Slashdot Mirror

here

Actually, that day has already been there, done that - look into the East India Company, circa 17th century. Basically a large "multinational" corporation with its own Navy and Army. More or less ruled India in the day, and controlled major trading routes (shipping). Its rule lasted for 200 years, until the British finally stepped up to the plate and dissolved the company.

History - learn it or repeat it. It happenned then, it could easily happen today (some might say it *is* happenning). Also, witness the rise of corporate military training and weapons systems suppliers, along with corporate mercenary squads (DeBeers, anyone?)...

In the modern theory of growth, monopoly plays a crucial role as both a cause and an effect of innovation. Innovative firms naturally gain monopoly power for some period of time, and it is argued without the prospect of monopoly power in the form of "intellectual property" would have insufficient incentive to innovate. In fact intellectual monopoly is costly, dangerous, and neither needed for, nor a necessary consequence of, innovation. In particular, intellectual property may hurt more than help innovation and growth, and as a practical matter, is more likely to hurt. To the extent that intellectual property is helpful, as the economy grows or as trade expands through agreements such as the WTO, the length of protection should be reduced.

what was the first word ?
--- here is the answer from the author:
http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/first_words.html

Those links all go to his (slow) Web site, which then redirects to the mirrors themselves.

Direct links:
WMV: External Overview of Creative Zen PMC: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
WMV: Demo of Portable Media Center UI: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Gallery of Images from Creative Zen PMC Mirror 1 Mirror 2

Those links all go to his (slow) Web site, which then redirects to the mirrors themselves.

Direct links:
WMV: External Overview of Creative Zen PMC: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
WMV: Demo of Portable Media Center UI: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Gallery of Images from Creative Zen PMC Mirror 1 Mirror 2

Those links all go to his (slow) Web site, which then redirects to the mirrors themselves.

Direct links:
WMV: External Overview of Creative Zen PMC: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
WMV: Demo of Portable Media Center UI: Mirror 1 Mirror 2
Gallery of Images from Creative Zen PMC Mirror 1 Mirror 2

Try reading the law before you spout off about it. See Section 1201, which provides: "No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title."

The anti-trafficking provisions are in addition to the anti-circumvention provisions. See also any published analysis before pontification.

The 1993 Nobel prize in physics was awarded for indirectly measuring the speed at which gravitational effects propagate: it worked out to the speed of light, within a few percent. They did this by observing a binary pulsar system whose orbits were decaying in exactly the way predicted as if they were losing energy to gravitational radiation; the measured rate of decay depends on the speed of light.

A direct measurement will have to wait until gravitational waves are detected directly, by LIGO or similar experiments.

As for your "missing mass" comments, the latest thinking on the subject involves dark energy inducing an accelerating expansion.

The republican party has been employing this theory for a couple of years now.

The idea is Rush and friends start using words that liberals use to argue for liberal policy. They change the meaning of the words, or the context to turn them around, thus making the liberal argument less convincing. It works quite well.

See here for a more in-depth discussion

Unfortunately, its encouraging for gruops that think they can change a negitive image by changing their name to something more appealing.

Doh! Just when you thought humans were intelegent..

I think on some level Linux is a challange to aristocracy because it reduces their power over your computer (and thereby, you). Hence, all the same groups that hate democracy hate linux.

Use linux because _THEY_ don't want you to. (:

If you want to read about real censorship at the Olympics, here you go.

it seemed to me you were saying the standard theory is in fact discontinuous in the detail, and thus not different than punctuated equilibrium for instance.

That was more or less what I wrote. Now I've written it to you two times, too!

The way I've read about Gould was that to understand his exact position is like old Kremlology. :-)

That was the way Gould wanted it -- he seemed to try to give the public a wrong impression about the state of evol biology. (See this reference from previous article.)

(I am asking a bit of a trick question. The way, if any, which Gould's position was different from standard evol biology is diffuse. Gould liked it that way. See e.g. for something Gould didn't want to answer...)

Besides that.

How do you explain that evolutionary algorithms work if you don't think evolution works? You have seen articles discussing evolution of e.g. eyes, I hope? Go read up on criticism of Behe, or something.

Yeah, our federal representatives did a great job of protecting the Japanese-American minority here in California during WW2.

Executive Order 9066

Fortunately for the Muslim Americans, they don't own large tracts of prime Californian farmland. During WW2, 200,000 acres of farmland were confiscated from Japanese Americans or sold under duress by the Farm Security Administration. If Muslim Americans had comparable real estate holdings, you can bet they'd be relieved of them "for strategic purposes" and to get them "out of harm's way".

>This system will be useful when one has a paper
>in hand, but does not have the bibtex entry.

Perhaps I'm spoiled by working in a field with very good online databases and journals that require only brief bibliographic entries, but it's hard to imagine where this would actually be useful. 95% of the papers one has in hand were located via an online database and came with bibtex entries. On the rare occasion one finds a paper copy of an article and no bibtex entry, it's usually faster to generate one by hand than to find it in a database.

If there are people who find it useful, I'm happy for them. But, I don't see it myself.

It also seems like it could worsen the propagation of errors in citations. An interesting, if tangential, discussion of the topic is in a paper by Simkin and Roychowdhury. (Note that I'm not endorsing the authors' claim that propagating errors in citations indicate that papers have not been read. A more plausible argument is that authors tend to assemble their citations *after* having completed the paper and crib citation text in order to save time formatting their own. Then again, I suppose that suggests that there are a lot of people who actually will use a service like this one.)

Shortly afterwards, the computer we use to run the DNA sequencing program (WebSeq) died as well.

coincidence? i think not...

The actual article to appear in Nature can be found here, which I found at the CNSI web page.

I only wish that CNSI will complete construction before I graduate with my Master's in CS... Seems like it will be a great facility to do research on this sort of thing. Oh well, there's always CENS :)

- shadowmatter

BTW Hindenburg was _not_ covered in flash powder! That theory is dead wrong. Its main proponent made a complete fool of himself by staging a demonstration where he ignited a piece of the Hindenburg's skin with a blowtorch, and the damn thing just smoldered a little.

I seem to remember that a woman was just elected as Prime Minister (a big leap for India!)


Not this time.
However, the late Mrs. Indira Gandhi was Prime Minister of India, 1966-77 and 1980-84. Someday the US will elect a woman president (a big leap for the US someday).

Wrong. The SCOTUS makes rulings based on past rulings. All they ever do is take "short next steps." Likewise, lawmakers use the rulings as starting points for new laws, and revise old laws incrementally. In fact, I'd almost say that our entire legal system is founded on the slippery slope.

Furthermore, for an interesting discussion of how the slippery slope can play out in public opinion, see this paper, which I believe was featured on /. a while back.

"the total mixture might well serve as a respectable rocket propellant"

The direction and color of the flame supports this theory. Hydrogen burns with a colorless flame and would burn upwards (being lighter than air). The actual flame burned downwards and looked like a "fireworks display".

See: http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm

Well, nice, but is it better than fractal antennas, i.e. Sierpinski antennas?

The Phd: an exercise in self-aggrandizing behavior with little application to the real world.

In the event you actually research or do something worthwhile your expertise is basically a very tiny narrow slice of the pie in your discipline in which you possess astonishing depth, and you are likely no more knowledgeable about the rest of your field than a masters candidate.

I've worked with a number of Phd candidates in computer science, chemical engineering, history, and life sciences, and then EXPECT (yes, I said expect) one of two things to happen when they graduate:

1. A company offers them quite a bit of money to do the research that *they* love
2. *poof* Tenure track faculty position

in reality now, its usually

1. Teach as an adjunct
2. Try to convince private industry that you're okay taking that 60k a year position as a chemical engineer.. I'm not overqualified, HONEST!

If you're good at what you do, there'll be good jobs for you no matter what path in life you choose. If you're a lazy slackabout, then you're screwed no matter what. There's no "right" or "wrong" answer about whether a PhD is a good choice -- it's about whether it's a good choice for YOU. This is the real reason why people tell you to do something you love -- chances are, you'll be enthusiastic about it and do it well, and success will follow naturally.

Also, look up JWPCE, a japanese word processor that runs on windows CE (as well as other versions of windows) - it's quite easy to use and has many good features - a searchable japanese/english dictionary and kanji information tool being the most useful.

JWPce is an open source Japanese word processor for Microsoft Windows. I first started using it back in 1996, when I was living in Japan but only had English Windows.
One of its most useful features is the ability to highlight a Japanese word and get not only the pronunciation but an English translation as well.

All about JWPce

Japanese public and private broadcasters will introduce an IC card for viewing digital programs to prevent shows from being copied illegally or distributed over the Internet. NHK and the National Association of Commercial Broadcasters in Japan said Monday they will introduce the common B-CAS Card in April. It will be given to consumers when they buy digital televisions. Viewers will have to insert the card into their TVs to watch or record digital content, while broadcasters will air their shows with a special transmission signal enabling only a single, nonrerecordable copy of the program to be made, the broadcasters said. The method will apply to both existing broadcasting satellite digital programs and terrestrial digital broadcasts, which are set to begin Dec. 1 in some areas of Tokyo, Osaka and Nagoya. From an article here

Dr. Keilis-Borok at UCLA and his team are claiming to have predicted two earthquakes. One in Japan as well as the one in San Simeon.

Using similiar techniques, they are prediciting an earthquake of a minimum magnitude 6.5 in the Southern California desert by September 5. It will be interesting to see if this pans out.

Interestingly enough, I am have an internship in seisomology with the So. Cal. Earthquake Center this summer and will be working at UCLA. I have a feeling it is going to be quite busy! :)

Forty years later, there's still no useful fusion power technology.

The US Department of Energy is terminating all work on fusion effective September 30, 2004. That's probably a good thing; it will free up activities in the EU and Japan from US interference.

One example: it's been found in the laboratory that when two similar tasks or pieces of info need to be learned (e.g. A and B), that interleaving study/practice of them (e.g. ABBABAABABA) results in better longterm learning than blocking (e.g. AAAABBBB), even though interleaving appears to slow down the learning process. Another example is that it's better for longterm learning to have learners try to generate (come up with on their own) a piece of previously seen info, rather than simply re-reading it, even though generation is harder and, again, may appear to impair learning at first.

This kind of research, with a strong foundation in cognitive psychology, could be extremely important for all kinds of education. But specifically, we're using some web-based educational software as a testbed for this. Computers may make implementing something like interleaving or generation a lot easier to implement in real educational contexts. If we can use computers to harness the power that knowledge of the human mind gives us, then they can be terrific learning tools. Without using that knowledge, computers could easily do as much harm as good.

Here's our project website: http://www.psych.ucla.edu/iddeas/

(There has also been a lot of research on 'multimedia' and learning; see studies by Rich Mayer at UC Santa Barbara)

One problem with this story. Who is Chinese? Labeling the country of Taiwan "Chinese" for example, is incorrect since most of the population is Formosan not Chinese. The same goes for a lot of the various modern and ancient acquisitions. These territories weren't acquired because they were "Chinese". Only two thirds of "Chinese" speak the main language, Mandarin.

IMHO, things make much more sense if you view the culture of China not in isolation, but rather as a highly successful tool of an imperialistic bureacracy. I think the culture was created from the very begining to form an empire. For example, two of the primary religions of China were created by bureaucrats (pardon the negative connotations, but I don't know a better term to describe their careers in the government), that is, Taoism and Confusism. In each case, the religion was quickly endorsed by the state. And the concept of the "Mandate of Heaven" (basically a claim of divine sanction to rule) precedes these religions by many centuries.

My point is that Chinese culture was shaped long ago into a tool of imperialism. It's longevity and the number of adherents is a good sign of its great success over this unimaginable period of time.

I should also add that I believe a key component of this has been one of the most successful eugenics programs in the history of man. I think it's fair to say that the old Chinese empire and culture were used as tools to make the entire Chinese empire related in culture and genes to the Mandarins of the imperial court. The emperor and other high nobles were encouraged to have many children (while the closely related Mandarins controlled education and even the survival of the children). The culture was set up so that marrying a child of higher status was a good thing. Hence, they had a means for propagating the genes of a small controlled elite to the general population.

I think you should consider the reason for the existence of Chinese culture and not just what Chinese culture "wants".

The 'No Electronic Theft' Act

On December 16, 1997, President Clinton signed HR 2265 -- the 'No Electronic Theft' Act -- into law. The act, sponsored by Representative Goodlatte (R-Virginia), was passed in the House on 11/4/97 and in the Senate on 11/13/97.

HR 2265 was viewed as "closing a loophole" in the criminal law. Under the old statutory scheme, people who intentionally distributed copied software over the Internet did not face criminal penalties if they did not profit from their actions.

The act was strongly backed by the software and entertainment industries but opposed by science and academic groups.

I'm not sure I like all this robotic harvesting of the traffic cones. Please, help save the cones. Join the Traffic Cone Preservation Society.

One other note on language usage at the time- note the phrase 'the Christian Religion" is singular rather than "Religions"; this is relevant to the "under God" debate as it shows that they thought of it in a collective sense. One defense of the "Under God" phrasing (though I don't recall if you've used it) is that its general to a group of religions- but if the founding fathers thought of religions in the collective (i.e. "the Christian Religion") then they would have regarded something pertaining to all christian religions as pertaining to "the Christian Religion" and not as allowing a choice of religions.

As to religion versus not-religion, my personal definition of the dividing line is faith, which in turn is based on whether the position is about something which is possible to know.

For example, the global warming debates are not religious, because the causes of global warming and the extent to which it occurs are fundamentally knowable. We don't actually have enough information to conclusively nail down the answers and heated debates and reasoned disagreement is possible given our incomplete information on the subject- but it's theoretically possible to actually get factual answers.

There certainly are people who are irrational on both sides of many environmental issues, and I'd say they that there exists a dogma in many cases- but there are factual answers to the questions even if we don't know the answers yet, so I wouldn't classify it as a religion (there are religious environmentalists as well- but in their case no rational argument is required. "Gaia doesn't want you to ____", e.g., is a sufficient reason.)

Much political debate, as the differences between Democrat and Republican, tends to fall into the theoretically knowable but not currently known categories. The economic effects of taxation, what the best stategy is to combat terrorism, what to do in Iraq, how to best spend federal money- all of these questions have factual answers but are too difficult for us to actually know for certain. Given the uncertainty, different people can rationally evaluate the existing inadequate evidence and come up with different conclusions. There certainly are a lot of preconcieved notions and dogma on these topics, but it's not religion for the most part.

Religion involves questions which are fundamentally unanswerable by facts. The origin of the universe, the nature of god(s), the nature of the 'soul'- any topic which is fundamentally unmeasurable or unprovable. (To answer a possible objection, if a god (or God) were to appear and demonstrate conclusively his existance, his nature might now be provable- but a belief in this entity would no longer be considered a religion by my definition as it wouldn't require faith, merely observation.) There is a grey area which I consider unfortunate, when a Religion makes falsifiable statements...you cite the example of evolution. In my opinion a potentially factual topic such as this should not rightfully be considered a religious area as it is theoretically factual. It is problematic for a Religion to decide on an answer to a factual question whether or not that religion happens to be correct in a particular instance. To do so is to restrict rational thought on the topic.

See http://engineer.ea.ucla.edu/releases/blimp.htm - hydrogen did NOT cause the Hindenburg to burn, it was the fact that it was painted with rocket fuel, basically.

As a major univerisity in Los Angeles, who do you think some of UCLA's major donors are? They have a school of Theater, Film and TV. And who do you suppose is the biggest supporter of the David Geffen School of Medicine? In addition to the RIAA paying for the system, I'm sure that various supporters have encouraged UCLA's pilot program for ACNS.

As a major univerisity in Los Angeles, who do you think some of UCLA's major donors are? They have a school of Theater, Film and TV. And who do you suppose is the biggest supporter of the David Geffen School of Medicine? In addition to the RIAA paying for the system, I'm sure that various supporters have encouraged UCLA's pilot program for ACNS.

In fact, UCLA has even published a letter to their students directly addressing file-sharing which states We are writing to alert the campus community - students, faculty and staff - to the personal risks involved with illegal file-sharing. It is important that you understand these risks, not only because of the possibility of disciplinary action, but also to protect yourself against criminal prosecution and the initiation of civil litigation by copyright holders. We would like you to be very aware that initiation of legal action by copyright holders is becoming more of a reality every day..

With ample notification of monitoring and a termination policy in place, why should UCLA need to explicitly state that they are turning on a new monitoring system any more than they would notify students that their P2P bandwidth was being throttled by something like Packetshaper?

In fact, UCLA has even published a letter to their students directly addressing file-sharing which states We are writing to alert the campus community - students, faculty and staff - to the personal risks involved with illegal file-sharing. It is important that you understand these risks, not only because of the possibility of disciplinary action, but also to protect yourself against criminal prosecution and the initiation of civil litigation by copyright holders. We would like you to be very aware that initiation of legal action by copyright holders is becoming more of a reality every day..

With ample notification of monitoring and a termination policy in place, why should UCLA need to explicitly state that they are turning on a new monitoring system any more than they would notify students that their P2P bandwidth was being throttled by something like Packetshaper?

There are critics of Einstein that are academically serious and not off their rocker like some zero point/tesla fanatics.

There have been critics of Einstein ever since he released his theories.

You don't hear much about them as they are all heaped into one group and astrocized.

Some of your questions may be answered in this FAQ or this one.

The LA Weekly had an article on this in the April 4-10, 2003, issue: Buckyballs and Screaming Cells: The amazing miniature world of UCLA chemist Jim Gimzewski

James Gimzewski's Website: Pico Lab

That's where this is headed, and I don't like it.

Are you familiar with the logical fallicy called "Slippery Slope?"

That's where this is headed, and I don't like it.

Are you familiar with the logical fallicy called "Slippery Slope?"

I completely forgot that RFC1 came out of UCLA!
Real timing considering that Engineering One was knocked down just a few weeks ago..

Anyway, I suspect that entire graduate theses can be written on such a topic.

Heck, one professor at UCLA has made a career out of it... ;-)

Lets see how they handle this case.

Just after the PBS special was made available online, I put together a page with links to all the segments here. That way my friends who were interested could download them and watch them later.

- sm

As long as there are people putting "I know CHMOD and Upload/Download" on their resumes, I guess anything is possible....

I wasn't in on the EMusic.com thing when it started up, but I am now. $9.95/month for 40 downloads when I can hear a 30-second preview of every tune on there seems like a pretty good deal to me. Still, I probably won't stay a subscriber for long though simply because I don't like monthly recurring charges and I already have a large library of CDs ripped to ogg files. To me, it's not worth it because I probably won't keep downloading 40 songs a month. There's a point where they run out of music I'm interested in. The pace of new additions I like is not 40 songs a month. Over all, I find their selections wanting; but, thankfully, I have found a few artists I had never heard of that I quite enjoy...and thankfully they've got some Tom Waits. So props to EMusic.com for that.

Anyway, I think a lot of customers are unrealistic. They want unlimited music downloads for US $10-20/month. But that $10-20 may not even cover the cost of the load those users put on the service. I think it's fair to limit it. I think it's too bad they weren't smart enough to get it right to begin with because then they just pissed a bunch of users off...but mostly just the unreasonable ones.

Oh, and FYI: copyright infringement is not theft. It's a different crime covered by a different set of laws. Even though the NET Act uses the word "Theft" in its title, it does not legally describe copyright infringement as theft. It makes it a criminal offense, instead of just a civil one, but it's still not theft. Thank you.