessig also wrote on this over At The Atlantic Monthly.
He says the picture of a world where one needs a license to read is discomforting.

Current laws represents a choice made by our democratic processes, and with copyright as code it's not clear how the same balance can be struck. The problem with regulation (And Law) through code is that there is no place for such a collective choice. If one kind of "trusted systems" software protects rights of fair use, a competing version will promise more control to the owner. This makes fair use a bug, not a feature.

Via broadband Internet access, the Streamium MC-i200 connects to the huge number of radio stations currently online

If the box won't connect to the 'huge range... currently on line', but only a smaller, Philips authorised, range, then that's false advertising, which, in Europe, anyway, is illegal. So before wasting time hacking the box it would be worth dropping a line to the Advertising Standards Authority or your national equivalent, or to your local Trading Standards office.

Remember, as Lessig points out, the law is also code, and has APIs you can use.

This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.

http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302

From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.

This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.

For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.

Here are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.

http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302

From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.

This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.

For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.

Here are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

This AEI-Brookings Joint Center for Regulatory Studies article by Mark S. Nadel is also relevant to showing the case against intellectual property.

http://www.aei.brookings.org/publications/abstract .php?pid=302

From the abstract: This article questions the economic justification for copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying. Building on the thesis of Stephen Breyers 1970 Harvard Law Review article, The Uneasy Case for Copyright, it contends that not only may copyright laws prohibition against unauthorized copying (17 U.S.C. 106) not be necessary to stimulate an optimal level of new creations, but that 106 appears to have a net negative effect on such output! It observes that the higher revenues that 106 generates for popular creations are, in the lottery-like entertainment markets, generally used for promotional efforts (rent seeking), and that such marketing crowds out many borderline creations. The article also identifies and explains how new technologies and social norms provide many viable business models for financing new creations relying on only a heavily abridged version of 106. Hence, the article questions whether the current 106 could survive the intermediate scrutiny standards of the First Amendment, given the lack of evidence that the benefits of 106 exceed its costs.

This is a fantastic paper. It is full of references and numbers a lot of hard work and scholarship obviously went into it.

For support for eliminating copyrights or greatly reducing their terms, see Richard Stallman, especially here:
http://www.memes.net/index.php3?request=displaypag e&NodeID=650

and also Brian Martin's essay "Against intellectual property" (part of a large book -- _Information Liberation_)
http://www.uow.edu.au/arts/sts/bmartin/pubs/98il/i l03.html

You can also see lots of other ongoing discussion here on Lawrence Lessig's blog here http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/lessig/blog/ and in his two books.

Here are some of my own comments on the situation: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=898 http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=889

What have you proposed?

We have proposed a tiny tax designed to move unused copyrighted work into the public domain.

How would it work?

Fifty years after a copyrighted work was published, a copyright owner would have to pay a tiny tax. That tax could be as low as $1. If the copyright owner does not pay that tax for three years in a row, then the copyright would be forfeited to the public domain. If the tax is paid, then the form would require the listing of a copyright agent--a person charged with receiving requests about that copyright. The Copyright Office would then make the listing of taxes paid, and copyright agents, available free of charge on their website.

Stanford had a guest lecture a couple of weeks ago from a group setting up a wireless network in Laos.

It's intended to connect about 5 villages with a town (the town has telephone lines to the rest of the world) on the other side of a hill/mountain. It allows them video conferencing with the rest of the world as they are using a verbal only language - so keyboards aren't much use. The gear is all battery powered, recharged using a modified exercise bike. They installed it a couple of weeks ago and are getting a couple of miles with it.

I seem to remember a couple of articles a few months ago about some academics managing to get about 20-50 miles with wireless over water - this of course is an idealised example as there are few areas that flat on land. And of course rain can screw up your signals a lot.

One would think that keyword searching and product categorization, along with many other concepts, were already demonstrated in 1968 by Douglas Engelbart.

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

I think the real application of denser and faster CPUs will be scientific study. In Canada we have a serious deficite of super computer access for research projects, so the academia is increasingly farming out stuff like protein sequencing to shared clusters and remote processing applications similar to GENOME@HOME. However should the 64-bit CPU sucker in enough average home PC users, the price will stay low, which will likely create a tremendous opportunity for advancing affordable scientific research in slightly less affluent nations like my own.