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I have some insight on this topic as a university professor. I've used both systems, and I was on the Academic Technology Committee when it was advising the CTO and CIO on purchasing decisions for such systems. We wound up paying for both. As you say, they both suck, and I'm sure whatever unholy combination is produced will suck even worse. At the time - 1999 or 2000 I believe - "open source" was something my colleagues on the committee had heard of but didn't know anything about, and the CTO and CIO were computer-savvy but looked on open source with disdain (this made sense as they were constantly wined and dined by folks who represent closed source companies looking for big deals). I was teaching summers at UCLA at the time and had the opportunity to use ClassWeb, an open source alternative to such tools. My experience with the tool was exemplary; I thought it was easy to use, it fulfilled the necessary functions and was not needlessly confusing for students. It was also free. Best of all, the developer worked at UCLA so when there were features I wanted I was able to ask him for them and they were available in days. It was truly a classic case of the superiority of the open source model working well. For much less the price we paid for Blackboard and CT, which all the students complain about, we could have hired programmers to handle coding issues on classweb and had an open source solution that we could fine tune at will. But when I made the suggestion, the feeling around the table (particularly from the CTO and CIO) was, shut up hippie.... Today I don't use any such tools -- I still code my course web pages by hand using html and have some very primitive open source discussion board technology for discussions. I think it's necessary to have courses online these days for various reasons, but the tools offered by these companies are needlessly ornate and confusing. The open source model makes sense in general but especially in public university settings where costs are a relevant factor and where the freedom to tinker with code brings with it additional educational benefits.

Cool idea. I wonder if diamagnetic levitation? would be a useful principle for controlling the track levitation.

How do we know the universe is 13.7 billion years old? It was recently discovered that the universe's expansion is accelerating as time goes by. Assuming this change in acceleration has been the case all along, doesn't that really fudge with the numbers we used to estimate the universe's age?

There are many ways to estimate the age of the universe, not all of which involve calculating the expansion of the universe.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/age.html

However, Lerner borders on crankhood himself.

"Bizarre things are going on that we are just beginning to get a handle on," says Marcus Pembrey, a clinical geneticist at the Institute of Child Health in London. Consider the pregnant Dutch women who starved during the famine of the Second World War. Not unexpectedly, they had small babies. Far more surprisingly, those babies went on to have small babies, even though the postwar generation was well fed and no genes had been tinkered with.

[interesting article with more examples of non-genetic inheritance and gene imprinting. Google on "heritable methylation" for many more.]

Parasites and evolution:
Evolution, Ecology and Optimization of Digital Organisms by Thomas S. Ray
http://www.his.atr.jp/~ray/pubs/tierra/tierrahtml. html

see also Lynn Margolis' work

non-constancy of evolution - see "punctuated equilibrium" - related to parasite co-evolution in simulations see Ray above

Sexual selection often unrelated to fitness - a commonplace. See peacocks, stags, Pamela Anderson, homosexuals etc. The signs of desirability become divorced from the reality and lead to more waste in display than ultimate reproductive or survival benefit.

Mitochondria as indispensable commensal organisms with an independent genetic lineage, e. coli and other gut organisms as affecting fitness either way (improved digestion/ peritonitis) - (look it up yourself)
Further, the mitochondria are inherited through the ova's cytoplasm.

Immune systems in mammalian infants are initialized from the mothers to a large degree through the colostrum (first milk) and additionally through regular milk. Breastfeeding: Unraveling the Mysteries of Mother's Milk Medscape Women's Health eJournal 1(5), 1996.
by Margit Hamosh, PhD, Georgetown University Medical Center
http://www.asklenore.info/breastfeeding/additional _reading/mysteries.htm

http://www.calfnotes.com/pdffiles/CN050.pdf
the number of leukocytes in colostrum can easily exceed 1,000,000 cells/ml. Colostral leukocytes are primarily composed of lymphocytes (23%), neutrophils (38%) and macrophages (40%). ...Colostral lymphocytes can survive in the intestinal tract due to the lack of proteases found in the intestine during the first 24 hours after birth and the presence of protease inhibitors such as trypsin inhibitor. Further, leukocytes have been shown to be absorbed into
bloodstream of the newborn.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fessler/ pubs/F&A2004InfantMouthing.pdf
IgA from breast milk provides protection against all microbes the mother has or has had in her intestinal tract, as the mother's intestinal Peyer's patches send SIgA against current antigens to the mammary glands, and memory lymphocytes able to target past antigens congregate there as well during lactation [39]. These passively transmitted antib

Cotton tree eh?

Well if you like being naked!

Among Bombacaceae, the most famous economically important fruit hair has been harvested from Ceiba pentandra, the kapok or silk-cotton tree. Probably few people in California have ever heard of kapok, a towering emergent of lowland neotropical forests, often reaching fifty meters in height and forming enormous, flaring root buttresses that prevent the tree from snapping at the base. Unlike cotton, kapok cannot be woven into cloth, but formerly it was widely used for stuffing pillows, bases and balls for baseball and softball, mattresses, and, especially, life jackets. In fact, during World War II, a U.S. sailor would commonly refer to his life jacket as a "kapok." Since the war, however, synthetic fibers have replaced kapok for these traditional uses.
quoted from: http://www.botgard.ucla.edu/html/MEMBGNewsletter/V olume2number1/Bombacaceae.html

you meant.. the cotton plant
http://www.factmonster.com/ce6/sci/a0857606.html

since you were wrong on that point, your ethos has suffered and your arguement is mute.

I would disagree with Hitler being a psychopath , he was certainly emotionally unstable and very passionate . He was an evil sick man , his turning on Germany was out of spite , he felt betrayed.. or perhaps the reason he destroyed the infrastructure was because he would rather it burnt than fell into the hands of "sub humans" .
http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/DB/issues/98/12.01/ news.hitler.html an intresting article on the subject
It does not require a mental illness to be a completey evil bastard

Learn the English language.

And copyright doesn't have to have anything to do with copying; misappropriation of a companies logo bearing property can invoke copyright violations.

The Fine Article doesn't mention one exciting development in the field of information theory, related to negative information, which may one day tie it to Vacuum Energy or Zero Point physics in a grand unified theory that, once we come to understand it, could form the basis of a star drive to power star ships.

It seems that virtual particles of antimatter and exotic particles of normal matter that spontaneously emerge from the void, and then disappear without interacting with anything. [1] The theoretical potential of tapping this particle flux has brought vacuum energy to the fore of research by the NSA into Quantum Information Theory.

Experiments conducted by the NSA and the DOE on large data samples gathered in large bureaucracies (both public and private) indicate that Microsoft Word Documents are effective containers for Negative Information, which hitherto had been considered a transient phenomenon, almost impossible to store given our current understanding of physics. The phenomenon of massive amounts of stored negative informisinformation, as it turns out, makes the typical corporate or government intranet much more resiliant to cyber terrorist attack than previously predicted -- nearly as resiliant as the typical government organization to a FOIA request today, for comparison.

It is expected that once we understand the characteristics of MS Word Documents which allow them to efficiently store negative information in a stable form, Quantum Physicists and Information Theorists should be able to get together, perhaps over a nice hot cup of tea, and stitch the two branches together, getting us one step closer to faster than light travel, finally bringing the stars within reach -- except it won't really be FTL, it will be something that we don't presently understand. [2]

Only the humor-impaired need read this bootnote.
[1]Yes, I see the grammar error. I've intentionally borrowed a pattern, common in conspiracy theory writing, of constructing a complex sentence, perhaps full of objects, perhaps full of verbs, perhaps full of nouns, on the theory that it might amuse, whereas it normally serves to confuse, as sometimes subjects or verbs may go missing. Oops I did it again! Or did I?
[2]Yes, I realize I mention antimatter only in the title, and not in the text.
[3]Yes, I realize there are 3 bootnotes, not a single bootnote as referenced above.
[4]Yes, I realize that only 2 of the bootnotes are indicated by reference numbers in the text. (Absurd bootnotes are also common in conspiracy theorist writings.)

Anyone else read this and think of Vendetta from Making Fiends, and get excited that something was out before September 1st?

Most useful open source bioinformatics software is going to be geared toward biologists with at least some programming and unix skills. A lot of it was written by bioinformaticians which tend to lean more toward the informatics than the bio. They get more caught up in the technical aspects of the feild rather than the biology of the problem looking to be addressed. Unfortunately, the same can be said about most commercial bioinformatics software as well.

On the flip side, when people more interested in the biology than the technology write software, they tend to write just enough to get the job done and then stop. Software from this camp is often buggy and has a bad UI or no UI at all. It gets the job done, but only if you know exactly how to use it.

Anyway, you might want to take a look at R - http://cran.stat.ucla.edu/. It's more geared towards statistics but it does have some protein modules.

Is this really a violation?

Unfortunately in current US law, the mere circumvention of a "copy protection" mechanism by the end user is illegal, whether your doing so violates ordinary copyright or not. There are exceptions made for libraries and research institutions, but not for ordinary end users.

This "well thought out" piece of legislation is called the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA).

The problem is, that the law is not necessarily based off what is ethical. Question: is it currently illegal based of the DMCA?

From http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm:
Highlights Generally (of the DMCA):

Makes it a crime to circumvent anti-piracy measures built into most commercial software.

Outlaws the manufacture, sale, or distribution of code-cracking devices used to illegally copy software.

IANAL but his steps do sound like they violated the wording of the law, if now the actual law.

But the maximum copyright term for anything in the US is 95 years.

No it isn't. Take the case of a work with an individual author who created the work at age 20 and survived until age 80. Then the work is under copyright for life plus 70, which equals (80 - 20) + 70 = 130 years. Yes, it could happen: see Irving Berlin.

And before anyone complains, you may be interested in at least considering:

http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Med ia.Bias.8.htm [ucla.edu]

which finds, in part

Our results show a very significant liberal bias.

...to win viewers/readers from FOX News. There's a Newsweek piece about it this week.

[CNN president Jonathan] Klein is making revolutionary changes at the cable network--scrapping signature broadcasts like "Crossfire" and "Inside Politics," shaking up his morning-show ensemble and his prime-time producing staff, and creating a new international news show at noon. These are only the first steps in a broad overhaul plan aimed at getting the pioneering and once dominant cable news network out of a seemingly perennial second-place finish, far behind Fox News.

And before anyone complains, you may be interested in at least considering:

http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Med ia.Bias.8.htm

which finds, in part

Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these media outlets (Special Report, the Drudge Report, and ABCs World News Tonight) were closer to the average Democrat in Congress than to the median member of the House of Representatives. One of our measures found that the Drudge Report is the most centrist of all media outlets in our sample. Our other measure found that Fox News Special Report is the most centrist.

and

Based on sentences as the level of observation (the results of which are listed in Table 8), the Drudge Report is the most centrist, Fox News Special Report is second, ABC World News Tonight is third, and CBS Evening is last.

Given that the conventional wisdom is that the Drudge Report and Fox News are conservative news outlets, this ordering might be surprising. Perhaps more surprising is the degree to which the mainstream press is liberal. The results of Table 8 show that the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, USA Today, and CBS Evening News are not only liberal, they are closer to the average Democrat in Congress (who has a score of 74.1) than they are to the median of the whole House (who has a score of 39.0). [...] the New York Times is twice as far from the center as Fox News Special Report, to gain a balanced perspective, one would need to spend twice as much time watching Special Report as he or she spends reading the New York Times. [...] Our results contrast strongly with the prior expectations of many others. It is easy to find quotes from prominent journalists and academics who claim that there is no systematic bias among media outlets in the U.S. [...] The main conclusion of our paper is that our results simply reject such claims.

Please note:

These findings refer strictly to the news stories of the outlets. That is, we omitted editorials, book reviews, and letters to the editor from our sample. (emphasis mine)

It makes me sad when people can't tell the difference between NEWS and OP-ED. Do people also have that same problem with the editorial page of the New York Times? Or just, say, Sean Hannity on FOX News? Is it acceptable to judge the news gathering and reporting capability of the Times by exclusively evaluating the content of its opinion page?

Further, one of the prime measures this report uses is the scoring for members of Congress by Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), the self-described "nation's oldest liberal lobbying group".

Now, some might say that comparing news to members of Congress, be they Democrats or Republicans, isn't an effective measure (especially if you believe there is virtually no real difference between today's politicians). But at least take time to consider the report.

Various FOX News "watchdog" groups are a dizzying array of alleged inaccuracies in FOX News opinion and editorial shows, with almost nothing in actual N

In practice, no economically optimized dictatorship has ever existed

Some people in South Korea and Taiwan may say that this concept is not quite correct. Recent work titled "The Political Economy of Growth: Democracy and Human Capital" (PDF) shows that democracy has no statistically significant direct effect on economic growth.

There are plenty of examples of dictatorships which were highly effective in achieving economic growth, and plenty of examples of democracies which are not effective in achieving economic growth. Of course, the converse of both is true as well.

Economic growth has much more to do with regulation per se, as opposed to the political source of the regulation.

http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/aasc/ex9066/

What bullshit. [...] Where's Stephen Gould when you need him?

Gould's argument was that all intelligence researchers were idiots or in a conspiracy. (Like the arguments from creationism believers against evolutionary biology.)

Here is one of the answers to Gould on intelligence.

Jensen's main complaint about Gould -- that he put up very stupid straw man arguments (not his real position) and attacked them -- seems very similar to the answers to Gould from the evolutionary psychology researchers.

The video editing is excellent. I would just like it to be longer and to show more stuff.

Also, this page contains more videos. Oh goodness! http://users.design.ucla.edu/~mylrea/blog/

From the same location...

LOL.

Weirdos.

Observation of nuclear fusion driven by a pyroelectric crystal is a press release dated Apr 27, 2005, from the journal Nature.

It sounds like they have achieved "nanoscale hot fusion," rather than P&F cold fusion.

If you had looked at the three previous articles other posters cited, all refer to Seth Putterman at UCLA. Unless he's invented three different fusion methods this year, I venture to say thay are indeed dupes. Today's from the CSM is particularly fluffy, a very dumbed-down explanation that might be suitable for primary school or Fox News.

Well, here's the abstract and a short description.

That's a pretty heady group.

Putterman is particularly famous for his work on sonoluminescence.

Funnily enough, this is not really the core research of Putterman, his earlier work has largely been in the area of blackbody radiation, sonoluminescence and certain related quantum phenomena.

More technical details would be nice.

It was reported on in the press (MSNBC) and Slashdot had a lively discussion here and slashdotted a UCLA server. There is more at a (hopefully non-slashdotted) UCLA website.

More info here: http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/

The most pragmatic thing would have been to KEEP the sanctions going and keep Saddam in his box. Less Americans would have died (1500 and counting) and less IRAQIS would have died (100,000) and counting.

If you look at it in a vacuum, sure.

But what about the approximately 600,000 Iraqis that died (according to various estimates by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch) as a direct result of the sanctions process?

Now that sanctions are over, we have a hope at a quite significant net preservation of Iraqi life when compared to the egregiously abused UNOFP and sanctions process.

The REAL motives of the Iraq war was to acquire the Iraqi oil resources (it was the ONLY asset protected after the invasion)

As I said, but I'd say not so much "acquire the Iraqi oil resources" as "ensure that we have continued and future access to the oil resources in the entire mideast region as part of a comprehensive plan to reshape the state of governments in the mideast, and prevent a possible Panislamic empire that would desire the destruction of the US and the West".

and to create permanent bases with which to frighten and intimidate Iraq's Arab neighbors.

All in the eyes of the beholder, I guess - YES, to frighten and intimidate Iraq's non-US- and non-West-friendly neighbors! We want them shaking in their boots, and for reformers and modernists to rise up from within and demand change, for example, in places like Tehran.

Hey, I was FOR the war when it started. I parted from my liberal colleagues because I believe that Saddam was a threat. I didn't believe ANYTHING Bush said. I believed COLIN POWELL. Jeesh, he sure spoiled his credibility with me.

Since hundreds upon hundreds of tons of Iraq's WMD are unaccounted for to this very day, it wasn't beyond reason to expect to find WMD in Iraq. But even if we did find large caches of WMD in Iraq, that wouldn't have changed the fact that WMD is not the primary reason we went to Iraq, though it was initially the *stated* one.

The only acceptable reason for risking American lives is SAVING American lives. You seem to think this little Iraq excursion is protecting Americans.

Actually, I didn't say either, but on this topic, you're falling into the trap I see many succumb to: once again, looking at it as a vacuum:

1500 lives lost; that's 1500 lives that would have been saved had we not gone.

It's not that simple or black and white, man! I find this type of black and white reasoning astounding coming from people who usually denigrate that type of reasoning. Iraq, and the overall mideast strategy, is NOT A VACUUM.

MANY lives will be lost in this effort. The goal, however, is that, longer term (e.g., the next 50-75 years), many more lives will be spared, on BOTH sides.

Now, I understand the pragmatism of saying "you can't predict the future, but we KNOW that those 1500 would still be alive had we not gone, and we further know we would not be directly responsible for XX0,000 Iraqi deaths". Certainly I agree with that.

But what of the approximately 50,000-100,000 Iraqis/year who would have died due to inattention under sanctions (as had happened each one of the previous 12 years, according to liberal human rights watchdog organizations, meaning there was no reason to expect it to change)?

What about the Americans or other Westerners - say, in Europe - that may die from attacks due to the unchecked growth and increasing aggression of Panislamic terrorists?

I think you've been watching too much Fox News.

http://www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/groseclose/Med ia.Bias.8.htm

"Our results show a very significant liberal bias. All of the news outlets except Fox News Special Report received a score to the left of the average member of Congress. Moreover, by one of our measures all but three of these medi

1. Genetic engineering: Gene therapy is currently a very promising field of study, and research on vectors is finally yielding some extremely promising results, both for viral (see some of the fourth generation or higher lentiviral systems) and non-viral (liposomes etc). As gene therapy becomes common, the same techniques can be applied to not just fix genes, but add or alter existing ones to give desirable attributes (better vision, etc).
2. Brain-computer interfaces: Once again, most current research takes place with the aim to provide superior prosthetics to people who have suffered from accidents. This is my personal area of interest. In principle, all the input and output going into the brain should be able to be intercepted and controlled. By doing that, a person could be transplanted into any artificial body desired. I feel that at the current pace of development, this will be a relatively (there is always risk with surgery) safe and well understood procedure within 20-30 years, assuming research isn't outlawed or anything like that.
3. Medical nanotechnology: Very speculative, I don't think anyone knows for sure whether is can actually be done or not. I'm listing it because it would be a different way to augment the human body from the previous two.

Some links:

University of California Neuroelectric Research Group. Some interesting information, with PDFs available, on BCI.

Gene Delivery Systems. A free quick intro (from a lecture/course) on some of the different vector systems being studied for gene therapy, and desirable characteristics.

Those of you with access to journals can go read a very interesting study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 16(6):1022-1035. "Optimizing a Linear Algorithm for Real-Time Robotic Control using Chronic Cortical Ensemble Recordings in Monkeys," by Wessberg and Nicolelis.

I hate Bush too, but let's not forget that Clinton is the culprit on this one: http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/iclp/dmca1.htm But yes, Bush shouldn't be screwing up other countries with the same screwups.

To paraphrase you:

"Yeah, don't let people start private schools, how could they possibly ever improve on public schools! What are they gonna do, cut teachers and classrooms?!?"

Of course, that leaves aside little facts like the private schools exist and are better for the kids than the public schools in the same areas....

As for your FDR theories, those programs you tout were responsible for extending the depression, not fixing it. If the USA collapses, it'll be because of socialist idiots who can't be bothered to learn history or basic economics, yet still think they should make all the decisions for everyone else.

How about we let people make up their own minds and pay for the things they personally want, instead of forcing them at gunpoint to subsidize whatever some popularity-contest winner and his crony bureacrats decide people should want?

We erected a tribute page on our website in his honor:

http://www.studentgroups.ucla.edu/abs/douglasadams /

Two years later, we finally ran our Big Event, with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Dr. Jill Tarter of SETI fame. We opened with a dedication to Adams. Here are pictures from the event:

http://homepage.mac.com/uniace/PhotoAlbum21.html

We erected a tribute page on our website in his honor:

http://www.studentgroups.ucla.edu/abs/douglasadams /

Two years later, we finally ran our Big Event, with Bill Nye the Science Guy and Dr. Jill Tarter of SETI fame. We opened with a dedication to Adams. Here are pictures from the event:

http://homepage.mac.com/uniace/PhotoAlbum21.html

Google is wonderful for these types of things. Here's a top rated result:

Highlights Generally: [...] In general, limits Internet service providers from copyright infringement liability for simply transmitting information over the Internet.

Section 202 of the DMCA describes this.

Their setup: The 'crystal' mentioned in the mainstream articles, is a z-cut lithium tantalate crystal (LiTaO3), with the negative axis facing outward onto a hollow copper block. A tiny tungsten probe (80 microns long and 100 nm wide) is then attached to the other crystal face. This probe acts as a tiny mast for the electric field so that there is a powerful electrical field at the tip of the probe. Then there were a bunch of fancy neutron-counters and single-photon counters bundled around it.

What they did: First they added deuterium gas (at 0.7 Pa) and then cooled the crystal down using liquid nitrogen (to 240 K). Then they used a little heater to increase the chamber temperature slowly.

What happened: Less than 3 minutes later, and still below 273 K (0 degrees Celcius), the neutron signal rose above the background level. There were x-rays coming from the probe tip, and a whole bunch of neutrons. After a few more minutes, the electric field was so strong that it caused arcing between the probe tip and the enclosure (because they kept heatingthe crystal, and the field thus kept getting stronger). The arcing stopped the process (and I'd guess it damages the crystal?).

They added a few links in the article to previous papers: a pdf describing the concept they are trying to harness, another pdf with more about how they use the crystals with the deuterium gas, and a brief abstract.

I think this is pretty cool. I bet/hope that before long (within 10 years), this will be powering small extrasolar probes.

Pretty neat stuff. I don't even mind dupe posts when they're on such important stuff.

A UCLA collaboration (Seth Putterman, Brian Naranjo and Jim Gimzewski) appear to have developed a fusion device powered by a pyroelectric crystal, a type of crystal used in cell phones to filter signals. When heated, such a crystal produces a large electric charge on its surface. The UCLA researchers placed a lithium tantalate (LiTaO3) pyroelectric crystal so that one side touches a copper disc. A tiny tungsten probe is then placed at the center of the copper disc. When the crystal is subsequently heated, a very large large electric field is produced at the end of the tugsten tip, ~25 billion volts per meter. This field gradient is so high that it strips the electrons from nearby deuterium atoms. The ionized deuterium atoms then accelerated by this field towards a solid target of erbium deuteride (ErD2). They collide with it at such high energies that some fuse with the target. A measurement of almost 900 neutrons per second was observed. This is 400 times the background! Although the amount of energy produced in this initial experiment was miniscule (~1E-8 jules), this technology could be used for things like microthrusters. There are pictures and movies on the UCLA's physics site. Reader richmlpdx adds a link to coverage at MSNBC.

Because this development was featured in prestigious Nature, the world is taking notice. An Associate Press story is receiving widespread coverage by mainstream news organizations. Google News is showing major coverage by a wide range of news organizations worldwide. http://pesn.com/2005/04/28/6900088_UCLA_Cold_Fusio n/

UCLA website http://rodan.physics.ucla.edu/pyrofusion/ credits SlashDot for overwhelming their server.

"Sorry, couldn't handle Slashdot effect. ...Last modified: Wed Apr 27 20:37:46 UTC 2005"

Also worth note: Cold Fusion Goes Back to School at MIT - Colloquium to be held on Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus May 21, 2005. http://pesn.com/2005/04/20/6900085_Cold_Fusion_MIT /

As for international violations, they apply only where the patent has jurisdiction. The US government is free to violate french patents so long as they do so on American soil.

The "slippery slope" argument is inherently fallacious

Remember, a slippery slope argument is only fallacious if the causality between the steps is unclear or non-existent.

Also remember, when free-speech activists decried the DMCA proposal because of its chilling effect, they were shouted down with "slippery slope fallacy!" as well. Yet one of the first to use the DMCA was the Church of Scientology to take down critics' sites.

Go get a logic class will you?

Actally, if you had bothered to read TFA you'd have noticed that the information comes from a survey conducted by researchers at UCLA, which polls freshmen at universities across the country:
The survey

So who's part of the clueless masses now?

No. The study was done by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, not solely of Freshmen at UCLA.

If you click the link provided on the CRN story page to the HERI web site and look at the FAQ for the study you will find a PDF document that lists all of the colleges and universities that participated last year (and every previous year back to 1966).

They aren't numbered. But I count 54 institutions on the first page and there are 26 pages in the document. That's 1400 colleges and universities. Granted, some of the institutions that participated in the past did not participate last year. But in any case it's a large study that encompasses many more than one university.

How about we raise the level of discourse here and try some cursory investigation before we post?

Did any of the moderators who modded up this post check to see if "Flexible Typhoon" was correct in his assertion that the study was only of UCLA freshmen? Is there some kind of mutually-reinforcing aesthetic of half-assed-ness here at slashdot? Do some fact-checking or you may reward a blow-hard.

Good quality midi is difficult to distinguish from the real thing. See how good you are by trying MIDI or virtuoso

Unfortunately the you need Real Player to listen to the files.

Whichever side you're on in the copyright debate, you have to agree this legislation is draconian and excessive, to say the least.

Obviously not, as Congress passed the bill.

Remember when you couldn't go to jail for copyright infringement unless you were profiting off the copyright infringement? Hard to believe the law has changed so much in only 8 years. Thanks a lot Bill Clinton, you opened up the floodgates.

See this FAQ.

P.S. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, twice what you said.

You know what annoys me?
that all the freaking sentient aliens are pretty much the same size.
why can't we have some superdense 15 foot giants walking around talking trash.
Why are they all the same size?

Glad you asked :)

Haldane's On Being the Right Size

Of course, his essay does make certain assumptions about an Earth-like atmosphere and gravity...

• Harvard doesn't list it in the admission requirements.
  
• But, U Penn does require a completed secondary education program in their requirements.
  
• Some like Penn State are a little fuzzy - they require four years of secondary education, but not necessarily a diploma (?).
  
• UCLA again doens't state a diploma specifically, but does require very specific secondary education credits.
  

Wow, a conference co-organized by Eric Lerner? No thanks.

Nobody's talking about constant state monitoring of your vehicle's position. Where in the bill does it say that? Yes, I guess they could, in theory, track your vehicle's location, but they're not doing that.

And the income tax was originally 3%, and those who warned it might one day reach 10% were told they were paranoid. And your Social Security number was never to be used for identification purposes. The slippery slope is not always a fallacy.

Slippery Slope arguments may not hold up in Logic class, but humans aren't logical. I saw this in another /. post recently that really clears up why Slippery Slope arguments both are valid, and important to consider, when dealing with humans and politics.

http://www1.law.ucla.edu/~volokh/slippery.htm

Copyright isn't criminal at all in the states. It's a purely civil offense, so the only redress is a suit.

I'm amazed anyone still believes this, given that it has not been true for eight years now: the No Electronic Theft act, signed into law by President Clinton in 1997, makes commercial piracy, or non-commercial piracy where the value of works pirated over a 180-day period exceeds $1000, a criminal offense, punishable by heavy fines, several years in jail, or both.