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If you think a paper tape really makes any difference, you really need to watch the videos attached to this article by the Computer Security Group at UCSB...

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/~seclab/projects/voting/

As far as I know, UCSB doesn't offer an official web design course of any sort. I tried looking through the schedule of classes, but all the CS department offers is things like "Data Structures and Algorithms" and "Introduction to C, C++ and Unix". From what I can remember, the only place where you can actually learn about Flash and HTML are the free classes held intermittently in the computer labs, for which you (of course) get no class credit.

I'm not sure what your friend could have been doing at UCSB to be taking courses that were "more akin software training courses taught at junior colleges or technical colleges like Devry, ITT Tech". Perhaps he is simply very confused?

California ordered a review of all the machines used in the state last year. They would give access to university security labs to one manufacturer's machines at a secure location. I mean the machines were held in cages over night and there was controlled access for only the researchers, etc.
They were asked to evaluate the machines.

UC Santa Barbara did ES&S, and their analysis is here.
They also have a short video on the subject, here it is on youtube

In short, all the machines were utter crap. The "seals" can by bypassed by bending some plastic. The locks can be bypassed with a screwdriver. Plus the software is susceptible to viruses, and they managed to make the machine vote for whoever they wanted. Even though all the machines have the VVPT (voter-verified paper trail).

Look at the history of the light bulb and the early development of the electric grid, and you'll see people making profit while providing a service to everyone.

It wasn't for-profit businesses that developed the electrical grid. Businesses like Edison Electric only operated in cities. Electric coops and Franklin D Roosevelt are responsible for the electrification of rural America. And back then much of the electricity was generated by wind turbines.

Falcon

I agree, tech support on campuses today can quickly become anachronistic; that is, if they are not have the requisite intellectual curiosity or do not have the cajones to spearhead new technologies like cloud computing (for distributed mathematical modeling), online E2E voting (for student elections), Educational MMORPGs and a list of other systems being developed now ready for deployment to the student population ASAP. You should have programmers on staff that can help contribute or partner with your CS department for folk that can contribute to these wonderful OS projects. It is important for you to realize that if you do not participate you are accepting other institutions philosophies of style, privacy and security that may be incompatible with yours or be forced to pay some contractor to customize it for you. You would be surprised how useful you will become when you start asking people not only what they want help with today but attempt to understand their needs well enough to plan ahead for what they will be clamoring for tommorow.

Stop playing WOW in the server room and start reading journals about UI Design, Human Computer interface and cybernetics for more advanced theory. Why should you study these journals instead of just reading the old faithful IT pulp mag, this website or some other "tech website"? Because you need to not only see what is coming down the consumer pipeline in a couple of months or be beta testing a new whiz bang software package; you need to understand where all this interaction is heading and how you can get ahead of the curve technologically by enmeshing your department in the active process of problem solving individual and institutional scale issues by being able to posit your own design philosophy coherently into the future and apply it cogently and adaptively as variables change.

Take Potassium-Argon dating for example. "Potassium-argon dating is accurate from 4.3 billion years (the age of the Earth) to about 100,000 years before the present."

One of the points behind the Electoral College and US Senate is to prevent the domination of small/sparsely populated states by large/heavily populated ones.

Then sometimes the system runs amok :-)

One of the points behind the Electoral College and US Senate is to prevent the domination of small/sparsely populated states by large/heavily populated ones.

Then sometimes the system runs amok :-)

Saying there were only 5% of the voters dissatisfied with the choices seemed way too low to me.

Note the "Neither" column. Occasionally it dips down to 4%. I believe you are making the assumption that these two are somehow different from each other. I can assure you, they are not. They represent the same interests of power. If one votes for a person they are "dissatisfied" with, then they really aren't dissatisfied. It is nothing more than passing the blame.

You're right about the sameness of these candidates. We basically have a corrupt one-party system disguised as a 2-party system. And I wasn't making any such assumptions, just pointing out that they both suck, and a lot of people feel that way.

That poll shows nothing but which candidate people think is the lesser of 2 evils. Asked to pick between the two choices, most people will just pick one, rather than trying to stand up to some kind of ideal that they are convinced will simply be ignored anyway.

That doesn't mean people aren't pissed off about the candidates the parties have decided to put in front of them - they certainly are. But most will (misguided as it is) simply hold their nose and vote for the one they think likely to do the least harm over the next 4 years.

"Continuing to vote for the lesser of two evils means you are still choosing evil." I think it was Jerry Garcia who said that.

Saying there were only 5% of the voters dissatisfied with the choices seemed way too low to me.

Note the "Neither" column. Occasionally it dips down to 4%. I believe you are making the assumption that these two are somehow different from each other. I can assure you, they are not. They represent the same interests of power. If one votes for a person they are "dissatisfied" with, then they really aren't dissatisfied. It is nothing more than passing the blame.

Didn't realize the executive branch wrote laws...

Yes... They're called Executive Orders. Ya learn something new every day.

Sadly you're right - US copyright law is messed up.

From: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/copyright.php
"Sound recordings were not eligible for federal copyright protection until 1972 and recordings made prior to this date are only protected by state and common-law copyright. All Edison cylinders are presumed to be in the public domain as the assets of Edison Records were transferred to the National Park Service, a federal agency. Other American sound recordings made prior 1972 may or may not be protected by state laws or common-law copyright. Foreign cylinders are all public domain in the country of production and are also presumed to be in the public domain in the United States.

The nature of the various state laws and differing interpretations of these laws in state courts means that the legal status of many early recordings is unclear. The passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 reiterated that all recordings made prior to February 15, 1972 are only eligible for protection under state laws until February 15, 2067, when federal law preempts state law and they enter the public domain. While the Sonny Bono law was intended primarily to extend the copyright protection to the soon-to-expire copyrights of multinational corporations and heirs to songwriters, in effect it meant that all early recordings, no matter what their commercial potential, historical importance, or availability as reissues (with the exception of Edison Recordings) may be protected for well over 150 years after their creation. This is in stark contrast to the original copyright law passed in 1790 which granted a 14-year term of copyright (renewable for another 14 years) or the copyright law in effect for other types of publications when these cylinders were recorded which granted a copyright or 28 years, renewable for another 14 year (28 years after 1909). Not a single person who composed a song recorded on these cylinders or sang into the recording horn is alive today, which suggests that the original intent of copyright to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" has been completely usurped by the Sonny Bono law."

This happens to be another incredible collection of old recordings: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

Sadly you're right - US copyright law is messed up.

From: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/copyright.php
"Sound recordings were not eligible for federal copyright protection until 1972 and recordings made prior to this date are only protected by state and common-law copyright. All Edison cylinders are presumed to be in the public domain as the assets of Edison Records were transferred to the National Park Service, a federal agency. Other American sound recordings made prior 1972 may or may not be protected by state laws or common-law copyright. Foreign cylinders are all public domain in the country of production and are also presumed to be in the public domain in the United States.

The nature of the various state laws and differing interpretations of these laws in state courts means that the legal status of many early recordings is unclear. The passage of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 reiterated that all recordings made prior to February 15, 1972 are only eligible for protection under state laws until February 15, 2067, when federal law preempts state law and they enter the public domain. While the Sonny Bono law was intended primarily to extend the copyright protection to the soon-to-expire copyrights of multinational corporations and heirs to songwriters, in effect it meant that all early recordings, no matter what their commercial potential, historical importance, or availability as reissues (with the exception of Edison Recordings) may be protected for well over 150 years after their creation. This is in stark contrast to the original copyright law passed in 1790 which granted a 14-year term of copyright (renewable for another 14 years) or the copyright law in effect for other types of publications when these cylinders were recorded which granted a copyright or 28 years, renewable for another 14 year (28 years after 1909). Not a single person who composed a song recorded on these cylinders or sang into the recording horn is alive today, which suggests that the original intent of copyright to "promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" has been completely usurped by the Sonny Bono law."

This happens to be another incredible collection of old recordings: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

check out the Cylinder Preservation Project: http://cylinders.library.ucsb.edu/

i got a bunch of stuff from there quite a while back. it's not exactly hi fi...but it's extremely interesting (if you're into the history of music sort of thing). probably even more than these 78s, though, you have to be aware that turn of the 20th century popular entertainment was often quite racist and bigoted. it's not all like that, but it's a definite presence in the collection.

No, I'm afraid you don't really understand. The 1992 law is a piece of a strategy that has, so far, failed. The idea, as described in the signing statement, is to "[...] encourage future commercial opportunities" by "[...] supporting investments in new remote sensing technologies".

This law (and many others that failed, thankfully), came out of a philosophy that proposed that private interests could do a better job than the government at disseminating data. It's totally cynical, of course: These entities just wanted to charge for what NOAA could distribute for free and make sure that any data that NOAA and similar agencies already had was "licensed" to them (i.e. not given away).

Accuweather's (for one) last attempt to "privatize" data was in 2005. It's almost a bi-annual effort.

On reflection, I can see how you could make a case for this law in the realm of remote imaging from satellites. This law was written for Digital Globe. The justification was that an imaging company needed government help to make the work economically feasible. But, obviously, the X-Prize foundation has a different philosophy on encouraging space exploration :).

Sucks that the DoC got stuck with implementing this thing. My main point is this: This is not NOAA's fault. Somebody at the Commerce Department threw a hissy (likely somebody at Digital Globe or GeoEye complained), and this law is indeed on the books.

Again, in summary: Please don't blame NOAA. They do amazing work, give us all the data we want for free with no hassle, and have resisted efforts to take away our (taxpayers) data. They're the good guys. Seriously. Very good nerds. Nerds that we can only dream of becoming someday.

Thanks for the info. Eucalyptus is an open source implementation of EC2, but does not support user-defined images yet. The admin tools are designed for your own data center or computer lab.

Unfortunately, the FAQ lists nothing about data storage. With Amazon's EC2, you cannot persist data inside your image, so I wonder how it works with Eucalyptus. (This comment says they don't support an S3 implementation.) Still, this appears to be a good starting point if you want to roll your own cloud.

Thanks for the info. Eucalyptus is an open source implementation of EC2, but does not support user-defined images yet. The admin tools are designed for your own data center or computer lab.

Unfortunately, the FAQ lists nothing about data storage. With Amazon's EC2, you cannot persist data inside your image, so I wonder how it works with Eucalyptus. (This comment says they don't support an S3 implementation.) Still, this appears to be a good starting point if you want to roll your own cloud.

Has the approval rating gone down because so many more americans are learning from the crowd?

Or..

Are we all just weekend hippies following the crowd to a doomed Haight Ashbury?

I think this was more like what you were trying to come up with.

And people die in car accidents every year. But we don't stop building cars. We just try to make the safer.

Didn't follow your own link, did you? File Not Found. Very sloppy of you. It's actually here, by the way. And Executive Order #10289, to which 11110 is simply an amendment, is here

In any case, the existence of 11110 doesn't doesn't prove anything about who killed JFK. At most, it suggests one possible motive.

So again, proof or you're lying.

A model

And years later, this became THE hippie car;)

They do have something to hide...

See the research done by Computer Science Department at UCSB for the California Secretary of State:

http://www.cs.ucsb.edu/common/wordpress/?p=73
http://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/elections_vsr.htm

That's a pretty serious accusation. Do you have any details on that? I googled this speech, which includes the following:

In addition, the bill extends for 10 years the protections for language minorities...

...Yes, there are differences over how to attain the equality we seek for all our people. And sometimes amidst all the overblown rhetoric, the differences tend to seem bigger than they are. But actions speak louder than words. This legislation proves our unbending commitment to voting rights. It also proves that differences can be settled in a spirit of good will and good faith.

So I'm guessing that the "critical portions" were along the lines of providing foreign language ballots.

How would you suggest we implement "proportional representation"? When you say "proportional", are you talking about party affiliation or ethnicity or religion or what?

Germany enacted specific legislation in 1991

In 1991. The war ended in 1945. By 1991, the vast majority of Nazi victims were dead. Also, former Nazis were invited to high German governments posts as well as prosecutors, judges, and so an and so forth, See, for example, this.

Well, for one thing; we did not spy on our own citizens. We spyed on the enemy and a US citizen if they were communication with them. And yes, it is the same thing.

Secondly, we did not allow corporates war profiteering and in fact made sure the money went into War Bonds, etc.

What? WTH are you talking about? War bonds was a vehicle to pay for the war, not to divest profits from fighting it. And what ever this profiteering is supposed to mean, most companies that produced goods and services for the US government, the military, and it's allies, did so at a profit. Of course we didn't privatize a bunch of stuff back then. But browning Made several guns, Ford made everything from airplanes to tanks to jeeps and then some. Good year tire and rubber, Firestone all made profits during the war. Even IBM who provided calculator tables.

Thirdly, No-Bid contracts were not allowed.

They most certainly were. And to do one better, forced contracts were awarded where companies like Ford motor company ended up producing AMC jeeps because AMC wasn't big enough to meet demand. Ford also got a no bid contract for pumping out B17 abd B29 bombers. Goodyear, firestone, and a few other companies played roles like this. They didn't fight WW2 by seeing how cheap they could win.

Fourthly, There was no guantanamo, even for japanese descent. The court trials (open or closed) gave even spies the same rights as citizens.

OMG, are you serious? First, what was the Japanese internment camps? Do you even know what they were? They rounded up anyone who appeared Japanese and relocated them, without telling their friends, other family, without any way of contacting the outside world besides bribing a guard, and placed them in holding facilities for the duration of the war so they couldn't be dangerous. And yes, some reports where that some were tortured. That is why the US government paid reparations to the families of them.

As far as open trials, I guess you never heard of the military tribunals of Gimpel and Colepaugh in 1945. Spy's and saboteurs who were caught in the US. Hell, Even George Washington court marshaled Maj. John Andre and hung him during the revolutionary war. That same was done to Benedict Arnold and this happen by our founding fathers. Roosevelt himself ordered military tribunals against offenders in Operation Pastorius and even defended that position against challenges in the Supreme court that back his decision. Roosevelt even went around congress to do so with an executive order too.

Fiftly, the president still answered to the congress and did not try to supersede it or treat it like the enemy.

Um.. No. First see above. Second, go read a damn history book about Roosevelt and his time in office. He is famous for going around congress. He has the second largest number of executive orders to Bush. He initially authorized the arrest and internment of the Japanese and german and italian americans before congress did. He spent money congress never allocated, and got into fierce arguments with congress when they wouldn't implement his plans. The interstate commerce expansion was because Roosevelt made an executive order claiming it to be illegal for a business to employ a person longer then 8 hours a day and 5 days a week. Typically, the work day was daylight to dark which was anywhere between an 80 hour day to 14 or more hours depending on the location and season. This sparked on the the famous supreme court showdowns where he was told it was unconstitutional and he so so what, make me stop. Congress then passed a reformed law limiting it's spirit and providing over time to force businesses to not work employees longer then 8 hours a day and the courts said the interstate commerce clause would allow it so Roosevelt finally backed down,

And

This was presented at the Volunteer Geographic Information conference in Dec 2007, see http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/.

The paper that TFA references can be found at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/position/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf

Another presentation on Openstreetmap from the same conference is at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/present/Coast_openstreetmap-opendata.pdf

This was presented at the Volunteer Geographic Information conference in Dec 2007, see http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/.

The paper that TFA references can be found at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/position/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf

Another presentation on Openstreetmap from the same conference is at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/present/Coast_openstreetmap-opendata.pdf

This was presented at the Volunteer Geographic Information conference in Dec 2007, see http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/.

The paper that TFA references can be found at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/position/Goodchild_VGI2007.pdf

Another presentation on Openstreetmap from the same conference is at http://www.ncgia.ucsb.edu/projects/vgi/docs/present/Coast_openstreetmap-opendata.pdf

He'd be opposed to those to.

He'd just be more opposed to the federal governent doing anything to ban them. In libertarian ideology there is no public property, no "commons."

There weren't a lot of changes in the Libertarian platform between the founding of the party in 1972 and a couple years ago when they finaly decided that electability was more important than insanity and dropped stuff like the bit about child labor laws being the cause of poverty in America.

Here's that 1972 foundational platform. It's a lot like what Paul ran on in 1988. I can't find his 1988 platform on the web anywhere. It's been scoured.

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=29615

You must be on crack for comparing Bush's popularity with Clinton's. GWB has had an approval rating less than 45% for more than 2 years.

There's a growing trend in math (and maybe other disciplines, for all I know) away from non-free publishing.

Prominent mathematicians have been complaining for years (more links here) about overpriced journals, and entire editorial boards of some journals have resigned in protest (see a list of mass resignations and similar changes here). There are now plenty of entirely free journals in combinatorics, topology, and other fields, and pretty much everything that gets published these days is either available on the author's website or on the arXiv.

So modern research tends to be free, but what about all the books you need to read before you understand this research? Sure, a copy of Rudin may be expensive and there's not much we can do about that, but maybe you can learn from the free analysis course notes at MIT's OCW site. You complain that EGA is out of print, but basically everything Grothendieck wrote is available for free, and you can even get them along with tons of other old French publications through NUMDAM. (There's even a project to transcribe SGA into LaTeX.) Lots of other books are free to download legally (and this is by no means a complete list), even though many are commercially published as well.

Finally, you can complain all you want about university tuition, but I really doubt that free tuition is going to open up mathematics to the masses. Ultimately the very top students who can't afford it are getting scholarships and grants to cover their education (and I do know some people who got free rides at Princeton because they couldn't afford it -- that school is definitely more generous than most), and since most other people couldn't get into Princeton anyway the tuition is never even an issue for them. The best way to make mathematics more accessible is to give everyone access to free textbooks and current research, and the "marxist university professors" you deride have been gradually moving in that direction for years now.

By the way, what do you think has been done to damage the Princeton math department's reputation? Whatever you think Shapiro and Tilghman have done to the university, nobody in their right mind would deny that it's one of the top few in the world and I doubt most people would openly proclaim any one department to be the best anyway.

Would it be possible for the open source community to launch a project to essentially make it impossible for a government to cut off its own people from the outside world?

Unfortunately the website seems to have died so I guess the project has been abandoned. If anyone's interested in working on a replacement, please Google my username plus "censorship" and email me.

Ronald Reagan didn't understand why ballistic missiles couldn't return to base. Wouldn't have been so bad if he'd still been an actor, but he was Commander in Chief at the time.

Cite?

I'm no fan of Reagan, but I do believe he was unfairly spun on that quote.

Here's what he later said about it:

"I never said, and I never ever thought, and I would have thought anybody was crazy who did think that you could turn a nuclear missile around and call it back. I was talking about the submarines and the airplanes. And the funny thing is, since my opponent [Mondale] rushed forth with a quote from the press conference where that subject was discussed, I have had more people--and I've seen more letters to the editor in papers on campaigning around the country that are saying, well, it's perfectly apparent seeing that he was talking about the submarines and the airplanes, not the nuclear missiles."

To say that geothermal power has no environmental effects is to ignore our recent attempts at utilizing it. In the 1980s, a flash geothermal plant at Beowawe in Nevada destroyed one of the largest geyser fields outside Yellowstone by lowering the water table and reducing the amount of heat available. The same thing happened at Steamboat Springs, Nevada. * http://www.elkorose.com/geysers.html * http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beowawe,_Nevada The same thing happened in New Zealand when geothermal power plants were constructed there. * http://www.uweb.ucsb.edu/~glennon/geysers/world.ht m There's also this list of geysers and other geothermal features that have been destroyed, in various ways, by man. Notice how many of them are due to geothermal drilling. * http://www.wyojones.com/destroye.htm I'm all for energy independence, and it may turn out that Geothermal has a role to play in it. But let's not delude ourselves into thinking that it has no effect on the environment.

Hmmm....

More cosmic rays, more clouds, less sunlight, lower temperatures, lower temperatures, less bio-diversity.

I have been on the board of the OSI for more than 5 years, and until last year it was fairly easy for us to police the term open source: once every 2-3 months we'd receive notice that some company or another was advertising that their software was "open source" when the license was not approved by the OSI board and, upon inspection, was clearly not open source. [...] Most of the time they would say "Oops! Thanks for letting us know--we'll promote our software in some other way." And they did, until last year.

But what about Scilab, which on its home page prominently claims to be The open source platform for numerical computation (and has been doing so for years)? Scilab clearly does not qualify for the (widely agreed-upon) OSI definition of "open source", because the license prohibits commercial redistribution of modified versions. And yet I've never heard of an OSI campaign to pressure Scilab to either change its license or stop calling itself "open source". As a result, there are many examples of people who have confused Scilab's license with the usual definition of "open source".

According to the Niemoller site, that version probably comes from the Congressional Record of 1968 (copy of text) , although there is an earlier citation from 1955.

However, it does appear that there is no "correct" version, as Niemoller himself was wont to change the order to suit the audience.

I do not pirate stuff myself, because I am simply an instinctively law-abiding sort of person, but I have to the slightest objection to other people breaking silly laws.

Its up to the companies selling (or not selling) the stuff to find a new business model - or go bust. No problem. Its called creative destruction.

Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine.

I don't think that is anywhere close to representing the scientific consensus. A lot of scientists believe that the brain is specially adapted to solving specific problems that were important for our ancestors' survival. For example, humans seem to solve logic problems involving social exchange in very different ways, and using different neural circuitry, than problems that have the same formal-logical structure but that don't involve detecting social cheaters.

Much experimental evidence supports the idea that the neocortex is such a general-purpose learning machine.

I don't think that is anywhere close to representing the scientific consensus. A lot of scientists believe that the brain is specially adapted to solving specific problems that were important for our ancestors' survival. For example, humans seem to solve logic problems involving social exchange in very different ways, and using different neural circuitry, than problems that have the same formal-logical structure but that don't involve detecting social cheaters.

This is so bad it's not even wrong. Please find a talking point that isn't so utterly ridiculous.

If you are going to get all snotty, please, please, check your facts. From the link above:

"Volcanoes contribute about 110 million tons of carbon dioxide per year while man's activities contribute about 10 billion tons per year."

I am really embarrassed for you.

yeah, it was "The human generates more bio-electricity than 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTVs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines have found all the energy they would ever need." source:http://dc-mrg.english.ucsb.edu/WarnerTeach/ E192/matrix/Matrix.script.html personally i think the fusion alone would have worked... but i guess it would be hard making a movie about saving all the poor protons from being smashed together.

Pres. Carter's pardon didn't apply for everyone. Those folks who used violence to dodge the draft and those employees who committed crimes during their duties in the Selective Service System (the department that ran the draft) are excluded from getting a pardon. The details are here.)

Other "real world" tests might involve LIGO and other gravitational wave detectors, as it is believed theorized cosmic strings and domain walls would both emit gravitational waves, and both are involved in string theories. Kip Thorne has a good downloadable online lecture here, with slides as well as audio (you have to sync yourself with them manually ;-)): http://online.itp.ucsb.edu/online/plecture/thorne/

I can't read the fine article because CyberSitter blocks it. However, I did remember an article a while back that changed the way black holes were perceived to operate.

Hm. Maybe google will help me to remember what it was. Oh yes. There it is. Darn. CyberSitter blocks loading that page. I know, user prefs, threshold 5. There we go. Now I can at least see the summary. Click, read, yep, that's the one I remember. Now, Samir Mathur, I remember a very nice .pdf showing his original hand-drawn representation along with some of the mathematical principles behind the whole "there is no true event horizon" hypothesis. Where was that? Ah. There we go.

Someone please tell me how the current article lines up with these from years past. Please try to do so without profanity so that I can click my comment and read the reply without CyberSitter dumping the page.

My iPod can't be a USB mass storage device. It's plugged into the Firewire port. Now you know what complicates it, so let's focus on what to do about it.

No, but it could be an SBP-2 device.

SBP-2 is a standard for passing SCSI commands over Firewire. It's supported by default on Windows, Linux and Mac, so SBP-2 hard disks will be recognized on all platforms.

So it's technically possible to build a device which allows Mass Storage Class type access over Firewire. What I, and I guess the GP, want is a device where you can copy a load of mp3s and maybe an m3u playlist and have it recognize them. Since m3u playlists are easy to generate (eg with a dir *.mp3 /s /b > playlist.m3u in a batch file), it means you can drag'n'drop files from your friend's MP3 collection to the device, run the batch file and have it play them. Whereas iTunes has to be seen to discourage people doing that because it's illegal. Plus, I can't install iTunes on my work machine. And all the music management apps I've seen, including iTunes, annoy the hell out of me.

That's the problem, and the reason that people don't like it.

As this is hardly an obscure reference on slashdot (it comes up almost as often as "give a man a fish and he is fed for a day...") would it really be that much effort to quote it accurately?

Oh, and the original by Pastor Martin Niemöller is about the need for collective political action, and the need not to be inward-looking and selfish, so it's not exactly a defence of individualism in the deranged and hateful Ayn Rand way.

So the OCPN research group here has already gotten our All-Optical packet-routing to work. All optical in that the signals is Never converted from Optical. The switching signals are still electronic, but an integral part of the system is the packet delay (so the signal is delayed while the switches are set).

We, at first, literally used strands of fiber to delay the signal (so a non-variable delay), now we're using the same fiber delay, but between the multiple strands of fiber are the typical 2x2 optical switch (like a Mach-Zender interferometer-based switch), allowing you to switch on/off various delay line segments (thus allowing you to choose the delay, so you can synchronize the incoming signal, etc.). For the next step we'll be integrating this system onto an InP chip (similar to what the article says has been done).
More importantly, what good is IndiumPhoside based technology if everything's made on Silicon??? John Bowers here, recently made the breakthrough in bonding InP to Silicon, paving the way for allowing this technology to actually become useful outside of the long-range communications industry!