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The open access movement advocates free online access to scholarly literature with minimal restrictions on its use. The Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E-Prints and Open Access Journals new bibliography presents over 1,300 selected English-language books, conference papers (including some digital video presentations), debates, editorials, e-prints, journal and magazine articles, news articles, technical reports, and other printed and electronic sources that are useful in understanding the open access movement. Where possible, links are provided to sources that are freely available on the Internet (approximately 78 percent of the bibliography's references have such links). The bibliography has following major sections: General Works, Open Access Statements, Copyright Arrangements for Self-Archiving and Use, Open Access Journals, E-Prints, Disciplinary Archives, Institutional Archives and Repositories, Open Archives Initiative and OAI-PMH, Conventional Publisher Perspectives, Government Inquiries and Legislation, and Open Access Arrangements for Developing Countries. It includes a brief overview of key open access concepts. The Association of Research Libraries and the author have made a PDF version of this printed book freely available. It is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License. http://info.lib.uh.edu/cwb/oab.htm

Downloading necessarily involves reproduction, which is one of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder, at 106(1).

When you download, you direct your computer to write information into one memory or another (e.g. RAM, HD, etc.). Due to the definition of a copy in section 101, these are material objects, and the downloading process results in fixing a work into them. Thus, they become new copies. And fixing works into tangible media so that they become new copies is reproduction and it's prohibited.

You're probably getting confused by the vernacular definition of a copy, e.g. that a file on a computer is a copy. Really it's the RAM, or the hard drive, etc. that is the copy; the file is just an instance of the intangible creative work.

I'm not really sure where you're getting the uploader part, though. It seems pretty obvious that the downloader is responsible for his own downloads. No one is forcing his computer to do it, after all. There've been some cases along these lines. You may want to read this case, which briefly runs through the analysis with regards to the downloading of web pages as a part of the process of viewing them. The court concludes that it can be an infringement on the part of the viewer. It also cites to other on-point cases if you want to follow up.

You couldn't be more wrong.

"It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the school-house gate." -- Justice Abe Fortas, Tinker v. Des Moines majority opinion.

Right, because the Germans invented DES which started the rush of crypto algorithms while IBM (an American company) was still using polyalphabetic substitution cipers. No, wait, it's the other way around, stupid ass. You're not only wrong, but stupid.

One thing Capitalism does very well is foster innovation, both in invention and improvement of other inventions. We didn't invent the rocket, but we made it better. We invented the atomic bomb. We made serious cryptography.

Partly true.

We invented the automobile and the cotton gin.

The automobile? As apparently everyone but you knows, you're dead wrong there:

It's amusing to watch people go out of their way to try to find fault with the USA. History won't even bother recording you guys.

The historical record is only of relevance to those who actually bother using it to check their facts before posting.

Hell lets throw out all that modern technology and go back to the "good old days" like during the Civil War, where over 50,000 died in one three day battle (thats around twice the total number of deaths in the entire Iraq war). I mean because of the horrors of war back then, people were so peaceful and never engaged in violence to settle a dispute.

If you are referring to Gettysburg, which was a three day battle and easily the largest engagement of the War, your number of "over 50,000 died" is a bit high. There were under 50,000 total casualties, which includes deaths (of which there were between 5000 - 7000), woundings, and missing (usually meaning captured).

I do agree with your point that the type of fighting waged during the Civil War was so absolutely horrible that it gave people pause before fighting it. This was by design -- for example, Sherman's stated purpose when when marched from Atlanta to Savannah and then north through the Carolinas with his three corps, essentially destroying everything in his path, was to break civilians' will to fight and support the Confederacy: "We cannot change the hearts of those people, but we can make war so terrible...[and] make them so sick of war that generations would pass away before they would again appeal to it."

If such a strategy unquestionably worked and helped The Good Blue States defeat The Evil Red States, why isn't it being considered as an option in Iraq? Armies are great at killing people and blowing stuff up but they make lousy police forces and negotiators.

OMG! Nooo! Serious? You mean there were no money lenders and money borrowers before quants?! Why, although I am an agnostic, I could swear that dude Jesus was moaning something about "usurers" and "money-changers"...

And I could swear the "percentage points" had way more to do with greed, competition and the central bank's politically motivated rate then with "callable bond market". But then again I am not a priest of mumbo-jumbo, voodoo, calculus-probabilistic-binary-stochastic multi-dimensional economics, like these dudes who blazed that trail before you.

For those who didnt get it: this whole "quant" subject is the modern rendition of the old traveling salesman selling the "patented" and "amazing", Kernel Sam's "secret" forumula snake-innard cure-all potion from the back of his wagon. A fool and his money....

Fun can be had be recreating old experiments. How about how Eratosthenes calculated the diameter of Earth? Take that, Flat Earth Society!

My alma mater, the University of Houston, offered a wine tasting class under the auspices of the Conrad N. Hilton School of Hotel and Restaurant Management. My understanding at the time, though, was that only HRM majors were allowed to take it.

I'm also a fan of Canon's cameras (I own an A75). They rate highly for the nerd factor if only because Canon provides to interested developers a really slick and very thorough SDK. (In the U.S. this SDK is easy to obtain, but in other countries the rules differ.) The SDK is available for Macs and PCs and lets you control just about every feature through the USB port that you can access by pushing the buttons on the back of the camera (zoom, focus, aperture, shutter speed, image quality, white balance, etc, etc).

I've designed a remote capture tool for HDR imaging while others have made replacements/supplements for Canon's own remote capture tool (Cam4You) that support features like time-lapse photography and turning your digicam into a webcam.

Now if I wanted to upgrade my camera, I'm not sure I could get used to one that I couldn't control through my computer. :)

So, by my saying that there is a place on the web called suprnova.org, I've just contributed to the infringement of copyright? Should I be prosecuted for spreading information that someone might use illegally?

Maybe.

If that was a material contribution, there was a direct infringement, and you had actual or constructive knowledge of such infringement, then yes.

My favorite case on this -- because it's clearly written and tends to shock people; I don't actually like the holding -- is Intellectual Reserve v. Utah Lighthouse Ministry.

Basically website A posted a link to website B, knowing that website B had posted copyrighted documents in an infringing manner. Because people reading website A were encouraged to go to website B, and because reading the documents at website B would constitute an infringing reproduction of those documents, and because website A's owners knew of the infringement -- they were felt to be substantially likely to themselves be infringers.

N.b., you're more likely to be sued civilly than prosecuted criminally.

Of course, the bare statement that suprnova exists really wouldn't be sufficient. But saying something like 'You can download movies from suprnova' might. In the end, there are no magic words. Courts'll look at the character of what you said, your audience, etc. If you're a model citizen (e.g. a New York Times with an article about piracy since its' a newsworthy thing) then you'll probably avoid liability. If you appear disreputable (e.g. a 2600 posting links to suprnova and talking about how people ought to pirate movies and stick it to the man du jour) then you'll have a harder time. This is because in the latter case -- aside from not getting much sympathy because you seem like a bad guy -- there probably is a higher chance of material contribution.

For suprnova themselves -- they'd be toast. You can't possibly say that hosting torrent files is not a material contribution. They'd have to argue the knowledge angle as far as contributory liability goes. I think it would be hard.

This is why they're not in the US, IIRC. They wouldn't have a chance here.

Let me ask you this then: What other options do people have? When unemployment on some reservations reaches past 30% to 75%, it's has ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with whether they're on welfare - they're on welfare because they have no jobs and no jobs available for them.

Don't give me that "pull yourself up by your bootstraps, move away from the rez" stuff, because it doesn't work like that. You can't take care of your family, let alone get a better education to get a better job, because you have no money. More than 50% of all Americans live within 50 miles of their birthplace anyway. How much do you think that has to do with employment and educational opportunities?

If that's truly the case, then we should probably just toss the whole rez idea in the trash - because keeping their culture is too expensive for them.

Oh, of course, the original purpose of the reservation was to keep the culture intact (as you implied there) and not the government's attempt to starve them off and kill them all.

Cigarette smoke is harmless.

And the Earth is flat.

If you're especially interested in Kerry's history, K. Poole has done a more detailed analysis:
Is John Kerry A Liberal? John Kerry's Senate Voting Record

If you're especially interested in Kerry's history, K. Poole has done a more detailed analysis:
Is John Kerry A Liberal? John Kerry's Senate Voting Record

These #s are a little old, but a couple studies to help illustrate:

http://www.law.uh.edu/healthlawperspectives/Health Policy/000807Myth.html

Oh you mean like this?

So... I don't have to imagine a beowulf cluster of these!

Even if allofmp3.com's asserted licence is bogus, says Minahan, "the end user would seem to have a good basis to argue that he is an innocent infringer, which would mean he isn't liable to damages, although he would still be liable to an order requiring him to destroy or deliver up any copies and an order requiring him to refrain from doing it again."

These aren't the only guys working on such things.

Dr. Bering working on variable specific impulse magnetoplasma rocket

Flynt's parody.

It's hilarious. :)

Here's an image that triggered an earlier Falwell lawsuit against Larry Flynt and Hustler magazine:

http://www.hfac.uh.edu/comm/media_libel/cases-conf licts/print/falwell.html

Ironically enough, Falwell lost that one.

Most major ideas are basically bound to happen once a certain point of technological and intellectual advancement are reached. We celebrate the people who invented this or that, but the reality is in most cases of "major" inventions, there are actually several people who can lay claim to the invention and we just remember the one who happened to market it or get the patent. Radio,
Telephones, these are major inventions, but many people arrived at the same point more or less simultaneously.

In the distant past, things tended to get invented by one person at a time because few were educated and had the advantage of our species collective knowledge. Now with printing presses and near instant communication we've all got that benefit. Quite a lot of things get invented in several places at once.

Now, I'm not opposed to patents for real inventions. However, I think our patent system has gotten ridiculous. Business method patents are a mistake, as are in my opinion patents on software methods which should fall under the category of mathematical algorithms which are not patentable. In other words, lets start inforcing the provision about not patenting things that are obvious to people in the field and start requiring that you actually _invent_ something worth mentioning to get it patented.


I worked my ass off earning $8/hour, in a manufacturing job (wood products), in middle of f*cking August with no a/c to pay for my application. I did not get any 'help' from 'Society'; in fact, I was impeded by you idiots. "For the children" and "For the good of the people" bullsh*t. Get off your fat ass, quit complaining about your life, and actually do something.

As for this little rant: If you to sell your idea with government protection, you have to pay for the application. If you've really invented something unique, good for you. Go reap the fruits of your effort. On the other hand, if you've come up with the stunningly original idea of say, having a "buy it now at this price" button on an online auction, your sweating in a factory doesn't really justify my having to pay you to do that.

Its always the case. The Brits invent the prototype, then the Americans refine it, market it, and take the credit. From Democracy to Computers, from Trains to Planes.

Now wait a second. We Americans have invented some pretty useful stuff like the light bulb, the telephone, and the automobile. You can't take those away from us!

Firstly, while there may be many messages on SMTP, I don't belive that the total size of transfers gets anywhere near that of BitTorrent. For example:
http://www.telecomm.uh.edu/toptalkers_smtp.html gives a (currently) 23 MB transfered per 5 minutes, for a university (at 6pm local). That's, what, one BitTorrent connection?

On the peer to peer or otherwise of SMTP: Peer to peer implies that the cost of transfer/storage is mitigated by the number of people on the network. That's a modern viewpoint, but if you examine what is called p2p, they all have that in common. SMTP doesn't do anything like that - these days it's typically a three hop system: Compsing client -> Source server -> Destination server -> Recivening client. The last hop isn't over SMTP, and the first may not. Any other hops are put in explicitly by the site administrator.

So, no, I wouldn't call SMTP p2p any more than I would call ftp p2p.

C'mon, renege on the $500 bonus?

You forget, these are the same people who claimed that they lost money on Forrest Gump, so they wouldn't have to pay Winston Groom, who wrote it (or at least the book on which it was based) the profit-based percentage he was owed.

In light of that, I fail to see how you expect them to be honest with minimum-wage theater workers who won't be able to afford legal recourse if they get stiffed. Sure, $500 is less than a percentage of millions, but these are some greedy motherfuckers we're talking about here-- no dollar amount is too small to weasel out of paying.

~Philly

Wow, now I know how to get rich:

1) Setup massive spamming operation
2) Make millions
3) Get sued and settle for a mere six figures
4) Stop spamming operation
5) Tell world you going to help children

So within the scope of a year or two, everyone will forget how this man made his fortune, and revere him for his good works helping children.

Sounds a lot like the Carnegie Legacy

There's Engines of Our Ingenuity, unless that's the "NPR database" you're referring to. (And as you can see from my URL, I am shilling somewhat. :)

ml-POV, a patched version of POV-Ray, allows you to use high dynamic range images (HDRI) for lighting--that's about as close as you'll get to real-world lighting in POV-Ray right now. I also wrote a pseudo-solution for the standard POV-Ray.

'Actual Malice' must be proved if the defamed person is a public figure. This means the perpetrator knew the statements were false and published them with specific malicious intent. See this page: What is Libel? Associated Terms.

So, if I read in the Weekly World News that Dick Cheney is in cahoots with Red Lectroids from Planet Ten, and reprint that without calling the Lectroid Consulate, I'm safe.

Could you please find me a picture of a pair of really big boobs.
Results
Nice! I can't believe it's still beta.

"404: Someone who's clueless. From the World Wide Web message> "404, URL Not Found," meaning that the document you've tried to access can't be located. "Don't bother asking him...he's 404, man.""

John Lienhard (the U. of Houston one) is the host of "The Engines of Our Ingenuity" radio program. If you haven't heard any of these, get the transcripts or see if the program is on in your area. I've always found them excellent.

It's about time high dynamic-resolution imaging was supported in hardware. It's not only simple to use, but makes many many things easier--no more worrying about hitting the 8-bit limit, picking colors to avoid saturation/overlighting, or struggling with realistic compositing. For compositing alone it's priceless. Debevec even has a light stage for compositing real-life objects into computer-generated scenes (instead of vice versa).

I've been working for a while now on HDRI solutions for things like POV-Ray--even if it is a pseudo-solution. (Or you can get the ml-POV patch for more native HDRI support.)

Haiti was run by the US Marines 1915-1933.

Of course, most US territory was a neighboring country before it got incorporated to it...

The ancient Greeks invented the computer over 2000 years ago.

You mean "libel." Slander is spoken, libel is written.

You are, of course, correct.

At any rate, I don't think they have libeled LinuxToday -- the claim that LT is not authorized to redistribute the content is not defamatory, it's merely incorrect.

CMP's statement implies that the content is beyond what would constitute fair use -- for otherwise, CMP would have no legal right to require 'authorization' its use.

Defamation usually requires that you know that the information is incorrect, and you intend to cause harm by publishing it.

From a legal standpoint, I'll refer to the University of Houston's web pages on "media libel."

"Actual Malice is what plaintiffs in the public eye have to prove in order to win a libel case. Actual malice is the act of publishing or broadcasting statements with prior knowledge of the inaccuracy of the statement or a reckless disregard for the truth."

The highlighting is mine. CMP's actions show a "reckless disregard for the truth" since LinuxToday has apparently been very careful to assure that their excerpts fall under fair use.

Now if only my other favorite NPR show, This American Life, would follow Car Talk's lead...

They're not going to use the money to SUE someone for buying a GM.

Hopefully not, but GM once sued Ford's customers for buying Model Ts. OK, it wasn't actually GM yet, but some of the manufacturers in 1903 Seldon consortium later became GM.

jeeze, the north korean's with their atomic bombs and the south korean's with their cloning... if they combined powers...

I will show the world that I can be its master. I shall perfect my own race of people -- a race of atomic supermen which will conquer the world!

thank you mr. wood, here's your oscar.

I was very let down that there was no mention of the Lunar Solar Power / LSP project, proposed by David Criswell (and I think recently reviewed by NASA). This project could not only "lift our national spirit", but prove the best long-term investment our or any country could make for global stability and prosperity. The Mars mission sends the wrong (militaristic) message to the world when too many nations hasten to blame others for their problems (which is what causes wars). The prospect of being able to power the world's population affordably, sustainably and extensibly by 2050, or even 2100, could carry a profound message of hope. Why not actually solve a real long term problem rather than leaving it to our grandchildren?

according to the the university of huston, the telephone was invented by a German 26-year-old science teacher.

Usually considered to be water-reactive? Either it is or it isn't.

Look here for more info.

The smell of soft Ambergris is enough to make most people vomit, and yet it has been a valuable ingredient for perfume (in very small amounts, after being dissolved in alcohol) for centuries.

Think of other passionflowers as being something like Pachelbel's Canon and gigue in D and Rafflesia as being more like, lets say Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, played at an extreme volume. (I actually enjoy MMM , though truth be told, only about once a year or so.)

Here, take a look at this page by Austin Roorda, a vision scientist at the University of Houston. He shows images of the cells in some test subjects' eyes, with the images colored to indicate which cells detect which colors of light. You can see at a glance that the eye has far fewer blue-sensitive cells than green or red sensitive cells. Thus, the few blue cells which are there are spread far apart. Hence we have much worse angular resolution in the blue than we do for red or green.

(Disclaimer: I'm not a vision scientist myself. I do hang out with them on a regular basis, however.)

I believe that nanotech, just like AI and superconductivity, is a pipe dream.

Superconductivity is a pipe dream?!? Have you been living under a rock for 92 years? It was accomplished in 1911 for Pete's sake!

(Yes, I'm sure you're referring to the way it isn't in "common usage", but the reasons for that are largely economic, not technological. The benefits of superconductivity simply aren't large enough to matter. It's certainly possible, though!)

Have you already seen an application of NanoTech in real life?

Yes. Your ignorance of them does not negate them.

We're only at the beginning of the flood here. You're the guy in August 1981 declaring that desktop PCs are impossible because who has ever seen a useful desktop PC? You're not exhibiting special insight, you're ignoring what's going on right now, right in front of you, at the infant stage.

Full-scale Drexler assemblers may or may not happen (though IMHO the real question is "how large will they be?", not "are they even theoretically possible?"), but nanotechnology marches onward, even though it can't jump to the ultimate conclusion of the technology instantaneously.

There's some video clips here showing the [astro|cosmo]nauts eating various unedible looking substances. There's also some shorts on the preparation of spacefood. All in all the stuff seems really noxious (we all know the freeze-dried icecream from museum stores is god-awful). I think the next ISS module should be a soul food shack. Am I the only one who wonders what the *nauts do when dinner doesn't sit well? Do you suppose Febreeze works in space?

To change the subject...
If NASA is so worried about errant crumbs perhaps they should spend a few million bucks researching a dustbuster that works in zero gravity instead of funding magnetic resonance imaging research into why their (crumb-free) tortillas taste bitter after six months on the shelf.

That explains this $136,216.20 proposal to NASA to study Development of Extended Shelf-Life for Tortillas for Long-Duration Space Missions".

They wanted to (or did?) use MRI scans of tortilla dough to determine whether there were any changes on a molecular level that could be linked to tortillas taking on a bitter taste after being on the shelf for extended periods of time.

I wish I could get my own NMR spectrometer by saying that I want to study tortillas.

Does anyone else find this to be hilarious?

See here.

Cool, it has a proper report designer and scripting. Not your average lame db frontend :)

If you're willing to think big and think technical, there is potentially a feasible way out of fossil fuel dependency and greenhouse warming. See this article . It's never cloudy or windy in space, so extraterrestrial solar power isn't clumsy or random. It's expensive to get started, but scales beautifully. Which basically means you can keep your suburban lifestyle (if you must) and lose your environmental, military and diplomatic, er, ramifications.

MIT received a very large grant (millions of $) and phenomenal amounts of publicity for this endeavor. Consequently, I expected something more than what I and most other (non-fossilized) professors were/are already doing on our time, typically with IT support from the university. (UCSC in my case.)

When I'm learning about something new, I already go to university websites and look at course pages for ideas on references or books. It's also fun to check out literature classes for novels to read. Seedlings of this sort are already common on the web, and some have grown into healthy young trees. MIT is not starting a trend here, or coming up with some great new idea that's going to inspire other universities to follow suit -- it's already being done.

Check out this site for example http://www.scholars.uh.edu/~math1300help/ which generates practice problems and solutions for basic algebra. It's been incredibly useful for the woman I'm tutoring right now. It's way more sophisticated than the sample of things I looked at on the MIT site, provided free of charge for everyone by the University of Houston.

And if anyone is in the mood to work out some intermediate economics problems contact me through my website and I'll send you a whole lot of pdfs....