Slashdot Mirror

This is old. More than one hundred years ago, A. Square wrote about isosceles triangular soldiers in Flatland; they could make other polygons dead too.

Reverse Polish Notation Lives

and

This sad is.

Hey, that's almost like English! Makes you wonder.

There are better written and more interesting discussions of Babbage out there. For example, check out John Lienhard's Engines of our Ingenuity site for some short essays on the topic, including:

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1059.htm
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1145.htm
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi646.htm
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi243.htm
http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi2.htm

If every airport, starbucks and business class hotel in the US deployed 802.11B I suspect there would be practically no need for 3G, Ricochet or the rest.

MobileStar has been doing that for a while. They have 802.11b access points at Starbucks, airports, and hotels. I travel back and forth between Dallas and Houston, two of the covered cities, and I'm mighty tempted by their plans, but the prices are too high. It's $30/mo for local unlimited, or $60/mo for national unlimited. If it worked at my college campus, then I'd be sold. Otherwise, I'm praying for Richochet to make it through.

So according to the Sherman Act all this talk of divestiture and behavioral remedies is really just a waste of time, seeing as a maximum penalty for MSFT is a $10 Mil fine. Any ideas on how all these other punishments got cooked up if there is no basis for them in the law?

See http://voteview.uh.edu/antitrst.htm for information on this.

http://www.isso.uh.edu/publications/A9900/html/min i/mini-fox.htm

Provide a testbed for developing 21 st Century technology.

How exactly? Give me examples, reasons or some good links to these. Plenty of 21st century technology is already developed on the ground. I doubt there will actually be a huge amount of 21st century technology used in the station on the grounds that in space where just about everything everything is critical tried-and-trusted technology is used.


I think by "21st century technology" they mean technology that relies on space (as opposed to 20th century technology which can be done on ground), rather than technology that is _used_ in space.

One example of such technology is the Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center. They define themselves: "The Space Vacuum Epitaxy Center creates advanced thin film materials and devices for commercial applications through growth technologies using terrestrial and space environments".

They operate a so called Wake Shield Facility: "The WSF is a 12-foot diameter stainless disk-shaped platform launched from the Space Shuttle that creates a unique ultra vacuum environment in its wake, with a combination of pumping speeds and vacuum levels thousands of times better than the best vacuum chambers on earth. Built for eventual long-term autonomous operation, the WSF supports all of the processing and characterization instrumentation required for advanced molecular and chemical beam epitaxy (MBE/CBE) materials processing."

On the role of the ISS for their business they say: "The ISS is the linchpin in long term WSF business planning, serving as the logistics and servicing node in a manufacturing process that will make the Wake Shield Facility a profitable International Space Station commercial tenant."

A range of other projects can be found at Space Product Development.

Information on Commercial development on ISS can be found at http://commercial.hq.nasa.gov/

The silly part of this political argument, particularly from a republican gun wielding person from Texas, is that such a person would contend that the best way to raise a child is to give them a shot gun as early as possible and let them kill as many animals as they like. Now I understand that when you kill an animal it real, and such a person believes that the reality will teach the sanctity of life, while the animate violence trivializes the value of life. I do not think it is necessary to reject the possible benefits of teaching a child to kill animals, or allowing the state to kill people that the state says are guilty of a crime. I do think it is ridiculous for Bush and Cheney to blame all of societies ills on violent video games and the Internet when parent and state sponsored violence is happening practically on thier front stoop.

Irregardless, if you're an underground opposition group opposed to an oppresive government...

Irregardless isn't a word. :) That said, why is it such a fun word to use, even though the correct word, regardless, is shorter and easier to roll out?

Deo

PS: Just a little offtopic chain pulling; I say irregardless all the time and get crap for it myself, so I couldn't resist. ;)

• JR Tolkien [if you don't think he counts see: Engines of Our Ingenuity: C.S. LEWIS AND TOLKIEN ] What would geek life be without Lord of the Rings?
• Larry Wall, what would geekdom be without Perl? See Feed Mag on Larry Wall: Divine Invention

Here's a few lines from the comments he made on May 4th (full text here)

• Defendant argues, however, that such copying is protected by the affirmative defense of "fair use." See
• 17 U.S.C. 107. In analyzing such a defense, the Copyright Act specifies four factors that must be considered...

  Regarding the first factor -- "the purpose and character of the use" -- ... involves inquiring into whether the new use essentially repeats the old or whether, instead, it "transforms" it by infusing it with new meaning, new understandings, or the like.

  • See, e.g.,
  • Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., 510 U.S. 569, 579 (1994); Castle Rock, 150 F.3d at 142; see also Pierre N. Leval, "Toward a Fair Use Standard," 103 Harv. L. Rev. 1105, 1111 (1990). Here, although defendant recites that My.MP3.com provides a transformative "space shift" by which subscribers can enjoy the sound recordings contained on their CDs without lugging around the physical discs themselves, this is simply another way of saying that the unauthorized copies are being retransmitted in another medium -- an insufficient basis for any legitimate claim of transformation. See, e.g., Infinity Broadcast Corp. v. Kirkwood, 150 F.3d 104, 108 (2d Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense by operator of a service that retransmitted copyrighted radio broadcasts over telephone lines); Los Angeles News Serv. v. Reuters Television Int'l Ltd.. 149 F.3d 987 (9th Cir. 1998) (rejecting the fair use defense where television news agencies copied copyrighted news footage and retransmitted it to news organizations), cert. denied, 525 U.S. 1141 (1999); see also American Geophysical Union v. Texaco Inc., 60 F.3d 913, 923 (2d Cir.), cert. dismissed, 516 U.S. 1005 (1995); Basic Books, Inc. v. Kinko's Graphics Corp., 758 F. Supp. 1522, 1530-31 (S.D.N.Y. 1991); see generally Leval, supra, at 1111 (repetition of copyrighted material that "merely repackages or republishes the original" is unlikely to be deemed a fair use).

  Regarding the fourth factor -- "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work" -- defendant's activities on their face invade plaintiffs' statutory right to license their copyrighted sound recordings to others for reproduction. See 17 U.S.C. 106. ... [The] defendant argues, its activities can only enhance plaintiffs' sales, since subscribers cannot gain access to particular recordings made available by MP3.com unless they have already "purchased" (actually or purportedly), or agreed to purchase, their own CD copies of those recordings.

  Such arguments ... are unpersuasive. Any allegedly positive impact of defendant's activities on plaintiffs' prior market in no way frees defendant to usurp a further market that directly derives from reproduction of the plaintiffs' copyrighted works. See Infinity Broadcast, 150 F.3d at 111. This would be so even if the copyrightholder had not yet entered the new market in issue, for a copyrightholder's "exclusive" rights, derived from the Constitution and the Copyright Act, include the right, within broad limits, to curb the development of such a derivative market by refusing to license a copyrighted work or by doing so only on terms the copyright owner finds acceptable.

And fixing the verification problem with a properly built mailing list program is easy if you're using something like MajorDomo, it's the default setting once you properly install it.

In Majordomo 1, the confirmation feature is at best useless, and at worst it provides a false sense of security. Daniel J. Bernstein has this to say about it (under the section ``Subscription cookie prediction'').

I've had a look at the cookie generation code in Majordomo 1.94.5 (the current version 1 release) and it's quite trivial, given a cookie and the email address you used to get that cookie, to make a cookie for any other email address. So if the list actually allows public subscription (e.g., open+confirm), be prepared to subscribe anyone.

This claim is substantiated; there is, for example, a working implementation.

Some people argue that the cookie algorithm can be changed; however this is no longer the ``default setting'' that you were referring to.

In my quick perusal of the Majordomo 2 code, they have got it ``right'', in the sense that you can't just spoof the ``confirmation tokens'' (as they're called in the code), which are randomly generated (using the standard Perl rand()---I don't know how secure or insecure this is).

Here are just a few of my favorite episodes of the Engines of our Ingenuity:

• No. 833: FERMAT'S LAST STAND, in which Dr. Lienhard examines the solution to Fermat's Last Stand... and concludes we may have lost something in its proof
• No. 157: THOMAS CRAPPER, in which Dr. Lienhard debunks the myth that Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet.
• No. 984: FAILED CONSERVATION?, in which Dr. Lienhard points out the counterintuitive relationship between efficiency and consumption.

--Jim

Here are just a few of my favorite episodes of the Engines of our Ingenuity:

• No. 833: FERMAT'S LAST STAND, in which Dr. Lienhard examines the solution to Fermat's Last Stand... and concludes we may have lost something in its proof
• No. 157: THOMAS CRAPPER, in which Dr. Lienhard debunks the myth that Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet.
• No. 984: FAILED CONSERVATION?, in which Dr. Lienhard points out the counterintuitive relationship between efficiency and consumption.

--Jim

Here are just a few of my favorite episodes of the Engines of our Ingenuity:

• No. 833: FERMAT'S LAST STAND, in which Dr. Lienhard examines the solution to Fermat's Last Stand... and concludes we may have lost something in its proof
• No. 157: THOMAS CRAPPER, in which Dr. Lienhard debunks the myth that Thomas Crapper invented the flush toilet.
• No. 984: FAILED CONSERVATION?, in which Dr. Lienhard points out the counterintuitive relationship between efficiency and consumption.

--Jim

There are transcripts of the show available at the University of Houston.

As mentioned in the article, John Lienhard does a radio program as well- it's actually more of a commentary on a single topic than a program, running somewhere around 5 minutes long. It's used a filler material by a lot of NPR stations.

Anyway, he's done a bazillion of these shows, and I'm guessing they were the primary source material for the book (which I haven't read). Fortunately, the transcripts (all 1500+) are available on the web. They're interesting reading and good for at least a few hours of time wastage. :-)

We even have one at the Virtual Environment Technology Lab at the University of Houston. They've used it for various NASA training exercises, including the repair mission for the Hubble Telescope...

We even have one at the Virtual Environment Technology Lab at the University of Houston. They've used it for various NASA training exercises, including the repair mission for the Hubble Telescope...

You are correct; there are plenty of existing precedents to indicate that "digital signatures" are as good as pen-and-ink.

While electronic manifestation of assent would have some positive attributes, it is also currently (mis)used to get you to agree to shrinkwrap or clickwrap license "agreements." These are ususally onerous, extremely imbalanced instruments that basically abscond with your money and your liberty, and leave you holding a piece of buggy software. I wrote an essay on this subject some time ago.

Finally, it would be interesting to see how this proposed legislation would affect Uniform Commercial Code 2B (a sweeping re-write of contract law to effectively legalize all shrinkwrap "agreements"). It's beginning to look like UCC-2B may not fly because of myriad legal and ethical flaws; I wonder if this legislation is in response to that.

Schwab